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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/writing-memorable-dialogue).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 371 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’ll be looking at writing and remembering dialogue, plus how to deal with a very large number of characters in a scene. Then we’ll be answering questions we’ve gotten from listeners just like you.

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** Mm. Craig had the dialogue topic, I had the topic about a bunch of people in a scene because that’s what we’re writing this week. It’s always nice when like the stuff that we’re working on is actually useful for people to listen to.

**Craig:** I mean, mostly any idea I ever do have is because I literally think, oh, here’s something that cropped up today. You know, I guess that’s sort of why we’re a vaguely useful podcast because we don’t actually invent baloney topics. We come up with the things that we’re actually dealing with all the time as screenwriters.

**John:** A vaguely useful podcast about screenwriting and things that are vaguely useful to screenwriters.

Before we get to those topics though we have some news and some updates. News on my side, I put out a trailer this past week for Arlo Finch, so Arlo Finch being the books that I write. The folks at MacMillan said like hey would you want to make a book trailer. I’m like, yeah, that sounds like a way I can spend a lot of time just like not writing the books and it would be a lot of fun. So, I made a book trailer so you can see a link to that.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Our own Matthew Chilelli did the music for it and did a fantastic job.

**Craig:** Great. Yes, I liked it a lot myself.

**John:** And a friend of ours, his son Cormac Gavari did the narration, so I want to thank him. I think Mr. Gavari listens to the podcast as well, so thank him for lending his son’s voice to the trailer.

**Craig:** I happen to know for a fact that Michael’s son is a big fan. So that must be a thrill for him. And you can’t fake sense of wonder. Well, no, I take it back. I suppose you can. That’s how movies are made all the time. But still, it’s hard to fake a sense of wonder. And children in particular when they try and fake a sense of wonder sometimes it just comes off as this incredibly insincere puppet act and you know how I feel about puppets. But this was sincere because Cormac is in fact a fan of the books.

**John:** Yeah. So, I was looking for – usually when I had to do voiceover stuff and I’m reaching out to somebody there’s these services you can go to and you can find the voices of stuff. And those people are really good and we’ve used those for like our announcers for Scriptnotes live shows and other times where we needed professional voices. And if you go on those sites looking for child actors and child voices you either find adults pretending to be children in a really uncomfortable way, or these actual kids and I worry that they’re being stage-mom’ed to death.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, it was much better to go to a real life kid I knew who is actually genuinely a fan of the books.

**Craig:** Of course. And if you become abusive in your recording session and hit him or something you can always just make it go away with a small payment.

**John:** That did not happen.

**Craig:** Oh. OK. Well, I’m just saying.

**John:** Several episodes ago we talked about the credits revision that is coming through from the WGA and the WGA East that Craig actually worked on, so this is the Screen Credits Revision. It is a whole cleanup of the manual for screen credits. But there’s been a change since the last time we spoke. Craig, do you want to speak to the change?

**Craig:** Yeah. So I’ve already gone on my rant, if you listen to the WGA episode where I went on my bananas rant. And so you know basically we’ve been dealing with a misinformation campaign. And you could even call it a disinformation campaign. And the last thing that any of us wanted was for the, I don’t know, 100 small but essential changes we were making to get undone simply because of this one thing. So we’ve altered the language to in fact reflect what I think was always going to be the reality anyway. And so what we’re saying now is reasonable requests for extensions will be granted but will not preclude the guild from proceeding with an arbitration with the statements then available to the guild. Essentially what has always been the case is that any participating writer can submit a statement up to the point where the arbiters render their decision. You don’t have to get it in right when they start. You may want to. You may think that that might help your case. But it’s not essential.

You are allowed to get it in when you can get it in. And the moment the guild receives it they forward it to the arbiters so that they can have it. And we’re just sort of making that quite a bit clearer and, yes, we’re saying reasonable requests for extensions will be granted. I mean, I had a conversation with a – I won’t say who it is – but a very high profile screenwriter who called me. He’s based in New York. And I don’t know him but he had heard about this and had some concerns. And I walked him through it and essentially he was saying, “Look, if I’m on location and something falls on my foot, or I have a heart attack and I’m laid up in the hospital and I miss the deadline by three hours…” And I’m like, no, you know, we’re not – the guild – we’re not a bunch of total jerks. I mean, we meaning all of us, we’re part of it, but also the staff. That’s not the business they’re in.

What we’re just trying to do is just get rid of the, you know, the endless pattern of obvious abuse of the system where I just said, listen, we have people who literally the writers will say, yeah, I’m happy with that timeframe to write my statement and then two hours later their lawyer calls the guild and says absolutely not, we need a week.

Well, no, you know, in that case that’s not reasonable. That’s just lawyers doing what lawyers do. So, in any case, this is a good clarification. I think it should clear up everyone’s serious concerns. And when we do submit this to the membership and go for a vote I will be urging all the members of the guild to vote yes on this. It’s a nice step forward and I think it’s going to make arbitrations go a bit more smoothly and hopefully with some of the extra explanation we’ve added a bit, well, just a bit more fairly.

**John:** Yeah. And also a bit more calmly I think. I think some of the good changes in this manual make the process clearer for both people going through arbitration and for arbiters and take a little of the panic out of it. And so anything that can sort of turn down the temperature a bit on arbitrations is a good thing.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Cool. Our future episode on random advice, well, we’ve been asking people to send in their questions, our premium subscribers to send in their questions for us to answer on a future episode called Random Advice. I thought we’d do a little sampler platter of some of the questions we got asked. We won’t actually give you our answers right now, but these are some questions that people are asking. We’ve gotten 53 questions so far. So, do you want to take one of these?

**Craig:** What is your opinion on polyamory?

**John:** Yeah. I’ve got an opinion. I’m happy to share it.

**Craig:** Me too. Me too.

**John:** Do either of you have a favorite sport?

**Craig:** Oh, I certainly do.

**John:** I do, too. What is the best thing you’ve ever cooked?

**Craig:** Ooh, best, I hate the whole best/worst.

**John:** Yeah, best and worst is tough. I can probably get down to some favorites.

**Craig:** Yeah, favorites.

**John:** Or things that I’m proudest to make, especially like family recipes. And those are just opinion questions. Here’s a real advice question. A listener writes, “I own a laser tattoo removal clinic. Occasionally angry or panicky parents drag in their underage kid with a contraband tattoo and pay me to remove it. The kid, while technically a dependent, is never on board with this, but he or she is my patient, not the parents. Am I violating my patient’s autonomy by following through with the removal as dictated by the parents?

**Craig:** That seems like a pretty easy one for me, but I’m excited to answer it.

**John:** I’m excited to answer it, too. I definitely have my opinion and at the same time there’s some shading on it. So, yeah, it’s going to be a good question. I’m excited to answer it.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is going to be a fun episode. And that’s only if people pay the exorbitant fee of $1.99 a month.

**John:** That’s what we’re charging for.

**Craig:** I mean, come on, $1.99? And we don’t do the stupid ads. We don’t even do telethons. We don’t even interrupt your, I don’t know, watching Upstairs, Downstairs to demand that you give us money and we’ll give you a tote bag. We don’t do any of that. $1.99.

**John:** All we do is talk about things that are interesting to screenwriters and topics like Craig’s that he proposed.

**Craig:** Hmm, Segue Man.

**John:** Craig, start us off.

**Craig:** Sure. So, a couple of weeks ago I had an opportunity to participate in something. It doesn’t really matter what the circumstances are. But it was the first time that I had to memorize dialogue in forever. And it was a particular kind of dialogue memorization. Most people at some point in school will have to memorize something like a passage from Shakespeare or if they’re in a school play or a musical there’s a script. And then there’s a lot of time given to memorize it. In the case of a musical, you rehearse over the course of a couple of months or so.

But traditionally the way we shoot movies and television an actor comes in and learns their lines for that day. Every day new lines. Maybe you’re doing one scene that day. Maybe you’re doing two. So, the object is to learn, well, somewhere around three, four, five pages of dialogue. You rarely individually have three, four, five pages of dialogue, but it’s part of a conversation that goes on and that’s roughly a day’s work. So actors learn their lines for the day.

And I had an opportunity to do that and so I had the scene and I just read it and I had to memorize it somewhat, you know, relatively quickly. But, you know, 30, 40 minutes or something like that. I mean, I was familiar with it prior, but about that much time to memorize it. And then I had to do it. And it was very instructive. And I hadn’t written this dialogue. So it was a way of interacting with dialogue that I don’t normally do at all.

And in the doing of it I kind of learned some interesting lessons that I had never considered that I think might be applicable to the writing of dialogue, because in the end someone is going to have to memorize it and someone is going to have to say it. So, there were certain challenges that come across right away. I mean, the really easy ones. You have to remember what you’re saying. You have to obviously think about how you’re going to say it. That’s the performance part. And then there’s this third one that I think people underestimate which is when do you say it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s easy enough to know when your dialogue ends because it ends. And then someone else starts talking. But when do you come back in? So that’s the listening part. But in that part you begin to see how memorization relies a lot on two things. The relationships between different words and what I call – what I don’t call, what neurologists call chunks. Have you ever encountered the chunking theory of memory?

**John:** I think I know what you’re talking about. Essentially we don’t hold little atoms of information. Instead we group things together in bigger packages and it’s those larger puzzle pieces that we’re putting together to form actual memories and to form a string that becomes a sentence.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. I mean, the brain is pretty good at taking certain bits of information like a number and then chunking them together in a group that is memorable. And so what they find for instance is that roughly seven digits is about the largest chunk of information you can make for people where they reliably remember it. Meaning to say if I come up to you and I say I’m going to read, I don’t know, seven random digits and I just ask you – single digits – and I say you’ve got to remember that, I’m coming back five minutes from now and you didn’t write it down, you can’t write it down. You’ll be able to. More than that becomes really, really hard.

**John:** Yeah. And the same thing would be true with words. If I gave you seven random words that had no contextual meaning together it would be very hard to get those seven words, or more than seven words, together. But if they had semantic meaning that would be very simple.

**Craig:** Correct. There’s a certain ability to chunk them together. They find that people that are really good at things or have a lot of experience, the amount of information they can put in an individual chunk expands. So for instance chess players they found, whereas I might look at a chess board, I’m a terrible chess player. So if I look at a chess board that’s sort of set up to be mid-game, and I’m told you have to memorize this, and then walk away from it, come back one minute later and reconstruct it on the board, the amount of pieces that I will be able to keep in my mind and where their positions are is very small.

Whereas people that are very good at chess, it’s a breeze for them because they’re essentially creating relationships between things. They understand these four pieces and relationship is sort of a thing. It’s a chunk.

**John:** It’s a pattern.

**Craig:** It’s a pattern. And so I realized that’s kind of how you memorize dialogue when you’re reading it. There are certain things that kind of indicate this is the beginning and this is the end of a chunk. And the chunks of words are anchored essentially. So, there’s always a word or maybe a couple of words that are stuck together that is the emphasis, the point, the reveal or maybe a strange word. In this little chunk, and the chunk could be five words long, those are the words that are kind of the glue that’s holding all the other stuff together. Little bits and bobs of words that maybe in and of themselves like The, And, But, Before, and OK, and Whenever, and Ever, and so on and so forth, all those are kind of connected to this anchor word.

So one thing to consider as you’re writing your dialogue is what is the anchor of this thought or piece of dialogue?

**John:** Yeah. So if it’s not hanging on anything it’s just going to sort of fall away. And probably was not a meaningful line anyway.

**Craig:** Is not a meaningful line anyway. And so what you end up with is, well, it could be a meaningful line but you heard it by creating a kind of hypnotic rhythm or pattern to it. So, for instance, here’s something that – the sort of thing that we might say in this sort of rhythm. “After we go but before we’re let in, if we can take a look at how we arrive at the” – every single one of those words was one syllable or maybe two. They were all roughly the same length. There were certain repetitions of words. A lot of minuscule words with hundreds of meanings, like look and act and can and in, you know, like there’s just a lot of – you’re asking the brain to do a lot of work to remember the stuff and there’s nothing anchoring it together.

The other thing that can sometimes anchor a chunk is not a word per se, but your reaction to something that you’re looking at or you’re smelling or you’re hearing so that the words are chunked around a reaction to the world around you.

**John:** Yeah. So classically dialogue, you’re going to be reacting to the thing the person just said beforehand, but there may also be something in the environment that’s actually causing the line to happen or causing you pick those specific words. And so you can think about what that thing is that’ll help you remember that chunk, or it will help unify that thought.

**Craig:** Yeah. If someone says I want you to take a look at this document and review it, and that’s their line of dialogue, and my line of dialogue is to pick it up and say, “I’m not even sure what I’m looking at here,” that’s, OK, those are sort of bland words. There’s not much of an anchor to that. But if someone says take a look at this and they whip a window open, “I’m not even sure what I’m looking at here,” that’s a reaction. It’s already so much easier to remember because it’s not just words. It’s words in relation to something.

And similarly I think the – as I was doing it I noticed that the way you realize that one chunk is over and another one is beginning is that inside of well-written dialogue there are all these little mini/micro reversals, reconsiderations. There’s little built in pauses or moments for emotion. And all those little things help you divide it up into chunks so that you’re not memorizing a list of words but rather you’re memorizing movements of thought. I don’t know how else to put it.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s like musical phrases but they are little sections of thought. And a lot of times they will follow English grammar. So, I suspect oftentimes you find the chunks do fit in where commas are or where connector words like “and” are. Or they end at periods. But they don’t always. And so it’s always worth looking at would it make more sense to continue this thought sort of beyond the period into its next line. You can also be thinking about sort of where is the natural place to breathe, and that may also give you a sense of where that thought really wants to break.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you’re right. Sometimes your desire actually is to blow through the stop sign because you realize that everything is chunked together around one emotion of rising frustration. So you blow through that stop sign and you chunk a larger bit together. And I also noticed how little bits of odd word order could trip me up. It’s interesting – odd words are great to help you remember things and they’re great to sort of signify what’s happening in a kind of attractive way when you’re performing dialogue, but here is the sentence I just – this is my example sentence. “Odd helps if it’s notably odd, but it hurts if it’s just odd in a mundane way.”

OK. Now here’s that sentence again. I’m going to make one change. “Odd helps if it’s notably odd, but it hurts if it’s odd in just a mundane way.” All I did in that second one was move the word just to a slightly different spot. I moved it down two words. It’s not wrong, but it’s a much harder sentence to memorize at that point because just is kind of the anchoring word. Because it’s a change. It’s sort of signifying a new chunk. And so I just made the first chunk way longer. And but if it hurts it’s odd in – all single syllable.

It seems like it’s not a big deal, but in a way it is. I’ve spent a lot of time on sets watching actors sometimes trip over these seemingly minor things and you wonder why. And I’m starting to think it’s because of things like this. Or for instance this is the third time. This is the third time you’ve done this. OK, perfectly reasonable bit of dialogue except this is the third time is kind of – your brain starts to–

**John:** It’s annoying. It’s not that hard, it’s just a little bit annoying. It’s because they’re different THs also. So the this and third are not the same TH.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that also messes you up.

I want to get back to your moving the just. I think part of the reason why it’s tougher that way is you’ve created a parallel structure where you’re saying odd twice, but the repetition isn’t meaningful in the second way without the just there. And so that hurts you. But you’ve also broken the rhythm of the sentence. And it’s like there’s a bump in the carpet and you’re trying to walk naturally across it and you just can’t because that just is in the wrong place.

And it’s a thing you don’t notice unless you read your dialogue aloud that it’s happening.

**Craig:** Ah, unless you read your dialogue aloud which therein is the ultimate lesson of this little mini discussion on craft. We advocate all the time that you read your dialogue out loud. Mostly because I think you start to hear maybe that some of the choices are wrong or perhaps you’re going on a bit too long. But also I think these little things start to emerge. These are the things that will subconsciously begin to undermine the performers.

They’re really good at what they do. They can memorize anything. And they will. But the stuff that’s easier to memorize I suspect is therefore easier to perform and therefore I suspect is easier to hear. And when I say easier I don’t mean less challenging intellectually. I mean just – it’s just more mellifluous. And so when you and I fuss over where the word just should be placed in that sentence it’s not merely writerly fussiness. It’s kind of the point. These things really, really matter.

So, the little lessons that I learned from my little bit of memorization and perhaps they might help people as they go about creating things for other people to memorize.

**John:** So a few techniques which I want to suggest to anybody who has to memorize dialogue they did not write is obviously the cliché of this, just sort of how the writer cliché is sort of like typing on the typewriter, oh it’s terrible, you rip the paper off and crumble it up. The actor cliché is I’m auditioning for something and I’m just running lines with a friend. Like that running lines, it really does happen, but the way we usually see it in movies weirdly just feels very false and fake. But literally just the practice of going through the lines and having somebody else work through the lines with you will help.

When I’ve had to do it for songs, I don’t know if you ever encountered this, is to memorize lyrics. Other singers have told me that you just write the lyrics out by hand. And the process of actually having to write it out sort of helps cement it in the brain a little bit more. Makes you think about what those words actually are and helps you chunk them down.

Make sure the words mean something to you. That you’re not just saying the words, but you actually understand the intention behind them. My daughter had to do Shakespeare, she had to do a scene from Midsummer Night’s Dream, and you can just spout the words out but if you don’t actually understand what they mean the scene is not going to really work and you’re going to have a harder time really holding onto those words because they’re just syllables. They’re not words that actually mean anything to you.

