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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/television-economics-for-dummies).

**John August:** Hey, this John. So today’s episode has a little bit of swearing. Not a lot, but if you’re driving in the car with your kids, this is your warning. Thanks.

[Episode begins]

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 253 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we’ll be doing another round of How Would This Be a Movie, where we take stories in the news and discuss how and if and whether they should become movies. But first, we’ve just come through upfronts where the networks announced their new TV shows. And as I read the coverage, I was perplexed and did not know what they were talking about, so we invited someone on to explain what’s actually happening.

**Craig:** Thank God.

**John:** Yes. Jonathan Groff is our guest, and he is a writer and producer whose credits include Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Andy Barker, P.I., How I Met Your Mother and the late great, Happy Endings. He’s currently one of the executive producers of Black-ish.

Welcome, Jonathan Groff.

**Jonathan Groff:** Thank you so much, John. Thank you, Craig. It’s nice to be here.

**Craig:** And taking time off from Hamilton?

**Jonathan:** That’s what I was just going to say. I’m so glad you went to it.

**Craig:** Yes. Yeah.

**Jonathan:** The disambiguation that is necessary now with my name.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You are in fact both the television writer/producer and portrayer of King George.

**Jonathan:** Thank you for the disambiguation, Craig. Exactly.

**Craig:** I do something called re-ambiguation.

**Jonathan:** You re-ambiguated, that’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Well, the best thing was — do we keep this clean on this podcast?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** We don’t have to.

**Jonathan:** Okay, good. The first —

**Craig:** Fuck it.

**Jonathan:** There you go. The first time I heard of him, my manager had my name on a Google alert which is, I think, how he knows how to manage me. [laughs] He finds out what I’m doing and that’s — I’m kidding. Tim Sarquis, lovely guy.

**Craig:** He’s been arrested.

**Jonathan:** Again. Better make a call.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**Jonathan:** So he had my name on a Google alert and also this name popped up and he was like, “Are you doing Gypsy at the South Shore Music Circus in Hyannis or in Cohasset, Massachusetts or whatever?”

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s so great.

**Jonathan:** And I was like, “No.” This guy was just out of like drama school. Really young.

**John:** Yeah, he started young. He’s still young.

**Jonathan:** He’s still young. He’s still really young. So I had no — so that was the first time I noticed him. Then he — you know, every once in a while, I’d hear something, and then he blows up in a show called Spring Awakening.

**Craig:** Oh, Spring Awakening prior to him being on Glee.

**Jonathan:** Prior to Glee, yeah, exactly.

**Craig:** Right, Spring Awakening.

**Jonathan:** And he really blows up on Broadway and he’s a big deal. And, you know, I would have incidents where I would be — like I was casting a pilot and I’d been on the Sony lot every day for three weeks going to a certain casting office and all of a sudden, they’re like, “Oh,” — one day like, “You’re not supposed to be here until 4 o’clock and you’re not supposed to be even coming into this gate.” [laughs] And I was like, “Ohhhhh.”

And then he had the same problem. He — I got an inkling that he was a good dude because he left his email address and said, “This is funny. We should connect.” I don’t think — I think I misplaced it. Or I was like this isn’t — the time isn’t right yet.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, you didn’t feel like it was — you weren’t ready.

**Jonathan:** I didn’t feel like the time was right. I want to chase this a little bit further —

**John:** Right.

**Jonathan:** And see where this went. And then Glee happened and he really blew up on people and he’s, you know. And so that’s sort of the high, whatever.

Finally, a couple of months ago I went to see Hamilton and he was King George III in it, and he — I got backstage because somebody from Black-ish knew Leslie Odom who plays Aaron Burr and he’s fantastic. And I just said, “You know what, this is going to happen.”

**Craig:** It’s time.

**Jonathan:** So we met, and he’s fantastic. He was wearing a bike helmet.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Because he’s a big biker.

**Jonathan:** A big biker. Gave me a huge hug. We had a great conversation. And we actually have emailed back and forth now. So it’s a nice story.

**Craig:** Ah, that is a nice story.

**Jonathan:** He said that he would occasionally get stuff that was meant for me like — not, you know, lots of them. But I think it was more —

**John:** He rewrites a few scripts just on the side.

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Or he’s just like, “Yeah, I would occasionally get calls but nothing exciting like you would get that was meant for me.”

**Jonathan:** Exactly. [laughs]

**John:** He put out an inflammatory quote about Black-ish, about sort of like an upcoming plotline of Black-ish. That’s always a good thing.

**Jonathan:** Exactly. That’s the best you get.

So on the other night, I was in New York and I did a panel with some other comedy writers and there was a woman, an alum of my college who had seen the bio listed on the flier to come. And she was very sweet. And she like sheepishly —

**Craig:** Oh, God.

**Jonathan:** When she was introduced to me, like, put her Hamilton playbill that had been signed by every other cast member, tucked it into her purse like, “I’m sorry. I just maybe thought it was the same guy.” [laughs] Yeah, it’s still happening.

**Craig:** Oh no, I have no interest in hearing anything you have to say at all. Well, anyway.

**John:** You’re both very nice guys. And so Jonathan Groff was the — played Will in one of the readings of Big Fish along the way, with the Big Fish Musical.

**Jonathan:** Oh, wow.

**John:** So O known him from that. And so I know that he’s a bicyclist from that.

**Jonathan:** Absolutely.

**John:** So it was him and Michael C. Hall where we asked — that’s sort of how all the iterations you go through when you are trying to put a show together.

**Jonathan:** You know what’s frustrating is I’ve always been like the nice Jonathan Groff and now there’s a guy who’s nicer than me.

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** And he’s younger, he’s better looking, and he’s nicer.

**Craig:** Better looking, nicer —

**Jonathan:** More successful.

**Craig:** More successful.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**John:** I will say you know more about TV, and so therefore —

**Jonathan:** Okay. There you go. Good segue.

**John:** You are more useful for —

**Craig:** We actually don’t know that.

**Jonathan:** I’m not sure that’s true.

**Craig:** Yeah, but we will —

**John:** He has been a star of a TV show.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Two TV shows.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah, so —

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Well, we’re going to find out. He’s going to educate us.

**John:** So this is the education I need. So the point of entry for me was this Deadline article about network ownership. It’s all about upfronts and so they’re talking through all the new shows. And Les Moonves talking about sort of this new season and how ownership is important. And like there were all these terms I just didn’t fundamentally understand.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**John:** So I hope you can explain some of this. And just — can you talk us through what the deal is with ownership because unlike features where it’s all sort of one company, there’s a studio producing a TV show, there’s a network airing a TV show.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**John:** And those used to be different things and they don’t seem to be different things. What’s going on with ownership?

**Jonathan:** They still can be different things. It’s really complicated. I mean, basically, the very basic — and I’ll do my best, and I’m sure there’s some things I’m going to get wrong and you probably — you guys are both so smart —

**John:** No, explain like we’re five.

**Jonathan:** Okay.

**John:** Because we really don’t know.

**Craig:** Well, explain like he’s five. I’m an adult.

**Jonathan:** Craig, no. Exactly. Craig’s been in the business.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know what’s going on.

**Jonathan:** So basically, the studios are the entities that make the television shows. And they are the ones who take on the cost of producing them, the deficit. And most television shows, they get — and then they get paid a license fee by the networks which is a lot less than the deficit. So, you know, roughly, maybe for a single camera television comedy, it might cost $2.1 million to make an episode and they probably get a $1.1 million license fee from the network. So the studios are eating that million dollar deficit for shows until they can eventually sell those shows into syndication.

**John:** So —

**Jonathan:** In which case they then get all of that money back and a lot more.

**John:** So let’s say the 2.1 number that you are getting for that half-hour show —

**Jonathan:** Should we say $2 million? Let’s say $2 million. It’s going to be a lot easier.

**John:** $2 million and $1 million, yeah.

**Craig:** Thank God. The show just got shorter.

**John:** Explain it like I’m five. Indeed. We lost a commercial break.

All right. So let’s say it’s a $2 million show. For the $2 million show, that’s all in, like all the expenses/costs to make that show and an amortization of sort of the overall costs of the sets and things like that, because it’s a weird thing to make a TV show because sometimes, you know, you have things you write a check for once and those —

**Jonathan:** Right.

**John:** Could be things that are going to be used for the rest of the series.

**Jonathan:** Right. Amortization is a big part of it which is why, you know, they like to make as many episodes. And one of the big things that they’ll — the networks really want these six episode orders now and eight episode orders of things to fill in because they want to be doing more and more original programing, and they want to be in fewer reruns which is something I think you want to ask me about as well, probably, because that’s another part of what’s going on in the business. But today like a lot of times, these short orders and the studios don’t like them because it’s much harder to amortize the shows. Because, yeah, especially, you know — and by the way, the $2 million figure does not count the cost of a pilot, like even a half-hour comedy pilot, probably a single camera which is mostly what I’ve done are — maybe I did one that was over $5 million, I think. That got really expensive, but they’re often three, four, four or five, something like that. So you’re figuring that factor in.

And yeah, the cost of building a standing set, you know, the cost of your actor contracts, your buyouts. You’re hiring a staff and writing staff, guaranteeing them a certain number of episodes. You know, that is all of kind of built in. So the more episodes you can do, the faster you get to that magical — used to be a hundred, now they talk about 88 or — when I did Happy Endings, we almost got another 20. We had done 57 and we almost got another 20 episodes when we were going to be able to sell it to USA. And that supposedly would have been enough to maybe —

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** Make a real syndication sale.

**John:** So $2 million is what it costs to shoot that half-hour.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**John:** The network is paying you $1 million. So let’s say — that $1 million is the right to air it on US broadcast television?

**Jonathan:** Yeah, and a limited number of reruns, I think —

**John:** Okay.

**Jonathan:** They get like three or four or something like that.

**John:** So for the studio to make its money back, it has to be able to sell that show either in reruns, syndication, or overseas.

**Jonathan:** Yes.

**John:** And so a lot of the money is coming from overseas now —

**Jonathan:** Yes.

**John:** Because that first run could be worthwhile overseas. So they could be airing that in China or Australia or someplace else right now.

**Jonathan:** Well, apparently. And I’m told that that is a bigger and bigger part of the equation for the studios and that they are making their money back in foreign sales a lot sooner than they used to.

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** Because the market has expanded and there is such a demand for product. As many platforms as there are here, there’re platforms internationally and they want product. So the whole idea of what used to constitute, you know, the back end and what really you would, you know, recoup or when the thing was out of deficit and now in profit, supposedly it happens sooner than it used to.

The Writers Guild feels this way strongly that these studios sometimes are making that money back sooner with foreign sales than they used to.

**Craig:** That’s really interesting because, you know, the independent feature film model is essentially based entirely on foreign pre-sales so we have a budget, the budget is $10 million, we’re going to go sell the rights in various countries until we have at least $10 million.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**Craig:** Then we’ll make the movie.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**Craig:** So we actually have no risk when we make the independent movie like that. You know, the interesting case with television is the idea that they could also create a situation of foreign pre-sale where before they’re even getting to the fifth episode, they’re essentially saying if we have — now, there’s a danger involved, obviously, where foreign pre-sales is the infection that incurs is an infection of talent. They all say, well, certain actors —

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Sell shows overseas and certain do not. And now that starts to infect the kinds of shows that we get here because the studios need to sell them overseas. I can see trouble on the horizon.

**Jonathan:** Well, there was — speaking of that and related, there was a really kind of a rough article in Hollywood Reporter about, you know, Empire, not selling as well overseas. And that plays into like race and all that kind of stuff. Black-ish supposedly has done very well. I think maybe a family comedy aspect of it helps it. But Empire, you would think — you know, since so much of like black culture and hip hop and so on is one of our national — international exports.

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** You would think it would sell but apparently it has been somewhat challenged so that gets into like —

**Craig:** I wonder if primetime —

**Jonathan:** The backlash against — is there’s going to be some kind of backlash against all the fantastic diversity, which is helping, I think, the networks get a little bit of a second wind. Especially ABC has done really well with it. FOX as well, obviously. And all of them realizing like, “Oh my God, the country is changing. This is who is watching television. We’re not reflecting America. Let’s be more diverse.” But that could factor in if it isn’t helping us.

**Craig:** It could be a problem. I mean — and the Hollywood Reporter is fairly reliable in getting things wrong. I do —

**Jonathan:** That’s true.

**Craig:** At least they are consistent. I mean, I remember reading that article and just thinking, there’s a thousand other possible explanations.

**Jonathan:** True.

**Craig:** For instance, I don’t know how primetime soap operas do overseas.

**Jonathan:** Yep, that’s a good point.

**Craig:** I don’t know if that’s something that people like.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**Craig:** And the fact that a show Black-ish is doing well is sort of — I refute thus.

**Jonathan:** Yeah, right.

**Craig:** I mean, kind of argument over.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**John:** I think it’s basically Malcolm Spellman’s fault. As a previous guest on the show.

**Craig:** Everything is —

**John:** He’s one of the Empire producers. It’s probably on his shoulders.

**Jonathan:** It should be.

**Craig:** He screwed it up. He really screwed it up.

**John:** So here is a question. This is again back to that same article.

**Jonathan:** Okay.

**John:** They’re talking about — Les Moonves talking about like, “Oh, in the shows we are picking up, we own a stake in all of them.”

**Jonathan:** Yes.

**John:** And so I’m taking this to mean that even if it is a Sony show or a Warner Bros show or some other studio is behind it, a network gets to say, “Okay, we are an investor in this show up to a certain percentage.” Is that — am I reading that right? Is that what they’re — ?

**Jonathan:** That’s exactly what they’re saying. And it happens all the time. I mean, it feels rare unless — it feels like the exception now is for — it’s the exception for an outside studio that’s not owned by the network that they’re selling to, to be able to maintain a 100% ownership of it. I think some of the studios are a little bit stronger than others and hold the line better, but a lot of times it comes out of deal-making.

In that same article that we both read, it said that, you know, NBC was less aggressively pursuing ownership of a couple of single camera comedies that were coming on because they felt that the backend wasn’t as significant so they didn’t want to assume the cost. Because when you co-produce, co-own, you’re also putting up the money to buy in essentially.

But, you know, they all talk about like, you know, they’re all I think so nervous. And again, I’m a writer, so I don’t understand all this stuff, but I think they all are worried about the business of being in the distributors. They all want to be in the content business.

**John:** Yeah, they want to be the hype. They want to be the, yeah.

**Jonathan:** Exactly. And that’s where the future is. There’s always going to be room for content even if the pipe changes and the distribution platform has changed that content is king. You see Netflix go from obviously migrate from pipe, a brilliant pipe, to how many boxes of screeners did you get —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** From Netflix this year.

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** They’re making so much stuff.

**Craig:** Well, you know, you’ve been around for awhile, so you remember the days where it was actually illegal —

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** For a network to own any part of a show that aired.

**Jonathan:** I wasn’t in the business then but —

**Craig:** Okay.

**Jonathan:** I remember that was the facts back in the day.

**John:** Was that called fin-syn?

**Craig:** The financial syndication laws abbreviated as fin-syn. And the purpose of those laws was essentially to prevent monopoly.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they did make sense when they were three networks and, you know, and so there was essentially a forced kind of competition where, essentially, the networks would pay a license fee and then make their money through the sale of ads. But they could not own. Similarly theaters, studios couldn’t own theaters.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**Craig:** And I don’t know if it’s changed or not. I think that’s still maybe a thing. But it’s not a thing anymore for television.

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**John:** Well, they certainly don’t have monopoly power but it does feel like a network has a tremendous amount of leverage over the studio where it says like, “That’s a really lovely show. It could be a challenge if you couldn’t put that on the air.” Or they say like, “You have to let us buy in.”

**Jonathan:** It’s absolutely what’s happening.

The only thing that’s hilarious is that all these networks pretty much own studios that want to sell outside. Every studio is able to attract better talent, writers and actors, producers, you know, a producer on overall deals, pods, people, if they can say we can sell everywhere. Like I will sign up with Twentieth in a deal or with ABC Studios — I like ABC Network, I like Fox Network, but, oh boy, I would like to be able to take my project to the right place.

And so, they’re all doing it to each other a little bit. Like Sony is really fascinating to me because they don’t have that partnership and they’ve actually — in some ways, I like that studio a lot because they’ve really kept their independence. But they were the ones also more forced I think a lot of times to always co-produce.

**Craig:** Right. So —

**Jonathan:** Happy Endings was a Sony and that was partly because I was in an ABC Studios deal and I got involved in that show. They needed a showrunner. Happy Endings —

**Craig:** But they’ll find some way in or another.

**Jonathan:** I think they would have.

**John:** But it is interesting. When we think about the old Hollywood system where you had writers’ rooms and you had like, you know, MGM writers’ room and like you were bound to MGM and that all went away. But to some degree, that still happens in television where you make a deal with a studio. And so you are writing shows for that studio and you are prohibited from working for anybody else unless certain conditions come up. In order for them to get you on Happy Endings, didn’t they have to do something with the studio who you originally had your deal with? There was a negotiation involved.

**Jonathan:** Yes. Sony, to bring me in, had to —

**John:** Buy you out of —

**Jonathan:** Had to basically, yeah. I think that became a co-production partly because I became involved. But then again, Craig is probably right. Certainly now it feels like it would just become a co-production, whether they were —

**Craig:** Right, right.

**Jonathan:** Needing a piece of talent or a writer to make the show made.

**Craig:** Well, getting rid of that law essentially cleared the way for the most obvious request of all. We are interested in airing this. The fact that we’re interested in airing it means we think it’s good. The fact that we think it’s good means we would like to own some of it. Now, it may be a case where multiple networks want to air something, which probably doesn’t happen that frequently.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So there’s a lot of leverage there on their part.

**John:** But some of these negotiations though would happen at the point where you’re selling the pitch. But some of these negotiations I’ve heard from other showrunners, they’re happening like at the last minute. Like you’re into upfronts and they’re still trying to hammer out this deal.

**Jonathan:** Absolutely. It happens really late and it’s the last piece of leverage that the networks have in negotiating with the studios. And the studios then have to decide whether they want to do it or not and whether it’s worth it to them to take on a co-producer. But, you know, all the studios are interacting with each other so well.

I’ve been in two Sony/ABC Studios co-productions, one on Happy Endings and one on a pilot I produced. And, you know, they’re smart people at both studios. Sony was kind of the lead studio on both of those, ABC Studios. I mean that’s why Black-ish is such a — you know, if you can get the owned show that works for you, that is the homerun. Like —

**John:** Right.

**Jonathan:** Like ABC loves Modern Family but Twentieth —

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Twentieth owns all of that. They’ve never gotten into that one and that would be, you know, great.

I will give you a little bit of interesting context though, that there has always been a tendency, and I think it’s partly about executive dynamics and like how to reward them, to migrate the purview, the sort of responsibility from network president and give him or her also the title of studio president. And every time they do that, it doesn’t work for you if you work at the studio.

**Craig:** You mean when they leave the network presidency or you’re saying —

**John:** No, no, they basically —

**Jonathan:** Perfect example is like Paul Lee was the president of both — under his, whatever, job description was the head of the studio at ABC Studios and also the —

**Craig:** The network president.

**Jonathan:** President of ABC.

**Craig:** That doesn’t make any sense to me at all.

**Jonathan:** I hated it. I always hated it. And it happened at NBC when I was there. Yeah, I think it’s the way it is at Twentieth Century Fox right now with Dana and Gary are also the head. They came from the studio and the studio was such a profit center and they did such a, you know, huge job in keeping that, I think, probably the strongest of the independent studios for a long time, that they wanted to keep that job. And it was part of the —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** But the problem is that what I found happening is, and I remember talking to my agent about this, it never really worked for me as a producer because I would be like, “Well, why can’t so and so put on his studio head hat right now and keep my show on the network?” Happy Endings is a perfect example. Like, let’s keep that show on the network. Paul Lee could have kept that show on the network and probably gotten all of ABC Studios’ money out of it if he had programmed it better.

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** But, you know, at the end of the day it’s like the big job still at that point, and this may be changing, was the network president. And they’re always going to choose the network president, “What’s better for me as the network president? Better for me to cancel Happy Endings. It’s not doing that great.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** You know what I mean? And I want to try something else. And so, it’s gone. So which is why I like the configuration they have now at ABC Studios. It kind of vacillates back and forth. It swings back and forth. And now, it seems like Patrick Moran is really growing ABC Studios and has a lot of independence, and makes deals with other places, and doesn’t just do it with ABC. But it’s so tricky when the networks own studios because they have that leverage and it’s an internal kind of thing, so.

**John:** Great. The next term I don’t understand, stacking.

**Jonathan:** Yes.

**John:** What is stacking?

**Jonathan:** I had never heard of that before a month ago.

**John:** Okay, all right.

**Jonathan:** But I get it.

**John:** Then tell me.

**Jonathan:** What it is, is the networks and the studios really realize that they are getting a lot of views of their shows, and the way people are watching television now is to binge watch. So, there’s obviously the DVR usage and that’s now counted for advertisers and it’s counted live plus three and live plus seven and live plus something else. And same-day viewing and it’s all, you know, added up and then sold to the advertisers. The other way that they can kind of binge, “Oh, I didn’t see The Last Man on Earth yet this season.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** “And hopefully it’s up on Fox.com,” or whatever their thing is. And the networks want to have those stay on longer and go past what they call I think the rolling five, which is usually what it has been. So even though they have to pay a little bit more to the writers for a residual, and I actually investigated this because I was curious about it and I talked to somebody at the Writers Guild today, they’re willing to pay that little bit of extra residual to maybe directors and certainly to the writers to have the shows hang around longer on the .com websites, the ad-supported video-on-demand segment.

**John:** So the theory being that it’s good for discovery, it’s good for helping people catch up on a show.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**John:** And so especially a show in its first season, you want to make sure people who’ve missed it the first round can actually —

**Jonathan:** Yes. And it’s something the networks I think want more than the studios because I think the networks keep the lion’s share of that .com advertising. And it’s a way of building audience. The studios are nervous about it because it affects, potentially, their back end.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So the stacking rights are a negotiation between the network and the studio.

**Jonathan:** Yes.

**John:** Which in many cases are the same company. But aren’t always the same company.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, and then, you know, you’re dealing with one pocket versus the other pocket. But it’s true. I mean the studio, theoretically, their interest is in making you pay to see this even if it’s a week after it was on air, right?

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And the network, their interest is in, no, see it forever.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** See it a billion times. They want to expand the breadth of the license, right?

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That they’re paying for. And it’s interesting because we tend to look at it as writers as how are we going to get screwed on the residuals, because — and this will get us into our rerun thing. There was a time in the world when it was really simple and network paid a license fee, they were allowed to air a show once or twice. That was primary exhibition. But then there was something called the network rerun where they would rerun it again on the network, during primetime. And the writers would get paid a lot of money.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they don’t really do that anymore.

**John:** Very rare shows do. And a friend just got staffed on a show that actually does that. And so he’s like, “Score. I get a second run.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But let’s talk about how writers get paid.

**Jonathan:** Well, the networks will do it on certain shows and like it’s another way of building audience. Essentially, it’s part of the license or the agreement that they have, so it’s not a great additional cost to them and the studios pay out the residual. And it’s fine. But yeah, like the comedies tend to do it more. I think ABC runs — we’re getting rerun a lot this summer on Black-ish. They’ll rerun their Wednesday night comedy block.

What I’m told is that the procedural dramas will do it. The place where it really is hurting is any kind of hour-long that is serialized —

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** They don’t tend to rerun as much. And that’s where you’re seeing, you know, short order things to fill in. You’re seeing reality shows, game shows, all the stuff that NBC does every summer. And they seem to be the most kind of throwing anything out there.

**John:** It’s a whole different network in the summer.

**Jonathan:** Kind of.

**John:** So let’s say I’m a brand new staff writer on Black-ish. How would I get paid? So what would my deal be like for working there and would I be paid a certain amount per week? If I got an episode to write, would that count against what I had already been paid? How would it work from there?

**Jonathan:** My understanding of it is I have weirdly never been a staff writer on TV show. I had this weird way in because I was a Conan writer and then I started creating shows and so I always had this kind of creator-producer role kind of early on. But the way I think it is, the staff writers do get paid weekly. Their scripts actually they don’t get paid for, which is why the residual is very important if a staff writer writes a script and the episodes gets rerun. They do get a residual.

**Craig:** They have to be paid for it in terms of Guild minimum. But my guess is that it comes out of their — in other words, their salary is this much plus this much for the script and we’re going to pay you that on a weekly basis.

**Jonathan:** I think the deal is that maybe that money gets thrown back into their weekly pay or something —

**Craig:** It has to be. Yeah.

**Jonathan:** But they’re really not getting additional — like if you assign a staff writer a script, it’s not a big like —

**Craig:** It’s baked into their salary. But —

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**Craig:** But that baked in price still has to cover pension and health and stuff, yeah.

**Jonathan:** Sure, absolutely, yeah. And so they’re on a weekly thing. And I think they’re only ones who are, maybe story editors are, too, I don’t really know exactly. But then after a certain point and, you know, a number of episodes, you bump up in the job description and, well, the job title really, and you then get an episodic fee. Which is paid out weekly, I think. But it’s an episodic fee.

**John:** But that episodic fee is not as a writer. That episodic fee is as a producer, correct?

**Jonathan:** Technically. But everybody’s a writer-producer, essentially.

**John:** Yeah. The frustration, the challenge that always happens in Writers Guild is that like a lot of the money that TV writers get is actually producer money and therefore it’s not Guild money. And so that becomes a strange —

**Craig:** And like we get so screwed because we pay 1.5% guild dues on every dollar we make.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**Craig:** You guys do not at all.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**Craig:** Not even close.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**John:** But this is not an East Side/West Side —

**Craig:** No, but in return —

**John:** We recognize.

**Craig:** In return for the larger share of money we kick in, can we get much less attention? [laughs]. So it’s a great system.

