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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/chekhovs-ladder).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 308 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we’ll be looking at how screenwriters signal to audiences. What kinds of things can and cannot happen in their films. And why that’s important. We’ll also be looking at suggestions for reducing sexism in screenplays and answering listener questions about writers on set and giving feedback on friends’ scripts.

Oh, it’s a big show.

**Craig:** That’s a lot. We got to motor, dude.

**John:** We got to. We got to pack a lot in, because I am packing up. I am moving back to the US in 24 hours.

**Craig:** I mean, are they going to let you back? Because, you know, it’s gotten a little weird over here.

**John:** It has gotten kind of weird over in your country. Yeah, I think so. We have our visas for living here in France. As a US citizen I believe they need to let me back in the country, but that hasn’t stopped them from trying to stop other people.

**Craig:** Well, we are certainly excited to have you back. It’s going to be nice. And honestly just from a selfish point of view, we can stop doing this bizarre thing where it’s either crazy late at night for me or crazy late at night for you. We get to just go back to our normal — just our normal thing.

**John:** Yeah. Our normal thing. Where we sacrifice the small animals at the altar and then we fire up our microphones and do the normal show.

**Craig:** I know. For one year we’ve been sacrificing large animals. Ew.

**John:** Just the amount of blood that you have to go through and living in a small apartment, it’s just a mess.

**Craig:** It’s gross.

**John:** Even with the tarp down, it’s a lot.

**Craig:** I know. Well, I used to use like the disposal tarps, and then I was like bills started piling up. So now we just hose them off.

**John:** Yeah. Well it’s a good thing. You have to be environmentally conscious when you’re sacrificing animals to produce a podcast about screenwriting.

**Craig:** Damn straight. This show has gotten so weird. I love it.

**John:** It does get kind of weird. I was really happy with our last episode. It was both weird and like educational. And the right combination.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We will jinx it by not being nearly as good today.

**Craig:** Nah, we’re going to be better.

**John:** Even better? All right. We’ll start with follow up. Last week we talked about the Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide which is where our listeners of our podcast, the best listeners ever in the history of podcasts, put together this guide of the back episodes, the first 300 episodes, and their recommendations. A bunch of people have downloaded it, so thank you for downloading it. If you would like to download this free PDF for yourself, it’s 113 pages. You just go to johnaugust.com/guide.

And we’ve also been selling a bunch of the USB drives. So we have the first 300 episodes, plus all the bonus episodes, on a USB drive. They’re at the store.johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Oh man. So much money coming my way.

**John:** So, so much money coming your way.

**Craig:** Can’t wait for that check.

**John:** So I have notifications turned on on my watch, so whenever one of those ships I get a little buzz on my watch. And my watch has been buzzing, so that’s great.

**Craig:** Nice. Nice. Great.

**John:** Nice. Finally, bit of follow up, our live show on July 25, I think as we’re recording this there are still tickets. Our guest is Megan Amram, plus some other special people to be announced soon. So, if you are in Los Angeles on July 25, and you’re not at our show, I’d just like to know why. I’d just like to know why you’re not at our show on July 25.

**Craig:** Well, until we announce the other guests, who are going to be terrific, I get why people are sort of going, OK, now that sounds great so far, but is it great-great? And it’s going to be great-great. It is.

**John:** I wonder if we have set expectations askew by everyone is like, oh, there must be this fantastic, amazing, ungettable guest that makes you want to come in to see the show, when really shouldn’t they be coming to see the show for all the special live stuff with you and me?

**Craig:** Or just me.

**John:** Yeah, basically just Craig. An excuse to see Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I’m great. I’m amazing. People should just come to see me. In fact, we should have a live Scriptnotes that’s just me.

**John:** Yeah. It would sell tickets. I’m pretty much a drag on this whole show.

**Craig:** Yeah. I could sit there in a chair like, you know, when Hal Holbrook would do his Mark Twain show. I’ll just sit there.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** And I’ll chat.

**John:** Or Val Kilmer, when Val Kilmer did his Mark Twain show.

**Craig:** I missed that.

**John:** I missed that, too. Oh, there’s always Val Kilmer.

There’s a universe in which Val Kilmer is a bigger star or does not exist. Like, in a previous episode we talked about the Mandela Effect in which things were different in a slightly different parallel universe than sort of how that all could come to be. We talked about the movie starring Sinbad which never existed. This next link which was sent to me by Craig McDermond reminded me of that, because it is a trailer for the Netflix series for The Addams Family. And it’s a well cut together trailer for the show that does not exist at all. And yet in a different universe it definitely does exist. So I’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s a well put together for The Addams Family as a presumably one-hour Netflix drama.

**Craig:** So it’s like Riverdale kind of thing where they take it seriously and it’s dramatic and emo?

**John:** I’d say it’s kind of dramatic and kind of emo. So, once again, Craig has not clicked on the links inside of the outline.

**Craig:** No, not until I get my check from those flash drives. [laughs]

**John:** Ha-ha. But it’s good. So I would recommend checking it out because it definitely feels like a thing that could exist and in a different universe does exist.

**Craig:** All right. All right. I will check that out.

**John:** So two other links in our outline, both related to something we talk about a lot on the podcast, which is writing stuff where there’s real people involved or things that are based on true stories. And our general advice has been go for it, but know that you could hit some rough waters down the road. And here’s two examples of rough water being hit down the road. Do you want to talk us through either of these?

**Craig:** Well, sure. So the first one is actually remarkable because it involves Olivia de Havilland, who is just about 101 years old. Olivia de Havilland is a classic movie star from the golden age of cinema. And the thing that’s remarkable about it is that this is not the first time that Olivia de Havilland has been involved in a fairly high profile lawsuit. She really was the person who kind of broke the old studio system, where studios would essentially own actors. And I don’t know if any of our listeners have heard the expression “an actor out on loan,” it’s a lyric that’s in a Doors song of all things.

And that’s the way it used to be. Actors were controlled by individual studios who had these long contracts with them that they couldn’t get out of. And if another studio wanted to use them, the studio would loan them to that studio in exchange for maybe borrowing one of their actors. But it was a bit like the way baseball used to — you were on a team and they controlled you. And then eventually free agency came along.

And so Olivia de Havilland was involved in that, but now a little something else. So Ryan Murphy Productions has made a show called Feud. It’s on FX. And Feud is basically about — true story of a feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. And Olivia de Havilland is involved in it. And is portrayed by Catherine Zeta-Jones. And basically what Olivia de Havilland is saying is that portrayal was not true. The lawsuit argues that de Havilland has built a reputation of integrity for herself and refrains from gossip. The series however paints an opposing picture. And it’s interesting because it’s not exactly about defamatory actions. It’s more that she’s saying she has this thing — and it’s true — this right to publicity, which is something that has emerged in our laws over time. Basically if you are a public figure, your right to publicity extends towards your ability to make money off of yourself, your image. So, while I can make a movie and have somebody portray say John Wayne walking through a scene, what I can’t do is then use that person’s portrayal of John Wayne to sell a product and say, you know, as if John Wayne were supporting it. Because now I’m infringing on John Wayne’s — even though he’s passed away — his right to publicity.

So, there was a famous, semi-famous soda commercial or something a few years ago that did in fact weirdly revive John Wayne to have him sell something. Clearly there the estate had been paid for the license to use the rights of publicity. She’s saying essentially this portrayal is violating that right.

Uh — seems like a stretch.

**John:** This feels like an incredibly slippery slope, too. So when I first saw the headline, I assumed it was a standard kind of libel thing where like how dare they make say that. I never said those things. And she kind of says like how dare they in this suit. But really it is over this right of publicity. The statutory right of publicity, unjust enrichment, invasion of privacy. And it’s interesting because she’s still alive. And yet so much of what is at play here really could be from the estate of — if she even weren’t alive. And so that’s what makes me really kind of queasy about this, because does it sort of like wall off anybody who is sort of famous can never be in a movie again? And that would just be a crazy situation.

So, while I can understand why a great actress would want to protect her legacy and her image, I do worry that this is a really bad precedent to set if she were to come out victorious here.

**Craig:** I agree. And the thing that’s salient to me here is that she is suing for Common Law right of publicity, statutory right of publicity, unjust enrichment, and invasion of privacy. But what she’s not suing for is defamation. And that’s — well, it’s kind of telling the story there. It seems to me that she’s complaining about defamation, but her attorneys probably looked at the situation and said we are not going to win that. This does not rise to the level of defamation. So, let’s try these other things.

People do this. I mean, for a while it was all the rage for aggrieved almost screenwriters to sue studios for implied contract. So, instead of saying you stole my script, because they knew they couldn’t win that, they would say you implied that you would pay me if you made a movie like this. Which of course they never did. The argument being you had a meeting with me, therefore we had an implied contract. No we didn’t. That’s never won. It’s never going to win.

And in this case it feels like another sort of an end run. But, you know, as always, you and I, we’re not lawyers. It will be interesting to see what happens here. I share your squeamishness about the unintended consequences that could result if she prevails.

**John:** It’s also worth pointing out that Ryan Murphy has a whole cottage industry of taking things that are sort of real life stories and dramatizing them for these limited series. So, Feud is an example of that. I worry that if this were to be a successful lawsuit, it makes it very difficult to make those kinds of stories about real life people ever again. So, I’m hoping this goes away and that maybe it’s the last we hear of it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Actually a more fascinating thing also happened the last two weeks. So this former Vibe journalist named Kevin Powell filed a federal lawsuit against the makers of the film All Eyez on Me. And so this is the biopic of Tupac Shakur, which I’ve not seen, but the lawsuit is really interesting because it claims that the film uses a character that Kevin Powell actually created in his articles, a composite character that Kevin Powell created in his articles about Tupac Shakur. So it sort of takes away the defense of like, oh, we’re just basing things off real people because this is not a real person. So he’s basically saying that you have appropriated this artificially created character in my stories, which is a really interesting thing I haven’t seen in other lawsuits about work being appropriated for the screen.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is interesting. My question — I have not seen the movie, nor have I read Mr. Powell’s article. What I’m curious about is whether or not his article presented this character who is named Nigel — and it says in this article describing the lawsuit that Nigel is a creation of Powell. It’s meant to be a composite of a real person named Haitian Jack and presumably a few other people combined in there. And that’s something that sometimes people can do. It’s a bit of dramatic license, but Powell wasn’t writing fiction. He was writing an article.

So the question I have is would anyone reasonably expect that this person Nigel in the article wasn’t real? Because if I’m gathering resource materials together and I’m looking at articles, journalism, and there’s a report, and there’s an individual that is cited and his actions are described, it seems reasonable that I would presume that’s a real person. And so I’m not copying fiction because I don’t presume it is fiction.

**John:** This is the problem with single sourcing. So, if you think back to the episode we had with Irene Turner where she was talking about her film about Madalyn O’Hair, she pointed out that her lawyer as they were going through working on that true life story, they were like really, really concerned whenever there was only a single source for a story. So, if it wasn’t in the public record, like that you can find multiple people all reporting the same thing. If you’re basing something off of one account of things, that is a written, owned account by somebody, and apparently this Nigel character is only going to exist in this guy’s reporting, because he doesn’t really exist in real life, that is a troubling thing.

So, whether or not the article made it clear that Nigel was a composite character or not, I don’t know that gets the movie off the hook.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. I think that there actually is a case here where infringement may have occurred. It seems to me that this is a trickier place. Powell is asking, or his attorneys are asking that the Lion’s Gate film be pulled from theaters and is seeking an unspecified amount to be determined by a jury. I don’t think the movie is going to be pulled from theaters. I don’t think it’s done particularly well anyway. It’s done OK.

I think that this feels like a settlement kind of thing. Like, OK, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to pay you some money. That’s generally what happens when there is an actual infringement. There is a settlement.

**John:** Let’s take a look at both of these stories from the perspective of you are a screenwriter working on a story that involves some true life people. And what you can learn from these two examples about best practices and what you should do. So, in the case of de Havilland, I don’t really know what to say. If you’re working on an historical account there’s going to be some real life people mixed in there, some of which could still be alive, some of which may be dead, some of which may have estates who are litigious. I would not let that stop you from writing the best possible story involving those characters you need to do. And just know that down the road it could be a problem.

In the second case, the Tupac Shakur, I’d be just extra vigilant that when you are doing the research on your stories, really make it clear who are real people and who are not real people. Look for multiple sources. Just don’t rely on one account for things. Because if you don’t control that underlying material, you’re going to be potentially in a bad spot down the road. And, again, I don’t know the specifics of what happened here. We’re basing this off of one LA Times article that we’ll put a link to in the show notes. So, this could be much more complex than what we’re seeing right here.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think that if you are working on material that is based on real people — dead, or alive, or both — that the most important thing is that you are very up front with the studio for whom you’re working, and if at all possible you do an annotation of the screenplay so that they can see the sources that you’re relying on. And then allow them to make suggestions because ultimately the deal is as long as they are aware of what you’ve done, and you have not lied to them, you’re indemnified by them.

But if you do lie to them, even if there’s a sin of omission, you may be liable and you may be in breach of your contract. I mean, ultimately you can’t — in every contract we are saying this is our work. We’re not infringing on the work of anyone else. So, get that relationship going and work with your studio and be up front about it. I mean, the project that I’m working on right now is historical drama and it’s at the forefront of my mind. And we’re annotating up the wazoo, you know, because I want to make sure that we’re covered.

**John:** And when you say annotating, my suspicion is — and correct me if I’m wrong — the actual screenplay which you’re working off of is a main document. That document is not replete with annotations? It is rather that you have a separate document that refers back to your script that says like, OK, these characters and these situations are based on real life things. That’s what you’re talking about with annotating?

**Craig:** That’s right. There’s a separate document that goes page by page and says here are the sources for this, for this, for this, for this. And then also this is dramatized. So that everybody understands. I mean, it’s really important to I think be up front about where you’re taking dramatic license, as you need to from time to time, but ideally you’re doing it for dramatic license without trampling truth. And that you are covered on things because you’re not proposing something that just is — no one said has happened, or maybe one person said happened. So, yeah, that annotation is sort of a big thing. I actually have a researcher that I’ve been working with on this project and she is — once I’ve completed the final script of this series, she’s going to spend three or four weeks and annotate. That’s her job. You know, write it all up, so that we’re covered. Because these things can happen.

But, don’t freak out about this stuff. Just be open with your studio and you should be fine.

**John:** I agree. All right, let’s get to our first big topic this week. This comes from Emilia Schatz. She is one of the lead game designers at Naughty Dog, the studio that does The Last of Us, Uncharted series, really great videogames. And I found this article. Jordan Mechner had linked to it. And I thought it was just terrific. So, the article talks about how a videogame designer thinks about affordances. And affordances she defines as the objects in a story, in a videogame, that the player can interact with. And so as you go through the article you’ll see scenes from Uncharted in which it’s just the Nathan Drake character walking around on wire meshes. And they’re figuring out sort of like, OK, what does the player think he or she can do at the moment and what do you want them to be able to do or not be able to do?

And so she’s coming at this from a videogame perspective, but as I was reading it I kept thinking like, oh, you know what? We’re sort of doing the same thing as screenwriters all the time. We are sort of defining what it is in our stories that the characters are allowed to do or not allowed to do. And we have to communicate to the audience like these are possibilities and these are not possibilities. And so I thought it was a terrific article and it really applied very well to a lot of things we are doing on a daily basis as screenwriters.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve never thought about this concept, but I do play a ton of videogames, including The Last of Us and Uncharted. And I know what she’s talking about. And you notice it most clearly when you interact with an object that actually doesn’t impact the storyline at all. So, you know, a game that does this thoroughly is Dishonored. And Dishonored 2 in particular. You will walk through a room and there’s a globe and you spin the globe. And there’s a piano and you play the piano. And there’s a glass and you pick it up and then you drop it. None of that is required for you to advance through the game. It’s just interactable. And it does create a sense of richness and reality to the world. It’s also as a videogame player when there’s too much of it it’s frustrating. Because you think, OK, I’ve walked into a room. One of these things, one of these affordances, is necessary to me. The other ones are not. I wonder which one. Now I got to pick up and smash every little thing, right?

So there’s an interesting balance. And when we’re writing scenes, I often think like, OK, in terms of objects, props, there are going to be some that are important and then there are some that are just there for vibe. And, of course, since we have our characters moving through the space, we can’t frustrate the audience with this sense of overwhelming interactability. But we do have to make those determinations. And I think a lot of times what happens with newer writers is they start with what are the key props that I need to make this scene work, and then they stop. They never get to the second bunch of affordances which are what makes this feel real. You know, what little touches can I add here to just make this seem like it’s alive. I don’t know if you’ve ever found this, John, but sometimes those sort of tonal affordances become plot affordances. Because now that they’re in the space, you suddenly realize, oh, I can use that. You know?

**John:** 100%. So as I’m sort of doing the set dressing on a scene in my mind, I’ll find like, oh, you know, that actually is really interesting and that provides a necessary break in the conversation or a way to pivot to get through a scene because I have that thing.

I think the first time I was ever aware of the difference between sort of sets and props was weirdly watching like a Tom and Jerry cartoon growing up. And if you look at old animation, quite often if there’s a dresser with a bunch of drawers, you can always tell the one the character is going to touch because it’s a slightly different shade. Because that drawer is going to be the one that gets pulled out. And for whatever reason it’s just painted slightly different. And so ten seconds before the character touches the drawer you can tell like, oh, that’s the drawer he’s going to pull out, because it’s just painted a slightly different color. And you have a sense of like, OK, in a weird way that’s an affordance. That’s a thing the character can actually act upon, versus everything else is just background. It’s just set dressing.

And what she’s describing here is that it is useful that characters can do so many things within a scene, but if you give them too many choices they can be paralyzed, the way you’re saying. Or if they see something that they cannot interact with that they expect to be able to interact with, it breaks their reality. And so a great example she gives is ladders. And so if you show a ladder in a scene, and the character cannot climb that ladder, they will be frustrated because our rules of videogames is like ladders are meant to be climbed. So you see something that looks like it should be climbable and it’s not climbable, you’re going to have a very frustrated player and they’re going to lose faith in your videogame.

I think the same kind of thing happens in movies a lot where we see an opportunity for the character. It feels like that’s something that is being set up, but if it’s not actually used in any meaningful way, we get frustrated as an audience.

**Craig:** Well, we begin to ask this very fundamental and irksome question for the filmmaker, or the videogame maker: Why is that there? Why would a ladder be there? If I can’t go up the ladder, what’s it for? To make the room look pretty with ladders? I don’t get it. I just don’t understand. I know why windows are there. I’m very used to videogames where there’s a room full of windows and I need to escape the room. And for the love of god I can’t open a window. I can’t run through the window. And, oh well.

But I get that. I understand there’s like a basic deal there and I can retcon in some reason why I can’t go through the window. It’s bulletproof glass, or it’s leaded glass, and it just doesn’t work. Or the frame is stuck and old and rusty. Whatever, there’s some reason. I can’t go through the windows. What are you going to do?

But if you’re going to give me a ladder and I need to go somewhere and I can’t use it, then, well, now you’re just screwing with me, right? And you do get that sense sometimes when movies provide potential avenues of action that would be useful to the character, and then deny the character the ability to use them. That is a kind of a cheat. And it’s honestly an avoidable mistake. There’s really no reason to do it in a movie.

**John:** Agreed. Because movies fundamentally, as we talked about last week, they are on rails. You control the experience of going through the movie. So nothing has to be there that you don’t want to put there. The great classic example of this is Chekhov’s Gun. So, Chekhov in talking about sort of what you build into your world and what you don’t build into your world and what you don’t build into your world said, “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter there’s a rifle hanging on the wall, or in the second or third chapter it is absolutely necessary that it must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

And that’s really what we’re talking about. Is that if there is something that is visible in your story that could provide a solution, that feels like it should provide a solution, you either got to use it or get rid of it, because otherwise it’s going to be frustrating to your audience and they’re going to stop believing in the journey that your characters are on.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, Chekhov’s Gun is one of those things that really ought to be expanded past the word gun. I think a lot of people get too hung up on gun. But there are Chekhov’s Characters. There are people that are implied are dangerous. Well, they better be dangerous at some point. They better do the thing that we were warned they can do. The best example I can think of is like — it’s like Chekhov’s Movie, you might as well call that — is Unforgiven.

Clint Eastwood is Chekhov’s Eastwood. We are told time and time again that he was once an incredibly dangerous man. And how do we meet him? He is an aging pig farmer who cannot even get back on his own horse. He’s not particularly good at shooting people anymore. He’s not really shooting that straight. He doesn’t really want to do any of it. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t seem particularly mean. He’s done nothing to warrant this reputation.

Until the end of the movie, when he becomes the devil. And there it is. The gun goes off.

So you can think about characters that way as well.

**John:** So I saw Wonder Woman for the second time yesterday and I really love the film and I think it deserves as much acclaim as it has been getting. But there is a Chekhov’s Gun moment in it. It is a guy with a rifle. And so there’s a guy who is set up as being a master sniper. And you can just feel something got cut. Something got changed along the way. And so he’s supposed to be a really good shot, and he never shoots. You never see him actually do the thing he’s supposed to be really good at. And the movie kind of tries to get through it and tries to pay him off a little bit, but it wasn’t the most important thing to sort of pay off and they never really do pay it off especially well. I think it’s just especially — egregious is too strong a word — but you notice it because it literally is a gun and because like, well, that gun should be fired at some point and it’s never fired and it’s never really addressed in a meaningful way.

**Craig:** Yeah. Isn’t it weird that there’s this psychological satisfaction to that? We know, in comedy there are movies like Police Academy. In Police Academy, you meet a compendium of characters. This is a very time-honored comedy tradition. A compendium of characters who each have a very special bizarre individual skill. And at some point by the end of the movie they each use that special skill to kick some butt. And it’s so satisfying. You know it’s going to happen. But you’re happy it does.

**John:** Ultimately we’re talking about expectation, which we’ve come back to time and time again on the podcast. Which is an audience approaches a movie with a certain set of expectations. There are the expectations before they even sat in the theater based on the genre, based on the trailer, based on sort of what they know about how movies work.

Then there’s also the expectations that are set up within your movie about the things the characters have said, the sequence of events, sort of like the natural flow of what they think should happen next. And most times you want to give them what they do expect is going to happen next. Just give them the best version of what’s going to happen next.

But there’s definitely some things you should be mindful of as a writer as you’re writing these sequences that if you call something out, if you shine a spotlight on it, if you give a character a name. If you make it clear that the characters within the world have a name for that character, there’s going to be an expectation that that character is going to do something meaningful. If that character doesn’t do anything meaningful, that’s going to be a problem.

If you’re shining a giant spotlight on the “McClinty device,” that McClinty device has to do something or we’re going to be very, very frustrated. You’re also always setting expectations about the nature of the universe that your characters are living in. So, the economic universe. Are we in a world where Monica from Friends has an amazing apartment that’s never really explained? Or are we in the world of Girls where Hannah lives in a realistic apartment for who she is and what she’s making?

Are we living in Bruce Wayne kind of richesse, or Richie Rich kind of rich? And those are both crazy wealthy, but they’re different kinds of crazy wealthy.

**Craig:** I loved Richie Rich. I read those —

**John:** I hate Richie Rich so much.

**Craig:** Loved them.

**John:** He’s my most despised character ever.

**Craig:** I loved him.

**John:** He has no redeeming qualities whatsoever other than —

**Craig:** No, he’s wonderful. He’s so nice.

**John:** There’s no character that’s ever been created that makes me as angry as Richie Rich.

**Craig:** His family has a waterfall of money.

**John:** Yeah. That’s good. He has McDonald’s in his house. That’s how rich he is.

**Craig:** That’s right. He has a Professor Keenbean, to make inventions.

**John:** Yeah. He’s got everybody. And you know what? He deserves it. He totally deserves all the good things that happen to him because he’s rich.

**Craig:** Every now and then someone would try and kidnap him. It never worked out.

**John:** No, no. Of course it would never work out. My daughter started to watch the Richie Rich Netflix show, and I came in the room and said, “No, you’re never watching that again. It is despicable on every level.” It was like one of the few times where I really intervened on something that wasn’t about sex or language or anything. It’s just like, no, that is a horrible, horrible message. And, no.

**Craig:** I love it. Well, you know what? Here’s the thing. My sister and I would read Richie Rich comics when we were kids and it was great for us because we were Poorie Poor. So it was like a fun fantasy of like, wow, can you imagine that mansion where you had to have a car to drive from room to room? And also your parents were really nice? And you had the money waterfall. And it was just, you know, it was very nice.

But, look, listen, your daughter will get over it in therapy at some point.

**John:** [laughs] At some point, yes. Let’s talk about the other kind of rules you set for your universe. You’re always setting expectations about how the physics works in your world. So, you know, there’s a certain kind of Charlie’s Angels physics. There is a Thor physics. Like, you know, Thor is really, really strong, but he’s not strong enough to move the world. Some Super Man movies he is strong enough to move the world, which seems impossible without a lever, but that’s fine. You’re always setting expectations about how all that works. What the magic can do in your world. That’s really important.

And so if you establish a kind of magic in Harry Potter, you have to be true to that magic throughout the rest of the series or people are going to stop believing in you.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is I guess one exception. You can create an enormous anticipation or expectation for something and then not do it, as long as you make a point of saying we’re not doing it.

**John:** 100%. You have to just acknowledge that you set it up and then call out that you’re not doing what you’ve set up.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** That’s great. And that works really, really well. And in some ways my frustration with Wonder Woman is if they had one or two more lines, they probably could have done that with that character and like see him not take the shot or get over not taking the shot. But they don’t seem to do that. And, look, that happens. I mean, we’ve all been in edits where like something has got to give and that has to go away. But that was my frustration there.