And the last thing I think really goes back to your idea of chunking, it’s really connecting the thoughts. And so obviously you’re going to be responding to the person who just spoke, but you also have to connect back to the scene as a whole. You have to understand, remember, what was your intention two lines ago, three lines ago? What’s actually happening in the scene and what is the environment in which I’m saying this line because the environment is constantly changing based on this conversation.

So it’s not just a ping pong match where the ball in on one side of the net or the other side of the net. It really is a bigger environment in which this is happening and make sure that you’re learning the line in that environment and not just in a little vacuum by itself.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, in the end when you learn your part of a conversation you have to learn their part, too. You have to. It’s essential. You need to kind of know at least – I mean, part of acting is being surprised by something you know is coming, including what you’re supposed to say. But you do need to know their side, or else you’ll get lost real fast.

**John:** Yeah. Being surprised by what you said is – that can be really useful. It can make a scene feel really alive. But do remember that in real conversations, it can be useful to sort of turn on that little recording light when you’re having a real conversation. You generally do have a sense of what you’re going to be saying kind of 15 seconds from now. Even while you’re listening to the other person, you do have a next line sort of queuing up. So, would your characters in the scene and so will you as an actor. So, it’s OK to let the mental wheels spin a little bit to get that stuff started even as you’re actively listening in a scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. Look, neither one of us are accomplished thespians by any stretch of the imagination, but considering that we work with them these things are always useful – I think they’re very helpful to consider. And I handed poor Jared Harris massive reams of dialogue that he handled brilliantly, but it was a challenge. His character in Chernobyl is a – he’s wordy. He’s a scientist and he’s a talker. And he’s an explainer. But he’s also very emotional. So when he gets going it all has to come tumbling out in this incredibly natural way. And he’s a master at that, but it’s a lot. It’s hard.

**John:** My prediction is the things that were mostly challenging for him, and this has just been my observation on many, many sets, is when actors have lines that are similar that are in different parts of the scene that messes them up. If they were completely different lines it would be great. But if they have things that are kind of the same idea and they’re repeating themselves but they’re not repeating themselves in the same way, that’s where things get tripped up. It’s like, wait, did I already say this? Where am I at in this scene? And that’s probably a sign that something isn’t working quite right in the writing or at least in the execution because each of those lines should only kind of be possible in that one moment.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, if you have any sense that thoughts or lines are vaguely repeating, that’s a writing problem for sure. And you have to eliminate those. And you can hear them sometimes, too. Again, when you read things out loud or you listen and you go, OK, that seems like we’re kind of rolling over the same ground there. And, yeah, you’ve got to get rid of that.

**John:** Yep. The writing challenge I faced this week was I’m doing a scene that is at the end of the second act, and so all the characters are well established. I didn’t need to introduce any new characters in the scene, sort of scene/sequence. It’s a pretty big number. It’s about five pages in all. But almost all of the characters in the story are in this sequence.

Now, the scene is clearly driven by one person. One person has almost all the dialogue in the sequence, and yet there’s a lot of other characters to service. And the challenge in these kind of scenes, and these kind of scenes happen in almost every script I guess, is how do you keep everybody else alive and active and engaged in that scene and sort of make them count in that scene when they don’t have a lot to actually do.

And so it’s a frequent challenge. So, I wanted to sort of go through why this happens and some strategies for dealing with it when it happens. Because Craig I’m sure you face this on a weekly basis.

**Craig:** It’s inevitable. I mean, there are scenes where people need to listen. It’s really important that they’re there because they have to listen to something happen and they’re going to have one or two important moments within that, but mostly they have to listen and yeah you need to really think carefully about how you’re portraying. You first need to ask do they really need to be there. And once you decide they do, well, then you’ve got to handle them. You have to service your characters.

**John:** And so one of the big complications in this sequence, but it’s also true I think for a lot of other movies, is the biggest name actors in the movie are going to be in the scene, but they’re not going to have the most to do. And that’s kind of inevitable based on the story. And that, again, does happen a lot. So, I want to make sure that as I’m writing this that these characters and these actors who don’t have a ton to do still feel very, very important in this scene because you and I both know that otherwise they might show up on set and be sort of frustrated that they don’t have anything to do.

So, I’m trying to be mindful from the start of giving them interesting business and making them feel important in the scene even though they don’t have a lot to do. And so that was one of the other things I was working through with this sequence.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, look, I don’t get too concerned with the egos of actors because I’ve given up trying to predict what will or will not spin an insecure person off their axis. But what I do know is if they’re the most important characters in the movie, and it sounds like they have to be because they’re the big stars, that means that the scene is about them. The bottom line is it’s about them. They may not be talking in it. They may be listening. They may be experiencing something. But it is about what they’re feeling. It’s about what they’re thinking. It’s about who they’re looking at and why they’re looking at them.

So, that’s kind of the thing. Like it may be when you look at A Few Good Men, it may be that we’re concentrating on Tom Cruise and Jack Nicolson. They’re going back and forth. But when you go over to Demi Moore or to Kevin Pollack, their looks mean something. There’s something happening there that’s valuable.

**John:** I think it’s good you brought up A Few Good Men because I was trying to list the types of movies where you see this challenging sequence happen. Courtroom dramas are one of the main places. But sporting championships are another important place for this where the action is taking place on the field but, you know, we need to also track the coach and the people in the stands and all of the other characters are there for that final sports championship.

**Craig:** I can’t get over sporting championships.

**John:** Sporting championships.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Well, because I’m saying, I don’t want to be just football, or just soccer, or just basketball.

**Craig:** I know. But it’s literally like you landed here yesterday from Planet Questrom.

**John:** I like sporting games. I like to watch the sporting games.

**Craig:** When writing sporting championships. [laughs] Oh, you’re the best, man. I love you.

**John:** But even like major battle sequences, so when you see Star Wars, when you see big fights like that, you have a ton of things happening in the sequence and to be able to track all those people. And every time you cut away to show somebody else, their reaction, you risk breaking the flow of the main action. So it’s finding that natural way to do it is tough. Some movies with big musical numbers, you’ll just have everybody in there. And so how do you service everybody in that big musical number? And then speeches and rallies where you have one character, this is sort of like a speech or rally kind of moment in the movie I’m doing right now, you have one character making a big speech, so therefore will have almost all of the dialogue, so making sure you find interesting things for the other important characters to be doing in that, even though they’re not naturally going to have lines because they’re not going to be talking at the same time as the other person talking.

So, those are circumstances where you find yourself in this writing challenge.

So, for me what I did is I went back to sort of real basics. Making sure to do an audit of all the characters there and really look at what they want in that moment. Like what are they trying to do right then at that moment? What are the micro interactions between characters? And so it’s a way of acknowledging multiple characters there. If two characters can look at each other, exchange a meaningful look, that takes care of those two characters and keeps them alive in the scene rather than having them do individual things.

I looked for like what physical actions could they do, so to give them something concrete, something we could see. And I really looked at sort of how can this scene geography suggest where people can be so that in cutting to them around the space we’re actually exploring more of the environment, exploring more of what’s really going on there. How can things change within that scene geography?

Those are just some of the techniques I sort of found for this sequence, but in doing it I found that’s probably true for most of the sequences I’ve had to write that had five or more characters in them.

**Craig:** Yeah. I try and think of these things in terms of sort of multi-track narratives, because you have your main narrative which is the narrative of the big scene. You know, we are watching the Super Bowl and the big narrative is what is happening with the football, where is it going, who is running where, and how far are they getting. And in trials it is between whoever the fireworks is coming from in any particular moment. Same with battles. And same with musical numbers. And same with speeches.

But, that’s one track of the narrative. Then the question is, OK, for the people that are watching, what is their narrative? Because if it’s I’m watching, then they don’t need to be there. And it can’t just be I’m watching, because at that point they become boring. They have to be actively watching. Actively listening.

**John:** Yeah. What I needed to make sure is that the characters who were there who had to watch or witness part of it still had important choices to make, and that the choices they’re going to be making are directly impacted by their reaction to what they just saw. And so that gives them a reason for why they needed to be there and why they’re making this interesting choice at the end of the sequence.

**Craig:** Right. So to go back to A Few Good Men and the trial scene there, there is a moment where Cruise’s character is considering basically putting his entire career, even his freedom, on the line to pursue a line of inquiry with Jack Nicholson’s character. And he looks over and Kevin Pollack simply gives him the slightest don’t do it head shake. That’s it. And these moments are crucial because it means he’s a participant. He is impacting and affecting what is going on around him as an observer. So when I write those scenes I really try and give every character a narrative and also a moment where they can make a choice to stand up and say something or to not. They can stand up and go I have to stop this, or they just let it go, but I understand that they are participating. And even if their choice is to not do a thing, they have changed the path of the scene.

This is frankly – no offense to our director brothers and sisters – but this is so important for us to do as writers because if we don’t do it and we don’t do it clearly on the page, they don’t do it. They don’t do it. They miss those little mini stories. They’ll just write it off as, OK, let’s just grab reaction shots now. OK. But what is the actor doing in the reaction shot? Listening? Coming up with their own theories and things? That’s fine. But that’s not as good as a clear narrative story that that actor understands that they are pursuing before they ever get there on the day. And that the director then can think about how they stage that scene understanding that they are not covering one narrative here but multiple narratives.

It’s really important that we do this on the page because, if we don’t, we are going to be deeply disappointed nine times out of ten when we see the film.

**John:** Yeah. So, the Kevin Pollack that you mentioned, I don’t know what it looks like on the script page. I suspect it is clearly called out there. It’s the kind of moment where as I read back through the script if I am worried that people are going to miss it because people sometimes do get to be a little skimmy and they might not be reading every line of the scene description, I might save one of my underlines for that. Just to make sure that it really lands. Like, oh no, no, this is a real moment. This moment has to happen. This is going to change and pivot what’s happening after it.

And, yes, great directors will look at a scene and look at it from every character’s angle and really have a chance to study and explore and would probably figure out, like you know what, I need to really make that moment so I’m not just going to worry about coverage to get that reaction. I’m going to make sure I specifically plan for what is the look between those actors, what’s happening in that moment.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** When you don’t have that kind of prep time, when you’re shooting a one-hour drama on a tight schedule, those are the moments that can be lost. And that’s the reason why in TV they want the writer on set. And it’s also the reason why in the tone meeting where they’re going through with the director while the director is doing prep they’re really trying to single out those moments that are so crucial that they anticipate needing as they get into the editing room.

**Craig:** Right. 100%. And I do think, look, every show has a different kind of constraint on it. But if you’re doing one of these scenes and you feel like given the nature of the time you have and the writing you have that you can’t afford to multi-track your narrative, rewrite the scene. Because otherwise it literally will just be boring or stupid.

**John:** Yeah. So obviously going into one of these things I should have said at the very start is one of your first choices may be like do I need to have all these characters? Am I making my life too difficult by trying to service all these characters in the scene? And sometimes you are making it too difficult. In the case of the scene I was writing, it felt like all the threads needed to come together under one roof, and so yes, I definitely needed all those characters there.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Cool. Let’s answer some listener questions.

**Craig:** Yeah! Good.

**John:** Josh writes, “I have been listening to ya’ll for several years and I don’t recall you ever discussing the process of adapting a script from stage to the screen. So I was hoping you might offer some thoughts about that subject. Obviously I know that in a global sense that film is a format better suited to shorter scenes and a more visual approach to storytelling than talking dialogue format of stage writing. But dialogue driven plays like Closer and Glengarry Glen Ross were adapted magnificently. So clearly that sort of story can be made just as gripping with good camera and editing choices. What needs to be on the page for a screenplay that wouldn’t be part of a stage play?”

**Craig:** Well, I have never done this. I have never – I have adapted novels. I have adapted all sorts of stuff. But I have never adapted a stage play. No, sorry, I take it back. I have.

**John:** Harvey.

**Craig:** Harvey. I don’t know why, maybe because it was for the Weinsteins and I have just been really just brain-bleaching, just a lot of PTSD brain-bleaching. You know what, I did. I adapted Harvey. That’s right. And what you do is you try and do what I think you do with all adaptation. You look for the heart of what is going on there and you try and translate it.

In certain cases there are plays that feel as if they can just be slid on over, because they can. Like Glengarry Glen Ross is not meant to be a large production. It is meant to take place largely in two spaces. And that’s basically what they did. And they were smart to do that because it didn’t ask for anything else. All the fireworks were from the brilliant actors that they had and the incredible dialogue of David Mamet and storytelling.

And then in the case of Harvey you’re talking about a play from many, many years ago and a lot of things simply don’t apply anymore. Like the notion of sanitariums and so on and so forth. And so it needed quite a bit of rethinking and restaging. And since it was a play that could take place in a city, where is this place? And we do want to go outside. And so you begin to separate yourself from the details, but draw upon the things that matter, the movements that matter. And my copy of Harvey was deeply earmarked and underlined and highlighted and circled and scribbled because I would seize upon these lines and go this means something important to me.

So, how I present it is less important than the fact that I do. And that I present it in a way that’s true to the way Mary Chase meant it. But all forms of adaptation essentially are different because you never know how close or how far the material is from the screen.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve only had the opposite experience, so I wrote Big Fish and then I wrote the stage version of Big Fish. And very little translated directly from the movie into the stage version. And I recognized early on that they were just completely different beasts.

One of the things that’s so different about the stage is that the audience has bought a ticket and they’re sitting in a theater to watch something and use their imagination to fill out the rest of it. So they are imagining the town of Ashton. They are imagining so many things. A desk rolls onto stage, and that’s a whole office. There’s a suspension of disbelief that is so different in stuff done for the stage than stuff done for movies.

And so looking at it the opposite way, you’re going to be making some things which could be sort of abstract on the stage and making them very concrete. And as you visualize these moments happening in concrete real places because you’re literally going to be filming an actor in a place, you’re going to have to look at what does this feel like when you’re actually in that place with the actor. And the expectations for reality and for even the naturalism of dialogue will change I think because of that.

You’re also going to be aware of there is a tick-tick-tick thing that happens in movies where just we become uncomfortable being in a place for too long with one sort of continuous moment happening too long. And scenes that you can have an hour-long sequence on stage where the curtain never comes down and it never goes dark, that’s going to feel really strange in most movies. It’s going to feel like you are just shooting a play. And if you really need to make it – if you really want it to feel like a movie you’re going to need to find ways to move outside of that space and allow for cuts, allow for time and change.

**Craig:** Exactly. All right. We have a question now from Daniel who writes, “I’m sitting here watching Shrek 2 on HBO and I’m a bit stumped. So during the red carpet scene the part Joan Rivers played in the theatrical release is now voiced by someone with a British accent, clearly not Joan Rivers. Considering that if you own this film on DVD or presumably Blu-Ray you can hear Joan Rivers, why would it be a different voice in this version? A dispute with the Rivers’ estate? Fine print about ancillary markets? The lines are the same. It’s just a different voice.”

John, what should we do to find this information out in a world where we’re not connected to a super-computing network?

**John:** Well, I mean, if you were connected to a super-computing network you could Google it. And so I Googled it.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** And so it turns out, because he was not the first person to notice, like wow it’s so weird that it’s a different voice. So it turns out that in different markets especially the UK they used local celebrities for the equivalence of Joan Rivers or other people. And that’s the concrete answer to Daniel’s question is that they used voices that British people would recognize rather than Joan Rivers, because Joan Rivers’ voice was distinctive but has no special meaning to a British audience, whereas this person’s did. So, Daniel for whatever reason was watching the UK version of Shrek 2.

But that kind of localization is fascinating. And all of our animated movies usually they’re carried overseas. They find great local actors to do all the character work for that. So I’m sure in France Shrek and Donkey were great local French actors who did great versions of that. We’re just not used to it happening in English.

**Craig:** That makes total sense. The whole reason they put somebody like Joan Rivers in there because there’s this kind of an instant caricature read. We go, oh, it’s Joan Rivers. Well, it’s absolutely useless if you don’t know who that is. Then it’s just a yelling lady. So you want the local yelling lady. Who did they replace Joan Rivers with out of curiosity?

**John:** Kate Thornton. So, British showbiz reporter Kate Thornton replaces Joan Rivers as the role of red carpet reporter.

**Craig:** Kate Thornton. Yeah, I’m looking at her. Yeah. So she’s sort of like known for being on the red carpet. There you go. They know her for that. Makes sense.

**John:** Yeah. Makes sense. All right, a question from Andy in New York. “Script takes place in three timelines, all at the same location. As a thriller, it relies on a few reveals and surprises. So the timeline specifics don’t really become evident to the viewer until the second half. While I want the viewer to be surprised by the reveal of multiple timelines, I think the script’s readers have been confused. Is there a way to clarify to the readers that this scene takes place in 1955 and this one in 1992 but explain that the viewer doesn’t necessarily get that insight until later?”

Craig, what’s your opinion on reader vs. viewer here?

**Craig:** What? I mean, Andy, we’ve got to talk. Look, you’re doing this thing where your script takes place in three timelines in the same location. You’re saying the timeline specifics don’t really become evident to the viewer until the second half. How is that possible? The clothing hasn’t changed at all? The furniture hasn’t changed at all? The lighting? The installation? The appliances in the room? The phones? It seems highly unlikely.