**John:** It’s really an awesome system.

**Jonathan:** Your name is much bigger though in screens and stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. When a movie gets made —

**Craig:** Really cool.

**John:** It’s really nice.

**Craig:** That’s right. It’s awesome.

**John:** But it is fascinating how, like, the writers who didn’t actually write that episode, their names do show up on the show as like those other credits.

**Jonathan:** Producer, yeah.

**John:** That’s nice, too. I think it’s a good thing.

**Jonathan:** Yeah, we don’t mind that.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**Jonathan:** Well, television, I don’t know about hour-longs. The only hour-long show I ever did was Ed. I was on that for a season. But I do know that every half-hour is super collaborative and super room-written to some degree, like you’re breaking the story as a group and then one writer goes off and does an outline and then gets feedback from the showrunners. Maybe another writer or two could get involved in looking at the outline and then the script comes in and the room works on it. So there’s a lot of people kind of throwing and it’s different.

**John:** So I’d forgotten to rave about your show but Black-ish is one of the few shows that we watch every night sort of when it airs. It doesn’t sit on the DVR long.

**Jonathan:** Fantastic.

**John:** And one of the episodes that you are credited with this last season is the flu episode where the whole Johnson family gets sick. So in an episode like that, how much more is that your episode than other episodes that ran in the season? Like percentage-wise, how much more invested are you in that episode than other episodes?

**Jonathan:** Well, I went off and wrote the draft by myself but I had a lot of help on that story. The story came together in the room and there might have been hours even when I wasn’t in the room when they were working on the story. And I came back in and people were like, “We think this is the direction for this.” There was lots of like group effort on the story. And then I went off and wrote the draft and lots of language and jokes are mine and sort of the structure of the scenes sort of. But then you come back in and it goes through another rewrite and you get jokes beaten and all scenes rewritten and you do a table read and it gets rewritten again.

So, you know, I would say the person with the highest percentage of stuff that he wrote in a draft being shot is Kenya Barris who created the show. It’s his show, it’s his voice. He’s a hilarious writer and he also takes on the toughest episodes that we do where we’re really talking about something. I had the advantage of — it was kind of a light episode. There was a sweetness to it, in which Dre was learning to take care of his sort of — like realizing he had missed out by avoiding taking care of his kids and had some regret. And then we learn at the end that Bow is pregnant. So he will have opportunities in the future to step up and be more involved in that way.

So it had an emotional wallop, I think. But it was in general not —

**John:** But it wasn’t the —

**Craig:** Police brutality episode.

**John:** Police brutality episode, yes.

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Oh, why didn’t they give you that one? [laughs] That’s weird.

**Jonathan:** It’s so funny though. But even now, and like Kenya, we really broke that story as a group. I mean Kenya had so much of the way in because it was really his story of how do you tell your kids about something really hard, like he’d been watching the Ferguson riots with his little boys and they were like, “Why is everybody so mad?” Well, how do you explain this?

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** So the way in was totally his. But then a lot of the structure of that and a lot of the comedy stuff or ideas for that were, you know, kicked around in the room. But then he went off and wrote a script over Christmas and kind of came back and it just had that feel to it of like this, we don’t need to — we cut a couple of things and changed a couple of folks —

**Craig:** Shoot it.

**Jonathan:** And then it was pretty much shoot it, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just shoot it, yeah. Yeah.

**John:** It was a one set sort of, you know, a little play.

**Jonathan:** Yeah, that was his vision. And that’s in a lot of ways his vision for that show is he likes the sort of, like, let scenes play out. Let it be almost a multi-cam in some ways, believe in the characters and their abilities to be interesting. You know, I tend to be a little bit more single camera and it’s probably a good blend because I’m a little bit like, “Just keep it moving in the scene because the scene is three pages. It could be two — ”

**John:** That living room is almost proscenium. It’s almost —

**Jonathan:** It is.

**John:** You know, a three-camera setup and you’re in that space probably more than any other space.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**John:** So the discussion of the police brutality episode, this is actually a pretty good segue into our other thing we want to do this time which is to talk about these ideas, these stories that are in the news and how they could be movies, which in the case of you, I’d also like to know like how could this be either a series or an episode, because some of these ideas feel like, okay, I can see a series about this but some of them feel like, okay, well that is the premise for an episode.

**Jonathan:** Right.

**John:** So we’ll dig into these and see what we have. So first one up on the boards, this is Peter Thiel v. Gawker. So I’ll link to it —

**Craig:** Who do you root for here?

**John:** Yes.

**Jonathan:** That’s a tough one, right?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’ll link to an article from —

**Jonathan:** This one kept me up a little bit, thinking about it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** I’ll link to an article from Nicholas Lemann for The New Yorker sort of going into the back story behind it. But the short version for people who are like following this years after the fact, Peter Thiel is a billionaire. He’s made his money off of PayPal and other places. He’s a big investor in Facebook. He has a vendetta against Gawker. There was a lawsuit that Hulk Hogan filed against Gawker for discussing or releasing images from a sex tape and Hulk Hogan actually won this huge lawsuit against Gawker. But it turned out that Peter Thiel was actually funding the lawsuit against Gawker. And the whole notion of this billionaire versus this company, here’s a man who can spend his entire fortune to bring down a company if he chose to.

**Craig:** There are some free speech issues. The one fact you didn’t mention is the source of his vendetta.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Which is I think relevant. Gawker outed him.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So —

**John:** As gay. You can be outed as anything now, so.

**Craig:** Yeah. They even outed him as Jewish.

**John:** Yes. [laughs]

**Craig:** That never happens. So I honestly don’t know who to root for here. I understand all the problems, you know, inherent to a very wealthy person possibly stifling a media outlet. On the other hand, ugh, Gawker.

**John:** Let’s talk about this as a movie because like the most simple, obvious thing is basically what if Bruce Wayne sued The Daily Planet out of existence. I mean —

**Craig:** Worst movie ever.

**John:** Yes. [laughs] But I mean there’s that quality of like, you know, what are the limits that you can put on an incredibly wealthy person who can just use the system to their advantage.

**Craig:** It feels like an episode of a TV show, doesn’t it? Like just an episode?

**Jonathan:** Well, first of all, it will be. Somebody will do that.

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** They’ll find a way to sort of boil that down for Law & Order or something.

**Craig:** Yeah, so like torn from the headlines kind of thing.

**Jonathan:** Yeah. If Good Wife was still on or somebody would find a way to tear that from the headlines, I think. But it also does feel like it could be a really great movie because it could leave you with like just as kind of conflicted coming out as you are going in because it’s easy to see both sides of it in a way. Like Gawker is disgusting.

I had lunch with my friend Todd Barry who’s a very funny comedian and we were talking about like some of the stuff they’ve just done and some of the shots they take of people in New York, friends of his. And he’s like, it’s gross. And I’m like, “Yeah. Screw them. They’re the worst.” And then like it’s chilling because what we’re not talking about yet is the context a little bit of Thiel’s thing is what Donald Trump is talking about.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** You know, and the way he went on the attack and played, I think, to a lot of receptive ears when he went on attack the other day against the press and what they were trying to do in just asking basic questions about where that money went through, his veterans things, where there were people going like, “The press is dishonest. The press is disgusting. The press needs to be shut down. There have to be better laws.” And that’s the legitimate press they’re talking about. So that’s the context of like it’s very much of a slippery slope kind of a thing.

**John:** In my head, I hear a lot of the Aaron Sorkin kind of dialogue about the arguments. And sort of like the way that both sides can make really impassioned cases for what they believe and sort of why what they’re doing is the noble thing. So the journalistic quality of like, you know, you may hate Gawker for what they do but recognize that any media publication could just as easily be in Gawker’s position where someone could go after them for anything they’ve ever written. And in this case, like the lawsuit for Hulk Hogan has nothing to do with Thiel other than the fact that he hates Gawker —

**Jonathan:** Exactly. The way to take them out. I would say this. I think that you’ve got to come down on the side of Gawker, ultimately, as much as I hate to say it because I — and I’ll say why.

**John:** For the movie version. Let’s just say like what it is the best movie.

**Jonathan:** But I think the aspirational thing that I would build into the movie, the ending, I don’t know how you get to this, is I thought about this as I watched the sketch that somebody posted today of Amy Schumer doing AMZ, a takedown of TMZ.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** And it was devastatingly great, on point. And it’s like the aspirational, maybe Sorkinesque, maybe somebody else would write it better. But like the idea that like — do you remember QB VII, the ending of QB VII where the libel case where the author of the book about Adam Kelso who was the doctor who was accused of Nazi crimes that Anthony Hopkins played. It was a TV movie, Leon Uris novel. That he wins this libel suit but he wins a British ha’penny, the lowest coin in the English crown.

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** The ending would be that Gawker wins but that they close for other reasons. So the market, the people would go, they’re discussing, we’re no longer going to read them, we’re no longer the market. It’s almost like a weird belief in the power of the common sense of people in the market to go like, you know, TMZ is disgusting and corrodes your soul so don’t watch it anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know if I would believe that ending.

**Jonathan:** Of course not!

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**Jonathan:** But that’s the ending I would want to write, you know.

**Craig:** There is possibly another angle where you are on the side of this guy and he is taking on a group that, look, the one thing that gets left out of the discussion is you can’t successfully financially back someone’s winning lawsuit if they can’t win the lawsuit, right? That he did win the lawsuit —

**John:** Oh, no, no, no. But here’s the thing. It’s like he —

**Jonathan:** He drained them.

**John:** He drives them down. So basically like he can bankrupt them just through legal fees, essentially because he’s filing like —

**Craig:** But they got a judgment. I mean the point is they did —

**John:** Yeah, I think they got a judgment but here’s the thing. It’s like he could file 150 judgments and he doesn’t care if he ever makes any money back.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Right. But in this case, what muddies the water is — see, because Peter Thiel is not actually acting like a super villain. He’s acting like a guy that specifically hates one group of people and he has reason to hate them. And a lot of people hate them. And so he’s going after them. And they did do something wrong. They’ve done a lot of wrong things. But there is an interesting ending where in the movie version he wins, gets rid of Gawker, feels good, and then turns on the TV the next day and somebody that is bad is doing it to somebody that doesn’t deserve it and he’s essentially released a virus, you know, of behavior.

**Jonathan:** How about this?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Another version, probably not as interesting as your version but I’ll pitch it anyway, is that I do think like he takes down Gawker, he wins, Gawker goes out of business, but when he tries to take down something has journalistic standards, people say no. And that’s the rally. Maybe that’s the sort of like, so all of a sudden let’s just say he tries to take down the New York Times. We could debate whether the New York Times —

**Craig:** Right. He goes too far.

**Jonathan:** Is of quality or not, I’m not going to get into that argument. But like he goes too far —

**Craig:** They’re not Gawker.

**Jonathan:** They’re not Gawker. And people go, no, and they go we still want a free press.

**John:** Yeah. So essentially like he’s taking down Spotlight essentially. Like, you know, he’s taking down the noble journalistic crusaders.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And like that’s the thing. What I do kind of find fascinating are the characters involved. And so I think Thiel is a great character because whether you portray him as a villain or a hero, he definitely perceives himself as a hero. He sees himself as that person like all great villains should. Nick Denton is a fascinating character who’s like — I think he is actually clearly very smart but also to some degree self-delusional about sort of what his function is. And he’s willing to sort of say like, “Well, to make an omelet, we’re going to break, you know, people’s lives.”

**Jonathan:** Nick Denton is the head of Gawker.

**John:** Yeah, the head of Gawker, yeah. You have the Hulk Hogan or whoever the plaintiff is you sort of put in that place is really fascinating because that person kind of knows they’re being used as a tool and it’s not really about them. Like Thiel doesn’t honestly care about Hulk Hogan whatsoever.

**Jonathan:** That’s so great.

**Jonathan:** He’s just only a vessel.

**Craig:** We don’t know that. [laughs] He might love Hulk Hogan.

**John:** Oh, he might love —

**Craig:** He might have Hulkamania.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Probably not.

**John:** Probably not. I mean, to me the fascinating —

**Jonathan:** The realization by that guy that he’s been used —

**John:** Oh, yeah —

**Jonathan:** The conversations between him and the Thiel character where he’s —

**Craig:** Because I can see he’s like, “This is amazing. Somebody…”

**Jonathan:** Believes in me.

**Craig:** “…that cares that much about me, I still got it.”

**Jonathan:** That’s a heartbreaking scene.

**Craig:** That is a heartbreaking —

**John:** And so there’s a possibility for like, you know, you think that character thinks that they’re an Erin Brockovich, that they’re like little town Erin Brockovich. And like no, no, no, you were just a pawn being used by these plutocrats moving stuff around a board. That I think is a fascinating —

**Craig:** I still feel like to me, everything we discussed would be a great hour of television. I don’t know —

**John:** I think it’s a great HBO movie maybe.

**Jonathan:** I think it’s an HBO movie. I think two hours —

**Craig:** That counts as television.

**Jonathan:** Two hours of it. Yeah, television. It’s not going to put butts in the seats in —

**Craig:** No, because these kinds of movies ultimately, the issue involved needs to be like — The Insider was a wonderful movie and that’s about tobacco companies killing people and lying. This is in the end, I get that it is relevant to our lives but doesn’t quite feel like it deserves to be that — I always ask myself, “Am I going to drive somewhere and park to see this?” Probably not.

**John:** That was Amy Pascal’s thing which always, like, you know, if she’s going to green light a movie is, like, would I actually get a babysitter and go to the theater on a Friday night —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** When I’m already tired and had a long day’s work? And like, that’s a high bar to put for yourself.

**Craig:** It actually is a very high bar.

**John:** All right, let’s go to a much simpler —

**Jonathan:** HBO movie — it’s an HBO movie.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s go to a much simpler one here. This is about stoned sheep. So this is a Daily Mail article by Keiligh Baker for MailOnline. So essentially what happened is a bunch of cannabis was dumped at the side of the road. A bunch of sheep ate the cannabis. They went crazy and ballistic and destructive.

**Craig:** Well, okay, but they didn’t so first of all —

**John:** Yeah, it’s a sort of false headline and I —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Of course.

**Craig:** It’s a classic Daily Mail.

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The Daily Mail headline is a Sheep Go on Psychotic Pot Rampage and then you read the article and what happened was they were wandering. They seemed confused. One of them got into a house and pooped. [laughs]

**Jonathan:** And one got hit by a car.

**Craig:** And one got hit by a car which is the most sheep thing of all time.

**Jonathan:** Yeah, exactly. With all the — pot is only going to have them act more sheep.

**Craig:** More sheep.

**John:** Yeah, like —

**Craig:** Like enhance their natural —

**Jonathan:** Like we used to say when we were getting high.

**Craig:** — harmlessness.

**Jonathan:** Like let’s get sheep.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like sheep are —

**Jonathan:** Sheep-faced.

**John:** Let’s use this is a springboard.

**Craig:** Sheep-faced. [laughs]

**John:** What is this? If someone came into the writer’s room with this idea, what might that spin into? Like what does that sort of get to?

**Jonathan:** You know, we would have to put it in a context of, you know, like a personal family story.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** I mean, a Black-ish, it’s much more of a — it’s not a Black-ish story maybe, you would try to — we have, you know, a —

**Craig:** Not really access to sheep.

**Jonathan:** No real access to sheep. Tracee Ellis Ross’s character, Bow, is a doctor so maybe there’s some way in which we could find an analog where a bunch of her patients got high or something off of an anesthesia — she’s an anesthesiologist or maybe something like —

**John:** You have grandparents — I also feel like they’re always potentially —

**Jonathan:** True.

**John:** You know, getting into things that they shouldn’t get into.

**Jonathan:** I can think it could be an interesting comedy movie, again, maybe, I don’t know.

**John:** Craig, can kids get high on pop syrup?

**Craig:** No, I mean, as somebody that has written a sheep movie —

**John:** Yeah, he has a sheep movie in development.

**Craig:** It’s a sheep movie about sheep that solve — they’re detective sheep, and they solve the murder of their own shepherd. This is not how we want to see sheep. [laughs]

**Jonathan:** Can I throw this in? What about — and I say this because I actually — every once in a while, I would perform on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and one of the things I did was we used to do the Clutch Cargo, which is the moving lips thing, where Conan would interview Bill Clinton or Bob Dole whatever.

**Craig:** Yes, yes, of course.

**Jonathan:** And I was Dolly the cloned sheep.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**Jonathan:** So what if there’s like a — because this happened over in Britain, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Swansea or something?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Jonathan:** That was in Scotland. She was a Scotland sheep.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Jonathan:** And I remember trying to do a Scottish accent. “Baa, I don’t know. I recognize myself.” I was trying to like — she was basically freaking out because there were two of her.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** So maybe there’s a cloning — maybe there’s some kind of high concept? I don’t know.

**Craig:** No. No.

**Jonathan:** Animated?

**Craig:** No. It’s just — here’s the problem.

**Jonathan:** Animated for adults?

**Craig:** Here’s the problem, sheep getting high is as funny as people getting high. People getting high is occasionally funny like back — but it used to be way funnier. Like Cheech and Chong were hysterical because getting high was transgressive.

**John:** I think sheep getting high is funny for a scene in another movie so like —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So like, oh, the sheep got high and then they like they ruin the house. That’s a moment, but it’s not a —

**Craig:** It’s a moment, yeah.

**Jonathan:** High sheep in like a DreamWorks movie, they would be like the penguins of Madagascar.

**Craig:** Right. But then you can’t put drugs in kid’s movies so you can’t do that, so.

**John:** Yeah, but they could eat like spoiled something or they eat the grass, yeah.

**Craig:** Or do like the fake high stuff? Like —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, my God. He ate those weird flowers.

**Jonathan:** We did a show called Father of the Pride for DreamWorks.

**Craig:** I remember that one, yeah.

**Jonathan:** That made it for NBC. Was kind of a debacle. Like it the show about Siegfried and Roy and the white lions that worked for them.

**Craig:** And the Union debacle.

**Jonathan:** Oh, Union debacle, exactly. That was crazy and then it was physical debacle because Roy got eaten by a tiger which was terrible.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Jonathan:** It was a huge amount of money that was wasted all round. But there were some funny things and one of the things, it’s sort of a thing you would do but is that the daughter who’s a white lion — teenage daughter gets caught with catnip. So you can do catnip as a —

**Craig:** The fake drug, yeah.

**Jonathan:** The fake drug, yeah.

**John:** Cats on catnip. All right. Our next story is The Great Swiss Bank Heist. This is a New Yorker article by Patrick Radden Keefe. It tracks Hervé Falciani who is a worker for the Swiss Bank HSBC. He stole a bunch of data from HSBC and in the revelation of what was in the data revealed that there is a tremendous number of people hiding a tremendous amount of money. And it becomes much more complicated from that. Craig, you were the one who loved this more than anything.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. So, first of all, this will absolutely be optioned by somebody if it hasn’t been optioned already.

**John:** Yeah. So usually whenever we do this section, one of these things absolutely becomes a movie. This is Craig’s prediction.

**Craig:** Somebody will — I don’t know if it will eventually become a movie. Somebody is going to buy the rights to this and here’s why. Here’s what’s boring. A guy steals a bunch of data and it’s got a bunch of information about tax dodging, whoop-dee-doo, right? They couldn’t make an interesting movie out of Julian Assange, so how are they going to make an interesting movie of this guy?

Here’s why it’s interesting. This guy is nuts, okay? This guy is amazing. He is a total psychopath, you can tell, right? Even from him talking. He invents these crazy scenarios and nobody knows if it’s true or not. So he invents a scenario where he was kidnapped by the Mossad. He invents a scenario where he wanted to get arrested because people were trying to kill him. He tells the French that he is bringing them this information out of a sense of some kind of patriotism to let them know that French people are hiding their money.

But he may only have gone to them because he couldn’t find anybody to sell this to, right? Because he was trying to sell through a woman he seduced, right? Even though he was married. This guy is a nightmare. And the character that’s unmentioned in this but the one that I would love to write because this is one of my favorite kinds of characters is — like we’ll call it the Diogenes character. Somebody who sees everything for exactly what it is and no one else does.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How frustrating that there’s this one guy who’s like, “No, this is not a hero. This is bad man who’s doing bad things.” And, you know, in a weird way, the one person that comes through like that in this article is the former mistress who’s — she’s the one saying, “Why are you all being suckered by the guy the suckered me?” [laughs]

“I’m telling you, you’re crazy.” Anyway, I love that character. I think there’s a really interesting story to tell here. It’s like I could see the trailer starting like, okay, we’re doing, it’s like we’re doing a movie about finances. It’s like we’re doing a Wall Street movie. But then, WAA-BAA. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Crazy guy.

**John:** So it’s that sense of like, is he a hero? Is he a villain? It’s one charismatic guy you’re sticking at the very center of this thing and from the audience’s perspective, are we supposed to be deciding ourselves or do you think the movie has a clear take from the beginning of good guy/bad guy?

**Craig:** I think, ideally, we are left to decide.

**John:** So, it reminds me a bit of — I can’t remember the name of the movie but it’s Matt Damon and Steven Soderbergh directed it where he claimed to be like this much more important CIA figure than he actually really was and he —

**Craig:** Is it the Good Shepherd?

**Jonathan:** The Good Shepherd?

**John:** No, not the black and white one. This was —

**Jonathan:** That wasn’t black and white.

**Craig:** It wasn’t black and white.

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** The Good Shepherd was about the founding of the CIA so that can’t be it.

**Jonathan:** Yeah, those Yale guys in the —

**Craig:** Oh, The Informant?

**John:** The Informant.

**Jonathan:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** So The Informant had like a really interesting tone where, you know, you thought Matt Damon was the character he initially portrays himself to be and then you realize like, “No, no, no. You are actually a self-deluding fraud at the heart of this.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that makes it really fascinating when you get into it. What I do like about what you’re describing, though, is it’s a way — sort of like The Big Short where you can tackle some real issues about sort of the way the wealthy hide money and sort of like how that cripples countries but actually have a story to it.

**Craig:** Right, exactly. Yeah.

**John:** A thread to follow on.

**Craig:** Yeah, because taxes are boring and Swiss bank accounts vaguely are boring. I mean, they’re — I mean, we’re all familiar with the phrase because of spy movies and so forth. But you’re right. I mean, this man’s insanity and his crimes, they’re not globally important. It turns out actually the boring stuff is globally important. This is a way to tell that story but at the same time show a scene where he is pulled off the street and a pillowcase put over his head, and he’s thrown into a room, and there’s two guys from the Mossad and they’re telling him that he needs to pretend to be arrested, and he needs to pretend this and triple lies and — oh, and he claims that there is a — what does he call it? The organization or the —

**John:** The Network.

**Craig:** The Network. He claims that his act of data theft was aided by a shadowy —

**John:** Yeah, a loose confederation of anti-tax evasion crusaders, consisting of law enforcement officers, lawyers, and spies.

**Craig:** Oh, bullshit, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, such bullshit and of course his former mistress says, “Yeah, that’s total bullshit. You knew the network was me and him. That was it. And, you know, why he’s doing it? Money, no big shock there.” But you see the things as like I would love to see the story that he’s telling be real and then from another perspective think, “Wait, did that happen or not?” That’s just you telling it. “Are you Keyser Soze or are you Verbal Kint? Which one are you? I can’t tell.” So I love this and somebody should be making this.

**John:** So Jonathan, is there any — if this comes into the room —

**Jonathan:** Yeah.

**John:** Is there any pieces of this that you say, like, “Okay, well, that’s an interesting thing we can use for our show.” Like the idea of hiding money or where people hide money or the idea of what information you reveal like, you know, Dre finds stuff out at work and has to decide — has to make a moral choice as sort of whether to reveal it, like, there’s little bits and pieces you can you use in this probably.

**Jonathan:** Absolutely. I mean, I think that in general, I mean, these things are — I wouldn’t call it high concept but they’re the kind of idea that can support the weight of a two-hour movie where I think the thing about a half-hour television show is it’s smaller stories that you spend a little bit more time. And, you know, characters don’t really change that much so you can’t —

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** You don’t quite have the giant crusade, like, the thing I always say about a half-hour show in a pilot, you do take your characters maybe from A to C or D in terms —

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Of a growth but then you spend the rest of the series shuttling back and forth between A or B.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly.

**Jonathan:** You know, and maybe at a special episode at the end of the season two, they get to C again and then they return —

**Craig:** But right back again.

**Jonathan:** Back a little bit. That’s kind of what people like in a way. So I think that it’s hard to find exactly what the father — but I will tell you a story like this will get us into — here’s what I think could absolutely happen with that story. If Kenya happened to read that and I happened to read that and a couple of other writers happened to read that. Or I said, “I want you all to read this.” It would get us into an interesting discussion that would potentially be — that I think we could do on our show which is the tendency to believe something like the Network exists or the conspiracy. Like, I was in San Diego last weekend and walked past the 9/11 truth squad —

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**Jonathan:** Display on Embarcadero. I walked past a Trump merchandise table which was very happily unpopulated by customers. Flags make America great again. Right near it, though, was a pretty well-attended, lots of curiosity seekers — including I saw this young black family that was listening to this guy give this crazy conspiracy that ultimately was kind of anti-Semitic about, like, Larry Silverstein, the [crosstalk] of 9/11.

**Craig:** And there’s a shock. And there’s the shock.

**Jonathan:** Yeah, exactly. And this family kind of listening and going —

**Craig:** Was it a black guy giving the speech?

**Jonathan:** No.

**Craig:** Because I learned this term called hotep. Have you ever heard of hotep?

**Jonathan:** Yes.

**John:** What is hotep?

**Craig:** Hotep is — I’m sidetracking here. Hotep is —

**Jonathan:** I just learned this this year.

**Craig:** Yeah, I literally just learned — yeah, exactly. Hotep is basically like the subculture of black men who over — they basically lecture all black people on black superiority and they’re kind of —

**Jonathan:** We did a hotep pop in an episode earlier this year when it was in, I forget. But it was a pop to Dre in college and he was a — he had a hotep face.

