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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/were-back-baby).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 338 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we will tackle the massive backlog of listener questions that have piled up while we’ve been away, including the Oscars for Best Screenplay, songs in musicals, nuclear war, characters’ last names, and incorporating ad-libs into a script.

**Craig:** That’s serious. But I think we can do it because we have the original flavor right now. Me and you, buddy.

**John:** Oh, I’m so happy to back recording a podcast. It is delightful. When I saw this on my calendar it helped me get through the day to know that we were finally back doing this. So, thank you to our listeners for your patience while we cobbled together other episodes while we were out on the road. I was doing Arlo Finch book tour. You were overseas prepping for your show. But now we’re back. Well, not back. I’m in Milwaukee. But we’re still back on the air.

**Craig:** Now, you’re in Milwaukee because you’re still on your book tour?

**John:** Yes. So by the time this episode comes out I will be back in Los Angeles, but after two weeks of traveling from LA to San Francisco to Denver to Dallas to New York to Philadelphia to New Jersey to Chicago to Milwaukee, I will now have returned to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Wow. That is bananas.

**John:** 3,000 different students I met. And a lot of other Scriptnotes listeners I met at live events different places. And some Launch listeners, too. It has been great. It has been exhausting the way you think a multi-city tour would be exhausting. And I have learned so much. It’s been really cool.

**Craig:** Well that’s great. Excellent.

**John:** Yeah. Nice. So I think it’s time to introduce a brand new branded segment which is John’s WGA Corner.

This is the segment in which I talk through small issues that are only applicable to WGA members, and I try to plow through it quickly so it doesn’t distract from the rest of the show. If you are a WGA member, you are going to get a bunch of emails in the next few weeks. They will be emails talking about sexual harassment, screenwriter issues, other industry issues. I would urge you to not ignore these emails and to come to meetings if you are invited to meetings because there’s some big stuff a-brewing. And we want to make sure we hear from you basically what you do and how you respond will determine the next couple years of the WGA. So, I would just urge you to pay attention to those WGA emails as they come in. Don’t just ignore them because they actually really matter a lot these next couple of months.

The second thing. Writers have asked me about how does the WGA know that I am a diverse writer, that I am African American or that I am Latino or that I am a gay writer. And I didn’t really know. And it turns out you tell them yourself. And so if you are a member of the WGA I would urge you to go to mywga.org and click on the little tab that says Update My Diversity Attributes. And when you do that you see what the WGA knows about you and what your background is. And maybe you filled some stuff out when you joined the WGA, but maybe you didn’t. Like, the WGA had no idea that I was gay, which seems crazy.

So, you click the little boxes. And there’s also – this is kind of cool – a little tab that says “Publish” for each of these attributes. And why you might choose “Publish” is that way if an employer is calling and saying I really need a female Vietnamese writer for this project, they can call the WGA and say like who do you have who is a female and Vietnamese. And the WGA can give them names. But only if you click “Publish.” So, I’d urge you to update those attributes in your profile.

**Craig:** I think that’s a great idea. And, listen, I think it’s fair to assuage perhaps fears. Because people understand that there is – the reason that we are now so concerned about diversity and self-identification is because the business has operated in a way consistent with racism. How is that for diplomatic, right? OK.

So, you might think, well, I don’t know if I want to do that because then they’ll be like, nope, I don’t want to hire her because she says she’s African American. I think right now, just my theory, that there is a net positive. There is goodwill. There is a real desire to improve and get better. And I think there is a net positive to self-identification in any of these areas.

And for those of you who think is there some sort of net negative if you’re a straight white male, I don’t think so. I ticked off the boxes for me. Straight white male, over the age of 40. I got a little something.

**John:** I had to tick that, too. So we’re diverse in the sense that we’re older writers now. How does that feel Craig?

**Craig:** It feels good.

**John:** You’ve lived this long.

**Craig:** I’ve lived this long. And I don’t mind that. I actually think that 40 feels really young for diverse age reasons. I think they need to bump that number up.

**John:** I think there is a 50 and a 60. So, we got space to grow.

**Craig:** Good. Good. Well, 50 is coming.

**John:** All right, end of the WGA Corner. Let’s get to some follow up. Alan writes in about Episode 332. He asks, “What does Craig mean by ‘using a lot of whitespace on a suspenseful section of a script?’ Does this mean less talking and more action description or the opposite? Could he give an example?”

**Craig:** OK. So whitespace is the portions of the page where there is no ink. Less talking and more action description? No. The answer is less talking and less action description. The answer is less of everything.

So, by suspenseful release and using lots of whitespace what I mean to say is you write a line that says “The box opens.” And then just do, if you want, do three carriage returns. Shift return to not get into the next element. Shift return. Shift return. Shift return. “And now we see it.” Shift return, shift return, shift return. “It’s alive.”

You know what I mean? So everything just gets quieter on the page and more intense and really focused to give it massive emphasis. We’re implying that time in the movie slows down. And we’re using text on a page to simulate that feeling.

Now, you don’t have to go quite as overboard as I just suggested. But, what you don’t want to do is hit your main revelation and go on an eight-line verbose description of it. That would undercut the emotional value of what I’m supposed to feel there.

**John:** 100% agree. So, I think when we talked about this the original time you don’t want to overdo this. Like this thing where you’re putting a lot of white space on the page gets annoying if you’re making this a technique all the time. But in general you want some sense of space on the page. And you want more sense of space on the page when you’re really zooming in on something. Sometimes I’ll even do the thing where here’s an action line. The next action line right below it is shorter. Then shorter. Then shorter. Then shorter. It gets down to a single word.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s a technique. You’re literally funneling down to an idea. That can work. Don’t do that twice in a script. Do it once. But if it’s appropriate, do it. And just, again, remember that the screenplay is meant to evoke the feeling of watching the movie. So think about what the movie is going to feel like. How can you achieve the same ends on the page?

**Craig:** Correct. And sometimes another thing that I will do to imply this feeling, and I think it is part of the white space, is if someone is trying to convey something silently that is very significant in the story and emotional or important, for instance, I’m going to sacrifice myself for you John, which I would.

**John:** Great. Thank you so much, Craig.

**Craig:** I like that you’re like, “Oh great.”

**John:** I applaud that choice. Let me get back to you about whether I’d kill myself for you, but I really want to thank you for that. It’s like when someone says I love you and you’re like thank you.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** That’s terrific.

**Craig:** That’s terrific. So I’m planning on sacrificing myself for you, and you are shocked and you’re terrified, and you want to stop me but I’ve already made the decision. What I may do – and I’ve done this sort of thing in a script – is Craig looks at John. And then I’ll just underneath in action, but in italics, it’s OK. And then a next line. It’s OK. And then the next line, it’s OK.

So, it’s like I get it. We’re watching that moment. And it’s not just one it’s OK and then I die. It’s a moment of back and forth, a connection, a silent conversation that’s boiled down to two words: it’s OK. And we feel these things more. We allow ourselves essentially on the page to be a little poetic. You’re absolutely right – you don’t want to do this throughout a screenplay. It would become exhausting. But every movie should have one or two moments that are poetic, unless it’s Scary Movie 4. So in a normal movie, where you’re looking for that moment, when you get there do it. Do it on the page.

**John:** Do it on the page. And I think it’s also fascinating how often you’ve written that scene where you’re saying that it’s OK that you’re going to die for me. I think the fact that you write so much John and Craig into your scripts I think is great.

**Craig:** I mean, almost every script I die for you. It’s really tragic.

**John:** I had the opportunity to go on Brian Koppelman’s show, which was tremendously fun, and good to talk about, and would Brian Koppelman die for you? I don’t know. We’ll have to ask him.

**Craig:** I think Brian would, actually. I’ve always said the thing about Brian is not only – if I called Brian and I said I need the shirt off your back, not only would he give it to me, he would fly here and give it to me. That’s Brian. He really is that good of a guy. But, you know, for the two of us, I understand it’s a one-way street. Basically what I’m doing is I’m reinforcing the anti-trope of that tragic straight guy that keeps dying for his gay friend. [laughs] You know, that thing we’ve never seen in movies.

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** That’s all I do.

**John:** I like it. Well, as we talk through tropes, let’s get to our next question. This is a question from our listener Becki, back to Episode 333. She recorded her question, so let’s take a listen to it.

**Becki:** Last week you answered a question about Act One structure. And John you mentioned how musicals kind of spell out the structure through the songs. So for act one there’s the welcome to the world song and the I Want song. Could you guys expand on that and list out the other type songs that tell the rest of the story? Thanks.

**John:** Becki, thank you so much for inviting us to talk about musicals for several long minutes. Craig, kick it off for us.

**Craig:** Even though we hate talking about musicals. So–

**John:** Oh my god. Musicals are the worst.

**Craig:** Musicals are incredibly instructive to us because, as John has pointed out many, many times, the best songs in musicals are ones that combine a moment and an interior feeling with an advancement of plot.

So, we have talked before about the I Want song, which is obviously really translatable to screenplays. But there are lots of other ones. For instance, there’s a kind of song called an Argument Song, which is typically a duet, as you might imagine, although occasionally people can have an argument with themselves. And in an argument song two characters kind of face off and have an argument. And the argument can be an explanation of the conflict between them. It can also sort of be the beginning of a flirtation between them. But what it’s doing is it’s defining a relationship that is not yet resolved within song.

So for instance “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better,” or “Sue Me” from Guys and Dolls, or “People Will Say We’re in Love” from Oklahoma, which is two characters basically trying to convince the other person that they should stop acting like they’re in love with the other person, even though they’re both in love with each other. Very sort of typical thing.

**John:** So that’s a classic musical trope. But we see equivalent kind of things happen in some of our movies. Like romantic comedies, even if they’re not musicals, will have this kind of song in it where the two characters are having the argument that is progressing the story forward but they’re actually kind of on the same side.

**Craig:** Yeah. And so there’s the we’re having a fight, we’re yelling at each other and breaking up, and then there’s also the kind of well you know that flirtatious argument. And so songs can present that very well.

There’s also just real nuts and bolts plot stuff. There are good scheme songs where a villain or a hero outlines a very clear plan of what they’re going to do. So, for instance, in Sweeney Todd there’s the song “A Little Priest” where Mrs. Lovett outlines very clearly with Sweeney Todd what they intend to do which is get people into the shop, murder them, and then cook them into pies.

**John:** Obviously. I mean, why wouldn’t you do that?

**Craig:** Why wouldn’t you?

**John:** It’s just laying out a clear logical plan for cannibalism and profit.

**Craig:** Yeah. And in a sense “A Little Priest” or a song like “I Want the Good Times Back” from the Broadway version of A Little Mermaid, and “I Want the Good Times Back” is an amazing song, these songs are the musical theater equivalent of the scene in an action movie where the team leader pulls up a hologram of the building that you’re going to enter and starts showing you – or like in Star Wars where they’re like “This exhaust shaft leads to the reactor.” It’s kind of the same thing. It’s sort of laying out the plan.

**John:** Great. So, you’re discussing the scheme as being something that either a hero or a villain could do, but there’s also basically the hero laying out their vision of the world. Like how things work from the villain’s point of view. So, you brought up The Little Mermaid. “Poor Unfortunate Souls” is a fantastic song that lays out the universe as seen by Ursula. And this is how things go. And that she is the benefactor of all these poor people.

So, classically a villain will get a song early on in the story which basically lays out their I Want as well. Sometimes it’s disguised a bit, like they may be lying in the I Want song, but it’s the story from their point of view.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you could sort of call that a Philosophy Song. And in movies we come across these characters who lay out a particular worldview which is fascinating hopefully and helps explain their actions. There are these moments in movies where a character finally in a moment of breaking down – this is a classic sort of low point kind of moment – that character expresses some profound remorse and sense of personal failure. This is a moment of honesty and of regret and it is a moment that needs to happen before they can finally unburden themselves of their pain and rise to attest and become a better person.

And these songs occur in musicals all the time. They’re songs of what could have been if only. They’re songs of regret. “On My Own,” from Les Mis. “Memory” from Cats. “Send in the Clowns.” These are all songs where people stop and basically deliver a heavy sigh of reflection on their life.

**John:** Yep. So the non-musical movie equivalent of this tends to be that moment where the character stops and either looks in through the window as that happy life is happening over there and they don’t have that. They might be expressing this to another character. Even a character who is not part of the main story, like that taxi driver who actually hears the story about what’s happened. It’s some ability to externalize this internal feeling.

And you have to think about all songs in musicals as externalizations of things that would normally be internal thought processes.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, in a romantic comedy you have just lost the guy. And you’re walking down the street. And you’re remembering what it was like. And now we’re into a montage where we see the stuff that happened in the movie before. This is in Annie Hall. So suddenly Woody Allen, I know it’s a little problematic now but let’s just go with it for cinema’s sake, is remembering having fun with Diane Keaton and the lobsters and the pot. That’s the equivalent of this song. It’s a reflection back. A remorseful reflection back.

And then the most famous category of a Broadway show tune is the 11 o’clock number. John, talk us through the 11 o’clocker.

**John:** This is the moment which is the pinnacle, it is the great sort of breakthrough. It happens very late in the story. Classically I think it’s called the 11 o’clock number because it’s near the end of the show. Like if the show starts at eight, this would be at 11 o’clock back when the shows were longer. This is the sort of centerpiece moment where the character is breaking through. So this is “Rose’s Turn.” This is “Being Alive.” This is a character finally achieving an internal breakthrough in their experience. Is that fair?

**Craig:** That is fair. And in movies we tend to see these things not so much in the framework of talking, but rather a character finally standing up and saying I’m not going to do this anymore. I’m going to fight. And I’m getting right back in there. And this is something that musicals do with song, but they do it in a way where you understand this character at the beginning of this song is this person and at the end of the song is who they’re supposed to be.

And sometimes it’s sort of a sad downward thing, like for instance “Rose’s Turn” which is tragic. But that notion of a transformation or sometimes a collapse. That is something that we do all the time in movies. And it’s actually as I think about this and I talk this through, Becki, you know what’s interesting is a lot of the equivalents to these songs in movies are kind of montage-y things. I never really thought of that before, but there’s a rough equivalent.

**John:** When Oprah Winfrey’s character finally stands up at the end of The Color Purple, is that an 11 o’clock moment in your head?

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it is. I think it is. And I actually haven’t seen – I’m not familiar with the musical Color Purple, but I bet there’s a big 11 o’clock number right around that moment.

**John:** Yeah. That would feel right.

The other type of song I want to bring up is the sidekick song. Musicals very often have sidekicks, basically humorous sidekicks who do a thing and they do a bit. Oftentimes that song is a slightly different style. It can be a little bit more like a wink, like an acknowledgment that we’re in a musical and that these two characters are singing this rat-a-tat song.

Often these sidekick songs exist in part so that the lead actors can take a break, make a costume change, do something else. Or there could be a giant set change happening behind the scenes. We literally have our sidekicks way up front. The curtain is closed behind them and we’re changing the set behind them. But sometimes these songs are just delightful and they just give you a different sense of the world, the characters, what’s going on.

So, I think of Timon and Pumbaa in The Lion King. Other things where these minor characters get to sing for themselves for just a moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. And “Hakuna Matata” is a great example of that philosophy song we were talking about earlier. You know, again, in the movie versions what you find is those songs always have some greater purpose. They are integral to the storyline. Whereas on stage you will get things like for instance in Shrek the Musical, which I am obsessed with, there’s ‘The Travel Song,” which is Shrek and Donkey walking. And it very much does feel like a – OK, behind the curtain we’re switching around. We’ve got a lot of stuff to do here, so let’s just do a quick song about traveling along and our relationship roughly.

You tend to not see those things in movies. There are certain stage-specific songs that happen and stage musicals generally are much longer than typical films. So, there are some areas where it’s not necessarily a direct line. But hopefully, Becki, by talking about our favorite topic–

**John:** Ha-ha.

**Craig:** Thank you for letting us indulge. We have helped somehow.

**John:** Yeah, Craig, I’ve got to say it felt really good just to be able to geek out about musicals with you for – it’s been a month since we’ve done this.

**Craig:** I know. This and D&D. Why don’t we just do a musical and D&D podcast? You know what I mean?

**John:** Enough of the screenwriting stuff.

**Craig:** Enough.

**John:** We should focus on what we actually genuinely love.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like what brings us joy.

**John:** What brings us joy. Craig, would you like to take our next bit of follow up?

**Craig:** Yes. This is from Steve regarding Episode 332. He says he enjoyed Episode 332 – Wait For It – “and your analysis of suspense and film, specifically the victory lap.

“I totally agree with John’s endorsement of how important it is to give the hero a moment to enjoy overcoming a challenge before moving onto the next challenge. My favorite of this is in Back to the Future. Marty McFly spends all of act two trying to get his parents to fall in love. He finally succeeds at the high school dance by getting them to kiss. Once he achieves that, thereby ensuring that he will be born, he still has to get back to 1985. He should immediately drive over to the clock tower and lightning storm because he has a literal clock to beat. If he misses the lightning bolt he’ll be stuck in the past.

“Instead, the writers give Marty a victory lap. A full scene of him on guitar practically inventing rock-n-roll. What I love about this lap is it serves two purposes. One, it gives Marty and the audience a chance to celebrate and catch their breath before the next big suspense scene. Two, it pays off Marty’s act one dream of playing in the high school band. He fails the audition in 1985 but gets a second chance in 1955.”

**John:** I agree with Steve. So, follow up doesn’t have to technically be a question. This wasn’t a question. It was just pointing out another example of victory laps but also setups and payoffs. And that moment only works because we set it up as a thing that could happen that we wanted to see happen. We weren’t sure how it was going to happen. And this is how he does it.

And I think Steve is right. That if we followed real story logic, yes, the character should just get onto the next thing. But emotional logic says we need to stay there for a beat and actually revel in what’s been achieved.