But let’s just say it’s a barn, OK? And the clothing hasn’t changed at all. Then I think you would have to just write the script as if you were seeing some sort of like parallel timelines. Right? You could call it we’re in timeline 1, timeline 2, timeline 3. And the point is these are all taking place in parallel universes at the same time. And then you could say my big reveal is ha-ha they’re not parallel and there isn’t three parallel universes. It’s one universe and you’ve been looking at things that are at three different times in our universe, 1955, 1992, and 2018, whatever.

I’m doubtful. I don’t know how you pull this off exactly, but that’s probably what I would do is I’d try to make it an ah-ha for the reader because the point is you want the reader to be surprised when the audience is surprised. You can’t separate that surprise out. It just doesn’t work.

**John:** So I suspect that the solution he’s looking for really is what you’re describing is that in scene headers you’re probably putting in little brackets that say timeline 1 after the day or night, just to make it clear. Because as a viewer we’ll see like, OK, we’re back in the same space but there’s different characters, so there’s a different thing happening here. They’ll at least acknowledge that they’re in different kind of spaces. They’ll follow different places. And I can see where they might be having a bit of an advantage over the reader who is just seeing – all text looks the same. So marking the different timelines in the header might be a way to do it. Some sort of just simple indication that this is the different stuff.

Ultimately when you board it and figure out how you’re going to shoot it those timelines will be useful for everyone on the production to understand that this is this part of it.

The closest analogy I can think of is the pilot for This is Us tries this trick where it’s not immediately clear in the pilot for This is Us that we’re in multiple timelines. And so they did as much as they could to hide the stuff that would make it obvious that they were in vastly different timelines as the story began.

**Craig:** Yeah. And they had to fit that within essentially 46 minutes or 48 minutes. This is different. Sounds like it’s a movie, so a little trickier. But sure. It’s doable.

We’ve got time for one more here. Alex writes, “I’m currently pitching a series and I’ve been asked to sign release forms that state ‘I the submitter acknowledge that the submitted materials to producer may be similar or identical to those submitted by others or in development.’ Is there a safe way to edit this to similar within reason so that I am protected if the company wholesale steals my material in the future? I know this is extremely unlikely, but I’ve come across extremely dodgy companies already in the pitching process and wondered if there were a sensible approach to this.

“I’ve looked everywhere I can think of online and I haven’t found a comprehensive answer. I realize in most cases companies are just protecting themselves from lawsuits, but is there a compromise edit to this kind of submission release form without looking like an unreasonably fussy person?”

Well, John, you and I have both gone to law school so why don’t you kick this off?

**John:** So, the kind of thing that Alex describes I hear about a lot. And there are things that people are signing. I don’t know that you really get away from signing it if you are going into pitch at these places. I’m not excited about you going into pitch at dodgy places. That doesn’t sound great either. And yet the process of getting started sometimes is taking a bunch of movies with people that like, eh, I don’t really like you but you don’t know until you kind of get in there.

The reason why they’re having you sign this thing is because they are worried about a lawsuit and a frivolous lawsuit about some other project just because they’re reading a bunch of stuff. I get why they’re doing it. I get why you’re frustrated to do this. What I will tell you, Alex, is that you signing this does not preclude you from doing a true on copyright lawsuit if they really do steal your idea. That doesn’t happen much.

Always remember that you are taking these meetings and trying to get your career started as a writer overall, not a writer of one particular project. And so to not be losing any sleep about your one idea being stolen. You want them to be hiring you as a writer to write stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, well first of all you can’t, well, you can’t file a proper copyright case if your idea is stolen because your idea is not property. But if you felt that your material had been properly infringed upon, that they were essentially appropriating your unique literary material in fixed form then sure. So, look, here’s the thing. I don’t know what the difference is between similar and similar within reason. I think sometimes people think – and by the way, to be clear, John and I are not lawyers.

**John:** Not at all.

**Craig:** But I think that sometimes people think that there’s some sort of weird magic binding power in these legal terms. And that if you come up with the proper incantation you have then protected yourself from evil — you have not. The fact is if you said I want to change similar to similar within reason, they would just argue with you just because that’s what they’re paid to do. But what’s similar within reason? OK. That’s what a judge would have to determine anyway. Because they would say, look, this thing was similar to something we already have. And you would say no it’s not. And a judge would have to say is it similar or not. That’s what similar – so it’s just adding words and I don’t see really what the magic protection comes of that.

And I also have to tell you, in general, I think people sometimes misunderstand. They think that these contracts are kind of the important factor. That your success or failure turns on the language of these things. When in fact it really turns on the nature of the people that you’re making an agreement with. If they’re bad people it doesn’t matter what you put in this. They’re going to abuse you and exploit you and they have more lawyers than you. And if they’re good people they won’t. So the most important thing that you said here Alex is, “I’ve come across extremely dodgy companies already in the pitching process.”

Stop. You wonder if there’s a sensible approach. Don’t pitch to them. By the way, don’t pitch to anybody that’s just like one of these pitchy pitch companies. Just don’t do it. And if they seem dodgy or dinky it’s because they are. Everything basically is as it appears when it comes to this sort of thing. The studios are studios. You’ve heard of them. They’re real. Then the mini majors, you’ve heard of them. They’re real. Then there’s like some companies that have made movies you’ve heard of. They’re real. Then there are these other places. They’re not.

And it’s not really hard to figure out who is who. And, yeah, it’s quite likely that people that are on the edges of things may be more willing to play fast and loose because they don’t care. The weird part is all these writers are out there trying to break into the business and they’re finding people that are offering them a toehold and they’re thinking, “Oh thank god, my ship has come in,” but the people that are offering them a toehold are also trying to break into the business, as producers, and financiers, and studios.

So, you see, we think as writers that we’ve found an adult, but we have not. We have just found another child who is far more ruthless than we are. So, I wouldn’t worry so much about the specific words here. I urge everyone to please, please have a lawyer review any document you sign. But I don’t think that your salvation lies within the tweak of a clause like this or a phrase like that. I think it lies within your own intuition and trusting your gut.

**John:** The other sort of crucial bit of advice, just having watched a bunch of writers start their careers and sort of how it all goes, is you’re more likely to have success by having as many people as possible read your stuff and your stuff gets passed around and people you don’t know are reading your script are reading your script. That’s sort of the organic process.

And so in saying like don’t pitch to dodgy companies, yes, I mean don’t get in business with people who are awful. But at the same time don’t run away from somebody just because they have one produced credit. Like everyone is starting someplace and so the person who may get your movie made may be a person who hasn’t done a lot yet. So, when you’re sitting across from somebody and they skeeve you out that’s a good sign don’t be in business with them. But just because they don’t have an Oscar on their shelf doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be taking that meeting.

**Craig:** There you go. 100%.

**John:** Cool. All right, it’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is You Might Be the Killer. So it’s a movie that is debuting on Saturday, so I’ve not yet seen it, but I love the genesis of this movie. So this movie is written by Brett Simmons and Thomas Vitale. It’s directed by Simmons. But it’s based on a Twitter exchange that I watched happen in real time between Chuck Wendig and Sam Sykes.

It is a genius Twitter thread. These guys are playing characters. And that became the basis for this movie. So everyone sort of read this thread is like, wow, let’s make a movie off of this idea. And they sold them the idea and made the movie. It is a slasher comedy. There’s been many slasher comedies. The first one I know that’s ever been based on a Twitter thread. And I’m just happy for these guys and happy for them to have made their movie.

Chuck Wendig and Sam Sykes are both fantastic writers to follow on Twitter, by the way. They have really good advice on a consistent basis. So I would urge you to follow the two of them. And just to see their movie which will have already debuted by the time you’re listening to this podcast, but should be available on Syfy Channel at whatever point you want to watch it.

**Craig:** Cool. Why does Sci-Fi Channel spell their name Syfy?

**John:** It drives me crazy.

**Craig:** What is that? They’re afraid?

**John:** They went to a branding expert who said we should spell it in a way that no one would ever want to spell sci-fi.

**Craig:** I want to go to a branding expert that helps me launch my new company where branding experts are paraded in front of large groups of people and then slowly beaten to death with wooden spoons. I mean, come on!

**John:** I mean, I think the first thing they would do is, “Does it need to be wooden? Because wooden feels organic, but it does it have to be wood?”

**Craig:** And can we spell spoons Spunz?

**John:** Oh my god let’s build a company called Spunz.

**Craig:** [laughs] I mean, it’s like Syfy. Like if you were starting the Action Channel. Now you have to spell it Axion. It’s so dumb.

**John:** You know that’s a real channel?

**Craig:** What? Axion is a real channel?

**John:** It’s a real channel?

**Craig:** What? What do you mean?

**John:** Yeah, I think Sony owns it.

**Craig:** Axion Channel. I’m looking it up right now. Axion Channel? No there isn’t.

**John:** Oh, maybe – what am I thinking? There’s a Sony brand that is essentially the same thing.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Unbelievable. So outrageous. Just spell words the way they’re supposed to be spelled.

Right, well, my One Cool Thing this week is something that I’ve been using all week long. It is a tool that is useful if you are currently in production and perhaps working with editors who are not where you are. It’s called Evercast. Their website is evercast.us. It is a company that was cofounded by Roger Barton of all people who is a big editor. He’s done a lot of big like Jerry Bruckheimer movies and Michael Bay movies and stuff like that.

And essentially it’s a proper screen-sharing of an Avid or Final Cut Pro or any standard professional–

**John:** Non-linear editor.

**Craig:** Exactly. And so it allows me, because right now our editors are in London. That’s where our postproduction is set up. That’s where it’s happening. And I’ve been over there to work with them and obviously the director has been over there working with them. But for little things like tweaking and reviews and stuff I don’t want to fly to London. So along comes this solution where we can get on this service together. It is studio approved and secure. And it allows me to literally see the screen. It’s a proper screen-sharing of the Avid screen, including the timeline and the bin and everything. And plus there’s audio and video conferencing. And interestingly you can also record your audio and video chat so that if you’re saying giving notes on something the editor can record it and then listen back later when they’re doing the changes.

So it’s really, really useful and it works quite well. A couple of times it’s glitched on us, but then support has been right on top of it and fixed it. It’s web-based. You access it through your Chrome browser. It does not work on Safari. And it’s been kind of a lifesaver.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think as production continues to become a global affair this is going to become more and more useful as time goes on.

**John:** Yeah, I’ll be curious which shows start going to an around the world production. Because podcasts like The Daily I know they record it in New York but then they send it over to Europe to do music and final sound editing. And it’s not because it’s cheaper in Europe but because just time zone wise it lets them work all night on that and so they can send it back in the morning.

**Craig:** Oh, interesting. Yeah. Right now I’m just waking up super early to spend time with this wonderful editor who goes to bed quite late now. So, we’ve been kind of dealing with that. But she’s been great and so far so good. So I just wanted to give them a little nod. They’re doing a fine job over there at the Evercast Company.

**John:** Very nice. That is our show for this week. As always, our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is also by Matthew. We’ll just use the audio from the Arlo Finch trailer, which he wrote and it’s just great music, so good to hear it even without the visuals.

If you have an outro for us you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. We’re actually running a little bit low on outros. So, folks, step it up. We need some more outros there.

You can find Scriptnotes on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there leave us a review so other people can find the show.

You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com. They go up within the week of the episode airing. That’s also where you’ll find show notes and links to the things we talked about.

You can find all the back episodes of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net. It is $1.99 a month. If you subscribe now you can send us a question to answer on our questions episode which I guess we should probably try to record that next week maybe.

Oh, also you can find all the back episodes available as 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com. Craig, thanks for another fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. See you next time.

Links:

* The Arlo Finch [series trailer](http://johnaugust.com/2018/arlo-finch-the-series-trailer) is live!
* [Chunking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology))
* [How Shrek 2 has been redubbed for the UK market](https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/how-shrek-2-has-been-redubbed-for-the-uk-market-730943.html) by Leslie Felperin for The Independent
* [You Might Be the Killer](https://nypost.com/2018/10/03/how-a-twitter-feed-morphed-into-a-syfy-movie/amp/?__twitter_impression=true), written by Brett Simmons and Thomas P. Vitale and directed by Simmons, born from this [Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/SamSykesSwears/status/890751932779839488) between Chuck Wendig and Sam Sykes.
* [Evercast](https://www.evercast.us) allows Craig to be in the Chernobyl edit from home
* T-shirts are available [here](https://cottonbureau.com/people/john-august-1)! We’ve got new designs, including [Colored Revisions](https://cottonbureau.com/products/colored-revisions), [Karateka](https://cottonbureau.com/products/karateka), and [Highland2](https://cottonbureau.com/products/highland2).
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed)).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_371.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/Two-Things-at-the-Same-Time).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Oh, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 370 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program we’re going to take a look at simultaneity which is a difficult to spell word for two or more things happening at once. Then we’ll hopefully be applying what we learned to three new entries in the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Ah. Our old friend.

**John:** Yes. It’s back to basics. Just me and Craig. No special guests. It’s a craft episode.

**Craig:** Good. Because you know what? It’s enough already.

**John:** Enough.

**Craig:** Enough. I mean, we are like County Kitchen Buffet, or Perkins Cake and Steak. I don’t even know if that’s really a restaurant anymore. I’m coming up with comfort food restaurants. We provide a certain comfort food experience to people. And while every now and then they might like the fancy breakfast, mostly they just want the Root and Toot and Fresh and Fruit’n or whatever that stupid thing is called.

**John:** I feel like this is more like the Quarter Pounder with Cheese. You know exactly what you’re going to get. That’s what you’re going to get. You’re going to get a conversation about a topic in craft. You’re going to have some Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There’s going to be some stuff we love, some stuff we think could be better. There will be spelling mistakes.

**Craig:** Probably a little bit of anger somewhere in there.

**John:** Maybe. There could be some anger. We’ll see.

**Craig:** You know what’s interesting about the Quarter Pounder with Cheese? It’s a very good example of getting what you expect, except it’s never a quarter pound. I guess it starts as a quarter pound and then something happens to it. So you actually never really know what it weighs. I’d be interested. Somebody should put them on scales and see.

**John:** I know exactly what a Quarter Pounder with Cheese tastes like, but I’ve not eaten beef in 25 years.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** But I still know what it takes like. I lost a tooth to a Quarter Pounder with Cheese growing up. It was a tooth that was going to fall out. I was losing my baby teeth.

**Craig:** Ah, OK. It wasn’t like the white whale coming to take your leg.

**John:** Not a bit like that.

**Craig:** OK. You’re not on some lifelong revenge crusade against Quarter Pounders.

**John:** What if I were? What is that were really my thing?

**Craig:** It would explain a lot.

**John:** It would explain so, so much. Last week, or the week before we talked about how we’re going to do a special episode that is just random advice for people who are premium subscribers. And so these premium subscribers have been writing in with their questions. So, here’s a little sampler platter of some of the questions we may be answering from our listeners. So, we’ve gotten a bunch in, but these are three ones that I thought were really good. I’ll start with one. Craig, what’s your take on traffic calming, such as narrowing streets or reducing lanes, adding bike lanes, etc. to reduce crashes between drivers and pedestrians or cyclists? How do you feel about that?

**Craig:** I’m pretty sure the robot cars are going to solve that problem for us.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Because the robot cars will just plow over those cyclists and pedestrians because they’re the enemy.

**Craig:** They’ve been taught to prize other robot cars. That’s in the hierarchy of who they should murder. First must protect self, then other robot car, then pets, then property, then human beings.

**John:** I think, I mean, Elon Musk is their first priority, isn’t he? Like must protect Elon Musk.

**Craig:** Like I said, the robots are going to protect themselves first. He’s – what’s going on with Elon? He needs to adjust the dosage there. Something has gone a little wacky.

**John:** The dials got a little bit off there. People who don’t sleep can kind of accomplish a lot, but they also can make some bad choices.

**Craig:** It’ll kill you in the end.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, here’s one. I like this one. One of the questions that we’re going to be answering is “Did John have a roommate in college?”

**John:** I’ve had many roommates in college. And I will talk about them I think on our special episode. None of them are as notable as Craig’s. But actually the last roommate, so by roommate I’ll define like a person I shared a room with for an extended period of time who was not my husband Mike is a famous person. So I can talk about that as well.

**Craig:** OK, well there you go. So we’ll have a little bit of that going on. What else are we going to be talking about in this – this is going to be a great episode by the way.

**John:** So another question is my partner and I have a theory that only one member of a romantic couple should enjoy pickles. Do you eat pickles? Does your significant other eat pickles? Are we speculating uselessly based on anecdotal evidence?

**Craig:** That one is not going to take a long amount of time.

**John:** But I mean yes or no. So we’re happy to answer your pickle-based questions.

**Craig:** Yeah. But I would also encourage people to write in with questions that are suitable for our vast intellect and enormous reserves of practical wisdom.

**John:** Yeah. So I will say that some people have been writing in with genuine screenwriting questions and it’s like you know what that’s probably not what we’re going to prioritize in this episode because we do that every week.

**Craig:** All the time.

**John:** All the time. So this is going to be a special thing. We’re going to really try to emphasize random advice, not screenwriting advice.