**John:** I didn’t know that you call those pop, so the quick cutaways where you’re in a different time period and it’s just for that one joke that’s a pop —

**Craig:** Hotep face.

**Jonathan:** Where he was talking about the, you know, the — the yeah. All this stuff.

**Craig:** Anyway, I learned and loved it but these people are spewing paranoid conspiracy cloning.

**Jonathan:** Yes, that gets me back to like where I would think we could do an episode where why a black family — a super educated black family could buy into some conspiracy stuff and I think a lot of the reason is because there has been a conspiracy against them a little bit.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** You know, in some ways and even if it isn’t necessarily as organized a conspiracy as what these 9/11 truthers would say happened on 9/11, you know, the belief in the black community maybe that there was — that AIDS was started as, you know, that there was —

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** Cooked up in a lab and, like, why would they think that? Because the Tuskegee experiments happened, you know what I mean? There have been conspiracies and so like — and we did sort of tap this when Dre had his fear of going to the doctor and then that was amplified and completely multiplied by Dre’s dad, Laurence Fishburne’s character, absolutely wouldn’t go to a doctor. Well, we talked a little bit about why there is a little bit of sometimes mistrust of doctors in the black community or certain members of the black community. And I hesitate always to say the black community because it’s not monolithic, another thing that I’ve kind of really learned a lot by being on the show. So I think that that kind of what would make people draw to something. So I don’t know whether that’s really what that — to be honest I did not do my homework.

**Craig:** No.

Jonathon: I did not read the long the New Yorker piece about the Swiss Bank Heist.

**Craig:** Clearly. But you see how important it is —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** For those of you listening at home —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** To be able to think and talk on your feet when you’re completely unprepared.

**Jonathan:** Exactly. [laughs] That’s what I do.

**Craig:** That’s how you get a career in this business.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No, but —

**Jonathan:** You have to love to hear yourself talk about nothing.

**Craig:** About nothing.

**Jonathan:** Yes.

**Craig:** But you are — you are demonstrating something else other than the fact that you’re not prepared, which is that for television, for episodic, I think a lot of times the real value is some kind of underlying psychological issue that you can carry through to any character, right? So how would we deal with this interesting thing?

Whereas in film, a lot of times what you’re looking for are characters like that man to me is a movie character. And you want to try and take it — it’s like the way I would pitch that movie to studios. I want to do The Insider, but what if you cannot trust? Like what if instead or Russell Crowe’s character, it was the Joker because basically that’s what’s going on. Like who do — how do you feel about this? How do you feel — and in a weird way, it is kind of similar to the Peter Thiel thing. It’s just that it’s a much cooler story.

Because it’s not about Gawker or whatever. It’s about the Swiss Banks and billions and trillions of dollars and countries fighting. It’s like in there — if you had read the article, you would’ve seen that they sent Greece a list of — so Greece, you know, few financial problems over there. Meanwhile, they get the data and they send Greece a list of all the very, very wealthy Greek people that have hidden their money in Swiss Banks and are not paying taxes on it. And the amount of taxes that these people were not paying was the equivalent of like 10% of all the taxes that should’ve been collected there. And you know what the Greece did about it? Nothing.

They couldn’t even — then like the new guy came in and found it in a drawer and the old guy had tampered with it to remove three family member’s names from it. It was a disaster — I mean that stuff you can’t make up.

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right, a final story. I think it’s going to fit more into the world of an episodic show. This is about the wrong grandson. So this is a story that comes from South Carolina. There will be a link in the show notes. It’s basically a 65-year-old Orangeburg County grandfather picked up the wrong son — the wrong kid at daycare. Actually the elementary school. And so, essentially, it wasn’t until he got the kid home and that someone looked at him and said like, “Wait you’re not our kid.”

And so basically the school released the wrong kid.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** The granddad —

**Jonathan:** Absolutely an episode of television.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Absolutely an episode I’m doing this fall.

**Craig:** And a broad comedy movie.

**Jonathan:** Absolutely.

**John:** I don’t think it’s enough of a movie premise. Unless the —

**Craig:** I know how to do it.

**John:** Unless it’s Home Alone — okay, tell me.

**Craig:** I know how to do it. You’ve got a kid. It has to be like, you know, think of like a Dennis the Menace age kid.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And his family sucks. And they don’t understand him or at least he thinks they don’t understand him and he doesn’t like them. And his grandfather, in particular, is the worst. [laughs]

And he wants to run away. So he’s made a plan — in fact, he doesn’t even have a grandfather, right? Just his parents. They’re the worst. So he’s made a plan, “After school today, I’m running away.” And he’s about to do it when this car pulls up and this guy goes, “Get in!” [laughs]

But it’s a nice car and he’s got like McDonald’s with him. And the kid’s like, “Oh my god, that’s Stewart’s grandfather but he thinks I’m Stewart. I’m getting in. And he goes and basically lives the high life for a weekend with this guy making this guy feel like he’s the grandfather except that he isn’t. And then, you could see all sorts of interesting —

**Jonathan:** I could see that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then, like, you know, family blah-blah-blah.

**John:** It writes itself. That was such a development executive pitch. Basically it’s like, yeah, do this thing and you can figure out the rest.

**Craig:** Family blah-blah-blah.

**Jonathan:** Have you seen the Mitchell and Webb thing about not that but that?

**Craig:** Yeah. A pebble, a penguin, a policeman —

**Jonathan:** No. It’s not that. It’s a guy talking about his novel.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s what he’s saying. But he says, “It could be a pebble, a penguin, a policeman. All of the above, none of the above, and they are in love or they’re not in love.” That, write that. Or, don’t.

**Jonathan:** Or don’t. It’s hilarious. But, yes, so that could totally be a development executive’s thing — something like that. You’ll figure it out.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** But I do think that could be an episode of television. I think you could have — I love the story. I do this story over and over, I think most shows with a strong lead are this most episodes where you have a problem, you try to solve the problem, make the problem worse. And then you solve the problem but in the way you thought you were going to solve it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** And it ends up kind of being a little bit of a moment of growth. So that would be the grandpa, we would have Dre or Laurence Fishburne, Anthony Anderson or Laurence Fishburne pick up the wrong kid. Try to fix it, make it worse, and then actually solve something else. Maybe not solve the real problem but solve something else getting not what he thought he wanted but what he actually needed.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** And you can do that in a half-hour television show.

**John:** For sure.

**Jonathan:** A lot, all the time.

**John:** And I bet what some of the challenges as you’re breaking the story in the room is figuring out like what it’s actually really about.

**Jonathan:** Absolutely.

**John:** The premise of it is like he does this thing. But like what is that actually really about? Is it about the fear of kidnapping? Is it about the —

**Jonathan:** I think it could be the fear of not having enough of a connection with your grandson that you notice the difference. You notice the difference until too late.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** So then Pops would try to fix that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Or Dre would try to fix that. I was so in my own head and distracted by work that I let this kid get in my car and drove him. And all of a sudden, the police think — people are thinking I’m kidnapping the kid. And I’m not and I try to fix that. And then you overcompensate and spend too much time with your kids. And realize that the truth is somewhere in the middle.

**Craig:** This guy — look at this guy. [laughs]

**John:** This guy looks great.

**Craig:** He looks so confused.

**Jonathan:** It’s such a bummer.

**John:** Yeah. So what Bart Simpson would always say is like, “The only thing worse than your crappy under-parenting is your scary over-parenting.”

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**John:** And that would be sort of the thing —

**Jonathan:** That would be a story I could see us doing. And that might not exactly be it but that would be what caused this problem in the first place. And you go back at the end of the third act to kind of actually address the problem in a rational way as opposed to the irrational way that you —

**Craig:** Right.

**Jonathan:** Addressed it for all of act two.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is this graphic novel series, a series of comic books from Image Comics but they’re gathered up together in nice little books you can go buy, called Sex Criminals. I’m the last person who’s read these things. Everyone has read them. But they’re really good.

**Craig:** You’re not the last person.

**John:** So in case you have not heard about it, it’s a series by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky from 2013. They are terrific. So the basic premise to this series is that you have this young woman who when she achieves orgasm, time stops. And so she can live in this sort of glowing moment for a period of time. A sort of refractory period in which she can wander around and everything else is frozen except for her. She meets a guy who has the same ability and together they rob banks. And it is brilliantly done. It is about sort of taking control of your sexuality. They’re funny, they’re weird, they’re naughty, so you shouldn’t live them sitting out on —

**Craig:** I have that thing by the way.

**John:** Yeah. It’s amazing.

**Craig:** I have that.

**John:** [laughs] That’s why everything seems a little bit misplaced every once in a while.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. You snuck in and done things.

**Craig:** I have two weird things.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I have the ability to stop time when I have an orgasm and I have the ability to just spontaneously have orgasms. So, yeah, my days are strange.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But that’s how, you know, sometimes people remark on the podcast, “Oh, Craig tends to speak in complete sentences.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I just simply go back and stop time. I think, I write it out, I memorize it, I put it in my pocket. But, first, I have to jizz my pants. Yeah. So if it smells bleachy in here.

**John:** That’s what it’s for.

**Jonathan:** Oh.

**Craig:** What?

**Jonathan:** Oh.

**Craig:** It’s just — it’s biology.

**John:** It’s biology.

**Craig:** Yeah. We have dirty shows so we can do whatever we want.

**John:** Yeah. We can do whatever we want.

**Jonathan:** I took it to that. I got into it earlier on with the cream my jeans in the third row of the theater.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Boom. I was also made —

**John:** Craig Mazin, do have a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** That’s not your orgasm?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know how to get cooler than that but I’ll try. Fallout 4, I believe, was one of my Cool Things when it came out. It’s very fun game. I don’t know if you’re a video game guy.

**Jonathan:** Not at all.

**Craig:** So big video game guy. Fallout 4 is a wonderful, huge, sandbox, open world exploration, quest-based game. And they have a new DLC for it, downloadable content, called Far Harbor. And so in Far Harbor, instead of wandering around Boston, irradiated post-apocalyptic Boston, you get to take a boat up to their version of Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park and go kill different stuff up there but always, of course, with these interesting moral dilemma storylines. They’re very good at that. Excellent. And I think it’s like 15 bucks or something and it’s another, god knows, 20-hours of game play or something, so Far Harbor —

**John:** Cool. What’s your One Cool Thing for us, Jonathan?

**Jonathan:** My One Cool Thing, this is going to sound lame, but is foreign travel now. You have to do it. We were just in Mexico. My wife and I had our 20th wedding anniversary and we took a fantastic trip to the Yucatan where I’d never been. We stayed at a great resort and it was really fun. And we took this day trip and in talking to our guides — our driver and our guide — the sort of tentativeness with which they asked about how we felt about Donald Trump made me say it’s really important right now to go and let them know that we’re not all crazy. Especially in Mexico, but I think anywhere and honestly the sort of overjoyedness with which when we said, “Oh, god, no please understand that that is something that is — not everybody is that way,” was actually kind of heartbreaking and heartwarming. So I’d say like it’s an old standby, but if you have a chance to reassure anybody —

**John:** Before November?

**Jonathan:** Before November and even after November that even if something — if he wins that he’s going to have a rough road because that’s not who we are.

**Craig:** I don’t think he’s going to win. I think we — I don’t think so.

**Jonathan:** I know, but he’s the nominee of a major party —

John. Yeah.

**Craig:** Kind of.

**Jonathan:** That has seemed to have left its senses.

**Craig:** Kind of. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Jonathan:** Well, I lost $500 on that with Kenya Barris, who’s a very good —

**Craig:** That’s the biggest problem with what happened. [laughs]

**Jonathan:** I lost the money.

**Craig:** You lost 500 bucks.

**Jonathan:** He took out in a thousand dollars from two writers who were both — Courtney Lily, who’s another writer on the show. We were both like, “Come on! He represents 30% of the Republican Party. Well —

**Craig:** Yeah, you failed to account for whom he was running against.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I could’ve been of assistance to you.

**Jonathan:** Yeah. I know. You should have stopped me.

**Craig:** I should’ve stopped —

**Jonathan:** Is that an okay One Cool Thing?

**John:** It’s a wonderful One Cool Thing.

**Jonathan:** It’s not a thing but it’s a thing that I think people — I’ve had a little hiatus and I’ve been — I took the opportunity to travel a little bit and it reminds me of a — it’s incumbent upon us now.

**John:** I’ve had the library as a One Cool Thing. So we go general sometimes.

**Jonathan:** Okay good.

**John:** Yeah, totally. That’s lovely.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** And that’s our show. Jonathan Groff, thank you so much for being on our show.

**Craig:** Thanks, Jonathan.

**Jonathan:** It was fantastic. Craig, John, thank you.

**Craig:** Our pleasure.

**John:** As always our show is produced by Stuart Friedel and is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is from Adam Lastname, who does such great outros for us. We don’t know what your last name is but it’s Adam Lastname.

**Craig:** I’m so curious.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Doesn’t he —

**John:** Weirdly, that’s a thing in podcast music where people use other bizarre names. You wouldn’t think there would be a podcast music thing but there is —

**Craig:** There is a thing for everything.

**John:** There’s a hotmoms.gov is another sort of podcast band.

**Craig:** Hotmoms.gov?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is the greatest title ever. That’s amazing. [laughs]

**John:** If you have questions for me or for Craig on Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Jonathan Groff, are you on Twitter?

**Jonathan:** I’m @notthatgroff.

**John:** What a great handle for you.

**Jonathan:** Notthatgroff.

**Craig:** I’m going to consistent every day. I’m going to be like, “By the way, love you in Hamilton.”

**Jonathan:** Thank you. [laughs]

**Craig:** Love you so much.

**John:** Yeah. We haven’t even gotten into all the stuff you do on your gay HBO show, Looking. So that was really brave.

**Craig:** Very brave.

**Jonathan:** You know, it just, to me it was just a job.

**John:** Very good. It’s just a body. It’s the instrument that you’re given.

**Craig:** It’s just bodies.

**Jonathan:** Exactly.

**John:** If you have a longer question, you can write in to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcript for this show in a couple of days. The 250 episode USB drives just arrived as we were recording this episode. So they should be in the store if not this week, but the next week. And if you’re on iTunes for whatever reason, please leave us a review because it helps people find our show. Thank you all much.

Thank you, Jonathan.

**Jonathan:** Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Jonathan Groff on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0342917/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/NotThatGroff)
* [Network Ownership & In-Season Stacking Rights Rule 2016 Upfronts: In-Depth Look](http://deadline.com/2016/05/network-ownership-in-season-stacking-rights-series-pickups-2016-upfronts-1201752808/) on Deadline
* [America’s TV Exports Too Diverse for Overseas?](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/americas-tv-exports-diverse-overseas-879109) from THR
* [Financial Interest and Syndication Rules (aka fin-syn)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Interest_and_Syndication_Rules) on Wikipedia
* Black-ish, season 2 episode 16, [“Hope”](http://www.hulu.com/watch/909068) on Hulu
* The New Yorker on [Peter Thiel vs Gawker](http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-peter-thiels-gawker-battle-could-open-a-war-against-the-press)
* Daily Mail’s [Stoned Sheep](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3609322/Stoned-sheep-went-psychotic-rampage-eating-cannabis.html) coverage
* The New Yorker on [The Great Swiss Bank Heist](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/herve-falcianis-great-swiss-bank-heist)
* [The Informant!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Informant!) on Wikipedia
* [Hotep, Explained](http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2016/03/hotep_explained/) from The Root
* [Grandfather “very sorry” after accidentally picking up wrong grandchild at school](http://www.kplctv.com/story/32102101/report-grandfather-accidentally-picks-up-wrong-grandchild-at-school?clienttype=generic&sf27594567=1)
* [Ok… Not this…](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LC0JjvAJt8) sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look
* [Sex Criminals](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1632152436/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky, on Amazon
* [Fallout 4’s Far Harbor DLC](http://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/435881/) on Steam
* [Travel abroad!](http://www.state.gov/travel/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Adam Lastname ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/what-is-good-writing).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 239 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today’s episode is 100% craft, there will be no follow-up, there will be no questions, no discussion of etiquette. We are going to try to answer the question of what is good writing before we take a look at three new Three Page Challenges.

A warning that one of the Three Page Challenges has some bad words in it, so if you’re driving in the car with your kids, you may want to turn down the dial before you get to the Three Page Challenges. But other than that, it should be a pretty clean show.

**Craig:** I’m glad for it. I feel like while it was fun to wander around a bit, we need to focus. We need to refocus on our mission.

**John:** We need to focus on our mission, which is to talk about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. So the idea for this topic came up because I read this piece in Slate and which is originally from Quora. It was by this guy, Marcus Geduld. And he was trying to answer the question, how do you differentiate good acting from bad acting? So I’ll put a link to the show notes for his original piece but I thought it was actually a really nicely designed explanation of sort of what he’s looking for in good acting.

And what I especially liked about it is he says, “If anyone tells you there are objective standards, they’re full of crap. This is a matter of personal taste. There are trends — there are many people who love Philip Seymour Hoffman’s acting but if you don’t, you’re not wrong.”

And so, as we get into the succession of acting and writing, I would back up what he says. It’s not there’s a one objective standard, but there’s things that I tend to notice when I’m saying like, well, that’s really good acting or really good writing and it may be useful to point them out.

**Craig:** This is a large philosophical discussion but I do agree with this gentleman as well. When it comes to writing, it’s not possible to say that this is capital G good and this is capital G bad. What you can say is that this is to my taste or it is not and here’s why. We do know that there are certain kinds of writing and the writing of certain writers that tends to be toward to most people’s taste, to a lot of people’s taste. There are some writers who appeal to the taste of those who consider themselves refined. There are some that appeal to the average man or woman.

But I’m with this guy completely. That’s why anytime I talk about a movie, I’m like, “It wasn’t for me.” That’s the best I could do.

**John:** Let’s take a look at his criteria for good acting. He says, “Good actors make me believe that the actor is going through whatever his character is actually going through.” So there’s a believability. You really believe that he has been shot, that he is terrified in this moment. And he singles out sort of like if you can tell they’re faking it, then it’s honestly kind of worse. Like you can sense that they’re acting.

And that’s very true. I mean, the performances that I admire the most, I genuinely believe that they are experiencing — obviously you know there’s artifice, you know that they’re in a movie — and yet the moment feels incredibly real because they’re responding to things in a very real way.

**Craig:** And ultimately verisimilitude is kind of what we do, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’re trying to create a fake world that at least seems real to you while you’re experiencing it or is real enough that you can suspend your disbelief. And this advice I think is perfect for actors or writers.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Actors, obviously it’s immediate. We see and hear them and so we know that they’re believable or not. But for us as writers, believability, that probably is my number one problem with most screenplays I read. I read something, I read a character’s line or I witness their choice and I think, “I just don’t believe that that’s what a person would do in that circumstance.”

**John:** Absolutely. You say like, “I don’t believe it. I don’t buy it. I don’t get it. It doesn’t connect for me.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s because you don’t believe that character is performing that way in that moment. But very related to that, Geduld is looking for surprise. The great actors surprise him. So out of all the choices they could make, they are making really interesting choices.

So he singles out sort of like if there’s a bank teller, you sort of want that bank teller just to be believable as a bank teller and not draw any attention or draw any focus to himself. But your main actors in your piece, they should be making really fascinating and interesting choices at times so you don’t know what they’re going to do next. Because if you can predict perfectly what they’re going to do next, you get bored.

I think I see the same thing with writing. If I can tell you what’s going to happen three pages later or three sentences later, then I stop being so intrigued. I’m not curious what’s going to happen next.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s where the boredom happens. And when we see characters doing these things that are sort of obvious, right, there’s the lack of surprise, this is when you tend to hear things like, well, tropey or just sort of, “I’ve seen it before.” The element of surprise isn’t so much about leaping out and going boo at the audience as much as it is delighting them with something that they were not expecting.

All comedy is surprise. You cannot get a laugh if there’s no surprise, right?

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Everybody knows that. If you tell somebody a joke and they’re like, “I’ve heard it before,” don’t keep telling the joke. There will be no surprise. All actors surprise, all emotion I think is surprise. It creeps up on you. Even when you are not surprised by the thing that happens, the intensity of it surprises you, and thus, the tears come.

**John:** And there’s no surprise without expectation. So the reason why a joke works is because you set up an expectation for what the natural outcome is and the punch line is a surprise.

The same thing happens in drama. You set an expectation for what is going to happen next and the surprise is something different happens or a different choice is made. So you don’t get those moments of surprise unless you’ve set expectation really well.

That’s one of the things I enjoyed most about Drew Goddard’s adaptation of The Martian is he was very clever about setting up expectations about what was going to happen next so that all the calamities that would happen to poor Matt Damon on Mars can still be surprising. You don’t get those surprises unless you’ve very carefully laid out for the audience what he thinks is going to happen next.

**Craig:** It’s remarkable how similar what we do is to what magicians do, because there is no surprise for the magician and there’s none for us. We know how it ends. We know everything. So there’s this careful craft of misdirection and misleading and setting up one expectation only to deliver something else. It’s all very crafted.

You know, if you spend any time reading Agatha Christie, she is just a master of this because in her case, think about what she has to do. She has to surprise the reader at the end and the entire time they are battling her.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They are not surprised that there’s a surprise. So it’s a bit like watching a close-up magician at work. You know he or she is trying to fool you. And then they fool you anyway.

**John:** Yeah. I think the other crucial thing to remember about surprise is if everything is surprising, nothing is surprising. And so if you don’t allow characters to behave in a way that we can have some ability to predict what’s going to happen next, we will stop caring or just stop trying to put our confidence in you that they are going to do something worthwhile. That there’s going to be a payoff to this.

And you see that sometimes in writing as well, where it’s just such a scramble of different things, it’s going in so many different directions. The rug is always being pulled out from underneath you to the point where like, “You know what, I’m not going to stand on that rug because I just know you’re going to pull it out from under me.”

**Craig:** No question. And in acting, we know this feeling when we’re watching a movie and we want to turn to somebody next to us and say, “Do you have any idea what this person is doing or talking about?” I love Apocalypse Now. I love that movie and my favorite book is Heart of Darkness. And I think there’s more great performances in that movie than practically any other movie I can think of.

But Marlon Brando’s performance is essentially surprising constantly to the point where I can’t quite get a handle on him at all as Kurtz. For me at least, that performance, it’s just all surprises and nothing to push against.

**John:** Yeah. It can be the real frustration. And of course, when you talk about an actor’s performance, we really are balancing what was written, what was the scripted performance and what was the actor actually doing. And in the case of Apocalypse Now, that was just a huge jumble.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. [laughs]

**John:** But there’s times where, you know, you’re trying to look at a character in a movie and it becomes very hard to tell, like, did that not work because it was bad on the page or did that not work because the actor made bizarre choices that made it impossible for that to function? And it’s one of the reasons why it can be so crucial to have a writer around on a set to sort of be that set of eyes to let the director know and everybody else know, like, “Okay, what they’re doing is fascinating but it will not actually add up and you’re going to be in real trouble when you get to the editing room.”

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s no question. I think Brando famously showed up on that set like 100 pounds overweight, hadn’t read the book, probably hadn’t read the script, didn’t know any of his lines. [laughs] Yeah, that one was a disaster.

**John:** Geduld’s next point is that great actors are vulnerable, which is very true. You feel like the great actors are letting you see parts of themselves that they might be embarrassed by or essentially that they’re not embarrassed to show you those things that are sort of icky inside them and they’re not trying to be perfectly put together at all moments. They’re letting you in and showing you the cracks.

And good writing does that, too. Good writing isn’t trying to impress you at all moments. Good writing is trying to explore uncomfortable emotions and uncomfortable feelings.

**Craig:** Yeah. This can be a little bit of a trap for writers who work in comedy because comedy is one of the great defense mechanisms of all time. And there are very funny movies that essentially truck entirely in comedy and they never show vulnerability and they never get you in a moment where suddenly you feel, you deeply feel. You’re there to laugh. And by the way, it’s perfectly fine. I mean, you know, there are a lot of terrific movies that are just there to make you laugh.

But if you are trying to do a certain kind of comedy, you need to be able to access your vulnerable side and put aside your humor armor and just be real. Sometimes, it’s those moments inside of comedies that are the most touching because of the contrast.

**John:** Absolutely. I mean, you obviously had that moment with Melissa McCarthy in Identity Thief but I’m also thinking about Melissa McCarthy in Spy. And I think one of the reasons why Spy worked so well is you definitely see what she is longing for and sort of her obsession with her boss that she doesn’t really want to own up to and her own fears and frustrations sort of bubbling out. And so they find great comedic moments for it but they also really let you deep inside. And that’s why you can sort of identify so closely with her character.

**Craig:** And Melissa’s really good at that. I mean, Melissa, you know, she has one of those faces, like Zach Galifianakis and Steve Carell, these are people that you want to take home and hug, and yet they’re also so funny.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Then there are some really funny people that I don’t want to take home and hug. Like Ryan Reynolds is really funny. But he doesn’t seem to need my emotional support. [laughs] He seems to be just fine, you know what I mean?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Whereas like Zach or Steve Carell or Melissa, I’m like, “Okay, come here, here’s some soup. Let’s talk it out.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, let me take care of you.

**John:** Yeah. His next point is listening, that the great actors watch them when they’re listening to other characters speak, which is a thing I’ve definitely noticed is that there are some people who just seem to be waiting for their turn to act next and there’s other actors who you feel like everything they’re saying is in response to the previous character, that they’re engaged in this moment, they’re engaged in listening. And those actors help the other person’s performance so much because they direct your attention back to what the other character is saying.

It’s such a simple and kind of obvious thing, but if you look at scenes that aren’t working, it’s often because you don’t believe that the other character is actually listening to what the first character is saying.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is acting school 101, you know. Sometimes all you do is just sit and listen and learning how to listen seems weird. Like why would it be so hard for me to do something I’m constantly doing anyway? But in the moment, when you are required to say things that you didn’t think and they are not extemporaneous, they were written down and studied, the act of listening in and of itself is a challenge, because suddenly you’ve lost yourself listening to this other person and you forgot you have something to say. That’s really tricky but what it comes down to is essentially putting your ego aside and not feeling like it’s more important for you to be in command of your moment when you say words.