**Craig:** And this is another good example of that all-important need of irony. We talk about this all the time. If you have a character that’s failing an audition for a crummy band in the beginning of the movie, the most ironic outcome for him would be to literally invent rock-n-roll by the end of the movie. So it’s smart. There’s just a smart coming full circle.

But think about how unsatisfying it would have been if there wasn’t that victory lap. It’s just kiss, great, I got to go. It would feel a bit breathless at that point. And there are times when you want to feel breathless. And then there are times when you want to just enjoy the victory.

So, very good analysis there from Steve.

**John:** Great. Next up, Mark. “In Episode 334 you guys took a question about if you should use the real brand or Twitter or a made up knockoff version in a screenplay. You guys stated that you like to see the actual brand used in films and TV. However, in a previous episode someone asked about using a late night talk show host in your script and you guys said you hated to see real news anchors/show hosts in movies. They seem like very similar concepts. Basically to you use real-life brands and not in your screenplay. So, why the difference in opinion on the two questions?”

**Craig:** Well, this one is pretty clear to me. There’s a huge difference between objects and people. I don’t believe human beings who are real when they’re put in situations that clearly aren’t real. There’s a disconnection there. But objects – well we see objects all the time in movies. It’s not like I question whether or not a car in a movie is actually a car. Right?

So, people are driving a Cadillac in a movie and, yes, because that’s fine. But when you tell that’s the David Letterman show in the movie and a fake character is talking to the real David Letterman there’s a disconnect. So there you go. That’s the difference for me.

**John:** That’s the difference for me, too. I think where you fall into this murky gray line is are we creating a fake news network for this person to be on? Yes, then I’m seeing – where I should be a seeing a CNN logo then I’m seeing something else. But I try to write around those situations so I wouldn’t necessarily need to see the brand of whatever the news network is. I try to sort of keep news anchors and that kind of stuff out of my scripts as much as possible anyway.

Just the degree to which you cannot be using real people or having to create a fake network to make this all work, that to me is great. Unless the whole premise of the thing is like that you are at a news network. I say then you actually build a news network.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because that’s a fundamental premise thing that you’re doing. You’re creating a whole news network for this. You’re doing Broadcast News where this is not NBC, CBS, or ABC. This is some other network. We are fine with that because that’s a fundamental premise you’re establishing.

**Craig:** What was the magazine called in Devil Wears Prada?

**John:** Exactly. I don’t remember, but I believed it. I saw what kind of magazine it was and that’s what mattered.

**Craig:** You knew it was supposed to be, what is it, Cosmopolitan? Is that what it was supposed to be?

**John:** I don’t know. Aline is going to be so upset with us.

**Craig:** I know. What was it supposed to be? I don’t know. But, you know, it was supposed to be one of those, and it was its own thing because obviously it needed to be its own thing. But you believed it because you understood what the point was.

**John:** Yep. Do you want to take our last bit of follow up?

**Craig:** This is the best question. This is a bummer. So Nick from Los Angeles, Re: 334 Worst Case Scenarios, one of my favorite episodes. He writes, “What if there were,” now he didn’t write that. He said, “What if there was–?” But, Nick, let’s talk about the subjunctive for a second Nick. Nick, if we use if then we need to go into the subjunctive.

**John:** Yes. Subjunctive is an important mood. And we don’t use it very often in English, but this is a case where really you do need the subjunctive. There are situations like if he was at the store at that time then that was crucial. Like there are situations where you could use was. This is a were situation.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a were situation. So you don’t want to say what if there was a. You want to say what if there were “a cataclysmic event that only affected,” oh Nick also misspelled affected. “Only affected the City of Los Angeles. For example, North Korea attacks the City of LA. The US retaliates and neutralizes North Korea. The US wins but LA is wiped off the map Hiroshima style.” OK.

“This is simplistic, I know, but stay with me,” says Nick. “What becomes of the American film industry if everyone in LA is dead? Would the NYC branches of Hollywood companies – studios, agencies, unions, etc. – and production heavy places like Atlanta be able to carry the torch of the entire film and television industry? How much of our business is dependent on this town and the people who live in it?”

Ooh, so a grim but interesting–

**John:** I think it’s a grim but very fascinating question. So, here’s what I will say. If Los Angeles were obliterated in a nuclear strike the biggest concern, of course, would not be, “Oh no, our film and our television.” The world would be profoundly different if this thing had happened. So, we have to acknowledge that we’re in a different universe when LA gets wiped off the map.

All that said, thinking about it just from our film and our television, I suspect it would recover surprisingly quickly. And it would recover because there are people in New York who write movies and who write television. There are folks in Atlanta. There are folks in Austin. There are other folks who could make this stuff. And eventually it would find its way back onto the air. We’d be making movies again. We’d be bringing in movies from overseas. It would eventually get back to something resembling what we currently have.

A nuclear strike would be horrible, but it would not be – understatement of the year. [laughs] It would be obviously tremendously devastating, but I think within five years you’d be back to something that resembled what we currently have.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** I’m less optimistic than you are about that. I mean, yes, inevitably, eventually things return. But, I think the biggest issue is not so much for instance – like Atlanta is a very production-heavy place, but it’s a production-heavy place in the sense of the personnel are crew. You can’t start without the writing. And I would be worried about how many writers would be dead. Now, I’m not just saying that because I’m a fussy writer chauvinist. But ultimately all the content comes from writers.

So, pretty much most of your big shows that you love, all those people are gone. All the people behind those people are gone. When you work in movies, the people who work in this business are always looking for good people to write stuff and they’re always complaining that they can’t find them. And that’s in Los Angeles where there are 1,000 people per block who want to do this. You eliminate all the people that do do it and all that institutional wisdom, all that stuff is gone and out the door. It’s going to take a long time. I think it’s going to take a long time to replace a lost generation of talent like that.

And, yes, for better or worse, most of it is located in Los Angeles.

**John:** Yeah. I do think you would import talent from overseas. I think you would take things that are sort of adjacent to what we’re doing and bring it into our broadcast networks and other places. It would be different. It would be different for a while. But, five years from now will be different regardless. So, there are so many hypotheticals on top of hypotheticals.

The only thing I can say with certainty is that “were” was the correct form of “to be” in that sentence.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** No question.

**Craig:** I mean, no question.

**John:** All right. That was all just follow up. Now we have actual brand new questions.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We’re going to start with Ash from Adelaide, Australia. I don’t know that we’ve ever had a question from Adelaide, but I’m excited to answer Ash’s question.

**Craig:** Go for it.

**John:** “I’ve always been curious how is the Academy Award for the two screenplays categories voted on.” That again is not grammatical. How are the Academy Awards for the two screenplays voted on. So the two categories are Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Screenplay.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Ash asks, “In that I mean is everyone voting based on the script alone, or are they voting based on the final film?” Craig, talk us through this.

**Craig:** [laughs] You bastard. You bloody bastard. Well, one of us is a member of the Academy and sits on the committee that deals with these rules and things and the other one of us could not even work at the event as a caterer. So, I think you should answer this question.

**John:** I will answer the question. The rules are that you are voting based on which you believe is the best screenplay. And there’s not requirement that you’ve actually read all the screenplays. That said, I would say over the last ten years it has gotten incredibly better about making sure that those scripts actually go out for the nominated films. And so of the ten nominated films I probably have received screenplays for a lot of them either as PDFs or as like physical printed bound copies.

Every screenplay that we’ve gotten online is also available right now in Weekend Read so everyone can download the scripts and read those scripts. That said, I will vote for Best Screenplay on some scripts that I have not read. I think it is great to have the ability to read the scripts because sometimes a script is vastly different than the movie. In some ways I feel like I’m voting for Best Original Screenplay or Best Adapted Screenplay based on, “Well, you know what, that was probably a good script and the director didn’t mess it up so I guess that was a good script.” Because you don’t honestly know exactly what was in the script, even when you get the script handed to you. Well, is that reflecting what the intention was of the script going into it, or is this more reflecting what the final film is? Has it basically been sort of reverse engineered from the final screenplay? You don’t know.

So, as I vote for these awards for the WGA awards and the Academy Awards I’m basing it on sort of in my experience as a screenwriter and knowing what it takes to go from the page to the screen what do I suspect the screenwriter’s contribution was to that film that was terrific. And that is honestly how I’m basing my vote.

Craig, as you’re voting on these awards, like WGA awards, what are you doing? Are you reading the scripts?

**Craig:** I don’t really vote on those things. I just don’t understand the whole thing. The whole awarding thing for this, I just don’t understand it. [laughs] I just don’t get it. I’ve never gotten it. I mean, it’s not that I would ever be not grateful if I got an award for something, but I just – it’s not – like I know people get really excited about it. I’ve never quite gotten it. It’s just not in my – I love what I love. I don’t know how else to put it. I love what I love.

You know, and usually when I look at the lists of like, “Well, here are the five things you’re allowed to vote on for best movie I think well the movie I loved the most isn’t here.”

**John:** Yeah. I get that.

**Craig:** So what’s the point?

**John:** I will say that I take nominations very seriously in the sense of like as a person who gets to nominate movies I take that really seriously because I want sometimes to call out well these five movies are fantastic. And they’re fantastic because the writing is really good. And so I want to commend those movies.

I love for a great movie to win the awards, too, but I think the nominations are incredibly important. I’ve not been nominated for an Academy Award. I got nominated for a BAFTA. That was great. But the whole award season stuff is crazy and exhausting. And as crazy and exhausting as it is to read about it and watch it, it’s like 15 times more exhausting to be in the middle of it. And you end up spending months of your life just going to different lunches and sitting around with different reporters to talk about your movie for the 15,000th time.

The only really good thing I got out of it is I got to talk to some other really great filmmakers and hang out with them because we were always doing the same panels together. So, if it gets some filmmakers together working that’s great.

A thing I think people would not understand is they always say like these movies are pitted against each other. The experience on the ground isn’t really being pitted against each other because you’re hanging out with these other nominees all the time. And they’re mostly great. And so that is a nice thing that comes out of award season is you get to hang out with other really talented filmmakers who are making something good, who made something good and are hopefully making good things in the future.

So, that’s a nice part of it. But, back to Ash’s question. We get the screenplays. There’s no requirement to have read them. We are voting based on our guesses in terms of what we think is probably the best movie based on the writing.

**Craig:** All right. Our next question is from Tommy Lastname. We’ve gotten a question from Tommy Lastname before.

**John:** Yeah. He’s going to be big. I mean, with a name like Tommy Lastname you’re destined for greatness.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there’s not too many Tommy Lastnames out there.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Tommy Lastname from LA writes, “A little background. I’ve been given a chance to write something for money. Not much money, but the producers have a movie coming out this year that I expect will do well and I feel I’m taking a chance on them as much as they’re taking a chance on me. My problem is that I feel like the script is not living up to the kind of work I’m used to writing.

“Frankly, I think it might be a bad script and I have a due date coming up. Is there any advice either of you can offer on the subject of turning a less than stellar situation like this around? I would like the ability to reach out to them in the future and possibly work on other things that are more in my wheelhouse, but I’m afraid a bad script might burn this bridge.”

Uh-oh.

**John:** Uh-oh. Craig, start us off with some advice for Tommy Lastname. Like, do you turn in the bad script? Do you email these producers to say these are the problems I’m having? What should Tommy do?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know anything about the situation other than what he’s told us. So I don’t know if he took this job because he just needed money. It sounds like it since he describes it as a chance to write something for money. That means, my guess, that he did this because he needs cash and so – and this happens. You don’t always get to write the things you want to write. The problem is when you are writing something, he describes it as out of his wheelhouse, but maybe we could also just describe it as something that he normally would never, ever write. The odds of you doing your best work are fairly slim.

In fact, let’s just go out on a limb here and say it’s not possible to do your best work or to live up to the kind of work you’re used to writing because you would never write this. In that sense I think Tommy you have to make peace with what you actually are writing. And you have to acknowledge that you may not be necessarily aware of whether or not this is or is not good because this isn’t something that you normally deal with. Your ability to judge it may be a little off.

That said, if there is anyone that you can have a discussion about this with, a producer, I think it’s fair for you to sit down and say, “Listen, I have some questions of things I’m not necessarily in love with and I just wanted to bounce some thoughts off of you and see if you had any ideas just to keep going and be able to revise as I go.” And see if maybe just talking it through might help you solve a few of the problems.

But, if there is an overall problem of, “Ooh, I may have been miscast in this part,” that’s not going to change from anything and you will face the music one way or another. It’s not a question of a bad script burning this bridge. It’s a question of you may not supposed to be writing this movie.

**John:** Yeah. I like your metaphor of being miscast. I would say that there’s a step before you turn it in that could be really helpful. So continuing with this miscast metaphor, let’s say you got cast in this part and you’re like I just don’t know if I can do this.

A thing you might try is to actually attempt the performance for somebody who is not the director, who is not the producer, and see like does this make sense at all. Like, am I being a crazy person? Should I try to get out of this? So you would actually – you perform the scene for some actor friends of yours to see like does this make any sense. And the equivalent for you would be as a writer is show some people what you’re writing. Show some people who actually this kind of is in their wheelhouse. And does this make sense? Is this actually bad? Because it’s entirely possible that you just don’t know whether it’s good or it’s bad. And you may be feeling it’s bad because as Craig said it’s just not your taste. It’s not your kind of movie.

If it really isn’t working then I think you have the conversation with the producers about this is what I’m doing and this is where we’re at.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But what I will say is that sometimes writing outside of your wheelhouse, writing a thing you’re not comfortable about writing, you’re doing this for the money. You’re doing this for the job, for the chance to do this. But part of doing the job is learning how to write for people. And this is something you’re getting out of this is basically “How do I do what I know how to do, which is to tell a story with words on a page, for somebody else.”

And this might be one of your very first jobs doing that. If the project isn’t great, if your writing isn’t the best it could possibly be, you’re at least learning how to do this part of the job. And that is an incredibly important part of everything you’re going to be doing for hopefully the next 30 years of your career. So suffering through this and figuring out how to make the best of a not great situation is a really valuable lesson you’re having a chance to learn right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. The one thing you don’t want to do is quit.

**John:** Yep. Just don’t quit.

**Craig:** No. Don’t quit. Get yourself through it. There is some pain ahead, but you get through it and you learn from it and, you know, helps you identify this particular bugaboo the next time it’s coming at you.

**John:** Cool. Our next question comes from Casey and Casey sent in some audio so let’s take a listen.

**Casey:** Yo. Hey, kiddo, I got to ask a question to Scriptnotes. Can you let me just do that? Yo. Robot John, Sexy Craig, my writing partner and I have a feature script we’re super stoked about with an eye on hopefully someday directing it, co-directing it. That is not happening anytime soon. So the next step for us, we plan on heisting the Whiplash blueprint and writing a short based on the feature script, making sure that short is something we’re confident that we can self-fund and produce on our own.

We’ve got a little bit of experience doing that, so we just need to figure out what that short script is. So any suggestions as to how best condense, abbreviate, or otherwise shortify a feature screenplay? The goal, of course, is not to just pick our favorite scene and shoot it. We want the short to standalone as a narrative and also tease the feature and the bigger arcs of our favorite characters.

So, what is a lonely, miserable writer clinging to his fading dreams to do?

**John:** So, what Casey is talking about is this idea where you have a plan for making a feature script so you make a little short film first as sort of a proof of concept in many ways. This is the world, the universe, the characters. And someone who sees the short, which wins awards, and then you get the money to make your feature script.

That’s actually a viable model. And you go to Sundance Film Festival every year, there will be a couple of shorts which get acclaim. Those filmmakers will go off and make the feature versions of those shorts and sometimes they’re terrific. So what Casey is describing isn’t just Whiplash. There are other films you can point to that had this as a template.

**Craig:** Yes. And I think – I mean, it’s a very good question. And I think the best advice I could offer you, Casey, is to think of your short film as a film. So, you have a feature film script and you’re right to say, OK, I don’t want to just lift my favorite scene, but there might be a temptation to say why don’t I just take the beginning of this scene and stick it onto the end of that one. Or, you know, and you don’t want to do that.

You want to be cinematic. I mean, short films tend to be very evocative and you can be a little more lyrical about things. You may be able, for instance, to take a scene where your character is saying something really heartfelt and beautiful and you show some other things from the movie and you play around with time a little bit.

You have to be a little inventive and the purpose of it is to give people a sense that you guys know what you’re doing. Not to advertise the movie you want to make, but rather to say we’ve made a film that – forget this other thing. It’s as if we always intended to make this short film. It is in and of itself for itself. And then if you really like it, guess what, we have a feature-length movie that is in the same world with the same characters as this.

**John:** Craig is exactly right on this topic. So, do not shoot this as a trailer for your feature. Shoot this as one complete thought, one full idea, one short film. Ideally, someone should see your short and say like, “Hey, have you ever thought about making that into a feature?” And you just say like, you know what, we’ve thought about that. But don’t pitch this as like here’s a short version of our feature. That’s not what you want to do. You’ve got to make the absolute best short film that you can do.

And it’s worth studying really good short films to see how they work, because they tend to be really one idea. Craig says lyrical, I’d say they’re asking one question and the character is answering that one question and we get out. And they don’t have the same expectations of hitting all those beats. Sometimes they can be really short and it’s just like it’s following almost in real time through one thing.

But ideally you’re setting up a fascinating world, an interesting character, a simple conflict that you’re going to get through in the course of that thing. So that’s why you’re not going to introduce all your characters from your feature. You’re going to introduce probably your hero and one supporting person. And sequences or scenes might not even be in your movie. Think about it like you might take that character and wind them back a few months. Or look at a sequence in the middle of your story and how could you do it simpler with different characters or different obstacles to get the feeling of that. But don’t just try to copy and paste out moments from your script to do it because you’re unlikely to get what you really want.