**Craig:** Yeah. John and I are trying to spice things up over here. Don’t bring us the same old thing.

**John:** Absolutely. We’re in a long relationship here. This is going to be sort of our weekend getaway.

**Craig:** Right. Come on. You get what we’re doing? Let us just have fun. Don’t – ugh, these people. What else is going on? You know what? I sense, just because I have a certain telepathy, that there’s some kind of t-shirt news in the offing.

**John:** There are three great t-shirts up. And so you were actually gone for when we announced these t-shirts, but there are three new t-shirts that are available at Cotton Bureau. The first is Colored Revisions, so it is a helpful guide to the order of colored revisions if you’re doing that in your script. Next we have a Highland 2 shirt. And finally we have a Karateka shirt, which we’d actually done years and years ago, but people asked for more of them so we made more of them. So, they are selling nicely. They’re available right now at Cotton Bureau.

**Craig:** Now, John, do we happen to have a revisions t-shirt that is Europe only?

**John:** Tell me about European revisions. Tell me what is different.

**Craig:** They flop pink and blue. So they go white, pink, blue, not white, blue, pink.

**John:** That’s crazy.

**Craig:** I. Know. Trust me I know. I mean, there’s a couple other weird ones down the line, but the big shocker right off the bat, I mean, because we’re so ingrained here in the US. It’s like after white comes blue. And they’re like, wait, what, blue, what happened to pink? I’m like what do you mean what happened to pink, pink is next. No it’s not.

**John:** I don’t remember that from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but I believe you. So I’m sure that’s just the order they use.

**Craig:** They may have let you do what you do. But because we had so many different countries and it was exclusively European, I mean, the production was entirely housed in Europe. It wasn’t like we were shooting stuff over from – I mean, you guys were at Warner Bros right?

**John:** We were.

**Craig:** So Warner Bros can sort of say we’re in charge. Do it American. But no, not for this.

**John:** That’s a good point. Because Warner Bros insisted that we keep the script formatted for 8.5×11 even though we were on A4 paper.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** There you go.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Last bit of news is that you and I are both doing some stuff in October. I am starting off in October in Frankfurt. So I’m doing an Arlo Finch event at Hugendubel an der Hauptwache at 11:30am.

**Craig:** That’s a great place.

**John:** On October 10th. It is a very cool bookstore based on how the website is set up. So I’m doing a tour of Germany and Scandinavia and so that is one of the public events in Germany there.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Then after the Austin Film Festival I am going to Boulder, Colorado. And so I’m going to be doing a 6:30pm reading event kind of thing at the Boulder Book Store which is my hometown bookstore. So come check that out. That’s October 29th at 6:30pm.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** But we’re both going to be at the Austin Film Festival, which should be great. We’re confirming our guests for the live show. It’s going to be a fun time.

**Craig:** Yeah. And based on the guests that I already know we have, you’re going to want it. And we now have a pretty decent multi-year track record of delivering some pretty awesome live shows. So, you’re going to want to see it. I don’t know what else to say. You’re going to want to see it.

**John:** Yeah. I’m going to say a little bit more of the entertainment burden for this show is on Craig’s shoulders this year based on an idea that we’re going to try to do. So I’m looking forward to it.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a little bit of an entertainment. I like to think that the entertainment burden is always on my shoulders because I’m vivacious.

**John:** Yes. You are vivacious.

**Craig:** And I’m a human.

**John:** You are. Yet, to pull this off you’re going to have to do some work ahead of time. And I’m usually the person who is just like Mr. Organized thing, but you’re going to have do some organize-y stuff.

**Craig:** After we conclude recording this podcast I will give you an update on that.

**John:** I’m so excited. All right. Let us get to our feature topic which is simultaneity. So this came up with some stuff I was writing this week and I thought it was something we could talk about in this episode because a lot of times in scripts you have two events need to be happening simultaneously. And it’s a weird thing about how text works versus how images work. So, when you see an image you see the whole image at once. And you can take in all of it at once.

When you are reading a sentence you don’t know how the sentence ends until you get to the end. And as a writer you have to arrange your sentences in priority of what you want people to see in the frame. So, here being an example. Let’s say you have a burning clown being chased by a polar bear in a post-apocalyptic landscape.

**Craig:** OK. Seen it, but fine.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s a cliché image, I know.

**Craig:** Trite.

**John:** You can only do so much in one sentence so you have to prioritize do you start with the clown, or the man on fire, or the bear, or the setting? Basically each sentence is going to do kind of one thing, or you’re going to have to basically arrange those objects and those things in the importance you want the reader to see them. Versus on an image, like if you just saw that as a frame, you saw this as a scene in your movie, you’re going to get all of that at once, to the point where like a director may have to make choices about what he or she is going to focus on in that frame so we can actually see not the whole thing all at once.

And so this kind of simultaneity, like we’re always wrestling with sort of the order of things and sort of how we’re seeing stuff. But it becomes especially challenging when two things are supposed to be happening at the same time and on a script level you have to figure out how you’re going to show that these things are happening simultaneously.

**Craig:** And it’s where the screenplay format does let us down a bit.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** The very first writing job I ever had was for an advertising agency. And they gave me a format to use for, you know, you’re writing a 30-second ad. And their format, which I think is fairly common in the advertising/copywriting world is basically a paper that’s divided into two columns. And the left column is for text. That’s dialogue or onscreen text or voice over. And the right side is visuals. So right off the bat they have created a sense of simultaneity that we simply don’t have in screenplays because we’re reading them top to bottom and we’re separating what we say from what we see.

**John:** And so we make certain exceptions, like dual dialogue, where people are speaking at once. And, sure, but you’re still going to always read the stuff on the left before you read the stuff on the right. So as a writer you’re making choices about who gets to be the left hand column because that’s the stuff that you’re going to read first.

You know, text, it’s inherently limited in its ability to do a lot of things at once. It’s always going to be – it’s always linear. It’s always going to be left to right, or right to left if you’re in a different language. But it’s not going to be everything at once.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, look, certainly everybody is dealing with this when they’re making the movie as well because we experience time in a linear fashion. So no matter what we do, no matter what funky games we play, we experience things linearly. In movies where we call them non-linear, for instance like a Tarantino movie. So Pulp Fiction gets all loopy and funky with its time and you realize that the thing you saw at the beginning is now at the end. And in fact it’s not really the end. The end is in the middle of the movie. But we experience all of it in sequence linearly and then the movie goes, oh wait, by the way imagine that that actually already happened or something. Right?

So, we’re always struggling with this, whether we’re writing or we’re shooting, but what you’re right to say that one thing the camera can do is witness things at the same time. We cannot witness for the audience, meaning our reader as writers, we cannot witness things at the same time. And this is why sometimes you will – if you listen to us a lot and we talk about these things and it may come up in our Three Page Challenge analysis – we harp on the way people write their action. Because in a very real way your return key, your enter, your paragraph break is you essentially saying this is where the end of a thing I want you to experience happens and now you’re going to see another thing.

So for instance, in your example, if I want to see the clown first I describe the clown. Then I hit return and then I describe oh my god look he’s being chased by a polar bear. But if I want to see it all at once, if I want to see the clown, the bear, the fire, the post-apocalyptic landscape, I just lay it in one tight little paragraph to say, “See, you experience all this before I hit the return key.” That means you’re kind of getting it all at once.

**John:** So if we want to separate those ideas out, like if we want to give a sense of how it’s going to feel on the screen you would probably say a man is running. We notice his oversized shoes. The man is a clown. Widening out we see what he’s running from. It is a polar bear charging on all four feet. Widening further we see the post-apocalyptic landscape of this thing. So that’s giving the sense of like by breaking out into those smaller sentences and putting them in that order we’re getting a sense that, OK, we’re probably kind of pulling out here. Basically we’re focused on this and we’re coming out.

If we did want to see the whole thing all together we’d keep it together as one sentence. And that gives a sense of like all of this is going to be sort of one shot. Sentences aren’t exactly one for one matches with shots. But we do as a reader tend to think about an image that goes with a line of scene description.

**Craig:** No question. And similarly when people are talking we either can say, look, this is what they’re going to say and you’re going to listen to it, or this is what they’re saying and while they’re saying it I want you to notice another thing happening. So, in that case you will break their dialogue up on the page. That is essentially how we create simultaneity between speaking and seeing is by carving up the dialogue. And the reader understands that it’s not like we look at the person talking then look away to see the thing then look at the person talking. It’s all at the same time.

**John:** An example being like a man and a woman are having a conversation at a table. She finishes her dialogue. She picks up the bottle and refills his glass. And then they keep talking. As a writer you may have put that there just to sort of break thoughts up. But it’s also going to change the energy of that moment. It’s basically signaling that there is a shift here. If we were in one type of coverage we may have moved to a different type of coverage. Something has happened here. And sometimes you see especially new writers they’ll throw that kind of stuff in without recognizing what it actually feels like from the reader’s perspective. Or that by breaking out a separate line versus sticking some of that stuff into a parenthetical they are really changing the texture and feel of how that scene is playing.

**Craig:** No question. And good point for all of you that are starting out. It may seem a bit random like why do you carve up this bit of dialogue. Why do you put a return thing here? Why don’t you? There’s no hard and fast rule to this except that you must always imagine how people might feel reading it if they don’t know what’s coming next. And think impressionistically. What is it that I want them to feel in the moment? Simultaneity is a very exciting thing to be used in a movie. You can use it sparingly. There are plenty of movies that have very little of it. But when multiple things are happening at the same time it’s exciting.

So, for instance there’s a scene in Chernobyl I’m thinking of where a character is listening to other people talking. And he knows something that apparently they do not. And he keeps waiting for one of them to say the thing that he thinks is so obvious but none of them do. And he’s growing increasingly nervous. So there’s simultaneity there because people are talking and I need to be also with him and see his experience of this. So, I have people talk and then in between I start writing bits of dialogue for him that’s in his head that he doesn’t say that’s in italics that’s in action.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it’s like I’m creating simultaneous dialogue between what is spoken by the talkers and what is being thought by the thinker. Anything you can do to kind of get across – and there’s no screenwriting book in the world that will list that as a thing you can do. And nobody taught me to do that. I only did it because it just seemed like it made the most sense to convey what I wanted people to experience. Simple as that.

**John:** Yeah. So what you’re describing is, well, maybe we can talk about three kinds of simultaneity you’re going to find in screenwriting. There’s at least three, but let’s talk about these three. So this first one is I think kind of what you’re describing in Chernobyl, also the example of the clown running from the polar bear, which is a simultaneity where everything is happening all at once in a frame and yet we are having to focus on certain things. And so a thing that often comes up in these questions that people write in is like I have this big party and there’s different conversations happening at different places in the party. How do I show that?

Well, that’s a thing that you do all the time and as you’re recognizing that while these people are having this conversation over here other folks are having a conversation over here and it’s all happening in a shared space. And maybe it doesn’t matter that they’re all exactly synchronized, but there’s going to be a reason why you’re moving from one conversation to another conversation. So, they’re all in a space and they’re all happening at the same time but there’s not a great degree of interaction between the two.

A second kind of simultaneity that you see is people in different places that have to be happening at the same time. So, it can be examples of parallel action but with interaction between the two. So like there’s two sides of a phone call. So you and I are talking, we’re not in the same space, but we can cut to either side and it’s one conversation. Or a car crash where you see we’re in two different cars and we realize like, oh, they’re going to crash into each other. Like they’re headed towards each other. That’s a kind of simultaneity that’s common and it’s generally set up through parallel action, parallel structure between what one character is doing and what another character is doing. And when it’s done really well can have a tremendous amount of suspense. If there’s no interaction between the two then we as the audience have information that the characters don’t and that is stressful in a good way.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you’re putting your finger on, particularly with the party scenario you described, you’re putting your finger on one of the main struggles that both writers and directors and editors have in transmitting narrative that’s like real life and that is that there is a certain kind of mundane simultaneity we simply cannot do. We are incapable of doing it. Because at a party three different conversations are happening exactly at the same time in different places. We don’t know how to do it.

**John:** Yeah. So often like those conversations are happening literally just across from each other, so like you and I are having a conversation and the people next to us are having a different conversation and somehow we’re able to keep it all straight. That’s actually very hard to do on film. I’m sure people can find good examples of places that have been able to pull that off, but when I’m talking with you at a party I’m able to tune out everybody else and just focus on what you’re saying. That’s really hard to do in film and in television because we’re used to like if there’s people talking we should be understanding the people talking. So to push out that other noise is really a challenge.

**Craig:** Neurologists have been studying this issue of attention for a long time because the human brain is remarkable. We can actually pick out if we choose to one person’s voice among 40 voices. If you were at a party, everyone is talking at once, you can still have a conversation with one person. Because your brain decides I’m just going to focus on you. In movies our attention devices are literal focus and then the levels of sound. So you can sort of simulate things by rack focusing. That means, OK, I’m looking at these people in focus, I’m hearing them, and then I rack and I realize that these people are also talking. They’ve been there the whole time but now I can see them and hear them because the other audio has gone down.

It turns out that this sort of thing is actually quite distracting and oddly artificial. Because in a weird way it’s closer to how our minds process. So therefore it ends up a little bit in the uncanny valley of attention setting. And that you may very frequently be better off just simulating the simultaneity by listening to one conversation and cutting and going to another corner of the room and listening to a different one. And it doesn’t matter – only if it’s really important that they happen at the same time. And if it’s really important that they happen at the same time then you get to play tricks like this person’s conversation is going on and then it gets interrupted by somebody coming in through the door and going I’m Here and everybody cheers. And then you cut over to the other corner and they have their conversation. And theirs ends with that same person coming through the door and going I’m Here and everyone cheers. And you go, oh, I get it. Those were happening at the same time.

But the rack focusy, gimmicky fade in/fade out stuff, sometimes it’s not worth it.

**John:** Yeah. My year living in France I saw a bunch of movies in French and generally I can do it. If I am watching a movie and I can see the actors talking I can follow, even without subtitles, I can follow what’s going. It takes sort of every brain cell. But if you try to do that and you also have a voice over, like that kills me. My brain can’t process both them talking and a voice over. I need to be able to see the person speaking the French or I am just completely lost. And to the point where like I saw a movie with Mike and I was like, oh yeah, that was good. And he’s like did you understand what happened in the last five minutes? I was like no. He’s like the little girl died. And I’m like the little girl died? I had no idea. And it’s because my brain could follow people talking. And the same thing happens at parties if people speak to me in French. I can follow one conversation in French if 100% of my attention is focused there. But everything else around the sides I can’t deal with it. It’s just too much noise and too much information.

**Craig:** Yeah. And so we kind of do our own weird approximation of simultaneity because we can’t actually handle it ourselves. There’s only so much information we can take in. So, it’s not cheating. It’s just sort of an acknowledgement that what we’re doing is we are approximating reality but we’re doing so in a very unreal way. Reality is not two-dimensional. Reality does not have edits. Reality doesn’t have a score. So I don’t get too hung up on the fact that we can’t achieve perfect simultaneity and I think it’s probably a dragon that certain fancy directors are more interested in slaying than writers.

But as writers our job is to convey a sense of simultaneity.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so apart from whatever simple kind of things we have at our disposal like the shift key and breaking of dialogue, it’s really about honestly keeping the reader in mind.

**John:** Yeah. The last kind of simultaneity I want to make sure we talk about is that sense of a shared clock, or sort of like you’re in movie mean time. Everybody in the movie is on the same clock. And by that I generally mean like if it’s day for me it’s also day for you. That we’re all in the same time space. And so soap operas are sort of a classic example of this. In college I used to watch Days of our Lives, and a thing you notice about soap operas is like all the characters they’re in the same day. So, you never sort of jump to the next day in soap opera. Every soap opera happens within a day. And really most movies and television they’re pretty explicit if we’re going on to a new day, time has changed. And every scene that happens happens after the scene that happened before it. So even if there’s different characters you’re going to default to the assumption that this scene has happened after the scene that happened before, even if it’s completely different characters. You’re going to assume that time movies forward. And it becomes jarring if you and I have a conversation and it’s sunset and the next conversation we see with the other characters it’s still afternoon. That feels weird. And we want to believe that it’s always going to go from morning to afternoon to evening to night to morning again.

And so sometimes as a writer you’re going to have to make choices about like, OK, when are we starting night and when are we going to believe that it’s the next day, or time has moved forward?

**Craig:** I told you about the crazy thing they made me do with the timeline writing in Europe right?

**John:** Yeah, so they want you to number every day and hour? Basically give a clock time for every scene?

**Craig:** Every single scene header had to have a time. An actual clock time. And I mean I gave it to a woman who works with me and I said please take the first pass at this because my whole thing is there are three times of day in movies – bright, dark, and in between. That’s the time of day. And, yes, sometimes you do need to know the time of day. And I had already called out those scenes. Like, yeah, you need to know this is 4:05. This is 4:10. Five minutes have passed by. But they’re insane about it. And it really wasn’t particularly useful. I don’t know why they do it that way. I will rail against it for the rest of my life. But they are very, very, very concerned about that sort of thing.

**John:** I would assume that their logic behind it is that it helps all the other departments figure out what day it is, what will have happened before, so if they need to make choices or changes. And literally so that the set department can move the clocks on the walls to the right time.

**Craig:** And yet somehow the largest motion picture and television industry in the world has managed to get by without this for a century. By the way, the way to deal with clocks: don’t show them. Don’t show clocks.