Sometimes the big moments are the ones where you listen. Film actors, the ones who’ve been around the block a lot, they know that oftentimes the camera is on them more when they’re not talking.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So listening becomes crucial.

**John:** From the writer’s point of view, you are often writing those words that they are saying. And so if you are just batting a ball back and forth, it’s unlikely that you’re writing your very best dialogue for those actors because it doesn’t feel like they had to hear what the previous person said to respond to it, didn’t actually need to process it, but rather is like, funny line, funny line, funny line, funny line, that scene is not going to work or this is not going to work as well as it could. And the actors are not going to be able to bring anything special to it because you’re not giving them any things to hold on to. There’s just no handholds in that kind of dialogue.

**Craig:** There are exceptions. Sorkin is very good at putting lots of dialogue and not giving his characters a lot of time to listen because he demands that they’re fast and smart. So I think of the first scene of Social Network, it’s very ratatat. It’s very verbal. But then in that scene, when there is a moment where somebody suddenly stops, it means something.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You realize that they’ve been knocked back on their feet a little bit. Those are very challenging scenes for actors to do.

**John:** Yeah. Well, you know, if you’re writing things where the point is that they actually sort of aren’t listening, where they are basically two simultaneous monologues directed towards each other, that can be great and be fascinating. But if your whole movie is built of that, you better be Aaron Sorkin.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, and even Aaron Sorkin understands that after a scene like that, you need a break.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. His next point, the great actors use their instruments to their best effect. So by instruments, he means their body, their voice, basically what they came to the show with. And so it’s recognizing what you have and how to make the most of what you have.

So his example is Philip Seymour Hoffman who was overweight and not conventionally attractive but definitely knew how to use his body to best effect to, you know, be that character or sort of provide that character a reality within that world. And I think that’s something we’re always looking for with our own writing and with the characters we’re creating is how do you use who they are and what they bring to best effect.

**Craig:** And also for ourselves, there are things that we know we do well. John Lee Hancock, he always says that when he is sent something, a script for consideration to direct, the first question he asks while reading it or after reading it is, “Is this a pitch I can hit?”

**John:** Ah, yes.

**Craig:** You know, and the truth is, not everyone can do everything. And there are things that sometimes we want to do for a change because they’re exciting, and those are terrific. But there are also things we know we can do. And this is why some great actors have been bad in movies because they were miscast. That’s what miscasting is, right? So for us as well, we have to kind of cast ourselves into what we write to make sure that we’re writing with the wind at our back and not in our face.

**John:** For sure. So let’s go on beyond his suggestions and think of some of our own suggestions for the things we notice about good writing that are sometimes lacking in writing that is not so good. Do you want to start?

**Craig:** Sure. For me, just a few things that came to mind that don’t really apply for the acting model of things. One is layers. Good writing I think is accomplishing more than one thing at a time. Usually, I’m watching plot happen while I’m also watching a relationship change or watching a character grow. There’s just layers to things. I think audiences appreciate those complexities when it’s very — okay, this, now we stop doing and we talk and we have a relationship. Now we do talking again. It starts to feel very simple to me.

**John:** Yeah. And sometimes in procedural dramas on television, you’ll notice this, like they’re just doing the one thing. They’re basically like just putting out information about the next thing they’re going to do. And that’s sometimes how procedural dramas need to work but it’s not sort of the best writing we could aspire to in other forms.

**Craig:** Agreed. The other thing I think is a hallmark of good writing is hidden scenes because, you know, we are trying to create the illusion of something that is whole and of one piece because it really happened even though it didn’t. Of course, that requires us to stitch things together. And sometimes we have to do things in our stories to make them work that aren’t completely organic to what happened before. And I think good writing knows how to hide those scenes so that they’re not even visible at all. It’s like a good tile guy knows how to fit two slabs together so you don’t even notice that it’s two pieces and it looks like one.

**John:** Yeah. You brought up magic before and I think of sort of what David Kwong does in his close-up work. And I don’t ever want to ask him how he does what he does because I’m never going to be able to do it. It’s sort of more fun for me not to know. But I’m sure some of the misdirection is a real vigilance about where the audience’s attention is going to be.

And so when you talk about hidden seams, you’re really basically being very mindful of like what are they going to see and what are they not going to see. And by putting something over here, they’re not going to be paying attention to this thing that I’m doing over sort of down here on the page. It’s being very aware of like where they are at and their experience of reading the story, of watching this movie so they’re not going to see what you’re actually needing to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. A lot of times when people talk about good craft, I think this is a big part of it, is just hiding the artifice and avoiding all those — you know, there’s a common thing people say in Hollywood when they want to say they had a problem with something in a script. They’ll say, “This bumped me.” And bumped means, literally, I felt the seam, you know. Like I was in a car, I was on what I thought was a smooth stretch of road and then bump, right? So those are the things we try and hide.

The other thing that I think is part of good writing is a point of view that unlike a performance which is delivering one character and making us believe that character, the writer needs a point of view because otherwise the story isn’t really about anything in particular. The writer needs something interesting to say and they have to have an interesting way of saying it. It doesn’t need to be text, it could be subtext. And it doesn’t have to be grand. It doesn’t have to be unsaid by anyone else before. But we do need a point of view.

**John:** Yeah. On the blog about two weeks ago, I addressed this article that Michael Tabb had written about — he called it premise and I sort of disagreed with him calling it premise. But what he was really talking about was this idea like what is the point, like what are you actually wrestling with in the story? Even if characters aren’t speaking aloud, even if it’s not even sort of obvious subtext, it’s the reason why you wrote the story, it’s the question you’re trying to answer. It may not even be like the dramatic question that a character is going to ask or resolve. It’s not the plot. It is sort of the point.

It’s like, I want to believe that the story is about more than just the surface plotting of it and that there’s a reason why you wrote this story, there’s a reason why I should be spending my time on it. That even if there’s not necessarily one answer, that you’re going to try to convince me of some point of view.

**Craig:** Yeah. I call it the central dramatic argument. Everybody’s got a different, you know, phrase for it.

Scott Frank told me he wrote a script once and he sent it to, I won’t say who, but a big screenwriter, to get their opinion and that person’s response was, “This screenplay is well-written but it’s answering a question no one is asking.” And I thought that was a really tough love way of saying that whatever the point of view was there, it wasn’t something that would connect universally.

And we talk about this a lot. When you’re writing movies, you are creating the uncommon and the bizarre and the remarkable and notable because those are the stories worth seeing. But buried in there, something that is the opposite, incredibly common, completely universal, applicable to everyone’s life experience.

So that’s where the point of view comes in. And similarly, I think that connects to another part of what I consider to be good writing, and that’s a general unity, that there’s a cohesion of the narrative, the end feels like a proper resolution of the beginning. The phrase coming full circle. A good movie comes full circle.

**John:** Yeah. And when we say coming full circle, meaning both in terms of like story and plot. So like we started some place and we got some place, the characters went through a journey, we actually saw them do something, we saw them accomplish something or failed something in an interesting way.

But also, thematically, that there was like these were the themes we were exploring and we succeeded in exploring these themes through different characters, through different situations and we got someplace. And it all feels like it’s of one piece and it’s not just like a bunch of things that happened and now the credits are rolling.

**Craig:** Yeah. Ideally, the beginning informs what the end is and the end informs what the beginning is, the two of them are yin and yang. And those pieces fit together gorgeously. By the time you get to the end of the movie, you go, “Yes, it had to start that way, it had to end that way.”

**John:** And yet, at the same time, ideally, starting at that place, you should not have been able to predict that it got to that place.

**Craig:** Bingo.

**John:** And that’s the narrative trick. That’s good writing.

**Craig:** That’s good writing. And the way to, I think, your best friend in achieving that trick is having a point of view, because that’s what you’re bringing that the audience doesn’t walk in with.

**John:** Yeah. The thing that I think I’ve noticed about good writing is confidence and that the writer has confidence in his or her words and that his or her story is going to be interesting enough that me as the reader should be spending my time to follow them on this journey. And it’s a hard thing to describe because you don’t sort of see it, you just feel it. You feel like, okay, this writer is confident, I am confident in this writer that this is going to be an interesting journey worth taking.

Some of the things that make me lose confidence at times are simple mistakes. And so, you know, a typo here and there isn’t going to kill you. But a lot of typos makes me wonder like, “Wow, are you really that dedicated to your story? Did you not even proofread this?” And sometimes it’s sort of more they’re not typos but they’re just like things they didn’t think through, like logic flaws that make me question whether this is going to end well.

And so, confidence is a thing I look for in writing. And when I see it, I sort of lean into it. I’m excited to see where they’re going to go next.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, you say that the idea that the writer is in control of the story and that’s exactly right. When you read a well-written script, you’re turning the pages knowing full well that when you turn the page, the next one is not going to be the one that makes you go, “Oh, god, really?” Whereas in bad writing, I’m feeling that on almost every page.

I mean, all of your triggers that you mentioned are correct. The one that always gets me is when I see the writer solving a problem in an evident way. And then I go, “Okay, I get that you had a problem and I get you needed to get out of that problem so that you could do blah, blah, blah, blah, but I don’t want to see that. Now I have no confidence in your story. Now I see the artifice.”

You know, I’ve been starting to create crossword puzzles because I’m not a dork enough, I guess. And when you’re building crossword puzzles, you have your big theme answers and then you’re going to fill in words around it. And sometimes you get jammed in a spot where, in order to make everything work, you need to stick a word in that’s just a really bad dumb crossword word.

**John:** What’s an example of a bad crossword word?

**Craig:** Well, there are so many. Well, there’s the crossword ease words like Etui and Esai and, you know, ero. And then there’s ones that are just like, you know, NGP and then you’re like, “What the heck’s an NGP?” And then it’s like, okay, one person once said it and it’s like this bizzaro thing or some foreign capital no one even knows.

And people do it because they have to solve their problem. But the good crossword puzzle creators, they just go, “Nope, let me undo this section and do it again because I don’t want people to hit that thing where they go, ‘Oh, that’s right, this is fake and you just magneted a solution on here so you could get to the next page.'”

**John:** Yeah. So things that make me lose confidence — typos, those kind of just like hacky solutions to things, and clichés which is a general kind of hackiness where it’s like, okay, that’s a really obvious tropey either plotting device or just a bad phrase that you just didn’t spend the time to think of a better way to say that thing.

And so, cliché can be great if you’re going to explode the cliché or sort of like play against the cliché. And if I have a lot of confidence in your story, in your writing, I will see that cliché and like, “You know what, that’s fine because they’re going to do something great with it. I’m going to keep turning pages because it’s going to be awesome.”

But if I was starting to lose confidence and then I encounter one of those cliché’s, I’m like, “Oh, it’s dipping low.” And remember in our last live show or two live shows ago, we had Riki Lindhome up. She was talking about when they were staffing for Another Period. And it’s like, oh, how many pages of a script do you read before you say yes or no? It’s like, well, about three.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so, if she encounters a really hacky cliché on page three, she’s done. And that’s what you have to be so vigilant about.

**Craig:** Yeah. This idea of confidence in what the writer is doing is going to come up in one of our Three Page Challenges. I think we’ll see it pretty clearly. Part of what happens is when you feel good about the writing and then something comes along that’s a little squidgy, you give the writer the benefit of the doubt, “This must be intentional, it will work out.” And then, in well-written scripts, it does.

Think of like a script as the Titanic and it’s sailing along and it’s got its watertight compartments. You can hit, you know, one or two things and if you fill one or two watertight compartments, you can stay afloat for a while. But when you’re dragging something across all of them, you’re going to sink.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And when I read scripts where characters are, their voices are changing from scene to scene, characters are behaving in the middle of situations that are just bizarre and not realistic at all or inconsistent with what they did before, suddenly, the Titanic is being ripped in half, Jack is drowning, Rose is on the piece of door.

**John:** Spoilers.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, the Titanic does go down.

**John:** Sorry, man.

**Craig:** Yeah, spoiler.

**John:** It’s good to bring up voices because voice is one of those things — we talk about characters having voices and making sure the voices sound believable. But writers also have voices. And good writing, that writer has a voice. And so I don’t care if it’s a non-fiction piece in Slate or something in The New Yorker or a Hemingway short story or Faulkner, or just any screenplay. You know, you read a Tarantino screenplay versus an episode of Game of Thrones, you read one of their things, they’re all very different but they all have a voice. They all sound like they’re written by a person who is confident about the words that they’re using to describe their world.

And as we get to the Three Pages, I think this sense of voice is really crucial. It’s a thing that keeps you turning pages because like, “Oh, even if I don’t necessarily love the story, I love hearing this person’s voice.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And there are writers who like, I’m not actually nuts about some of their plotting but their voices are just so fantastic. You want to talk about an amazing writer, someone we both follow on Twitter, Paul Rudnick.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** What an amazing voice he has.

**Craig:** Brilliant.

**John:** So Paul Rudnick wrote In & Out and lots of other movies.

**Craig:** Addams Family.

**John:** Was it Addams Family or —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, you’re absolutely right. But he also used to write as Libby Gelman-Waxner. It was a column for Premiere Magazine which was the big film magazine at the time. And it was written for the point of view of this film critic kind of. She would review two movies in every issue. But it was mostly about her life and sort of her daughter and her dentist husband, Josh, I think.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And basically, it was all about sort of her even though she was technically reviewing these films. And it was all just a wonderful exercise in voice.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m just such a fan of his. In & Out is such a good movie. I love that movie. I mean, that’s a great movie, by the way, for anyone to study in terms of structure because it’s structured perfectly. And talk about, it’s loaded with surprise. I mean, you have a movie where someone is gay but isn’t ready to come out of the closet and you’re like, okay, it’s going to end with him coming out of the closet. Yeah, but that’s not where the surprise is, you know.

And then his voice, look, he’s one of the wittiest people ever. [laughs] He’s like Dorothy Parker witty. That guy is, he’s great.

**John:** He’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My last little thing I’ll say about good writing, and this is not an exhaustive list, there’s probably other things you can think of, but I want to talk about finesse. And this is a thing that you maybe only kind of recognize when you have written a lot. But when I see a writer doing something that’s actually really difficult and they make it look so easy, you’re like, “Wait, how did you do that?”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And that’s the thing that I start to really appreciate. And so, two recent examples I can think of, over the Christmas break I read To Kill a Mockingbird. And obviously the book is great on many levels and that’s why you study it in high school.

But looking at it now, Harper Lee was able to do these things, these transitions where she was in a scene and it was like really a detailed scene and like every moment, every sort of gasp and every, you know, scratch on the floor, and then like within just a few sentences, several months could pass and then we’re off to something completely new. She was able to transition in and out of these sort of close-up moments in ways that were just remarkably subtle and clever and adept that you didn’t even sort of notice. Like, “Oh, wow, just months passed and now Scout’s older and like two sentences have gone by.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s a really remarkable thing.

**Craig:** It is. I think that the idea of making the difficult scene easy is more a hallmark of great writing. You know, the person that confounds me time and time again is Neil Gaiman. I read this guy and I’m like, “How did you just do that? How did you pull that off?”

You know, just reading through the entire Sandman series at least once in every issue, I’d go, “Wow. Wow. How did you — ” especially later on when you’re like, “Wait, did you set up something three years ago and it just paid off?” [laughs] I mean, his mind is just remarkable and he makes it look so easy.

**John:** Yeah. And I had this filed underneath the finesse category but it speaks back to sort of all these things, so maybe my final example will sort of talk about how well she did on all these different levels.

So Gillian Flynn in Gone Girl, both in the book and in the movie, and different ways how she did it in both the book and the movie, there’s this narrative handoff that has to happen halfway through. And when you see what she did, we’re talking about the layers, there was actually much more going on than you sort of thought was going on. There were these hidden scenes that she was just masterful.

She had a point of view as an author about what she was trying to express but also very clearly you could understand the characters’ points of view on this. There was a unity, there was a deeper thing that this was all sort of connected to. And she had confidence and it’s only because I had confidence in her writing and sort of what she was doing that I was able to take this giant leap halfway through the book and halfway through the movie that like, “Okay, everything has completely changed and I’m so excited to see where this is going next.”

**Craig:** It’s such a good feeling knowing that every page you’re reading has been thought out and is part of a larger plan.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you never get that sense of — because I’ve read some novels where — I read one in particular recently where I was so happy halfway through. And then I got into the second half and it just seemed to me that the author had kind of gone, “Okay, that’s enough craft. Let’s just wing it.” [laughs] And it just fell apart.

**John:** I will tell you quite honestly, there was a book I was sent as an adaptation, I had this two years ago maybe, maybe even more than that. And it had sold for a fair amount and then I heard back — so I read it, it’s like, “Well, the first half is really good and the second half is not really good at all.” And the backstory was like, yeah, people only read the first half. They bought it at an auction, they only read the first half. And so no one sort of knew how it ended. And then they got the rest of it and they’re like, “Oh, oh, no. Oh, no.” And it just wasn’t a good ending.

**Craig:** No. And that’s a real challenge for us when we’re adapting these things because, like I said before, the ending must be fundamentally there in the beginning. So it means that the beginning that you like so much, you might have to change that a little bit.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the frustration. And as we start these Three Page Challenges, we are just looking at the beginning. So we have to be mindful of, the first three pages are so crucial but in some ways they’re so easy because you’re not responsible for like the next 90 pages as you’re writing these three pages and giving them to us. But of course, if you’re writing the full script, these three pages would actually have to set up the things you want to do for, you know, another two hours of the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re crucial. Crucial.

**John:** They’re crucial.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right, let’s get started with this. Which one should we do first?

**Craig:** Here, I’ll do Brewed.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Brewed is written by Joey Perotti.

**John:** So as always, if you’re new to the podcast, you may not know that there are links to the PDFs of these Three Page Challenges in the show notes, so you can read along with us if you’d like to. So these are people who have written in to johnaugust.com/threepages and they said that we could talk about their pages on the air. So these are willing participants in this and they’re all very brave to give us their pages.

**Craig:** Indeed they are. So we summarize them and then we discuss and you can play along with the home game. And for those of you listening and you don’t have the pages in front of you, Brewed is B-R-E-W-E-D, not B-R-O-O-D. Brewed by Joey Perotti.

So we open in the brew house which is a small, moderately busy coffee shop and we’re listening to Chuck, an overweight buffoon and manager, and he’s holding up a journal and he’s basically instructing his employees, it seems. And he’s talking to Henry who’s in his late teens and giving him this information. And then Henry notices Robert, he’s a homeless man. The homeless man is talking to Jude who works behind the register. And the homeless man, Robert, is asking to use the bathroom. Jude says, “No, it’s for customers only.” Robert then walks up to Henry and says, “Hey, can I get some change?” Henry gives him some money.

A customer named Paul tells Henry he’s made a big mistake. That Jude is going to be mad at him. Paul is a regular, he’s been there all the time. He sees everybody and what he knows is the most important thing in the coffee shop is the bathroom key, it’s for customers only. At which point Robert, the homeless man, says to Jude, “I want the bathroom key, I’m a customer.” And Jude is annoyed.

**John:** Yes. So we’re going to have I think two really promising things to talk about next. But to me, I felt like that this was one of Joey’s first screenplay exercises. And there was a lot here that didn’t work for me. So this is going to be one of those things where like it sounds like I’m just going to pick and pick and pick and pick. But I think there’s a lot to pick at here.

So we can talk about sort of the concept but I’ll tell you where I had issues on the page and we can work through those and then maybe other ways he could sort of set up this thing which read to me like it was maybe a pilot or an indie com. I wasn’t quite sure what I was reading.

**Craig:** Right. All right, well, go for it.

**John:** Go for it. So this is going to be some tough love for Joey, but hopefully helpful. So let’s just look at the first page. There’s a fade in, which you don’t need. You can have it, you can let it go. A lot of typos, just a lot of typos. Buffoon is B-U-F-F-O-O-N. We see the Brew House a lot in this first bit. You could take that out. So Chuck tells a joke and then like laughs hysterically and then like laughs bigger about it. I didn’t believe it. So going back to our discussion, like I didn’t buy that. I don’t think I would buy any actor actually being able to do that. Unless there’s like a meta joke about someone doing that, it felt really strange and weird to me.

I also got lost about like, wait, is he giving instruction to a bunch of people or just to this one new guy because it wasn’t clear. Just the geography of the space was not clear to me.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If we’re going to be in a place called the Brew House, are we behind the counter? Are we on one side? Like I had no idea how the layout of this place was working.

Opportunity is misspelled twice.

**Craig:** Three times.

**John:** Three times. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Opportunity is misspelled consistently.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Slightly is missing a T. On page 2, a few things, parentheticals. Parenthetical, the first letter is not capitalized. And so if that parenthetical is truly that thing that’s underneath the character name, that first letter is not capitalized. OS when it’s like off screen or voice over, those abbreviations, those are different kinds of things. Those actually go up on the line with the character name. So those are two different things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Page 3, we have the same problem with the capitalization and the parenthetical. I asked Stuart why he picked this and he said that we hadn’t done a lot of things that were just comedy and we hadn’t done things which were just dialogue and that’s why he picked it, which I think is true. So I think it was useful for that reason. But also because there are some things here that people would probably — they might see in their own scripts and fix.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, this is the one I was thinking about when we think about confidence in reading. So we look at this line here, Chuck says, “I want you to jot down any time you size an opprotunity. And then Henry goes, “Size?” “Yeah, is the opprotunity big? Is it small?” Okay, so there’s a joke here that Joey is trying for which is that Chuck isn’t good at talking. But now is opprotunity on purpose? Does he not know how to pronounce that word or is that just a typo like all the other typos on this page? This is the point. I don’t know what you’re going for and I have no confidence in it, so now I’m just chucking it up to a typo.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Since you talked a lot about form and I agree with every single thing you said, I’m going to talk a little bit about content here. I have no idea what a journal is in terms of a manager at a coffee house instructing what appears to be a new employee. Chuck says, “This is your cold beverage journal. And your pastry journal, and your tasting journal, and you’re African coffee journal or as I like to call it, your ‘urban’ journal.” And that’s his joke.

Okay, A, that’s not a very good joke. And not because of racism, it’s just not a very good joke. B, I have no idea what a journal is. So I don’t know what’s going on. Is it an instruction manual? Is that a menu? So journal is a weird word. If I haven’t worked in Starbucks, then I don’t know what that is and I don’t know if that’s a specific word for that.

And Henry isn’t saying anything here at all. He’s just sitting there, so I have no idea who he is, what he’s about, I suspect he’s our hero. This is not good. Chuck ends this conversation on the top of page 2 by saying, “Wait here, I’m going to grab Zoe,” gets up and walks into the back. Great example of not hiding the scenes. [laughs] Character just says, “I have to go away now, bye.”

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about character names. All the characters have very similar names and it was very easy to get them confused. And so when your homeless person is named —

**Craig:** Robert.

**John:** Robert. Well, that doesn’t feel like — I’m sorry, that doesn’t feel like the homeless guy to me. I couldn’t tell Robert from Jude from Henry by the bottom of page 2 and that’s really a problem. Particularly if Henry is supposed to be our lead character, he’s not particularly well described or set up. And we don’t see him, going back to our craft thing, we don’t see him listening. We are never given any instruction for sort of what he’s like as he’s listening or sort of how he’s reacting to this crazy stuff that’s he’s being told.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s little bits. He nods his head confused. But who wouldn’t nod their head confused at that?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s something particularly unique to him or his responses. Henry looks at all the journals. I still don’t know what those are. Then Robert is having an argument with Jude. Now, Robert’s had this argument many, many times with Jude.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** First of all, in the parenthesis, apathy on the verge of annoyance, you can just substitute the word annoyed, okay? Just bored, annoyed if you wanted to, right? Shorter. You don’t want to ever have two lines of parenthetical. Just indicates that you’re a failure of imagination basically. So Robert says, “Come on man, I just got to take a piss.” And Jude says, “Restroom’s for customers only.” How many times has he said this to this guy? A thousand? So wouldn’t it be, “You know the restrooms are for customers only.” [laughs]. You know right, there’s got to be some indication of a past life. Talk about acting — one of the things they drill into you in acting class is the moment before. So there’s a whole world before this. So that’s a moment where I don’t believe it.

**John:** So the parenthetical for what Craig is describing could just be in parenthesis, (thousandth time). I mean that gives the actors something to play.

**Craig:** Right, exactly. And that’s what those things are there for, right? It’s to get them something to play. Apathy on the verge of annoyance is rather wordy. This, by the way, is where parentheticals get a bad rap, you know. And people will say, “Never use — don’t tell what actors what to do, blah, blah, blah.” You know, that nonsense. You know, just don’t do it like this.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But yeah, for the thousandth time would be a terrific thing. Then we introduce Paul. And Paul delivers this monologue on page 3 that feels very written. And the way he gets into it is so written. I don’t know if Paul is empathetic toward Henry. I don’t know if Paul is a weirdo. I don’t know if Paul is attracted to Henry. I don’t know if Paul is trying to make Henry stay a little bit better. I know nothing. All I know is that he delivers exposition that feels like an announcement about what this movie is.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s look at Paul’s introduction because there’s potential here. So let’s look at what it says. “Henry turns around to face Paul (60s), a bearded gentleman wearing two sets of eye glasses, drinking from a ceramic mug and holding open a book, Factotum.” So there’s a lot of gerunds happening here kind of. But each of those is sort of individually a good idea. I could sort of see him like as a kind of like he is an NPR tote bag kind of person. And that may be fine. But I don’t know specifically what Craig is going to, like I don’t understand like what he’s trying to do for Henry in this moment.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I don’t understand like what’s the moment he’s playing. You give me sort of a physical description, but I don’t get a sense of who he is.

**Craig:** Yeah. Look, characters always want something. Always, even the littlest things. But they want something. I have no idea what Paul wants when he said — by the way, they’re not gerunds. I actually realized, the gerunds are the noun like the wearing of clothes, right, yeah.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** But Paul has no motivation to deliver this, so that means the writer is forcing it in there and now I’m aware once again that we have a problem.