Another thing you have to set up about the rules of your world is practice and mastery. So, is this going to be the movie where we see people working really hard to do the thing that we’re seeing them do? Or do they magically just do it? And so I think about the difference between — in Glee the kids can just put on this amazing show and you never actually see them having to work at it. Pitch Perfect also has that sense of like, yeah, you see them rehearse a little bit, but basically —

**Craig:** It’s a montage. They do the classic montage.

**John:** They’re montaging through it. But Glee they don’t even montage through it. They suddenly can just like sit down at the piano and do this amazing thing without any practice. Compare that to the football in The Blind Side where you see like, oh you know what, it’s a tremendous amount of work to be that good at football. And that becomes an important story point. So, think about sort of the rules you’re setting for practice in the world.

**Craig:** I love it when you say “the football.”

**John:** The football. You got to practice the football.

**Craig:** The football.

**John:** We’ve talked about hanging a lantern before. And hanging a lantern is when you sort of call out that you’re doing something in the film. And it’s a really important skill. It can be done really awkwardly and haphazardly, but it can be really useful in saying like this thing I’m doing, you see that I’m doing it and I acknowledge that you see that I’m doing it, but this becomes really important. You’re shining that spotlight on something or acknowledging that you are doing something that is different than expectation and done carefully, done with the right finesse it can be a really useful way to signal to the audience like, yeah, I get what’s happening here and that’s OK.

You see that being done a lot in the Iron Man movies where you can have Tony Stark acknowledge the sort of improbability of what’s happening and yet it just rolls off him because he has the charisma to sort of sell the idea.

**Craig:** Yeah. You just have to be careful to not overdo it. Because what happens is the movie will start to push towards a general irony zone. Now, you may want to be in irony zone. For instance, Deadpool is just — that’s a big irony machine. So it’s perfectly fine to do that constantly in Deadpool because people want that from that movie. They don’t want it to be the other kind of movie that takes itself seriously.

But if you are kind of in that middle zone, and you do the lampshade or the lantern thing one too many times, the movie starts to feel a little cheaty. Because here’s the thing: everybody knows it’s cheating, right? Now, you get away with it once or twice because you’re saying we know we’re cheating, so don’t be insulted. But the more you do it, I think the chintzier it all starts to feel.

**John:** Yeah. It feels like the kind of rules about coincidences. You get one coincidence, maybe two coincidences in a film. More than that and we’re like, OK, we’ve stopped believing in the movie itself.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Here’s the last thing I want to say about this idea of affordances and sort of what characters can do and what they can’t do. Sometimes it’s helpful to just have a character say it. If you need to rule something out, sometimes it can be useful just like a character has to acknowledge that it’s a possibility and then explain why that cannot happen. Or, you can sort of physically set up your world in a way that that option is taken off the table. So you’ve taken away that as a possibility for the character to consider. So, you’ve like burned that bridge. You’ve forever sealed that door. There’s no way to go back to that thing. And, again, that’s a real advantage to the way that our movies do work on rails. Like very carefully disguised rails, but you can move the characters through to a place but there’s no way to get back to that option that seemed so useful before.

And that can be really useful dramatically, too, because the journey of a character should be like things get more and more desperate. So if you take away that simple solution to the problem that is a terrific thing.

**Craig:** And this is something that I think good screenwriters spend a lot of time on. Because ideally you never want anyone to stop and go, “Oh, I see, there’s a lot of explanation for why they can’t do this or that, which would make the movie not work anymore.” You’re always looking for those elegant solutions that don’t seem like solutions at all. The problem isn’t a problem because this is just clearly true and therefore this must be true and so on and so forth. It all feels seamless.

It’s more important oddly in comedy. Because comedy relies on a certain sort of effortlessness. And if anyone ever catches a whiff that you are changing the rules of the world so that you can do a joke, the joke just isn’t as funny. In dramas, I think people get away with it a little bit more. Again, this is why only comedies should get awards.

**John:** [laughs] 100% agreement there. All right, let’s get on to our next topic which is something you found. So, talk us through this.

**Craig:** Well, actually this was sent to me by Derek Haas, friend of the podcast, and co-creator of the many Chicago shows. Chicago Fire, PD, Education?

**John:** Chicago Vet. Yeah. Chicago Social Services where they deal with all of the characters and the families who are displaced by the events of Chicago PD or Chicago Fire. I think it’s a really noble show. It’s not doing as well in the ratings. I think it’s pulling about a 0.1. But, you know it’s crucial. And so I think it’s good that NBC is keeping it on the air just to sort of fill stuff out. Because I always have a lot of questions about what happens to that family after their house burned down or after their father was arrested for that crime.

**Craig:** Tell you what, it’s doing better than Chicago Permit. It’s just the office that does the permits. Yeah.

**John:** What’s so funny about the Chicago Permit show is mostly they’re pulling permits for shooting the Chicago shows in Chicago.

**Craig:** I know. It’s weird.

**John:** Again, there’s a snake eating its own tail quality, but I like that. I like that the shows have been willing to get so meta. I think the crossover with Hawaii Five-0 is fantastic. You know, it’s all feeding well. It’s a cross-network crossover, which is the best.

**Craig:** Chicago Rubber Roasts. Oh, that’s right, I said Rubber Roast. So, this is an article by Radha O’Meara who is a lecturer in screenwriting at the University of Melbourne, which I believe is the Australian Melbourne. And this is what — I believe Radha is a — I think she’s a woman. I think Radha is a female.

**John:** Radha Mitchell is an actress who is a woman. So I’m going to say all Radhas are now women.

**Craig:** All Radhas are women. So, we’ll throw a link on in the show notes, but she had some suggestions for how to avoid general sexism in screenplays. And I thought they were all very good suggestions. I had zero umbrage on these. So, I thought I would go ahead and share the bullet points here and then you at home can read further.

So the first one is a real simple one. Give female characters names. And there’s a very interesting reason that — I mean, sometimes characters don’t deserve names. And as you mentioned, sometimes if you name them, it might stop people and think, oh, that must be a very important character. And then they turn out not to be. Sometimes a character should just be named Waitress or Cop, because they have one line and it’s not particularly important.

What she says is if you give female characters names, oftentimes named characters are paid more. Now, I think that probably is a little bit of a non-causal correlation in that generally named characters are named because they are more significant, therefore they are paid more than non-named characters. But I do think that it does open things up a little bit and at least gives you a moment to think, particularly if there’s a chance for you to take this character that you think is just there as a type to say a word and maybe make a little bit more of a human being out of them. It’s certainly a good thing to keep in mind, wouldn’t you agree?

**John:** I would absolutely agree.

**Craig:** All right, so the next one is give female names to lines of dialogue/action. Meaning then when you have choices about those random bits of lines that come up — passersby, cab drivers, a barista behind the counter, whatever it is — if you make a conscious choice to assign female names to those characters you are helping to just improve the general balance of the dialogue in the movie. Because what they have found in analyses is that movies tend to be, at least the talking in movies, tends to be dominated by men. And even something as small as just as much as you can getting some of those random lines that are not necessarily tied to specific characters that you need in the movie, assigning as many of those as possible to women just generally makes the movie closer to reality where, as I will remind you, half of all people are women. So, a good idea.

This one is something that you and I have discussed. I think we did a whole show on how to intro characters. Give all characters a similar amount of description when you introduce them. In general, I don’t think these little short, tiny, nondescript lame-o descriptions are very good like “hot but doesn’t know it.” That’s the most amusing and stupid one, which we’ll refer to later when we get to Rick and Morty. But if you are describing a male character and you’re using terms that get into their motivations, their mannerisms, their desires, whatever it is, you should have the same kind of description for your female characters. You shouldn’t just default to short physical descriptions only, which is reductive.

And also — this is something that I’m just going to add this. I don’t think she included this in her article, but I’m going to add it because I think about it all the time. You have a character and you describe her as like hot. Librarian hot. Hot librarian. Whatever you want to do. It’s some dumb reductive way-too-short description that reduces a human being down to just physical appearance and one little thing. Here’s what happens. Somewhere down the line there is going to be a room full of women who are all trying to be actors who are working hard in this business who are looking for their break. And they have all shown up to this audition. They’ve come from their acting classes and trying to perfect their craft. And they’re all now sitting in a room trying to figure out how to apply all of that skill and all of what they’ve learned about sense memory, and emotion, and reactions, and internal life to “librarian hot.” And it’s demeaning. And it’s a bummer.

That’s the side of Hollywood that no one ever sees. And it all starts with us. So, we, the writers, have a responsibility to try and short circuit that before it happens.

**John:** This last week on Twitter somebody tweeted at me a question asking what do you think about when you’re reading a screenplay like “Aubrey Plaza type?” So basically using that as a character description. And my answer was you’re a writer, use your words. It’s so reductive to say that somebody is like an Aubrey Plaza because like, well, what is an Aubrey Plaza like? I can see what you’re going for. There’s a wryness. There’s a sarcasm. There’s a think. But like use your words to describe what that thing is rather than just coasting on the term Aubrey Plaza.

Because if you’re a studio executive who cannot describe people, then saying Aubrey Plaza type, I get it. But you’re supposedly a screenwriter, so like use your words to describe what that person is like. And that way you will not just reduce it to she’s like this other actress who a person may have heard of, or you’re just giving a physical description and not getting into what makes that character interesting and specific and unique.

**Craig:** I think that the Aubrey Plaza type is just creatively bankrupt. At its fundamental core, you are saying I want you to act like Aubrey Plaza. Not the characters that she plays, but her. Even Aubrey Plaza can’t play the Aubrey Plaza type, because it’s not a thing. She plays characters.

Now, every actor brings a certain essence of themselves to various characters. But I’d love you to sit down with Jack Nicholson and say, “OK, Jack, in this movie the character you play is, yeah, it’s like just do your Jack Nicholson thing.” OK, well, enjoy your last day on the set my friend. Because you ain’t coming back. That’s ridiculous. It just denies what acting is. It also denies what writing is. We are creating characters. There are actors that are better suited for certain characters than others. That’s what casting is all about. But if you say Aubrey Plaza type, what you’re essentially saying is I don’t understand what my job is. I literally don’t get it. I know that I’ve created this document, but I’m not really a screenwriter.

**John:** So, here is your task as a screenwriter is if you think Aubrey Plaza should play that role, then you need to create a character that a person reading the script says, “Oh you know who would be fantastic for this? Aubrey Plaza.” So, without you having ever said Audrey Plaza, they in their head say like, oh, you know who would be fantastic in this? Aubrey Plaza. And if you write a role that is exactly perfect for her, there’s a chance you might get her. But even if it ends up not being here, you created a character who is so specific that you will find a great actress for that part.

So, that’s my challenge to you is create a role that you want to put her in that position.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a thought. Create a human being that is unique, that we haven’t seen before, and then that will attract high quality actors. See, that’s how it goes. Now, it’s perfectly fine for you to write this part and then when you send the script off to the studio in your email you can say, listen, for these characters these were the actors I was thinking of. So you have a sense in your mind of how I would cast this movie. But you open the script and you start reading a description of the character, you’re reading a description of my character. The person. The human being I invented. Not, oh you know, just whatever, that lady.

Because all you’re doing is just drafting off of the other writers that did their jobs. Right? And wrote characters that Aubrey Plaza wanted to play. Oh, it’s — oh my god, I’m going to break something.

**John:** This last point in the article was actually the most challenging I would think to implement which is that to call out women in the crowd. And so she uses a quote from Geena Davis that says, “When describing a crowd scene, write in the script, ëA crowd gathers, which is half female.’ That may seem weird, but I promise you somehow or other on the set that day the crowed will turn out to be 17% female otherwise.” Craig, what do you feel about that?

**Craig:** Well, it hasn’t been my experience. You know, thinking of the crowd scenes that I have witnessed being shot. And they were pretty well balanced. The director usually doesn’t pick those people. Usually it’s a producer or the First AD who goes through the list of extras that is provided by the extras casting director. Then they bring the list over to show the director like look at all these photos. Does this seem roughly like the kind of crowd you want? And the director goes, oh yeah, that looks good.

But there’s usually some general instruction. The crowd should be roughly this age. Let’s say it’s a night club. Like I remember we shot a scene in Hangover 3 where Mr. Chow was singing karaoke in a night club in Mexico. That crowd, it’s a karaoke club, for dates, so it was 50/50.

Now, I think there’s got to be a better way than saying a crowd gathers which is half female. I would argue that this is probably one where Geena Davis is talking to the wrong people. This isn’t actually on screenwriters. This is one that you need to kind of get out to directors, first ADs, extras casting people to say, “Make an effort.” Unless there is a reason. If this is a scene where you’re gathering conscripts for a war, that’s probably going to be heavily male. And if this is a scene where you’re gathering members of the elementary school PTA, demographics tell us it’s going to be heavily female.

But otherwise, you guys should aim for 50/50. If we wrote in a script, “A crowd gathers which is half female,” we’re signaling that that’s really important, because that’s how screenplays work. But then it’s not important. It doesn’t actually turn out to be important and that’s going to be confusing for the reader, I think.

**John:** I agree. Where I think you may have an opportunity is if the composition of this crowd is important enough that it merits a second line, that it merits a texture line to sort of describe what the crowd is like, there may be an opportunity in there to sort of signal that like even if you say like the women — if you call out the women first in the crowd, that will sort of clue people in like, OK, the women are actually important to this thing. Or it will make people think like, oh, that’s right, I’m going to need to make sure that the women are represented in the crowd and that they are appropriate to what this crowd is. That I totally can get.

If you want to signal like, you know, if you’re calling out individual things in it. So like there’s a mom with a kid strapped to her chest. Then there’s actually a woman that you’re sort of signaling is in there. But in general, this line as Geena Davis sort of states it would feel so weird in the script that I would sort of stop if I read it right there. And maybe in some way it’s a good exercise to make people stop every once and a while and think about that, but I don’t think it’s going to help your read individually for this one script to do it.

I think you’re right to say that making sure that representation in films is diverse and inclusive is sort of everyone’s job. And so a screenwriter needs to do his or her job, but everyone down the road needs to make sure they’re doing their job as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. We just don’t pick who — we don’t pick the extras.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** We can describe roughly a group of people. You know, and it can be as simple as, you know, a crowd gathers, men and women, all ages. I’ve written things like that, to sort of say it’s a general crowd. At that point, I think I’ve done my job. And you can also say sometimes a diverse crowd gathers, men and women, all ages, all races. Whatever you feel would be the right kind of look. But to call out like half female, it’s too salient. It’s going to be misleading to the reader. They’re going to spend the next three pages wondering what’s going on with the women in the crowd. That’s just the way we read scripts.

But it is everyone’s job. This was a very good article and I thought it was just a good thing for all screenwriter to read as we go about our jobs and try and make the world a better place.

**John:** Indeed. All right, we have two questions this week. I think they’re actually fairly short answers, so let’s get to them. The first one comes from Nick in Michigan. He sent in some audio, so let’s take a listen.

Nick: My question is about being a screenwriter on set. You’ve covered that in some situations the writer is very involved day to day throughout the entire production, while other times the writer might not ever even come to set once. So my question is if you are a writer on set acting only in your capacity as a writer, are you getting paid for that time? It’s something that hasn’t really been touched on and I can see it going either way. From what I’ve heard in most situations, a writer doesn’t really have any obligation to be on set. I might be completely wrong in that. But if there’s no financial incentive or contractual obligation, it just seems like a lot of time and energy.

Adding to that, is there any difference if you’re really active with the script still even during production, working with the director, or doing a pass every morning on that day’s sides, versus just sort of being there and hanging back with the producers? Also, is there any difference if the production is local versus being on location? So, the difference of shooting Go in Los Angeles as opposed to shooting the Hangover 2 in Thailand? Thanks so much guys.

**John:** That’s a very good question. So my short answer is that in many cases I’m not being paid any extra for being there on the set. I wasn’t paid any extra for being on set for Go. Technically I was a producer on that, but as a writer I was not paid extra there. And there have been a number of shows in which I’ve been on set for some portion of filming and I don’t get paid anything extra.

But what often happens is that as the movie goes into production, you’re paid what’s called an all-services deal, which means after a certain point they say like, OK, we’re going to pay you X dollars and it’s just going to cover anything else you’re doing through the rest of production, including post-production. And that’s fairly typical I found.

So, in situations where I’m not there in a crisis mode, where I’m being paid as a weekly, an all-services deal will often kick in. Craig, what’s your experience?

**Craig:** Yeah. I actually have not ever been on set without being paid. And I don’t think I would go. To me that’s just visiting. You know, to me if you’re on a set and you don’t have a job, then you’re already in a troubled spot. If you have a purpose on the set as a writer, it is in fact to occasionally write. And if you’re going to write, you need to be paid. And so I always have an all-services deal.

The nature of all-services deals are such that generally they often don’t really cost the studio anything, because the way our deals are designed, if those things are pre-determined, that gets applied against your screenplay credit bonus. So if you’re earning, if you’re going to get sole screenplay bonus, like you did on Go or something like that, or the way that Todd and I did on Hangover 3, then you know, OK, that’s the big number that I’m getting paid here. And all these steps and things, first draft, second draft, polish, all-services deal are applied against it. So they’re paying you money they’re going to have to pay you anyway, either this way or that way. But yes, I always have an all-services deal. And this way also the writing that I do is then owned by the studio.

If you don’t have a deal, they don’t own it. So, that’s a problem for them. So, yes, all-services deal for sure. What was the other part of Nick’s question? Oh, the traveling?

**John:** Does it matter whether — yeah, travel. So, if they want you on set and you’re not in Los Angeles, they’re going to fly you out there. They’re going to put you up someplace good. And that is going to be pre-negotiated in your contract before you started working on the project.

**Craig:** That’s right. In every contract there is a travel provision and it says essentially if you’re required for a certain amount of time to go to production and it is this amount of distance away, then here’s what happens. They cover your airfare. And the question is do you get business class or first class. Business class I believe is guaranteed by our collective bargaining agreement, but you can individually negotiate up to first class, which I try and do.

They also then give you a per diem. You’re going to be in a hotel, you pay for it with your per diem. You have to go out to dinner, you pay with it your per diem. But that’s essentially a weekly allowance that they then pay you that is not applicable against bonuses or anything like that. And that amount is set to the size of the city. So the big cities of the world, New York, London, Paris, they get your highest number. And then the next tier down gets you a little bit less. And usually there’s also a guarantee of some kind of transportation while you are there.

So, it’s all pre-negotiated by your attorney. We’re not there footing our own bill.

**John:** No. So our next question is about how honest your feedback should be when giving notes on a friend’s script. Let’s take a listen.

Question: I have some friends in the business and every once and awhile they will send me their material for feedback. And generally my philosophy is it’s not about telling that person what I like and what I don’t like about the script. What’s important is to recognize what they’re trying to accomplish with the story and then point out for them the ways that they’re successful in doing that and the ways that they’re not successful in doing that.

That is what I thrive to do when giving people feedback. But every once and awhile you get a script and you read it and you’re like, oh god, this is bad. And I know you guys have talked about it on the show before. Sometimes you get writing from people and you’re like, oh god, this person will never make it. This person is just bad. So my question is as sort of raw, subjective thinking, is it ever useful to relay that back to somebody? Should I still follow my philosophy or is it best just to be honest with that person?

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

**Craig:** We’ll go to just this extreme case. Someone has given you material to read. You read it. And three or four pages in you realize it’s just inept. When I have encountered those moments, I ask a couple of questions first. Who am I dealing with? What kind of person are they? Are they kind of person who has a certain amount of ego strength? Are they the kind of person that I intuit is going to be defensive? Are they a very sweet, kind person?

And then I tailor things to them, because first do no harm. I don’t want to make someone miserable. I don’t want to make someone cry. I don’t want to make somebody outraged. So a lot of times what it comes down to is I say, listen, this did not connect with me. I’m only going to talk about how it made me feel. And I actually stopped reading here. And I want to walk you through my relationship with these first 10 or 15 pages.

And then you have a choice of whether or not you want me to even — I just may be the wrong person for this. And so then there’s no presentation of objectivity. I’m not a judge saying you suck, you’re never going to make it. Give up your dreams. I just let them know how I felt. And where it was not working for me.

And I have so far — and this doesn’t happen frequently — but so far I have managed to avoid tears and lashing out. But I don’t know how you feel about this, John, but my feeling is if you read that script and it’s inept and that person is never going to be a screenwriter, they’re not going to stop because you tell them. They’ll stop when they finally realize it.

**John:** I agree. My saying something will probably not be the one thing that forms a wall that makes them sort of decide like, OK, now I’m going to take this other path. I always wanted to be a doctor, and now I’m going to go be a doctor. I don’t think my feedback is necessarily going to make that choice, that decision.

I often come back to our friend Kelly Marcel, I sent her one of my scripts to read. And she was so smart and she asked, “Do you want me to tell you that you’re brilliant, or do you want me to tell you what’s wrong?” And it was such a smart way of setting up the conversation, before she’d even opened up the script. Because then she could sit down with the thing of like, OK, am I going to read this to enjoy this and to point out the things that are working so well? Or am I actually going to look for the things that are wrong?

And that’s a thing you can do with another professional writer who you know has a certain level of competence. When you come to something where it’s like, oh man, I can’t even start here, I often go back to a thing that happens sometimes at the Sundance Labs in that up at the Sundance Labs you have these really talented filmmakers who are often coming from different backgrounds who may not be the best writers on the page sometimes. And so over the course of this long weekend as we’re looking at their scripts, different advisers are reading them and sitting down with these writers and talking about what they’re trying to do. And I found that there’s different roles people sort of naturally slot into based on who they are and sort of like where they sort of fall in the batting order in terms of talking with these writers. So, there’s that first person who is just there to suss out what was the intention behind the script.

Then there’s the one who is there to gently challenge and nudge and see where there are opportunities. Where is there flexibility? Where can we get a little bit of stuff to happen here?

There’s often a person who is just the sledgehammer. Who is just there to smash things apart and point out everything that’s wrong, everything that’s not working, and really sort of say this is not a movie yet. You have a lot of work to do here.

There is a person who sort of bats cleanup who sort of like puts the pieces back together, sort of emotionally reestablishes somebody. And then often my function is that cleanup or sort of the getting that person to think about what’s going to happen next. And so the Sundance model, like those are all probably people who kind of get it on some level. They’ve been through that creative process before. They have a sense of sort of what the work is ahead of them.

When you get that script from your drycleaner who has not read other scripts and you’re like, ugh, man, I just don’t know where to start here. That is the tough situation. And that’s where I think you go back to the Kelly Marcel of like, great, do you want me to tell you what’s fantastic, or what’s not working? If they say tell me if I suck, then I think it’s kind of on them. And if the writing is just not good, I think they do deserve your honesty. A kind honesty, but an honesty about like this is not working at all right now. And these are the kind of things I think you need to do next if you’re going to keep trying to write.

**Craig:** I don’t really believe when people like that tell me, “Oh, no, no, give it to me straight.” I’ve definitely had a few of those where I started to give — I mean, I hadn’t even gotten to third gear. I was in gear two of 100, and I could tell they were already getting defensive and bristling, and so I just backed it down to gear one.

The truth is that no one who isn’t inside of our business and has done what we’ve done for this long — no one can really understand what the true unvarnished meat grinder looks and feels like. We have experienced the meat grinder from the people paying us. And there’s nothing like paying somebody to make you feel entitled to tell them exactly what you think. So, we have been flayed and ground up and beaten to pulps.

When we talk to each other, we all have a shorthand and we also have a shared empathy and experience. We understand that these things are hard. We also understand that you’re one draft away from something much, much better all the time. There is always a hope, right? If I read something — I read something by mutual friends of ours, a writing team, and I love their work. I really do. But this one particular script they had written, they were working a spec and I just didn’t get it. I didn’t get it. And I had many, many, many problems. And I started off by saying, “I may be the wrong guy here.”

And they were like, “Or not, so tell us.” And I did. And they took it like champs. They took it like champs because they had the ego strength to know that I wasn’t saying you suck, stop writing. What I was saying was you, like all of the rest of us, have gone down a blind alley here. Back out, find a different path. You can do it.

That’s the difference between these things. When you’re dealing with somebody who has not succeeded yet, the implication is this is not working and nothing you ever do is going to work. Beat it. And that’s a whole level of emotional anxiety that I just — I’m really aware of. And I don’t want to be abusive about it. So, I try and put it in the context of me and my relationship to the material. And then I ask a ton of questions. Instead of saying this is stupid, that doesn’t work, that doesn’t make sense, I’ll just be very Socratic about it.

Here’s how I felt here. What did you want me to feel? And I think in a sense our obviously Canadian questioner already does that. And I would say to him keep doing it. You’re doing it right.

**John:** I agree. This last year I’ve had a chance to catch up on a lot of TV shows that I’ve missed along the way and one of those was Rick and Morty. And so this last week I was watching an episode of Rick and Morty and I feel like we cannot close this segment without doing a clip from this season two show in which Rick and Morty go to visit a lighthouse keeper on this alien planet. The lighthouse keeper agrees to help them as long as —

**Craig:** You listen to my tale.

**John:** Listen to your tale. And so it’s a screenplay reading. And so we’re going to play a little clip of that and it’s basically the worst case scenario for notes giving. And I should set up if you have kids in the car, there’s a bad word said three times. Not the very bad word, but the S-word. So kids-in-the-car warning here.

[Clip plays]

**Lighthouse Chief:**

Blane: Maybe I don’t need a new friend.

Jacey: Maybe you’re the only friend I need.

Blane: Need, or want?

Jacey: I’ve never been much for wanting.

Blane: Spoken like someone with needs.

**Morty:** Oh, geez.

**Lighthouse Chief:** Hmm?

**Morty:** Uh, sorry. K-keep going.

**Lighthouse Chief:** Jacey reaches out and touches his face. It’s clear he needs what she wants. She’s a woman. He’s a man. The city burns in the background as he takes her in his arms. Fade out. Title… The End — Question mark.