**John:** Don’t show clocks.

**Craig:** There you go. Problem solved. Because clocks are a continuity nightmare anyway.

**John:** Maybe we can find this episode online or a clip online from it, but I do remember an episode of Studio 60 which is all about the clock, because it’s all racing up to put on their Saturday Night Live like show. And there’s this meeting between two characters and they’re talking and the clock on the wall changes every time they cut back to the character. And you just can’t believe that they left it in. And so the clock is important as a story element but why they wouldn’t have stopped the clock is crazy to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. Stop the clock. Yeah, that’s like a rookie mistake. There’s that and the scenes where there’s one that Melissa always gets crazy about in Thelma & Louise where Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon are in the, I think it’s the bar, it’s right before the big confrontation where they kill somebody. And they’re having drinks. And every time you go back and forth the level of liquid in each glass goes up and down, and up down, and up and down.

**John:** The prop people are just like killing themselves when they see that.

**Craig:** You know, at some point though I guess you look at that and you go whatever. Like it’s important and then it’s obviously not important because Thelma & Louise is an institution. I don’t think that that glass scene harmed anyone’s appreciation of a classic film.

**John:** It was an important movie about women taking control of their lives. But the glasses. Oh my god! I can’t get past the glasses.

**Craig:** I always thought it was a movie about the strange behavior of liquids.

**John:** It really is. The fluid dynamics of that movie I just couldn’t put up with that.

**Craig:** It’s my biggest problem. I just thought that they kind of got away from what mattered.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, obviously evaporation in that universe works completely differently.

**Craig:** And condensation.

**John:** Indeed. So.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. Amazing.

**John:** Magical.

**Craig:** We’ve got some three pagers here that we’re going to have to deal with, huh?

**John:** We do. So let’s wrap up our simultaneity saying like if there are situations where you have to signal simultaneity, Craig really hit on one where it’s that sort of repeated moment, so the guy walks through the door and everyone says welcome or like surprise, to signal that those two moments really did overlap, they happened at the same time. So characters reacting to the same thing is a good way to do it.

Just really repeated scenes. So that’s what Go does. It repeats the exact same scene three times. And when we first shot Go we didn’t have that scene. We were repeating a different scene, two different scenes. And it didn’t work. Like the audience couldn’t track it. So that’s why I had to write a new scene that could be the one scene that we’d always go back to. And then finally like just communication between two characters can signal that people are in the same time space. And so classically now a text sent between people lets us know to connect where they are and that we’re in the same time. Because otherwise if you just cut to somebody you don’t know is it right now, is it hours after that last scene. So some kind of communication between the two of them can signal this is happening now and not slightly in the future.

**Craig:** Excellent summary, John, and an excellent topic of something that is a challenge but also an opportunity I think for writers.

**John:** Agreed. Let us take this opportunity to look at more writing. This is a Three Page Challenge–

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** A segment we do every now and again. The next time we’re going to do this segment is at the Austin Film Festival, so we’re going to do a live version of this at the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So starting today if you would like to submit your three pages you can submit them specifically with a little tick box that says I will be at the Austin Film Festival and I am happy to come up on stage with you and talk through these three pages.

**Craig:** I feel like we’re extra nice to people in that venue. So if you want the nicest possible treatment, that’s the way to go.

**John:** And we always have special guests up there to help us talk through things. It’s a fun time to do it. So if you would like to submit to that you can. But in a general sense these are the first three pages of movies or pilots that listeners have sent in for us to take a look at. This is not a competition. This is just an exhibition of screenwriting craft. And we talk through what’s working and what could be better. So if you have three pages you want to send in you go to johnaugust.com/threepage. If you would like to read the pages that we’re about to discuss they’re attached to the show notes or just go to johnaugust.com.

Craig, do you want to start us off with Collective Outcasts?

**Craig:** All right. I will do that. This is Collective Outcasts. This is a pilot written by Angelique Gross. And so we begin with Jack, he’s 25, kind of a buzz cut military guy, waking up in the morning to his alarm. Meanwhile in her own bedroom is Amy, 24, a slacker who does not want to wake up at all. And we kind of go back and forth between them. He’s completely on point, gets up, gets dressed, he’s clean, he eats a healthy breakfast. She refuses to get up. She drinks some wine from last night. She’s kind of a big hot mess. And then she eventually gets going a bit late.

We see that they’re both on the same campus. She is – it’s some sort of art campus I believe, an art college, and she’s talking to her mother and explaining that she’s registering for her classes right now. And Jack, who is former military, walks through this very sort of squishy liberal campus to arrive at this faculty adviser Richard, who is surprised to see that this is their first student who has ever been here on the GI Bill. And Jack explains that he has in fact been in the military since he was emancipated at the age of 16. He served in Iraq. And now he wants to meet people with similar interests. He did not make any friends in the army. And those are the first three pages of Collective Outcasts. John, what did you think?

**John:** Well, let’s start with the obvious relevant topic which is the parallelism. So, this first page is all parallelism where it’s the exact same time we’re seeing Jack, we’re seeing Amy, we’re seeing them going through the same time. It literally says 6:00AM, 7:00AM, 8:00AM in the scene headers there to show us that these are happening simultaneously. It’s a very classic structure to show two characters with very different reactions to the same kinds of everyday things.

Where I was frustrated by this set up is – I think we talked about sort of like the showing hitting the alarm clock when you wake up in the morning is just such a cliché beat that you have to really put some spin on that or else it’s going to feel just really cliché and it’s going to start you off on a bad foot. This kind of does that.

The bigger problem for me was moving from Jack’s side to Amy’s side to Jack’s side to Amy’s side, the transitions really weren’t built there. It was just basically contrasting, but there was no sense of flow between them. And the good versions of these sequences it really feels like you’re moving forward every time you’re moving between the characters. It can be as simple as like he opens a door and then she opens a door, or she walks through a door. That sense of like there’s a visual feeling of moving through a space. And here it was just like a bunch of shot, shot, shot, shot, shot, which got me a little bit frustrated.

Craig, I had a hard time understanding this campus. And so our initial description of the campus, I think the reason why you sort of wonder like is it a private art college, so “Amy walks across a small but fancy university campus pathway. This school probably wasn’t like your college. There are no frats or grades but there are workshop nights with copious amounts of alcohol and ever present judgement from the anti-commercialism students.” But you didn’t say private art college. You didn’t give me a sense – give me a name. Just be specific about sort of where we’re at. I didn’t know where we were at sort of in the world. So, you gave me a lot of context without telling me what I’m actually looking at.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, let’s talk about the simultaneity in the beginning. I think you’re exactly right. The best of these things work where one side of the simultaneous action is commenting on the other. So it’s simply the contrast of I got up on time, I didn’t. I’m clean, I’m going to take a drink. But there’s something a little bit more commenty about it. It seems like – well first of all I thought they were in the same place for a while. It’s a natural thing to presume that if we start with an interior of a bedroom and then we cut to an interior of a bedroom and they are two people in their mid-20s and they are both waking up at the same time that they may be roommates. They could be living in the same house. I don’t know. So partly I also wanted to make very sure, or I would suggest to Angelique that she make sure that there’s a little bit there to make it clear that this is one kind of space, this is another kind of space. This one is on the ground floor of a tiny thing and this one is in the high rise of a large dormitory. Whatever it is, just so I know they’re in different places.

It is very cliché. And it’s not giving me much other than this. This guy is a straight-shooter and she’s a mess. Which kind of, hmmm, we’ve seen it. We’ve just seen the wake up sequence many, many times. It’s hard to get excited about it. And I’m not sure it’s the best way to introduce somebody like this, meaning Jack. Amy, yes. Right?

So let’s get to John’s point about this college. Here are the things that Angelique describes about the college at the top of page 2 that we will not see. We will not see that it is small. We will not see that it is fancy. We will not see that it wasn’t like our college. We will not see that there are not frats or grades. And we will not see that there are workshop nights, whatever those are, with copious amounts of alcohol. And we will not see the ever-present judgment from the anti-commercialism students. What are they anyway?

We will see none of that. Here’s what we will see. We will see a 24-year-old woman walking across some sort of quad. So, therefore what Angelique does later down is exactly the kind of thing she needs to do right away. “Jack walks down the hall taking in all the posters and art. One flyer reads: ‘WANT TO JOIN AN EMOTIONAL FIGHT CLUB?’ Another: ‘JUNG DEMOCRATS MEETING TONIGHT!’”

So, you need to build the space. First of all, give this place a name. Tell me that it’s an art college. Tell me that it’s super snow-flakey. Whatever it is that you want to do so that you want to set up a situation where Jack is a fish out of water. Go for it. But then you have a fish out of water. So, introduce him as the fish out of water. He walks into a place and people presume that he’s someone’s dad, or that he’s lost, or that he’s security. Do you know what I mean? Like what could possibly happen when this guy walks in. But just to see him wake up and approach his adviser just feels sort of like a pretty boring way to introduce this character.

When he meets Richard, who is his adviser, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to think about Richard. Richard seems to be both interested and not interested. He announces exposition. He says, “That’s right, Jack. Nice to meet you. I just wanted to touch base before the semester started. You’re our first student here on the G.I. Bill!”

What? No. No one says that. Ever. In the world. And nor would he want to touch base with him just because of that, especially because right after that it says, ”Richard doesn’t really care about what Jack is saying.”

So, it just seems like Richard is here for exposition. He’s Professor Exposition and it’s not working.

**John:** I agree. It’s not working. So my bigger macro concern isn’t really Richard. It’s Jack. Because Jack doesn’t feel like a guy who just spent eight years in the military. He feels like unfrozen Boy Scout. Like what I’m getting right now doesn’t feel like a person who has lived and done stuff. It feels like he’s just naïve in ways that you wouldn’t be if you served eight years in the military. So, you’ve seen some stuff if you’ve served eight years in the military. And so, yes, I think the general idea of a guy on the G.I. Bill going to an art college, that can be some good interesting tension. I buy that as a concept. And ultimately I assume this is a romantic comedy, so they will become a couple.

But this isn’t the right way for me to meet him and I’m nervous about how we’re setting up this character because I can sort of feel his arc and the thawing of his soul and I’m not loving it.

**Craig:** I agree with you. And another thing that always concerns me is when fish are out of water and seem to be really excited about it. You should be gasping for breath when you’re out of water. You don’t belong here. You want to get out of here. You didn’t want to be here in the first place. And the good news is you don’t have to stay. You’re only there for a week to do something. And then you get stuck, or you meet someone you fall in love with, or something.

But there’s no conflict inherent in the idea that he really, really wants to be there. So, I’m not sure where this goes. But I would say to Angelique that while these pages are laid out nicely and–

**John:** And they use Courier Prime which is a beautiful font.

**Craig:** Courier Prime, which as you know always butters John up. I think you need to go on cliché patrol. I think you need to go on exposition patrol. I think you need to really think about how you want to introduce characters. And you definitely, definitely want to manage information flow, because right now what you’re doing is you’re just kind of dumping information on us either through clunky dialogue or clunky action. But you’re not actually providing the filmmakers, whether it’s you or another person, with the tools that are required to convey this to the audience.

**John:** Yep. The last really small thing I want to point out is as Jack and Amy are introduced, “JACK (25), he’s a buzzcut military man but socially awkward,” so you can lose the pronoun for he and for she on this. When you’re introducing a character let them be their own noun. Let them carry the sentence. So, I just think you could lose the he’s and the she’s. Jack is a military buzz cut man, but socially awkward. Just let that be the thing. Don’t double up your noun and your pronoun.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can also drop the verb. Jack, 25, buzz cut military man. You don’t even need A. Buzz cut military man, socially awkward, endlessly curious. I like a nice bip-bip-boop. But yes, Amy, “she’s a feminist slacker.” It starts to feel a little bit like he – it’s like The Dating Game.

**John:** He’s a/She’s a. Yeah.

**Craig:** Exactly. Yeah. What’s next?

**John:** Let’s go to Yohannes Ashenafi. This is The Foster House Part 1, GPS. So, let me read a little summary of this. Mr. Kenny, 40s, is a raging hillbilly in every way. He’s driving recklessly while drinking a 12-pack PBR, Pabst Blue Ribbon, listening to a college ball game on the radio, and angrily trying to navigate through the Pocono Mountain backroads.

Toby, 17, with the brains of a genius but the accent and vocabulary of a hillbilly, is surrounded by his younger foster siblings watching a nature documentary on VHS. Hearing the screeching approach of the car the kids all jump, Toby signaling for them to keep quiet. Mr. Kenny enters in a rage, kicks the dog, meanwhile Toby warns the kids to stay quiet. Lucy, who is 11, wets her pants and asks him not to leave, but he must. And that’s the end of our three pages.

Craig, get us started at the Foster House.

**Craig:** Well, it’s not The Foster House. There’s about three different foster house movies in three pages, so let’s go through each one of those and maybe Yohannes can figure out which one he or – I guess it’s a he – wants to write. Because we have tonal problems throughout here.

Here’s what we have in the beginning. We have by the way a fairly well described scene where a goofy redneck weirdly in a neon blue Nissan, which already I was like, wait, what, OK but fine, is yelling at his radio because there’s a game going on and he obviously bet on it and it’s not working. That part was a bit cliché. And the radio broadcaster does not sound at all like a radio broadcaster. Sounds like movie radio broadcaster.

What I thought was really true to life was the way he started yelling, Mr. Kenny started yelling at the GPS navigator voice. That felt true and comical. Honestly comical. And then we go to at the same time this foster house where children are watching a nature documentary and they’re really excited by this and most of it is occupied by the narrator’s voice over for the documentary. And so the kids seem to really be enjoying this movie where animals kill each other, which is this whole other different vibe. And then things take a real hard turn once more when Mr. Kenny, who was presumably just a hapless goofy idiot who yells at GPS woman, comes home and now you realize, oh god no, he’s like Bill Sikes from Oliver and he’s going to beat or sexually assault them. And they’re terrified. I don’t know why they’re suddenly terrified. Because apparently they live with him all the time.

He kicks the dog which I got to tell you if you literally kick a dog on screen some people are just going to get up and walk out, FYI.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If you actually kick a dog, without warning, with no warning. You can show violence towards animals as something that a cruel, terrible person does, or you’ll see in the case of Chernobyl something that soldiers are required to do and it’s very sad, but it is explained. But there’s this sudden shocking moment of really awful violence. And then we have Toby speaking in a very kind of cornball approximation of an Appalachian accent or something telling these kids to be quiet because he is going to essentially beat them up or something.

And one final bit of confusion, a little girl, 11, which is not little by the way. 11 years old they have iPhones and a bunch of them are vaping at this point, but fine. 11 years old, it says, “She has soiled herself.” Which one is that?

**John:** That’s a bad thing.

**Craig:** I didn’t want to know. And she says sorry to Toby, who is one of the older kids, “Please don’t leave us.” Why would he – he’s 17, he lives there, he’s their brother, their foster brother, where is he going?

**John:** So my hunch is that Toby has left the house and is probably living out in the woods and sort of watches over the kids. So, there’s a lot to unpack here.

Let’s start with our sort of marquee topic of simultaneity, which is part of the reason we picked these three pages.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So hillbilly guy is driving back, the kids are watching a nature documentary. We sense that he’s probably headed towards them just because we’ve seen movies before. We know how movies work. But there was an opportunity here that if we were to intercut between the two of these a little bit more we could have a little bit more tension. If we really establish that he’s coming to them before they know he’s coming that is a possibility. I don’t know if it’s necessarily what we want, but it’s a possibility of escalating tension which could be good.

I agree with you that this sort of initial like he’s driving and he’s bet on the game, there’s too much, but I like sort of what it gets to. Where I wanted more is on page two, “Mr. Kenny slams on the breaks, the car fishtails to a stop. Fueled by petulant tantrum he trashes his car.” I want to know what trashes his car means.

**Craig:** Did he get a sledgehammer out?

**John:** But if you actually describe what that is, that is a really good revealing character moment. He’s just the kind of guy who beats up his car can be funny but it can also be really kind of terrifying. And it would be great to know that it crosses from funny to terrifying at this moment, because then I have a very different feeling about him coming into this house.

What you said about the dog, it drives me crazy. And so it’s not even about violence to animals, it’s just that, you know what, racist hillbillies, they love their dogs, too. And I think there’s a much better version of this scene where he’s this maniac but he still pets his dog or something. He doesn’t at least kick it. I think there’s something about that which is I just checked out of the movie because I didn’t believe that moment and I didn’t sort of want to keep going with it.

My probably biggest problem with these pages is there’s a bunch of foster kids. I have no idea how many. I don’t know what ages they are. I don’t know how many kids are in this scene. And that was frustrating to me. They’re not even uppercased when they appear. And so I don’t have a sense of am I looking at three kids, am I looking at ten kids. What is the nature of this scene we’re headed into? And if I don’t have those details I don’t know what to be anticipating.

**Craig:** Yeah. That is an unacceptable level of ambiguity. At the very least you need to know how many actors you’re hiring to put in a scene, if they’re children in particular, and people need to know the size of the family. Similarly, there’s just basic logic things. If this is the sort of guy that kicks his dog, the dog – this is what we have here, “His dog knowing no better comes running towards him bearing love.” No, dogs don’t do that to people that kick them in the face. They cower. You know, it’s just like stuff like that where it’s just – it feels like this is one of those things where we have a writer who wants to do things but doesn’t necessarily want to be accountable for them. I mean, even soiling themselves. Like now what? Are you going to just let her stand there in that? You know what I mean? You have to be accountable for everything.