**John:** Yeah. Paul’s big block of dialogue — I’ll just read it for people who are not reading along with us. He says, “I’ve been coming to the Brew House for seven years. You see a lot of strange stuff, all walks of life: bums, businessmen, commuters, teens, hippies, hipsters, wanna-be writers, wanna-be intellectuals, druggies, psychos, stressed-out mothers, cat ladies, and creeps. And they all want the same thing.” “Coffee?” “The bathroom key.”

And so let’s get back to sort of the idea of the scene that I think there’s a good idea underneath all of this where it’s just like, okay, no, the most important thing in this entire place is the bathroom key. That’s actually a good comedic idea behind a scene. And so if the scene around it were sort of like, you know, talking about sort of like the training and all the stuff, or like how to do this and how to — the temperature you have to do for these kind of beans and stuff like that, but the most important thing in this entire place is the bathroom key. That’s a comedic premise which I don’t think this achieved.

**Craig:** No. I mean there’s a way of redoing this where we begin with Henry sitting with Chuck, his manager, and Chuck is like, “Okay, so I graded your test and it’s 100. So you scored a 100 which is really remarkable. You obviously studied the manual. So now I’m just going to ask you a question that isn’t on the test. What is the most important thing here in this coffee shop?”

**John:** And so the natural answers you could give is like respect.

**Craig:** Hard work, coffee, equality. [laughs] Cleanliness.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s a million things and for him to go, “No.” And then he just holds up this thing. “This is. This is the bathroom key. This is the one thing, this key, that separates this store from civility and success and absolute chaos.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you go, okay, there’s a point of view, right, instead of somebody just being this guy that just says, and now a monologue that is unmotivated by anything to a person I do not know for no reason. [laughs]

**John:** What we didn’t put on our list of good writing, but what this describes is you’re in and you’re out. Sort of like what is the first thing we’re going to see in the scene and what’s the last thing we’re going to see in the scene. And what we’re pitching is like how are you going to open this moment? And if you’re going to open this moment with the manager guy, that should get you to the comedic payoff here and that probably is the key.

**Craig:** I agree. And that’s why you can really see the gears turning and hear the metal on metal noise when Chuck says, “Wait here, I’m going to grab Zoe.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s just bad showmanship, you know, as a writer. The other thing is that Paul’s speech doesn’t really tell us anything that we haven’t heard before. We’ve all been to coffee shops. We know who goes in and out of there.

**John:** Also, if you’re going to make a list in a comedy, you have to throw in some wild things there. Like, you know, like Frisbee duelists, you know, something that’s just like really absurd or like, you know, something to break it. Because you’re setting a pattern — and in comedy you set a pattern and then you break it wildly and so break that pattern.

**Craig:** Yeah. So lot of trouble here. And this does feel like early work. This feels like the beginning of something. Maybe Joey’s first attempt at something. There are a lot mistakes here. And I think that you need to — this is one where I feel like you need to do a little bit more homework. You need to watch and think more about how the things that you like are and then ask yourself if you can rise to that standard.

**John:** I think it’s worth looking at your favorite comedies and pulling up those scripts and going through it scene by scene looking at sort of how they work and really figure out where the ins and the outs are, how — the economy of those scenes.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** All right, let’s go to our next one. This is HALCYON by Amanda Mar”n. We are in Gus’s sporting goods store in Dartmouth, New Hampshire. It’s day. There’s a revolving stair-climber caught in an endless cycle climbing to nowhere.

Paul Adam (50s) shuffles in. His preppy, upper class clothes are wrinkled and stained. Goes up to the counter where he talks to a sales woman and he’s thinking about buying a new gun for the hunting season. She says, “Well, hunting season doesn’t start till fall,” but there’s some stuff on sale so she’s showing him options for guns. Shows one that might be a good fit for him. He clearly doesn’t actually know a lot about hunting. He doesn’t know a lot about the geography of the place. He wants something that takes a 3.5, a 3.5 magnum. So she shows him that gun. She’s very clear about like we don’t have ammunition here, so you’re not going to be able to load the gun. She seems suspicious and weary, but is also still trying to sell him the gun.

He ultimately takes the gun, loads it with a single bullet that he has, and puts it to his forehead and he says, “I have not changed the world. I’ve destroyed it.” Steels himself, finger on the trigger, face tight and closed, as we end on the bottom of page 3.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, Amanda, this is I think a good idea for an opening scene. It does all the things that opening scenes should do. I just have major issues with the way you’ve executed it. So I’ll begin with the simplest thing and then I’ll go to content. You begin by saying over blackness. No. Over black, yeah. Unnecessary-ness. But already it’s shaking my confidence because it’s such a clunky word and it’s unnecessary.

But let’s talk about what’s going on here. Paul wants to commit suicide. Paul is walking into a store that sells guns. He has a bullet in his pocket. The store does not sell ammunition. They’re going to give him a gun to look at. He’s going to take his bullet out, load it or in this case, a shotgun, shall load into the weapon. He’s going to say these very creepy things. And then presumably he’s going to die. We didn’t get quite there at the end of page 3. That’s terrific. I really love the idea of somebody going gun shopping, having somebody be nervous and say, by the way, we don’t sell ammo here. And the guy would be like, “No, no. No problem.” And then taking out his own ammo. Very clever, very smart. Here’s my —

**John:** Yeah, it’s a surprise.

**Craig:** It’s a surprise. Here’s my problem. You make way too much of Paul being scary. So this woman knows he’s scary. We all know he’s scary. So all of the juiciness and creepiness at the end you have diminished greatly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Whereas if this man walks in and is maybe a little bit off but almost a little too chirpy, then suddenly there’s that other thing like, hmm, does anybody in the audience or the people in my row get the same creepy feeling from this guy? Probably not. He’s overtly okay.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There is two pages solid of back and forth about guns. And it’s boring. It just goes on too long. The idea is he would like to buy a gun and he should be talking and she should say, “Okay, what kind of gun are you interested in?” “Well, I was thinking about this or this, but, you know, what about this? Do you have that?” “Yeah, we do. I should let you know that we don’t have ammunition.” “No problem.” Can you just show me how to — how do you open it? Does it like — do you have one with this?” “Yes.” So much. I mean the saleswoman does this enormous chunk of dialogue on page 2 where she’s trying to sell him the shotgun and it just was, it just kept going. So just too much.

Lastly, gun choice. He goes in there to kill himself. He has a shotgun shell and he needs a shotgun. Shotguns are not great ways to kill yourself. I mean they’re long. So it’s really hard to do and it’s very easy for somebody to stop you from doing it because you’ve like got to wrestle it into position and everything. [laughs] Why wouldn’t he just be in there with a 9mm bullet asking to see a Glock and then load it and put it in his mouth? That’s one where I was struggling with his choice.

**John:** I was struggling a little bit with the bullet and sort of the issue of sort of the size caliber of it all. I got confused about that, too. But I felt the idea that like, “Oh, this isn’t for the size bullet I have,” is actually really good. He actually knows nothing about guns at all so he just happened to find one bullet.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That was really interesting to me. So it wasn’t that he magically had the right — he had a bullet and this was his plan from the very start. Like somehow he came across a bullet and decided that this is what he was going to do.

**Craig:** Right. That would be cool.

**John:** So I liked this a lot more than you did. And I agree with you that I think most of page 2 should be greatly compressed because I can imagine filming all this. And if you filmed the scene as written, you would take out most of it because you sort of get it. Like you get like — what I love about the saleswoman is like she’s trying to do her job, she’s trying to sell the gun. At the same time, she’s like, but just so you know, we don’t sell the stuff. The natural red flags are going up for her and I was so happy to see that she was aware of the situation. But there’s just too much of it.

**Craig:** Too much.

**John:** Too much awareness. And so we were ahead of the story and if we’re ahead of your story, that’s not good.

**Craig:** Yeah, I struggled with the saleswoman. There’s red flags and there’s red flags. Somebody walks in, here’s how Amanda describes this character, Paul. His clothes are wrinkled and stained. His hair is matted with something dark and sticky. His eyes are blood shot. He is unblinking. He answers with no emotion each time she speaks. That to me is more than a red flag. And that I think was putting stress on it. It started to make me hate her for like not just going, you know what, I’m sorry, you should probably talk to my manager. Like there’s got to be some way to bail out of this discussion. [laughs] This guy is off, really off, as opposed to curiously off and then we are surprised.

**John:** Craig, as an exercise, on page 1, if we take — so once the dialogue starts, if we took out all of the scene description, I think you actually have a better flow. So, “Help you hun?” “Thinking of a new one for hunting season.” “Well season doesn’t start till fall, but you’re in luck we got a few on sale cause of that.” Like essentially like, if we stop stopping so often for the scene description, I think there’s a flow there that might just give it a little bit more energy there and make it feel like, you know, she’s just not so vigilant from the very start.

**Craig:** I agree. I agree. There’s a lot of — all that I think exacerbated my problem that things were overwritten here. And I’m such a believer that the first 10 pages are precious, precious real estate. There shouldn’t be one wasted letter on those 10 pages. So, you know, your job should be to be ruthless about weeding out the unnecessary.

There’s a couple of other things I’ll mention and then I’ll turn it back over. There are some typos here. Holds it’s weight, I-T apostrophe S, there should be no apostrophe there. Feel it’s cold steel, same there. Its-it’s thing, your-you’re, there’s just no excuse anymore. It makes me upset.

And in the moment, here’s what happens on page 3. He’s looking at the gun and then he says to her, “I’m sorry. I have no choice. Then he pulls his hand out of his pocket, a shell casing gripped in his palm.” Then he says, “I’ve done a terrible thing.” Then he shoves it into the shotgun, closing it with a pump. Then he says, “Without our suffering we are no longer human. We become monsters.”

Then the saleswoman lets out a scream. This is the latest scream in movie history, right? So he says, “I’m sorry. I have no choice.” He pulls out a shell casing. We all go, oh, and she needs to go, gun, gun, right, and just go. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he can do all the rest of his lines to himself but that was crazy.

**John:** Yeah. Take out all those lines there and I think it’s actually a stronger moment. Going back to sort of typos and other things. On page 1 again. So we’re inside Gus’s sporting goods store. The sound of a revolving stair climber caught in an endless cycle. The sound happened beforehand so if you’re going to show it, then it’s not the sound. I think you probably want to show it because that’s a great image. So take the sound of out of there. Bloodshot is one word or hyphenated. You can make your choice. So this is the fifth sentence of the scene. “A long expired in summer banner exclaims — New Year New You! With a woman in a bikini.” I doesn’t actually make sense. I get what she’s going for but it was very hard to read. And it stopped me three times. So get rid of anything that is hard to read basically.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. Also, beeline is a wonderful word for somebody that’s walking quickly or running quickly towards something he’s not. He’s shuffling, so you can’t beeline while you’re shuffling

**John:** Yeah. But I do like that he had single focus on something. That’s a great description for where he’s headed.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. So there’s other words you can do to accomplish the same thing so that you’re not confused. Is he running suddenly? We have the same thing where Amanda capitalizes “whispering,” the first word inside a parenthetical, which generally you don’t do. I mean it’s not the end of the world.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** If these were three terrific pages, I wouldn’t care.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, okay, well, John liked that one a bit better than I did. But I love the idea, Amanda. I thought it was really creative, really smart. So, you know, basically even though John and I seem like we’re slightly different on this, I think we’re king of saying the same thing. Just tighter. Tighter.

**John:** Tighter. Tighter.

**Craig:** Tighter, tighter. All right. Well, let’s go to our last one. This one is called Blue Forty-Four. And it’s written by Josh Corbin. All right. So here we go. So this one begins outside a field in morning. And it’s the kind of day that was shitty twenty minutes ago. Gray overcast split open by a blast of early-morning sun. We’re behind a dog. And the dog looks like he’s been beat up a bit and then he hears somebody whistling. He stands at attention and then in audio we hear a phone ringing. Somebody is yelling for Benny, or Benny is yelling over the phone to somebody named Daniel that he needs cavalry.

And then we are now in a chase. Benny Miller is in a car and he’s speeding down the road on the phone with Daniel trying to get help because some guys are chasing him. And each one of them is wearing a monster mask. There’s a wolfman and then there’s a skeleton and a zombie and they’re shooting at him. They’re not cops and Benny is shooting back at them. And then Benny gets a moment where he can actually kill one of the guys but he can’t actually take the shot and kill the guy.

And then Benny’s rear window explodes because it’s been shot by the wolfman character and Benny loses control of the car.

**John:** And we should say that he’s on the phone with Daniel throughout this so it’s a speaker phone we’re hearing this other voice who is not actually in the scene.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** I thought these pages were really strong. There were some problems but I dug the moment. I could see it. I believe that the writer could see it. I believe that it could be shot. I believe that it would probably be exciting. And it read like the kind of action sequence I like to read on the page when I’m going to see a movie.

**Craig:** I completely agree. I have no idea what’s going on with this dog.

**John:** I don’t really either. And honestly, my confidence was flagging from the very first sentence. “The kind of day that was shitty twenty minutes ago.” What does that mean? I have no idea what that means.

**Craig:** Well, I actually understood it because the next sentence — I agree, like when I first read that I’m like, “What?” And then he says, “Gray overcast split open by a blast of early-morning sun.” I’m like, oh yeah, I know what that is. That’s that thing where it was like the sky looks like it was just raining and now it’s not.

**John:** All right. So flip those two sentences and I understand it.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly, exactly. Very good advice. The thing about the dog, maybe I assume it will eventually make sense. And that’s fine. But it was well-written.

**John:** But it was confusing at times. And here’s where I got confused. “Until someone whistles from afar. He stops, alert as we angle on him.” So the dog suddenly was a he but I thought that he was referring to the someone whistling. And so I just got confused. And so either keep the dog the dog. I just felt like it was overwritten for what was actually happening here. And I just don’t even quite know what I was seeing there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I think you could have just set up the dog staring, looking at something, and then got me to the chase faster. I bet you could have lost two-eighths of this page.

**Craig:** Yeah. But the meat of it is obviously this chase. And once I was into the chase, I was really happy. I believe that we should be allowed to write things to match the feeling we want the audience to feel. The feeling that Josh wants me to feel in this chase is panic. And so even his slug lines are panicky. A cutlass. Moving. Fast as fuck. Day. The car engine working its ass off because Benny is fucking panicking. And Josh is capitalizing. He’s bolding. He’s italicizing. Which, you know, in a scene where people are just moving through a space and talking is incredibly annoying. In a scene where it’s life and death and cars are screaming down a road and people are shooting, that’s right.

**John:** Yeah. This is as good as I’ve seen it. I mean, I’m not a big fan of like crazy bolding and underlining and all that stuff. But this is a really good version of it. He’s using the double dash to sort of keep connecting thoughts together and sort of single out what shots are. And it works really well for it. And it gives a good feeling. He’s also using a lot of onomatopoeia for shotgun in the hand — SHK-RK — wolfman aims at Benny. Some bwooms, the difference between a blam and a blam, blam. It works.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, it works and I really appreciated as a reader that I could identify these three people. It’s creative. Look, we’ve seen movies where guys are in kooky masks. That’s a cliché, right? Bad guys wearing masks. And that’s fine. I mean they actually do wear masks so the cliché is fine. What I appreciated was that there was a wolfman, there was a skeleton, and a zombie. And all of a sudden now I can see what’s happening.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The fact that those were specified unlocks my visual mind. Otherwise, it’s guys and what am I looking at? Guys.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know?

**John:** Thug one, thug two, thug three.

**Craig:** Exactly. And boring, right? Now, I’m imagining when he says, because he makes a moment here, right? And this is what I also really appreciated about what Josh did. Inside of plot and we talked about layers before, there should be character, right? So here, this is this crazy, hyperactive chase with guys wearing monster masks and then everything slows down for a character choice because he structures this so that Benny is afforded a choice. And the choice is should I shoot this guy wearing a zombie mask in the head and he chooses not to.

So that’s really the payload for this. All of the other stuff is icing. That little moment is why the scene exists in the movie. I assume that is going to be something very meaningful going forward. So I thought that this was done really well.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I have no idea what the rest of the story is. But I would be curious to keep reading the story. I have confidence that he seems to know what he’s doing. That’s a lot sometimes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** These were also I think three really good examples because the problems they had were addressable and they were all very different. And they very well illustrated some of the things we’re talking about with like what is good writing and sort of what we’re looking for with good writing and what makes us not think something is as good as it can be which is the moments that stick out in the wrong ways.

**Craig:** Absolutely. By the way, I should add that I really like this title, Blue Forty-Four. I don’t know what it means, but it grabbed me.

**John:** Yeah. So as always we want to thank our three very brave listeners who sent in their pages to let us take a look at them. If you would like to send in your own pages for us to look at, the link is in the show notes. You can also find it at johnaugust.com/threepage. And Stuart will take a look through those and occasionally pick three of them to send for us to read through.

All right, it has come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a very simple little web game. Not even game, it’s like sort of a demonstration. It’s called Creatures Avoiding Planks. And basically it’s these little AI, adorable, little googly eyed things that will try to avoid running into these planks that keep drifting past them. It’s a very good example of sort of like emergent behavior based on changing environment. So each of the little things is just doing its own thing and has very simple rules. But those simple rules sort of act to help keep it alive. And so because we are all malevolent gods, we will inevitably try to put too many little creatures in a space or like too many planks and then they’ll get crushed. But it’s a fun way to pass a few minutes of time.

**Craig:** Well, that sounds interesting. My One Cool Thing is a substance. There’s no particular product I can endorse here. But it’s a substance I didn’t know existed. I didn’t know why anybody would need it. And now I need it. And it’s very, very good. So John, as you know, I have a beard now.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** A lush, lush beard. And this means now I have to start thinking about hair because like you, not a lot up top. [laughs] So not really that much of a concern for me. But now, it is and beard hair gets really coarse and dry. So there’s this stuff called beard oil. And my whole life, I thought the whole point of hair care was to get oil out of your hair. So the idea of putting oil in your hair sounds gross. But beard hair literally becomes like fire kindling. It’s so dry and nasty. So you put this oil in and it actually is quite lovely. So if you have a beard and it’s getting a little dry, scraggly, scratchy, buy some beard oil. It’s cheap. There’s like a thousand brands. They all have some different stupid smell that’s designed for a man, you know. [laughs] So like what are man smells? This is a whole thing. Like what would you say are man smells?

**John:** Sandalwood?

**Craig:** Yeah, a lot of wood. A lot of wood.

**John:** Yeah. Wood, leather.

**Craig:** Yeah, wood, leather, tobacco.

**John:** But weirdly, Drakkar Noir has that sort of orange peel smell and you often find that in men’s things as well.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s fascinating. Like why do men like the smell of wood and leather? I mean I guess.

**John:** I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the #masculinitysofragile, which tends to be a bunch of photos of like side by side on the shelves they’ll have like toothbrushes for men and toothbrushes for women and they’re like the men’s packaging is always like, you know, corrugated, steel and stuff like that.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** I think there was actually a pack of Q-tips, like Q-tips for men and they’re actually the same, but it’s like a corrugated cardboard/sort of metal thing.

**Craig:** I mean, gendered packaging is so insulting to everyone, to everyone. I mean, you know, like I was standing in the pharmacy like, you know, behind the counter waiting for them to bring some prescription and they had a wall of stuff and I didn’t know — and because it was their, you know, prescription meds, it’s not marketed for consumers, but still there’s packages. And I looked at this wall and I was like this is the wall of either contraceptives or hormone replacement therapy for women or something because every box had some pastel swirl, a butterfly, some tulip opening up. I mean, it was incredible. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s not even for sale to consumers. That’s just for the pharmacist. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And like what do Viagra bottles come in like with like a mushroom cloud on it or a jet fighter? [laugh]

**John:** They come in solid steel packaging, yeah.

**Craig:** It comes in a steel cube.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, like what? Stupid.

**John:** It’s stupid.

**Craig:** It’s all stupid.

**John:** All right. Well, that’s our show for this week. So thank you for joining us for that. Our outro this week comes from Daniel Green who I just saw in New York. And he has a big beard, too, so he can use that beard oil that you recommended, Craig. If you have an outro you’d like us to consider for the show, you can write into ask@johnaugust.com and send us a link. If you have questions for us, that’s also the great address to send questions. Short things on Twitter are fantastic. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

Our show, as always, is produced by Stuart Friedel and is edited by Matthew Chilelli. You can find us on iTunes. Please subscribe if you’re there because that helps people know that we exist. And, also, leave us a comment because that tells people that you like the show. We have all the back episodes available in the Scriptnotes app which you can download on the applicable app store. Subscriptions to the app and to Scriptnotes.net where all the episodes are stored is $1.99 a month. A steal.

**Craig:** Come on.

**John:** We also have a few of the 200 episode USB drives left. And so I’m not sure we’re going to make anymore. So if you’re curious about one those, just go to store.johnaugust.com and get one of those. You can find the show notes for all the things we talked about on the webpage at johnaugust.com. Just look for this episode title. And that’s our show. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Marcus Geduld looks at [how you differentiate good acting from bad acting](http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2014/09/10/how_do_you_differentiate_good_acting_from_bad_acting.html?wpsrc=fol_tw)
* Michael Tabb on [The Concept of Premise](http://www.scriptmag.com/features/script-notes-where-story-begins-premise), and [John’s response](http://johnaugust.com/2016/the-premise-or-whats-the-point)
* Paul Rudnick’s [Libby Gelman-Waxner](http://paulrudnick.com/secret/libby-gelman-waxner/)
* Three Pages by [Joey Perotti](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JoeyPerotti.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Amanda Marín](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/AmandaMarin.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Josh Corbin](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JoshCorbin.pdf)
* [Submit your Three Pages here](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [Creatures avoiding planks](http://otoro.net/planks/)
* AskMen on [beard oil](http://www.askmen.com/grooming/appearance/best-beard-oils-reviewed.html)
* [#masculinitysofragile](https://twitter.com/hashtag/masculinitysofragile) on Twitter
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Daniel Green ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/the-job-of-writer-producer).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. And this is the standard explicit language warning for this episode of Scriptnotes. There’s some heavier language than most episodes, so you may want to save this one for later on if you’re driving in the car with your kids. Thanks.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 238 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today, we have a special guest. We are joined by Dana Fox.

**Craig:** Ah!

**John:** She is a writer and producer whose credits include The Wedding Date, Ben & Kate, What Happens in Vegas, and the new How to Be Single.

We are going to try to talk about the transition between being just a writer and being a writer-producer like Dana is. And we’ll also get into other stuff about her life and her career. She’s one of my favorite people. Dana Fox, welcome to Scriptnotes.

**Dana Fox:** Hi, I’m so happy to be here. You two are my favorite human males besides my husband.

**John:** Aw. That’s so sweet.

**Craig:** I don’t really — I know your husband. I don’t think you need that qualifier.

**Dana:** [laughs] I’m really excited to be in this sandwich. Thank you for having me.

**John:** Her husband is Quinn Emmett who is a writer and an all-around good guy, who often comes to our live shows. So, it’s nice to have you here, live in person with us.

**Dana:** I’m so happy to be here.

**John:** Before we get into your career, your life as a writer and producer, we have some follow-up from previous episodes, so we’d love your opinions on these topics as we just go through them. So, last week we talked about tipping. We talked about tipping in two different ways. Questions about whether you should tip the valets at studios. Because you know how like Paramount has a valet?

**Dana:** Oh, that’s interesting.

**John:** Or Sony does, too. Dana, what’s your opinion? Should you tip those guys? Do you tip those guys?

**Dana:** Wow, that’s bumming me out big time, because I have literally never thought of tipping them, and I’m going to immediately commence tipping them right now. That makes me feel really sad inside my soul place.

**Craig:** [laughs] Wow.

**John:** What I was saying last week —

**Dana:** Thank you for laughing so hard at me, Craig. I really appreciate that. I’m so glad this is such a safe space for me to share.

**Craig:** It’s not. At all.

**Dana:** It’s really starting this off nicely.

**John:** So, one of my points last week was that normally when you’re parking a car, when there’s valet parking, there’s already cash being exchanged, so the tipping feels like it’s just part of that whole cash exchange. Whereas on a studio lot, there’s not a natural transaction happening there, so it feels weird to sort of suddenly pull out money and give.

**Dana:** That’s exactly right. It does sort of feel like you’re saying something is happening there that isn’t necessarily happening there. I always sort of thought it was like, oh man, now I just hate myself. I don’t even want to talk about anymore.

Here’s my problem. My problem is not about tipping. My problem is about ATMs. I never have cash on me, because I feel like the second I have it in my wallet it just like shoots out of wallet at great, great speeds. And so I don’t keep cash because I spend it instantly when I have it. So, that’s a bummer.

And then also Uber has kind of kept me from needing money for tipping valets. Because valets was sort of the only reason I needed to tip. So here’s what I do at the SoHo House. Spoiler alert: I may be not a good person at the end of this story as well.

I don’t ever have any money on me, so I never tip them. And they’re so nice to me. And I actually love those people who work there like family. Like, I was more excited to tell them about the birth of my third child then like anybody who is my actual friend. And so what I do is I give them like $60 one day and then I don’t tip them for like a month.

**John:** Okay.

**Dana:** That’s how I do it. Because I can’t — it’s every day, I can’t have the money in the wallet. I can barely get myself out of bed in the morning. I have 17 children. I can’t pull it together.

**Craig:** I feel like you’re not the person we should be talking to about this.

**Dana:** This was not a good follow-up.

**Craig:** Yeah, with that story, you’ve excluded yourself.

**Dana:** Can there be like a drinking inappropriately to fall asleep follow-up like right now? Because I could talk about that at length.

**Craig:** No one needs that follow-up. We all know how to do that. There’s no decisions to be made. We got into this thing last week about this, and I mean, I love what you just said about Uber, because I got in a little bit of trouble. So, I do — I tip those valet guys at studios. I just — I said last week, sometimes I just worry like is this insulting somehow. Do you feel like — ?