**Morty:** Wow.

**Lighthouse Chief:** Yeah?

**Morty:** It’s… G-good job. Good job.

**Lighthouse Chief:** You liked it?

**Morty:** Of course I did.

**Lighthouse Chief:** You didn’t laugh at the scene in the bar.

**Morty:** I…Thought it was funny, but I wanted to hear the rest.

**Lighthouse Chief:** Do you have any thoughts? Notes?

**Morty:** No. I-I just enjoyed it. That’s my note, you know? Please write more.

**Lighthouse Chief:** Seems a little insincere.

**Morty:** What? No.

**Lighthouse Chief:** You don’t have to mollycoddle me. I want to improve my writing. Tell me your real thoughts.

**Morty:** All right. Well, um, I’m not a huge fan, personally, of the whole “three weeks earlier” teaser thing. I feel like, you know, we should start our stories where they begin not start them where they get interest —

**Lighthouse Chief:** — Get out.

**Morty:** Um, what?

**Lighthouse Chief:** No, I’m sick of this. You bang on my door, you beg me to help you, I share something personal with you, and you take a giant shit on it.

**Morty:** Hey, man, we asked if we could put up a beacon —

**Lighthouse Chief:** Well, you can’t. I want you out of here. You’re a petty person, and you’re insecure, and you’re taking it out on me. That’s a good script.

**Morty:** What the hell?

**Lighthouse Chief:** I don’t care. I want you out.

**Rick:** What?

**Lighthouse Chief:** Take that thing down. Your grandson is a shitty person. Leave now.

**Rick:** Morty!

**Morty:** Rick, I didn’t do anything. I sat through his entire screenplay…

**Lighthouse Chief:** You sat through it?

**Morty:** Yes! Did you want me to weep with joy? It’s terrible!

**Rick:** Whoa! Morty! We’re guests here.

**Morty:** I tried to be a good guest! He dragged it out of me!

**Lighthouse Chief:** I’m taking down this beacon. No, stop! That’s not fair! Just because you hate your own writing doesn’t make me a bad person! You like that? You want me to cut to three weeks earlier when you were alive?

**Rick:** Whoa, Morty. You just purged.

[Clip ends]

**John:** I just love that they actually call out the Stuart Special in clip. It’s so fantastic.

**Craig:** Isn’t that great?

**John:** It literally is the Stuart Special we’ve read so many times.

**Craig:** It is. Well, it’s pitch perfect, right? I mean, not only is the terrible writing something that I’ve seen many, many times before, but that’s that phenomenon I’m talking about where someone will say, no, and they seem so believable. No, please tell me, I want to hear it. Because they can’t yet conceive of a world where somebody doesn’t like part of it. They think that they’re going to get these minor things like, you know where you said she was in a big car, maybe she should be in a little car. Oh, OK, I can see that. I can see that.

But the second there’s any kind of scratch at the surface, all of that terrible stuff just pores out of them. Pores out. And that’s the nightmare. That’s the absolute nightmare. It’s just wonderful. It’s wonderful. It’s perfect. I watch that clip probably once a day. Because it just makes me — just also just the way he’s so self-satisfied as he sits down to read his terrible — and also, because you think like, OK, he’s going to read a tale. It’s going to be some fairy tale or something. The second he says Fade In, you know, EXT., blah, blah. And the look on Morty’s face as he realizes this is a script. And he looks like he’s dying. It’s wonderful.

**John:** It’s fantastic. All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is this video and physics paper that go together. It’s about toppling dominoes. And so we’ve seen a lot of dominoes be toppled and sort of like billions of dominoes all falling at once, but this is about the physics of how a smaller domino can topple a larger domino. And so the mathematics work out to be I think it’s 1.5 times the size of the first domino can knock the next one over. And it ends up scaling in a really fascinating way. So, you don’t need to read the physics paper, but the video that goes with it is actually really great because it starts with this teeny tiny little domino that you have to hit with tweezers and it can knock over bigger and bigger until there’s this giant tombstone size domino falls, but it’s only like ten dominoes in a chain to do that.

And so there’s all sorts of metaphors you can sort of obviously take for dominoes falling down. But I thought it was great. And the thing I had not understood until I watched the longer part of the video is that I always wondered — in some ways, how is that possible? And it’s because potential energy is actually stored in the larger dominoes as they’re stacked up on their end. And so that’s why this little tiny domino can knock down that bigger domino.

And that’s why when the small domino knocks down the bigger domino, there’s basically potential energy being converted into kinetic energy. So I thought it was just terrific. So, if you enjoy things falling down, which you are a screenwriter so you probably do, check out this video.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because you just need enough force to move that larger domino in a position where then gravity pulls it down the rest of the way. So all you have to do is — you just need that little bit, and then gravity pulls it down the rest of the way and that then is more force because of momentum and blah, blah, blah. Physics.

**John:** Physics! Now, Craig, we haven’t done one of our special episodes where we just rip something apart for a while, but I fell down this rabbit hole, not a very deep rabbit hole because the nature of physical reality, about flat-earthers. I find flat earth truthers to be one of the most fascinating kinds of crazy. So maybe somewhere down the road we need to do a flat earth episode, because I just love it so much.

**Craig:** Yeah. Flat-earthers have to make a lot of excuses. Tons.

**John:** Tons.

**Craig:** They have to excuse away almost everything we know. Normally, the conspiracy theorists just have to excuse away a few things. Not them.

**John:** Because usually a conspiracy theory simplifies things in a way that it may try to make something simple that’s actually complex. But it actually makes everything much, much more complex than just, you know, we’re on a sphere that’s circling the sun.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s an incredibly complicated thing. So this past week I went and did one of those wonderful escape rooms. You know I’m a big fan of those. And I went with this just all-star team of geniuses, including our friend David Kwong, and another crossword genius/lawyer named Dave Shucane. And a bunch of other people, including a girl named Tiffany, I think it was a woman named Tiffany. I believe. She was very young-looking, so I don’t know if she qualifies as girl. She’s got to be at least 30, right? And she was a member of like an international escape room team at the Escape Room Olympics. I didn’t even know that this was a thing.

**John:** That’s amazing.

**Craig:** I was so impressed with her.

**John:** And now Craig must compete.

**Craig:** Well, no, I’m not. I don’t think I could. Well, I don’t know. See, you don’t want to do these things to me, because I will.

**John:** You totally will.

**Craig:** So we went to this terrific escape room in LA. An Evil Genius Room. Was Evil Genius 2, I think. And it was a very hard room. Only 20% solve rate. We obliterated the record. I mean, I really was with some ringers. I mean, I helped. I wasn’t useless in there, but I was also aware that I was not the best person in that room. So it was a great bunch of people.

And so I’m a big escape room guy. There’s a ton of not great escape room apps that you can buy. A whole lot of them are just shoddy and lame. But I did find this one group of them by one guy. His name is Mateusz Skutnik. And he has created a series. I believe there’s 14 in this one sequence that all is part of this larger story called Submachine. And so you can find this online. We’ll throw a link on. But it’s at mateuszskutnik.com/submachine. Don’t worry about spelling it. We’ll give you — we’ll let you cheat on that. And start with Submachine 1, the basement. And proceed forth. They are very cool. I like them a lot.

**John:** Craig, I’ve only done one or two escape rooms. But when you are on a really good team, what is the general strategy? Should everything be focused on the same problem at once, or do you just fan out across the space and everyone tries to do as much as they can in their own little space? What is a good strategy for a team?

**Craig:** Most escape rooms are best conquered by a team that is fanning out and then communicating constantly. So, the second you find something, you announce it out loud. Because many of the puzzles are interacting across spaces. So somebody is working on something and then someone says, “I just found a puzzle piece.” And you’re like, wait, I need that. Bring that over here. Or there are levels of things, right? And sometimes it’s as simple as I’ve just found a look that was hidden under a thing.

Occasionally you will find some that you kind of need to separate off a little bit. There’s a really, really good one called The Alchemist which is part of Escape Room LA Downtown. And that one kind of requires you for a while to split up into four groups because there are sort of four isolated sections and then it all comes back together. But generally best practice is fan out, parallel problem solving, constant communication.

**John:** Sounds good. All right. That is our show for this week. As always, it’s produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, I’m on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

We are on Facebook. Just search for the Scriptnotes Podcast.

You can find us on Apple Podcast at Scriptnotes. Search for us there and while you’re there leave us a review, because those are delightful.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. If you want to listen to all the back episodes, go to Scriptnotes.net and there’s also an app in which you can listen to all those.

You can get the USB drives now for sale at store.johnaugust.com. That has all the back episodes.

And we also have tickets for the live show in Los Angeles on July 25th. So you’ve not already purchased those, purchase them now. It’s a fundraiser for the Writers Guild Foundation.

And that’s it. Craig, I will see you in Los Angeles before too long.

**Craig:** Stateside buddy. Have a safe trip.

**John:** Thanks.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Scriptnotes Homecoming Show](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-homecoming-show/)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USBs drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Addams Family on Netflix](https://www.facebook.com/netflixgeeks/videos/197379134097035/)
* [Olivia de Havilland Sues FX](http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/olivia-de-havilland-feud-lawsuit-fx-ryan-murphy-1202484973/)
* [Creators of Tupac biopic ‘All Eyez on Me’ sued](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-tupac-biopic-lawsuit-20170623-story.html)
* [Defining Environment Language for Video Games](https://80.lv/articles/defining-environment-language-for-video-games/amp/)
* [Chekov’s Gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun)
* [Hanging a Lantern, or Lampshading](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hang%20a%20lantern)
* [How To Reduce Sexism In Screenplays](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-04/how-to-reduce-sexism-in-screenplays/8675688)
* [Morty’s Screenplay Criticism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ-Z_DW0AuE)
* [Domino Toppling](https://phys.org/news/2013-01-physicist-math-maximum-incremental-domino.html)
* [Submachine Escape Room Game](http://www.mateuszskutnik.com/submachine/)
* [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_308.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2017/teaching-your-heroes-to-drive).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 307 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, Craig, what are we talking about?

**Craig:** Today on the podcast, John, we’re going to be answering some listener questions as we often do. We’ve got some exciting follow up to cover from our prior podcast. And our main topic today is going to be talking about how characters can drive story instead of the other way around. Should be a good episode, John.

**John:** It should be a great episode. Craig winged that and did a fantastic job. In our follow up we’ll start with something that has been long promised but is finally now here. The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide is now available. There is a link in the show notes. Or you can just go to johnaugust.com/guide. So this was the thing that Craig wanted to call Scriptdecks. But no.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** This is a 113-page document, a PDF you can download for free, that has the listener recommendations on the best episodes of Scriptnotes in case you are catching up on the show late in the game.

**Craig:** That sounds like, what, $19.99? Or…?

**John:** No, I already said it was free. It’s a free PDF download.

**Craig:** So like about $8 maybe?

**John:** Yeah, so less than that. It’s actually all the way down to $0.

**Craig:** Not including shipping and handling, or?

**John:** The shipping and handling is handled, we email it to you. So essentially if you are already on the Scriptnotes mailing list, we’re just going to send it to you, so you will have already gotten it.

**Craig:** Oh, like that U2 album that Apple gave us, and they just gave it to us.

**John:** No, but, no, they forced it upon you. This we’re not forcing upon you.

**Craig:** Oh, OK. OK.

**John:** So I guess we’re emailing it to you, but it’s like not already – I guess it’s in your email system. In some ways, Craig, your analogy is completely appropriate. I feel bad.

**Craig:** Well, no, it’s more like if people used Kindle or iBooks and this just showed up in it. That would be the U2.

**John:** That’s probably the more accurate thing.

**Craig:** What a weird thing, right? Like they gave us a free album from one of the best bands in the world and everyone was like, “Screw you. Get this out of here.”

**John:** Here’s the thing. Nobody really wanted the album. Like nobody was into U2 for new music at that point and just it felt intrusive. It was tone deaf. Weirdly tone deaf for Apple.

**Craig:** I think there’s also this psychological thing. When someone says to you, “Hey, by the way, I’m going to give you something that you would normally consider paying for, or certainly somebody would have to pay for, I’m just going to give it to you for free.” You look at it like, oh, well, it’s not very good then, is it?

**John:** Well here’s the thing I would also say like let’s say you like fish, you like to eat a nice piece of fish, but someone just shows up and hands you a fish. No. I don’t want a piece of fish. I want a fish when I want a fish, not when you want to give me a fish.

**Craig:** I like that you use the article A. When you order fish you have A fish. You ask for an entire fish. Not some fish. You ask for, I would like, you know what I’m in the mood for some fish tonight. No, I want A Fish.

**John:** I live in France where they serve you a fish. They serve you a whole fish. It’s got its head on it. It’s got all the pieces.

**Craig:** Un fish? Un pechine? What is it, pechine? What is it? No, it’s poisson. Poisson.

**John:** Le poisson. Le poisson.

**Craig:** Oh, so it’s un poisson.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Very good.

**John:** And fish is always delightful here. Once you have this PDF of the Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide, and by the way Craig I thought of you often because I went through so many debates about where to put the apostrophe for the Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide. So you will see in the notes, so that’s wrong here. So in the notes I listed it with apostrophe-S, but in the real thing I put the apostrophe after the S.

**Craig:** Thank you. Because otherwise it’s the guide of one Scriptnotes listener. And we’re really implying that we only have one also. You know, the Scriptnotes listener? This is her guide. [laughs]

**John:** The argument in favor of apostrophe-S was that it’s good for a listener.

**Craig:** That would be A Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide.

**John:** It’s true. It could be read that way. So this is the guide belonging to and a product of the listeners of Scriptnotes. Once you have this in your hands, you can use it to listen to the back episodes. Well, you might choose to listen to the back episodes. You could find those at Scriptnotes.net, but also on the brand new 300-episode USB drives.

**Craig:** Ta-da!

**John:** Craig, have you clicked through to see what these drives look like?

**Craig:** I’m doing it right now. Because, you know, I like to wing things. That’s my style. I find that I’m more exciting. Whoa. Look at that. This thing looks like a little mini-grenade.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a grenade full of knowledge.

**Craig:** Yeah. It looks like a little mini-mag light. It looks like so many little mini things. It’s very cool. Is it metal?

**John:** It is chrome-plated, apparently. I’ve not actually touched these. Etah had them and they were all in our office for a while before we shipped them off to the fulfillment company. But yeah, so we have a bunch of them, so people can buy them. They are $29. It has all the back episodes, including the bonus episodes, the dirty show. Has all the transcripts. It has all of the Three Page Challenge scripts. So, it’s handy. It’s got it all there. And it’s waterproof, or at least strongly water resistant.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** It will survive a lot. We had to bump up to the 16GB, because we just talked so much on the show.

**Craig:** Well, the good news is that the price per GB goes down far faster than we can talk. So by the time we hit the, what, 400-episode flash drive, or 500-episode flash drive, we’ll need a Terabyte and it will cost $0.04.

**John:** Yeah. Moore’s Law is in our favor.

**Craig:** Yeah. And how much is this? $80? $100? Something like that?

**John:** This is a $29 USB drive.

**Craig:** Wow. Unreal. And of that $29, I presume the customary amount comes to me of nothing?

**John:** 100% of the customary amount goes to Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Unbelievable.

**John:** Yeah. So good.

**Craig:** You know what? Buy them. Please, everyone, just buy them so I can get thousands and thousands of nothings.

**John:** Another thing Craig will be making no money on is our live show. July 25 in Hollywood. Tickets are on sale now. It’s a benefit for the Writers Guild Foundation which does great work on behalf of writers and people who are aspiring to become writers. Megan Amram is our fantastic guest. We have other guests to be announced soon. It’s 8PM July 25 in Hollywood, so come see us there. And then I think we’re going to do some other special little event kind of things there. Some little games. Some stuff that you’ll benefit from being there in person. I want a little more audience participation in this one, not just questions. So, I think we’re going to get our people involved more.

**Craig:** Like a big Simon Says kind of thing? Or something more screenwritery?

**John:** I think one lucky listener will get something.

**Craig:** And you get a car. And you get a car.

**John:** So the danger is like all the listeners of that show are going to be checking underneath their seat to see if there is something because you’ll remember at our very first live show–

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** There was something hidden underneath a seat. And we read their script. That’s right. We read their script.

**Craig:** And we read their script. And it was good. So, what will be under the seat this time, John?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Oh, that would ruin it. Plus, there’s not going to be anything under the seat.

**John:** We’ll have to see. You’ll have to come to find out. So, Craig, please do show up July 25.

**Craig:** How about as people are coming in we microchip them?

**John:** Oh, nice.

**Craig:** Yeah, OK. There will be a little soreness, a little redness at the spot of insertion. However, at the end of the show, we will scan the audience and somebody with the lucky serial number will receive a prize.

**John:** That could be good.

**Craig:** And then we can track them for the rest of their lives.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, that’s really the thing. I mean, Mail Chimp is a start. But I think beyond Mail Chimp we really want to have some full knowledge about our listeners, because that’s how you monetize, Craig. That’s how you monetize.

**Craig:** Oh, you know what? I got an idea for a new thing that we can start.

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** It’s called Chip Chimp. OK? I know that Mail Chimp doesn’t have real chimps, but Chip Chimp will. And Chip Chimp’s name is Chim-Chim, you know, like from Speed Racer.

**John:** So Chim-Chim, the Chip Chimp. Oh, I think it’s great.

**Craig:** Chim-Chim, the Chip Chimp. Well, he obviously roller skates through the audience and just – and then ka-donk right to your upper arm. Right in the fleshy part of the upper arm. Moves around. You know, doesn’t necessarily do it in order, because I mean, folks, he’s a chimp. OK? Let’s not get crazy. He can roller skate. He knows how to do essentially a medical procedure, which is the sterile insertion of a microchip into your arm. So, if he doesn’t quite go in the order you’d like, I don’t want to get any complaints.

Anyway, it’s a great idea.

**John:** I think it’s important to keep in mind though when we selected this monkey, I guess it’s not really fair to call him a monkey.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** He’s a primate ambassador to a greater world view.

**Craig:** He’s a chimp.

**John:** We had to really compete against a bunch of other possible candidates, but this is the one who won. This is Chim-Chim, the Chip Chimp champ. And he’s going to be there live in the audience.

**Craig:** Honestly, it came down to him and Chris McQuarrie. [laughs]

**John:** Chris McQuarrie? He was busy shooting a movie.

**Craig:** He wasn’t so busy that he couldn’t apply. And honestly, you know, I was not expecting the tears that we got when we told him that he just didn’t quite get it.

**John:** It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. Because there have been, what, like 19 Mission: Impossible movies?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There’s only one Chip Chimp.

**Craig:** Chim-Chim Chip Chimp. Yeah. And it’s not McQuarrie. You know what though? I got to say so much spirit from him. So much spirit.

**John:** We got a listener review from Pedro Lisbow. So, I wanted to read this aloud because I thought it was so revealing. So, at the end you’re going to find out what he does for a living, but I want to see if you can figure out what he does for a living before we get to that point. So, let’s listen carefully, OK?

He says, “This is my favorite podcast. I found it by chance. And though I’m not a writer, I find the discussions pleasant and illuminating.”

**Craig:** All right. Clues. Clues.

**John:** “More than once, I’ve applied the advice they give to writers on my profession. You would be surprised how much of it is universal, provided you adapt the boundary conditions on it.”

**Craig:** Huge clue.

**John:** “Recently I entered a small screenwriting competition. Might as well test one’s self, right? And got honorable mention on my first short.”

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** “In summary, if this back office quant can benefit from listening to the podcast, so can you.”

**Craig:** Is quant supposed to be a giveaway? Because I don’t know what that means.

**John:** Quant is a number cruncher who generally works for a financial services industry. So, sometimes they have degrees in physics or like really esoteric mathematics, but they end up working generally for financial services.

**Craig:** It’s shot for like a quantifier?

**John:** Quantitative Analysis.

**Craig:** Got it. So did you just give away the answer of what he is?

**John:** I did. I did. But hopefully people along the way – you figured out that he was some sort of number cruncher nerd.

**Craig:** Yeah, boundary conditions is very mathematical. Very codey sort of term.

**John:** All right. Last week we punted on a question. So, we are going to jump on that ball and continue our sports metaphors into this week’s discussion.

**Craig:** Jump on that ball! You know, most games require it. Jump on it.

**John:** They do. Jumping on the ball.

**Craig:** Jump on the ball.

**John:** That’s the game I made up. Going to answer a question from Ferris. He was asking about – he was actually sort of demanding that we give him some new answers about how to truly get into the mind of a character, understand their motivations, and how they’ll react in certain situations. How do you go about making the character drive the story instead of the other way around?

So, Craig, tell us. How do you do that?

**Craig:** So this is a big one. I remember we brought this up towards the end of our last podcast and thought, oh no, no, no, we can’t short thrift this. You need two things, I think, to make this work right. The function of having a character drive the story. One, you need an actual character. We say character to cover anybody that has a name ranging from a real name to Cop Number 3 and who says stuff and does stuff. That’s actually not a character. That’s the loosest term of the phrase.

A character is a person, a persona that you are creating, that feels realistic. That feels like an actual person. That’s a character. Otherwise, you have a characterization. I don’t know how else to put it.

**John:** I think it’s great that you’re focusing on that character, because I also want to define these terms as well. So, let’s define story. If a character is going to define a story, let’s make sure we’re talking about the right things in terms of a story. For story, let’s talk about a sequence of events, a sequence of narrative events that feels greater than the sum of its parts. So it’s not just a bunch of “and then this, and then this, and then this.” It feels like it adds up to something bigger and that ideally, especially in movie stories, it’s the journey of that character from one place to another, either literally or metaphorically. That’s what we’re watching.

So, when we say we want this character we’ve created to be driving the story, we’re talking about what Craig is saying. A very distinct individual person driving a very distinct individual series of events that’s happening, at least for movies, just once.

**Craig:** Yeah. The question that Ferris asks, which I will read verbatim, how do you go about making the character drive the story instead of the other way around, implies a kind of Cartesian duality between character and story. When in fact, they are related to each other. They are in a relationship with each other.

Plot, you can define down I think as very much a series of events that flow one to the next, perhaps and hopefully some causality between them. And beginning, middle, and that’s plot. But story to me is the phenomenon that emerges when a character is moving through a plot. Because when we tell the story of a movie we’ve seen, we don’t – like if someone says tell me the story of The Matrix. Machines have enslaved humanity and they are sucking electricity out of them and enslaving them and they make humans think that they’re in the world when they are really not. And they’re defeated.

**John:** Yeah. So that is a definition of that’s plot. It’s the underlying thing of it, but you’re not talking about Neo. You’re not talking about who is actually in charge of your story. And you’re not talking about the experience of watching your story through that principal character’s eyes and the choices he’s making, the discoveries he’s encountering as these things come to light in the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. The only interesting way to experience a plot is through a character’s movement through it. And that is the story. The story is humans or sometimes people serving – sorry, animals serving as humans, or machines serving as humans, but human-like creatures moving through a plot. And from that marriage and relationship and synthesis comes story.

So the first thing that’s really important to say is there isn’t one and then the other, because you fall into the trap – if you look at Ferris’s question carefully, you can fall into the trap of thinking, OK, there’s a story that happens. Then my character walks in, hits a thing, that changes what will happen next in the story. My character now reacts to that. Very reactive. Even if your character is reacting, and then hitting a thing, and then causing the next thing, your character is simply becoming a plot mechanic. The way that the cops showing up in a story are a plot mechanic. Or an asteroid is a plot mechanic. Or a blackout is a plot mechanic.

That’s not how it works with characters.

**John:** When you were talking about moving through a story, the one thing I want to stress though is movement alone is not enough. So if a character is on a rollercoaster, they are moving. And they can be on a rollercoaster that is sort of the plot of the story, but we’re going to be frustrated as the viewer because they’re not making any choices. They’re just on rails. And so they’re being dragged through the story. And when I see scripts that aren’t working, it’s often because that character really has no agency. Has no real decision-making capability on what’s going to happen next.

Either they’re always responding to what the villain is doing, or what other characters are sort of instructing them to do. They’re put upon, they’re directed, they’re instructed, but they’re not actually doing anything themselves. So, you could write the most delightful dialogue ever for that character. It would still be a frustrating movie because you don’t see that character making any choices, having any control of his or her life within that movie.

**Craig:** And you can see how videogames struggle with this life on rails problem. Because the nature of a videogame – well, I’m only talking really about let’s call them the higher narrative videogames – they tell story. They tell narrative. They aspire to be movie-like. But ultimately the experience is defined primarily by a series of obstacles that you, the player, must overcome. Those are very plot obstacles. They are essentially plot obstacles.

Every now and then you’ll find a game that attempts to pretend that you’re making moral choices. But you’re not because there are only so many choices in their decision tree they can handle. I don’t know if you ever played Mass Effect, for instance.

**John:** I know of Mass Effect. I never played it myself. But I know that it had a bigger built out set of choices and outcomes. It was a little more like a Choose Your Own Adventure situation than an Uncharted, which you truly are on rails. Like incredibly well disguised rails, but there’s like one way through Uncharted.

**Craig:** That’s right. Absolutely on rails. No question. And even in Mass Effect, you’re on rails. And that’s where it actually becomes really frustrating, videogames, when they try and pretend you’re not on rails. One of the reasons why Bio Shock was such a wonderful game is because they pointed out that you were on rails. That was the big twist. Surprise. You’re not making any decisions at all. You’re on rails. And that was brilliant because it acknowledged this big thing. In movies, the experience is not one where we are primarily overcoming obstacles and therefore there is a very narrow set of choices and decision trees that are available to us.

In movies, we’re watching someone’s life. What has happened has happened. We are being invited into watch somebody. And that is the experience of our lives in general. What happens, happens. And the excitement, I think, of proper storytelling in movies is not that we’re watching a character going through a story, but rather we are watching an event in this person’s life that needed to happen to them. Because movies are purposeful, and because they are truly intelligently designed, the way that some people wrongly thing the universe was, everything is absolutely fated. It is intentional. It is as if god created all of this in such a way as to make a point and help this person change. Or fail.

**John:** So, I think you hit on the sort of Cartesian duality here is that you are trying to create a system in which it seems like your protagonist, your hero, is in charge of the decisions he or she is making, when in fact you are – you as the writer are in charge of the decisions that are being made. You are creating a universe where those are the decisions that are going to lead to the most interesting outcomes. And so you’re definitely making it feel like that character is in charge when in fact that character is working for you. That character is working for your story. And so I think the way to sort of back into the answer to Ferris’s question is to be making sure that you have a sense of what the story is you’re trying to tell.