**John:** So, I have no idea whether English is Yohannes’s native language or not. There were some things in here that made me believe that either it wasn’t carefully proofread or this is not sort of his first language. I would say that simple things like repeating hillbilly a lot doesn’t give me a lot of faith. You’ve got to be more specific. I think you can say hillbilly once. You can use it as a noun. Then you don’t get to use it as an adjective again. You have to be more specific about sort of what specific things we’re seeing.

So, Pabst Blue Ribbon, great. I buy it. That’s good. But you’re going to have to keep providing details that are not just hillbilly.

**Craig:** Agreed. One quick typo at the top of two. Mr. Kenny is yelling at the GPS woman but he refers to her as women, plural, but it is a woman.

**John:** It is a woman.

**Craig:** A woman. All right, well.

**John:** Great. Let’s do our third and final Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** This one is Token Genius, also a pilot. The title of this particular episode is Andre and Aggy and it is written by J. Gordon.

So, we begin with Andre Brown, 30s, black nerd, addressing an audience we do not see. And he’s there to tell them about what it is that he does. His research is to create humanity’s last invention. And he talks about how at some point technology is going to render human beings completely obsolete. You might as well just give up because the super intelligence that Andre is going to help create will kill all of the people on the planet in their sleep.

And then we reveal that he’s talking to a group of five year olds in kindergarten under a career day banner. And that ends our teaser. When we come back the students are watching an animated lesson, which is some sort of thing on the television about the body and the brain, and how the brain is sort of like a computer. And while that’s going on Andre is talking with the teacher, Janice, a young Jane Goodall sort, and she’s trying to explain to him that he didn’t quite exactly fit the bill of what career day was. And she points out he looks terrible. And he says, “Yeah, late nights.”

And the animated computer on the little video that they’re watching crushes a brain, a regular tiny cartoon human brain, and the video is over, and Andre is confused – or not confused. He understands they didn’t applaud because they didn’t get it. He knew they wouldn’t get it. And Janice reminds him that they’re five.

**John:** They’re five years old.

**Craig:** Those are our three pages, Token Genius.

**John:** I’ll start. So the simultaneity in this one is these kids are watching a presentation while the adults are having a conversation. And it works here. I believe that we can cut back and forth between the two of them. We can hear walla-walla while the adults are talking. Works great. And the two sides inform each other and that’s lovely.

I thought the writing was really great and also these pages just look really good. There’s just generous white space on the page. I was never sort of frightened to read stuff. What was bolded made sense. It all really invited me to sort of keep reading through it. And that’s worth a fair amount. I would keep going into this script because it was funny, because it was very specific, and I was curious sort of what else was going to be happening in this story.

I loved the description of Janice so much. So here’s the full description of Janice: “JANICE (30s) young Jane Goodall; frizzy bun, empathetic brows, counselor’s smile and speaks with the calm confidence earned after over a decade working with irrational creatures.” And that’s a very set up for her next line. There were a lot of really smart choices here and I really dug it.

Craig, what did you think?

**Craig:** I’m a little harder on it than you. Although I do agree that the character descriptions were great and if you look at Andre’s black nerd is brilliant. Says a lot right there. And there’s a certain confidence to that. And then it says, “He cleans his thick lenses with the hem of his cardigan.” Well you know me. Wardrobe, hair, makeup. It’s my favorite. So we’ve got thick lenses. We’ve got the hem of a cardigan. We’ve got a frizzy bun. We’ve got empathetic brows. Love it. So I can see these people.

Here are my issues. First, this set up where the sort of crotchety, curmudgeonly scientist doesn’t understand that delivering some kind of anti-human scree to five year olds won’t work. That feels very broad. Broad to the point where I just think, OK, we’re not in real-ville at all. Because I don’t get it. And at the very end of it for a teaser definitely doesn’t work because we reveal that these kids are sitting there and then the last line says, “SPOOSH – a juice box EXPLODES in the back row and we…END TEASER.”

What? I don’t understand. Meaning like a kid squeezed down on something? But that’s not what they do. And even then it’s just not that funny. So the kind of set up is not – it just feels very clammy to me.

Second problem. I agree with you that the simultaneity that was handled really well. When we come back and they’re watching an animated lesson, first of all I’m like what’s this? So is this from him? Did he bring this? Maybe at the end of his little speech when he realizes he blew it he could say, “Maybe I should just show the video,” and Janice says, “Just show the video.”

When we see the video though it seems like the video is just reiterating the stuff he said, which is odd. And doing it now, again, it’s the same joke. Computers are going to kill us. And you just don’t want to repeat that vibe again. It just doesn’t quite move the ball forward. It just seems like we’re doing the same thing again. I’m not even sure why Janice is letting this continue.

I like the fact that J. Gordon allows me to determine that Janice and Andre have some kind of relationship without telling me that they do. I just get it. They know each other. I don’t know what that relationship is. If they’re friends, if they’re lovers, if they’re exes. Doesn’t matter. I just know that they know each other. And again at the end when Andre says, “No one clapped. I knew they wouldn’t get it.” “They’re five.” Dude, it’s like you’re just not a real person at that point. You know? You’re now repeating the thing from the beginning. Do you still not understand that they’re five? What?

So, it got clammy. It got broad. That part I thought was not great. But the general flow of things I agree with you is really good. The descriptions are good. I just would say to J. like, OK, you hit the broad one, now do better. You can do better. I can tell. Just be a little smarter about this and just presume that we’ve already seen this joke done this way on Nickelodeon and Disney Channel sitcoms. Don’t Zack and Cody me man, you know what I mean? Give me better, right?

Couple of big typo-y think-o things in here. Meet and greet he spells “meet and great.” That’s greet, not great. And there was another wacky one early on.

**John:** You should route for me to win?

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, root is R-O-O-T, not R-O-U-T-E.

**John:** There was also an its/it’s problem on page three.

**Craig:** There you go. These things matter.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about the clamminess because, yes, that page one is a giant clam. And where I think you have to be really careful about it is it also feels like a cheat if you didn’t establish the background behind it in a way that could work for both what we’re supposed to think it is and the real thing. And so Crazy Rich Asians which is a movie I loved so much and saw it twice, one of the things it does really well quite early on is it establishes our heroine in the middle of a poker tournament or poker game and she’s against an opponent. And it’s a very dark space. And it looks like it could be some sort of backroom at a club or something. And then as the lights go up we see it’s a lecture hall. Is it a bit of cheat of a lecture hall? Sure. But we believe that it could possibly happen. And I want to make sure that in this script we believe that in that initial shot we can believe that we are in someplace like a Ted Talk or something and then it’s revealed that he’s actually talking to a bunch of kids.

So I want to make sure that that is a possibility. Maybe this doesn’t have to happen at the school also. Maybe there’s some other place where he could do the same presentation.

I also agree with you about the video. It’s like I think the idea of showing a video because it would be fun could be good, but like what was the video actually made for? And if the video was a sales presentation or some other thing that he’s just, well, it’s got animation and kids love animation, that may be a reason why we believe he’s showing it.

**Craig:** Yeah. You make such a good point. I mean, it did occur to me that if someone said to me you must direct this I wouldn’t know how. Because a kindergarten classroom isn’t like only a kindergarten classroom in one direction. There’s colorful baloney everywhere. That’s kind of the nature of it. And you could say, well, you could be really close on him. Not for an entire half a page of a monologue. It would become bizarre. And understand also, J. Gordon, the longer you are on somebody talking without showing who they’re talking to, the more people, with every passing second, more and more of your audience will go, oh, there’s going to be some sort of funny reveal or crazy reveal of who he’s talking to but it’s not who I think it is.

And by the time you get about halfway down the page that number goes to 100%. There’s literally nobody who doesn’t see it coming at this point. And then if you turn around and you see it’s a kindergarten classroom and they go, whoa, whoa, hold on, it wasn’t behind your head, now you’ve just cheated. So, it’s a clam and you actually cheated to do the clam, which is the worst clam.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s one of those bonus clam strips that you get at a second rate fast food seafood company.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s just batter. There’s not even a clam in it.

**John:** Just batter. There’s no clam inside.

**Craig:** Right. I actually like those.

**John:** Yeah, I do too. I kind of loved Sea Galley fried clams. I mean, it’s just fried fat. It’s delicious.

**Craig:** We just love fried.

**John:** Fried anything. Love it.

**Craig:** Fried. We love fried.

**John:** Tempura fried stuff. Tempura fried is delicious, but of course it’s just fried.

**Craig:** It’s just a different kind of fried.

**John:** It’s all good. So let’s recap what we learned from these pages. So we had examples of simultaneity, of parallel structure, of people in the same space experiencing different things. We had simultaneity of someone approaching and sort of the tension you can build from that.

I want to thank all three of these people for writing in with their Three Page Challenges. And basically everyone who has written in, because to pick these three Megan went through, god, like a 100 of these over the last couple of days to get these down. So thank you to everyone who sends those in. Thank you to these people for being so brave.

Megan did point out to me that she estimates that about 6% of the things she looked through were written by women. And so we’ve talked about this on previous episodes is we’ve gotten as high as like 30% I think in past years. So I don’t know why we’re down to 6% right now, but–

**Craig:** Wait, 6% of the submissions?

**John:** Of the submissions.

**Craig:** What is going on?

**John:** I don’t know what’s going on. But, at different times the ratio has been up to like 30%. And obviously, yes, sometimes people are using initials. Megan is Googling to see if she can figure out who these people are to see if they’re male or female or don’t identify as male or female. But we would just love to have some non-guys in here. So, if you are considering writing in this thing and you think like, oh, they never pick women. Yeah, we do pick women. We really do try to. So send those in.

**Craig:** Apparently wildly disproportionate to the submissions we get.

**John:** Anyway, we would love to have–

**Craig:** OK, so you know what? We should just say, you know what, for the next two months only women submit. Literally. That’s it. Just women. Because this is crazy. And it’s nothing against guys. It’s just that, OK, you’ve been getting kind of a free ride here off of the reluctance of women to send in script pages. Well, let’s just cut that out for a while. Just women, come on. We want to do this.

**John:** All right, so Craig, are we going to say that for Austin it’s only women? Or for the next ones we do in a non-live panel? Because I don’t want to sort of–

**Craig:** No, Austin is special. Austin is special.

**John:** So right now send in your three pages to Austin or to other stuff. There’s basically a tick box if you’re coming to Austin. But for the next one we’re doing just as a normal show, it’s going to be all women. So, we’re going to be looking for those submissions.

**Craig:** Yeah. So your odds of being selected have just skyrocketed. Maybe women aren’t sending these in because they realize that it’s just a terrible experience.

**John:** But I think it’s mostly a good experience. So we’ve done previous live shows where we had I think all three of the entrants were women. I don’t think that’s been the case. I hope it’s not the case.

**Craig:** You’re right. You’re right.

**John:** All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a video I watched on “How to Beat Any Escape Room,” by Mark Rober. And I thought it was pretty good. So I’ve done a bunch of escape rooms. You’ve done a bunch of escape rooms. I thought this guy’s advice he wasn’t an expert at all, but he went to talk to people who have done a bunch and people who design escape rooms and I think his basic advice makes a lot of sense. And so the first thing that Rober is going to tell you is that communication is key. You have to be speaking aloud about the things you’re finding and also crucially what inputs you need to solve a problem. So make sure that everybody in the room understands what you’re trying to do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** A thing that Mike pointed out, which I’m glad to see this video points out, is you need to clean up after yourself. And so once something is done, find a place to put all the stuff that’s finished because you will waste so much time picking up a thing, a puzzle, that’s actually already solved. And so there are these kind of suggestions, but also other suggestions in here. So if you’re interested in escape rooms I think this would probably help you.

**Craig:** I’ll watch that. I mean, I did escape rooms in Lithuania.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** I did escape rooms in Latvia. How about that?

**John:** I’ve never done a Latvian escape room.

**Craig:** It was quite good.

**John:** It’s just a hotel room.

**Craig:** It’s called Latvia. No, I like Latvia quite a bit. The bit of advice I always give people beyond I mean the things that you said are absolutely true. I mean, communication is always the big one. But I always say to people ask yourself what could pair with this. Because it’s very rare for any escape room to give you a self-contained puzzle. Like here’s a lock and the stuff around it will answer the answer of the lock. No. It’s going to be something somewhere else that you’re going to have to go, oh wait, that plays back to this. So think about an escape room as a series of pairs of things. And puzzles are in pairs. And if you can figure out what the pairs are a lot of times you’re well ahead of the game.

**John:** My other bit of advice which is not covered in this video, but understanding how to do tangrams is genuinely useful for many escape room situations which are those – like how you arrange the pieces, the little triangle pieces and things to fit into puzzles. I’ve seen that in multiple cases in multiple places. So knowing how to do that will save you some time.

**Craig:** That is literally an automatic minus star for me. Because I just – tangrams, it’s just a waste of time. It’s busy work. It’s a busy work puzzle. It requires no insight. It’s just sort of doing it. So I don’t like it when they do stuff like that. I much prefer the insight.

**John:** I guess the other problem with the tangrams is that like really only one person can do it at a time. And so there’s no teamwork.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s like, oh, let’s put that guy – just randomly start mushing these triangles around until you find. I think it’s lazy. I don’t like the tangrams. There was a tangram in one of the Escape LA rooms which I think you were saying they were converting to a different room which it was their worst room by far I thought. The cavern.

My One Cool Thing this week, I mean, you know I’ll go on and on. If I could make 1Password my One Cool Thing every week I would. But what I really love is the combination with – so in iOS 12 they now, you know, it was a big thing when they allowed you to use the share functionality to kind of go over to another app, get something, and pipe it into a thing. But now you can literally – and it’s with a bunch of different password managers – when you are on a field on your iPad or your iPhone and you need to fill in account information and you put the cursor in that thing it will bring up your keyboard. But above your keyboard it already says something like, hey, do you want to pull in your information on this website from 1Password. And you hit that and off you go.

**John:** Bloop bloop.

**Craig:** So it’s just getting much, much faster and zippier. I really like iOS 12. I think there’s a lot of cool stuff.

**John:** Yeah. One of the new features that’s in Mohave I think is it’ll show you all of the saved passwords you have for various things and it will put little yellow triangles if you’ve repeated a password for multiple sites. And it’s a very useful way of thinking like, oh, shoot, I should not actually be using the same password on multiple sites. And so you can see which ones you’ve done and then change them on those sites.

So, credit to Apple and to everyone else working on the problem of passwords.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re trying. 1Password has something called Watchtower where it will both analyze all of your passwords to make sure that they’re not weak or even just good but strong, and they’ll also reference everything against the Have I Been Pwned database to say, oh you know what, you need to change this one because there’s some evidence that there was a hack and some of that information might have gotten out.

**John:** We got an email in here that said like, oh, this was your password for this and I have evidence of you doing these terrible things and it was because of just one of those LinkedIn kind of password things that got broken years ago. And so it’s scary when you get an email that says like your password is this. And it’s like, yeah, but you know what because I use a different password for every site I know exactly which one that was and, nope, you’re just a scammer.

**Craig:** Yes. If anybody sends me your password is this, it’s just going to be a big long string of garbage. What do I care?

**John:** You don’t care.

**Craig:** I don’t care man. I don’t know my passwords to anything.

**John:** All right. This is our show. And our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions, longer questions are great there.

Short questions are great on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

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You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. That’s also where you can sign up to be a premium subscriber. And those premium subscribers, well, you need to send in your questions. And so there’s a special link in the show notes where you send those questions and it shows up a little Google form and it’s great. And we will be doing an episode with just those questions pretty darn soon.

Craig, a pleasure.

**Craig:** As always.

**John:** And have a great week.

**Craig:** See you next time.

**John:** Bye.

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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/what-is-a-movie-anyway).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 369 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program we’ll be answering a fundamental question: what is a movie? We’ll also be talking about award season and other stuff. We’re going to do follow up from five years ago. It’s going to be a big show. And because we have a big show and fundamental questions we asked Mr. Fundamentals on himself. Franklin Leonard is here joining us. Franklin Leonard of the Black List fame. Franklin, welcome to the show.

**Franklin Leonard:** Thanks for having me. I’m going to add Mr. Fundamentals to my Twitter bio.

**John:** That would be nice. You were on quite early episodes of Scriptnotes. I remember the first time I think you were on was at the Austin Film Festival.

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**John:** You came on to announce the Black List website.

**Franklin:** Yeah. It was like six years ago. Because we launched the site October 15, 2012. And it’s funny because I don’t think of it as being early in the Scriptnotes’ lifespan, because I had been listening since the beginning. But, yeah, I guess it was.

**John:** You were there right at the start. So, thank you. Our first bit of follow up is actually from five years ago. And so we have a little clip that we’ll play. So, five years ago we talked about iPads in movie theaters. And so Disney was doing an experiment where like you bring your iPad in so you have a second screen experience in the movie theater. And Craig and I wondered if it was going to be a slippery slope. Let’s hear what Craig predicted.