**Dana:** That’s what I’m saying. Yeah, exactly. It’s like sort of saying like, well, I’m assuming you’re getting paid a decent salary by this studio. But I should not assume that, because I am often not paid a decent salary by the studio —

**Craig:** Well, there you go.

**Dana:** — so why would I assume they would be?

**John:** So, we asked our listeners to write in, both on Twitter and on Facebook, with their opinions about tipping, both tipping studio valet people and tipping Uber drivers, which was another thing that came up.

**Dana:** What did everybody say?

**John:** So, let’s start with Mike from Huntington Beach. He wrote, “As a former valet during my teens and 20s, I can assure you in almost every circumstance a valet prefers a tip. There are two circumstances I can think of that a valet may reject a tip. Number one: When a valet’s employer issued a wholehearted threat to fire any valet on the spot who will accept a tip. Even then that valet might be coerced into accepting the tip if the amount is sizable enough and gifted with enough finesse.

“Or, number two: When the tip is change that amounts to less than a dollar.”

So, that’s from Mike from Huntington Beach.

**Craig:** But Mike, I mean, thanks, but this was not an issue. We know to tip regular valets. This wasn’t the question. We all tip valets. I mean, nobody doesn’t tip.

**John:** I think Mike is saying any valet at any place on earth will take the tip is what I think he was saying.

**Craig:** Okay, well, and look, that may be true. And I default to that. I do tip those guys. It’s the Uber thing opened the whole can of worms.

**Dana:** So, are people being expected to tip their Uber drivers? Is that a thing?

**John:** Yeah.

**Dana:** Oh my god, you guys, I am an extra triple horrible person.

**John:** Dana just Ubered to this interview right now.

**Dana:** I literally just Ubered to this house.

**Craig:** Well, this is the question. Because we discussed this last week. And my understanding was that, no, the whole deal with Uber is you don’t tip. It’s built in somehow. And the whole point is Uber says don’t tip your driver. And it’s a non-cash transaction deal.

**Dana:** But maybe it’s built into the way that Uber is boning their Uber drivers. And that’s what we don’t know about. Ah, man.

**Craig:** Well, here’s the situation. We got a lot — so a lot of people tweeted at us. And part of the thing that’s confusing is Uber is confusing about it. They used to be clear. Now they’re less clear.

The other thing is there’s a lot of different kinds of Uber. So I don’t use Uber a lot, because I love to drive. But, when I do, I use I guess what you would call Uber Standard, which is usually a sedan, you know, like the black car.

**Dana:** Say sedan again.

**Craig:** What’s that?

**Dana:** I just liked the way you said sedan.

**Craig:** Sedan?

**Dana:** Sedan. [laughs] I don’t know. Keep going. Keep going.

**Craig:** I feel like you’re trying to bring out Sexy Craig. [laughs]

**Dana:** [laughs] I love Sexy Craig.

**Craig:** Sexy Craig is the best. He loves to — yeah.

**John:** I’m pushing for our Whole Foods Craig. Whole Foods Craig is not a [crosstalk].

**Craig:** No, he’ll show up soon enough.

**Dana:** Wait, who is Whole Foods Craig? I need him so bad. Where is he?

**Craig:** He’s about to show up.

**Dana:** Does he work at the checkout at Whole Foods, or is he in like a specialized area giving out samples?

**Craig:** You know what? It’s like, yeah, I work there, if you want to call it work. Wherever man. If they tell me to go there, I do that. The whole thing is doesn’t really matter, you know.

**Dana:** Oh my god. I love that Craig.

**Craig:** It’s a label. It’s not me.

**Dana:** [laughs] I do love that guy.

**Craig:** So, there’s Uber X, which is sort of the more affordable Uber. And I guess the deal is some of those drivers aren’t getting paid that much. So, a lot of people are like, “No, you have to tip them.” I mean, when people are lecturing you about tipping, it’s so hectoring. Somebody wrote something at me in all caps and I just wanted to punch my computer in the mouth. So, you know, there’s a lot of confusion about it.

And I said, I mean, to this date I’m like, no, I didn’t think that that was the thing you did. John was like, no, I always tip my Uber driver. So I’m glad that you’re here. Because you’ve been aggressively not tipping.

**Dana:** Okay. So, for me personally, what I think Uber needs to do, because I think of Uber as the whole entire reason I take Uber is because I have entered my credit card once into a thing and I never have to deal with it again. For me, it’s like on Postmates, I’m tipping like a crazy lady on Postmates. I’m tipping like I’ve got all the money in the world, because all I have to do is click that button baby.

**John:** Exactly.

**Dana:** I just click it. And if there was an Uber question at the end of it, where it was like, “Do you want to do 15, 10, whatever,” I would just hit it and I’d crush it. I’d be 20%-ing it.

**John:** So, Lyft lets you do that. And Uber doesn’t. So, here’s what Carrie T writes, “You should tip. I drive for both Lyft and Uber and sometimes we average like $9 an hour. That sucks. Especially if you’re going to the middle of nowhere. Leave a big tip because your driver will take a big loss driving back to civilization without the possibility of picking up another passenger.”

**Dana:** Oh my god. Yeah.

**John:** Bradley Dennis writes, “As a Brit, my view is that if you want more money, raise your prices. Giving a lowball figure and expecting people to just give you more out of some form of expected guilt is just bizarre and sneaky. It’s anything but genuine.”

**Dana:** Well, and that’s what makes me so uncomfortable if I ever get the luxury of traveling to Europe, is I feel like there’s this emotional transaction that occurs when you’re tipping. For me, obviously tipping is like just about psychology. It’s just about how do I feel. What weird power dynamic did I get into with this waiter? Like how much did I learn about their personal life? How sad do I feel about the job I know that they lost? Whatever it is, I get way too involved in everybody.

And in Europe, it’s just like you just pay the thing. They bring that weird little credit card thing over to your table. Like you don’t even — nobody goes in — they just come over to you and you swipe it and then you’re done. And you’re walking out. But if I can’t have that weird emotional/psychology moment at the end of it, I don’t quite know what tipping is about. That’s what it’s about for me.

**Craig:** This is weird. The whole tipping — look, I understand the tipping economy for waiters and bartenders. The whole deal there is that their management is allowed to pay them less than minimum wage or something like that, some crazy deal. But like, you know, I was talking about tipping — like here’s the insanity of tipping. You go to a restaurant and you sit down and you’re at one table, Dana, I’m at the other. Okay?

**Dana:** Interested. Listening.

**Craig:** Same restaurant. We have two different waiters. My waiter does a fantastic job. Your waiter does an okay job. The only difference is that I happen to order the sandwich, you got the steak. Your waiter gets more money.

**Dana:** That’s really interesting. I’ve never thought about that.

**Craig:** It makes no sense. It makes no sense.

**John:** So, I think people will write in to Craig to let him know that in restaurant situations, tips are generally pooled, so they’ll be shared among the waiters, so there’s some way it averages out.

**Dana:** So sandwich guy and steak guy have to put their money together.

**Craig:** Okay, well then let me extend then. You’re at the restaurant next door. Okay? I’m at my restaurant. My restaurant just happens to charge more for food. It’s fancier food. The fancier the food doesn’t mean that the waiter somehow has to work harder, right? In fact, sometimes the lower end restaurants, the waiter is working even harder because there is families in there and kids screaming and dumping their sippy cups. Meanwhile over at Café Swank, everyone is sitting perfectly quietly eating their $20 piece of tomato. Why do those waiters get more?

**John:** I don’t think it’s fair.

**Craig:** It’s not fair.

**John:** It’s not fair. And it’s not reasonable. And yet this is the system that we’re in. And so I think what’s been good about sort of the feedback we got was that a lot of people who are actually doing the job of driving cars for Uber or for Lyft or who are parking cars for valets at studios are telling us like don’t assume that we’re getting paid really well for our job. And so tipping is appreciated and is not an affront to be offering them a tip.

**Craig:** So the people that make money off of tips —

**Dana:** I appreciate this new information, honestly. I feel like I’m going to change my ways. Did you guys hear that thing — I feel like it was on something I listen to with my ears. So, it was something that I got to believe it was like This American Life or something. They talked about tipping and they were saying that you assume that waiters who are nicer to you and who are more friendly make more money, and actually it’s the ones who like grumpier and more withholding. And what they think it’s about is because the people who act happy and pleasant, the person having the dinner seems like, “They like their job. They’re having a great time. They’re just doing this for fun. They’re just bringing me that sandwich for fun.”

Whereas the people who are like very clear that it is a job, and they are doing it for a job to give you your food, and because they have to for their job, you tip them higher. I thought that was kind of interesting.

**John:** That’s why I like what you’re saying about like if there’s an option for like, you know, 10, 15, 20 percent, I would just click the button, and it would always happen.

**Dana:** I click the button every time.

**John:** It would always happen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Dana:** Give me the button.

**Craig:** Yeah, I would click it, too. I don’t know how accurate it is for people that would benefit from tips saying, “You really should give us more tips.” I’m still — here’s the deal. Uber needs to be really clear about this, and they’re not. And they need to smarten up and just solve this once and for all.

Because, yeah, look, if they were okay with the tipping culture, first of all, there never would have been this whole thing of you don’t have to tip your driver. They used to have a thing that said, “Don’t tip your drivers.” And then instructed their drivers, “If you are offered a tip, decline it.” Right? So that’s how that whole thing started. That’s what —

**Dana:** And was this an effort to differentiate them from taxis? Was that sort of part of the idea?

**Craig:** Yeah. The idea —

**John:** But if you look at how Uber has evolved, I mean, Uber was just the sedans for a while, just the town cars who had availability. And the way it’s become, my perception of Uber is Uber X. it’s the only thing I ever take. And that is a low end and those people aren’t making a lot of money.

**Craig:** I don’t take Uber X because I’m just concerned that I might get assaulted.

**John:** So, I will tell you a great Uber X story. I was going to Kelly Marcel’s party a couple weeks ago. And happy birthday, Kelly Marcel. And we took Uber. And I was talking with the driver and he had a fascinating accent. And I said like, I’m so sorry, but what is your accent, because it’s fantastic. And he’s like, “Oh, I am from Czechoslovakia.” Or specifically, “I’m from Czechoslovakia, not Czech Republic, but Slovakia.”

I was like, so the character I wrote in this last script was supposed to be Slovakian. And like I’ve had the hardest time finding an English speaker with a Slovak accent. And so I’m like, would it be really weird if I like got your information and I Skyped with you and like recorded your accent? I really need it as a language reference.

And it was great. And so we had an hour-long conversation with Elan about his history, his backstory, and I have this great footage of his accent for down the road.

**Dana:** Ah, that’s amazing. And I’ve read that script and I love that script.

**John:** Yeah. So she knows exactly who that person is.

**Dana:** I know exactly what you’re talking about and I am into it.

**Craig:** Honestly, that’s my nightmare. Talking to a driver for an hour?

**Dana:** Craig, what kind of an assault — is it like your ear’s assault? Like your ears are going to be assaulted with like a story? Or is it like you actually think you’re going to be sexually assaulted?

**Craig:** I’m always worried about sexual assault, you guys. [laughs]

**Dana:** [laughs] You think everyone is trying to sexually assault you.

**John:** Well, when you’re as sexy as Craig Mazin, it’s going to —

**Dana:** He’s a very, very sexy man. I get it. I totally get it.

**Craig:** You guys, you can’t be too safe.

**Dana:** As we all know, sexual assault is a crime of hotness, right?

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Let’s open a can of worms. Would you like to open that one?

**Dana:** Yeah, I just opened that for everybody. God, I hope everyone knows I’m kidding.

**Craig:** It’s a crime of hotness for me.

**Dana:** Oh.

**John:** Craig basically doesn’t want to have any interactions with people that he can’t completely control. And it does — I will grant that starting a starting with your Uber driver does feel like, okay, this could go a lot of different ways. It could go terribly.

And so most times I’ll just stick to the pleasantries and not go any further. But when I heard this guy’s accent I was like, you know what, we’re going to have this conversation.

**Dana:** You know what I do also is I have a little convo in the beginning, and sometimes I get really involved and I talk to them the whole time. And other times I don’t. But I always ask permission to make work phone calls. That’s how I do it. Because I think it’s a polite factor where it’s like I’m in your car. If you were just a person I was in the car with, I would ask you if it’s okay with you if I make a phone call. So I always do because I like to be polite about it.

**Craig:** You’re paying them to drive you somewhere, and you’re asking them permission?

**Dana:** I’m a human being, Craig. I have a heart.

**Craig:** I don’t understand this.

**John:** But I think the social contract with Uber is just a little bit different than it is with sort of a normal taxi. Because like, yes, you’re paying them to do it, but also you’re getting into their space, and you’re sharing it in a weird way.

**Dana:** It’s also like everybody you talked to that drives for Uber honestly has another job or is trying to be something or has an interesting story for you. And so I always get the sense that like I assume that anyone who is driving a car is like a doctor in the country that they came from and like can’t do that here. And that’s like my baseline for who I think is driving me. [laughs] So I usually have like just a lot of respect for those people.

**John:** So, most of the Uber drivers, I would say at least half are screenwriters. And so I’ll talk to them, “So what else are you doing?” It’s like, “Oh, I really like this because it gives me time to write,” and blah, blah, blah. And I’ll just shut up.

**Dana:** You shut down. And I’m out.

**John:** It’s like I’m not volunteering any more information.

**Craig:** It’s an absolute nightmare. It’s a nightmare. So I’ve never used this version of Uber. Ever. I’ve only used like the kind where, you know —

**John:** Fancy.

**Dana:** The fancy guy.

**Craig:** But it’s not Uber limousine. It’s just like, you know.

**Dana:** I’m just not comfortable unless the car is a little bit like my car, where there’s like so much stuff in the backseat that shouldn’t be in there. Like then I feel right at home.

Although I have to say, I got into a car the other day on my way home from — I went to London for the premiere of How to Be Single. And the guy that drove me home, god bless him, I loved him so much. That was one of the guys I got very involved in — P.S. emails were exchanged. I like emailed him honestly like the second I got home, because that’s how much I loved him.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**Dana:** I know. I’m you’re worst nightmare, Craig. This is why we’re not married and you’re married to Melissa.

**Craig:** Ah, thank god.

**Dana:** But he had like a little tray on the floor. And there was like Kleenex and like lotion. And then like hand sanitizer. And I’m like does he just assume like everyone is jerking off in the back of his car?

**Craig:** Yeah, man.

**Dana:** Because it was just like a jerk off tray. It was really interesting. And then there were like mints for afterwards for yourself.

**Craig:** So you could kiss yourself.

**Dana:** So you could just like freshen yourself up. I don’t know. I don’t know what was going on.

**Craig:** Listen, do you mind? I’m asking you permission. I’m going to be making business calls and jerking off back here.

**John:** [laughs]

**Dana:** Yes. I’m just asking your permission to jerk off while making a business call.

**Craig:** Yeah. Is that cool? [laughs]

**Dana:** Oh, lord.

**John:** Now we have to put the explicit —

**Dana:** You guys, this is amazing. You got to put the explicit thing at the beginning.

**John:** — warning on this podcast.

**Craig:** We knew that was coming.

**Dana:** There was a zero percent chance we were not going to need that with me.

**John:** All right. So you’re on your back from your premiere of your movie, How to Be Single, which you produced. I was so happy to see the little PGA after your name when the credits rolled by, so you’re officially the Producers Guild producer on this movie. But when I first knew you, back when you were my assistant, you were just a writer. And so how did this transition happen? Like what was the process that took you from, oh, I’m going to write movies that other people can make to I’m now making these movies.

**Dana:** Back when I was your assistant, you forgot to say I was just a really bad assistant. You were the world’s most amazing boss. And every day I would be like, “I just don’t know exactly when to take my nap.” I was like, “John, could you help me figure out when to put a pillow on my head and have your dog sleep on me, because I’m going to need to do that at some point today?”

You were literally the world’s greatest boss. So, how did I do that? I think what happened was the transition for me really crystallized around the TV experience. I was working as a screenwriter in movies, and getting treated the way that screenwriters in movies get treated, which is like you’re very disposable. They will fire you without thinking twice about it. And they will hire — I always think of it as like there’s a Crayola box and you’re like you’re the writer that’s like the nude color. And then they pull you out and they do what they need to with the drawing. And then they want a different color, so they grab the different writer out of the Crayola box.

And there’s some writers who are great at doing lots of things, and so they get to stay on longer. But I just felt like after —

**John:** Let’s talk about you being that Crayola. So were you brought in to do the work on like these characters aren’t working, please add a voice to these characters?

**Dana:** I got put into that a lot. I also got put into the “we need the girl voice.” Like we need the woman to sound like an actual human being was a call I got a lot. You know, it’s like there’s these big boy movies and the girls don’t sound like real humans. So I got that call a lot.

And I chose not to be offended by that. I chose to just be like, great, this is work. I need work. This is great.

**John:** And so through that experience you’re building up your quote and you’re building up your experience. You’re building up relationships, so you’re getting employed to do more and more of these things, but they’re not necessarily the jobs that you would dream about. And a lot of times your name is not on them because you were just doing a couple weeks of work?

**Dana:** Right. And what would happen is, you know, the movie would go to get made and then you would be completely blocked out of the process. And that was the part where I always felt really frustrated, because as a writer, you think about absolutely every choice you’re making on the page. And you’re very careful about like why the comma is where the comma is.

And, of course, you have ideas about what clothing the people would be wearing. You’ve thought about absolutely everything else about the character. Of course you know what kind of outfits they would wear. But no one asks you that because you’re just the writer.

So it was always really frustrating to me to just kind of hand it off, and once the process got really good all of a sudden I wasn’t invited to the party. Well, actually, you know, Couples Retreat was the first one where I was on set every day. That was sort of the thing where I was like, “Oh…”

**John:** So Couples Retreat is the movie with Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau and other folks. And you were on an island in Tahiti, right?

**Dana:** I was in Bora Bora for a month and a half staying. And Craig knows because he has stayed there.

**Craig:** It’s great.

**Dana:** In like the world’s nicest over-water bungalow, with like a hole in the floor where you can see the fish. And it’s this whole thing. And it would normally have been like the most amazing experience. But every day I woke up feeling like I was like fighting for my life, because it was just a really tough shoot.

And we were changing things on the fly all day long. And there’s a lot of pictures of me just like standing in knee-high water, like holding a laptop. Just like in a flop sweat.

**Craig:** So you’re movie plays 24/7 on one dedicated channel at the St. Regis Resort in Bora Bora. It’s just, that’s it. It’s just a channel that does —

**Dana:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** Well, there’s two channels actually. One in English. And one in French. And when I was there with Melissa, we used to come back from our day of whatever, you know, petting sharks and —

**Dana:** Snorkeling or like, yeah, rubbing your body up against a sea creature of sorts.

**Craig:** A thing? Or a person.

**Dana:** Or your wife.

**Craig:** And we’d come back. And so like Melissa is in the shower, and I’m just sitting there, and there’s not anything to watch except Couples Retreat. So the two of us watch Couples Retreat like 100 times in bits and pieces.

And I remember I wrote you and I was like, “We’re here and we’re in St. Regis and we’re watching your movie. This is the best place ever.” And you were like, “Oh, that’s nice. All I remember about it is typing and crying.” [laughs]

**Dana:** That’s all I did the entire time I was there. I remember one night I was in the fetal position sobbing saying, “Vince Vaughn is my father.” And Quinn, who was my lovely husband at the time, who was I swear to god 25 years old, was like, “I think I’m in a little bit over my head here.” I was like, “I can’t do it anymore.”

No, but Vince was actually really, really a great sort of graduate program on having tough skin, because he is a very, very hard worker and he just demands that everyone around him is working as hard as he is. And he taught me that work ethic, which is I guess great.

But, yeah, a lot of crying. And then a lot of very, very small croissants. And like eating so many chocolate croissants that were miniature size that I could make like a giant croissant inside my stomach with them. I did that a lot.

Yeah, Bora Bora was kind of hard core. It was amazing. And I look back on it and I think how did I not enjoy that.

**John:** So was that your biggest onset experience?

**Dana:** That was my biggest onset experience. Yeah. And I was there pretty much every day of that whole shoot. And it was a really long shoot. So, I got a lot of experience with that. And I started to just sort of discover that for me the writing almost begins onset as opposed — you know, most people feel like that’s the destination and once you’ve gotten there you’re done. But for me, that was like the start of the real writing. And I felt like so much changes when you’re there with the actual actors and they’re saying the actual words. And you see stuff. And you go, “Oh my god, well this could be better.”

And I loved sort of challenging myself to imagine what the editing problems were going to be later, and then fixing them in the moment so that we wouldn’t have those problems later. And then that experience kind of made me really sort of hungry for the onset experience.

And so then I decided to do a television show. My friend, Liz Meriwether, was doing New Girl. And she was just like, “It’s amazing. They actually think writers know what they’re talking about.” And she sort of encouraged to meet this woman, Katherine Pope, who is this incredible executive/perfect human being. And Katherine just kind of slow played me and talked me into being in television.

And then that was when I really understood like, oh, this is what I want to do. I want to be the person that gets to answer the question what is the person wearing, and what color should the wall be. And all that stuff, because I had the answer for all of that. I knew what the answer was and no one was asking me that.

And so then I just decided, okay, I think I have to start producing things in movies to stay close to the process while it goes all the way through to the end.

**John:** So Ben and Kate was a really quick rise. I remember meeting up with you in New York, because Quinn was running the marathon, and we were racing around the city. And I think you had shot the pilot, or you were about to shoot the pilot. And it was like sort of last minute. And like, “Well, we’re doing this thing. We’ll see what happens,” and suddenly you’re on the fall schedule. And you have this giant spotlight on you. Were you ready for it? Is anyone ever ready for it?

**Dana:** You know, it’s so funny. I don’t think anyone is ever ready for network television. It is so bonkers insane how many hours of TV you have to reduce in such a short amount of time. It’s like making a movie over, and over, and over again without stopping. And you’re making like three movies at once.

And so I would have a to-do list board up on my wall, because I had to be able to visualize it, otherwise it just felt infinite. And it would be like pitch, you know, writer’s room on this episode, pitch document on that episode, outline on this episode. There’s a script on this episode. There’s a cut on this episode. I mean, it was like there literally were like ten episodes going on at any given time. And so it was really hard to kind of keep all that stuff straight. I had some really great writers on the show who were just amazing, helping me and Katie Silberman I met on that show. And she was just like a killer. She was so awesome and so great at helping me kind of keep stuff straight.

But, yeah, I was as it turns out completely ready. And I felt like finally I felt like a fish in water. And it was weird. I think it was partly because Katherine Pope and also Liz Meriwether were just kind of like, “Of course you can do this. You’re awesome. Go.” That was really helpful.

And I just — I guess I just had spent so much time kind of as a woman, and I hate to get kind of feministy about it, but doing the tap-dancey, like I am a scared little girl and I don’t know the answer, but maybe the answer is this. But it’s your idea, and you just thought of it. And I had done so much of that. And I realized I always had the answer, I just was giving it to other people and pretending that they had thought of it. So then I was like, oh look, I can just take credit for the answer and I don’t have to be ashamed of it.

And then that was an amazing moment where I feel like I came into my power and I felt like, oh, I don’t have to ask for permission anymore. And when you know that you don’t need permission, that’s when you really don’t need permission anymore.

**Craig:** I mean, I love that. I love that you’re taking that additional capacity on. And we’ve talked a lot about this idea of the writer plus. You know, even if you don’t necessarily have the title of producer, a lot of times in features you can work yourself into a position where you’re the writer plus. I mean, for instance, like you were on Couples Retreat, you were more than just a writer, even if you weren’t producing that movie.

And then you kind of take on this additional thing where, okay, now I am in fact the official producer of this movie. And my question for you is, so, there’s one thing that producers that I — because I’ve thought about this a lot, but generally I shy away from doing any producing whatsoever. And part of it is because there is this thing I think really good producers that aren’t you, and that aren’t writing, can sometimes service this wonderful buffer between you and the outside world.

Some of them are bad and all they do is take what’s in the outside world, amplify it, and then shove it in your face. Those are the worst ones. Frankly, those are the more common ones. But occasionally you find ones that shield you. Did you feel more exposed as the producer because there wasn’t any kind of buffer between you, and the studio, and all the politics, and all the baloney?

**Dana:** Yeah. Well, that was what my question to you was going to be. Is the outside world like the studio and all the actors being crazy? What do you think of as the like stuff that it’s all that stuff?

**Craig:** It’s everything that’s not in my head in the screenplay, or sitting with the director and blocking a scene. Anything that’s not making movie, but all the other stuff around it, which is a lot.

**Dana:** Yeah. That was tricky on this one. I mean, to compare it to the TV experience, I had a whole crew of people who were there to support me in the creative endeavor on the TV show. And then on this one, on How to Be Single, like I was the person supporting everybody else, but I was also sort of expected to be able to do all the scene work that you’re expected to do as the writer onset. And that was really a huge challenge. And I have to say, like, thank god for Katie Silberman, because she was with me onset every day. And she kind of would have the script. And she would come up with all these great alts. And I had some good alts in the moment, but a lot of times, you know, I spent a lot more time dealing with the political stuff and just all the stuff that you’re talking about than I normally would as a writer on set. And so, yeah, it was really, really difficult to juggle and to manage.

But, I think when you sort of have that super power, which is the like I can talk to the studio. I can talk to the actors. I can talk to the director. I can talk to everybody. It’s hard to sort of put the super power away. You know what I mean? It’s like —

**John:** Let’s talk about the relationship with the director, because that seems like that would be an interesting and challenging shift in dynamics. Because in television, of course, the showrunner is ultimately responsible for the show. It’s this ongoing process, so the director is there for an episode. And so whatever that director does, well, you’re going to sort of decide what makes it through the edit.

You’re ultimately going to be picking that director and picking what’s going to be shot. It’s your show. But with a movie, that’s not traditionally how it works. And so as we look at the people who are like you, the writer-producer, so I think you, Chris Morgan, Simon Kinberg, there’s a growing number of these people who are doing that job of I’ve written the screenplay and I’m going to shepherd the screenplay through production. It changes your relationship with the director, doesn’t it?