**Craig:** Exactly. You want to start a new file. You know what I mean? Like on your computer, whatever program you use, start a new file. And I think you have to at least be somewhat inquisitive about your feature script and ask what is the ultimate purpose of this movie. Where is the beating heart of this thing? What is an image or a moment that gets me? That is meaningful.

Maybe start there as an inspiration. But begin a new document. I think you will be so much freer at that moment. You will feel so much freer. And you will be able to design something that was always meant to be short.

**John:** Agreed. Another way to think about it is imagine that your screenplay is like the novel and now you’re making a short film based on that novel. You wouldn’t take things directly. You would take a characteristic of it and use that. Don’t use that whole document. That’s not how you should start.

All right, Craig, let’s do one more question then. Do you want to take Nate?

**Craig:** Yeah, this is a little quickie. Nate writes, “Do we need last names?” Not us, you know, in life, but in our scripts. “Somewhere way back in my junior college screenwriting classes I seem to recall being told to always give both first and last names for any character who has dialogue. I know we hate rules, but is there a rule on this?”

John?

**John:** Oh, Nate, your junior college writing class steered you wrong. So here is what I would say about last names in scripts. Last names are useful to signal sometimes that a character is important enough that they need a first name and a last name. Last names can be useful in making a character more specific. It gives us a clue to their ethnic background, some other characteristic of that person. But, no, you can have characters with dialogue in your script who do not have last names. It’s fine. You can have characters in your script who sort of only have last names. That’s fine, too. There is no hard and fast rule about this. It should be what works best for your script and your story.

**Craig:** I feel like we could sell a little buzzer and we would sell it at cost, you know, because obviously I make too much money on this show. And people in junior college screenwriting classes could just hit the buzzer when their professor delivered a rule. This would be a great example of a silly rule. So, Nate, John is absolutely correct. And, you know, look, there are certain things like – let’s say you’re writing a show about a team, teammates, right. Like cheerleaders. Baseball players. Cops in a precinct. Generally speaking they kind of do the whole last name thing, you know. And that’s normal. And that’s what you would do. And, yeah, you don’t need last names. You don’t need first names.

You could call people by colors.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Tarantino did it.

**John:** And we’ve talked about a lot of times where characters are just identified by their job, like Clerk. And so these are characters with dialogue but especially if they’re only showing up in one scene it’s kind of better not to give them a real name because once a character has an actual real name you’re signaling to the audience this person is crucial. You have to pay attention to them. Whereas if you call them Clerk or Hairdresser, we know subconsciously it’s OK. We don’t have to focus on them so much.

**Craig:** Yeah. I feel like if it was good enough for Beckett to just say Vladimir and Estragon, then it’s probably good enough for us, right? You don’t need last names.

**John:** Yeah, again, Craig quoting the Beckett rule.

**Craig:** [laughs] The good old Beckett rule.

**John:** Ding.

**Craig:** Ding.

**John:** It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article I read this week. It is “The Bittersweet Beauty of Adam Rippon” by Richard Lawson writing for Vanity Fair. It is a great article. It’s about Adam Rippon the figure skater, but it’s not really about him. It’s about the sort of the experience of watching this openly gay figure skater out there in the world and Richard Lawson thinking back to his own childhood and how much he loved figure skating, and a friend of his, and their relationship, and finding out later on that that guy was gay, too. It’s really great. I won’t spoil stuff in it, but I thought it very much captured this really unique and interesting moment that happened this past week and things going forward.

And so these last two weeks I’ve been talking to so many school kids and some schools I’ve been talking to seventh graders and like well that’s clearly the gay kid. Like that is the gay kid. And it’s the gay kid in ways that I think when Craig and I were going through school you wouldn’t want to point and say like that’s the gay kid, but I think these kids are out. And that is so interesting and so fascinating. And so Richard Lawson’s article made me think of that as well as sort of my own youth. I thought it was just a great synthesis of this really interesting time that we’re at right now.

**Craig:** It is. And you’re absolutely right that kids are out now, which is really encouraging and lovely. I read this article, too, before you had listed it here. And I agree it was really, really well done. And from my point of view as coming from the outside of being straight, one of the things that I never really thought about but I thought this article did a really good job of pointing out was the value of the outness itself. Because, you know, growing up and even into my 20s and 30s and stuff, to me figure skating always seemed like, well, there were a lot of gay figure skaters.

So when they were talking about Adam Rippon I was like, really, he’s the first kind of one? Because, you know, Brian Boitano, what about Brian Boitano? What about Rudy Galindo? What about Johnny Weir for god’s sakes? Well they weren’t out. And it’s one thing to say, “Well Brian Boitano, he’s probably gay, right?” But it’s another thing for him to say, “That’s right. I am.”

It’s different. And I thought that was a really interesting point to make and why Adam Rippon is – I can see really important compared to say just somebody who else who is probably gay but isn’t saying it. That not saying it thing is a symptom of something bad, I think, in the world. And so it was great to see.

**John:** So these last two weeks I’ve been talking to all of these school kids, and at the end of my presentation we open for questions. And so they’re asking about the book. They’re asking about movies. Sometimes the questions just go far afield. And so this one boy raised his hand and he goes, “Are you married?” And so I said, “I am married. And my daughter is 12 and she really loves middle grade fiction.” And I transferred out of it so quickly.

And I had that moment of hesitation like do I out myself. Because in general in real life I will proactively out myself to just sort of make it clear that there’s a gay person out there in the world. But I hesitated and I didn’t say anything because these are fourth graders and it was a giant crowd. We were in like the cafetorium and there’s like a hundred kids. And I just knew it was going to be the moment where like, “Oh, it’s going to be about that now. Like that is going to be the headline that sort of comes home from this.” And I didn’t want that to happen.

At the same time, I felt bad ending myself there. So, it’s never easy. I sort of assume that I’m always out, but of course you’re never always out to everybody.

**Craig:** No, that’s absolutely true. And I immediately empathize with that situation as you’re describing it because I can do all the math in my head in the same way and you just think, “Well, you know, now there’s going to be a bunch of murmuring.” [laughs] Especially in fourth grade. Just some murmuring might happen.

Whereas if you were in a high school setting, no problem. Today, zero problem.

**John:** Easily. So, yeah, you’re always making choices. So, that was the choice I made there and I still feel kind of weird about it.

**Craig:** I get it. I get it. Sometimes life does sort of put those moments at you and – I mean, at least I don’t think in that moment you didn’t compromise who you were. I don’t think that happened.

**John:** Yeah. But it was sort of a lie of omission. And I’m always mindful of when I’m doing that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Listen, I’ve had moments in my past where I’ve compromised myself and I feel terrible about it where someone has said something – they didn’t know I was Jewish. And someone said something about Jewish people in front of me and I didn’t say anything. I mean, it was when I was a kid. But because I was kind of paralyzed and embarrassed and didn’t know what to do.

And, you know, there’s that thing we’re more terrified of offending people than we are of being hurt ourselves. And I think about it to this very day.

**John:** Yeah. What you’re describing is that same symptom of like a person is choking and they will run out of a room because they don’t want to embarrass or inconvenience people where they need to actually get the attention and become the center of attention. So, in many ways I think I’m applauding Adam Rippon for letting himself be the center of attention on this moment.

**Craig:** I completely agree. Good on him.

Well, I have a far less interesting but so satisfying One Cool Thing. And, of course, how could it not be The Room: Old Sins. This is the fourth Room game for iOS.

**John:** So excited for you.

**Craig:** Did you play it?

**John:** I haven’t played it yet. But when I saw that it was out I was like well that is clearly Craig’s One Cool Thing. There is no question that that’s going to happen.

**Craig:** Look, slam dunk. And I have a bunch saved up. So I’ll actually have some One Cool Things for a while. But The Room: Old Sins was terrific. It was beautifully done, as always, and I liked also they kind of changed it up a bit in the way that they did things. But overall just as always brilliantly done. I think it’s Fireproof. Fireproof Games.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** Wonderful stuff. I hope that they continue to make The Room games forever.

**John:** We will all hope that. And I hope we get to make our show forever. It’s nice to be back doing this with you. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is 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 ask questions like the ones we answered today.

On Twitter, short questions are great. So Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We are on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to get podcasts. Leave us some ratings. Leave us some reviews. Those are very, very helpful. And thank you to everybody who left reviews and ratings on Launch. I guess I haven’t talked to Craig since we did the first episode, but I hit number eight on the charts which was nuts.

**Craig:** That’s amazing.

**John:** So thank you to all the listeners who clicked over to Launch and I’ve gotten some great feedback on that so thank you so much for that.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. We get those up a few days after the show goes up. We’re trying to find a way to get the transcripts for Launch up as well, because transcripts are very helpful and they help people find stuff in there. Also, people who can’t listen to the show can read them, which is always good.

You can find the back episodes of this show at Scriptnotes.net. It’s $2 a month for all the back episodes. You can also get the USB drives that have the first 300 episodes if you’d like to have them on a small USB drive. Just in case LA is hit by a nuclear device and you will have to carry on the tradition wherever you have your USB drive.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the most important thing. [laughs]

**John:** That is the most important thing. You’re making a show about Chernobyl. I mean, who knows how much screenwriting knowledge was lost in the disaster of Chernobyl.

**Craig:** I do. And the answer is none.

**John:** [laughs] OK. That’s fine. If any place is going to have a nuclear disaster and not affect the film industry, it’s Chernobyl, except now does impact the film and television industry because you get to make a TV show about it.

**Craig:** Good point. Good point.

**John:** I’m all optimism now.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

**John:** All right. See you.

Links:

* WGA members, you can update your diversity details at [my.wga.org](https://my.wga.org/home/Login.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fhome%2f). Don’t forget to “publish.”
* John on Brian Koppelman’s podcast, [The Moment](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-moment-with-brian-koppelman/id814550071?mt=2)
* Common musical number types include the argument song ([“Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO23WBji_Z0) from Annie Get Your Gun, [“Sue Me”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlqCfesfoYs) from Guys & Dolls, [“People Will Say We’re in Love”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEwVAV3VPw4) from Oklahoma!), the scheme song ([“A Little Priest”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atSbk0vLuRw) from Sweeney Todd, [“I Want the Good Times Back”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eNnHxFqXqs) from The Little Mermaid stage play), the philosophy song ([“Poor Unfortunate Souls”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfkkMHieqcI) from The Little Mermaid), the If Only song ([“On My Own”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFEkErGUjCU) from Les Miserables, [“Memory”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-L6rEm0rnY) from Cats, [“Send in the Clowns”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNwnrA8EshM) from A Little Night Music), and the Eleven O’Clock Number ([“Rose’s Turn”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsgVIr3LNbU) from Gypsy, [“Being Alive”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjrA93_O6Dw) from Company) and the sidekick song ([“Hakuna Matata”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB5ceAruYrI) from the Lion King, [“The Travel Song”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikwSTF0O06k)).
* Marty McFly’s [victory lap](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1i5coU-0_Q)
* Awards scripts are available on [Weekend Read](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/)
* [“The Bittersweet Beauty of Adam Rippon”](https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/02/adam-rippon-gay-olympic-athletes/amp?__twitter_impression=true) by Richard Lawson for Vanity Fair
* [The Room: Old Sins](http://www.fireproofgames.com/games/theroomoldsins)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [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/)
* [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_338.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 334 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Our last few episodes have been about craft, but today we’re going to be talking about the profession of screenwriting, specifically what if it goes away and there are no more screenwriters.

Craig: Yay.

John: We’ll look at worst case scenarios and put odds on them happening. We’ll also answer listener questions about optioning books and working with actors.

Craig: Hmm, great. This is a good topic. I always like contemplating my own doom.

John: I find it very therapeutic and really kind of calming to think about the worst things because then everything else seems OK.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. We just float. We all float down here.

John: Let’s do some follow up first. Luisa in Cliffside, New Jersey, but she was originally from Rio, Brazil, writes, “I really enjoyed your talk about suspense but I wanted to ask a question. Usually when I’m teaching or thinking about my own writing I think of suspense in terms of curiosity about something that will happen in the future. But when it’s curiosity about a past event that’s unclear or unknown, I consider it a mystery. So, a whodunit for example would cause a mystery. The expectation of discovering who did it might be suspenseful, but the whodunit itself, that would be a mystery.”

Craig: Well, Luisa, I think you’re correct. I don’t detect a question in there.

John: I guess that’s true.

Craig: But as a statement–

John: As an observation.

Craig: Yeah, as an observation you’re right on. I mean, it’s hard for anything in the past to be suspenseful because it’s happened. When you’re at a sporting event and you’re waiting to see how the last minute goes and who is going to win, that’s suspenseful.

John: Yeah.

Craig: If you’re watching television and the game has already happened, it’s probably a little less suspenseful.

John: Yeah. I’ll go back to the French. So, suspendre, it’s hanging above you. It’s literally hanging above. That’s what the word means. But if it’s already on the floor, then you can ask why did it fall on the floor. That is the mystery.

Craig: Yep. Agreed.

John: Do you want to take Aldo’s question?

Craig: I do. Aldo, “In Episode 324 during your How Would This Be a Movie segment you have a discussion centered in a NBC News Video about female firefighters from the California Department of Corrections. Craig states…”

This better be my actual words.

John: Check the transcripts.

Craig: “’I believe that by the time this episode airs this will have already been optioned to be developed into a movie.’ Can you please elaborate a bit about optioning? I guess if a writer would like to develop a screenplay based on the NBC News Video, using that as the source material, then the writer would option the story from NBC News or Matt Toder, the video producer for NBC News. But if a writer would like to develop a screenplay about female firefighters from the California Department of Corrections, is there really anything to be optioned?”

John, what do you think?

John: This is a fair question. So, let’s say you watch that video and say like, “Yes, yes, this is what I want to do,” and there is unique stuff about the women who are interviewed in this video, sort of how it’s all set up, that I feel like this is the piece of material that I want to option, you would then go to see who controls the rights to it. It could be NBC News. It could be Matt Toder if it was done as a freelance kind of thing and he retained some rights. But you would go and you would investigate to see who has the rights to this in order to exploit it in a different medium.

But, your instinct is correct. If you just want to make a movie about inmate female firefighters, you could just do your own research and do it by yourself without purchasing any underlying rights.

The reason why some producers might go and get that video, even if they didn’t need it, is it sort of puts a flag in that saying like I’m making this thing. Clear away from other people trying to make inmate female firefighter movies because I own the rights to this thing.

Craig: Yeah. Keep in mind, Aldo, that public facts are not ownable, so when people report on things that becomes part of the public record. Anything that any of the women said in that news story is public record. And you can use it. The fact that they are firefighters and that they’re in prison. Literally any information that this news report puts out on the air now belongs to the world.

However, in a case like this, if you wanted to be specific about it, let’s say you want to write a movie about the female firefighters but you actually also really want to use two of the actual women featured in that news story, I would actually argue you don’t want to go to NBC News because they don’t own anything that you don’t already have in a sense. Because they’ve put it out there in the world. It’s news.

What you want to do is get the life rights of those two women. Because the beauty of life rights is it gives you access to all of the information about their lives, all of the stories that aren’t in that news report, and that would be pretty useful I would think if you wanted to make a movie about those specific women.

John: I agree. An example of the kind of thing that would happen is like last month I was approached with the rights to this radio story. So it was a segment of a popular radio show and producers had optioned the rights to this episode. And it seems weird to option the rights to this episode, but when I listened to it it’s like, OK, I get why they’re trying to do that because it was a very unique story and how they were telling the story was really informing how you would do the movie version of it.

So, even though the reporting on people who existed in the real world and all the reporting I guess could be considered public record, it’s out there in the world, the way it was put together would be key to how you would do this as a movie, which is why they had gotten the rights to that story.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, there’s certain narrative things that do hold copyright. So, facts, available. Narrative structure, copyrightable. I mean, to an extent. To an extent.

John: But, you know, classically like Rolling Stone articles always used to get optioned to be made into movies. And sometimes they were made into movies. So like, Perfect, the aerobics movie, that was a Rolling Stone article I believe.

Craig: That’s right. Well, you know, one of the things about those articles is – for instance, Rolling Stone articles, and you’ll see this too with Vanity Fair articles, long form articles actually contain an enormous amount of research, quotes, many stories. So when you option that article it’s almost like you’re sweeping up a whole bunch of let’s call them sub-life rights. You know have the rights to all of the life that has been reported inside of it.

John: Yeah. And that can be very, very useful. Even if you’re going to fictionalize those characters or do other stuff, you are controlling a big block of stuff that could be useful material for your movie. And I will go back to the point that a lot of times producers are doing it just so they can try to claim an area of the world and say like, “No, no, I’m making this movie so everyone else back away.”

Craig: Yeah. That’s right.

John: All right, let’s get to our feature topic which was thought up about ten minutes ago, but I think it could be an interesting discussion. So, as we talk about people who are aspiring to be screenwriters or our lives as screenwriters, we talk about sort of my running for the WGA, we have a vested interest in the profession of screenwriting. It’s been very good to me and to Craig. I want to think about what if it all went away. And sort of what are the scenarios in which it could all go away.

This comes kind of from a business exercise which I did with my own company here making software where you pretend that like let’s say two years from now this project we’re working on or this whole company goes out of business, like basically it fails. If it were to fail, what are the things that would have happened that brought us to failure? And by thinking through those scenarios that brought you to failure, you might think about what things you should be doing now to make changes that won’t lead you there.

Craig: That’s smart.

John: So, let’s think about that in terms of screenwriting. If screenwriting is not a viable job, a professional job, five years, ten years, 20 years from now, what will have changed?

Craig: OK. All right. Well, I have some thoughts on that.

John: All right. And I guess we should think of some parameters first, because it’s very broad what I’m saying. I don’t know if we want to limit it to US screenwriting. I don’t know if we want to limit it to screenwriting that is able to pay you as a full-time job, so that your only job is to be a professional screenwriter. Are we talking about screenwriting only for big screens as we currently think about them? I don’t know that we need to nail these down, but as we talk through these scenarios we might want to actually discuss what kind of parameters we’re putting on them.