[clip plays]

**John:** And so you will see more and more kids with glowing devices at movie theaters.

**Craig:** That is incorrect.

**John:** And it’s going to suck.

**Craig:** That is incorrect because this is especially designated as an iPad-allowed zone. I have no doubt that the Disney people will very smartly say to every kid as part of the app and part of the audience thing that this is a special thing and that this isn’t something you do in the theater normally. They’re very good about that sort of thing. And I also – and I also know that movie theaters and other audience patrons are very good about policing these things.

So, no, I don’t believe children will be bringing iPads anymore because of this into any other movie and the slippery slope argument is – it’s a fallacy.

**John:** I know slippery slope is a general fallacy and yet I will ask Stuart at this moment to flag in a follow up pile. Five years from now–

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** We will discuss whether there are more children trying to use electronic devices in movie theaters.

**Craig:** I am totally in support of that.

[clip ends]

**John:** So the Stuart I mentioned there is Stuart Friedel, the original Scriptnotes producer. Stuart Friedel sent himself some email to the future and so he emailed this past week to say it has now been five years. So, we are now living in the future. We can only imagine back then. Five years later are we seeing a preponderance of iPads in movie theaters?

**Franklin:** Thank god no. At least I haven’t.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I have not seen it either. So Craig was correct. I think every once and a while we need to point out when Craig is completely correct. The number of iPads in movie theaters has not increased. And I would say even the abuse of cell phones in movie theaters hasn’t increased at all. It’s still annoying when it happens, but–

**Franklin:** I mean, I’m aware when it happens enough because it doesn’t happen that often. And weirdly about this, thinking about it now, I actually think kids are better about this than adults are. Right. Kids just kind of want go in and take me away. Adults will be distracted every five minutes by the thought of our phone, at least I know I am. And a good movie will make me not think about that.

But, yeah, I don’t think it’s changed that much.

**Craig:** It just was never going to be a thing. Mostly I think because it’s just annoying. I mean, children in movie theaters are already annoying, to add more annoyance to their baseline annoyance level. And I just think in general Franklin is right. People are getting better about it. Everybody knows that it’s kind of the equivalent of, I don’t know, blowing your nose into your hand or something. It’s just bad etiquette and you shouldn’t do it. So, I’m glad that that hasn’t happened. It’s actually kind of amazing in a weird way that it hasn’t, I suppose, because phones in particular – forget tablets – but phones have infiltrated everywhere else. But the movie theater remains a little bit of a sacred space.

**John:** Yeah. We never let our daughter use the iPad at restaurants, but I do see so many families, which is like they prop up the iPad at a restaurant and it drives me crazy.

**Franklin:** 100%.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Franklin, you were just back from the Toronto Film Festival. I take it it was a good time. You enjoyed Toronto?

**Franklin:** Yeah. I mean, it’s sort of a high point of my year and certainly my cinematic year. Yeah, I mean, it’s a really strong year for movies, or at least it feels like it, at least that’s the big take away from me from the festival.

**John:** I was watching your coverage from it and a tweet that you sent out from the Black List had Kate Hagen who was on the show before and the hashtag “show us your room.” And so can we talk about #ShowUsYourRoom and sort of what that is?

**Franklin:** Absolutely. So, #ShowUsYourRoom actually did not start with us. It started with a writer who on the Black List last year, Amanda Idoko, who just wanted to share photos of writers’ rooms to sort of show the makeup of it. And I think some of that had to do with showing the diversity or lack of diversity in some rooms, but I think it also had to do, and the thing that I really took away from it was these are the people that are writing the things that you love. And especially in a space like Twitter if you’re a 16-year-old kid or a 21-year-old kid and you don’t think that you’re represented, like here’s a bunch of photos of people who look like you, who come from where you come from. If this is something that you ever gave a thought to wanting to do, it is possible. Not that it’s going to be easy, but like there is a path, which I always think is a good thing. So, should-out to Amanda. She does amazing writing and amazing sort of social media advocacy I suppose.

**John:** Yeah. Especially in this time where I think ten years ago we started to see showrunners who were social creatures, and so you knew who Joss Whedon was, you sort of knew J.J. Abrams. They were sort of the giant titans. And so you associated a show completely with that thing. But now in the age of social media you have accounts that are run by the writers’ room and you have the individual writers on that. And so there’s a lot of pressure, but it’s also an opportunity to really show what you look like and there really are people behind those words.

**Franklin:** Yeah. It’s one of my favorite things about social media actually. Like when you watch an episode of television that you really loved you can literally sort of say to the people who wrote like thank you. Which how often do we get that opportunity in everyday life, even if you work in Hollywood?

**John:** Craig, are you going to show us your room for the writing room on Chernobyl?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s me.

**Franklin:** Actually, you should do a photo of just you with the hashtag.

**Craig:** That would be a bit obscene. No, it’s just me. It’s the least diverse room ever because there’s only one person in it.

**Franklin:** But there’s so many Craig Mazin personalities.

**Craig:** No, I mean, they’re all of a sort really–

**Franklin:** They’re all actually the same. Fair enough.

**John:** I’ve really tamped down on the number of personalities he’s allowed to–

**Franklin:** Well just the intros alone.

**Craig:** The intros alone. That’s where I really get to spread my wings. John is a very controlling podcast daddy. But, I actually am helping out Rob McElhenney on a new show that he is doing that’s not yet been shot but it will be. And so I’ve actually had my first experience working a little bit in a writers’ room. Again, I’m not like a full time, I’m just sort of like a consulting – I don’t know what you call this. I really don’t. It doesn’t matter. I’m helping my friend. That’s what it’s called for me. But I do spend time now every now and again with a room full of writers in a proper writers’ rooms. And it’s actually fascinating.

I’m learning now after whatever 24 years in this business how a writers’ room works. Finally. A quarter of a century later. And I really enjoy it. I think it’s really interesting. And I’ve met some really, really smart people in there. But I’ve also come to appreciate and understand that some people, they’re not big room talkers, they’re more writer-writers. But it’s OK. Not everybody needs to the room talker, you know.

I always thought that that was a big part of it, but I guess there’s enough flexibility for different styles. So that’s nice to see. There’s a social aspect to it that’s kind of awesome.

**John:** We had Alison McDonald and Ryan Knighton in here last week talking about being a staff writer and sort of the life inside the room. And Alison said that she will meet writers who are just genuinely great writers who just don’t fundamentally belong in a room. You have to be able to share and just play with others in a way that is just so different than other kinds of writing.

Craig, do you think if you could put the 25-year-old version of Craig Mazin out here in Los Angeles, do you think you would fit in well on a room or not?

**Craig:** Yeah. I generally do very well in those situations. I mean, again, I haven’t been in the writing room, the classic television writing room situation, until now. But over the years have been in many, many, many roundtable rooms where you spend a day with other writers trying to plus or punch up a movie and those are writing room situations. They’re not just sort of extended, you know.

And I’m very comfortable speaking in front of people, obviously. I like that. I enjoy that process. But what I wasn’t aware of and what I had no experience in was the way that things are sort of built and then unbuilt and rebuilt and unbuilt and rebuilt. And it’s fascinating. I really – I just enjoyed watching that part of it happen.

**John:** So before we get to our marquee topic there’s one bit of news for our premium subscribers, so these are the folks who pay us two bucks a month to get all of the back episodes and there are some bonus episodes we’ll be doing. But one special bonus thing we’re going to do for our premium subscribers is Craig and I are going to record an episode of the show that is answering any question, so not just writing questions, but it can be anything. So it’s a random advice episode on my take and Craig’s take on anything that is troubling you in the world that you have a question about.

But you have to be a premium subscriber to send in those questions. And so there will be a link in the show notes for where you send those questions. We’ll check your email address to make sure you really are a premium subscriber. But we’re be recording that in the next couple weeks, so if you would like to have us answer your question and to hear the answers to those questions this would be a good time to sign up for the premium version of the show at Scriptnotes.net.

**Craig:** And we have all of the answers, right?

**John:** We have all the answers. There’s literally not a question you could ask that we won’t have an opinion on.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It might not be actually true.

**Craig:** I’m going to say it’s going to be true.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a true opinion is what it’s going to be.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** All right. It’s time for true opinions on movies. This was a thing that Franklin and I had sort of talked a little bit about online and so that’s why I wanted him to come in because it’s sort of a fundamental question and he’s Mr. Fundamental. What is a movie? And I think growing up I had a really clear sense of what a movie was and what a TV show was and what other things were. And it’s just gotten increasingly blurry. And you might say well does it really matter and from a writer’s perspective it really matter financially. It tremendously matters. And so I thought we’d spend a few minutes talking about classically what we think of as movies and sort of where we think we’re headed.

So I’ll start off saying growing up I thought a movie was a thing you bought a ticket for and you saw on a big screen. And after it had been on a big screen eventually it would show up on VHS, and then DVD, and sometimes it would show up on ABC. I got to watch the James Bond movies on ABC. But those were clearly movies that were just showing on TV.

And then there was a thing called a TV movie which really happened kind of during my lifetime where this sense of it’s a thing deliberately designed for network television. That was about two hours long but had a seven act structure or something. And that was a whole different beast.

But now we’re moving into a time where I don’t think those distinctions really apply. Franklin?

**Franklin:** No, I totally agree. I think we’re close enough in age that I think I have exactly the same conceptions. A movie is something that you went to the theater for, you bought a ticket, it ran somewhere between an hour and a half and two hours and 15 minutes. Yeah, a TV movie was about two hours with commercials, but it definitely had commercials. And then a TV show was something that, you know, came on every week. And it was a half hour or an hour long. And I guess the miniseries was, you know, but even miniseries though I think of that as something that came on four consecutive nights. Or, did they even do them over four weeks? I think it was just a sort of consecutive night special event.

**John:** It was like a block event. Because Roots I think was night after night. I don’t think it was a once a week.

**Franklin:** I think it was night after night. Absolutely. So, yeah, and those were very clear – it was very clearly delineated. Like the idea that I wouldn’t be able to distinguish them never even occurred to me until relatively recently, but it really does feel like all of that is collapsing. And I’ll be honest. I don’t know that I have a clear definition. It’s one of the reasons I emailed you was how are people talking about it right now. And so I sought the advice of people wiser than I.

**John:** Craig, you’re wiser than either of us. What is a movie?

**Craig:** A movie is a closed narrative story that takes place over a time span that is greater than one hour and can be viewed in one sitting, and is intended to be viewed in one sitting without interruption. That’s what a movie is. And we are no longer in a world where we can define it as that kind of story and also shown in a theater. That’s over. There are theatrical experiences of movies, no question, and there will continue to be so. But the notion that these feature films that would have otherwise been in theaters but instead are airing first on another channel, I mean, we used to call them direct-to-video movies, remember?

**John:** Oh yeah. For sure.

**Craig:** They were movies, right? There was no question that those were movies. It’s just that they were direct-to-video. Well, it’s the same thing. It’s just direct-to-streaming, or direct-to-screaming if it’s really bad. But it’s a movie. And we all know. We all know. There’s no question. I mean, maybe every now and then you’ll run into something and go, uh, what’s this exactly, but most of the time I’m pretty sure we know. And so the real question is what does it matter? And there it actually weirdly matters a lot because we have – well, the thing that most people think of is awards. But, the awards are ultimately irrelevant. They are trophies as Seinfeld calls them.

The bigger issue is we have these massive and massively complicated collective bargaining agreements where the directors, the actors, and the writers have negotiated all this stuff over decades, decades, with those studios. And those are based on a division of this is what happens in theatrical, this is what happens in television. And that’s all getting blown to hell and our deals no longer reflect the reality that’s going on.

So, we have a problem where we have one set of rules for instance to determine the credit of a movie that runs in a theater for seven days and then goes to streaming and one set of rules that covers almost a similar experience except it just doesn’t do the seven days in the theater. That makes no sense. So, we’re going to have to figure all of this out.

**John:** So, there still are equivalents of movies of the week or made for television movies, so there are movies that are made for Hallmark channel that really fit kind of what we grew up with in the sense of like it’s a very limited pattern budget. It’s designed – a certain kind of story that is still a made-for-TV movie. And those still exist. And so as we see the reports going out of the WGA we see folks who write for those movies and that is still a thing that exists. The challenge is like these movies that are debuting on Netflix, are those made-for-TV movies? Not in any meaningful sense. They’re exactly the same movies – in many cases they were developed at studios to be theatrical releases.

**Franklin:** 100%.

**John:** And instead they’re showing up there. So the Cloverfield Paradox is an example.

**Franklin:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** That was going to be a giant budget studio movie.

**Franklin:** Movie release.

**John:** The same with Bright. I was talking with Liz Hannah last night who is doing a movie that’s going to be a Netflix movie and in every way it’s like an indie movie, a pretty significant budget indie movie, but it is technically, maybe a movie-of-the-week. It’s really a made-for-TV movie. It’s really hard to say what these things are. And where it matters is we have formulas for what the residuals are going to look like, how credits are going to be determined, that are vastly different based on our expectations of where movies end up.

**Franklin:** Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting to me because really the distinction between what we think of as a TV movie, like Hallmark Channel is a great example, and what we’re thinking of in terms of Netflix and these other platforms, it’s a quality distinction or sort of our assumption about what the quality of those are.

**John:** Assumption of quality and budget. We assume that a TV movie is going to be budgeted under $2 million and it’s going to have like a 17-day pattern. There was a way those used to work.

**Franklin:** But even, I mean, there are platforms now that are making a large quantity of those, of movies that fall into exactly that category. And maybe even made on lower budgets and sort of with more constrained production realities, and so it really is – it’s a fiction of our brain on some level this distinction. And I’m, A, glad that I don’t have to be the one to resolve it, though I mean my general attitude is tie goes to the writers. I mean, again, at the end of the day you’re creating minimum an hour and a half to two and a half hours of content. Where it screens is a separate question from what contribution you made to it and you should be compensated fairly for the contribution to the thing and where it chooses to be distributed is a different question that other people have to deal with.

**John:** So we look at this from a writing point of view because we’re so egocentric with writers, but of course it also matters for directors because directors have different deals based on where it’s going, actors have different deals. So it’s a more systemic thing. So, the Writers Guild could come and say – and Craig maybe you could help me out with your answer where we’d actually say this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig’s basic definition of this is a piece of entertainment that is between and one and three hours or something.

**Franklin:** Seems right.

**John:** That it’s designed as one piece and not a serialized piece of entertainment, that I guess is what the boundaries of what we’re going to call a movie is. So we can say like anything that’s like that has to be treated by certain rules. That still is not going to fundamentally change the nature of the industry. Netflix is an example. Because a movie that debuts on Netflix is only on Netflix there are no residuals. It’s not going to go to another place where you would earn residuals. So it’s not going to go on home video. You’re not going to get those rentals. So you’re going to get – they’ll buy you out of your hopeful residuals. And it’s just a flat fee based on how much they expect it to do. It doesn’t actually correlate to how many times the project is viewed.

**Franklin:** Right.

**John:** And that’s not just a writer’s thing. That’s a director’s thing. That’s an actor’s thing. That’s an everything.

**Franklin:** Yeah. And I think the other thing that’s interesting is, I mean, there’s indications that Netflix is going to make a move with some of their movies and put them in theaters. And how does that affect those deals? Do they just sort of fall under the sort of original deal for theatrical distribution and then Netflix is the post-theatrical distribution window? Again, lots of open questions. I don’t know what the answer is. But, again, my fundamental thing is the people who are making the thing need to be compensated fairly for it. Period. Full stop.

**John:** Craig, what do we do?

**Craig:** We may come to a day where we have to, all of us, ban together and fight Netflix. Wouldn’t be shocking to me. Depending on how things proceed. And we could also do the same with Apple if need be. We could do the same with Amazon. And we could do the same perhaps with Disney. So that’s the one that’s over the horizon but it’s coming fast is Disney’s direct competition for Netflix.

You’re right to say that at least in the short term, assuming that for the sake of argument we did change things so that movies are movies, and we take the word “theatrical” out of it and we just say, look, a movie is a movie. We all know what it is. That’s a movie. That’s not a movie. The residual thing is the residual thing and it would have to be worked out, you know, but credits would change. The way that we determine credits would change. And I think frankly putting the pressure on movies to pay residuals. We don’t have to define residuals the way we define it. You know, we can define it in all sorts of ways.

I mean, right now we all struggle. I think the entire business, frankly, the entire non-Netflix business, is struggling with the fact that Netflix is so untransparent. And it may be frankly that they are not making any money on these things. Who even knows? We don’t know. No one knows.

**John:** So let’s talk about classically what residuals are so we’re all talking about the same thing. So, a movie is released theatrically and then every other time it is released on home video or if it shows up on ABC TV or premium cable there is a fee that is paid to writers, to actors, to directors, and that ends up being very significant money. So, that could be millions of dollars of residuals. A big family movie can generate a tremendous amount of residuals.

And the equivalent Netflix movie would not make those residuals. So, with Netflix it’s even a question of are they making money? We don’t know anything about sort of how many times those movies are being watched. But I think what we’re trying to get at in residuals is that a tremendously successful movie that’s watched a lot should generate additional revenue for the creator.

**Franklin:** You would think so.

**Craig:** So, it’s important for people to understand why we even have residuals. The whole purpose was to emulate what would normally be a royalty system. If we maintained our copyright then reuse would have some sort of fee. Every time a song plays on the radio there is some reuse fee that is generated and siphoned back through ASCAP or BMI and then some portion goes to the artist. And every time a copy of a book is sold the writer receives a royalty.