Likewise, have a sense of who the character is in the story and at every moment those stitches have to be working together. That this character needs to go on this journey. This character needs to make these discoveries. Therefore, I will create a universe in which he can have these moments of challenge, these moments of opportunity so that it can change the character. And you’re creating the universe of the story and the character of the story at the same time.

**Craig:** Right. So, at the core of this, Ferris, is a question of design. When you say how do you go about making the character drive the story, here’s how. You design a character, you design a problem that that character has. A fatal flaw. A primary challenge. You design a story, plot rather I should say, that will repeatedly test that character. That will force them to leave their comfort zone. That will force them to confront terrible truths. That will cause them pain. That will threaten to tear them apart. And the only way that that character is going to be able to survive is if they overcome what has held them back. If they overcome what is wrong with them. And in the end, success.

Or, they fail. Either way, both are fine. I mean, traditionally they succeed. Happy endings and all that. But sometimes they don’t. Either way, you have designed a person and then you have designed a plot that are married together. The person does not understand that that plot is going to lead him or her to something important. They have no idea.

There’s this wonderful analogy. I think it was in Slaughterhouse Five. Where the Tralfamadorians, the aliens, they don’t experience time the way we do. And so they’re describing it, it’s like as humans the way we experience time is we’re on a train and there’s a window. And what we see in the window is our present. And when it leaves the window, because the train is moving, that’s our past. And then the future rolls into our present and we see that.

But what we cannot see is what’s coming. We’re only looking out the window. The Tralfamadorians, they’re outside the train. Right? They know where the train is going. They can see it all. Very clear to understand.

You, Ferris, are outside of the train. Your character is inside the train looking out the window. Your job is to create a path for that train which you can see that is going to cause problems for this character. And then your job is in a very strange psychological exercise to exit outside, go into the train, put yourself right in that little train car, and ask, “What do I see out the window? What does this mean to me?” I don’t know anything other than what I have seen and what I’m seeing now.

So there’s two of you, Ferris. There’s the outside guy who can see it all, and there’s the inside guy who can only see what’s there. And your job is to make sure that you can do both of those jobs perfectly well so that they work in harmony and this exciting story emerges.

**John:** Yeah. Screenwriting is always about that shifting your frame of reference. And you’re trying to see only what your characters know and then also know everything that your characters don’t know. It’s ridding yourself of the curse of knowledge of what’s to come, of the motivations of other characters that they couldn’t possibly see.

So, the questions to fundamentally ask is – and we can put a link in the show notes to an earlier episode where we talk about what characters want – but really ask yourself what does this character want right now. And when I say right now, like what are his basic motivations? The primal kind of things they’re going after. What are their higher aspirations? Are they hungry? Are they frustrated? Are they sleepy? Ask yourself all those questions. Look at their sort of near term. Like what are they trying to do in the next ten minutes, in the next two hours, and then also be able to ask the question like where do they see themselves a week from now, a year from now.

Not every scene is going to address those things, then you have to have a sense of what those are for that character, so you can get inside his or her shoes and really understand the world from their point of view. And then when you start to ask those questions, make sure you check in on those motivations, those general goals and wants and wishes throughout the story. And you may need to find excuses and reasons to have your characters expose those to us so that we can see them and so we can remember them.

Because unlike the novelist who can just get inside a character’s head and just tell us what that character is thinking, in screenwriting we are very limited. We don’t really have insight on characters unless they say something or if they’re in a musical they can sing something. So, make sure that we really understand what this character is experiencing in case we can’t see it just by what’s being put on screen.

**Craig:** You know, I went through this whole Sherlock binge. There’s a moment in one of the episodes where I believe its Mycroft, my favorite character, Mycroft Holmes, tells this little story called the Appointment in Samarra, which it’s an old story but it was most famously told by Somerset Maugham. So I’m going to read this story to you. It’s very short.

There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture. Now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw Death standing in the crowd and he came to Death and said, Why did you make a threating gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, Death said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

Now, I love that story. So, you, Ferris, or any screenwriter, you’re death. You know where people are supposed to be. You know exactly what’s going to happen to them and they cannot avoid it because you’re writing it. But, your characters have no concept of this. They are, therefore, free to make choices. And this is a very kind of strange, Calvinistic, pre-deterministic way of looking at life. I don’t think this is actually how reality functions happily, but it does function this way for your universe you’re creating.

Your characters must react. They must have agency. They must have free will. They make choices. But in the end, the movie that will happen to them must happen to them. So, part of what makes “character drive story” is the dramatic tension and often the irony that is connected to characters making decisions and then dealing with the circumstances of those decisions as you create them.

If you know what’s going to happen to them, you have all of the opportunity in the world to make it seem to them that they have succeeded. In fact, it’s a very common dramatic trope in movies to give the characters everything they do want, only for them to discover they no longer want it because of the journey they have been on. And then they must turn away from that to want something more, or something better, or the thing they should have wanted in the first place.

It’s a very difficult thing to do. But once you understand that the plot is there to serve the character’s life, so that when the movie is over the character is either healed or broken, then you understand there’s no other result than to have the “character drive the story.” The character is the story.

**John:** I would refer him back to our episodes on The Little Mermaid, which is of course a mermaid makes a very dumb choice and deals with the consequences, or Groundhog Day, which is nothing but a character getting what he always wanted and then suffering for it, and having to learn how to overcome it and his ongoing struggle.

We’ve never talked about Aliens, but the second Aliens is a great example of a movie that feels like it could just be on rails, and yet isn’t because it’s so carefully constructed that Ripley is on a journey. That she’s on a journey – that she’s making choices herself the whole time through and you really feel her making those choices. They’re not easy choices. There’s continual consequences. And it works so well because of the marriage of plot and character to create story.

**Craig:** Yeah. You have this remarkable tool as a writer. And for lack of a better word I call it torture. You can and should torture your protagonist. No one wants to see somebody very easily arrive at a solution. That’s a boring and short movie. So, you know that there’s a problem in them. And you know that you need them to be the opposite of that when they finish this journey. Torture them. That’s how you make the character drive the story. The story becomes painful for them. It’s hard. When they have to do the right thing, it comes with terrible costs. When they try and do the right thing, punish them for it.

This constant pushback, this constant torture, this crucible that you create is what we want to see because that creates empathy in the audience and a desire for the character to succeed.

The worst possible outcome is for a character to make this large, grand change in their lives and you don’t feel like it was that hard for them to do. You want it to be the hardest thing, because after all, this is the movie. Their lives – they don’t really have lives, but we imagine they do. Clarice Starling had a life before she shows up at the FBI and gets the Buffalo Bill case and has to go talk to Hannibal Lecter. And she has a life afterwards. But that stretch of time where she’s dealing with that case and Hannibal Lecter, that’s the most important time in her life.

So, for her to finally get to the end has to be excruciating for her. Otherwise it didn’t deserve to be a movie. We should have found some other part in her life that was a movie, or maybe her life isn’t a movie at all.

**John:** One last note before we wrap up this topic is we’re both screenwriters. We mostly talk about movies, which are two hours of entertainment, and you’re following one character’s life. But I will say in great TV, like the TV that we get to watch every day now, you do see characters driving story in ways that they probably didn’t do so much ten years ago. And so you see characters making difficult choices in everything from Game of Thrones to The Americans. They’re not simply responding to things. And they’re not trying to just recreate the normalcy of the routine. They are being challenged and they’re pushing beyond those challenges to get to new things.

And so I really do believe that most of the advice we’re talking about can apply to one-hour of television, and two hours of movie, it’s just you have to find ways that you can use those characters and let them continue to grow over the course of a season rather than just one two-hour movie.

**Craig:** 100%. It gets really complicated in television because you do have to now prioritize your characters and your story and television shows do it in so many different ways. There’s a method by which there is an A character and that is the primary story. That character drives the major portion of the story. But there are other characters who have smaller stories inside of the stories that really are driven by them.

And when we say “driven by,” what we really mean is a function of. OK, I think Ferris that will be the cleanest way to kind of resolve your problem. Characters don’t really drive story. Story is a function of character.

So you have a lot of choices about how you handle these things. But ultimately whatever you choose, you do make a choice. And you know your story is a function of character.

**John:** All of our TV writer friends are back in the room now writing the next season of their shows that come in the fall, or come in midseason, and that first week, those first two weeks they do a lot of big whiteboard stuff where they figure out where are all the characters going this season. And that’s what we’re talking about here. They’re figuring out the broad arcs for these characters over the course of the season. And then within episodes how far can they take them within this episode. And that’s great. And that’s the kind of thing that is amazing about the TV we make right now.

So, a lot of this advice can apply to TV as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, imagine how backwards it would be if you showed up on day one for a season and the showrunner said, “OK, we have three characters and we got to kind of arc out how the season is going to work. But here are a few things I definitely know. There should be a train crash somewhere in the middle of the season. I want a huge train crash. And you know what? I’ve always wanted to do a thing where an airplane – it’s like a car chase but with two little small twin-engine planes.”

**John:** Little Cessnas? Yeah.

**Craig:** “Through a city. I want to do that. So those are on the board. So let’s figure out how we can kind of make…”

No. That would be the worst. No.

**John:** Yeah. You and I have both worked on movies that have had that kind of situation. Oh, it is the worst.

**Craig:** It’s the worst. Because in the end you’re just now I guess retrofitting characters that would then have the ability to find meaning in those sequences. But, oh god, it starts getting bad real fast. But if you sit in a room and someone is like, “Here’s the situation. These two guys are best friends. At the end of this season, one is going to kill the other. Now, let’s talk about how that happens.” OK. Now we’re on to something.

**John:** All right, let’s wrap that up. And Craig could you read us our next question?

**Craig:** So, a person whose name is the same name as a famous person’s name writes, “I share the exact same name as a remarkably famous celebrity. I won’t mention who, but I will say he is a household name and sadly one of the most famous people on the planet. It just so happens that this particular celebrity is a total cretin who is very well known for being a major douchebag. My concern is that sharing my name with this incredibly talentless parasite will negatively affect people’s opinions of my screenplay before they’ve even read it. What are my options here?

“Should I use a pen name, so I’m not mistaken for this bungling idiot? Or should I keep my name and dedicate a line on the title page to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that I am definitely not him? Or since he’s famous as hell, should I just keep the name and just roll with it? A famous name might generate more interest, I guess.”

**John:** This is a really easy answer. Do not use that famous person’s name. It will only be confusing and will not help you in your career or your life. Pick a pen name. Use your initials. Do something else. But you will benefit not at all by sharing a name with whoever that is.

**Craig:** Slam dunk of slam dunks here. There’s no point, really. Let me be honest with you, whoever you are. Let’s just call you Donald Trump. That’s not who it is, but it would be funny. Even if the celebrity that you shared a name with was a fantastic person that everyone loved, it still wouldn’t be–

**John:** Like Tom Hanks. Let’s say your name is Tom Hanks. Not helpful.

**Craig:** No. It’s just going to be an endlessly annoying discussion you have with people that will start a lot like this. “Is that really your name? What’s that like?” Every meeting you have. Every – look, you already now. You deal with this in your life anyway.

So, no, John is absolutely right. Get a pen name. I believe you have to register those with the Writers Guild, right?

**John:** Yeah. I think you’re supposed to register pen names. I legally changed my name before I moved to Los Angeles. So, for people who don’t know the backstory, my original last name is German and it looks pronounceable, but we pronounced it weird. It was a challenging last name. And so I was deciding as I went through high school, like I think I’m going to use a different name for my career. And I think I might go be a screenwriter, so it was like my mom’s maiden name is Peters. And I’m like, Peters is a good name. I could be John Peters.

**Craig:** Whoops.

**John:** But, nope, there’s a famous movie producer named Jon Peters. He’s J-O-N Peters, but that would have been confusing as heck. And so I’m really glad I didn’t pick that. So I picked my dad’s middle name, August, and it’s worked out for me very, very well.

So, Kanye West, or whatever your name is, I think you should make a similar choice and pick a name that you like. It could be your legal name, if you want to change your name legally.

You know, if you got an annoying name like that, just change your name legally. It’s not going to help you at all to have a weird name.

**Craig:** I agree. If it’s really bumming you out, just change it. What’s your actual – what’s your middle name, John?

**John:** Tilton. T-I-L-T-O-N.

**Craig:** And you didn’t want to be John Tilton?

**John:** To me it always felt like I was missing a name there. Like Tilton didn’t feel like enough of a last name to me.

**Craig:** Because you just knew it as your middle name.

**John:** I knew it as my middle name. And it feels like a cheese.

**Craig:** John Tilton?

**John:** Like Tilton cheese.

**Craig:** No, that’s Stilton.

**John:** It’s Stilton. I know. But it’s close enough. I just didn’t like it. I didn’t love it.

**Craig:** God. You are just so WASP-y. John Tilton August.

**John:** Yeah, but the Tilton is gone completely. It’s been banished. It hasn’t been part of my name for 25 years.

**Craig:** Tilton.

**John:** Tilton.

**Craig:** Tilton.

**John:** Tilton. Ben in LA wrote in and he sent audio, so let’s take a listen to what Ben wrote.

Ben: I have a quick question. It’s about writing for humor. Now, there’s a thought that “you can’t teach funny,” which I believe to be fairly true. But, is there a method you use to improve, construct, workshop humor in your scripts? I have my own script that I’m trying to break right now that has a decent character and set up, but trying to find all these possible and best scenarios it could go. For TV, you have the audience of the writers’ room, but on features you tend to work alone and I don’t necessarily laugh at all my own jokes.

So, anyways, any advice you have would be greatly appreciated. And, again, thank you very much.

**John:** Craig, what advice do you have for Ben?

**Craig:** Well, this is a tough one. I mean, so no, you can’t teach funny. But certainly funny people can get funnier. And I think that every funny person starts out as an amateur funny person, a class clown, or someone who writes funny emails to their friends, or funny texts. And then hits the rubber and road of being a professional funny person, where you are now not just being paid to make people laugh. You are accountable for people laughing. And that is a whole different world.

The demands of that take some time to develop. Any standup comedian will tell you that time is required. And I doubt any standup comedian’s first set went particularly well. And it’s the same for comedy writing in movies. The first scripts you write tend to be broad. I think basically there’s a lot of insecurity. You know, you’re so worried about people laughing that you try and make them laugh every three seconds and it gets really big and really broad.

The only practical tip I have, other than going through the experience of seeing people react to your work, which is easy enough to do. Have a little reading with some actors and see if people laugh. Is to always keep in mind that surprise is at the heart of laugh out loud comedy. You can’t really get it without surprise. So think about how to surprise people.

**John:** Yeah. I think sometimes we over emphasize this “you can’t teach funny” idea. And we sort of generalize it to like you can’t learn funny. And I think the funny people I know, they definitely spent some time learning about funny. I just finished reading Lindy West’s book, Shrill, which I really liked a lot. And she was talking about how growing up she used to tape Saturday Night Live and SCTV and basically anything she could possibly find. This is back in the days of VHS tape. And she would tape them all, and she would rewatch them, and she transcribed them, and she cut them together into super cuts. And she was really just trying to study and break down how it all worked.

And so she was a funny person, but she was also studying her craft. The same way I think people have musical talent but they also work really hard at it and they sort of – they study it. They really pick it apart to see how it all functions so they can do it themselves. And so I don’t want anyone to sort of think like, oh, because you can’t teach funny no one can learn. People definitely do learn. And it’s important to sort of keep that in mind.

I think one of the first things you’re going to learn is the difference between something being funny situationally and funny because the character is saying funny things. And they’re really different things and we sometimes conflate them. So, situationally funny things are that sense of a mismatch between the character and the environment they’re in. The bull in the china shop kind of stuff. Funny situation is a character trying to keep a secret, physical absurdities. The stuff that’s situationally funny will tend to work even if the sound was turned off, or a language you don’t speak, you could sort of get situationally why it’s funny.

The ability to write funny dialogue is a different thing. The ability to write jokes is a different thing. And you have to understand more what’s happening in the listener’s mind to get a funny line, to get a joke to work. And that, again, takes practice. It’s a different kind of thing.

You know, we talked about shifting frames of reference. Being funny is you as the person telling the joke or setting up the comedy, you know where it’s going to go, but you have to be able to put yourself in the mind of the person who doesn’t know where it’s going to go to see exactly where they’re at, and then be able to surprise them with where you took them. And that takes skill and talent, but also practice. And so you have to dedicate yourself to that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. I mean, comparing it to music. You can carry a tune, so you can sing. OK, you want to be a professional singer, here are 5,000 technical things you need to learn that are all the way from breath control to different kinds of bravado to how to transition from your chest voice to your head voice. It’s the same with comedy. You do have to be a funny person. You have to know how to sing. But the technicality of comedy is extraordinary. It is far and away the most technical aspect of any writing I think that’s done.

And the rules and the constraints that you set up for yourself are really important. I mean, I can’t tell you how much I learned from David Zucker. And it’s not that I generally even write in that vein of comedy, but I learned technically an enormous amount from him. I also learned a lot technically from Todd Phillips. It was a very different style of comedy. But you have to be an endless student of the technique of comedy because it is rigorous.

Nobody – well, I’m not going to say that. I will say this. There are people that make comedies and they think that the easy part is the joke parts and they’re wrong. Those are the hardest parts. It is a rare thing to find a director that can shoot a funny movie. There’s just not that many of them because that’s where all the technique has to happen. Even if all the technique is in the script. So, what I would say, Ben, is practice. And look at it rigorously. And like John says, study technique. Watch funny movies, that are funny to you, and then stop every time you laugh and go, OK, hold on. Back up. How was that set up? Where did I laugh? Did I laugh when they said the thing, or did I laugh when they cut to that person reacting?

Was it all in one shot? Was it physical? If it was physical, were the elements in play before that physical occurrence blew up? All these things. Analyze them carefully. Analyze them really, really carefully. Because that’s the physics of comedy. And it’s hard. I find it hard, obviously.

**John:** I think the other thing to watch is to watch for trends and watch sort of what’s happening out there. Because something that was funny ten years ago may not play funny now. Watch where the puck is headed. Like I watch Catastrophe, which I think is a terrific show, and smart on so many levels, but one of the choices they’ve made which I’ve seen them talk about is if I’m saying something that’s really funny, you’re going to laugh about it because it’s weird that people don’t laugh in comedies. And so a choice they made in that show is that if he says something funny, she’s going to laugh, and vice versa. They’re going to acknowledge that they’re saying funny things at times. That’s the rules of their universe. That’s the rules of their world. And I can see that happening probably outside of that sort of indie sensibility. I think it’s going to bleed out.

So, look for that kind of stuff. Look for what is out there and what’s possible.

Now, yes, if you’re writing on a TV show, there’s people around you and there’s other people who are going to help you sort of find that funny, which is great. And also to be writing for established actors playing those characters, which is also great. But in most of my experiences I’ve just been like the one guy alone in a room. And how do I know if something is funny? Well, you just kind of know. And to me what I’ve found to be most useful is if I’ve written a scene one day and I can go back a week later, a month later, and that scene is still funny, it’s probably actually funny.

It’s the thing that I wrote and the next day I’m like, ugh, this is just not funny at all, I trust myself in those situations and I rip them up. But I go back and start again.

**Craig:** This is a process that if you are a professional writer, Ben, you will be studying this changing it and perfecting it, whatever you want to call it, for your entire career. It never stops. Comedy is like magic. So, somebody comes along like David Kwong and says pick a card, and you pick it, and then he effortlessly pulls it out of your butt and you go how the hell did you do that? That’s amazing. It’s like magic.

It’s not like magic. It’s actually the result of thousands of hours of practice. And very careful misdirection and a ton of setup. And physics. Literally physics. So, that’s kind of the gig is you got to work at it.

**John:** The other reason why I think that magic metaphor is good is that there are different kinds of magicians. And so there’s people who do really great close up work, or sort of like Kwong does amazing things with numbers and words which are all great. But he’s not making planes disappear. He’s not doing that sort of big look at this giant stadium I have full of stuff. There’s different kinds of magic that are out there. And there’s different kinds of comedy also.

So, a person may be tremendously funny and really good at the jokey-joke stuff, and we love them for that, or the little sketch things, but they don’t really thrive in situations where they have to play the longer game, or they have to figure out the bigger movie. And that’s OK. I think it’s great that there’s people who are good at different kinds of things. And so as you’re writing, and you’re figuring it out what it is you like to do and what you’re good at, you may find that you have a strength. And play to your strengths. Go for what makes you happy.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** Cool. I think it’s time for our One Cool Things. I actually have two this week, so I’m sorry, I’m going to cheat. So my first one has been on my list as a One Cool Thing for a long time, but this week it’s especially relevant. So it’s McMansion Hell. Do you know this site, Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s the best.

**John:** It’s just the best. And so it’s only because it’s this last week that I know that it’s actually run by this 23-year-old. Her name Kate Wagner. And the blog is great. So McMansion Hell, it’s actually a Tumblr and just every week or sometimes twice a week she goes through and she pulls all the listings of these McMansions across America in different states and she takes like the relator listings and draws on them like little captions for all the horrible stuff you sort of see there, and like the bad architectural decisions. And so it’s really funny, but it’s also really good criticism of the choices that we make to make these giant monstrosities of houses. And how unlivable they are and how just impersonal they are.

So I’ve really learned a lot from this 23-year-old woman who does this great analysis of McMansions. And so I’ve loved the site for months and I should have mentioned this earlier on. But this last week, Zillow, the real estate company, sort of the online relator listings company, sent a letter basically cease and desist. You cannot be using our photos anymore. And basically she pulled down her blog.

So lucky the EFF stepped in and responded to her lawsuit. I’ll put a link in the show notes to what they wrote. And Zillow backed down. And so the site is back up. So you should go. You should enjoy it. You should support her on Patreon like I do. It’s a great site and I’m so happy that this – it’s one of those rare things that it just turned out the way it should have turned out.

**Craig:** I love that site. Where I live in La Cañada, there are a lot of McMansions. I do not live in one. I live in a very – I don’t know if you’re an architecture guy, but there’s an architect named Cliff May who kind of invented the California ranch home. And we live in one of the homes that he designed. It’s old and it’s rambly and it’s not at all a McMansion. It’s the opposite of a McMansion, which is why we love it.

But I look and see the real estate listings in La Cañada and so many of the homes that were built in the ‘90s and 2000s, they are essentially the same. They have this bizarre – I only like to talk about the interiors – this bizarre Italian great entry hall. There’s a sweeping staircase.

**John:** Well, it’s called the Lawyer Foyer.

**Craig:** OK, the Lawyer Foyer. That’s fantastic. There’s a sweeping staircase. Sometimes two. There is a very formal dining room. There is an oversized kitchen with an oversized island. There’s always a wood paneled study and then some weird creepy wine drinking thing with bad Tuscany kind of vibe. And it’s always the same. And it’s over, and over, and over.

**John:** Always the same.

**Craig:** Always. But you know what’s not interesting at all? The ceilings and the walls are just bland and flat. And they all use the same lighting. And it’s just, I don’t get it. I don’t get it. Why people look at that and go, yeah, this is amazing. I want to live here. It’s like that’s their idea of what a mansion looks like, the way that for some people Trump is their idea of what a rich person is.

**John:** Yeah. I was going to use that same metaphor. Yeah, it’s very much that. It’s a weird obsession. An aspirational idea of like if I have this kind of house I will be happy. But, I don’t think those people are happy.

**Craig:** No. No.

**John:** And if you a Patreon subscriber to her blog, she sends you a link to a slide show that has abandoned McMansions, which is just an extra kind of thing. And so at first you’re like, well, how can you tell they’re abandoned. But then you actually start to look. The yards are completely overgrown and sometimes the windows are like busted out. And it’s just like, oh, it’s great and sad.

**Craig:** It’s a real mess.

**John:** So my other One Cool Thing has also been on my list for a while, so I’m just going to knock it out. It’s call Yoink. And I’ve managed to use it quite a lot while I’ve been here in Paris because I’m on a 13-inch MacBook for this whole year. And mostly it’s been good, but there have been times where I needed to drag files around and just do organizational stuff, which on a bigger screen is easy, but on a small screen, man, it just bites.

And so what Yoink is, it’s a little docky kind of thing that you just drag something over to the edge of the screen and it just holds on to it for you, so then you can navigate to the next thing you need to go to and just drag it back out. It’s so simple, but I use it like nine times a day for putting stuff together. Even for doing the Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide. It was so helpful for just dragging stuff in and out and around.

So, Yoink. It’s a utility. You’ll love it. So, I’ll link in the show notes for that.

**Craig:** I purchased it. I purchased it and now I just have to remind myself to use it. Sometimes I get these very handy utilities and then I forget that they’re there and I keep doing my old stupid way of things. So, I’m going to do my best to Yoink it up.

My One Cool Thing this week is Matt Gaffney’s Weekly Crossword Contest. Can’t believe this hasn’t been one of my One Cool Things before. So Matt Gaffney is a fantastic crossword puzzle constructor. And he has this website – we’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s Xwordcontest.com. And what’s unique about his site, and what he does, there’s only one crossword puzzle a week. It comes out on Friday. But that crossword puzzle is not just a crossword puzzle. It’s a meta puzzle.

In every single one of his crossword puzzles there is a larger meta answer you have to pull out of it somehow. And then you send that in as your contest entry. And as the weeks go on, it gets harder. So there are two kinds of months. There’s the four-week month and then there’s the five-week month, depending on how the calendar is that year.

So, in a four-week month, you get to week four, it’s pretty tough. On a five week month, like for instance the one we are in right now, the fifth puzzle is generally brutal. David Kwong and I are big fans of this. We try and solve them together when we’re stumped. I’ll give you an example, for instance, of a recent one. The puzzle had running through the middle of it this big long answer that was subprime lending. Or subprime borrowing I think is what it was.