Craig: Well, what if we say we’re talking about screenwriting as we know it dying. So that means a general accepted range of income and a certain kind of method of employment. And it all goes away and is replaced by something else.

John: Yes. So, I mean, the biggest scenarios are scenarios in which the world is vastly changed because of something catastrophic. So the meteor hits us, there’s a zombie outbreak, there’s no film industry because making movies is such a low priority on the hierarchy of needs of things to do. So, you know, if it’s Walking Dead, you’re probably not making movies. Even Michael Bay is not making a movie during Walking Dead times.

Craig: Yeah, I’m pretty sure that at that point everyone can take a break and put their spec away, because, yeah, they have to run.

John: Yeah, I guess so. Even like LA people in coffee shops right now, they’re just not going to finish. They’re going to get stuck like last week’s guy who was at the end of the first act and really having a hard time getting to the second act. He’s going to be stuck there for a long time.

Craig: Feel like actually a lot of writers would be thrilled to see the meteor streaking towards us, just “OK, either I’m a working writer and I had a deadline and now it’s not a problem,” or “I’m an aspiring writer and I’m really tired of banging my head against the wall and I have to write yet another spec. Oh, thank god, here comes the meteor.”

John: You know, I will say in my own professional life there have been times where a movie has fallen apart and I’ve just been hooray. I’m just like so glad to be liberated from the process. Yes, you want to see movies get made, but also sometimes they’re just horrible and you’re just like, wow, to be done with it is great.

Craig: Oh. Yeah. For sure. You know that whole psychological thing of people being, what is it, fear of failure leads to fear of success and that’s for a good reason. Actually doing something and making a movie is just nothing but enormous risk. Emotional risk and personal risk. And it can all go wrong. And, man, think about how much easier it is to say I wrote a brilliant screenplay and Hollywood just couldn’t get it together. And so it’s just one of those screenplays that will never see the light of day, but it’s just one of those that people talk about.

So you’re forever a genius. You are a genius stuck in amber like a little bug. But once that movie is made, yeah, OK genius, here we go. [laughs]

John: When I see writers who are fixated on like the one project that never got made, or they’re still trying to get that one thing to have happen, I think they are kind of stuck in that loop where this is the thing, or I would have been a successful writer if it hadn’t been for this one producer screwing me over. They can happily sort of get trapped in those things. And I think sometimes they welcome the meteor because it provides a convenient excuse for why things never worked their way.

Craig: No question. You know, and I get it. I get it. It’s a really, really hard thing to do and sometimes we just need that little bit of dignity, because we feel ashamed if we quit. And so we’re looking for that dignity. And, yes, there are times, by the way, when this business is terribly unfair to people. We’ve been reading about a lot of them lately. And a wrong is done. A true wrong. Like people say I was screwed over and pushed out of the business. This does happen. We know that.

Now, no one is ever permanently pushed out of anything. You can fight your way back in one presumes. But it’s hard. And it’s harder than it needs to be. It’s unfair. It’s unjust. And I think in certain circumstances people, they get exhausted and they don’t want to and, all right, well, you know–

John: That’s OK, too.

Craig: Yeah, it is.

John: So, I think there’s a second scenario which is not a nuclear strike, or a meteor, or a plague, but like an economic collapse. And so I guess we should talk about like how big of an economic collapse would have to happen before the film industry goes under.

If you think back, granted the film industry was in its infancy during the Great Depression, but there were still movies. And even in those darkest times we were still able to make films. Craig, what’s your thought about how bad would finances have to be before we stopped making films?

Craig: Um, very bad. And kind of hard to imagine, because people’s desires for content seems inversely related to their general happiness. When things are bad, that’s the brilliance of the entertainment business. They seek entertainment and diversion more, and more, and more. And regardless of our complaints about the cable bill, or the Netflix subscription cost, or going to the movie theater, it’s still a fairly efficient and economical way for a family to entertain itself. And it is essentially what our culture is.

You know, particularly American culture is a culture of televised and filmed entertainment.

John: Yeah. So I guess I would wonder whether people would be willing to sort of substitute cheaper forms of entertainment, like television, like the stuff they can get for free, and like going out to the movies, even at a lower price point, because in an economic collapse I would assume that some prices would collapse down again, but you know, I do wonder at what point it gets so bad that people don’t go out to the movies.

Again, I get back to like going out to the movies is one of the cheapest sort of social activities we still have left in America. So, some version of that I got to feel is going to stick around.

Craig: I agree. There seems to be something in humans. They want to congregate. And even in desperate economic times they want to congregate together. And, yeah, in a total flat-out depression, movie ticket prices would go down and popcorn prices would go down. Of course. Everything adjusts.

Certainly I hope it doesn’t happen. And there’s no question that it would impact the movie business, but I don’t think it would destroy movies or television because we kind of have evidence that it doesn’t.

John: Yep. We do. All right, so let’s imagine that there are still movies, but maybe we’re not writing them. So let’s think about who is writing these movies. Obviously an easy choice would be writers who just not living in the US. We want to make our parameters for like you and me are no longer screenwriters. And the North Americans writing movies are no longer writing these.

You know, there’s people around the world who are writers and who are writing movies. Do they farm out? Do they ship those jobs overseas, Craig?

Craig: No. No more than they currently do. I mean, the truth is that any movie studio, any television entity can hire any writer they want anywhere in the world. They are free to do so. And they currently choose to generally speaking hire Americans and Brits.

John: Now, it’s worth noting that people in other countries, they have writers guilds, but they’re not the same as our Writers Guild. You will know better than me sort of what the requirements are on a US WGA signatory when they hire an international writer. Do they have to obey any of the same Writers Guild minimums/contractual things?

Craig: If they are employing that writer here. So, it actually is a question of geography. If they hire a French writer, but they bring the French writer here to the United States to be on set working and writing, then they have to be covered by a WGA agreement. But if they hire a French writer to write something in France, no. Not only do they not have to have them be WGA, I don’t think they can. I don’t think they’re allowed to be. I think that our contract only covers US employees because of federal labor law and all the rest of it.

So, it’s sort of defined by where you are, where you’re doing the job.

Similarly, if you go overseas and write and movie in France, you may not be employed by a WGA signatory because you’re writing it physically there. Obviously if you start a project here, and then you go over there, it’s covered. Once you start it, it’s covered. But, you know, I think that the – and I remember when we went on strike there was like rumors that studios were going to put writers on planes, stick them in hotels in London, and have them start writing movies, which didn’t happen. But I don’t think that globalization is necessarily the thing that’s going to undo us.

John: It’s true that China will become a bigger film market, an even bigger film market in the years ahead. And so I don’t know whether we’ve reached the tipping point where their box office is bigger than our box office. Right now, the movies that are made in China for China are not traveling to the US and to Europe the same way they are traveling throughout China and maybe Asia. But, some of those movies are going to break out. So there are going to be some movies that are entirely made in China, with Chinese money, with Chinese screenwriters that will become incredibly successful.

I don’t know that that’s going to replace our work in any meaningful way soon.

Craig: No. I don’t think so. China has become a large film producer. Yes, you’re right, most of the movies that they make locally are for China the way that most movies that India makes are for India. But, China has had some notable successes. I mean, you look at guys like Stephen Chow with Kung-Fu Hustle, and Ang Lee coming up with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. There are examples where these movies crossover and become global phenomena.

John: So, let me propose a new scenario. There are still movies, there are still things being shown on a big screen, yet the way they are shot – they’re essentially animation. So, animation takes over. What we used to think of as live action becomes predominantly animated. So essentially we see movies but they’re all basically Pixar movies and they’re photorealistic Pixar movies. That is work that is written but is not written by our kind of writers. I mean, they are in many cases – most cases animation writers are not covered by the same kinds of contracts.

Craig, is that a scenario you can imagine where there is a fight over what kinds of movies are coming on screen and whether those have to be written by us under our live action contracts or that they are really essentially animated films?

Craig: Yeah. That fight is coming no matter what. Now, I don’t think that we will ever be in a situation where moves are exclusively made in that manner because at some point we need new human beings to become fascinated with. Even if we leave the age of the movie star behind, we want to find people that get us excited again. Movies are endlessly renewing in this way.

If we switched over today to an all photorealistic/CGI model, well, I hope you like Tom Hanks because that’s all you’re getting from now until the end of time, right? So we need new. That said, yes, there are absolutely going to be situations where animation essentially has become akin to a totally controllable live action.

When that happens there’s going to be a fight. And the fight will have one of two outcomes I think. Either the WGA will somehow manage to establish that it actually has jurisdiction over photorealistic animation, which is an interesting argument and it’s possible. The other possibility is that the animation guild says, “No, it turns out that we do.” At which point if there’s a lot of that kind of work then suddenly you have a whole lot of WGA screenwriters becoming members of the animation guild. And at that point they become voting members of the animation guild and then you have a big fight on your hands.

It will get messy. If the companies are smart when they get to that crossroads, they will avoid a senseless battle. But they might also see an opportunity to crush us.

John: Yeah. It will be interesting to see what happens. I think we should explain that right now most of the photorealistic movies that you’ve seen have been written under a WGA contract. And some of that is just because of the filmmakers involved. Like Justin Marks’ Jungle Book. That was a WGA movie. It had a live action character in it. It had like a real human in it, which I think is part of the reason why it’s very safe to define, but I believe that the Lion King movie which is being done photorealistic is also a WGA movie.

I don’t know that to be true. But, we’re not the only union with a dog in this fight. There are actors who are doing these movies, at least right now, whose performance is being captured. And so those actors are working under a SAG contract.

Craig: Right.

John: And we are working under a WGA contract. The cameras are different. The filming mechanism is different. But it’s still very much like making a live action movie in that part of it.

Craig: Yeah. And I think that this is an area where all three guilds, the DGA, SAG, AFTRA, and the Writers Guild will join together. What choice do we have? We have to join together, when that comes, and say this is ours. We own this.

And, you know, I’m not going to say it’s going to be easy, but I don’t think that that form of filmmaking will ever completely replace standard filmmaking.

John: Standard filmmaking is comparatively really cheap. And so if you want to make a movie like Lady Bird, which is fantastic, you’re going to probably use real actors there. You don’t get a huge benefit out of using animation to do that.

Craig: No. It’s painstakingly slow. Just having someone blink takes either a blink or days.

John: Yes. So, last sort of big scenario I want to lay out there is what if screenplays are still written to some degree but they are not written by human beings? That some AI algorithm is generating screenplays and whether that is exactly what’s being filmed, or created through a computer process, or those scripts are being written and handed off to someone to polish and make them sound better. That a lot of the writing of screenplays gets handed off to AI.

So, I have a blog post that I still have not really ever published about it. I think you read an early version of it. I do wonder at what point AI will replace screenwriters. And so let’s chat about that.

Craig: Well, I don’t think it ever will. Again, for the same reason that even as we recycle a million things over and over with our, whatever they say, seven fundamental narratives, that we crave certain kinds of new. And we crave a certain kind of surprise and shock that is specifically crafted for surprise and shock. And I think that AI – I’m just guessing here – will never get better than mediocre. Mediocre would be amazing, by the way. I mean, the fact that a computer could be a mediocre writer would be kind of amazing.

I think that I could definitely see a future where AI or a couple of AIs are in a writer’s room. I could see them offering suggestions for storylines that might surprise you because they’re odd and they’re AI and they can do it really quickly. I can also see a situation where people would be like, “All right, we have to solve this problem. We need them to be here, but they’re over here, so we need to solve that logic problem. Hey, you know, Jim-bot, any ideas?” Well, and then, you know, by scanning through a billion possibilities Jim-bot offers you three or four and you’re like, “Oh, one of those is pretty good, but let’s now humanize it.” I could see that. Yeah.

John: I could see that as well. I think I am a little bit more, I don’t know if it’s optimistic or pessimistic, that AI algorithms and other sort of developments will be able to through iteration and just technologies we don’t really fully understand yet, sort of the black boxes that are able to do these amazing things, is going to come up with some things that are really fascinating. And so there will be some work that is created by an AI. It will be a movie that will come out and then right as it is coming out, or right after it premieres at Sundance it will be revealed like, “Oh, actually a computer wrote this.” And that will be part of the story behind it. And that will be an interesting tipping point the degree to which AI-assisted or AI-influenced movies are a thing that is existing in our world and displaces some of us fleshy writers doing our jobs.

I think the other stronger possibility is that these AIs will create something that is just wholly new. That isn’t like what you or I would do, but is fascinating because it’s just so different.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And I think that is actually a bigger danger in a way to the future of screenwriting and the future of movies is they’ll come up with something that is just really incredible, that is immersive and just mind-blowing so that you don’t want to go to the movies because what you can experience is so much cooler than movies that why would you go to the movies.

Craig: It’s possible. I also think that if AI comes up with something really cool like that, people will immediately be trying to make money off of it by doing their own versions of it. I also wonder sometimes, just as a purely theoretical question, if it’s impossible ultimately for humans to create a true human mimicking AI because we don’t have access to our own brains. We only have access to the function of our brains, if that makes sense.

John: Yes.

Craig: So there is always that weird separation between what we teach it to do and what’s actually working to create the experience of our consciousness and all the rest of it. So I wonder if there’s just a fly in the ointment there that can never be overcome and that’s the thing that keeps AI from becoming us. It’s like asking a microscope to look at itself. It just doesn’t work.

We’ll see. Either way – listen – either way, you and I die.

John: Yes. One of the guarantees here. Well, actually I’m not going to take that as a guarantee. I think if I were ten years, maybe 20 years younger there’s a stronger possibility that I would not die. That essentially who I consider to be myself might continue on in some virtual form. I’m not so optimistic that’s going to happen in my lifetime, but for daughter, I think there’s a good chance that a lot of who she is would not die when her body dies.

Craig: [sighs] Whoa.

John: Whoa. How are you feeling about that, Craig? Would you – given the choice, would you want your consciousness to live on after your body has ceased to function?

Craig: No question. I have a lot of puzzling to do.

John: Yeah. There’s so many crossword puzzles. And honestly with better hardware you could just do more, you could do more at once. It would be amazing.

Craig: Fun. Yeah. It’s just fun.

John: So, last scenario I want to raise is, you know, in some ways one of the most realistic of the scenarios, but I’m curious what you think about it, the WGA ceases to exist for some reason and we can talk about some of the reasons why. It could be this animation sort of surpasses us. Some sort of huge change in how labor law works in the US.

Craig: Collusion with Russia? Something like that.

John: Yes. Just basically the nature that the WGA is a monopoly that is negotiating with oligopolies. And basically oligopolies become so powerful that the WGA monopoly is no longer enough to sort of stop it. What does screenwriting look like if the WGA goes away?

Craig: Terrible. One thing we can count on with our friends at the companies is a certain inescapable short-sidedness, like greedy children let loose in a candy store. They will gorge themselves until they puke and they will do the same with writing. If they can, they will exploit writers and content creators to the extent that nobody wants to do it anymore. They will. It’s just inevitable.

When you look at – I think this is all business in general. When it is unrestrained you get these busts and booms. It’s that cycle. They can’t help it. So, from a long-term point of view you’d say we have to treat these people well or else they’ll leave and not be here and then we’ll be out of product. And that’s true. But right now I personally can get a promotion if I deliver product at half the price. And so it begins.

John: It’s the creative version of the tragedy of the commons, where it benefits each individual person to be greedy and not think about the future, but by not thinking about the future they create this problem.

Craig: It’s also true for us. As writers, we’re humans. If you remove our commons, right, which is the sort of enforced commons of our union, and you just send us out into the workplace where there’s 20 jobs this year for four million people, it’s a race to the bottom. It’s just a very, very fast race to the bottom. And people will screw each other over to get whatever work they can just thinking, “Well look, I understand this is going to damage my profession and it’s going to make it harder for other people, including me, to get a decent living, but right now I need to pay my rent, so yes, I’ll work for minimum wage.” Well, there you go. It’s over.

John: Yesterday I heard a term I had never heard before, then it was described to me and I was horrified. Have you heard the term “virtual roundtable?”

Craig: God no.

John: So, the writer was describing it to me. And basically they said like, “We’re going to put together a virtual roundtable on this project.” What it means is you’re not going to be physically in the same room with the other writers. Basically we’re sending out the script to a bunch of writers and we’re asking each of them to do a punch-up on it. And then we’ll sort of assemble what people did. Which is troubling on some levels, but the amount of money they were paying for that virtual roundtable for basically a free comedy polish on the whole thing was like about $2,000.

Craig: That is not acceptable for our contract. That is a violation of the MBA. And I hope that you referred this to our legal department. It is a violation.

John: It is a giant violation. And by making up that term and sort of combining it with a thing which is a real thing, which is a roundtable, it makes it seem like it’s legit, but it’s not legit.

Craig: I have already made an argument, as you probably are aware, to our general counsel at the Writers Guild that the way studios currently do non-virtual roundtables but actual in person roundtables is a violation of the MBA and that we have all been systematically underpaid for those for like decades. And now they’re figuring out a way to make it even worse.

John: Yeah. So it’s on the agenda, Craig. You will hear more about this in the months ahead. I can’t tell you to relax. It’s not possible for Craig to relax. But know that that is a thing that will be – it’s on that agenda.

Craig: I mean, my god.

John: My god. Let’s go back through our worst case scenarios and try to apply a percentage to each of them. So let’s go back to a world ending or sort of civilization destroying instant that makes it so we’re no longer screenwriters.

Craig: Well, a couple years ago I would have said 0.001%, but now I’m going to put it at 2%. [laughs]

John: Yeah, I’m between 2% and 5% of some sort of giant catastrophe. An economic collapse that makes it impossible to make movies?

Craig: That makes it impossible to make movies? I mean, we’re due for a nice, big sock in the jaw, but I would say that’s pretty low. I’m going to go with 5%.