Similarly, our system was based on reuse where they said, OK, look, for the movie once we put it in theaters that’s what we call primary exhibition. That’s not reuse. That’s use. And then everything after that with the exception weirdly of airplanes is reuse. And then you get paid your royalty.

Well, for Netflix I think what you end up looking at is something similar to what they have done on television where it’s a window. There is a window that we define as primary exhibition. Once you start showing something you have two or three or four weeks or whatever the normal theatrical release life would be to say that’s primary exhibition. And then after that it’s reuse. And that means every freaking time you show it some nickel goes in a box. And they may, you know, kick and scream about that. What they’ve been doing is essentially saying, look, this is roughly what you would have gotten under a system like that. We’ll just pay that to you now.

And a lot of people are taking that deal. My general philosophy in life is when somebody offers you a check you should be immediately suspicious. Why? Why are you offering me this money? Why are you telling me that this is just as good as something? If it’s just as good then do it the other way.

**John:** Sometimes Netflix they’re paying you your full rate and so like it’s the sense of like, well, you could either make this or not make this. So you’re going to take the deal to make this. But, you know, you don’t know what the back end is going to look like.

**Franklin:** Can I ask what might be a dumb question? Specifically how do they handle residuals for writers let’s say on pay cable, like HBO or Showtime?

**Craig:** There’s upset fees. It’s a similar thing. There’s a way for them to essentially buy out your residuals. That’s built into these deals. And it’s part of our agreement. And I hate it. But–

**Franklin:** Because here’s why I ask. If a bunch of people buy tickets to the movies you deserve a piece of that. If they watch it on television, they’re making greater ad revenue because more people are watching it, you deserve a piece of that. If you buy a VHS or a DVD or streaming, you deserve a piece of that.

Netflix’s model, like they’re not necessarily getting more money because more people are watching it. But they may be getting more money because they get more subscribers. Someone may stick around on the platform longer because they know your movie is coming or they know that there is the possibility of a movie like yours coming. And that feels like, A, a very difficult thing to sort of determine the value of something algorithmically in that system unless they were being hyper-transparent and they’ve made clear they have no interest in being – and in fairness, they don’t really have an interest in being, and not just for that reason alone, but it presents problems that are, I mean, it could be darn difficult.

**John:** So let’s figure out sort of why it’s different than what’s happening right now with studios. Is that when a studio ships a DVD that’s a physical thing that ships. When a studio makes a deal with somebody for this movie to show up on this pay cable place that is a deal. There’s a paper trail for all of this. When you are both the creator of a thing and the distributor of a thing–

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a closed loop and it’s self-dealing. And Franklin is right. There are many, many metrics that they use in theory to define success. And we don’t know what they are. And nor do I care. Because they can’t really monetize those specifically. At some point you simply have to create some kind of artificial structure to mimic what would normally happen in a royalty situation.

And in a pure royalty situation if Netflix didn’t have work-for-hire they would come to me and say we want you to write a movie. And I would say, great, I’m going to write this. It’s my movie. I own the copyright. I then will sign a licensing agreement with you. This licensing agreement allows you exclusive rights to air this and it’s in perpetuity. And this is the fee that you pay for that. And also this is the royalty rate for every single time someone watches. Period. The end. There’s no other way to do it.

Or you do time. Right? But there has to be some kind of system in which you are rewarded for the only thing you care about as an artist which is how many people saw it.

**John:** So, theoretically, we’re going to talk about Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma later on. I know it’s your One Cool Thing. Alfonso Cuarón makes this movie for Netflix. So, Alfonso Cuarón has some deal that’s going to be a little different than what you and I would have, but ultimately we need to have collective decisions for sort of like what the overall deal is going to be. And that’s the WGA. That’s SAG. That’s DGA figuring that out.

**Franklin:** Yeah. I mean, look, I don’t claim to have the answers and I think that really the only way to come to any answers that anyone could realistically be happy with is if there was greater transparency around how many people were watching it. How much time they were spending on the platform? But again for obvious reasons Netflix is going to be loath to make that information public. Maybe there could be some sort of private information sharing between the guilds and them as an organization. But again I don’t think Netflix is going to be the only sort of platform that’s going to have to struggle with these issues. Like Craig already said, Disney is coming in hot.

**John:** So I was talking yesterday with a friend, a former Scriptnotes guest, who is writing a movie for Fox right now. And so I asked him what’s going to happen, where is your movie going to end up showing up. And is it going to be at Fox? Is it going to be on Disney? Is it going to be Disney streaming? And he has no idea. So to be in the middle of production and not knowing where your movie is going to end up is just a crazy situation to be in. And it’s not just an esoteric like you know oh what little label is going to be at the front of the movie. I don’t know what his deal is like, but theoretically if it debuts on Disney’s streaming will he get residuals in a normal sense?

**Franklin:** I think that’s another reason why these issues sort of need to be resolved in a macro sense, because I actually think we’re headed in a direction where that will become the norm for a lot of folks, like where you’re making a movie and the results of the film, like the final product determines where it is distributed. And that is just sort of – it’s untenable the idea that people would sort of go into making a movie without knowing what the business structure of the thing is.

**John:** Yeah. So, any last thoughts on movies? So we defined movies as being between one and three hours long. They’re a closed story. Yes, you can have Marvel cinematic universe movies, but they’re essentially a closed narrative that’s not supposed to have a second installment right after them. And it doesn’t matter where it shows up.

**Franklin:** Yeah, I mean, I’ll add one additional wrinkle to it and it’s sort of on the eve of the coming Game of Thrones final season. But I actually think for example HBO is leaving money on the table by not putting those in theaters.

**John:** Agreed.

**Franklin:** And they’re coming in at like, what, 1:15, 1:20 each episode? I would go to a theater every Sunday night to watch each episode of the final season of Game of Thrones. And they’re not a closed narrative necessarily but there are certainly episodes that you could beside most movies and feel just as sort of fulfilled with a closed narrative when you leave the theater. So, all of these things are collapsing and expanding simultaneously and I think it’s all the more reason why these big questions about how people are going to be compensated for making them need to be resolved sooner rather than later.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** I think they have a little bit of a limitation, I think all these places do, in that they’re charging people money to watch their product on a television screen. If they then start to release them in theaters for money they’re kind of double-charging. Or, yeah, they’re double-charging. And that’s a problem. And then you get into like well OK if you subscribe then you can go for free. Then what’s the point at that point, right?

So, they are a little bit jammed up. The only way I think they can get away with these things is if they do like for instance a special movie event. But even then I think you start to risk danger of people wondering well what am I paying for exactly, what am I getting. Because my understanding of HBO and Netflix and Amazon and Apple is I pay you a subscription I get to see everything you do without an additional nickel spent.

**Franklin:** Oh no, 100%. But I actually think they could double charge and people would willingly double pay. Like I pay for HBO right now. I would continue to pay HBO, but I would take on an additional cost in order to see the final season of Game of Thrones in a theater. I think the same thing is true with a lot of these Netflix movies that’ll be in theaters. I’m going to continue to pay for Netflix, but will I pay to go see Roma again in a theater? I absolutely will.

**John:** So you brought up Roma. Roma is going to be one of the movies we will look forward to this award season. But I have to confess I am not looking forward to award season.

**Franklin:** Me neither.

**John:** I’m just done with award season. And so this doesn’t have anything to do with the popular Oscar. I actually enjoy watching the Oscars. I don’t think they’re too long. I’m happy to watch them.

**Franklin:** Same.

**John:** What’s way too long is the four months leading up to the Oscars, or five months, or however long it is.

**Franklin:** It’s basically six months of the year at this point.

**John:** It’s such an industry.

**Franklin:** Yeah. Look, the award season unofficially starts now with the sort of Telluride/Venice/Toronto thing which is end of August/early September and runs until the Oscars which are the end of February. I mean, the year is basically summer movies, which creeps earlier and earlier every year, and Oscar season, which is now until basically late February.

**John:** So, Craig, what should we do about award season? Or should we just ignore it? Should I learn to pretend it’s not there?

**Craig:** I think it’s over. It’s too late. Toothpaste is out of the tube. Like so many things in our world, all of this has become commoditized and turned into an orgy of list-making, odds-making, betting, gossiping, argument-causing nonsense. We can’t help it. It’s a reality show now. And it’s stupid because it has absolutely nothing to do with any of what needed to happen to make those movies exist. Quite the opposite in fact. People had to all come together and collaborate on things and love each other to make these movies exist. And then it becomes this stupid rat race of nonsense.

I don’t know what there is to do about it because basically Harvey Weinstein weaponized the process in the ‘90s and it’s just gotten worse since then. And unless you – you can’t change the constitution and outlaw 90% of what publicity people do. This is how it’s going to go for a while because people are chasing money, although I have a weird feeling that it’s not even about that money. I think it’s just about the pointless need to be at the front of a line. It’s a very Los Angeles thing.

You know, I think it was Bill Maher who once said if you put a velvet rope in front of a toxic waste dump in Los Angeles people would start lining up. And that’s kind of what I think award season has become. It’s just this weird pointless craving, like getting the best table in a restaurant, which has always confused me because I don’t know how to tell the difference between tables in a restaurant. I’ve never known that. So, that’s, you know, I think it’s too late. It’s over. It’s gone. We lose.

**Franklin:** The one thing that I will say in defense of award season, and it’s not even really in defense of award season so much as being maybe an errant consequence of award season is that they do serve as marketing for movies that might not otherwise get it. And I’ll use a movie like Moonlight as an example. And certainly it’s a rare case. But without the award season, without the Oscar race, I think a movie like – I think a lot of people don’t see a movie like Moonlight. I think a lot of people went to see it because people were talking about it as a contender for Best Picture.

I think that’s probably true of Roma for example. I think it could end up being true for If Beale Street Could Talk, although more people were anticipating Beale Street because of the Oscar success of Moonlight and Barry in particular. So I agree with you Craig in the main about the content of award season and I wish there was some other way that you could frame a showcase of the best of cinema, or sort of the things that people think of as the best of cinema that didn’t have all of the sort of toxic realities that are really just a sort of boiled down version of everything that can be terrible about Los Angeles and Hollywood in particular.

**John:** Listeners, if you have suggestions for how we could get rid of award season, or get through award season in a more sane way you can write in. But let’s make some predictions for Megan to send five years into the future. Five years in the future what’s going to become of award season and what’s going to become of movies?

**Craig:** Oh, well I’ll take the lead on this. Nothing will change. In five years movies will pretty much be as movies are. There will be more original movies running on our screens at home through the Disney service and Netflix and so on. But there will still be huge theatrical releases coming out every single week. There will be a big summer box office battle issue of Entertainment Weekly and so on and so forth. And when it comes to awards nothing is going to change at all.

**John:** But will anything have changed in terms of getting writers and other people fairly compensated for movies that are not released theatrically?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Will we figure any of that stuff out?

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** We will have essentially the same conversation five years from now you predict?

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Yep. Franklin what’s your thinking? Five years in the future.

**Franklin:** It’s really hard for me to argue against that honestly. Yeah, look, the theatrical business will still exist in five years. I think people will be going to see movies of all sorts. There will continue to be a giant summer blockbuster season and probably a six month award season. As far as how people are compensated, I certainly hope there’s a change, but you guys have much deeper knowledge on the realities of that than I do so I happily defer to your judgment.

**John:** A thing we found out as we surveyed screenwriters for the WGA is that 80% of screenwriters are also TV writers. Either they’re currently working in TV or they’re planning to work in TV. As these things get more and more combined we’re going to have to figure out ways to do what Craig describes. Basically after a certain window every new time it’s watched a nickel goes into the jar. Because it shouldn’t really kind of matter ultimately whether it was a 90-minute thing or a 30-minute thing. Just you pay that person.

**Franklin:** I totally agree.

**John:** There will be more things like Chernobyl, like Craig’s.

**Franklin:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**Franklin:** And more limited series specifically authored by Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** There will be at least one more. There will be at least one more of those.

**Franklin:** That’s my big call for 2023.

**Craig:** I do agree. I think that that is a format that is expanding and expanding rapidly. It’s a tricky one because I feel like a lot of these – here’s another award season bunch of baloney. The whole like limited series, not really limited. Like The Crown was a limited series its first season. No it wasn’t. And so a lot of these limited series become these sort of back door seasons into a multi-season show.

But I do think that that is going to – what’s happening is the television business seems to be shifting away from just pure ratings and into more of a kind of targeted depth. So they’re like, look, we don’t need to be the Super Bowl. We don’t care if 80 million people watch. What we want is these five million people to all watch.

**Franklin:** Right.

**Craig:** And if we can get those five million. And the only way to get those five million people is to show them this. So, it doesn’t matter that most people don’t see it. These five million did. And that’s going to keep them paying for all the stuff, right? Because they’re not going to watch any of the rest of this junk. They’re just going to watch this.

So, you start to get into the – you know, there’s a great article by Malcolm Gladwell many, many years ago about how Prego figured out for the first time that if you sold five different kinds of Prego you would make so much more money than if you just sold one kind of Prego. So, it’s the Prego-ization of television. That’s what’s happening. And I think that is going to drive actually a lot of wonderful new content. I think there’s going to be a lot of limited series. There’s going to be more documentaries. There’s going to be all sorts of smart stuff.

But for movies and for award stuff, I just think as the guy says in Fall Out, “War. War never changes.”

**John:** It has come time for our One Cool Things. Craig, why don’t you take it away?

**Craig:** OK, well, sometimes I have like a prospective One New Cool Thing, which I don’t know if it’s going to be cool or not. You know what? In fact, I’m going to hold that one off because I’m trying it. So I’ll be able to come back in a week or two and tell you if it was cool. This thing is cool right now. You know I’m a huge fan of these Rusty Lake games. We’ve talked about the Rusty Lake games before. They’re amazing.

So Rusty Lake has a new one out called Paradox. For the first time they’ve incorporated video of actual people which makes their normal totally screwed up experience even more totally screwed up. I love these games. And it’s not so much about the gameplay, although I do like that. It’s their aesthetic and their weird backstory mythology which barely makes sense and yet you can tell the people doing it it makes sense to them. And their weird fetishization of certain strange objects like shrimp. They just keep showing up.

It’s so weird. It’s so weird. And so it’s just very much like if David Lynch kind of created a point and click adventure in a series that’s been going on now for years. So, Rusty Lake Paradox. Totally worth the – I guess there are two chapters in this one, so maybe the total amount is $4. Come on.

**John:** Yeah. Play it.

**Franklin:** I’m sold based on that description.

**John:** Yeah. Franklin, I think we’ve already spoiled it for you. But your One Cool Thing is?

**Franklin:** My One Cool Thing is Alfonso Cuarón’s film Roma. And it’s funny I was nervous about mentioning it because I didn’t know if the One Cool Thing could be a movie. But I saw it at Toronto and it just hasn’t left me. I find myself in traffic thinking about its images, thinking about what it was trying to say about the world. And it’s just an extraordinary film. And the one thing that I will say is that you should see it in a theater. It rewards the theatrical experience. The sound design is just exceptional. The performance by the lead actress, Yalitza Aparicio – speaking of award season. But like I want her to get the notice that an actress of a different background would receive for a performance of this caliber. It is just remarkable.

So, yeah, everyone should see that movie. Go see it in a theater. It is very much unlike anything that you’ve ever seen. Bring tissues.

**John:** Cool. My One Cool Thing is, well, so every week on the show I do a One Cool Thing but I generally have like many cool things I would like to share. And so on Twitter sometimes I will link to them or sometimes I’ll put them on the blog. But I wanted sort of a repository of all the things that I kind of find interesting. So, I started a weekly newsletter just called Inneresting, the way that Aline makes fun of me for saying interesting.

And so it’s just a once a week, probably on Wednesdays, maybe on Thursdays, maybe not every week, but it’s a little short email of just like here’s a list of things that I found kind of cool that you might find cool, too. So if that sounds at all appealing there’s a link in the show notes. It just shows up in your inbox and it’s a way to sort of see what I found cool this past week.

**Franklin:** That does sound appealing. And I will be subscribing.

**John:** Very nice. That is our show for this week. As always, our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is also by Matthew Chilelli. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions or follow up.

If you want to reach us on Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Franklin you are?

**Franklin:** @franklinleonard.

**John:** Makes it very simple. You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. While you’re there leave us a review. That helps other people find the show. Transcripts go up on johnaugust.com about a week after the episode airs. But you’ll find the show notes up just with this episode. So the stuff we talked about you can see there.

And all the back episodes are at Scriptnotes.net. If you subscribe now you can send in a question for me and Craig to answer on our random advice episode that will be coming up soon.

Franklin Leonard, thank you so much for coming in.

**Franklin:** Thank you so much for having me. I have always enjoyed it and consider it a great honor.

**Craig:** Thanks, Franklin.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes, Episode 108: Are two screens better than one?](http://johnaugust.com/2013/are-two-screens-better-than-one) addresses the fear of iPads in theaters
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* Rusty Lake’s new game, [Paradox](https://store.steampowered.com/app/909090/Paradox_A_Rusty_Lake_Film/), with video of actual people
* [Roma](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKVYRtE-kXI), written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón
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