**Dana:** Yeah. And I think I get away with it a little bit more because I’m like brutally honest. I’m not afraid of conflict. I’m not afraid — I’m super nice, but I get to the point. And I’m not afraid of stuff. So, I think I have like a personality that’s kind of built for it. But you’re right, it’s a really complicated — you do sort of have to walk on egg shells a little bit at certain moments, because the director is absolutely the boss in the movie business.

And so I was very lucky on How to Be Single in that I had a director who liked me and thought I knew what I was talking about. And so he and I were good at working together. The actors and I all got along great. And so we were all good at working together. It just — I don’t think I’ll ever do a movie again and not direct, honestly.

**John:** Oh, that’s the question.

**Dana:** And that’s the sort of weird twist of I guess this podcast which is that I think I will either just write it, and I will hand it to someone and be like, “Good luck. Have fun at 3am on the streets of NYC without me. I’m going to be in bed,” or I’m going to be directing it. Because it is very hard to feel like you kind of have the answer and feel like you could be the person the way that you are in television and then all of a sudden you’re like, oh no, wait, I’m not the boss-boss.

**John:** I described it, when I Jordan Mechner was writing the script for Prince of Persia, I was just a producer on the film. And I would see these things happening in the script and say like, “I know how — just let me fly the plane.” It’s like you’re in the cockpit of a plane, and you know how to operate the controls, but you’re not allowed to touch the controls. And it was so bad to not be able to use the controls.

**Dana:** You actually used that analogy with me. A long time ago you told me that. And I have quoted it a million times, because that’s exactly what it feels like. It feels like you’re in a 747 and you’re going through turbulence and everything is kind of crazy. And you’re like, “Press the red, oh god, can you just press the red button — no you’re not pressing the red button. You’re putting the, oh, god, you’re pressing the green one. Okay.” It drives you nuts.

**Craig:** It’s worse in a way because sometimes if you’re going to make the analogy really accurate, the person flying the plane is doing a poor job. You are a much better pilot than they are. Not only are you not allowed to touch the controls, somehow it’s considered rude to suggest that maybe they do something else.

**Dana:** By the way, you’ll get kicked out of the plane sometimes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Dana:** If you suggest that you should, yeah. 100%.

**Craig:** That is so nuts. And I’ve found that the better directors aren’t like that. You know? Just looking at all the directors I’ve worked with, it’s the ones that are insecure and frightened who turn you away and get super weird about that old school auteur baloney nonsense. And the new ones aren’t like that as much. And the good ones aren’t like that as much.

**Dana:** I’m so happy to hear you say that, because I guess I can amend what I was saying before, which is that if I found the right directors who really wanted a collaboration, I would 100% do it again, because I absolutely love it and I know I’m good at it. It’s so funny that you should say that, because when I was on my television show I had a really moment with some people that worked on the show and they sort of suggested that I was losing my power because I was deferring to other people who I thought were smart. And instead of sort of taking that bait and being a dude and saying, “You’re right, I have an ego. And I’m not going to listen to you. And I know the answer,” I actually said, “I think it’s what makes me powerful is that I pick the right people to listen to, and that I know that there are creative people here who can give me better ideas than even I can think of.”

And to me those are the really exciting sets to be on are the ones where everybody sort of feels like if you have the right group, you know, the contributions are welcome. And to me it’s like if the idea can’t withstand a little bit of criticism, then it’s not the right idea.

So, how could you get panicky about somebody else telling you they think they might know the answer? I take it all in. And I don’t take it — if I don’t agree with it, I just don’t take it. I filter it out and I go on to the next thing.

But, you can take it in. You know, that’s not an ego jab. I don’t know.

**Craig:** I agree.

**Dana:** It’s interesting.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, the people that said that to you, this was the show you were running, correct?

**Dana:** Yes, it is. And I’m happy to know that, Craig, you’re experiencing it, too. Because sometimes I feel like I’ve gotten into slightly more feministy/sexism-y place lately because I’ve experienced some more examples of that that are kind of shocking. And I hadn’t really experienced it before.

But it’s like I wish I was almost at like an all-girls school in Hollywood so that I could just say like, “Oh yeah, there are still the bossy women who want to talk all the time and — ”

**John:** All right. Because Craig and I could never talk knowledgeably about this, because we don’t experience it, can you give us some examples of the things you encounter — and so obviously you can change the details around it, but what are some things — because no one is doing more better movies than you are for this kind of space. Like you have big movies that open with big movie stars, but what are you encountering?

**Dana:** You know, I think it’s like there’s a sense that any time you get emotional about something, you’re being an emotional, hysterical woman, as opposed to I’m being passionate. That’s how I get when I really believe in something. And it’s not like I cry at work. Like, of course I’ve never cried at work. I’m like basically a dude, but I just — I think that if you say something that’s emotional, and a lot of times actors are very emotional people. That’s why they’re actors is because they’re super empathetic — or not all of them, but many of them are very emotional. And so I’m interested in psychology. I mean, my mom is a psychology professor. I’ve talked about psychology. I used to read the DSM-3R, you know, mental health case book when I was like 10 years old as like a bed time story.

**John:** Oh, Craig is so excited to hear that. Because he loves his psychology.

**Craig:** You said DSM-3?

**Dana:** It was the DSM-3R, I believe, is the edition that was out when I was growing up. What was your edition?

**Craig:** Well, you know, I prefer 4 or 5 is really interesting. Five is good. Five is good.

**Dana:** I love that you’ve read all of them. That makes me so happy. But, Craig, you can back me up on this. Those books were like my first access to — they would have a little example of a person who was whatever mental illness they were talking about. And they would tell a little story about them. They’d be like, “Sally, name changed, age 35, has blah, blah, blah.” And you’d read these little stories and I think it was like my first access to sort of character types and people who behaved in certain ways.

And I was really interested in that stuff. But for me, when that — that is a part of what we do. You know, this is a business, but it’s also emotional and it’s kind of a little bit art. And it’s kind of a little bit all these things. It’s very organic. It’s very living and breathing.

And I found sometimes that when I would talk about like an emotional thing, like I’d say, “Hey, this is actress is having trouble because she feels blah, blah, blah,” there was definitely a lot of male executives around me who were like rolling their eyes at me. And it’s like, you know, and that was a little bit frustrating because I kept trying to explain to them like this is a business conversation. Because this emotional thing is affecting our business. And so we need to address this emotional thing.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a bunch of trying to make art, which is by its nature an emotional experience. And trying to make it in a very difficult way. But to expect that everyone is going to behave rationally and sort of clinically cleanly at all times is unrealistic.

**Dana:** Yeah. Absolutely unrealistic. And, you’re getting together a group of people who all are probably slightly different pages in the DSM-3R case book, including myself. And I’m sure I’m like page 68, you know, OCD and this, that, and the other.

But, you’re getting together all of these different sort of personality types, and then you’re kind of putting them into a war zone type situation where there’s so much money at stake and everyone is kind of in their most heightened behavioral state. And that’s why you sort of need a person like me that kind of dives — I take my body and I just like dive on grenades left, right, and center every day. That’s sort of what I would do.

**Craig:** I’ve been watching these discussions online. A lot of times there will be these Twitter battles between screenwriters. And a lot of times the fights are about these issues — issues of sexism, perceived sexism, and how it’s working in the workplace in Hollywood.

And it strikes me that part of the disconnect that’s going on is women will say, “Look, this is how I’m treated and this is no good.” And then guys will say, “Well, hold on. I’ve been treated that way.” Because, you know, all writers are treated poorly to some extent.

And so there’s this interesting disconnect, like, “Oh, you think that’s just because you’re a woman.” The problem is that it is worse for women. We know that there’s just facts. Right? So there are these facts.

**Dana:** Yeah, there’s just numbers. There’s like actual data. Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s actual data. And so, you know, on your DSM thing it’s true. We’re all worried about our own emotional well-being. Our emotional well-being is the most stark and salient to us. So, we come home — so you’ve got some guy who comes home, he’s just been beaten up by his producers, belittled, made to feel like he doesn’t belong. Told that he was being difficult, and emotional. And then he gets online and someone is like, “This is how they treat us because we’re women.” He goes, “No! It’s because we’re screenwriters!”

And that doesn’t help. [laughs] It doesn’t help at all.

**Dana:** Yeah. It’s so funny, because I’m sort of bummed that I even have to engage in these conversations about sexism, because up until now I feel like I kind of ignored it, just because I’m bored with it. I don’t want it to be a thing. And I feel like, you know, the film business is so hard. It’s so hard to be successful, whether you’re a woman, or a man, or any of it.

But the place where I feel like it does actually come into play, again, going back to like weird psychology stuff, is I think that women are afraid of failure in a way that men kind of grow up not being as scared of screwing up. We’re told that like you’ve got to be a good girl, and you’ve got to get the A-plusses. And you have to be a good girl, do it right.

And so we aren’t taught by society that it’s okay to screw up at stuff and be bad at stuff. And this is a business where you have to mess up over and over again and you have to get your — like you were describing, Craig, you have to get the shit peed out of you over, and over, and over again, every single day. And then you have to get up and dust yourself off and just start over again. Day in and day out. And day in and day out.

And I don’t know that that’s the way that girls are socialized in our culture at least.

**John:** Well, talk about the failure. The first cut of every movie is going to be terrible. It’s going to be just awful. It’s going to be unwatchable.

**Dana:** Yeah. Your skin is going to crawl.

**John:** But I could definitely imagine if you are delivering that first cut to the studio, there’s a different reaction because it’s like, “Oh, she really screwed up that cut. That cut sucked.”

**Dana:** Right. Yeah.

**John:** Versus like if it’s a guy who delivered it, it’s like, well, every first cut sucks.

**Dana:** First cuts always suck. Yeah. 100%. And I think that is the place where it’s actually real and actually damaging. Which is I think that women don’t get as many chances as guys do in this business. And I think Diablo Cody said it really well at one point. She was talking about how like if you fail once as a woman, it’s like you’ve failed for all women kind. Whereas guys fail all the time and they get second, and third, and fourth, and fifth chances.

Women fail once and they never get another chance. So that’s a little tricky. And, you know, I do think that — again, Lorene Scafaria had a good point to me the other day about like financiers. It’s like, all of this is all about — it’s all about money. It’s always about money. Which is why I always urge people, like if you want to see more movies like this, you have to go to the movie theaters on that opening weekend and use your money to vote.

Because if you don’t go see them, Hollywood is going to stop making them. They’re just going to follow the money. So, Lorene mentioned like all the financiers are male. You’re looking to try to make a movie and then you also have to get involved in a conversation with a guy who is looking at you as either his wife, he ex-wife, or his daughter.

And that’s tough. Again, like critics also are tough. Because critics can make or break a movie, and I would say the majority of critics are males, probably age 50. Would that be sort of a fairish thing of saying?

**John:** That sounds about right.

**Dana:** And those people don’t like our kinds of movies.

**John:** Yeah.

**Dana:** So, you’re going to get bad reviews if you make a movie about a female journey. The same movie with a male protagonist that’s dealing with relationships, like they would never have called 40-Year-Old Virgin a romantic comedy. They just called it a comedy. But it was about a guy and romance and relationships. That literally all that movie was about. But that’s a comedy.

**John:** Yeah. So any of the Apatow movies are just comedies, but any movies that have more than three women in them are romantic comedies.

**Dana:** Exactly.

**John:** And so your movie, How to Be Single, got lumped into the, oh, it’s a romantic comedy, even though the romance of it is not a big factor. It’s like an Apatow kind of movie, but with girls.

**Dana:** Yeah. Exactly. And that’s frustrating because, you know, again, it’s not an ego thing. I don’t’ read reviews because I think it’s really self-flagellating and weird. It’s like don’t go to that place. Because if a tree falls in the forest and you didn’t hear it, it’s like I don’t have that in body. I don’t have that horrible thing that that person just about me in my body, because I didn’t read it.

But, you know, I occasionally dip in because I sort of have to know what are people who are trying to go to the movies this weekend reading, so I dip in a little bit. And, yeah, it’s frustrating because you get marginalized by being called a rom-com. And the truth is nobody goes to theaters to see romantic-comedies because they want to see them on their TVs at their houses.

So, that’s messing with my business, dude. It does actually affect the business, which is a bummer.

**John:** I hear you. So, you mentioned their names before, so we should talk about Diablo, and Lorene, and Liz, and the four of you, the Fempire. What was the genesis behind that? So, these are four young writers who have sort of set out and were going to kind of work together to make projects?

**Dana:** It wasn’t really that we were ever working together. It was just there was a New York Times article written by the great Deb Schoeneman, who is now a writer in her right and doing awesome. And it was back in the time when the four of us had just kind of become friends. And we were all doing our own stuff, but somehow we got called the Fempire and it kind of seemed like it was the group.

We would more sort of casually help each other with our stuff, so like I would read Lorene’s script. She would read my script. We would give each other notes. And I would read Liz’s stuff. And she would read mine. So it was a little bit more casual like that. But what I liked about it is I liked that it kind of said, you know, this is a group of women who are all trying to do the same thing, and we’re not being catty to each other. We’re being good to each other. We want to help each other. We want to watch each other succeed. And that’s the thing — like I have absolutely no patience for women who don’t like other women. Like I think there’s a very special, delicious place in hell for women who are mean to other women.

So, I just liked that it was like these chicks are all trying to do the same thing, and we’re all really proud of each other. And it could have been like this story about these four people who kind of never ended up being friends, or staying together, but we all are still really good friends. And we still love each other and we still support each other and come out for each other. So, it’s just like kind of a cool thing to have.

**John:** But seeing you guys work, you guys would help each other out on things in ways I’ve never seen guys help each other out on things, which I thought was really laudable and great.

**Dana:** That’s cool. Like what? I love that.

**John:** There would be times where it’s like, “Oh, I got to help Lorene with this thing that she’s writing.” Or, I just feel like reading other people’s stuff is one thing, I feel like you guys were kind of in the room helping each other out in ways —

**Dana:** Yeah. And —

**John:** And ultimately you went through New Girl, which I know actually you got paid to work on New Girl, but like I felt you were a very important part of the early years of New Girl.

**Dana:** Yeah. And Lorene actually directed a bunch of New Girls. Because, you know, we would just convince Lorene. And she directed a Ben & Kate. Like, we would just convince — Lorene is mostly just a feature director, and she only really directs her own stuff, but we would just kind of convince her like, hey, come be with us on TV for a second because we thought she’s so talented. And we tried to convince her to get over there.

But, yeah, there was some formalizing of it. Like I would watch cuts of New Girl and kind of like help Liz out. But, I mean, I think it was — now that I’ve been in television and I understand that sometimes, for some people writing is a very solitary thing. I imagine for you, you like to get into a hermetically sealed train and get sent to space on your space train and do it there or something.

And, Craig, I don’t know if you’re the same way. But, for me, I think by talking and so I needed other people around me to kind of like figure out what my ideas where. Because I sort of — by pitching stuff out loud over and over again, that’s how I kind of land on it. And so, yeah, like Lorene and I would tag in to help each other just sort of stand there — a lot of times it was literally just an emotional support animal. Like, you know, like Lorene would just stand there and be like, “You can do it. You’re okay. Breathe. Have another coffee. You can do this.”

And a lot of times it was emotional support. And other times it was tagging in with actual, you know, she would come up with a great line for me, or I would come up with a thing for her. And now that I’ve been in television and I see how fun that can be, and how collaborative that can be, that’s what I’m trying to bring into features in a weird way as well, is just a little bit more of like a TV sort of collaborative environment in features.

I think in television, I can name off the top of my head a lot more female boss ladies. So, I think that means it’s better in television. But I think it’s getting hard across the board because the business is contracting so much.

I feel like when I started out, they made 30 movies a year that were the kinds of movies I could have written. And now I see maybe eight of those every year that get released. And you sort of look at it and you say I wonder where I would fit into this new marketplace. I’m so impressed with what Deadpool dead, even though they kicked me in the dick and stole probably $5 to $10 million from me last weekend. God bless you, Deadpool. I’m so happy for you.

I am happy because it’s an original movie that people were excited by because it was original. So that makes me happy. And then I go, ooh, like should I be trying to get into the Deadpool tent pole business? And, you know, I talk to people about it and I start floating that idea, because it’s like I’ve got ideas that are big like that. I’ve got huge super hero ideas all the time. It’s just not my genre, so I haven’t really pursued it. And the response I tend to get is like, “Oh yeah. We’ll look and see if there’s a Cruella de Vil, or like a female super hero thing.”

And I’m like, but, oh, so I get it. You would never in a million years consider me for the male job.

**Craig:** Out of curiosity, who is giving you that response? Your agents? Or — ?

**Dana:** I mean, just anybody I talk to about it.

**Craig:** But who are these dummies? Honestly, like —

**Dana:** How many women do you know though, Craig, seriously, like I love you. You’re my favorite, because you’re a total feminist. You guys both are. But like how many women do you know that have written on those big movies? The Marvel movies?

**Craig:** No, no, I’m not questioning that it’s happening. What I’m questioning is who are these people saying this? Like I want to know who they are. I want to know —

**Dana:** Do you want to key their cars for me? [laughs]

**Craig:** Well, I just feel like it’s just so profoundly dumb.

**Dana:** It’s a little backwards looking.

**Craig:** And you know my whole thing is I decry all of the isms, but those are all underneath the thing I hate the most which is dumb.

**Dana:** Dumbism?

**Craig:** It’s dumb. It’s just dumb. I don’t understand it.

**Dana:** Yeah, it’s dumb.

**Craig:** Why would you — what?

**Dana:** It’s because they don’t want to do the hard thing. And what I’ve learned —

**Craig:** Well, let me ask you this question.

**Dana:** Yeah, please.

**Craig:** Is the dumbness, because I’ve gotten this kind of dumbness before, too. Is the dumbness, they look and they say, “Well, here are the movies that you have done, which of course we’ve been allowing you to do. So we look at what our filter has allowed you to do and we’ve decided that must be the only thing you can do.” Is that — are they giving you any rationale for this, dumb, dumb thing?

**Dana:** I think it’s exactly that. But, to bring it back to I think the point that you guys were making before about maybe it’s just because we’re writers, I think that either of you guys if you wanted to do something that was so far outside of your genre, you would have to do the same thing that I would have to do, which is you have to write your way into it.

So, you have to either take a really deep pay cut to do something outside of your genre. Like if I wanted to do a period piece on television, like some of the weird British stuff that I like, you know, I would have to just write it, and prove to someone that I could do it, so that I just took the question mark out of the equation.

And I’m assuming you guys would have to do that, too, right? Or would they give you the benefit of the doubt?

**Craig:** No, no.

**Dana:** I don’t think they would.

**John:** I think they give us more benefit of the doubt than they might necessarily give you.

**Craig:** I don’t feel like I get any of it. I mean, I did — I’m working on something that is definitely — like characterized I think the way you just said, something that’s really outside. And, yeah, I just said, let’s not even bother. Money doesn’t — we’ll just do it. I’ll do it for scale. I don’t care.

**Dana:** Right. So you have to do that, too.

**Craig:** Just let me this. Let me do this. There are times I think where —

**Dana:** And that’s how you had to win that job.

**Craig:** Yeah. But, I think that where there’s this pernicious thing is that people may say, hmm, well this guy is saying that he’s willing to do all that. Wow, he’s really passionate and he’s really aggressive about it. I admire that. And I wonder if when a woman does it they’re like, “Desperate.”

**Dana:** Oh, 100%. Because, again, the dating stuff, and the psychology plays into all of it. It’s like no guy ever wants a woman who is coming after him, because they’re biologically programmed to want to chase after the cheetahs because the cheetah is the meat and they’re going to survive if they catch it. So, like if I’m a woman, and I stand there right in front of you and go, “I’m available,” it’s like, ew, gross. I don’t want her. They need to actually see the other cavemen trying to fuck me.

**Craig:** I’m okay with that actually.

**John:** It’s such a weird metaphor. I’m trying to visualize it.

**Dana:** It got a little confusing there.

**John:** Are you eating the cheetah? I don’t know.

**Dana:** I think we’re eating — yes.

**Craig:** Does anyone eat cheetah?

**Dana:** We’re both fucking and eating cheetah.

**John:** I mean, I hear cheetah is delicious. So, I mean, I don’t want to — it’s a specialty.

**Dana:** But it was like a sexual eating of the cheetah.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Dana:** So there was some of that in there, too.

**John:** [laughs] Sexual —

**Dana:** It was like a really weird picture.

**John:** Dana Fox and Sexual Cheetahs.

**Dana:** This is why they hire me for the writing.

**Craig:** [sings] Sexual Cheetah. Sexual Cheetah.

**John:** So, Elizabeth Banks directs Pitch Perfect 2 —

**Dana:** The greatest.

**John:** She’s the best.

**Dana:** Love her.

**John:** And that movie is a giant hit. And I think her really valid frustration is why are you not offering me this Marvel movie or this other giant tent pole thing when she did a kick ass job directing that movie.

**Dana:** I’m not speaking for Liz. I love Liz to bits. And I think she’s amazing. And I’m not speaking for her here, but I do think that a lot of the time when women direct stuff, they think it’s like a fluke or something if it’s successful. It’s like look at that accident that lady tripped on and fell into.

**John:** How great was that, yeah.

**Dana:** How did she fall into all that money by accident? Like if you think about it, I had never heard that the person who directed Mamma Mia, which made like a bazillion dollars worldwide, I did not know that was a woman. I don’t know her name. I don’t think she’s been allowed to direct anything until she’s about to direct Bridget Jones 2.

I mean, like why? That’s super weird, you know.

**John:** It is super weird. Because I would say that, my personal opinion, I didn’t think Mamma Mia was especially well directed —

**Dana:** Didn’t see it. Making lots of comments about it, but never saw it.

**John:** Made lots of money. But I do agree with you that like any man who made a movie that made a gazillion dollars, their next movie is easy to make.

**Dana:** Gets another chance. Yeah. They get another chance. The next one is immediately green lit. Or whatever they want to do is immediately green lit. I do think that’s interesting. And I think, you know, with Liz, there’s probably a little bit of a sense of like, “Well, she had that property before, and she was part of that property all the way along, so maybe she… blah, blah, blah.”

And it’s like this is the thing that happens to women is that they’ve got to prove themselves over and over and over and over again.

**John:** Well, they explain away the success, rather than sort of celebrating saying how do I get a piece of that.

**Dana:** Yeah. Exactly. And I personally kind of thrive on the energy of needing to prove myself over and over again. I, much like Hamilton, am young, scrappy, and hungry. And I think if I remain young, scrappy, and hungry, like my country, I’ll be okay. So, in a way I sort of get excited —

**Craig:** It worked out for Hamilton just perfectly. [laughs]

**Dana:** It worked out for Hamilton you guys. Oh, that makes me sad. It didn’t work out.

**Craig:** I’ve imagined my death so many times. Just like a memory.

**John:** I get to see Hamilton next week, and I’m going to be so excited.

**Dana:** Wait, have you not seen it?

**John:** I haven’t seen it yet.

**Dana:** Oh, god, John. I can’t even —

**John:** No spoilers.

**Dana:** The spoiler is zero. Zero spoilers.

**Craig:** He dies at the end. He dies, he dies.

**John:** I can’t believe it. History is the worst.

**Dana:** I mean, he does.

**Craig:** History has its eyes on you.

**Dana:** The magical thing is I have — I’m so proud of my education. You know, went to Stanford. Went to USC Film School. Like super educated. Sort of a blank spot where all of American history is concerned for me.

**John:** It’s really not that important.

**Dana:** Like just didn’t really, I don’t know, either go to that class, or pay attention in that class. So, Hamilton to me, the whole time I was like, “Oh my god, what? America?”

**Craig:** Slavery? We had slaves?

**Dana:** Wait, what was Britain doing in this whole thing? I mean, the whole thing to me was like a shocker. The plot of that thing. It’s the first time in forever that my own ignorance has created like an incredibly magical viewing experience.

**John:** You managed to avoid all spoilers.

**Dana:** It was amazing.

**Craig:** You were kind of in suspense to see if we won the Revolutionary War.

**Dana:** Oh yeah, 100%. I was like, did he play golf?

**Craig:** That’s spectacular. John, you’re going to love it. It’s the greatest.

**Dana:** John is literally going to have to take like a Hamilton vacation for a week and a half afterwards to like reevaluate who he is as a person. I felt like a different human being. I felt like I was born during that show, and I came out of it and I didn’t know who the new me was.

**John:** I’m really glad you’re not trying to set expectations too high for it.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s a little absurd. That’s just crazy. That’s your DSM acting up.

**Dana:** I don’t, man, I had a really emotional reaction to it. I really DSM’d it. I DSM’d it hard.

**Craig:** Yeah, you DSM’d it. I mean, it’s an amazing show. The one thing that I actually had to do was take a break because I couldn’t sleep. Like I would keep cycling Hamilton songs in my head. It was bad.

**Dana:** I know. I have been doing a thing where I just had a baby three months ago, and I’m trying to lose the last of my baby weight. And I’m tricking myself into running by only allowing myself to start at the beginning of the Hamilton soundtrack, so I only get as deep into the Hamilton soundtrack as I can run, as far as. So I keep getting to like My Shot or like the Skylar Sisters. And it’s like, that’s like a 20-minute chunk. And I’m like, I can’t go further.

**Craig:** You should start a little bit later, because I would imagine Wait For It would be a great running song.

**Dana:** Oh, god, it would be so good. But I got to earn it, dude. I got to run that far so I can hear that song.

**Craig:** I get it. I get it.

**John:** Bringing up your baby is actually a perfect last bit on this topic of, oh, why are women not more successful in Hollywood. Oh, they have to stop and have babies. You have three kids under three.

**Dana:** I have so many babies. They’re all babies. I just have babies. Three of them.

**John:** You have nothing with babies. And you were pregnant with your first child while you were creating Ben & Kate.

**Dana:** That’s absolutely right. I mean, I actually had sort of a dark — this is dark. I don’t know if your audience can handle this.