John: Yeah. I’m going to go even a little bit lower because I feel like the economic collapse would have to be so massive.

Craig: You’re right.

John: I think a plague is more likely than the kind of economic collapse that stops all movies.

Craig: I think you’re right. I’ll knock that down to a percent. A point.

John: Movies are written, but they’re written by international screenwriters?

Craig: No. Zero percent.

John: I’m going to give it still more like the 5%. I think there might be some way in which that happens. AI writes our movies?

Craig: 1%. Very low. Very low numbers.

John: That’s low. I would say that AI takes a certain chunk out of the screenwriter’s life, or basically the number of screenwriters becomes lessened because of it.

Craig: OK, well that’s different. Then I would go up to – and of course, what’s our timeframe for that?

John: Let’s say in 20 years.

Craig: Oh, 20 years? Yeah, 1%.

John: Something else replaces movies. Basically we stop making movies because something else is cooler.

Craig: Question mark percent. I mean, because I don’t know what – that could be anything really.

John: Yeah. I’m basically describing magic.

Craig: Right.

John: The WGA falls apart. The WGA ceases to exist?

Craig: Sadly, that is one of the more likely scenarios. It is not a likely scenario, but I would put that at 4%.

John: I think that’s about right. In 20 years, I think I would be nervous that it would happen. I might even go a little bit higher because I can imagine if organized labor really goes under just even greater attack, I could see that falling apart.

Craig: Yep.

John: All these percentages are still pretty low. I think if you’re an aspiring writer listening to this podcast, we’re not telling you to give up. I think you should still try to do it.

Craig: Yeah. Generally speaking, your problem isn’t any of the things we’ve said. Your problem is the fact that there are fewer of these jobs than there are in the NFL.

John: Indeed. A person with a problem is Dean in Sydney, Australia.

Craig: Segue Man.

John: He sent in his question as an audio clip, so let’s take a listen.

Dean: My question is actors. Do you ever find that actors come up to you and go, “Hey, so what’s that about? Help me out with that.” If so, awesome. If not, why not? And how do you approach actors as a writer?

John: So, Craig, how do you approach an actor as a writer? And I take it, yes, actors do sometimes come up. Sometimes you have things you would like to say to an actor. What is the dance there?

Craig: Well, in television it’s no dance, right? So, you’re running your show, you’re in charge, you sit and you talk to the actors all the time. And that’s fine. You know, you want to respect a certain relationship between the director and the actor so that while they are actually shooting there is a – we’ll call it a simplification of voices. Because acting is hard enough. When you have two different people telling you two different things on top of each other, it can be confusing. Actors are trained to respond to one person giving them a point of view about their performance.

And, you know, then at times there may be a pause and a discussion and that’s different.

Now, in features, it should work the way I just said it works in television. It doesn’t. In part because directors have created a – I would just argue an artificial culture of dominance over performance and talking to actors.

There are times when I think the actors are desperate to talk to the writers, and vice versa, but there is this strange religious thing that you’re not allowed to, and it’s offensive, and the director will lose their minds, and ban you from the set because how dare you. Which really speaks to how remarkably insecure some directors are. Again, there is a great reason to filter all immediate input about a performance through the director to keep things clear and understandable for actors. But aside from the performance, when we’re talking about in between days and we’re talking about before shooting and rehearsals and all that, the writer wrote it. It makes sense for the writer and the actor to have a discussion about what it means.

But in features, directors feel this need to be the sole god of interpretation, which is why I think a lot of movies are just stinky.

John: Yeah. I agree with you that it should be different in features than it is. I think you have to be mindful of just the way it is and find the best ways to influence the process.

So, this last year as we were doing Big Fish in London, we started rehearsals and one of the things that was the best part of the process for me is we pulled the actors aside in little small rooms and I sit with me, and the actors, and the director, and we’d read through the scenes and we’d talk about them and then we’d read through them again. And that was really my chance to influence what they were doing. Because it was in front of the director, but it was really about the text. And we could really focus on what the intentions were, what some of the options and choices were. We could really look at that. And after that process, if actors came back with a question we could refer back to that previous meeting where we all sat down and it was clear that these are the cool things we can all talk about and it was good.

Then when we’re actually in the room rehearsing, if I had something I needed to change about an actor’s performance, I would go through the director so it was clear that like this is something I want to see, but I’m not trying to do his job, and I’m not trying to insert myself.

Occasionally on movies I’ve had that same experience. On Go, we would sit in little small rooms and just talk through stuff and figure out how we were doing things. And on that movie I ended up becoming incredibly involved in sort of performance because Doug is literally holding the camera on his shoulder and so we’d shoot something and if I needed to change something, or if I saw something happening in front of the camera, I would have to tell Doug who was standing there right with the actors with the camera on his shoulder. So I would tell Doug and Doug would say, “Oh yeah, yeah, what he said.” And then we’d keep going.

That’s ideal and it’s really rare. Most cases when I see something and I need to give a note, it’s this weird dance of suggesting to the director and then hoping that he or she passes that note along to the actor.

Craig: Exactly. And, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time on sets and by and large I’ve had great relationships with directors. And that’s how I do it. I’m there at the monitor and I choose my points. There’s a certain talent to it, Dean, and, well, wrong word. It’s not a talent. There is a craft to it that you can learn. So, you learn, and here, I’ll make it easy for everybody listening. You can skip a lot of mistakes just like this.

The first take or two, let the director just direct. Eight times out of ten the thing that you see, they see too. When you’re directing an actor you are building a performance a lot of the time. So, you get something and then you have a bunch of things in your head. OK, I need that to go faster. They’re saying this word wrong. They don’t understand what that line means. And I need a pause here and here. And then I need them to look and respond without saying a word. That’s a lot.

You cannot tell – some actors you actually tell all that too and they’re like machines. Most you can’t. Most you’re going to go, “Great, awesome. Let’s do it again. Let’s just go a little faster. We’re feeling it. We’re getting into it, right.”

The director has the plan. A lot of times writers who are new to sets sit there and go, “Oh, no, no that’s not all right. That was terrible.” And it was. But calm down. Because “that was terrible” is not great direction. So give the director a chance. Then, when you notice that the director seems to have locked in on a thing and you are still concerned about something, it’s OK at that point to kind of saddle up and go, “Here’s one thing to think about. What if…or do you think that…?” And they’ll go, “Oh, OK.”

Now, sometimes they’ll say, “No, no, no.” Sometimes they’ll be annoyed that you’re talking to them. Sometimes they’ll be, “Oh yeah, good idea.” You never know what you’re going to get. Directing is hard. And then one thing I’ve learned over time is to not take the director’s mood particularly personally. Because they have to swallow all of their misery, anger, frustration, and impatience so as to not show it to the actors. Because actors will presume it’s about them and then it’s messing up their performance.

So everybody else gets the worst of them. Right? And that’s, you know, and I get that. But you figure out a way to kind of deal with them, just as they’re figuring out a way to deal with the actors. And now everyone is taking care of themselves, but you’ve given the director a chance. And then you should be OK. Especially, by the way, if your comments are actually helpful.

You make four or five annoying, stupid suggestions in a row, no one is going to listen to you.

John: Absolutely. Acting is hard. Directing is hard. And you as the writer have this ideal performance in your head, because you wrote the scene. So you saw it a certain way in your head and a lot of the process as you’re watching it is like, OK, this is different than what I saw, but does this accomplish the same things? If it doesn’t, then yes, you speak up. And you speak up after they’ve had a little chance to get into it.

If you do notice that words are being messed up or a thing I sometimes notice is they’ve changed the tense on a verb and I know that it’s not going to cut right with the other thing. They’ve locked into a bad pattern. This is your chance to talk to the script supervisor. So the scripty is there to remind actors what the actual lines are and to sort of get them back on track with that. And she can be your incredible ally in getting the words that should actually be there there.

Again, don’t mess with it if it’s just slightly different words and doesn’t really matter. But if it does matter, or if it’s really changing the meaning, or changing an important plot point, yes, you need to step up there.

I remember on my first movie, on Go, there was a point where I went off to the restrooms, but I still on my comm text — on my headphones. And I heard the scene being performed. And I realized like, oh shit, they’ve changed the tenses here. When they try to turn it around to shoot the other side of that it is not going to match at all. So I scrambled back in there and got them to take one more take with the actual right proper verbs there, because otherwise I just knew we were going to be in the editing room and we were going to be cutting around this thing that they shouldn’t have had to cut around.

Craig: Yeah. Or looping in a line, which nobody ever wants to do. I mean, we have – this is why directors frustrate me. They make it hard for us to do our job on the set. And they should make it easy for us to do our job. I understand their fear and concern about writers essentially wrestling away everyone’s job and the difficult task of making something to hold it to some imaginary movie in their heads. But most of us are smart enough to know that’s not really what we do. And just let us help because we’re actually very good at understanding how our scripts work.

John: All right. Do you want to take Matthew’s question?

Craig: Sure. We’ve got Matthew here. He says, “I’m an author of four novels, first with Doubleday, and now Macmillan, and I have a couple more on the way in 2018. All four of my published works are currently optioned for film by a variety of entities – production companies, producers, and a writer. My first novel has been optioned at least four times by four different entities, but to date nothing has happened. Scripts have been written. Well-known actors and directors have been attached at various times. I get paid a small but not insignificant amount of money every one to two years as the options are renewed or expired and then get picked up by someone else. But I’m wondering: will this ever happen? Can you give me some insight from your side of the table? How often does an optioned novel end up on the big screen? Why is this process so fraught and uncertain?”

That’s a great question, Matthew.

“My agent says to just keep writing my books, which I have. And actually written a couple screenplays now for my film agent. But I’ve gotten to the point that I just tell my friends I’ve stopped thinking about the possibility of a movie a long time ago.”

Oh, that’s a tale of woe, John. What do you think?

John: It’s not really a tale of woe. It’s a tale of reality. And I think Matthew has hit on it. Most books that get optioned don’t get made into movies. Most scripts that get written don’t get made into movies. And when I see authors being so excited about the film rights sold, or it’s going to be a movie, I’m happy for them, but I also want to pull them aside and let them know that like if it gets made into a movie, that’s winning the lottery. That so rarely happens.

Because I’m usually the person who gets sent these kinds of books. And I’ll read the book and say like, “Yes, this is a great book. I just don’t see this actually happening as a movie in our environment.” And I’ll be honest with the producers about that.

But other times, like Big Fish, it happens. And so you just don’t know. And you have so little control over it, Matthew. That’s the remarkable thing. As the author you control everything. And every word and every comma. Movies seem like they’re made by magic. Like other people just go off and run and 200 people are off making your movie. Except most times they don’t get made. They get optioned, they pay someone to write a script. That script sits on a shelf and it doesn’t happen.

Craig: Yeah I actually think you’ve come up with the best possible method here, Matthew, which is to stop thinking about the possibility of a movie, because this is our world, too. I mean, we’re the ones who get hired to write these things. And I understand from a logical point of view you say, listen, you’ve paid me money to adapt this into a movie. Adapt it into a movie! Why would you pay me money to not adapt it into a movie?

Well, there is an appetite for material. And that appetite is greatest when the costs are the lowest. And then it narrows as the potential costs become higher. So, the option amount, there’s a low barrier of entry there. That’s a dollar and a dream. It’s a lottery ticket, right?

OK, I’m not suggesting that you optioned your books for a dollar, of course, but I’m saying – let’s say you’ve optioned your book for $500,000. Well, for a studio it’s actually not that much. So now the sky is the limit. Let’s see who we can get with this great book. Let’s see if we can get the big star, the big director, the big writer. And then, you know, maybe you do get one of those things. And then you start to try.

And you get a script. And you get a director. And you get a producer. But at some point when you’re really close, someone is going to come up with a budget. Well, now the decision is not $500,000, or a million or two for a writer. The decision is $50 million, $80 million. Really it’s more like $150 million because of marketing and all the rest. This is the problem. And so you should stop thinking about it. You should take the money, spend that money, save that money, do with it what you will. Don’t think about it. This is the proverbial watched pot. Turn away and it will either boil or not.

John: The other thing you have to keep in mind is that even if the movie gets made, that may not be a good thing. In the process of doing Arlo Finch, I got to talk to a lot of authors whose books were optioned and in some cases were made. And it wasn’t always a great experience. In some cases the movies were really bad. And so it’s a frustrating experience as an author to have made something that you truly love but there’s another version out there that you don’t love. And that is a strange thing that can happen to you as well.

So, I don’t have any advice for Matthew other than to I guess be happy that in the movies not getting made at least not a bad version is out there of something that he worked on. It would be so incredibly dispiriting to see these characters you love and this world you’ve built made into something that does not resemble at all your hopes and your ambitions. That’s not good for anybody.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. Always look on the bright side there, Matthew.

John: All right. Last question is Scott from Scotland.

Craig: Oh, of course.

John: Of course. He asks, “Is it OK to use Twitter and so on as part of a plot? Or are there circumstances where it’s necessary to create a fictional brand that mimics an actual existing site?”

Craig: Well, like always, Scott, it depends on what you’re doing. You can certainly mention Twitter casually and a character can say I tweeted about it, and I saw it on Twitter, and so forth. If you want to show a screen with Twitter on it, you’re going to have to deal with Twitter. Because now you’re using their design and their logo and their technology as part of your movie. By and large what happens in production is either the platform is so essential to the concept of the movie that the studio makes a deal and works it out so that they can actually use that. Or they come up with their own fake version of it.

John: The fake version is always terrible. I hate the fake version.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And I will say that I used to work in clearance at Universal so when you saw things that were trademarks on screen, I was the person who had to call and get the legal clearance to show that thing on screen. I had to get the clearances for Reality Bites a zillion years ago.

A lot of places now I think are just saying kind of screw it. It’s the real world. We’re not going to worry so much about clearing all that stuff. I don’t know what has informed them that they feel like that’s a choice they can make. But I like that they make it. Movies don’t feel real to me. I’m aware that I’m watching a movie when I see a fake version of Twitter or Facebook or anything else in there.

I understand why it still happens, but it always annoys me when I see it.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, there are ways to create things that are close enough that you don’t even notice that they’re not the real thing. You know, you want to show a Facebook page. You can design a page that looks a whole lot like Facebook, but it’s slightly different, and just don’t show the top of it where the logo would be. Now it looks like Facebook and everybody gets it. So, there are all sorts of cheap knockoff things like that.

By and large though, it’s a risky thing to write a movie like that. I mean, you can say, “Look, we’re writing a script. It’s called Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.” Well, you’re going to need White Castle. [laughs] You’re going to need them to play ball. There is now way around it, right? Otherwise it’s going to be Harold and Kumar Go to Burger Prince, and that’s not going to be any good.

But, Scott from Scotland, good news, it doesn’t really matter right now. I’m guessing that you are just trying to get some attention and some love for the work you’re doing, so write the movie you want to write. You’re free here. You are unfettered. John and I have to deal with this crap all day long. You don’t. So, why? Why burden yourself with it? Just presume that if somebody falls in love with this script, they will let you know how to work around it. And if truly the whole thing is like, oh my god, if only we could do this but we can’t, well, they’ll have other work for you. That’s just the way it goes.

John: So this is all a matter of public record. You can Google this. But I originally set up the rights to RJ Palacio’s book Wonder. And I loved her book and as we were pitching at places and describing it, one of the things which was always in the back of my mind is, “Wow, when I actually get around to adapting this we’re going to have to talk about some of the things that are in the book and are fine in the book but are going to be real challenges when we put them on screen, such as Star Wars.” Chewbacca is in it. There’s a lot of Star Wars throughout the whole thing.

Craig: Right.

John: There’s Minecraft in it. They perform scenes from the play Our Town. There was just a lot of stuff in there that like, man, that is going to be a complicated clearance situation and we should be thinking about alts.

I did not end up writing that movie for other reasons. But I finally saw the movie and they cleared all of it. They used Star Wars. They used Our Town. There’s specific music things that are in there that I would have thought would have been challenging to clear, but they did it because they felt it was important enough to make it be in the movie. I have no idea what the deals were behind that, but they were able to make it happen.

Craig: Then you also have things like the – there’s a song You’re Making Things Up Again, Arnold in Book of Mormon. And in that you’ll see he’s referencing Yoda, Darth Vader, characters from Lord of the Rings. And they just do generic versions of it. So it’s sort of Yoda, but it’s not Yoda. And this way they don’t have to pay anybody. But we all get it. We all get the joke, you know.

John: And because they’re living in a world of parody and sort of heightened things it’s much easier for that to play there.

Craig: Correct.

John: But like fake Chewbacca for Wonder would have been really, really weird.

Craig: That would have not – fake Chewbacca in general, it’s like who can even tell it’s Chewbacca at that point?

John: I know. Then it’s just a rug.

Craig: It’s just a rug. It’s a bear.

John: It’s a bear with a haircut.

Craig: Yeah. Bear with a haircut.

John: All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is the USS Callister episode of Black Mirror from the new season of Black Mirror. It’s written by Charlie Brooker and William Bridges. I thought it was terrific. And I think Black Mirror is a great series anyway, but what I really liked about this episode and why I think it’s so useful for writers to take a look at it is it does very interesting things with our assumptions about who is the protagonist and who is the villain. You know, characters who you think like, oh, is that a love interest or a principal character? There are characters quite early on that you’re like that’s going to be the bad guy of this one-hour of entertainment, and you are surprised by sort of how stuff plays out.

So, I just thought it was a really terrific episode, but also a really great exercise in understanding audience’s expectations, manipulating them, and also sort of trusting that they’ll go with you. And that you can have characters do some really surprising things if you’ve set the groundwork of your world really well.