And the way to get to the meta answer was to look at all the prime numbers in the crossword puzzle on the grid and then – because it was subprime borrowing, go one letter below that. Take that letter, take all of those, and then unscramble them to get the ultimate answer. That’s the kind of brutality that Matt Gaffney visits upon everybody. Well, I love it.

This week, the entry – this was the first month he had done guest constructors. And this week, the fifth week, the guest constructors are myself and Mr. David Kwong. We have created a puzzle for Matt Gaffney’s Weekly Crossword Contest. And I think it’s going to stump quite a few people.

**John:** Very nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. Really happy about that. If you are interested in subscribing, it is a subscription-based service only. You get one month free as a little taster, and then you got to sign on. But it’s $26 for the year. It’s $0.50 a week for, I mean, I don’t want to tell Matt how much I would pay, but it’s 50 of the best cents I spend every single week. I absolutely love the work that he does. He’s a pretty brilliant guy.

So if you like crossword puzzles and you like brain teasers, this is for you.

**John:** Nice. Craig, I don’t think you know this, but because of you I have started doing the crossword puzzle every day. The New York Times. What? And so including David Kwong’s. This past week he did a New York Times crossword puzzle which was terrific.

**Craig:** Yes he did.

**John:** And I got it. And, yeah, so I quite enjoy it. So thank you for turning me on to the New York Times crossword puzzle.

**Craig:** And are you able to handle the Fridays and Saturdays?

**John:** I am most Fridays and Saturdays. There’s a couple times where it was like, you know what, I could spend an hour on this, more than an hour, and it’s not going to be rewarding, so I will reveal it. But here’s what I try to do. If I’m going to reveal, I reveal a word at a time so I can use that to help me get other stuff. So I can at least learn from it.

I don’t reveal the whole thing.

**Craig:** You will get really, really good. It’s just – I mean, I’ve been doing the New York Times now for, I don’t know, 20 years essentially. And you get really good. But it takes time. You pick up things along the way. Some of it is just picking up annoying words like Etui, and Esai, and R, and all that stuff. But some of it is just horse sense. You’re just like, oh, you’re not going for what I think you’re going for. You’re going for this instead.

**John:** Craig, is there a term for people who are famous only because they are useful in crossword puzzles? So, like Uma Thurman, Esai Morales, Enya, she shows up all the time. There’s a class of people who would seem much more famous than they actually are, but it’s just because their names fit well in crossword puzzles.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, there’s general crossword-ease, and then there are these crossword-ease people. There’s not a specific term for them, but it’s like Uma Thurman, she’s legitimately famous in her own right.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** But I think in today, Friday’s New York Times crossword puzzle, spoiler alert, one of the answers is Anna Sui.

**John:** Oh yeah, and I did not know who that was, but she felt well in this thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Anna Sui is basically only–

**John:** She’s a designer or perfumer?

**Craig:** Yes. She’s only famous because of crossword puzzles. Esai Morales, wherever he is ranked on IMDb Pro, he’s ranked number one for actors in crossword puzzles. And when you start to make them, you begin to understand why. When you build, so I’ve started making them now, and you realize that you get – you know, the basic concept is you lay down your answers that need to be there. Your theme answers. And then you start working around. And occasionally you get into a spot where you’re like the only thing that’s going to make this all work is if I can have an E-S-A-I here. So, it looks like Esai. Let’s get him in.

It’s just an incredibly useful name.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, if we can just make Godwin more famous, Godwin Itai Jabangwe, that Itai could be a useful crossword.

**Craig:** It would be huge.

**John:** Huge.

**Craig:** To have Itai would be amazing. I-T-A-I. So, the most valuable words for constructors to make their lives easy are short words full of vowels.

**John:** Mr. Jabangwe, it will be very lucky to be used in crossword puzzles.

**Craig:** Oh my god, if he became famous, Itai would revolutionize crossword puzzle construction.

**John:** That is an immigrant success story. That is Hamilton for all right there.

**Craig:** That’s right. Immigrants. We get the job done.

**John:** The job done. Our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, send us a link at ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send the questions like the ones we answered today. We love it when people send in audio files, so just read your question aloud and attach it to your email. And that is helpful for everyone. Because otherwise Godwin may have to email you and ask you to do it, so just do it the first time.

We are also on Twitter. I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. On Facebook, search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a review like the nice one we read aloud today.

Show notes for this episode and all episodes are at johnaugust.com. If you go to johnaugust.com/guide, you will get the Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide which you can download. And in the store, store.johnaugust.com, you can get the USB drives.

The other way to get all the back episodes is at Scriptnotes.net. It is $2 a month for the whole back catalog. We’ve got transcripts. We’ve got everything else. So just visit johnaugust.com and see those there.

And, Craig, a fun episode.

**Craig:** Terrific episode, John. I’ll see you next week. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USBs drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [McMansion Hell](http://mcmansionhell.com)
* [Zillow Threatens to Sue](https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/26/15876602/zillow-threatens-sue-mcmansion-hell-tumblr-blog)
* [EFF responds to McMansion Hell lawsuit](https://www.eff.org/files/2017/06/29/wagner_eff_letter_to_zillow_-_2017.06.29.pdf)
* [McMansion Hell wins](https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/29/15896146/zillow-will-not-sue-mcmansion-hell-blog)
* [Yoink](http://eternalstorms.at/yoink/Yoink_-_Simplify_and_Improve_Drag_and_Drop_on_your_Mac/Yoink_-_Simplify_drag_and_drop_on_your_Mac.html)
* [Matt Gaffney’s Weekly Crossword Contest](http://xwordcontest.com/)
* [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_307.mp3).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So, one of the scripts we’re discussing today has a few bad words, so if you’re in the car with your kids, that’s your warning.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, Episode 305, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s another Three Page Challenge where we take a look at scenes written by listeners and see if they follow the rules set forth by the Screenwriters University.

**Craig:** The laws. The laws of Screenwriters University.

**John:** Not mere rules. They’re actual laws.

**Craig:** Law.

**John:** We’ll also be answering listener questions on vintage screenplays, maturity, Smash Brothers, and writing with a budget in mind.

**Craig:** Oh, Smash Bros. Smash Bros, just so you know.

**John:** Smash Bros. Was it Bros?

**Craig:** Well, it is Smash Brothers, but they abbreviate the Brothers “Bros,” which my son’s generation apparently doesn’t realize stands for brothers. So they all – every kid I’ve ever met calls it Smash Bros.

**John:** And that’s actually a good shibboleth for Hollywood. If someone says Warner Bros, then they’re not actually in the industry. Because everything with Warner Bros is always Bros, but you say Brothers. You never say Warner Bros. You say Warners, honestly.

**Craig:** Right. I had a friend growing up whose name was Thomas. That was his given name. But his parents liked to abbreviate it as Thos. Which is the old fashioned way of abbreviating Thomas. And he just started going by Thos.

**John:** I like Thos. That’s a great name.

**Craig:** Yeah, Thos.

**John:** When we get the Three Page Challenges, Godwin actually did pick ones he thought had interesting correlations or challenges to the rules put forth by Screenwriters University, so I wasn’t completely making it up in the intro.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** So, hold tight. Some follow up first. Last week we talked about a new initiative where Sony Pictures would be making available the clean versions of some of its movies. Now, you and I did not have a lot of problem with this. There was minimal umbrage from us. But some people – they had some umbrage.

**Craig:** Predictably, the DGA.

**John:** Yeah. So the directors were not nuts about this. The DGA was up in arms about this. And so Sony backed down. So today as we’ve started recording this, we’ll link to a Variety article, but basically it said, oh, you know what, if the director objects, we won’t do it. So, some of those movies will not have the clean versions released into the world.

**Craig:** They are obsessed, the DGA is, with the authority of the director. And it’s so funny. When I read this I immediately knew it had to be the DGA, because in my mind I thought, well, what if the writer has a problem with it. Nobody cares, apparently, in features. Now, in television, no one would care if the director of an episode had a problem with anything. They’d be like, Piss Off. You know? Oh, my god, but the writer-producer, he doesn’t want it or she doesn’t want it, well, we better not do it.

And in features – this is the most arbitrary, bizarre delineation – it is growing more and more obviously stupid every passing year as I live. I’m just stunned by the, I don’t know, the dumbness of it all.

**John:** So, I have tremendous sympathy for a director wanting to have his or her work portrayed in the way that was originally intended. I totally get that. And yet when it comes time for a home video release, I think there’s by nature going to be some concessions kind of made. So, for example, if your movie is showing on broadcast television, you know there’s going to be an edit happening there. So I think it’s actually not uncommon for some directors to take their names off of movies or use a pseudonym for the TV edit of things. And I get that. But I also get why you need to do a TV edit of things because it’s broadcast television and you’re putting commercials in there. I just can’t work up significant outrage over this affront.

**Craig:** Neither can I. Well, you know, look, I love these directors who take their names off of things. Oh, like now somebody is going to turn it off. Nobody cares, for starters. Unless you’re Steven Spielberg and you took your name off, it’s not a news story. Nobody gives a damn.

Second of all, screenwriters working in the feature business, I mean, the people that are constantly telling us, hey, things have to change are directors. And now directors are just shocked. Hey, it’s the same deal with us. You took a check. You did something as a work-for-hire piece. Shut up. Piss off.

I mean, now I’m just angry at directors. Listen, if they came up with a system where the writer and the director, if the writer and director agreed, then they could do it. And if they writer and director didn’t agree, then they couldn’t. I’d be fine. But I’m just so – just the DGA’s cavalier presumption that half of their raison d’être is to promote the creative primacy of the director in features. It’s just so ugly to me. As somebody who has directed and as somebody who writes, I just find it so dumb.

**John:** Yeah. I’m glad that this topic actually was able to generate a little umbrage from Craig, even if it wasn’t the initial intention of it. Umbrage was found.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was a secondary umbrage infection.

**John:** So, previous umbrage to go back to is everybody remembers Patrick. Patrick was that guy who wanted 75% of this writing teams’ money for this feature idea which never went anywhere and it sat around for like 14 years. And so we advised KB when she wrote in that she could go back to Patrick is she really wanted to redevelop that idea, but honestly she should just focus on something else.

Well, KB wrote in and she sent us an audio clip. So, let’s take a listen to what’s new with KB.

KB: I really appreciate you guys dedicating so much time of the podcast to my question. And to give you just a little bit of follow up, my writing partner and I have agreed to let it be for now. I have a big project I’m trying to undertake and I am fully content to just throw myself into that instead of worrying about this other thing. And in the meantime I may very well try to reach out to Patrick and see if 13 years later he is interested in renegotiating with a much more reasonable rate for the work that we all did.

Again, thank you so much for helping us come to a conclusion on this. And I appreciate everything you guys do. You guys are the best.

**John:** Well that’s lovely. So, I’m glad she’s taking our advice. I’m glad she’s moving on and doing other stuff. And if she reconnects with Patrick, I hope it’s on better terms that are not 75%.

**Craig:** I would imagine it would be. I mean, time generally does put things in perspective, doesn’t it? And people grow up and move on. And there’s an immediacy to ownership in the middle of things. Also, when there is nothing but potential, I think everybody is probably a little paranoid that they’re going to be that guy who owned Apple along with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and then sold it all away for a handful of magic beans. They don’t want to be that person. But now all these years have gone by. OK, it’s not Apple. It’s not Star Wars. So, let’s all keep it in perspective.

But the one thing that she’s definitely right about is that we’re the best.

**John:** No question about that whatsoever. So, let’s see if we can be the best for some other listener questions. We’ve got a whole batch to go through. Craig, do you want to take the first one here?

**Craig:** I do want to take the first one. Daniel, from Los Angeles, writes, “I just finished reading a shooting script of the Sullivan’s Travels screenplay. I noticed the formatting was significantly different than modern production drafts. It was broken down into sequences with each scene heading being a shot description instead of a location. My questions are why did they change old production screenwriting methods into what we have today. And how much can a writer or director manipulate format when it comes to the shooting script?”

That’s a great question, John. And I’m a little worried, because I’m not sure how to answer this one. What do you think?

**John:** So, I’d actually done a little research on this for a blog post many, many years ago. And so my blog post isn’t fantastic, so I’m going to instead link in the show notes to History of the Screenplay by Michelle Donnelly. She wrote it for Script Lab. But basically as screenwriting developed, it developed hand-in-hand with shooting movies. So, it’s about 100 years old. And originally the first screenplays were just a list of shots. And first off, it was just a list of shots for the director to figure out. Like, oh, these are the shots I need.

And then as you started to have sound, you started to have recorded dialogue, they got more sophisticated. It got a little bit more like a play. But there are many different kind of formats for how they were doing this. What we kind of call now the Master Scene screenplay, which is just to you and me it’s just like a screenplay. It’s the only thing we’re used to. That started around with like Casablanca. That’s when you start to see scripts that kind of look like our scripts.

Now, they become more literary over time. If you think about the original scripts, they really were just like plans for making a movie. The scripts that you and I write now are plans for selling a movie. They’re very much like here’s the vision of the movie and in reading this script you’re supposed to be getting the sense of what this movie is going to feel like. But the initial drafts and probably what the Sullivan’s Travels screenplay was like was kind of more minimalist. And it wasn’t doing some of the standard conventions that we just think about with screenplays now where everything was a scene heading and everything was laid out a certain way on the page.

So, the history of it is interesting. I’m sure there’s probably really good books out there. I haven’t read the books. But right now we’re at a place where there’s a pretty standard screenplay format that most people in western countries end up using.

**Craig:** And it’s a fairly enduring format, too. It has essentially not changed since you and I began and now we’re on two decades now. And I don’t think it was vastly different prior to that.

Of course, with individual variations. Some writers are idiosyncratic in the way they approach it. But I think you kind of put your finger on what is almost certainly the truth. That back in the days of Sullivan’s Travels and Preston Sturges, my guess is that what happened was the head of the studios said to Preston Sturges, “I need another Preston Sturges film.” And he said, well, here’s an idea I have. And the guy said, “Great. We’re making that movie. Can you get an actor?” Well, here’s an actor. “Terrific. Make it.”

At that point then the screenplay becomes a very internal document. It does not serve the purpose that we have now. A screenplay now either is something that needs to be bought, or if it’s being developed at a studio it needs to be evaluated and signed off on and approved by many, many layers of people. And then it needs to attract actors. And then it needs to attract directors.

And so the screenplay needs to be fully fleshed out and also universally understood, like a Rosetta Stone of a movie, so that all of these disparate elements can come to it and then agree to participate whether they are financial elements or creative elements. So, that makes total sense to me. I’m going to accept that as the right answer, John.

**John:** Very good. So the second part of his question was are there alternates, or like how much can you push the form. And you and I both see some screenplays that do things a little bit differently. A classic example is some screenplays don’t really use the normal scene headers. Instead they’ll sort of go to slug lines that are a shot or a sequence. And it doesn’t do normal INT/EXT. That’s OK. Ultimately if you do that kind of thing, the line producer down the road is going to assign scene numbers to some of those things, but it will still all work.

As long as what’s on the page is a reflection of what you’re going to be shooting and what people are saying, it’s going to work. But you can’t push it too crazy far. At a certain point, people aren’t going to recognize this as a screenplay and they’re going to have a hard time really understanding what you’re going for. And they’re going to freak out a bit for that.

**Craig:** Correct. And in fact what you start to realize is that all of the stylistic variations ultimately are superficial. They are almost certainly employed to help the writer just do their job. Scott Silver writes in this kind of funky quasi-format format, but really it’s the format. It’s just that there’s a few stylistic differences. And it helps him do his job. It helps him write the way he writes. Everybody has those little quirks and bits and bobs.

But none of it really does ultimately undermine the functions of the elements of a screenplay. Because people are relying on those. And if they’re not there, they’re going to hand it back to you and say, “Can you put them in there.” It doesn’t really matter if they look exactly the way they do in most screenplays. But we do need some version of them because we need the information.

**John:** So I’ve written a fair amount of animation, as have you, and in animation, sometimes the scripts look a little bit different. They will number sequences out. And honestly the process of making animation, the script is really important, but the script goes through another process where it becomes storyboarded and that becomes more the shooting template before you actually get into a production.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** In the bonus episodes, I have a really great article with Justin Marks where he talks about Jungle Book. And for Jungle Book he wrote a script and people read his script. But he also had like all these presentations where they had to show through sequences of what things were going to look like. In our conversation it’s clear that it was a much more interactive process of getting that script and the production and sort of what they’re doing – he was writing little bits and pieces all the time. And that tends to be very true in animation. And the kinds of things we’re making are often sort of hybrid animation.

So, I think you’re going to see a little bit more experimentation in certain kinds of screenplays that are designed for like not traditional point a camera at something and shoot.

**Craig:** 100%. I mean, I’m going through it right now on my Lindsay Doran movie, because it’s a live action movie but it’s Jungle Bookish in that there are a lot of entirely CG-created creatures. And many of their scenes are separate and apart from humans. Those essentially become animated scenes, comped against live backgrounds, but essentially plates.

So, we’ve been doing some previs work there and what I do is I take the relevant pages from the script and I just make a new document. That’s now a sequence document. And I start fiddling around with it, you know. And coming up with ideas and thoughts and adding things in. That’s the freedom that you get from animation. And then that really becomes – all of those sequences ultimately will in aggregate become the screenplay of those sections of the movie. Screenplay is a functional document. And when it ceases to be functional, it’s perfectly fine to transition to a more functional document. There is no need ultimately to worship the original format of that document. If it runs out of usefulness, let it go.

**John:** Agreed. All right, our next question comes from Varune in Pennsylvania. He writes, “I was wondering how important it is to consider budget size when picking a project from a list of ideas to write. I know you often say write the movie you wish you could see, but when you’re equally interested in say four or five ideas, and they vary from being something that would be low budget or higher budget, which is the one that you realistically as someone who is trying to break into the industry should focus on?” Craig?

**Craig:** I wouldn’t get hung up on it. There are really very few exceptions to what I just said to you. The issue is this. You may think, well, if I write a higher budget movie, there is a higher barrier to production, therefore there’s less of a chance that this gets made or it gets bought. Well, I’m not sure that that’s true. In fact, studios tend to now make fewer but higher budget films. So, there is this enormous appetite for tent poles and more importantly most of the jobs that are available at studios are to rewrite or work on the development of high budget movies.

Now, that said, there are certain genres where low budget is kind of a plus. If you are a horror fan, writing low budget is probably smarter because there is this tremendous renaissance in low budget horror film. They do extraordinarily well at the box office relative to their budget, and sometimes relative to any budget. And writing a high budget horror movie will probably raise a few eyebrows in terms of what are we supposed to do with this. We don’t really make these.

But mostly I would say don’t get hung up on it because if it’s terrific, then you have done your job. Far better that you write a terrific blank budget movie then a so-so blank budget movie.

**John:** Agreed. I would also say it’s important to understand what is the kind of budget for the kind of movie you’re trying to make. And so if you’re making a romantic drama but you are writing it in a way that it’s going to clearly cost $100 million, that’s a weird mismatch. So, that’s where you need to be aware of the budget. Likewise, if you’re doing things, the single room horror movie, great. That’s always going to work.

If you have an aspiration to do big comic book movies and you want to write one of those, well, write one of those. Write something that is up to that scale. And it would be a good experience for seeing what it’s like to write that kind of stuff on the page. It’s much less fun than you think it’s going to be. I guarantee. It’s actually really tedious to write those big sequences. But read those scripts and if you want to write one of those scripts, absolutely write it. I think it’s useful, especially as you’re starting out, to not limit yourself to only things you think could get made, or only things that could get you staffed. Write the things that you think you could do great at. Or, you don’t know if you can do great at, but you have the opportunity to experiment when you’re just starting out.

**Craig:** That’s great advice. It is actually quite boring to write those large, noisy scenes. There’s always, hopefully, some bits and pieces in there that are inspiring to you. That’s why the scene or sequence is there. But the actual choreography of things falling and blowing up is sometimes can feel a bit tedious to do.

By the way, you can always go down and stay interesting. For instance, if you want to write a low budget superhero movie, that would be totally fine. You can write a fascinating $1 million superhero movie because it’s genre-bending. It’s just when you’re going up, that’s where because you’re asking people to spend a lot of money, you probably don’t want to get particularly experimental or artistic about it. You want to live within the pocket of stuff that is popular because you’re saying, hey, I’m expecting you to spend a whole lot of money.

You know what movie comes to mind? I don’t know if you ever read the original script for Hancock which was entitled Tonight He Comes.

**John:** I did. And I actually got to help out on that movie a little bit.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** I loved that script. And I absolutely love what Vince Gilligan did with that script as well.

**Craig:** Yeah, so you know, initially Tonight He Comes, it was that kind of strange thing where the script was a big movie, but it was – it had an indie sensibility. And, of course, over time the sensibility was changed to match the budget. And I actually like Hancock quite a bit, but you can do it, it’s just that it becomes a challenge. Whereas writing down towards a budget I think is always a perfectly reasonable choice.

**John:** I agree. Do you want to take the next question?

**Craig:** Sure. James writes, “Do you think it’s easier to write when you are young and stupid?” Ha, James. “In your teens and twenties you believe you know everything. The ideas you have are better than anyone else’s. The plot points are obviously the best way things could occur. In your thirties you realize human behavior is a little more complex. Your earlier plots start to feel a little naïve and unlikely. In your forties, so many of the exciting, interesting ideas become totally implausible. Do you find that your own perspective on writing has changed over the years? How do you make sure that the weight of life experience becomes a launch pad and not an anchor?”

Fascinating question. We have excellent listeners. They’re smart.

**John:** They are so smart.

**Craig:** Yeah. The ones that aren’t in their twenties. They’re young and stupid. [laughs]

**John:** James, it’s less of a question and more of an observation. Naturally, things are going to change over the course of your career. There are things that I loved about being a writer in my twenties because I didn’t – in some ways I was more worried about more things then. I was always worried about screwing up. And I’m much less worried about screwing up now. The advantage of experience is I can recognize opportunities and problems much further in advance. And so I don’t have to write my way into the middle of a scene, or the middle of a movie. And you’re always like, oh wait, that’s just never going to work. Or I should have done this differently.

But I think in some ways, like part of the reason why I went off and did Arlo Finch as a book is because it was a chance to be 20 again and to be like brand new at something. And that’s also really exciting. So, I think there’s no reason why your experience at 40 is going to slow you down as long as you’re continually trying to push into new things and not keep doing the same stuff again and again.

**Craig:** I agree. I think, actually, James, you’ve kind of found the right dichotomy here. There are plusses and minuses to all of these stages of your life. There’s no question in my mind that after 20-whatever years I’m a better writer now than I was when I started out. Certainly the wisdom that comes with experience is greatly helpful. It speeds things up. It’s a bit like – somebody once told me having a pool doesn’t add value to your house when you sell it, but it makes it sell faster. And I think sometimes age is a bit like having a pool. You probably aren’t going to be better at solving particularly intractable problems, you’re just going to see them a lot faster. So, there is real benefit there. I also think that as you go on in time, hopefully if you’ve had success along the way, there’s a certain comfort level that comes with that.

You naturally will begin to accrue an authority, because you’ve been doing it for a while. It’s only – I mean, it’s human nature. If you’re sitting in a room and you’re 22, the people in that room with you are almost certainly older than you and almost certainly have more experience than you. And that will color the way that they read your work and speak to you. And, of course, the converse is true. If you are older than they are and you’ve been doing it longer than they have been, even if they are technically in a position of authority over you, there’s a natural deference that occurs. It’s earned. And it is reasonable. And as you’re older, when you run into trouble you tend to panic less because it’s trouble you’ve been in before. It’s not your first time in quicksand.

Now, the one thing I will say about being in your 20s is that there is a freedom to the way you write that is glorious. Because you do not see things ahead of you. So you are running fast and wild with no concern whatsoever that you’re going to get smashed in the face by, you know, a boulder trap. Later on you realize it’s nothing but boulder traps. The idea of just stepping on a twig, a thing is released, and a boulder smashes you down. That’s kind of what screenwriting is.

Alec Berg I think said once that he was going through some old stuff and he pulled it out and he was reading it and he thought like, well, it’s not as good as what I write now, but there’s a freedom to it. And he said he missed it. Just a certain abandon.

So, you know, you – we are always where we’re supposed to be. That’s the truth. And I don’t think that as we grow older life experience becomes an anchor. If you start feeling the weight of an anchor, I think it’s probably not so much that your life experience and your age is getting you down, it’s that you have now been doing something long enough to know you don’t want to do it anymore. Which is an entirely legitimate feeling. And there are people who just stop. And look at Dennis Palumbo, our Scriptnotes favorite therapist, who was a very successful writer in television and then in film. He got an Oscar nomination. And then just decided I don’t want to do this anymore. And just stopped and became something else.

That is a voice to listen to. But, yeah, every decade of your life comes with ups and downs. Alas.

**John:** Alas. That’s how it goes. Let’s do one last question. This is from Reed. He writes, “I’m currently writing a script that is basically a road trip movie with gamers. Super Smash players go on a road trip to a tournament and play Super Smash Bros really throughout the story. As far as the characters in the story, they are all original, but much of the content they discuss and play I don’t have the rights to. I finished the first draft and am preparing to send it out. I’m wondering what people in the industry are likely to say given the nature of the story. Will they laugh at me because I made a rookie mistake? Or is it something they could potentially work around?”

Craig, what do you think? Is Reed going to be laughed at?

**Craig:** No, he’s not going to be laughed at. I think in this case, though, because it’s so heavily weighted on somebody else’s IP, there’s probably value in acknowledging to people when you send it, hey, I am aware of this. Just so that people don’t go, “Is this guy the dumbest person in the world?” There is a difference between sending somebody a script and saying, “Buy this, make it,” and “Read this, I’m good.”

Reed does need to understand that he has put himself in a very difficult situation. There is no chance that this movie is going to be made without a lot of input and control ceded to the Nintendo Corporation. By and large, they don’t do this frequently. And when they have, it hasn’t worked out very well for them.