Craig: Yeah. That’s the – I think that’s part of the freedom of the format of television. There’s an understanding like you can pause, you can get up, you can walk around, you can come back. So we’ve all lowered the stakes of “Oh my god this must be awesome every second and I must be comfortable every second.” Movies are more and more designed to have like, you know the way like big potato chip companies obsess over mouth feel and stuff like that.

Movies are not designed to just like, ah, no objections ever. Television kind of doesn’t care if you’re there or not, which I love.

John: Which can be great. Gone Girl is another example of a movie that is so confidently made that they’re able to do things about the hero/villain relationship that is surprising and different. So, I always want to sort of single out and celebrate the ones that take those big swings and connect.

Craig: I hear that. Hear that, yo.

All right, so my One Cool Thing this week is a human being by the name of Megan Ganz. She is writer who worked on Community, Modern Family, It’s Always Sunny, Last Man on Earth. That’s a whole lot of funny in one resume.

But why she is my One Cool Thing this week is because she spoke out publicly about a difficult time she had working on Community with Dan Harmon, the creator/showrunner of that show. And essentially implied that he had created a sexually hostile environment. That she had experienced harassment by him and it was very upsetting and difficult for her.

And what ensued interestingly enough was this very long, very heartfelt apology from Dan Harmon. But that’s I think where a lot of people stop. I think people go, wow, Dan Harmon, good job for apologizing.

But, you know, my whole thing is a good apology just gets you back to zero. Right? I mean, you’ve gone negative by doing a bad thing. The perfect apology, the best apology ever possible just gets you back to zero. Apologies in and of themselves are not good works.

But here is what is a good work. Megan Ganz, after listening to his apology, forgave him. And I thought that was just remarkable. You know, he did a bad thing. He did a series of bad things. And in fact by her talking about it, I also learned more about how pernicious this kind of thing is. Because we tend to think of it as the simplest example. Someone grabs your butt. They grab a boob. They say a weird thing to you. They show you their whatever. And it’s, blech. But actually there’s this other kind of just relentless, creepy kind of thing that’s like a slow drip. And it turns sour. And it crosses the line into professional stuff. And you become mistreated and you doubt yourself. And the whole thing is just – it was fascinating to hear how it all went down and it was very upsetting. And all the more reason that I thought her forgiveness of him, which she earned, and she made a decision about, was impressive. And I think forgiving somebody on your own terms is a sign of character.

Doesn’t mean that you have to every time. But I was really impressed. I thought that she handled herself bravely to start with and bravely to finish with. And so I want to concentrate on her and say well done Megan Ganz. You have led by example. I think you’re great.

John: Yeah. I’ve followed Megan on Twitter for a long time. I don’t think I’ve ever met her in real life. And I didn’t know any of this backstory. But knowing this backstory makes me appreciate her very, very funny tweets in a whole new light. So, I agree with you. I think we need to commend what she was able to do here.

Craig: Yeah. Really, really very uplifting. It moved me. It really did.

John: Great. Our show is produced by our own Megan, Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Andrew Roninson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send questions like the ones we answered today.

On Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You can find us on Facebook or Apple Podcasts or pretty much anywhere you type the word Scriptnotes you’ll find some version of us there. Wherever you find us, leave us a review. Leave us a comment. It helps other people find us.

You can find all of the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. It’s $2 a month. We also have USB drives where you can get the first 300 episodes. In both places you’ll find all of the bonus episodes as well where we do extra things that were never in the main feed.

You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcript. It goes up within the week usually of an episode coming out.

Craig, thank you for a fun episode.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: I hope we didn’t destroy screenwriting in talking about it.

Craig: Oh, that would be kind of cool.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Sort of like opening the Schrödinger’s cat box. Oh, you killed it.

John: I killed it.

Craig: I knew you would.

Links:

• Wonder, adapted from RJ Palacio’s book, references many brands. So does “Making Things Up Again” from The Book of Mormon.
• The USS Callister episode of Black Mirror written by Charlie Brooker & William Bridges
• Megan Ganz
• The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!
• The USB drives!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Find past episodes
• Outro by Andy Roninson (send us yours!)

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/the-end-of-the-beginning).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 333 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to be taking a listener question about getting through the first act to look at the bigger issues of how we get our scripts on the right track to begin with. Then we’ll be looking at the role of writing and writers in creating VR, AR, and other immersive experiences.

Craig, you are in Seattle. How is that as an immersive experience?

**Craig:** Seattle is a great city. I really like it up here. It is verdant, as we like to say. It’s got that kind of – well, I’d guess you’d say a big city vibe but little city kind of vibe at the same time. It reminds me a little bit in that way of Boston or San Francisco. You kind of have the best of both worlds. Super educated. Very progressive town. Honestly, it just feels like a lot of LA to me, except colder, wetter. The time is the same. You know, you don’t have the time change problem.

So, it’s nice. We’re up here just for a few days. My son is taking a look at some potential colleges and things like that. And, you know, just chilling.

**John:** Cool. We are trying to figure out a date for us to come up to see Seattle and talk to screenwriters up there. Maybe this summer? It’s all really depending on really kind of Craig, because Craig’s schedule is crazy, because he’s making a giant TV show for HBO.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But we’d love to come up there. So if we have dates, we will share them as soon as we know.

**Craig:** As soon as we know.

**John:** Last week you were absolutely correct. You diagnosed me over the air with a sinus infection. That is in fact correct.

**Craig:** Nailed it.

**John:** I’m on my heavy antibiotics. I feel much better. I don’t really sound better, but people will suffer through my nasally voice for one more week hopefully and then I’ll be better.

**Craig:** And what did they lob at you?

**John:** It is not a Z-Pack because it had been going on long enough that they put me on a different antibiotic. I also have some Mucinex, I have two different kinds of Mucinex to take.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** My saline nasal spray. I have other stuff for kind of emergencies. But I really do feel quite a bit better. I was able to fly yesterday without my ears exploding, so I was very happy with the progress so far.

**Craig:** It’s amazing how quickly the antibiotics will turn around an infection like that. And let’s just all pray that we don’t ultimately succumb to bacteria that don’t care about our antibiotics. It’s a real thing. Because, you know, the problem with sinus infections, there are very few blood vessels running through there, so you have to actually bomb your system with a pretty sizable amount of antibiotics just to reach those little nooks and crannies up there. It’s atrocious.

And, also, the clearest evidence we have, I believe, that there is no intelligent design of human beings, the sinuses are absurd. They’re so dumb.

**John:** Yeah. Hopefully they’ll be restored to full functionality soon enough and we’ll be good. My question is would our voices be the same? Our voices would not be the same without our sinuses. So we have to credit some of our wonderful resonant human voices to the bizarre structure of our sinuses.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I guess a little bit. But, I mean, you’ve got a big hole that runs from your nose down to the back of your throat. That’s why we can breathe through our nose. But the sinuses that are in our cheeks and our foreheads, I don’t know if they’re doing that much for resonance. But, yeah, I’ll give you this. Maybe we wouldn’t have – maybe we wouldn’t have Barbra without the sinuses.

**John:** Yep. All right, let’s do some follow-up. Man, this is going back so, so far. Why don’t you try Richard’s question here.

**Craig:** OK. This is from Richard. “I’m writing as a long-time listener with an update to a question I asked all the way back in Episode 3. That’s right, not a typo, Episode 3 from 2011. How simple life seemed back then, right?” An aside, yes. Right. It did.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It did. Oh, 2011, how we miss you. Richard goes on, “Back then I asked as a prospective parent what it’s like raising a child while trying to break in as a screenwriter. You both gave some great perspective about how it’s tough but doable. Well, I wanted to let you know that last year, 2017, I was admitted into the WGA having written two freelance episodes of TV, but better yet my daughter turned five.” Awesome.

“Somehow, through perseverance, discipline, luck, moxie, and a very, very patient wife I was able to become a writer and a parent in these past six years. I’m now preparing to go out for staffing season this year and transition to a fulltime TV writer. I find you both inspirations as writers and people. Your podcast has given me an education and a sense of hope.”

Holy cajole, thank you, Richard.

**John:** That’s very nice. What a lovely way to start 2018 with a follow-up from six years ago. So, congratulations on being a parent. Congratulations on being a paid writer, a working writer who is now a member of the WGA.

Some clarification for people who don’t know, freelance episodes of TV series are – a lot of US TV shows are written by staff. And so the staff is assembled and they put together the whole season of television. There are also freelance episodes. And there are requirements that change and it’s all complicated, but some episodes of network TV shows are intended to be farmed out to somebody who is not a member of the staff, or for other reasons they’ll bring on an outside person to write an episode of a TV series. That sounds like what happened to Richard and that’s fantastic for Richard.

So something else he wrote attracted the attention of the showrunner, or other decision maker there, and said like, “You know what, let’s give that guy a script.” And Richard apparently did well enough to do it twice last season and now he is a paid writer writing under a WGA contract, which is fantastic.

**Craig:** That is. It used to be, I think, a lot of these freelance jobs existed. As I recall friends telling me, they sort of disappeared, but not completely. And so it’s good to see that Richard got that. And really cool to see that, Richard, our podcast is older than your child. I like that.

**John:** Yeah. It’s nice to see.

**Craig:** You know, your kid will always be younger than our show. Thanks for listening for all this time and we’re glad we have helped.

John, we’ve got some more follow-up from Laurie.

**John:** Laurie from Episode 331 writes, “Why are you so adamantly against work-for-hire? Are you saying that non-WGA screenwriters should turn down paid ghostwriting gigs? If the price is right, and the client insists on such terms, that is the alternative is no work and no money, what’s the downside for the writer?”

Craig, what is the downside?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t think, Laurie, that we’re adamantly against work-for-hire in the essence of it, because John and I both work in that capacity all day long, work-for-hire for studios.

What we’re concerned about, and yes, we are saying non-WGA screenwriters should turn down paid ghostwriting gigs. What we’re concerned about and what the downside is is not the downside for you individually in the moment, although there is one, but rather the collective downside for all of us. Because you’re essentially pushing down the nature of the work around us. Anytime somebody shows up and works for less than minimum wage, for instance, they are harming all minimum wage workers. I think we can all agree on that.

Well, in our business of professional television and movie writing, we have minimum wages. We also have some other protections that are minimum protections like our credit protections. When other people show up and work for less and under conditions where they don’t get credit, or paid properly for their work, or residuals, they essentially put pressure on the rest of the world. Not only do they make their lives worse in that moment, but they make other people’s lives worse.

Yes, in that moment you will get paid as opposed to not being paid, possibly, although I would argue you could take a stand. But what are you essentially doing is mortgaging your future to make a little bit of money right now. And you’re also harming everybody else’s.

So, the downside is not so much for the writer. The downside is for writers. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch, Laurie, to say that writers who are hired with money to write things should be able to write, if they so choose, under their own name. They should receive credit for the work they do and they should be compensated fairly. To me, that is not being adamantly against something, it is being reasonably for something.

**John:** Absolutely. So work-for-hire is common across all industries. So it’s not just writers, there’s artists, there’s other folks who work-for-hire. And we are really working-for-hire when studios employ us to work on screenplays. But they’re hiring us under very specific circumstances and conditions because of the union that we have. And if you talk to people in other industries, or writers who are doing the kinds of things that aren’t covered by the WGA contract, they would love to have some of the protections and some of the guarantees that we have. And so I don’t want to dismiss the possibility that there are writers who are working on movie stuff that is not covered and for other reasons maybe can’t be covered because of the weird esoteric conditions, but the aspiration should be to get that work covered and get that work paid fairly and those writers treated fairly. Do screenwriting on feature projects or television projects that could be covered under a contract because you are not just hurting yourself, you’re hurting everybody else who could be doing that work.

**Craig:** Hallelujah.

**John:** All right. Let’s move on to our marquee topic of the day. This is a question that came in from Dr. Cakey, and he sent audio, so we’re going to listen to Dr. Cakey’s question.

**Craig:** All right.

**Dr. Cakey:** To give some context for my unfortunately long question, I write almost constantly, either actually writing pages or more in the notes phase. But despite that, I almost always fizzle out very early on to the point that I finish less than one, even the messiest rough draft, per year. If you have a magical solution to that, I’m certainly open. But otherwise I think a place, or the place that stymies me, the place where I lose my way is what’s in the three-act structure term’s the second half of the first act. That is the incident has incited, the ball has been kicked, but its flight hasn’t yet stabilized.

The transitional period between what the story is going to be about, you know, crystallizing, and the protagonist actually doing that story. The period between Luke Skywalker seeing Leia’s message and him in the Millennium Falcon shooting TIE Fighters, and getting between those two points.

Because this is a period in the story rather than a point in it, I feel like that’s why it’s difficult to talk about, or why I haven’t seen people talking about it. And it’s also why it’s something I can’t find when I outline. So if you have advice about this space between inciting the story and beginning it, I’d appreciate it.

**John:** So an interesting topic and one we’ve never specifically dug into in these first 332 episodes. So, let’s talk a little bit about what we mean by the first act, because anyone who has picked up a book on screenwriting has probably heard the descriptions of what a first act, a second act, and a third act is. But just so we’re all talking about the same things. First act is the beginning of your movie. It’s usually the first quarter to a third of your movie. You’re meeting the characters. You’re setting up the world. You’re setting up the situation.

In the very classic sort of screenwriting book, the end of the first act is this big pivotal turn where everything is different. It’s the Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore. Then you go into the second act which is sort of your biggest act. It can sort of be twice the size of your first and your third acts. That’s where the meat of your story is happening. The end of your second act is the moment of final crisis, the big worst-of-the-worst kind of twist. And then you get to your third act and the movie wraps itself up.

So, what he is describing, Dr. Cakey, is that moment after you’ve sort of first set things up, that inciting incident has happened, the fuse has been kind of lit, but before the character has really fully undertaken this journey. And that seems to be where he’s struggling.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, I tend to think about these things entirely in terms of character. And in terms of the psychology of the character. Because you and I, when we’re doing this, we are in full control. The character isn’t. The character is as close to a real person as we can fashion. But we, as the writers, well we’re in perfect control. So everything we’re doing is intentional.

When I think about the character in the beginning of the story, this is a person who has achieved some ability to survive in the world a certain way. And then you, the writer, have upended things. People call this the inciting incident, and so on and so forth. And that’s, I think, what Dr. Cakey – which I really want to believe is his real name and that he’s a real doctor – Dr. Cakey is describing as the first half of the first act, right.

So, here’s the person. He’s living his life, she’s living her life, and then boom, a thing happens. Everything is rattled up. So, then he knows, Dr. Cakey does, that when we are in our second act some journey of a kind, whether it’s metaphoric or literal, is going to be undertaken. But what happens in between the point of the big shakeup and the going on that journey, the crossing of a threshold?

And to me a lot of times what that section is about, Doctor, is a character resisting and a character contemplating and considering, a character planning, trying to get out of, and then making some sort of bargain with the universe or fate. Characters are I think always on page 15 trying to get back to page 1. And between page 15 and whatever you want to call it, page 30, and please don’t hold me to those page numbers. You know how we are about these sort of things. The character is attempting to wriggle around it. They are meeting people and they are learning things that make it harder for them to wriggle around it, but in short they’re bargaining a bit.

I mean, Luke essentially is, I mean, in Star Wars he’s going to go return the droid and then this guy says, “Kid, come with me and fight the,” and he says, “Nah, that’s not for me. I’ve got to wriggle out of it. You know what? Let me just do one more harvest and then maybe.” He’s bargaining.

And then he goes back and he sees that his aunt and uncle have been murdered. There’s nothing more for him now and so our second act begins. But the second part of the first act for a lot of characters, whether it’s an animated character like Shrek, or a person like Luke Skywalker, or even in romantic comedies, you’re talking about–

**John:** So the decision that the Bill Pullman character is just fine. Like, you know, I don’t need to go off on the better one, I can stay with Pullman.

**Craig:** There you go. Exactly. And so really what – I think what I find helpful, because I think it’s real. It’s not like any of these things were written down by a monk in the 1500s and we just have to follow them blindly. These conventions occur because they mimic in some satisfying way what we know to be true. In your life, Dr. Cakey, if a big boulder comes rolling through and changes things, you are not immediately going to leap into a journey or an action. You are going to spend a little bit of time trying to undo what just happened, trying to make sense of what just happened, trying to excuse it, get out of it, return to where you where, and then once that becomes impossible then you start to think, OK, maybe I can do this, or this if I talk to this person and this person. To me, that’s kind of what it’s about.

**John:** So, what you’re describing is very true and very emotionally accurate to what it would be like to be in those circumstances. It’s also a very classic mythic structure, though. You’re talking about the denial of the call to adventure, which is a very classic sort of moment that heroes go on a classic hero’s journey/quest.

They won’t always have the denial. Like sometimes it won’t be a bad situation that’s forced them into that thing. They actually finally are able to voice that thing that they’ve wanted.

So, you’re talking about something outside coming in and disrupting their life. Sometimes it’s the character’s own want that finally gets expressed. Like this is the thing I want more than anything else, but they’re afraid to sort of fully grapple with it. So that’s another moment you’re going to see in these sort of we’ll say 15 pages, but really after you’ve sort of introduced the character, before they’ve really fully taken on their journey.

But as important as it is to understand this from the character’s perspective, you also have to understand it from the audience’s perspective. The first act is really how you’re teaching the audience how to watch you’re movie. And so in that initial set piece, the initial opening, you’re talking about the world, you’re talking about the characters, the tone, the voice. You’re giving them a sense of what’s important and what’s not important. But it’s after that section, it’s this period that we’re talking about, where you’re really kind of describing the path ahead for that character. What the kinds of things the movie will be doing over the next 90 minutes. And so you’re kind of cordoning off the sections that the character won’t go down, that the story won’t go down, so the audience sitting there in the theater watching it has some sense of what they’re in for.

You’re basically laying out the contract with the audience, like if you give me your attention I will make it worth your while. These are the kinds of things you can expect to see happen. And these are the questions I’m going to set up that I promise I will answer for you over the course of this next 90 minutes if you give me your full attention.

When movies don’t work, when TV shows don’t work, it’s often because that contract wasn’t well written, or was broken essentially by the end of the movie.

**Craig:** Well that’s exactly right. You are not only offering the audience a chance to crawl into your little world and thus give them an orientation tour of it, but you are also establishing a connection with them in terms of your responsibility to them. This portion of the movie is where you get to assure the audience that you’re going to be taking care of them by letting them inside your hero’s mind or thought process in some small way.

Even if the character is thrilled by the boulder that has rolled in, I’m going to go out on a limb and say generally speaking she may want to immediately get in the car and go on that exciting road trip because of what just happened on page 15, but A, she’s not going to want to go on that road trip for the right reason. Something is going to ultimately change with her, so I want to know, I want to get in her mind. I want you to show me her mind so I understand that she has something to learn. That she is not a complete character at this point. And then I want her to, I don’t know, say goodbye to some people. I want her to quit her job. I want her to pack, purchase clothing. I want to see a preparation.

Really, this area is to get ready. All of us, we get to get ready.

**John:** You’re assembling the team. You are figuring out what the path is ahead for you.

Going back to Star Wars, you know, it’s crucial that Luke not only deny the call to adventure, but he goes back and the family is dead. So, we call this burning down the house. You’re essentially making it impossible for them to get back to the life they had on page one through circumstances. Ideally, it’s circumstances that the character themselves have done and not some external force, but it also works if it’s an external force.

But something has changed and you basically said of all the stories this character could go on, the story the character is going to go on for this movie, for this two-hours of time is this story. This is the road ahead for this character. And that’s a crucial thing you’re doing in this period at the end of the first act.

**Craig:** Yeah. I actually don’t necessarily mind if a movie burns the house down, or does something like that in order to force a character to do something as long as I have seen that character refuse to do it prior. Because that does set up a certain tension which is to say, oh OK, now you’re doing it but you didn’t want to. You had to. And eventually you’re going to need to want to. You’re going to need to make this right choice when you can go back to a house.

And that’s a good expectation, but this is all stuff that you are setting up in motion here. You know, you think about the first half of your first act, Dr. Cakey, as who is this person and what is their problem. You can look at the second half of the first act as a little bit of an indication of what the ending of the movie is going to be. Because the motions that they’re going through here should be both in denial of that ending, but also in a sense predicting it.

**John:** So let’s talk about if you’re having problems in this period, what are some things to be looking for? I would start with do you really know what your character wants? And when I say wants, I mean both macro level like what is the overall hope, dream, ambition of the character, but what does the character want moment by moment? It goes back to what Craig was saying about trying to find a way to get back to page one. They probably want to retreat to a place of safety. How do you juggle the very immediate wants, the sort of scene by scene wants, with this bigger sort of emotional want?

Can you hear what the character’s song would be if this was a musical, because this is classically the moment where you’ve already had the “welcome to the world” song. This is the “I Want” song. Well, what is that character’s song? And if they could sing it, what would they be singing? Because that would probably tell you where they’re emotionally at as they’re trying to head into the second act.

Second I’d say have you picked a story that’s interesting to you, or just a character or situation that’s interesting to you? Because maybe it’s a fundamental thing about the nature of the story you’ve chosen, because if you’re not actually that intrigued by the journey, by where they start and where they’re going to, but you really love this character, or you really love this world, or this situation, that may be your problem and that may be why you’re struggling to get through this part of the first act and really only finishing a script in a year is you’re trying to force yourself to be interested in something that’s not fundamentally that interesting to you.

**Craig:** I think also, Doc, if I may, sorry, I think I’m coming down with John’s whatever sinus infection, I think you need to take a step back and start watching some movies that you love that you think you know. And watch them specifically for this. Write down everything that happens in every scene until the first act is over, and then think about what connected you to the second part of that, what you call the first act. Think about it. Really think about what grabbed you and what meant something to you and then ask how that might apply, not the details, but the spirit, how that might apply to what you’re doing.

**John:** The thing I want to stress is we’re talking about first act and second act that like it’s a really natural clear distinction between the two.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And a lot of times in the movies that I’ve worked on, I would disagree on sort of where the first act is and where the second act. I think it can be kind of arbitrary and honestly invisible. When a movie is working really well you sort of cross over that boundary and you don’t really notice that you’ve crossed over it.

Like, you might check in with a character later on and realize like, oh yeah, they’re in a very different place than they were 20 pages ago, but it wasn’t right on a certain page break where like, oh, suddenly now the curtain closed and now we’re open to act two. It doesn’t often feel that way. So, looking through some of my movies, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has a very, very obvious act break where we’re outside the factory, then we’re inside the factory. It’s a very different movie and things happen completely differently inside and outside.

But Go really doesn’t have that same kind of break, even though there’s three sections to it they’re all following different stories. Basically each one of those little stories has its three-act structure, its beginning, its middle, and its end.

Big Fish kind of has a first act and a second act, but I would have a hard time pointing at one specific scene that says like, oh, that’s the start of the second act. You know, it’s two characters on two different journeys and you’re following them. And if I’m doing my job correctly, scene by scene, you’re intrigued enough that you’re not really noticing that the landscape underneath your feet has changed.

**Craig:** Sometimes I find myself in a room where a producer and executive are discussing the first act or the second act, and one of them say, “And the first act, you know, I think ends here.” And then the other one will say, “No, I think the first act ends here.” And they’ll start arguing about it. And I will tolerate it, briefly, but eventually I will say you all understand there’s no – the curtain stays open the whole movie. No one cares. Why are we talking about this? Just talk about the movie. Talk about the story.

A proper movie has one act. Beginning, middle, end. That’s it. I don’t get all hung up on this act stuff. I really don’t. And, by the way, I think partly because there are other kinds of entertainment I’ve come to enjoy very much, like say musicals, that are two acts. But, you know, you could also take any two-act musical, ignore the fact that there’s a break in the middle so people can pee basically, and then re-divide that into three if you’d like. Or five. Or seven. You know.

**John:** So both stage musicals and classic broadcast television, they have act breaks because they literally have breaks where they stop the action and go to the next thing. And because they have that mechanical divide, you write them in a very specific way so that you have an intriguing question at the end of an act and then you come into the next act to sort of answer that question.

So, with Big Fish I had to figure out how to both resolve the action and have a big moment, but leave an open question so that the audience has something to talk about over the break and is eager to see that question resolved. In TV, we look at what Aline does with Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, they have to really plan for what those act breaks are. And once you get used to that form of writing for television, with act breaks, it becomes an incredibly useful structuring tool to figure out how you – those become the moments in which you story sort of hangs. You figure out those act breaks first a lot of times and then write to those act breaks. And it’s powerful when you can do it.

When we had our live show and we had Julie Plec talking about the one thing she wishes she could kill, or the lump of coal, it was the six-act structure which is imposed on some broadcast shows now where the acts become so short that like you’re just scrambling to get any meaningful piece of entertainment in between those last commercial breaks.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, in the writing of Chernobyl I’ve never thought about acts, but not even once. Each episode is an episode. That’s what it is. It’s an episode. Inside of the 60 pages I couldn’t even begin to tell you where there’s acts. It’s just not relevant.

**John:** Yeah. And as we were talking about Game of Thrones and sort of the challenges of that first pilot episode and making it work right, they really weren’t act problems that you were describing. It was audience understanding of what characters were going for. It was audience’s understanding of the world and, yes, those are first act issues because you’re trying to establish things, but they’re really the whole piece issues.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. They had problems at the end of the show when people were showing up and I would say, “Well who’s that?” And I watch Game of Thrones religiously. I couldn’t tell you where an act occurs in any given Game of Thrones episode. Nor could I tell you where an act occurs in any given episode of Breaking Bad or any TV – any episodic TV show, like a 60-minute show. There’s no first, second, third to me. It’s really more about just breaks. It’s different.

In movies, there is this sense of dramatic motion, like “And now the second act is over and the third act begins. Well, the third act seems to be starting a little late.” And I always just giggle. I’m like, is the movie the right length? Then let’s just call to five pages earlier the third – who cares? What are you talking about?

If the movie is the right length and it’s paced properly, I don’t know what any of this jargon means. So hopefully we’ve helped Dr. Cakey without over hammering on the orthodoxy of this act stuff.

**John:** Yeah. So I want to try to square this circle here by saying I think it’s fine to talk about acts while acknowledging that they don’t really exist. What’s useful about talking about acts is we recognize that in most feature films with a central protagonist there’s a journey that happens because these stories happen to a character just once. Like there’s a once in a lifetime thing that is happening to this character that you’re going to kind of naturally flow along a certain path. And one of those paths is going to be leaving this comfortable place and going on a journey.

And not necessarily a literal journey, but some sort of change is going to happen to this character. And in that process of change there are turning points. I think it’s fine to talk about all those things without getting too hung up on “It’s this act, it’s that act, we’re on this page, or that page.” And where I feel the danger is is that somebody at some point read a bunch of scripts and watched a bunch of movies and realized like, oh, it’s happening at this page counts and at this minutes. And that must be how movies work. And they mistook the measurement of the thing for the thing itself.

**Craig:** Yeah. People watch movies and then they confuse symptoms for causes. And they will advise people. You see it all the time. “Well, in the middle of your movie this thing must happen.” OK. Why? “Because it does all the time.” Well, yes, but why? “Just do it. All movies have it.” OK. Well how am I supposed to do it if I don’t know why it’s there? And why did all the people who did it before me who didn’t have you telling them to do it, why did they do it?

And so these are the things that interest me. I’m never concerned about the act effect, which is why I actually like this question because he’s really asking why. Why do these things happen? Yeah.

**John:** So, back in Episode 100 someone asked in the audience, basically I have these two ideas, which one should I write. And I said write the one with the best ending because that’s the one you’re going to finish. I think my advice for Dr. Cakey is as you’re auditioning ideas to write, for you specifically I would say write the one that has the most interesting section of what we’re talking about. Pick the one next to write that has a really fascinating change from the normal world into the – we’ll call it second act – into that journey of like where things are going. Write the one that has a really intriguing moment of that character having to decide to go on that journey, because that’s the one that’s going to probably work best in that section. And it may work best overall for what you’re struggling with.

**Craig:** I’m down with that.

**John:** Let’s go to Nicole in Rome. She writes in with an audio question as well.

**Craig:** Let’s listen.

**Nicole:** Hi John. Hi Craig. My name is Nicole Mosely. I’m listening to your podcast from Rome in Italy. And I’m enjoying it very much. Thank you.

I have a question regarding new formats of storytelling that became possible in the last years. I’m talking about virtual reality, 360 film, and augmented reality. I’d like to know what you guys think about it. Is this the future of filmmaking? Or is it just to hype something that is already dead before it hits the mainstream?

And the thing that would interest me even more is how does it affect storytelling? For example, how do you actually get the viewer to look at what is important and convey story and meaning when it’s no longer you, the screenwriter, but actually the viewer who decides what he’s going to look at? What does all of this mean for dramaturgy like the three-act structure? Does it still apply as it does in non-linear movies, or does it work in a completely different way?

And is that still storytelling? Or would it serve for journalism, education, gaming, and other experiences? Also, the moment we talk about full immersion and the viewer being inside the story, what role does he take on? Is he the protagonist? Or is he a fly on the wall?

I know those are so many questions, but I’d really like to know what your take on all of this is. Thank you.

**John:** It was one of those epic questions that sort of keeps on going. But they’re all related and I think they’re all fair questions to ask.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** From my perspective, I don’t think AR/VR/Immersive storytelling/360 movies, I don’t think they’re the future of cinema. I don’t think they’re the future of moviemaking. But I think they are in our future. I think they are important art forms that need to be talked about in their own way and to try to just say that all movies are going to become them I think is really naïve.

I think they have as much to do with video gaming as they do with traditional movies. I think you have to sort of look at what is the best way to tell a story in those new mediums and not necessarily try to apply everything we’ve learned from TV or from film. Just let them be their own thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. Well, first of all, Nicole, these are really, really good questions. And I don’t blame you for being a combination of skeptical and also possibly hopeful. I mean, it’s always exciting when these things come along. And then, of course, scary as well. What is it going to mean for all of us?

I think the first thing to understand, at least from my point of view, is that virtual reality/360 film, and augmented reality is – well, let’s leave augmented reality aside. Let’s just talk about VR/360. That already exists. They’re called videogames. The only difference that we’re seeing now is the delivery method which now straps to your head, so you’ve eliminated the space between yourself and the television. So, visually the experience is different. But storytelling-wise it’s the same. You control your point of view in a 360 up and down way the way you do in say Skyrim.

The storytelling that occurs in that format, well, there’s lots of ways of doing it. One way is the kind of it’s open and you discover things as you go. One way is sort of a combination of that, but you are also kind of on rails, so when you attach yourself to a certain story point you follow that little quest and you’re kind of on rails with it. Or you have choices between things to follow. That exists. And I think that when John says games, I think he’s right that this feels more about games to me than movies.

Movies and books and television shows are entirely passive experiences for the audience. They have always been so, with rare exception, and I don’t see any reason why that’s going to go away. That experience is actually the fundamental narrative experience. To read a book. To watch a play. To see a movie. To listen to a song. And we will always come up with other ways to have that experience, but the fundamental experience will always be there. No new technology has gotten rid of the technologies before it. None.

I don’t think there are any story type of technologies that have just simply been eliminated. We just accrue more of them, which I find fascinating.

There are some examples of things that are happening. One of the people that we want to talk to is Ed Solomon who has put together this crazy thing with I think Soderbergh, right?

**John:** Yeah, exactly. Mosaic.

**Craig:** Yeah, Mosaic, which is very much a kind of, OK, choose your own adventure style parallel storyline. Everything all adds up. Lots of different points. And it will end differently depending on what you’re doing. But, of course, no matter how complex you make these things, and we will talk to Ed about it, it comes down to, well, it’s written right? It’s written.

So, yes, these things are kinds of storytelling. They are all sorts of storytelling. And just as there are simple children’s books you can read and then these very complicated children’s books that aren’t really for children but more like for adults that involve moving back and around and turning things upside down.

Did you ever read – there’s just all these multimedia things and ways to do storytelling. And so I guess I’m going to say, Nicole, all of it is going to happen. None of it is going to eliminate anything else. That’s my crazy point of view. It will accumulate, but it will not eliminate.

**John:** Absolutely. I think the question that’s sort of underlying what Nicole is asking is how do you write it. How will we figure out how to write it? And we’re still grappling with that. I think we’re still grappling with how to write certain kinds of videogames. Like videogame writing has improved dramatically, but it’s a very different kind of writing than what we’re used to. Because usually when we’re talking about a book, we’re talking about a play, we’re talking about a movie, it’s one shot straight through. And we know exactly what we’re going to be looking at. We can direct the viewer’s attention completely.

But in a videogame you may not have that option because the character could do a thousand different things. It’s a forking branching paths, and so you have to plan your writing for all the different scenarios they could come across.

A similar thing happens with immersive theater. So, Sleep No More, New York, or I went to Safe House 77 here in Los Angeles, and those are situations where parts of it are clearly written and controlled and there’s a whole plan for this is going to happen at this moment. There’s a timeline in which things happen. But you can’t know for sure that a certain person in that audience was looking where you wanted them to look, or was interacting the way you wanted them to interact. You can direct your actors to do certain things, but the audience can change that as well. They have to be able to sometimes improvise based on what’s happening in the space. So every time is different.

So that’s still playwriting to some degree, but it’s also a different thing. And I think to try to force it to become the future of something, or to be like something else, is limiting its potential.

I would say when you’re grappling with AR/VR/360/some new storytelling mechanism/an alternative reality game, always great to take lessons from what other things have done before it, but you really are walking into uncharted lands. And enjoy that uncharted landness. I think it’s important to be able to not limit yourself because the movie version of it would have done this. Well, you’re not making a movie. You’re making something else. What is going to be the cool experience? What is going to be the thing that people will take with them?

And one of Nicole’s great questions is are you a spectator or a participant as a viewer? Are you changing the story? Are you making the story move around? Or are you a fly on the wall? Both can work, but that’s a fundamental choice you’re going to have to make early on in any of these projects is to what degree are you participating in the story versus watching.

Jordan Mechner who did Prince of Persia, he really describes his games as being like you are the hero of the game. You have to think about every action being you are the protagonist doing it. So, if you’re watching people have a scene around you that is a failure. You have to be driving the scenes that you’re in.

**Craig:** Yeah. A lot of it reminds me of magic in the sense that you are implying a certain amount of choice to the audience that they don’t have. Pick a card, any card. I know what card you’re picking. Or it doesn’t matter what card you’re picking. You’re going to think that it’s this card. This is what craft is all about, right? So, when we do these things, I think videogames do it all the time, they make you think that you’re making a million choices. They make you think that you are somehow going to change the ending of something. But sooner or later the debt comes to be owed.

And the debt is to story. It’s to narrative. Mass Effect had a little bit of a problem when they arrived at the end of their trilogy of a billion user choices only to realize, “Uh, we have to give an ending. And the ending has to cover at least an enormous amount of these possible choices. So, let’s go with three of them,” and everybody went bananas.

And I understood why they went bananas, because the game had promised a certain kind of something it could not deliver. I played it. I played them. They made you feel like the choices you made mattered and you had many, many multiple choices. But in the end really they were kind of squishing you towards two poles, which were manageable narratively. And then some other things that occurred, which were managed narratively, but you know, it comes down to decision tree. No game, no piece of art can offer you a decision tree that is as complex as just walking down the street to the 7-11 is in real life. Because there is an end, right? The show ends, therefore work backwards from that.

So, I think, Nicole, no matter what happens it’s our brains that will always be the sticking point. That’s sort of the log jam. We have to deal with our brains. And people’s brains do require a certain kind of firm narrative to cling to one way or the other.