So, if he’s aware of that, then I think it’s fine to just sort of say, hey look, this is about the writing.

Now, I have to say, my son went through a Super Smash Bros phase in his life and one of the questions is how necessary is that specific element to this. Can it survive without it? It may not be able to, but it’s something worth at least asking.

The other movie that comes to mind is Fan Boys, which centered on guys on a road trip trying to break into Skywalker Ranch. And it was very Star Wars heavy. But there are so many Star Wars elements that are now essentially doable because they’re part of culture and there’s kind of a fair use thing going on there. So, no, I don’t think they’ll laugh at you. But I think it probably would be good if you somehow acknowledged that you knew.

**John:** A way I might acknowledge that I knew would be the intermediary title page which is like you have the title page to your script and then after that you have what would be like a dedication page in a book where you might say like Super Smash Bros is a worldwide phenomenon, sold this many things. It’s property of the Nintendo Corporation. It’s not mine. And then the script starts. It’s a way of saying like, look, this is a really big deal. I don’t own the rights to this, but you’re going to read this because it’s a really good script. That’s a way of sort of setting up what you’re going into.

I would also say like, Reed, you wrote a writing sample. We’ve talked about this on recent podcasts. You know, you wrote something that you really wanted to see out there in the world, and if it’s good, people will read it and they might hire you for other stuff. And maybe there’s a way you can swap something else in.

What I found so fascinating about Reed’s question is he’s worried what people are going to think and say. He’s sort of worried about his feelings. Don’t be so worried about your feelings. Write the thing you want to write. And if it’s great, people will respond to it.

**Craig:** What are these feelings you experience, Reed? [laughs] Oh, I will say though that you’ve given him excellent advice, by the way, of how you described that intermediate page, because there is something very clever about saying this is what it is, this is how many people play it, it is owned by these people. Not only are you acknowledging that you’re very aware of what you’ve done, but you’re also telling them this is huge.

The issue is somebody might pick it up and go, “Well, this is, A, somebody else’s property, and B, who gives a damn about Super Smash Bros?” Well, 80 million people. You know, whatever it is. That number is going to perk them up. They always get excited about that sort of thing. So, very smart.

**John:** Cool. All right, let’s get on to some new work. Let’s get on to our Three Page Challenges. So, as always, we have a special guest reading our synopses this week. Craig, do you want to set up this guy, because he’s your hero.

**Craig:** He is my hero. Steve Zissis, my sprit animal, my Greek brother from another mother, star of the dearly departed series, Togetherness, on HBO. And Steve has now kind of branched into his own deal. He’s a proper entrepreneur now. He has set up a new series – and who is that with, that new series? Oh, I don’t know if it’s been announced yet. So I’m not going to say. But he’s got something going on. How about that?

He is the partner of friend-of-the-podcast, Kelly Marcel, and they have a child. So he’s a new dad. And we thought since he was probably up a lot at night he could just do this for us.

**John:** So thank you, Steve, for reading the synopses. If you would like to read the full Three Page Challenges, there are links in the show notes, so you can open up the PDFs and read along with us. So let’s let Steve take us off with our first Three Page Challenge.

**Steve Zissis:** Oh Fuck, I’m Invisible, by Wyatt Cain. We open on Vlad and Ilyich, two Russian soldiers, standing guard outside a Siberian military base. They chat about weight loss plans, when suddenly an invisible creature snaps Vlad’s neck and strangles Ilyich. Cut to Dave’s apartment, where Dave watches his roommate, Mandy, through the key hole, waiting for the chance to make his escape. He thinks he’s clear, but then Mandy spots him and regales him with a story of how she finally fucked that adopted chick.

Dave emerges from his apartment, checking the time. He spots, Kalman, his decrepit Polish neighbor. Kalman invites Dave inside to look at his new painting. Dave is too polite to decline. Now, seriously, Dave rushes down the street. He’s accosted by a crazy homeless lady muttering a prophecy about the one who casts no shadow. She follows him. At Leo’s Tacos, Mohammed waits. He sees Dave and homeless lady approaching. Homeless lady in the middle of a prophetic proclamation. With that, we reach the bottom of page three.

**John:** Craig, what do you think of Oh Fuck, I’m Invisible?

**Craig:** Well let’s start with the title first. Obviously it is designed to provoke. Oh Fuck, I’m Invisible. Now, these sorts of things when we started out would have just been like, what? But it’s quite trendy now to do this sort of thing. Obviously Wyatt Cain is very well aware that you cannot release a film called Oh Fuck, I’m Invisible, but Wyatt Cain quite cannily also understands that that’s OK. He’s just trying to get his script read. And in a big pile of scripts, the idea here is, oh, somebody might pick up Oh Fuck, I’m Invisible.

It is quickly becoming overdone. I see a lot of this. The cutesy title. But that in and of itself, there’s no judgment there. There was generally speaking here a very solidly put together three pages. There’s some mystery and there’s some confusion, but mostly tends towards mystery, which I like. So, just going through it roughly.

First of all, just the appearance of these pages is correct. If I don’t read them and I just look at them, they look correct. A lovely balance of action and dialogue and the action is rarely more than three lines long. Only once really. So I love that. Very, very good.

A little bit of a problem right off the top, just always worth proofreading here. It’s not really a proofreading thing, it’s more of a think-o thing. We’re EXT. Siberian Military Base. Night. “Frozen tundra. Just bleak, icy bullshit in every direction,” which is hysterical. That’s funny. “The only dot on the landscape –,” Dot on the landscape, “A Russian military compound. Two RUSSIAN SOLDIERS, Vlad and Ilyich (30s), stand guard outside a heavy bunker door.” Well, if it’s a dot on the landscape, how the fuck can I see Vlad and Ilyich? They are dots inside of the dots across the bleak icy bullshit.

So, you want to like move in there. You can establish your exterior. Really, what I think you want is EXT. Siberia. Night. And then the only dot on the landscape—new thing. EXT. Military Base. A Russian military… So that we know we’re jumping in.

They have a little bit of pointless chit chat and then they are killed by an invisible creature.

By and large, it was exciting. It was fun to read. Lots of underlines and capitalizations and italics, which were reasonable because it was something that was kind of shocking. It wasn’t random. There was an invisible man or woman trying to kill them.

There’s an attempt at a transition, which I don’t think would actually work. Pushing in on Vlad’s bulging eyeball and MATCH CUT to an eye peers through the crack of a door. That’s almost certainly not going to work. But, you know, at least his heart is in the right place. I mean, if you just imagine it, it’s just not – either Wyatt hasn’t written his intention right, or he just hasn’t thought it through. One or the other. It’s not quite right.

And I did have to read a bunch here back over and over, because the geography was a little cluttered to me. He’s in his apartment. An eye peers through the crack of a door. I immediately – I don’t know if you did this – I immediately went to he’s at the front door looking out into the hallway.

**John:** 100%. I got confused on geography quite a few places in here. I’ll just jump in to say like what I love so much about this is Wyatt gets it. From the title forward, like Wyatt understands what he’s doing. And he seems to have probably read a bunch of scripts and sort of knows how this all works. I felt like I was in really good hands tonally throughout the whole thing. Sort of like he knew what we were expecting and he knew how to sort of honor that and push past it in ways that were really smart.

So you start with these Russian guys talking. The first guy is like, “I’ve lost seventeen pounds in six weeks. All I did was cut bread and sugar.” Which is like the weirdest thing to have Russian guards say, but it was just delightful and gave me a really good sense of like what the tone of this was going to be. But then the action sequence with this invisible guy killing them was great. So I loved all of that. Just really, really well handled.

But I had the same kind of like I had to reread a few things that I don’t think Wyatt understood that we could get confused on. So this confusing geography from the front door, but also on page two, Mandy is in the kitchen and Dave is trying to sneak out past. And we hear, “Yo, Dave, you’re up,” and reveal Mandy is in the bathroom, pissing with the door open. But she was just in the kitchen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I got – like wait, what? So here’s how you could make that make sense. So if Mandy was OS at that point, basically she’s walked off camera. So he doesn’t know where she is. He’s probably assumed she’s gone back to her bedroom. Then if that’s OS, then we hear this, he turns back, and then it’s revealed that she was closer by than he thought. But that seems so trivial, but if I had to read this three times to understand it, there’s a problem.

**Craig:** I completely agree. Those little things are important. It’s annoying. It’s frustrating. Because there’s actually no creativity involved there. You’ve already done the creativity. So Wyatt has imagined this apartment. He knows. He could draw us a picture of the apartment perfectly. And he might even understand that the time lapse between her cooking breakfast and her in the bathroom is a bit elastic. It’s just that we don’t see it. So there’s this annoying busy work that must be done to protect the creative parts. Think of it that way, Wyatt. It’s just you’re protecting all of your brilliance by doing the annoying parts so that we can see it. It’s as simple as that.

But, yeah, and you know, and Mandy, there’s kind of a fun way of revealing that Mandy is a lesbian, or bisexual. And then we’ve got a great little screenwriting convention here. You’re always looking for some sort of propulsive force through things. You know, we don’t like reading scenes where nothing is happening or people are simply floating through. He’s late for something. We don’t know what it is. Classic simple mini-mystery.

He glances at his watch. It’s 12:07. He’s trying to get out. He gets pulled aside by his neighbor. And now he’s even more late. Now, and this is the part where it’s on that think border between confusing and mysterious, he encounters a crazy homeless lady. He is not taking her seriously until she says something that’s not particularly more crazy than the first thing she said, or the first two things she said. And then he decides, oh OK, you’re coming with. That was one point where I actually wanted to see him react. I needed a moment there where I understood that Dave heard something in what she said the third time that wasn’t there the first two times. And even though we can’t tell the difference, he can.

So, I needed a little moment of recognition there.

**John:** Craig, I think you actually misread that. And I had the same problem here, too. So, Dave says, “That’s great. I actually have to—“

“…about the one who casts no shadow.” So that following, I think it means that she gets up and starts following him.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** And so if you take that, so take that parenthetical and break that out as an action line. She gets up and physically follows him. Because then his line like, “Oh, OK, you’re coming with.” Basically she’s just started walking after him because then he sees like Dave and homeless lady are approaching in the next scene. So this homeless lady is just like following him.

**Craig:** Oh OK.

**John:** And kept talking to him. It makes good scene sense. It just didn’t make sense with the words on the page.

**Craig:** Yeah, no. So that was just executed incorrectly. Because following shouldn’t be in parenthesis. The problem with “following” is it’s an ambiguous word. People follow each other just with speech. They follow by understanding, whatever. So I thought he meant following, like I get what you’re trying to do, but I’m going to keep talking.

So you do need to put that in action. And then when Dave says, “Oh, OK, you’re coming with,” I think then Wyatt means to say that Dave is like, “Oh, OK, you’re coming with, like you’re not leaving me.” That does require a parenthesis of like (oh shit) you know. We need to know what his attitude is there, because those words on their own are far too ambiguously read for me to get what’s going on there. But I mean, overall these were very good–

**John:** Good pages.

**Craig:** Pages. And it’s a fun tone. And certainly makes me want to keep going. I think you put your finger on it. Wyatt seems to know what he’s doing. And we’re in good hands here, so good job.

**John:** Cool. All right. Let’s get to our next Three Page Challenge. Mr. Steve Zissis, if you would please give us our next entrant.

**Steve:** TMU, a pilot by Azhur Saleem. London. 1847. Night at the Tabbard Inn. In a lodger’s room, an oil lantern flickers. A leather case slams on the table. Ervin, a small haggard man, frantically grabs his belongings around the room. He lifts the mattress, retrieving reams of paper – mechanical schematics, machinery layouts, anatomical drawings of human body parts.

Ervin folds the papers away into his carry case. He scrawls a message on a sheet of paper, then doubles over, throwing up a thick tar-like substance. As he tries to compose himself, a burly man bursts into the room. The two men tussle, with burly man going for the carry case. Ervin fights back, rescuing what he can of his papers. In a final desperate effort to escape, Ervin leaps out of the second floor window. Burly man expects to see his [unintelligible] dead on the street below, but to his surprise Ervin is gone.

And those are Azhur Saleem’s three pages.

**John:** All right. I will start off this one. So, I had a lot of notes here. I had a lot of things that I had a hard time following just on the page. I liked overall where this is going. I liked overall the tone we were able to create. It felt overwritten to me. And I felt like every sentence was about one clause too long. And so I want to sort of really just dig in to the words on the page here less than about the plotting that I saw.

So, this starts with a teaser, so this is some sort of pilot for some sort of show. We’re in Bethnal Green, London. First line here: “Hopeless poverty stains the fabric of this borough. Down one squalid street, several silk weavers close up shop.” So those first two sentences we had fabric and silk, which is sort of the accidental parallel and makes it feel like they’re the same thing, but fabric is a completely different thing than silk for how you’re trying to use it. It was poetry doing you wrong there. So, clean that up a bit I’d say.

I would also advise to sort of combine these first two sections. Because it’s meant to be this establishing shot that gets us into London 1847. And then we’re at the Tabbard Inn. But I kind of felt like we were in the same place the whole time. Maybe it’s one tracking shot. Maybe it’s some way to get us to the Tabbard Inn, like follow somebody to get us there. But it was a lot. I had to sort of slog through it.

The other word that got repeated a lot in this opening section was light. So, “The windows glow with a warm light, which peters out on the river of mud squelching through the street.” Not quite sure what squelching means there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Mud doesn’t squelch on its own.

**John:** “Above all the noise and clamor, a second-floor window with a solitary light that illuminates one room.” A light illuminates – it was just a little – again, just a little too much. I felt like there were extra words being thrown in there just to sort of be pretty that weren’t actually helping tell any story or get us moving through the scenes.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yup. Keep going.

**John:** Keep going. So, we get into the Tabbard Inn. “An oil lantern flickers on a wooden table.” God, we’ve had a lot of light here so far. Let’s get rid of the rest of this sentence and finally get to our main guy. So, this guy Ervin, he’s described as being blustering around the room. He blusters around the room. Not entirely sure what blusters means in this thing.

But there’s some actions in the next paragraph that are really helpful. “He grabs his belongings from around the room. Throws them into the carry case.” Let’s let that be our first encounter with Ervin and then give him the sentence that describes what he’s like. I felt like I had to go through a long description of what he was like before I could see what he was doing.

He’s in the middle of action. Let’s see the action first before we kind of get into it.

Then finally we start to have this encounter with the burly man. I like the burly man’s dialogue. “Don’t kick up a shine now.” That felt great. That felt period. And the action within this was all good. I was curious to see that there’s something kind of Lovecraftian/Steampunky kind of happening here. And that was really interesting. So l liked when we actually got into the action sequence. I just wanted to get there a little bit faster.

**Craig:** Yeah. Generally I’m with you. I think that these are good pages in terms of what happens. The character, what he’s doing, and the encounter that occurs is perfectly fine. I agree with you that there’s a bit too much poetry. Here’s the danger with poetry. If it’s good poetry, well, your script has a bunch of unnecessary good poetry in it. If it’s bad poetry, oh boy. And there are things here that are just bad poetry. “The windows glow with a warm light, which peters out on the river of mud squelching through the street.” I don’t know how light peters out on a river of mud. If the windows are glowing with a warm light, they’re glowing. And mud doesn’t squelch on its own. Boots can squelch through mud. It just becomes sort of pointlessly ornate. And it starts to undermine confidence in what’s going on.

My bigger problem with the first half of this page is that it’s boring. If I’m shooting it, I’m so bored. So, I have a shot of a street. I have a shot of an inn. This is London in the middle of a sort of nightmarish, Victorian-ish time. And this is a rough part of town. There must be some better way to do this. Is there a rat running? Is there something – what are we following? Can we follow somebody who is leaving a prostitute and maybe she’s trying to get away and he grabs her and yanks her into the bar. And then we come up to see the light. There’s so many dynamic, fascinating, disturbing, funny, terrifying ways that you can do this and you’ve done none of them. You’ve just shown me a street and then shown me a building.

People and action are interesting. Streets and buildings are just streets and buildings. So, I wanted so much more. And remember, this is the first thing we see. The first thing we see. And you are using this to advertise your creativity here. And if it is not meant to be quiet and soft and small, then it must be somehow invigorating, provocative. And I think that given the tone here you want invigorating and you want provocative.

Similarly, when we get inside the inn, I just was missing a sense of direction. You have this image. He’s going through, he’s rummaging through his room. We’ve seen that a million times, so let’s not imagine that that’s interesting. He’s grabbing up all of these papers. Well, we have a mild interest in what those are. One particular image that we’re going to see – a figure suspended in the air. “Holding him aloft, six mechanical cables IMPLANTED into his back. Man and machine fused together…”

That’s something that could be just sitting there in the foreground. And in the background, there’s this man going around. Somebody lifting up a mattress and pulling stuff out is vaguely interesting because we understand he hid it for a reason. But that’s something that might be more interesting if the show is saying we have more to say than just that. Look at this picture. And then he comes up and then he grabs that picture at the last moment. Or maybe he doesn’t grab that one. That’s the one that he grabs in the fight. But make it special. Make it provocative and bizarre. Give us a moment to look at it so we can be looking at that while he’s doing these other things.

There is some good mystery going on. He’s puking up this creepy black substance. And then, of course, this man appears who is sort of Mr. Hyde-ish. And there’s a good fight. I like the way the fight is spread out. There’s a nice use of white space here, which is all terrific. And then here’s what happens. What happens is we see a street and we see a bar and we see room. We see a guy grabbing papers, and then a man comes in. He beats the guy up. The guy throws himself out a window. And then when the guy looks out the window, that man is gone. There is nothing there that is actually quite shocking to me.

The only thing that is shocking to me is the picture that has been drawn. That is the thing where I got, ooh, what is that? Yikes. Even the puking up black stuff. I’m like, OK, I guess there’s a supernatural thing going on here. Maybe that’s the last thing we see.

But, somehow or another this was well written, it just wasn’t well directed. And–

**John:** I would agree with you. This is an obvious thing to say, but I think the obvious thing might be the appropriate choice here. So, the action of this scene is that Ervin is like panicked and he’s packing up all his stuff to get out of there. So, why didn’t we start with him outside? Like he’s racing back to the Tabbard to get his stuff to get out of there. And so if those opening shots are like we’re following Ervin as he’s frantically trying to get back to his place and get past the prostitute and the guy fucking in the alley. And then get into the place, to get up to his room. He throws open the door. He’s packing up his stuff. And then the guy shows up. Then there’s at least some – there’s a reason why we had those earlier shots. And he’s helped introduced us to the world.

There might have been also just one opportunity for him to say something to somebody, or some other interaction would have happened before we got into this room and started fighting with this guy.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. Also I thought that the arrival of the burly man was a bit anticlimactic – or not anticlimactic, anti-pre-climatic, because his arrival is announced by footsteps. And generally speaking, if I’m in a show here where this guy is puking up weird creepy black stuff, and he’s dealing with man and machines, this man that’s pursuing him, there should be some hint of Something Wicked This Way Comes. Even if that man himself is not supernatural, here’s a tinkling. There’s somebody outside. The prostitute who is laughing with a guy. And the two of them, suddenly they’re not laughing anymore. Do we hear a body outside hit the ground?

There needs to be some exciting way to let us know, oh shit, the bad person is coming. And so there’s just more – there just needs to be more creativity here, I think.

**John:** I agree with you. The last thing I want to point out is that in both of the blocks of dialogue it’s starting with dot-dot-dot. But there’s no sort of pre-dialogue to get us into there. I don’t understand why there’s dialogue that’s starting dot-dot-dot. So he says, “…No, not yet.” “…Don’t kick up a shine now.” I don’t understand why the dot-dot-dots were there.

So, get rid of the dots.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve never actually done the preceding dot-dot-dots unless there was a trailing dot-dot-dot prior to it. And usually I wouldn’t capitalize the first letter of the first word following a dot-dot-dot because it is a continuation of something. It’s not the beginning of something. So, yeah, but that didn’t – believe me, if everything else was great, I wouldn’t have cared.

**John:** I wouldn’t have cared either. All right, Mr. Zissis, bring us home. If you could please read us the third Three Page Challenge.

**Steve:** Four Nineteen, but Ashley Sanders. The year is 2002. On a street in suburban Manchester, parents and their kids leave a birthday party. Owen Millar drives his four-year-old son, Sam, home. At home, Owen feeds his son, bathes him, then puts him to bed. Later, Owen’s wife, Sara, comes home. Takes off her makeup as Owen reads in bed. Through the course of the night, we come back to the time on the clock. 11:47. Owen tosses and turns. 1:12. Sara gets up to go to the bathroom and checks in on Sam. He’s fast asleep. 4:18. A moan from Sam’s room wakes Owen. 4:19. Owen goes to investigate. He opens the door to find two figures standing over Sam’s bed. One lifting the still sleeping child. That’s when we reach the end of page three.

**Craig:** I really enjoyed this. There is a strange thing that happens I think when stuff is working somewhat well. And that is it can impart a feeling without any individual piece of something telling you this is what you should feel. And overall what I felt was a growing sense of weird, unsettling dread. And I didn’t know why. That’s the best kind of dread. Because that’s actually how dread works.

You start to feel something and you don’t know why, because not one single thing that’s happening in and of itself is demanding of anxiety. And yet anxiety is what you feel.

So, let’s talk a little bit about sort of the first page. We’ll call this the normal life of things. We’re EXT. Suburban Street, Manchester. Please tell us if this is Manchester, United Kingdom, Manchester, New Hampshire, Manchester, Texas. Where are we?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Manchester in and of itself is not specific enough. Opening credits and music over “4 TODAY party balloons tied to a garden gate.” I understood that, but I think four should probably be spelled out F-O-U-R, because otherwise it’s 4, number 4 today, what is it 4 Today party balloons? It’s weird to start a sentence with a digit.

**John:** Yeah. What did you take that as? Were the balloons printed with 4 Today?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Or there were four Today balloons. Four balloons printed with the word Today.

**Craig:** Today. Like the party is Today. I think? But hard to tell. Generally speaking, what you don’t need to say is something like, “The cars, clothes and haircuts tell us this isn’t present day. CAPTION: 2002” The caption does it. Also, we don’t really call them – captioning is more of something that is imposed upon a movie to indicate this is what these people are saying in another language, or this is what this sign means in another language. Generally we would say Title.

**John:** Or super.

**Craig:** Or super. Exactly. Not caption.

**John:** Here’s my suggestion for that sentence getting into it. I would get that down to, “The cars, clothes, and haircuts tell us we’re in…,” here’s a good use of dot-dot-dot, “Super: 2002”

So you’re letting the page do some of the work for you here.

**Craig:** Right. I think that’s exactly right. I like actually how mundane this is. It’s so boring, and that’s exactly the right choice. So we have Owen. He’s the dad. And he has his young four-year-old son, Sam. And they’re returning from a birthday party. And now they’re in a – and I like the way also that this was done here. Ashely, our author, has done something that answers a question that we get all the time, which is how do you slug line or scene head scenes that take place in a house but in lots of different rooms and all sort of smushed together. This is how I would do it probably. We’re INT. MILLAR HOUSE. DAY. And then as we move around she just gives us bolded notes for where we are, which rooms we are. And we understand therefore that time is passing. And it is compressed. And there’s no need to over-explain it.

They’re watching dinner. He gives Sam a bath. They’re enjoying it. He reads his son a book. Now he’s alone. Suburban boring life. He’s drinking a beer, standing outside on the patio. His wife comes home. She gives him a kiss. Now she’s getting ready for bed. He’s getting ready for bed. There’s a little bit of a reminder that we are post-9/11. Owen reads a colour supplement in bed. Now I know, by the way, we’re in Manchester, United Kingdom, because it’s colour and supplement.

The front cover is a picture of the Twin Towers, the strap line: One Year On.

**John:** Strap Line. Yeah. So many things in one sentence revealed it. Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s the most English sentence in history. Colour Supplement. Strap line.

So in America we will not know what a strap line is, nor will we know what a colour supplement is. Twin Towers would be capitalized because that was a proper noun. And now they’re sleeping, kind of.

So, by this point on page two, either this is intentional or it’s not, but if it’s intentional I am enjoying how perfectly boring this is. It feels intentionally boring. That’s what we want.

And then what happens is Ashley delivers more intentional boredom, but now the dread begins to grow. There are these elements. Each parent wakes up for whatever reason. As mundane as I need to pee. And then goes right back to bed. Every time they move across the landing, there’s a floor board that creaks. Does it mean something? Maybe not. It happens each time. There is a little nightlight. Sam is sleeping. The clock keeps advancing. Keeps advancing. And then at the end of page three, he just again – repetition – the clock changes to 4:19. Owen gets out of bed. He crosses the landing. There’s the creak again. He steps into Sam’s bedroom. And gets an adrenaline jolt like a brick in the face. Very good.

And two figures are standing over Sam’s bed. One lifting the still sleeping child. This is very exciting. And we know from the title that the time 4:19 means something. I felt like this was expertly done, in my opinion. I really enjoyed it.

**John:** I really enjoyed it, too. So, a few things I would suggest for Ashley. I liked how she moved around the house. I would say for INT. MILLAR HOUSE on page one, rather than DAY say VARIOUS, which gives a sense of like, OK, this is going to be at different times. Or DAY TO NIGHT. Because you ultimately are going into night. So it’s a way of cluing in the reader we’re going to be here for a while, so just go with me.

I thought the Twin Towers stuff was on the nose when I read it, but it totally could work. I mean, nothing else bumped me, so I would totally forgive the Twin Towers stuff. And it does let me know that something bad is going to happen, probably, so that’s useful.

I loved near the bottom of page two, “Sam is spread-eagle in bed, sleeping the way only little kids can.” Absolutely true. Here’s what I liked about Ashley’s writing here. She was observant of normal human behavior in a way that felt like, oh, these are actual people. This is not just people in a movie. And that was great.

So, I loved the suspense I was feeling. Like the suspense of like I know something is going to happen just because of how she’s doing this on the page. And I’m really nervous. And there wasn’t thrum. She wasn’t talking about the music. Just the way it was done on the page, I could feel what the movie was going to feel like, and that was suspenseful. So, really nicely done.