**John:** Circling back to Dr. Cakey’s question, I feel like this is also a case of the contract you’re making with the viewer, the participant, whatever you want to call the person who is experiencing the art that you’re making. It’s quite early on, the first few minutes, you are going to be establishing these are the kinds of things that can happen. These are going to be your responsibilities. These are going to be my responsibilities. Together we’re going to make this all work. And in a film or television show, it’s one kind of contract. In an immersive theater piece or in AR/VR, something that’s 360, it’s a different kind of contract. But it has to be there and you have to recognize that whether you’re explicitly stating it or just sort of implying it, people are going to have expectations about where you’re going. And so as long as you’re going in a place that meets their expectations and hopefully surpasses their expectations you’ll have a good experience.

Where it’s just confusing, or I just don’t even know what I’m supposed to be looking at, that’s where these projects tend to fall apart.

**Craig:** Yep. 100%.

**John:** Cool. Do you want to take Melissa’s question?

**Craig:** Yeah, Melissa in Eugene, Oregon, not too far from where I am now, asks, “I’m writing because last year I made it to the semifinal round of the Nicholl Fellowship,” congrats Melissa, “and ended up getting some inquiries from managers and producers based on that. The majority of people that reached out asked for the whole script, but two people asked for a writing sample.

“Is there an industry standard as to what a writing sample should consist of? The first ten pages? Any ten pages? The first act? Or is this generally up to the individual writer? Any advice you can give would be appreciated.”

John, what do you make of this?

**John:** Great. I don’t really know what to make of it because I’ve never been asked to send in a writing sample that wasn’t the whole thing. Because honestly I feel like you can send the whole script and if they just didn’t finish the script that’s up to them. We talk to a lot of people who read scripts for a living, who are staffing, and they stop whenever they stop, or they skim through stuff. We had these agents on for the last Three Page Challenge and they said like, “Yeah, we’ll start reading and then when we get bored we’ll skim.”

If they’re asking for a sample, it makes it sound clear that they don’t want the whole script, I would send them ten pages. And ten pages doesn’t feel like a lot and I think if you’re sending ten pages, I’d send them the first ten pages I should stress. And that’s not a lot. If they like the ten pages they can always ask for more. Craig, what’s your instinct?

**Craig:** I wouldn’t do that. Because here’s the thing. You have gotten inquiries, Melissa, from managers and producers based on making it to the semifinal round. The majority of people will ask for the whole script. That implies to me they haven’t read it. Two people asked for a writing sample, I wonder if that means we’ve read your script that was in the semifinal round. Can you please send more?

No matter what, I would never send anything less than a complete script. Because like John said, especially now in the age of PDFs where we’re not creating extra weight on their desk, they can read as much as they want. The script is a writing sample, top to bottom. If you send ten pages and they love it, the problem is they may go, “Great. I’ll ask her for the rest of those later,” but then a couple days go by and something happens and they’ve forgotten. But a script is a script. So, I would just send the whole script every time. If they ask for a writing sample and you’re not sure if they’ve read your Nicholl script, send the Nicholl script and something else.

If you don’t have another script, just resend the Nicholl script and say this is what I have so far.

**John:** Yeah. I think you are right and I’m going to sort of retract my previous advice. I guess I really can’t make a strong case for the ten pages. I think I may have been thinking about writing packet submissions, which are for a very specific kind of thing, and the WGA has been addressing abuses in that world.

The other thing I’ll say is it’s not even that we’re shipping big chunks of paper around, or even attaching PDFS. If you stick a link on there saying here are some things I’ve written that you may enjoy, then you’re sending two of those things and they’re basically just Dropbox links they’re going to open or not open.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Great. You’re really creating very little burden for them to do it. Just make sure you’re steering them to the thing you think is your best work, the thing that is going to best showcase what you’re able to bring.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. You know what? Every now and then, John, I feel like we actually answer a question.

**John:** Oh, that’s so nice.

**Craig:** A lot of times, you know, listen, I’m not dissuading people from writing in. We do our best. Some of these questions you people ask are not answerable. You realize that. We do our best. But every now and then I feel like we nail it. And we’re definitely going to nail this next one. Definitely.

**John:** All right. Let’s bring in our next and our last one. It’s the last one in our list here. It’s from Will in Toronto. He writes, “How feasible is adapting a novel into a screenplay? Does the red tape of IP and rights make an adaptation virtually unreasonable to focus on or even impossible? I came across a novel in the past few months that would serve as a brilliant screenplay, but should I give it my undivided time and effort if it’s going to be ultimately denied?”

So, this is a very fundamental question but also a naïve question and I think a question that we can frame out for Will here in this discussion. Yes, a lot of books are adapted into movies. And sometimes those books are optioned by studios or producers who say like, “Hey, let us borrow the rights to your book and we may make a movie out of it. We’ll pay you a small amount of money. We’ll pay you more money if we make it. We’re going to hire a writer to work on this.”

That happens. That’s a lot of what I do is adapting books into movies. Individual writers can also option books. So, you, Will, in Toronto, if there’s a book that you love that you thought could be a movie and you felt like you could convince that author to sign over the rights, to option those rights to you, you could option those rights from that author and do it.

I’m sure on previous episodes we’ve talked about optioning stuff, about adapting other work. But I think you are fundamentally asking is this a thing you should be thinking about doing. I don’t think it’s the first script you should write is an adaptation. I think you need to learn how to write screenplays first. And I think you need to write one or two screenplays that are just yours, that are just entirely your things that you own every piece of.

And then if you want to circle back around to that book to adapt, go for it. Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** I think you did it. I think you nailed it, John. I predicted that this question would get answered firmly and completely and you did it. I have nothing to add except this tiny piece of information. When John says, “Hey Will, maybe you could find this author and option the rights yourself.” That is absolutely true. And it may cost you a dollar. It may cost you nothing. Right?

It depends on who the author and the book is. If no one is asking them about their book, it’s an obscure book, or there wasn’t any interest. You’re the only person interested. What does it cost them to say, “All right, well you know what, give me ten bucks and you have a year to set this up somewhere, at which point somebody will have to purchase the rights to this book, but you have the exclusive right to go ahead and create a screenplay based on it and go and try and sell it.”

**John:** Yeah. Back in the day, when I was a young screenwriter, there was a book that I really wanted to option. And the only way to figure out how to get to the author was to call the sub-rights department of the publisher. So let’s say it was Macmillan, you would find the number for Macmillan in New York. You’d call the operator at the Macmillan switchboard and ask for sub-rights. And you get to someone in sub-rights and say I’m looking for the film rights for this book. And they would look up in some sort of catalog and then they would tell you who the person was. Or later on you’d email or you’d fax something through and they’d fax you back information.

Now with the Internet, you find the author, you find the author’s Twitter thing, and you ask them. You find an email address for them and you email them directly. The few times that I’ve optioned the rights to books myself, I just figured out who the author was and how to reach them and started the process myself.

**Craig:** That sounds exactly like the way to go. Will, we’ve done it. We’ve answered your question. I feel really good about it.

**John:** I feel great about it.

All right, it’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is Bathe in my Milk. Craig, have you clicked this link yet?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Click the link. Clink the link, Craig.

**Craig:** Batheinmymilk.com. OK.

**John:** Now, please describe what you see.

**Craig:** OK. So I see a photo. Oh, all right. So, it’s a photo of a bathroom. It’s a bad bathroom. Peeling wallpaper. An elderly white woman is standing in a shabby white nightgown, cleaning products at her feet. There is a torn tassel rope and then a standalone tube. There is an African American man also about her age I would say sitting in the tub and the tub has apparently got milk in it. But maybe just soapy water.

And then her head is casting a shadow against the window. It’s not good. Should I keep scrolling?

**John:** Keep scrolling.

**Craig:** Oh god. OK. So now she has repositioned herself on the other side of the room and now there is a younger Asian man in the same tub. Nothing else has changed except a plunger has appeared in the cleaning – oh god. What is the story here? What is happening? Every single photo is the same except that there is a different man in her tub of weird, creepy, milky water.

Oh, there’s a big boy at the end. He’s big.

**John:** Yeah. He barely fits into the tub.

**Craig:** Yes he does. Oof. Yikes.

**John:** All right. So, Craig, tell me your theory. What the hell is going on here?

**Craig:** OK. Well, theory number one, this is a very, very low rent spa. This is a spa that costs $0.14.

Now, I think this is some kind of art project. I can’t imagine it’s anything else. The bathroom doesn’t – it’s – what could possibly be happening here? Oh my god, there’s one picture where she’s outside looking in through the window. Did you see that one?

**John:** [laughs] I saw that one, too.

**Craig:** That’s horrifying. So in one of the pictures she’s not even in the room. She’s outside of the room looking. Yeah, this is just a weird art project.

**John:** All right. So now you can click through to the New York Post thing which shows the actual flyer this all comes from. So it’s a flyer that’s mounted onto a telephone post. It says Bathe in my Milk. It has one of the photos there. It says Bathe in my Milk. Offer open to men only. Soy, almond, or traditional. Use my sponge. I will watch you. And then it has a link to the batheinmymilk.com.

**Craig:** So what the hell is it? It is a prank. Should we tell people?

**John:** It’s a prank, yet it is a meme. It is a creation, this guy Alan Wagner, and his friend Sydney Marquez helped him build it. He’s a guy who just does these things. They’re kind of art projects. They’re just like sort of little bits of cultural stuff that go out there. And this is an especially effective one, I thought. I just thought it was delightful.

**Craig:** Yeah, this is great. I like this line. He says, “Nobody seems to be enjoying it, and yet they are partaking in it.” That’s a great description of what these people are like. Yeah.

**John:** So I’m going to put up a link to the New York Post article which goes into sort of the backstory of it. So, Alan Wagner is a USC film school grad. I suspect he might be a listener, so Alan if you’re listening, hello.

**Craig:** Well done.

**John:** And basically he built that bathroom set in his garage. He just did it for the giggles. It looks like all those actors are from Craigslist. I just thought it was a nice example of just making something for the hell of making it. And a wonderfully creepy sort of disturbing thing to float out there in the world.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s got a bit of the Saw bathroom kind of going on in this. It’s creepy.

**John:** It does. Yeah.

**Craig:** Very creepy.

**John:** It also reminded me a little bit of escape rooms. You can sort of imagine that there’s some escape room that’s kind of like this bathroom. That is just so disturbing.

**Craig:** Yeah. There will be a Bathe in my Milk Escape Room. Well, god —

**John:** Top that.

**Craig:** I won’t. I will go right underneath that with the most mundane One Cool Thing ever, but you know I’ve got this Apple Pencil. I don’t use it. It’s just there. I have it. I don’t know what to do with it. And finally I just thought, you know, I had to go somewhere and just jot down some notes and I didn’t want to bring my laptop. So I brought my iPad. I just said, screw it, I’m just going to do the pencil, the Apple Pencil note thing. I’m just going to plunge in. I’m not going to read instructions about anything. I looked to see there’s two apps that people use. There’s Notability and then there’s another one. I can’t remember what it’s called.

And I just flipped a coin, went for Notability. And you know what? It’s actually not bad. I don’t know if this is a One Cool Thing as much as a one begrudgingly, yeah, it actually works pretty well. I guess the nicest part of it, the part that made me happiest was I’m writing these notes down and it just automatically puts an image of the notes that I’ve taken on my computer when I’m at home via the magic of Dropbox of iCloud or whatever. But, you know, yeah, it’s OK. I mean, it’s not Bathe in my Milk, but it does the trick.

I’m not like fully into it. I’m OK with it.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t use my pencil for very much, but when I do need to go through a script and do some markup on it, I find it’s actually really good. So, even doing Three Page Challenges, I will find I usually use my Apple Pencil for that. So I’m looking at the PDF. I use a PDF Expert for that. And then I use the little pen function on that and circle things, highlight things, mark things. And it’s quite good for that.

And I agree that the iCloud aspect of it is incredibly important because then when I’m on my computer and we’re recording an episode I can pull up that same PDF with all of my markup in it and sort of see what I wanted to talk about.

So, I do use my pencil some. I think the pencil is remarkable. I just don’t have as much use for it as I’d hoped I would.

**Craig:** I’m there with you. Look, this is a better method for me than what I normally do, and what I normally have done, which is to just write notes on a regular piece of paper and then take a picture of that with my phone so in case I lose the note I have an image of it. But that’s sort of dopey.

The one thing I wish they could do differently is I don’t like that the Apple Pencil makes a little click when it contacts the glass of your iPad. I wish that there was no click. Because there’s something about graphite on paper, you know don’t get a click. You know what I mean?

**John:** I don’t hear that click. Are you sure you have the nib screwed all the way in?

**Craig:** No, it’s not a click-click. It’s more just – it feels hard. There’s no give, basically, right? There’s a little bit of give to paper and a little bit of give to graphite, because the graphite is wearing away as you’re drawing, right? And the paper is wearing away as you’re writing and drawing. But there’s nothing – it’s a fully inelastic collision between the nib of the Apple Pencil and the service of the iPad. And I wish it was slightly – I wish there was just a touch of give.

**John:** I get it. I get it. My wish for the Apple Pencil 2.0 or whatever is some stylists in the past have had a thing where you flip it over, and it’s like an eraser on the other side.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** I keep trying to do that and to try to erase and instead you have to click the little erase thing and that’s just frustrating. There are also great apps out there that are doing innovative things where you’re touching with your finger while you’re using the thing. And you watch people do it and it’s amazing and it’s magic. I just don’t have a need for those things right now.

**Craig:** Also, I don’t have any talent with anything that involves dexterity and some sort of fine art instrument like a pencil, a crayon, a marker. I’m a disaster.

**John:** Yeah. I’m good at craft. I’m good at wrapping up things and that stuff.

**Craig:** You are.

**John:** But I’m not good with the little fine motor skill stuff whatsoever.

**Craig:** I’m also bad at craft.

**John:** I remember during the strike you were so impressed with my duct-taping abilities as we were duct-taping signs.

**Craig:** I still think about it. Yeah, we had this job of like, so, you know, these picket signs are made of two posters that are stapled together over a stick. Not even a stick. Like a slat.

**John:** It’s like a yard stick.

**Craig:** Yeah, like a yard stick. It’s a piece of crap piece of wood. And if you were to just walk around holding it your hands would be shredded with these terrible splinters from these things. So you have to duct tape them so that people can walk around and hold them without shredding their skin. And so John and I spent an hour at the Writers Guild one morning in 2007, I guess it was.

**John:** I guess.

**Craig:** Duct-taping these things. And my method, you know, just because again I don’t understand craft. I just figured, you know, I’m just going to start winding duct tape around this thing. And eventually I’ll stop. And then John’s method, everything was at a perfect slant. Each layer overlapped the other layer perfectly, so it just looked professional.

**John:** I’m a professional picket sign maker.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was really good. So I tried to do it like you were doing it, but I wasn’t as good.

**John:** Yeah. No, I really love that. I love that kind of stuff. I love wrapping presents. There’s something really calming about that. Like me and Martha Stewart, we love to wrap presents. Love it. Love it.

**Craig:** I still can’t do it. I’m almost a 47-year-old man, and when I have to wrap a gift I go to Melissa and I just say can you please wrap this for me. Because I don’t know how to do it. [laughs]

**John:** I kind of feel bad for my daughter because I will still wrap gifts that she’s giving out for presents for people and like I’m denying her the ability to actually learn how to do it, but I just love it so much that I always want to do it.

**Craig:** You know what I do? My one crafty thing is tiling out large D&D maps and then taping them back together.

**John:** That’s quite a skill. I’m not good at that. So nicely done.

**Craig:** That I rock. I knew that somehow this would come around in my favor. I just didn’t know how it would happen. So exciting. This is why VR struggles because you could never predict that.

**John:** No. They would never know that like Craig’s ability to tile things is crucial.

**Craig:** It’s going to be the ending. Like who could have seen that that was the ending? Our show is produced by… [laughs]

**John:** This Sunday, Craig, we get to play the next installment of Storm Kings Thunder. I could not be more excited.

**Craig:** Oh I know. I mean, it’s all I want to do every day.

**John:** Our adventuring party is headed into some place along the spine of the world and we have a giant who is a friend, so it’s going to be great.

**Craig:** It’s going to be great. And there will be blood.

**John:** There will be blood.

**Craig:** There will be blood.

**John:** Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send questions like the ones we answered. We love it when you record your audio with your question because it just makes it easier, because that way we don’t have to read your question. And also we get to hear the voices of our people. We get to hear your accents. The way you pronounce words in Canadian and/or Italian accents is fascinating for us.

But short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We are on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes or really any place you get podcasts. Leave us a review. That’s always so lovely. It helps people find us.

The show notes for this episode and all episodes are at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts. They go up within a week of the episode airing. And for all the back episodes you need to go to Scriptnotes.net. It is $2 a month for all the back episodes and the special episodes. We are crucially close to having 3,000 paid subscribers, which is remarkable.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** So if you are the person who pushes us over, I will be eternally thankful, because that would just be kind of cool.

**Craig:** I won’t care because it means nothing for me. [laughs]

**John:** It means nothing for Craig.

**Craig:** Nothing.

**John:** Other than something else for him to complain about.

**Craig:** Ooh. Yay.

**John:** That’s a gift that keeps giving.

**Craig:** Come on people. Help me out here. One away.

**John:** We also have some of the Scriptnotes USB drives in the store. So that’s store.johnaugust.com. That has the first 300 episodes of the show in one handy little package.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. I’ll see you next week.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Bathe in my Milk](http://batheinmymilk.com) and the [NY Post article](https://nypost.com/2017/12/22/the-story-behind-creepy-as-hell-milk-bath-flyers/) about it.
* The [Apple Pencil](https://www.apple.com/apple-pencil/) works pretty well! You can use it with [Notability](http://gingerlabs.com/).
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [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/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([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_333.mp3).