**Craig:** Really nicely done. And also a little note on the title of the episode. So the series is called Four Nineteen. And this is episode is Episode 1, Sleep and Dream of Home. What a fantastic title. And I’ll tell you, that actually goes further with me than, Oh Fuck, I’m Invisible. Because it’s not gimmicky and yet I’m already somehow nervous. Sleep and Dream of Home. It’s very Neil Gaiman-y. It was all just really well done.

Ashley Sanders can do this and I’m excited for whatever this is. You never know, right? I mean, these things can turn into this wonderful series or not, but she can write. And she can write in this format. So very well done, Ashely. Very well done.

**John:** One last wrap up note. For both Ashley’s script and for Wyatt Cain’s script, which had title pages on them, they left off the word Written or Written by, so traditionally on screenplays and teleplays you will spell out Written by for this kind of thing, rather than just By or rather than just your name. So do say Written by. Put it on a separate line. That’s sort of the standard format here. And it’s just – it’s nice. There’s no reason to not do that on your title page.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** So I would also want to celebrate the wonder of Steve Zissis, so thank you very much for reading these aloud for us. If you have three pages you would like us to take a look at, go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all written out there. And there’s a form you can fill out. You can attach your PDF. And it will go into Godwin’s inbox. And he will take a look at it. So he picks the ones he thinks are going to be the most interesting, so not necessarily the best, never the worst, and we take a look at them every couple of weeks.

Thank you to all three of these writers for being so brave to share these with us.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. Mine is A Speck of Dust, the new Netflix comedy special by Sarah Silverman. It is delightful. So if you have Netflix, it is there. And you should watch it. I loved Sarah Silverman’s show on Comedy Central. And I was at the taping actually for one of her previous specials, Jesus is Magic, which is just so great. And I haven’t gone back to watch the special, but I feel like if the camera ever pans past me, there are moments during that special where I couldn’t breathe anymore. Like I had to sort of close my eyes and recapture oxygen in my body.

What I really appreciated, though, about this new special, A Speck of Dust, is what a good writer she is. Because she’s, I mean, after doing this for so many years, she’s a really good performer. She knows how to sell a joke, but the very careful ways in which she sets things up and comes back to them.

There’s a moment pretty early on in the show where she does a throwaway line, and then she stops and she goes back and she explains what a throwaway line and why she threw that joke away. And how it’s all going to – basically why you throw some jokes away, because they work better that way. But then she folds that back in to where it’s going. You recognize that it’s all so carefully planned and yet so effortless. It was really remarkably done.

So, I’d really recommend everybody check out A Speck of Dust, by Sarah Silverman.

**Craig:** If the world were fair, only comedies would receive awards. The level of skill and awareness and specificity and craft that goes into things like this are just remarkable, and she is an exceptionally good performer and writer. There’s no question about that. She really is at the top of her game.

So, my One Cool Thing, is somebody else who is at the top of their game. John, did you watch the BBC Miniseries, Sherlock?

**John:** I watched the first two seasons. I have not watched this most recent season. I will tell you that I fell off the Sherlock bandwagon, but I think you’re right in the middle of the Sherlock bandwagon, aren’t you?

**Craig:** Well, I went ahead and binged the whole damn thing because I was on a long flight and it seemed like a good idea. And the truth is there are parts of the show that I absolutely love, and there are parts where I’m like, meh. But my One Cool Thing is Mark Gatiss, who is both the co-creator and co-writer of the series, and also he plays Mycroft Holmes.

**John:** Oh, I didn’t realize that was the writer. He is so fantastic.

**Craig:** Yes. He really is – I hope I’m pronouncing his name right. It could be Gatiss. It’s Gatiss. Probably should have done the homework on that. Regardless, these are the people that somehow make me feel so terrible about myself because here he is, he was a performer and writer in a popular comedy troupe in the UK. Then he was running, writing, and occasionally acting in Doctor Who for a number of seasons. Then he does this. And he acts in it. And he does all these other things.

Ugh, I didn’t do anything today.

His portrayal of Mycroft Holmes is phenomenal. I would love a show that’s just Mycroft Holmes. That would be the most amazing series, just the Mycroft series. It’s spectacular.

He also, if you watch Game of Thrones, he also has appeared as Tycho Nestoris, I think the character’s name is. He’s the banker from the Iron Bank of Bravos who sits there–

**John:** Of course, that’s right.

**Craig:** And patiently explains to Stannis why they’re not going to back him with cash. Mark Gatiss, just spectacular. And, again, do look at – if you haven’t seen the show, and if you don’t get into it, you don’t get into it. But his portrayal of Mycroft is just wonderful.

**John:** Agreed.

All right, that is our show for this week. So, as always, it is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Sam Brady. 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. But the short questions, we love them on Twitter. So Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We’re on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Just look for Scriptnotes. If you’re there, leave us a review. That does help – helps other people find our show.

You can find the show notes for this episode, including the PDFs for the Three Page Challenges at johnaugust.com. You’ll also find transcripts there. They go up about four days after the episode posts. And you can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net, including the Justin Marks episode I reference today, which is really just terrific.

So, Craig, thanks for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. I will see you, whether you like it or not, next week.

**John:** Awesome.

Links:

* [Sony Won’t Release Clean Versions of Films if Directors Disapprove](http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/sony-wont-release-clean-movies-1202466211/)
* [The History of the Screenplay](https://thescriptlab.com/features/screenwriting-101/3147-the-history-of-the-screenplay/)
* [Steve Zissis](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1587813/)
* Three Pages by [Wyatt Cain](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/WyattCain.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Azhur Saleem](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/AzhurSaleem.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Ashley Sanders](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/AshleySanders.pdf)
* [Sarah Silverman – A Speck of Dust](https://www.netflix.com/title/80133554?source=applesearch)
* [Mark Gatiss](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0309693/)
* [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 Sam Brady ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 304 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’ll be looking at how screenwriters describe locations and how those choices impact production and the final product. Plus, we’ll be talking a look at how podcasts have become a new source of IP for adaptations. Also, how to deal with that note to make your characters “more likeable.”

**Craig:** Argh.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, for the first time in 11 months, we are in the same time zone.

**Craig:** It’s so nice. So I am here with my family in Amsterdam and having a lovely time. And we are on the exact same time you are. Central European Standard time, which in France is nice because it’s – c’est – it is.

**John:** It’s really, really nice.

**Craig:** So yeah, we’re here at the same time. The place where I’m staying, it’s a very large room. You know, the Dutch people are the tallest people in the world. You knew that, right?

**John:** I did not know that. That’s scientifically proven that they are?

**Craig:** It is a fact. And so the ceilings here are very high. They’re so much higher than any human being would ever be. For instance, the average height in America, it’s shorter than you think. Because it’s an average. So, some people are very, very small. In the Netherlands, the average height of a Dutch man is 6 foot. That’s average.

**John:** That’s tall.

**Craig:** Yeah. In the United States, I think the average height for a man is like 5’8” or something, or 5’9” maybe.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re very tall people. So, anyway, it’s very boomy and echoey in here. But, hey, you know what? We’re on the same time, so there’s that for us. Nobody else will appreciate it, but we can.

**John:** I was going to say, it’s going to be one of those rare cases where neither one of us is tired, is except that you’re probably a little bit jet-lagged. So, we will get through this together.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, I’m actually not jet-lagged now. Today is the first day of non-jetlag. And you know, that’s usually two days before you leave. And in fact it is. So, it’s just beautiful how you get perfectly attuned and then you get on a plane and do it again.

**John:** Because you’re no longer jet-lagged, you probably have the energy in you for these first two things. So our listeners, again, the best listeners in the entire world, they sent us two pieces of chum this week, just like bait to get us going. And this first one was really targeted towards you. It’s from a place called Screenwriters University. Craig, get us started.

**Craig:** Well, someone sent this thing. First of all, Screenwriters University, which is not a university, of course, and I assume they mean it’s a university for screenwriters, but then wouldn’t it have an apostrophe? They don’t have an apostrophe. So it’s just Screenwriters University. Those two words. They sent a list of what those people think are 20 common sense script rules. Now, you know, John, you and I are big fans of rules here, right?

**John:** 100%. We’re completely rules followers. If you give us a template, if you can give us some sort of like dogma to follow, it really helps us out a lot.

**Craig:** Well, normally when people put these things out, we don’t necessarily know if they mean them as dogma or not, but the people at Screenwriters University did us an enormous favor because they just went ahead and said right there at the top, “Note: These rules will not make you a better writer. They will simply keep you from annoying your average reader or crew member.” What? But here’s the best part. Per Screenwriters University, “You must learn these simple rules or consider another line of work.” [laughs]

**John:** That’s a fairly strong statement. Like basically you have to do this or else you’re not even a screenwriter.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t have a chance. There’s no world in which you cannot learn – learn – the rules according to ScreenwritersUniversity.com. There’s no chance for you. If you don’t, you’ll never work.

So, let’s go through a few of these. You know, some of them, sure. So, for instance, Fade In at the beginning of your film. Fade Out at the end.

**John:** Well, see, I’m already jammed here. Yeah, I’m already in a horrible position here because I’ve written many scripts that don’t start with Fade In and don’t end with Fade Out. So…

**Craig:** Well, John, I’m going to have to ask you to consider another line of work. [laughs]

**John:** Fortunately today we are actually at the Musée des arts et métiers which is the arts and trades museum. And I saw all sorts of other professions I could get into, such as like plumping or weaving. So that could be my next step if I can’t master Fade in and Fade out. At least I have those.

**Craig:** I’ll direct you to Weavers University for their 20 cents common sense rules. All right, so then we have things like, for instance, slug lines have no times of day. No afternoon, morning, mid-afternoon, evening. No.

I do it all the time. I write afternoon, morning, mid-afternoon, evening constantly. Now, by the way, when I got to this – that was number four – when I got to number four I stated to think, “Oh dear, I’m only a fifth of the way in. I hate these people so much I want to fire them into space. How will I ever make it to the end?” And I forced myself, John. I forced myself.

**John:** Well, the way you got through it, you probably didn’t use a Cut to, because that’s line number 14. Don’t use Cut to. Specifically, “I don’t care if people still use it, or scripts you’ve read have it in spades. I’m telling you the reader will throw out your script for such a small and petty offense. Learn the proper way to do it, and when you’re world famous you can bring the Cut to back into everyone’s good graces. And then we’ll wonder what we ever did without it.”

So, again, just this last week I used a Cut to and, man, it’s a problem.

**Craig:** Well, you never learned the proper way to do it because you didn’t go to ScreenwritersUniversity.com. Of course, we get to number 15, your favorite, my favorite, the eternally favorite and wonderful Don’t Use We See. And this is what they say, “Seriously, one ‘we see’ per script is plenty. And that’s only when you absolutely must, because you’ve exhausted every other possibility of explaining what we see without actually saying we see.”

Now this is where I put my hands around the virtual neck of Screenwriters University, squeezed and rotated in opposite directions until I heard the snap.

**John:** My theory is that someone is deliberately doing this just to anger you. That you’ve made an enemy somewhere in your life and this enemy wants to sort of rile you up and distract you from other things. And so therefore they’ve created this whole website just to antagonize you. Because that’s the only reason I could see wording these things in this way. Because I look through all of these rules and at each one I could say like, OK, there’s a general case to be made for like pay attention to this thing, but absolute prohibitions are never actually valid.

So this list of 20 things, they are probably 20 things that are useful to look at here, but they are all phrased in ways that I find maddening.

**Craig:** Maddening. And inaccurate. And misleading. And then in certain cases just wrong. For instance, their “we see” thing is wrong for a hundred reasons. But what fascinates me is they don’t even understand what it’s for. They literally don’t get it. They think the “we see” is somehow a substitute for explaining something. It’s not. Rather, it’s indicating to the reader who is seeing something. Us. We are. As opposed to say the character. It is mindboggling to me.

Now, I’m going to say the following as diplomatically as I can. And this is where it’s good that I know, you’ve changed me, you’ve made me a better man, John. You have.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Because I think three years ago I would not have been this diplomatic.

**John:** I think in some ways you could draw a parallel between our relationship and the key relationship in Wicked. Because if those two protagonists had not met each other at that point in time, who knows the arcs that their lives might have traveled in. But because I knew you – because I knew you, I have been changed for good.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s right. Well, I don’t know if you’ve been changed for good. I think I’ve changed you for evil. But you’ve changed me for good. So, I don’t say this diplomatically just to cover my tracks. I feel what I’m about to say. This is honest. I naturally was interested in who wrote this. They did not put a name on it.

So then I looked to see who actually teaches at Screenwriters University. Now, any one of these individuals may be a fine writer. That is absolutely possible. There is nothing that says that a lack of shiny credits means a lack of talent, nor is there anything that says a presence of shiny credits means a presence of talent. However, there is a general lack of experience here and what I would say relevant experience.

This is not a collection of individuals that inspires a tremendous amount of confidence in me that they are in tune and have good grasp of the way feature films are currently written and sold today. And I don’t see any other reason for anybody to be going to Screenwriters University and spending money – quite a bit of money – at Screenwriters University, because I do not believe their instructors are necessarily in a position that is any more informed in any substantive way than most of the people who are paying the money.

That’s the diplomatic version. How did I do?

**John:** Very good diplomatic version. Craig, I was incredibly impressed. You really withheld some of your umbrage and your fire. I think there’s some really good choices you made there.

What I will say is like some people go to college for the social experience. And so maybe you’re going to Screenwriters University for the social experience. Maybe you’re going there for the parties, for the fraternity life.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Maybe you really want to play Division III football. So, I mean, those are all reasons why you might want to go to Screenwriters University. But I don’t think you are going there for the quality of the education.

**Craig:** Yeah. They don’t have any of those things. They don’t have a building or anything. So…yeah. No.

**John:** Then maybe you could save your money.

**Craig:** I think maybe you could save your money.

**John:** This was sent I think to anger me, but this is the second bit of umbrage bait. So Sony Pictures Home Entertainment announced that it’s going to start releasing clean versions of some of its movies. There’s a list of 20 movies that they have picked which “allows viewers to screen the broadcast or airline versions of select Sony films free from certain mature content.” So basically in renting the film you can rent the original filthy version or you can rent the clean sanitized version.

I think some people have sent this to me, but I also saw Seth Rogan sort of pleading with Sony like please don’t release the clean versions of R movies. So this was sent to me I think to make me feel like well that’s horrific and Sony should not ever do this. And I had a hard time working up a proper amount of umbrage over this. Because it looked like what Sony was going to be doing is essentially when you download a film you have a choice of the original version or the clean version, or basically they send you both of them. You get to choose which one you’re going to do. I’m kind of surprisingly fine with it. But, Craig, I want to see how you feel about it.

**Craig:** Well, I’m not outraged. It’s not like they’re eliminating the proper version. And we have children and we understand what it means. I guess I’m a little confused. I’ll just come at it as a parent now. I’m going to take myself out of the movie industry and I’m going to put aside any impulse I might have for artistic fury here and just talk as a parent. I can’t imagine that there is a movie that I want to show my child but I just want certain things taken out of it. At that point, I just don’t want them to see the movie. Either they’re ready for a movie or they’re not. The “clean” version thing is something that never really is very satisfying. You know, when I say to my child, “Hey, you should watch this,” I’ve thought about it and I thought they’re ready for this, if it’s something that requires that sort of thought. Obviously a Pixar movie doesn’t.

And so it’s OK. I don’t really think I would ever use this service. I don’t want my child to see Goodfellas but with the cursing and blood taken out of it, because they’re not going to like it. It’s going to stink. I’m not sure what this is good for.

**John:** I pulled up the site and it’s talking through the movies that they’re originally going to release with the clean versions available. And some of them I think actually do make some sense. And so like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a movie that I can see kids enjoying because it’s just beautiful, but there probably is some stuff in there that you might want to have a younger kid see. I can kind of imagine that.

The three Spider Man movies, the original – actually all five Spider Man movies – they’d release a clean version of that. I guess. I can’t even imagine what’s so dirty about them. But I think they were PG-13, so it may move a PG-13 down to sort of more of a PG level.

But White House Down? I don’t want a kid seeing White House Down because of the language. I just don’t want them seeing White House Down.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly.

**John:** Captain Phillips?

**Craig:** Captain Phillips? What’s the point of watching a cleaned up version of Captain Phillips? What child is sitting there going, “I really want to watch Captain Phillips, daddy.” Well, I don’t know, there’s some cursing and there’s some blood. “Well, if we got rid of that, could I then watch the escapades of Navy snipers and shipping captains facing off against Somali pirates?”

What the F? See, I just did it myself. I cleaned myself up. So weird. Captain Phillips?

**John:** Yeah. So here’s the thing. There have been services out there that have been trying to do this sort of not officially sanctioned by the studios for years. And so to have essentially the airline version of this be available for people to choose, I don’t see a huge crisis there. Now, I do know that there are filmmakers who will take their names off of the airline versions because it’s not their original version. I think that makes sense as well.

And I guess I like that all the edited versions are just as a bonus feature. So essentially you’re downloading the real movie, but under the Extras feature you can choose to have the cleaned up version. I guess I’m just not that outraged by it. If it lets that 10-year-old kid who really wants to see The Amazing Spider Man, it makes his or her parents feel more comfortable watching that movie, I guess that’s not so bad.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like I said, I can’t. I’m not lit up on fire over it. I’m just more confused by it. As far as the airline thing goes, isn’t the airline cut kind of going by the wayside anyway? Because that was always – you know, in the old days they would have a screen that came down and your five rows were all watching the same movie together because there was one movie. But now everybody gets their own movie on the back of a seat, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I don’t think they clean those up anymore, do they?

**John:** Yeah. They do clean them up sometimes. I’ve definitely been on some flights where you’ll see a bit of nudity got blurred in the thing. I think it’s because they’re figuring there might be a kid sitting next to you who could be seeing the same screen. So sometimes you will see a little bit of cleaning up in those. But, yeah, I just can’t be that outraged by that.

I think a fairer question to ask is what does cleaned up really mean and what kind of content are they taking out? Because if they’re taking out that tiny bit of gay content in Beauty and the Beast, then I just get a little bit annoyed that that’s the filthy content that you have to protect young children from seeing. But I still can’t be all that outraged by it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. You know, I’ve been kind of, I don’t know, marveling at the general liberalism and progressivity of the Netherlands here. I took my daughter to the science museum and they had half of a floor dedicated basically to sex. And this is one of those museums where, you know, elementary school classes are coming through. And there were young children there. They’re like, yeah, it’s sex. You’re here. Go look at the sex now. Let’s talk about how the sex works. They have no problem with it.

So, I can’t imagine what the Dutch would make of this whole thing where we’re snipping out pieces of a movie. I think that they would just find that absurd. So, I’m with you. I can’t get too upset about this. But, seems kind of weird and vaguely useless. I’m probably mostly just umbrage hungover from Screenwriters University. Which, by the way, just to bring it back to them for a second. You realize they’re charging people like $500? I’m going to lose my mind.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a lot. All right, so let’s give some free education here. Let’s dive in on a topic–

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** That we’ve talked about in previous episodes, but a new thing came up this week which made me think about it again, which is location. Which is how we are describing the locations we’re using in the movie, how we’re picking those locations, and how the locations we’re using really can impact the story that we’re trying to tell. So, obviously Screenwriters University can tell you that locations are preceded by an INT or an EXT. But there’s an important level of specificity here. So I want to quickly go through some of the choices you’re making as a screenwriter when you’re picking a location for a scene. And then really look at how those locations you’re picking are going to influence what characters are doing in that scene. Because that’s the new piece that really occurred to me this week. So, let’s look through some questions that a screenwriter asks when picking a location for a scene.

The first one is always what is the most likely location for this scene. And so this scene is a police interrogation, well, that police interrogation headquarters room feels like the natural place for that. It’s the most obvious place for that. But the second question should be what is the most interesting place for this scene to have happen. And I think you always owe it to yourself to go through and like brainstorm five more interesting places for that scene to take place. Before you commit to that first location, really think through like where are the other interesting places I could set this. And what opportunities would occur if I set this at a different place.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, you’re right that sometimes your best move is to present the expected location. If you do have, you know, you’ve given the example of an interrogation scene. We know where those take place. And for good and legal reasons it’s rare that you can do them on the rooftop or in a basement. They’re generally going to take place in that room.

But then your job as a screenwriter, I think, when designing that location is to say is there something about that location that is slightly off, a little bit of a twist. Is the paint peeling? Is there a leak in the ceiling because it’s raining outside and that’s this annoying drip-drip into a coffee cup while they’re having this.

You have to do something. Because otherwise it just feels, well, this is not to disparage television, because television is wonderful and they’re putting out better and better television every day, but when I think of the traditional style TV where they got to shoot really fast and they’ve got to shoot a lot and they just don’t have time sometimes to deal with stuff. So you’d end up with these stock locations. Especially if you’re writing a movie, you really want to either not be in a stock location or turn your stock location into something that’s interesting and memorable.

When Clarice goes to visit Hannibal Lecter, that’s the mental institution. That’s a hallway. That’s bars. That’s people inside. But look what they did with it, you know?

**John:** One advantage to using the stock location, the expected location, is you get a lot of stuff for free. And so going back to the example of an interrogation room or a doctor’s office, we know how those work. We’ve been there ourselves. We’ve seen them in movies before. So there’s no process of like getting the audience used to the location or having to figure out where this place is. We just get it immediately. We see it. We know exactly what it is. And in some ways it’s helpful because the location doesn’t demand a lot of our attention. And so that can be a very useful thing about picking a stock location.

But, I would just say like don’t default to the stock location unless you have to.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Another question I ask myself is are the characters moving or are they standing still? And if they’re moving, you need to give them a space to move through. And so in a location where they’re going to feel hemmed in, it’s not going to be a good choice for a scene that should be on its feet and should be up and moving.

Conversely, I get frustrated sometimes where I see in movies where they have this incredibly active and vibrant location and then they just have the characters standing there. It’s a real mismatch between the production designer picked this great location or the director picked this great location, but the action of the scene doesn’t demand them to be moving at all. And so therefore there’s just a bunch of business happening around them.

So, really ask yourself do the characters want to be moving through a space? Or are they standing there, sitting there, just talking through some idea?

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, there’s the question which is do the characters want to be moving. And then there’s also a question does this location want them to be moving. Because there are locations that entice you to move. If you’re at a fair, and there are people moving through and around. And there’s rides and things turning all around you, it’s really hard – like if you go to Disney World and you just get into the middle of Main Street and stand there, it’s going to get annoying really fast for both you and all the people around you. So, there is a natural need to keep moving, which is good. Obviously, there are scenes where the motion is the whole point. A chase, for instance, and then that’s a whole different idea.

But if you’re in a situation where you’re thinking, oh, it would be great if my characters were actually moving. They weren’t just standing on their two feet, find something in the environment that naturally gets them to move. Because what I don’t like is the unmotivated walk and talk. It’s just a dreadful thing. And you see it all the time. It’s just two people walking and talking and there’s no reason for them to be walking, because they’re not going anywhere. And they’re just doing it because the camera guy thought it would be nice. And it’s odd.

**John:** Yeah. They’re doing it because another static scene would just be a killer. Everyone would get bored if they were just standing there, but like there’s no reason for them to be moving. That’s the real frustration.

A question I ask myself is what color do I want to see on screen. And this seems like a weird thing, but we always talk about like hair and makeup and wardrobe and sort of what are we seeing. And hopefully you’re seeing something. But what color are you seeing? And I try in my movies and other things I write to really have a progression of color throughout the story. And so that we’re in a period where we’re in greens and we’re outside a lot, or we have periods where we’re in reds. We have a period where it’s white, because it’s a lot of snow. And so think about what color we might have seen in the scene before. What color would make sense for this scene? Do we want to be consistent? Do we want to mix it up? Just think about sort of what colors you want and that can help point you to a good choice for location.

Now, sometimes based on the nature of the story you’re telling, you may pick a look just to differentiate between two different things. For instance, you may have an A plot and a B plot. And when we cut between those two locations they have a very different color palette just by their very nature. If people watch The Americans, this last season we were in Russia for a lot. And they just slap this massive blue filter on every scene in Russia. And so I feel so bad for the people in Russia because they clearly don’t have enough lights and it’s always blue. But that’s just the nature of the show, the world they’ve chosen to describe. And so it’s always going to blue when we’re in Russia. So, I try to make some of those choices in my head while I’m writing and that can help inform people down the road as you’re actually moving into production.

**Craig:** Yeah. I put color in all the time. I’ll talk about the color of the walls sometimes, or the color of the floor. I don’t describe the color of everything, but there’s always one thing that I think will catch your eye. And that’s interesting. An old grimy yellow. I can see it now. And I know that it’s grimy because it’s neglected and that’s a thing. I also know that whoever painted it probably didn’t paint it in the last two years.

So, you learn these things from little bits and pieces. I do tend to think about them in contrasting ways. I don’t have an overall color palette for the whole thing. I think of it more the way I think of, you know, when we talked about transition, size changes, you know, like when you go over here suddenly it’s sort of very bleak and gray and cold. And then you go over here and you’re inside with different people and it’s warm and reddish and brown. But those notions of cold and warm, you know, temperature to me is part of location. And temperature informs color. I just think of cold as being bluish and grayish and I think of warm comforting places as those oranges and reds.

And it helps paint the movie for people. You know, this is I guess the opposite of Screenwriters University tells you to do, so forgive us. Because they’re really good. But we’re making a movie. I don’t know how else to put it. You’re making a movie. All these people that tell you, “Don’t step on blankety-blank’s toes,” there’s no toe I don’t step on. Just to be clear. When I’m writing a screenplay, I step on every toe. I am directing the movie, I am casting the movie, I am production designing movie. I’m putting props in the movie. I’m costuming the movie. I’m doing it all on the page as best I can in a way that is evocative so that all those people that come after have something to go on.

But more importantly somebody somewhere read it and said, oh yeah, I’ll spend the money to make that. That’s the point. So, I think it’s great. Color. Yes, use it.

**John:** You’re making choices that describe the feeling, and that’s sort of my next question I always ask is if this location were a character in the movie, what would its personality be? So if this location could speak, if this character could take an action, what kind of character would it be? And a lot of the adjectives you use to describe in this previous section really apply here. It’s warm. It’s cold. It’s inviting. It’s foreboding. Think about what that location would feel like if it’s a character and then try to figure out what location could embody those ideas. And that’s incredibly helpful to really think about is it sleek and cold and fastidious or is it a jumbled mess? And putting the same kind of scene in those two different locations will greatly impact the scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a chance for you also to impart some authenticity to your story, especially if the point is that it’s set in a recognizable place, a specific place. This is where doing research is really, really helpful. And it’s important when you present your version of this real place that you’re not just relying on things like, you know, we’re in Chicago. There’s Wrigley Field. There’s Sears Tower. But you also, you know, you get the vibe of the contradictions of the place, the magic, the ugly, the beautiful.

We spent – Todd Phillips and I spent a lot to time just studying Bangkok. Studying Bangkok online. Then going there and walking around into every kind of neighborhood. And offering people a glimpse of all of it, because there is squalor and there is wealth and there’s beauty and there’s ugliness and there’s crime and there’s peace. It’s got everything. And we kind of wanted to really hand that over. So, that’s kind of how you start to make the place the character is by knowing it as best you can. You know, obviously if you’re not there, start with Google, I guess.

**John:** That sense of like which Chicago you want to show is so crucial. Because I get really frustrated when I see the establishing shot of Wrigley Field and now we’re at that Fountain. That kind of stuff is just so cheap and tourist brochure that it doesn’t help me at all knowing what kind of movie it is that I’m seeing. And so, yes, ideally you should go travel to the place where you’re setting your story and figure out what parts you want to actually describe and what it actually feels like.

It also means giving yourself the space in your script to describe some of those things especially early on the script to give us a feel for the texture of where we’re at. And hopefully you’re not just flying by some of these places before you get to a real scene. Hopefully you’re setting some of your early scenes really in those places. So your main characters are moving through these locations and giving us a feel for what kind of Chicago we are seeing in this.

I get so frustrated when I read in scripts, you know, it just says, “Chicago,” but I have no idea of what just Chicago means.

**Craig:** What does that mean?

**John:** It could be anything. And you just don’t know. And also keep in mind that people are doing to judge the look and feel of your movie very much based on those early scenes. And so if your initial Chicago scenes are in these glamourous hotels and suites and skyscrapers, it’s going to feel like that kind of movie. So if that’s not what most of your movie is, or if we’re starting there and we’re going to someplace else, you’re going to have to spend some page real estate to really paint the picture of where we’re at for the rest of this story.

**Craig:** But you can do it economically. I mean, nothing of what you just said and nothing of what I have said requires people to burn a lot of space. It’s just that you have to be specific and know what it is that you want to communicate. Because ultimately whatever you want to communicate, it is in its own way going to be very directed and compact.

If you’re telling a story about the seedy under belly of someplace, that is a compact notion. Now, let us get that vibe without you saying it, but rather by describing a street, a place, a smell, a look. Taking a camera and showing me something beautiful and then the camera just lowers down, down, down, and now we’re below a bridge. Now we’re below this. Now we’re in the gutter. Whatever it is, it actually doesn’t require a lot of time. What it requires is attention and care. Sometimes I think that when we write scripts it’s like we’re a 3D printer and we’re putting these layers on top of layers on top of layers.

And the script comes out I guess misshapen if we forget a layer somewhere in there. And this is one of them. This sense of location is a really important layer.

**John:** So here’s an example. “Jane unlocks her apartment door and goes inside.” So, you know, if you just give me that sentence, I don’t know anything about the apartment. I don’t know anything about Jane. I don’t know anything about the neighborhood. But if she has to unlock three locks on her door, and there’s trash in the hallway, and the light behind her is flickering, and we hear off-screen shouting, then I know a lot more about Jane and her apartment building and everything that’s going on.

Versus if it’s like a sleek high tech glossy, people sort of float by silently, someone tosses a look over her shoulder that Jane’s not dressed well enough to be in this building, or is suspicious of Jane, that tells me so much more about the building, the universe we’re in, and who Jane is. And that’s two sentences early in your script.

**Craig:** Yeah. They also give you an opportunity to learn something about her. Because she’s interacting. You’ve given her an environment, a location that can be interacted with. So, how she responds tells me about her. When somebody looks down on her, does she internalize it? Does she not give a damn? Does she argue back? Is she scared of living where she is? Is she unscarable? This is the kind of feedback loop you can create. And it’s why you – it’s hard. Sometimes I feel like we give these lessons and it’s unfair to you guys because we’re making things sound easier than they are. They’re actually kind of hard. Because it’s like a circle that feeds into itself. And you have to figure out where you’re going to jump into the circle – character, location, description of location, reaction to location, purpose of moment.

All of that stuff weirdly has to feed into each other. So, you think I know what I need to do. Where would that kind of happen? It could happen here. What would she do? Well, maybe this place could help me show that if it were like this. But now this place means da-da-da, and so the circle goes.

This is how writing kind of happens. It’s hard, John, sometimes, you know.

**John:** So this last week I’ve been on a rewrite, and part of the reason why I wanted to do this episode was there was a scene that I encountered which I strongly suspect used to take place somewhere else and so the location does not match what’s actually happening in the scene. There’s a kind of generic conversation that’s happening between two characters and yet the location is really spectacular and kind of fascinating and really could speak very well to these two characters, but it’s not speaking to these two characters because I think they just changed the location and basically kept the scene the same way. And so as I look at sort of how would I redo this scene, the location is really driving my choices.

Because to me it just feels weird that they’re in this location and they’re not acknowledging it. It’s a really visual change in the movie and they have to acknowledge that they’re there. And so I’m using that as the basis for really the comedy that’s hopefully going to sort of help drive the information in the scene. So ultimately the scene will still get through the same – it will still stick off the same beats as before, but it’s just going to use the location to acknowledge why they’re there, what’s going on, and hopefully find some new life between these two characters that felt perfunctory before.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, it speaks to how important location is, because when you’re stuck with it, that’s when you really feel how it drives so much. I mean, I worked on – I mean, it’s public record that Frank Darabont was going to direct The Huntsman and he left. There was an amiable departing. I don’t know, whatever you call it. And the studio hired a new director and yet kept essentially to the schedule, which meant that the principal photography was going to start in about two weeks. And so I got called in and they said, “All right, we’re starting in two weeks. We got to make a bunch of changes. Here’s the situation. We’ve built a bunch of sets and so we’re using them. And these are what these sets are for. These are the locations.”

That is a tough box inside of which to work. And, you know, these are the things of course people who casually comment on movies don’t understand. This is sometimes what happens.

So, you have to write some scenes in certain ways because the location has happened before you. That’s obviously a very rigid thing in a – that’s a fairly rare circumstance. But it’s a very common thing even when you’re doing a regular rewrite, but a producer or a big star says I really want to do – I love that sequence in Monte Carlo so we’re doing it. OK. I guess we’re going to work with that, but it is one of the fundamental pillars of the story. So, choices are now that much narrower.

**John:** But the same kind of thing happens on indie films as well. Because if there’s a kind of move that’s so driven by location, indies generally have a very limited selection of what locations they can use to shoot in. And so if you are making a film that is by necessity going to be taking place in one or two locations, those locations become exponentially more important to your story because we’re going to be seeing them the entire time.

Or, on the other hand, sometimes the choices about locations are not really the writer’s choices. They are the choice of production. And so some of the practicalities you’re going to be encountering are costs. Can they afford to rent that amazing penthouse apartment that you have written in page 37? If that location is just there for that one day, and they can’t make it work because of money, or more often they can’t make it work because of schedule, because there’s only sort of one scene there and it’s half of a page, so they have to marry it with some other days’ work. Sometimes you just can’t make that fit.

Sometimes they can’t make a location work because that’s great that you want to set the scene in Rio de Janeiro. There’s no money to go to Rio de Janeiro. So we’re going to have to set this in Guadalajara instead. That’s a change. That’s a change you’re going to have to roll with.

And finally controllability. And I find this a lot where people want to set things in big public spaces. Well, that’s great. And you get a lot of sort of free production value because you get all the monuments behind you or something great in the center of Paris, but you can’t control those locations. And sometimes you’re just not allowed to shoot there. And so figuring out what the balance is going to be can be a real challenging thing.

So, I guess we’re saying as the screenwriter you have to be ambitious in your choice of locations as you’re writing, but you also have to be smart in understanding what’s going to be changing during production and being able to roll with it to make the best use of the locations you actually do get to use when the line producer comes back to you.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is one of the most frustrating things because the first moment of rubber meets the road/reality check/whatever you want to call it is when you’ve written the screenplay and everybody is on board and it has gotten the green light. And then they come back and they say, “Well, we’ve gone through. This is our budget. This is what we can do. Here’s what we can’t. We just can’t do it.”

And it’s so hard because everybody has been so invested in creating this crystal tower with you, and now someone just comes along with a hammer and goes, “Nope. Not here.” And sometimes you end up in situations where you just think we are being asked to fail. The smartest of the Indies are the ones that anticipate all of that. You know, I’m thinking of for instance Phil Hay and Karyn Kusama and Matt Manfredi. When they did The Invitation they knew they didn’t have a lot of money. They barely had any money at all. So they made a movie that took place in a house. They spent a lot of time trying to find the right house. They found the right house. They’re good. They don’t have to worry about something falling through. That’s kind of the way to go. Protect your key locations because if you don’t, someone is coming with that hammer. And then, oh my god, what a mess.

**John:** Yeah. Get Out is another movie that is essentially all in one house. There’s a few things that venture out beyond the house, but it is essentially one house. My movie, The Nines, is largely one house. And so when the line producer came back with a budget which was wildly too expensive, I had to sort of talk her through saying like, no really, this one house is mine. We can control this. And you don’t have to worry about rentals or leaving and coming back. This is a safe place. And so that can be the jumping off point for all of the other little field work along the way.

When you are the writer-director, a lot of times you will have in your head like this is where I want to shoot this thing. That can be fantastic. But I had to learn how to let go of some things that I really wanted to shoot in certain places because it just wouldn’t work for budget or more often for schedule. Like there was no way to find that seedy hotel within a three mile radius of where we were going to have to shoot this other thing. And so you make it work.

If you go back to the conversation I had with Chris McQuarrie, he’s on a giant, expensive Mission: Impossible movie, but the same kind of things still happen. It’s like, well, we have this grand vision for what we want to do, but this is the reality of what we have. We don’t have enough extras to make this party scene work. And so we’re going to have to flip the scene around so these 200 people feel like enough people for this party.

That happens at every level.

**Craig:** You know, it’s funny, when I write and I come up with a location, I start doing some math in my head. It’s never about expense, per se. it’s more about how much is going to be required to dress it. Because what happens is when you get on a movie set there is a negotiation that begins to happen. This is really in preproduction, frankly. There’s a negotiation between the production designer and the cinematographer. And the cinematographer is essentially saying, “I want to be able to see as much as I can.” And the production designer is being held to a certain budget and knows that they have to plow money into sets and other locations is saying, “Yeah, but could you tell me where you probably will be looking? Because then I don’t have to create a whole bunch of world that you never even look at,” because that’s expense.

And one of the expenses that goes separate and apart from what production designers do is extras. Filling a space with people is expensive. You don’t realize it until you show up on a movie set and you see the area where they’re keeping the extras. And you go, oh my god, that’s a lot of people that we have to feed. And someone has to make sure that they’re wearing appropriate clothing. And they’re going to all get paid for the day. And wow.

[laughs] Bob Weinstein once asked me, he goes, “Hey Mazin, do all those people get paid?” I was like, yeah. He goes, “Really?” So, Bob, I think it’s slavery if they don’t get paid, right? And he goes, “Wow, man, never thought of it that. Ha-ha.” What a dick.

**John:** The only time I will somewhat come to Bob Weinstein’s defense is that it is a little strange that studio audiences for sitcom tapings are not generally paid. So, we are hearing their laughter. I guess they’re getting a free show out of it all. Sometimes they’re getting prizes. But they are not paid. But an extra is really paid.

The one other thing you will find if you are in a place where movies are being made often, sometimes you will walk into an area where they’ll say, “Filming is currently happening here.” And basically by entering this space you understand that you may be in a shot. That’s another thing that can happen.

So, in my movie, The Nines, there are some shots in New York where we didn’t control that at all and Ryan Reynolds is just running down a street and he’s passing real people and we make it all work. But there was one moment where we needed to have an upfronts party. So, when a new TV season is announced, when the network is announcing its whole schedule, they throw these giant parties in New York. And so I needed one of those giant parties. But I could afford like six extras. And so like how do you do that?

And so you do it by figuring out very carefully what your shots are going to be. We did the check in table. We used a hotel and we used a hallway at the hotel. And we just made those people feel like a lot of people. And you use sound design to make you feel like there’s a lot of people over there somewhere to your left, but we’re just not focusing on them. And it works for what the scene needs to be. We needed to sense that there was a big thing happening, but the actual scene was small and intimate so therefore I didn’t want to be in a giant space.

**Craig:** Yeah. These are the – it becomes a Rubik’s Cube. It really is. It’s a Rubik’s Cube of – once you get into production it’s a Rubik’s Cube of money and practicalities and creativity and vision. But when you’re writing your screenplay, remember your goal here is to attract financing and attract actors and attract directors, if you’re not directing, and terrific crew. Create the world you want to see, and then, you know.

Now, if you know, like I said, that this is the kind of movie where you’re going to be dealing with a couple million dollars for your budget, create a world that you’d like to see that you could probably do for a couple million dollars.

**John:** Absolutely. All right, our next topic. So, in previous episodes we’ve done How Would This Be a Movie. We’re usually looking at stories in the news to figure out how they could be converted into a big piece of blockbuster entertainment. But a new thing happened this last two weeks that I thought was really interested.

So Julia Roberts has attached herself to star in a TV adaptation of a podcast series. So it was a podcast series called Homecoming which is a fiction series created by Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg. And Mr. Robot creator, Sam Esmail, is supposed to be doing the TV adaptation of it. It was just really interesting that essentially it was a radio drama done as a podcast form but now going to be adapted into TV.

And the first time I could think of that transition happening, which I think we’re going to see a lot more of.

**Craig:** Yeah. You may very well. Again, you know, I don’t listen to podcasts. But it seems to me that the ones that I keep hearing about are the ones that are narrativizing true life things. This one was fictional the whole way through?

**John:** This one is all fiction. So, Catherine Keener played the main character in the radio version of it, the audio version of it. Julia Roberts would play her character in the next version of it. I think radio drama is really hard to do, and so god bless them for doing a good job with this. I haven’t listened to it, but I’ve heard only the promos for it. But people loved it. So that’s great. And it’s great that it’s getting traction in another form.

What I see more often happening is another Gimlet show called Start Up is being converted into a TV comedy called Alex, Inc. So Zach Braff is staring in that and it’s about the birth of a podcast company. So it is more the classic thing where it’s like it’s kind of like Shit My Dad Says, where it was a Twitter feed and it became the basis of a real sitcom. This is a comedy based on one guy’s quest to get a business started. And you can sort of more clearly see like, OK, you’re fictionalizing the real versions of people.

**Craig:** So when is our show?

**John:** That’s really the natural next question. So, when is our show? How are we divvying up the credits on it? Who is playing whom? These are tough choices, but I guess we should probably ask our listeners, because our listeners are the smartest people out there.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, look, I know who should be me. If it doesn’t work out with Homecoming, I would love Julia Roberts to play me.

**John:** Oh yeah. That’s a nice choice. I’ve always seen myself as a Sandra Bullock type. So, she’s both a free spirit, but also a little restrained at times. And I think the two of us, I think casting it as women opens up new possibilities. It really can speak to our sense of the challenges as working moms in this business.

**Craig:** I don’t think we’re interesting enough to get gender matching casting. It’s too boring. Literally, we need a gimmick. We need a gimmick. We have to be played by women because we’re not women. If we were women, we should be played by men. Basically, we should be the opposite.

**John:** So, I’ve been thinking like who should play Aline and how about Stanley Tucci?

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Yeah. Just mix everything up.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Like really what I’m saying is the Scriptnotes show should not resemble Scriptnotes in any way. In any way.

**John:** Yes. But something I’ve learned about television development is by the time it would get on the air, it would not resemble the original pilot whatsoever.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m requesting something that’s just going to happen anyway.

**John:** One of the first things that will come up as people start reading the script based on Scriptnotes is the same thing that Tom Sanchez tweeted at us this week. “Hey guys, I got a note to make protagonists more likeable. Any tips or basic principles or advice?”

So, Craig, when they read the script and they go this Craig Mazin character is not likeable, how do we fix that?

**Craig:** You don’t, because it’s not a problem. And this is the worst note to get, because it’s not a thing. This is hard. I don’t know how to combat it in any clean way. If I hear this, I know I can’t say, “No, that’s stupid. Doesn’t matter.” People actually love unlikeable people. There are entire actors that have made a career out of it. It’s wonderful. Grouches are delicious. And, I don’t know, I could sit here and name 4,000 television shows and 4,000 movies that you love that star unlikeable people.

I could sit here and show you Walter Matthau in Bad News Bears. But I don’t have time. I can’t say any of that, so in my mind I start backing for the door. I got to be honest with you. When I hear somebody say, “Well, the protagonist should be more likeable,” I judge that person for giving me the dumbest note in the world. It’s not a real thing.

It is ignorant of the way movies and television work. The key is that the protagonist should be understandable. So I guess that’s my only defense.

**John:** That is my defense of it, too. Is that sometimes you’ll hear the likeable note and they just don’t actually have a read on the character. There’s something about the Velcro of that character that’s not quite gripping. And so you may need to look for some moment early in the script that gives that character a specificity, something really fascinating about that character that makes people want to engage with them.

So, it could be, you know, a joke. It could be some action they take very early on that is interesting, relatable, remarkable, something about that character that makes say like, “Oh, I get that dude. He’s fascinating. I want to be on his story.” But I get the likeable notes, too.

And so in Big Fish, Will is always considered not likeable. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s the movie version, or the Broadway version, you always get the note “I just don’t like Will. Will is just not likeable.” And it’s just really a functional problem, because he’s the antagonist to a character who is tremendously likeable. There’s a sort of dual protagonist/antagonist relationship. And if he was this charming, life of the party kind of guy, there is no story. I can’t make Big Fish work if Will comes on as being the most likeable kid in the world.

So, we always have to be mindful of that sort of structural challenge in casting a Will that we just don’t cast the most dour, bleak person ever. You have to have a spark of life in the actual actor we cast. But functionally the role is not especially likeable at the start. And hopefully by the end of the story you’re loving him.

So, Tom Sanchez, when you get that note, I just say like, you know, try to figure out whether they’re understanding the character before you try to make huge changes to what the character is doing.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s helpful, too, if you can at least point out that your character doesn’t like him or herself either. So they are aware. I do think that it is off-putting when there are characters who are unlikeable and are perfectly happy with themselves and we don’t quite know what to make of that. That’s just Ted Cruz, basically, right? So, we look at Ted Cruz and we say, “I don’t like you and, also, you seem to love yourself.” That’s a terrible combination. That’s where we start to feel like we’re dealing with an alien.

But with characters, for instance, Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa. It’s hard to be more unlikeable than that guy. He is a thief. He is a drunk. He is mean. He is racist. He’s hurtful to children. But, we know that he is in terrible pain. And that whatever it is that he is dealing out he is dishing upon his own head even more. And so we understand there is a potential redemption. And we move toward him. That’s important. If you can underscore that, then I think you’ll be fine.

But I hate it. I hate the whole likeable thing. It’s stupid. And basically it’s the kind of thing you’d expect to be taught at Screenwriters University.

**John:** 100%. I think you can actually get a special certification in likeability if you pay an extra $500.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** All right, it has come time for our One Cool Things. I actually have three things, but they’re all short and related to locations.

So, the first two are maps. There’s a great new Metro map of Paris called the Circle Map designed by Constantine Konovalov and other folks. It’s just fantastic. So, every time you try to do a map of a Metro or bus lines or underground subways it’s always a balance between representing reality and sort of an idealized version that is clear and simpler to understand.

And this version is really just fantastic. It chooses to bend the lines into sort of circles rather than keeping them quite as naturally flowing as they would otherwise be. But it makes the Metro much, much easier to understand. So I’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

Also, a great one that Craig you’ll dig is the Roman Roads. So basically all the roads that the Romans built, but done as sort of a subway map of Europe. And showing sort of like, wow, they did a hell of a job. They really built out a lot. And it’s fun looking at the stops along the way to see what are now cities and sort of like how those Roman names of cities became the modern names of cities. So, another great one.

Finally, you can’t talk about locations without one of the greatest games I think ever for iOS that now has a sequel out. Monument Valley 2 is now shipping and it’s just delightful. So, it has the same impossible geography as the first one, with some other great choices and changes. So, if you’ve not played the first one, play the first one, then play the second one. They are both just great games.

**Craig:** Yeah. Currently, I don’t know how far in I am, but I’m in it.

**John:** I would also say Monument Valley, especially the second one, has really good storytelling between the mom and the daughter for like characters who don’t speak. Just their little tiny physical interactions are so well animated that I’ve just really loved watching them.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s good stuff. Well, I have a One Cool Thing this week that’s also a game, but I have not loved a game with this much fervor and joy in a long, long time. It’s called Human Resource Machine. No, that’s not my nickname for you, John August. But, it is sort of John August-like. It is very simply a game where you are creating code. They don’t really tell you so much on the nose that you’re creating code, but they give you tasks. Here are a series of numbers or letters and here’s what we need you to do. So here’s your inbox. That’s what your inputs are. You take them, you design a system of things to do to them, and then there’s a result that goes out. But you don’t have a lot of commands. You have very few. In fact, I think there’s a sum total of 13 commands. And it starts off pretty darn easy, and then it gets crazy hard. But every time I did something, I was so proud of myself. So proud because it really hurts your brain. But it’s all doable. I loved it so much. And, it is also wrapped in this very bizarre kind of meta story that was kind of this extra bit of surreal glee for me.

So, the company that makes this game is called Tomorrow Corporation. They are I believe the people that did World of Goo, which I know a lot of people liked. But this is just – I’m just in love with this. Human Resource Machine. John, I think you will like this game.

**John:** Craig, I can guarantee that I will like this game. Because while you were talking I went through Google and this was my One Cool Thing in Episode 254.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So let’s pull up the transcript and we’ll see how you made fun of me for Human Resource Machine.

**Craig:** Did I?

**John:** You did. You made fun of me. So, let’s see.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** This is what I said. The second one is a thing that Craig will make fun of me for. It’s called Human Resource Machine. It’s a game. “Oh, I get to make fun of you for it? Fantastic,” you say. So, Craig says, “This is so great because he is a robot. He’s a robot playing on a robot machine, pretending to be a robot.”

**Craig:** That’s accurate.

**John:** Yes. So, I’ll send you a link to the show notes for this one, too, so you can see what we said about Human Resource Machine. I really did love it. And so have you finished it yet?

**Craig:** The only one I – I’ve gotten halfway through my last level that I have to do which is prime factory, which is brutal.

**John:** It is brutal. And some of the things are – you know, the interface is delightful, but when you have to make really complicated ones, it gets to be just really, really exhausting. So I think there may have been some left hand forks of some of these things, which I didn’t end up doing, but I really did love the game and thought it was just perfectly well done.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s great. And so you were right. And now here I am, 50 episodes later, which that’s about right. I need about a year.

**John:** I’m about one year ahead of Craig on all things.

**Craig:** Well, this is not the first time this has happened either. Generally speaking what happens is you say something, I go that’s stupid and you’re dumb, and then about a year later I go, John, I’ve heard of something wonderful.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you say, “I said that a year ago and you called me stupid and dumb.” And then, weirdly, I don’t retract any of that.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I say, oh, yeah, you were, but because I’m thinking it now, I feel it.

**John:** Yeah. The thing you’re doing right now, that’s the thing you do.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s what I do.

**John:** You are 100% consistent. That’s our show this week. As always, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, or things you want us to rant about, on Twitter I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

We are on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts at Scriptnotes. And while you’re there, leave us a comment. That actually does help in the algorithms of things.

You’ll find the show notes for this episode at johnaugust.com. Transcripts go up about four days later. That’s the only way that I can really keep Craig honest by proving that I did actually recommend something years ago.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** You can find the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. Godwin says that the USB drives have just now arrived in Los Angeles, so they are probably two weeks away from being available to order. So, if you would like a USB drive of all the back episodes, hold your fire because they are coming soon.

**Craig:** You should get those.

**John:** We should get those. We will also have a PDF version of the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide, so thank you to everybody who has contributed to the Listener’s Guide. It turned out so, so well.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Those will be coming out soon.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Craig, have a great rest of your time in Amsterdam. Don’t fall in a canal.

**Craig:** I’m going to do my best to not fall in a canal and I will see you next week.

**John:** All right, thanks.

Links:

* [Screenwriters University](https://www.screenwritersuniversity.com)
* [Clean Movie Versions](https://www.yahoo.com/movies/sony-clean-version-initiative-provide-sanitized-versions-select-films-home-video-exclusive-160201339.html)
* [Homecoming](http://deadline.com/2017/06/julia-roberts-homecoming-tv-series-sam-esmail-podcast-1202106692/)
* [Alex, Inc.](http://www.indiewire.com/2017/05/alex-inc-trailer-zach-braff-abc-1201817372/)
* [Paris Circle Map](http://metromap.fr/en)
* [Roman Roads](http://sashat.me/2017/06/03/roman-roads/)
* [Monument Valley 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW2KUxyq8Vg)
* [Human Resource Machine](https://tomorrowcorporation.com/humanresourcemachine)
* [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_304.mp3).