**John:** We love dark. We love dark.

**Dana:** But I actually had like a ton of trouble getting pregnant. I had to do seven IVF cycles and I had two miscarriages. And the first miscarriage I had, or the one that was really tough for me, which was like about 11 weeks or so, I found out that it was not going to work out. I found out the baby was dead the morning of my Ben & Kate pitch.

So, I had to go into the network and be like the funniest person in the entire world with like a dead baby inside me. And as much as that’s like just sort of a horrible story —

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah, it’s the best story ever.

**Dana:** Everybody said, “We have to cancel the pitch. We have to cancel the pitch.” And I was sort of like, why do you think I have a sense of humor? Because comedy to me has been what has saved my life throughout my whole life. I mean, comedy for I think so many people who are in comedy is a defense mechanism. It’s a way to survive. It’s a way to kind of like make the world okay if you feel like the world isn’t going to be okay.

I had a pretty great childhood. I love my parents. It’s all cool. But, you know, it’s hard. And so I made people laugh as the way to kind of make everything okay. And so everyone kept saying, “We got to cancel this pitch. This is so creepy. This is so dark.”

And I said, no, I need this pitch. Like I’ll kill myself if I don’t go to this pitch.

**Craig:** Good for you.

**Dana:** So I went and I just like crushed it.

**Craig:** Love that. I love that.

**Dana:** And I was really glad I did it.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know what? Cry later.

**Dana:** Cry later, man.

**Craig:** Go do your job. Cry at home. I think that’s amazing.

**Dana:** But that sort of set the tone for my —

**John:** Definitely. You’re going to have three beautiful kids and a kick ass career simultaneously, and you’re going to make it work.

**Dana:** And for me personally, I never stopped while I was pregnant or having babies. I went back to work three weeks after the first baby. I went back to work two weeks after the second baby. And I think I was like working while cranking the third baby out of my body.

**Craig:** Unbelievable. I mean, not to — listen, I don’t judge any woman and how she behaves after a pregnancy, and particularly I don’t judge my own wife because, you know, I don’t think like —

**Dana:** Your wife is the most awesome creature.

**Craig:** She’s the best.

**Dana:** That’s the thing.

**Craig:** She was like, after those babies were born, she was like, “Okay. I’m going to sit here as still as I can sit and you’re going to help me.”

**Dana:** I think her stillness was my work.

**Craig:** Got it.

**Dana:** Like I think people are just different, people are just built differently. And the way I was built was, you know, for me, working is my passion. I love it so much. It keeps me going and also the more I keep moving, the less I have to deal with things that are scary, or sad, or I don’t want to deal with.

So, and the first one, I was having weird post-partum depression, but I don’t think I realized it was that at the time, because I’m such a chipper motherfucker most of the time. So, I was like, wow, this is kind of weird. I can’t seem to stop crying. Wow. Boy am I crying a lot. Is anyone noticing how much I’m sobbing? This is pretty weird.

So, I was like sort of positive about my depression. And then I went back to work and I was around people and I was doing what I loved and it made me feel like everything was going to be okay. So, you know, I think all women should do exactly what their body and their brains are telling them to do to make them feel like their happiest, best selves.

**Craig:** You only have three kids is the way I say.

**Dana:** Craig, stop tweeting babies into my body. Stop getting me pregnant, Craig.

**Craig:** I’m going to tweet another baby at you.

**Dana:** Don’t tweet that baby at me. I can’t have four babies.

**Craig:** Done. It’s done.

**John:** One more plug for How to Be Single. It has the best baby I’ve ever seen in a movie probably.

**Dana:** Oh my god, that baby was incredible.

**John:** It’s a scene with Leslie Mann and this baby, who is just the most angelic perfect baby. And their conversation, which is a good like — it felt like two minutes of conversation, a one-sided conversation with a beautiful baby, is just delightful.

**Dana:** I cry every time during that scene. I cannot pull it together. I almost have a fourth baby every time I watch that scene. It’s so bad. I’m like, where is Craig when I need him while I’m watching the scene. It’s such a beautiful scene.

**Craig:** I’m here.

**Dana:** And I hope everybody goes to see How to Be Single because I’m really proud of this one. And I really love it. I think it’s different. I think it’s interesting. I think we sort of casually do some kind of interesting stuff that I don’t know if we’re getting credit for. But like there’s an interracial relationship that we like 100% don’t comment on. It’s like not a big deal. It’s just like people get together sometimes and they aren’t the same race.

**John:** There’s an ex-boyfriend who is actually very sympathetic. And you can completely understand the movie from his point of view and sort of why he is doing what he’s doing. And in any other movie he would be a villain.

**Dana:** He would be vilified. Yeah. He would be vilified. And we have an incredible amount of respect for the men in our movie. We don’t sort of make them into the typical arm candy characters that women are sort of relegated to in movies where the main story is about a guy. We really tried to give those people respect. And like most of the dudes in the movie, I mean, they’re flawed just like the girls are, but they’re good guys. Because I didn’t want to —

**John:** I feel like Jake Lacy is a really good guy.

**Dana:** Jake Lacy is like the greatest guy of all time. He’s my favorite. My favorite line that Katie Silberman came up with on the day was, “My Halloween costume when I was in sixth grade was the stay-at-home dad.” Like how much do you love that guy? He’s like of course I want to be the daddy of your baby. What are you talking about?

But, yes, please see the movie, because I’m really proud of it, and I love it.

**John:** Hooray. It’s time for our One Cool Things. So, every week on the show we talk about One Cool Thing. So, Dana, you can go third so you can figure out exactly what your One Cool Thing should be.

**Dana:** Okay. I’m going to think about it. I think, for me, my One Cool Thing —

**Craig:** She doesn’t understand what third means.

**John:** She doesn’t understand the idea of you go third if you want to.

**Dana:** I can go third. I can go after you guys? Wait, but I’ve got to really think about it, you guys. I don’t have a cool thing.

**Craig:** That’s why he said you could go third. And then you were like, “Okay, so my One Cool Thing — ”

**Dana:** Okay, I’m going to say my One Cool Thing and I’m going to alienate every single one of your listeners. It’s going to be amazing.

**Craig:** Do it.

**Dana:** Okay, you do your stuff first.

**John:** Okay. So I’ll go first. My One Cool Thing is this great article I read about cow tipping. So, going back to our tipping discussion, here’s a great article about cow tipping. I’m going to poll both of you. Is cow tipping a real thing or a made up thing?

**Craig:** That is a made up thing.

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

**Dana:** I am going to go, because I’ve seen the movie Heathers, it has to be a real thing. And I think it’s offensive and creepy.

**John:** Okay. Cow tipping is not a real thing.

**Dana:** Oh, thank god.

**John:** So, this article by Jake Swearingen for Modern Farmer gets into the realities of cow tipping, which never was a thing and is actually almost impossible to do. So, for many reasons, like cows don’t actually sleep standing up necessarily. It would take so much force to push over a cow. You couldn’t do it. Cows would run away before you could get anywhere close to them.

So, it’s the movie Heathers, which I love the movie Heathers, that sort of kind of first put it in popular culture as a thing, like, oh, that’s a thing —

**Dana:** Did they make that up? But it sort of popularized it?

**John:** They popularized it.

**Dana:** Oh, that’s interesting.

**John:** It was already sort of a meme that was out there, but they sort of like grounded that meme. And so you see it in all of these movies and it’s like a thing that never actually happened.

**Dana:** That gives me great relief. I really worried for those cows.

**John:** You don’t need to worry for those cows.

**Dana:** I’m like upset about the cow tipping. Do you think the guy that wrote that article plays huge on that all-farmer dating website? Have you seen the commercials for that?

**John:** He’s the star of the all-farmer dating website. I think he’s going to be great. My question is, if you tip a cow, do you have to tip them afterwards? Do you have to give them like 20% if there’s —

**Dana:** If there was a button I would do it, but not if I had to do with cash. Zero percent on cash.

**John:** If there was an app for it, that made it really simple?

**Craig:** Wait, I’m sorry, there is a dating app just for farmers?

**Dana:** You’ve never seen this commercial? There’s a commercial on weird television programs. I don’t know. I watch a lot of like weird stuff. Just sometimes I’ll end up on like a weird — I’m in like a weird Steve Harvey place right now. I’m just really into Steve Harvey. And then you’ll get there, and you’ll be like what’s the demographic. Who is watching these shows?

And then you see the commercials and you’re like people who want to date farmers, apparently. There’s an all-farmer dating website. You should look it up, Craig. You could play huge on that, too, because you’ve got that beard going that’s pretty sexy.

**Craig:** I’ve got the beard. I know, I feel like a pair of overalls, I could kill it.

**Dana:** Oh my god, you would crush it. Also in the gay community. Careful.

**Craig:** What? Why? At this point, who cares? Do you know what I mean? It’s enough already. You know what, man, it’s like gay/straight — those are words from like my grandpa’s time.

**Dana:** Oh my god, I love that know that we’ve circled all the way back Whole Foods guy, and Whole Foods guy is not going to be labeled gay or straight.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Why should I be? Why should I be?

**Dana:** I love that guy.

**Craig:** Like Hector is like, okay, you either work in produce or not. And I’m like, wrong Hector. Wrong. I don’t care what it says on my sheet.

**Dana:** I work in the chocolate bar. You know, don’t you feel like that’s going to be the next thing? It’s just going to be like what percent cocoa there is.

**Craig:** I mean, the word cocoa gives me dick shivers.

**Dana:** It upsets me so much.

**John:** Dana, I see the look in your face. I think you have a great One Cool Thing figured out.

**Dana:** Okay, so my One Cool Thing is the Spectra S1 breast pump. It is a new breast pump that has literally changed the face of my earth. And nobody is talking about it, and so I’m going to alienate every single person in your entire audience, except for the one pregnant/potentially nursing lady in your audience.

**Craig:** Oh, no, I think we’ve got quite a few I would imagine.

**John:** So tell us what makes this breast pump better than other breast pumps?

**Dana:** It’s special. It comes out of Australia.

**John:** We like everything that comes out of Australia.

**Craig:** I’m not impressed by the way.

**Dana:** I like all Australians.

**John:** Do you watch The Katering Show? The Katering Show is great.

**Dana:** Oh, no.

**John:** We’ll send you the link.

**Dana:** Wait, what? Oh, John, you know that’s right up my alley. That’s going to work.

**John:** You’re going to be so excited. It’s Australian. But tell us about this breast pump.

**Dana:** I have like a really deep hole where The Great British Bake Off is. Like I need new Great British Bake Off. Oh wait, can I change my One Cool Thing, or do you want me to do the breast pump?

**John:** Stick with the breast pump. Everyone knows about The Great British Bake Off.

**Dana:** It’s an Australian breast pump. And they created, you know the Dyson guy who talks about vacuums in this really creepy way? I feel like maybe that guy created this because they’re basically like, “The sucking mechanism of the breast pump,” is much more like an actual baby. And so you get — the long and short of it is you get like twice as much in half the time, and it has literally changed everything. And it doesn’t hurt. And it’s kind of incredible.

**John:** That’s great.

**Dana:** So, I’m just going to urge all women to throw their creepy Medela things out the window, because they hurt and it’s a bummer. And go to this weird Australian one.

**Craig:** My wife had that. She had the Medela one. And, honestly, the thought of more coming out, you know, my job was to save it all and put it in those bags and stick it in the freezer.

**Dana:** Yeah. Every good man.

**Craig:** My wife, it’s not like — you know, you know her, she’s not like super chesty or anything, but oh my god. I mean —

**Dana:** Really? That’s awesome.

**Craig:** It was crazy. I was like we need to open a store or do something. Because it was like our freezer was just overflowing. Yeah, it was crazy.

**Dana:** Black market Mazin milk.

**John:** So when Stuart does the show notes, will he be able to find this breast pump online?

**Dana:** Spectra S1. You got to get the S1, because that one has a battery involved inside it. So you just plug it in. The battery is all charged up. You can cruise around town with it. All good. On my way over here in the Uber — I really should have tipped that guy — because I was pumping in the car on the way here.

**John:** [laughs] Absolutely. So you got your lotion. You got the breast pump thing.

**Dana:** I can jerk off, and pump, and sanitize myself afterwards. It’s perfect.

**John:** It’s good stuff. Craig Mazin, try to top that.

**Craig:** Can you use the breast pump to jerk off with? I mean, describe the sucking action on this thing?

**Dana:** There’s probably like an online hack that would allow you to do that.

**Craig:** Someone has hacked it.

**Dana:** You should look on YouTube. I imagine it exists.

**John:** Or a board that you sort of solder and you put together.

**Dana:** Definitely.

**Craig:** Well, you know, that’s what we do. When it comes to jerking off —

**Dana:** John August will have like a brain trust on this and it will be solved by next week for sure.

**Craig:** I have no doubt. Well, my One Cool Thing is nothing at all to do with nipples. Weird. It’s called Sky Guide. And there are a lot of apps for your phone where you can hold it up to the sky and it tells you what you’re looking at. You know, oh, that’s Venus, or that’s a constellation.

What I love about this one is they track the schedules of passing satellites, of the space stations that go by. And the deal is at times when things are going by, they will reflect the sun from the other side. So like at night, like for six seconds, literally six seconds, they’re reflecting sunlight from the other side just because of the angle that they’re at. And then it’s gone.

And so you’ll get like a little ping. Go outside. It’s a minute away. And you stand out there and it tells you like look over here. And you look there and it counts down and then you see it.
**Dana:** Like a little flair?

**Craig:** You see like a shooting star because you’re catching a piece of satellite or something. And I don’t know, it just reminds me of the big, big beyond.

**Dana:** That’s really romantic. I like that technology can be romantic and can bring you back to something that’s so sort of primal and outdoorsy, even though it’s very computer-y.

**Craig:** And then I also have that breast pump on my dick while I’m doing it.

**Dana:** [laughs] Oh my god. Can you edit out the fact that I just spit water all over when you said that?

**Craig:** No. Are you kidding me?

**John:** All spit takes have to stay.

**Dana:** All spit takes.

**John:** You have a recurring spit take in your movie.

**Dana:** I do. I have a spit take call back, no less.

**John:** Well done.

**Craig:** The best.

**John:** We have a tiny bit of news here at the end of our show. So, listeners will know that we were supposed to have Lawrence Kasdan on our show, on our live show, and he couldn’t do it for that night. And we were very lucky to have the Game of Thrones guys fill in for him.

But, we’re going to do our Lawrence Kasdan interview live with an audience on Saturday April 16 at the Writers Guild Theater. It’s a joint program with the Writers Guild Foundation and Academy’s Nicholls Fellowship.

So, this is not a normal Scriptnotes live. This is actually their event, but we’re going to crash it and do the interview with Lawrence Kasdan there with an audience. So, if you’d like to come to see us talk to him live, there will be a link in the show notes. So, you can join us for that.

And that’s our program. So, most of the things we talked about, including the breast pumps, and the international space station tracking app, will be compiled by Stuart Friedel and put in our show notes. You can find them at johnaugust.com.

You can find me on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Dana, you are?

**Dana:** @inthehenhouse.

**John:** Very nice. Oh, because you’re a fox.

**Dana:** Uh-uh. Fox in the hen house. Everything with the word Fox was taken by like some porny weird stuff. So, I had to get creative with it.

**John:** That’s nice. We like it.

If you have comments for us, you can join us on Twitter, but you can also leave comments on our Facebook page, which we actually checked this week, so that was kind of cool.

**Craig:** Wait, we have one of those? [laughs]

**John:** We have one of those.

**Craig:** Oh. Wow.

**John:** And so the things we talked about today, those were from the Facebook page, Craig.

**Craig:** Uh…yes. Of course.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** I knew that.

**John:** You can write in with questions to ask@johnaugust.com. That is a good place for the longer things we sometimes address on the show.

If you would like to subscribe to Scriptnotes podcast, join us on iTunes. Just click subscribe. And while you’re there, please leave us a comment. That helps other people find the show.

We also have the Scriptnotes app there. That lets you get access to all the back episodes of the show.

We also have a few of the 200 episode USB drives that have all the back catalog of Scriptnotes which you can get. So, if you’d like one of those, just go to the store. It’s at johnaugust.com. There’s a link in the show notes.

Our outro this week is by the same guy who did our outro last week. His name is Adam Lastname. I don’t know what his last name actually is. It just shows up as Lastname.

If you have an outro for us, you can write it to the same address, ask@johnaugust.com.

Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli. It is produced by Stuart Friedel. And thank you for listening. We’ll see you next week.

**Craig:** Thanks Dana.

**John:** Thank you, Dana. Bye.

**Dana:** I love you guys.

**Craig:** Love you, too.

Links:

* Dana Fox on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Fox), [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1401416/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/inthehenhouse)
* [DSM-III-R](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders#DSM-III-R_.281987.29) and [DSM-5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5) on Wikipedia
* The New York Times on [The Fempire](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/fashion/22fempire.html)
* [How to Be Single](http://howtobesinglemovie.com/) is in theaters now
* Modern Farmer on [Cow Tipping: Fake or Really Fake?](http://modernfarmer.com/2013/09/cow-tipping-myth-or-bullcrap/)
* [farmersonly.com](http://farmersonly.com/), and [their YouTube page](https://www.youtube.com/user/FarmersOnly)
* [Spectra S1 breast pump](http://www.spectrababyusa.com/#!products/cjg9), and [on Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DBKFFJM/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [The Katering Show](http://thekateringshow.com/) is fantastic
* [The Great British Bake Off](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b013pqnm)
* [Sky Guide](http://www.fifthstarlabs.com/#sky-guide)
* [Get tickets now](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/wgfestival-2016-craft/) to see John and Craig interview Lawrence Kasdan as part of WGFestival 2016
* [USB drives with the first 200 Scriptnotes are available now at the John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Adam Lastname ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/sexy-but-doesnt-know-it).

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

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

**John:** And this Episode 237 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program, we are going to look at how you introduce characters in a screenplay and how to avoid being mocked on a Twitter feed for it.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** We’ll also discuss writing two projects at once and answer a bunch of follow-up questions.

So Craig, we are a little bit late starting because you were just writing on a script and asked for five more minutes. So in those five more minutes, did you finish the scene you were working on?

**Craig:** I did. It’s such a weird feeling when you — it’s so hard to start writing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So then when you’re writing and then you’re like, “I know what to do. I’m getting there. I’m just,” you know, you’re inside of a line or whatever, and you know you’ve got three more lines and you know how it ends, and you just — you can’t stop.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s all about inertia.

**John:** Yeah. It is mostly about inertia. Writing is inertia.

Yesterday, I was doing some kind of non-writing work. I was like pasting some stuff from different things, getting some documents ready, and sort of accidentally ended up writing a scene. It was just delightful. It’s like, “Oh, well, I’m kind of in this. That seems like the dialogue. I’ll just write the dialogue.” And boom, a scene is done.

**Craig:** Isn’t it amazing how much easier it is when you’re not trying?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** God, our life.

**John:** Some follow-up from previous episodes. First, the most exciting piece of follow-up this week. Last week on the show, my One Cool Thing was The Katering Show.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A great web series by Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney. And you put a challenge out to our listeners.

**Craig:** And the challenge was, “Go get us Kate and Kate.” [laughs] Let them know that we want them to be on our show and that we want to make them famous.

**John:** Yes. And so through Twitter and through other means, you guys reached out to them. They reached back out to us. And so we were going to try to do them on — have them on Skype and talk via Skype to Australia. But they said, “You know, it could be even easier if we did this in person.” And they are coming to the United States in April to promote the second season of their show. And so we will try to have them on while they’re in the United States.

**Craig:** Oh, we are going to have them on the show while they’re in the United States. And also make them famous. We’re going to make them famous.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, famouser.

**John:** Famouser. I do definitely detect that situation of like, well, they could be famous for Australia. But like, when we say famous, we mean famous in the United States and therefore famous in the world. And we think they should be more famous.

**Craig:** Yeah. We mean United States famous.

**John:** We want them Rebel Wilson famous.

**Craig:** We want them R-Dub famous.

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** By the way, isn’t it — I mean, these are their real names, right? Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney?

**John:** They are.

**Craig:** It’s just so bizarre.

**John:** Isn’t it so weird, the Lennan, McCartney?

**Craig:** It’s so close to Lennon and McCartney.

**John:** And they’re both Kates. It is really strange.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well —

**John:** Wouldn’t it be weird if they deliberately changed their names planning for this?

**Craig:** It’d be kind of cool.

**John:** It would be kind of cool. They both also have young babies, so it’s an exciting time in life.

**Craig:** Oh, well they should bring their babies.

**John:** They should bring their babies. I would hope they would. I suspect they’ll bring their babies to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** You know what? If they bring their babies, then maybe I’ll bring my daughter, and your daughter and my daughter can babysit their babies.

**John:** Completely a plan.

**Craig:** Hey Kate and Kate, our daughters mistakenly killed your babies. [laughs] But —

**John:** The good news is — I don’t know if there’s any good news.

**Craig:** Yeah. And also, we can’t make you famouser. But thanks for being on the show.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, it’ll definitely shine a spotlight on something. [laughs]

**Craig:** That, by the way, that should be the sequel to Spotlight, this next movie. [laughs]

**John:** How our daughters killed some Australian babies. [laughs]

**Craig:** And that’s — the tagline is, “This time we’re shining a spotlight on something.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** Did you see Spotlight? Craig didn’t see Spotlight. You didn’t see any movies.

**Craig:** What? What? No, I did. I have. That’s not true. I have seen a bunch. I’m just still making my way through my stack.

**John:** All right.

Also in last week’s episode, we talked about the Top 100 movies and how many of them were franchises, basically — it’s basically either the start of a franchise or a member of the franchise.

George from Plymouth, UK, wrote in to say, “Given that a sequel can’t happen without the first movie, and given that the first movie has to be pretty damn good to spawn a sequel, and given that pretty damn good is a necessary characteristic of the Top 100 Movies, shouldn’t your list exclude the first movies to properly reflect the franchise phenomenon?”

So George is basically asking for a list that is just the sequels and not any origin films. And so if we do that, the answer still is 72 or 73 of the top movies in the box office worldwide in all history are sequels.

**Craig:** Wow. That’s remarkable.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s still up — and you know, George from Plymouth makes a good point.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So you have to — I think we talked a bit about that in the episode where, you know, you can’t — some of our frustrations as screenwriters is you’ll pitch something that is an original idea and it’s like, “Yes, but we also want to make the sequel to this thing.” It’s like, well, you don’t get to make sequels unless you make the first movie.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So — yeah. Now, some of those non-sequels may have been based on books.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I don’t count those.

**John:** Many of them are.

**Craig:** Yeah. So then to me they’re not really the first of a thing, like it wasn’t a big risk to make Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

**John:** It was not.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

And actually, Maleficent is the reason why I’m saying 72 or 73. Do you consider that a sequel to Sleeping Beauty? Well, kind of. It’s based on Sleeping Beauty’s story, but like it’s not necessarily a sequel to Walt Disney’s version of Sleeping Beauty.

**Craig:** Yeah. I would say no, because that movie could have been made at another studio.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, so it’s not — I don’t see it as continuous of that chain.

**John:** Yeah, right.

**Craig:** Like for instance, whatever the latest Wolfman movie was, I don’t think of that as a sequel to The Wolf Man movies with Lon Chaney Jr.

**John:** Yeah. I agree with you there.

Also, last week, we talked about Final Draft and the state of screenwriting software. And there were a bunch of listeners writing in with some follow-up emails about that. So we’ll try to chug through a few of them.

**Craig:** All right. Well —

**John:** So you start.

**Craig:** So we did hear a lot from people who said, “Au contraire, Write Brothers, the company that makes Movie Magic Screenwriter, they have been updating their software.” And in fact, that very day our episode came out, a lot of people said, “Hey, there’s a new update to that software. It’s now 6.2.1. It’s fixed a bunch of bugs and has a bunch of new features.”

Here’s the issue with that. That’s an incremental update. That’s not really a new version. So you know, Movie Magic 6 has been stuck on 6 for years now. And the fact that they’ve gone up to 6.2.1 is nice. So for instance, now you can import Final Draft files. But that’s kind of crazy that you couldn’t prior to that because everybody else is able — has been able to do that for a long time.

So, look, I loved Movie Magic Screenwriter. I used to be, you know, a big supporter of theirs. And I was an endorser of their product. But it just stagnated. They don’t —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re not really still in the game. I mean, if Movie Magic Screenwriter 7 comes out and blows us all away, great. But —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It seems like they’ve withered.

**John:** Yeah. So this new update also fixes iPartner, which I guess is their simultaneous screenwriting thing, so like, you know, two different people can be working on a script over the internet.

**Craig:** Yeah. That never worked.

**John:** And that had not been working for like two whole system software versions.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So that it isn’t — it’s not great that it sat fallow for so long, but I guess I am happy that they are still updating their product and there still seems to be like someone in the office fixing bugs.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s the — I guess that’s how I’d put it because when you see that they have a new update to software that hasn’t had a major revision in years, and one of the new features is new spellchecker and thesaurus, I think, “Oh, boy. There may only be one person over there.”

And I feel bad because they — you know, for a long time, I thought their software was superior to Final Draft’s. I mean, you know me. [laughs] I feel like — I feel like a bucket of rocks roughly arranged in the shape of a keyboard is better than Final Draft. But they — yeah, I don’t think 6.2.1 quite is what we meant by updated.

**John:** Yeah.

Steve wrote in to ask, “To shorten page counts, I like to format my scripts in Final Draft’s tight mode rather than normal. I don’t use very tight because it’s very hard to read. I never use loose because I can’t imagine anyone ever wanting to lengthen a script. So tight it is.

“My writers’ group teases me about this saying it’s cheating. Is it cheating? Is tight format acceptable by the industry? If not, then why is it an option? I haven’t used any other screenwriting software, so I don’t know if this feature is specific to Final Draft or not.”

**Craig:** You know, this comes up a lot. It’s not specific to Final Draft. I know that Fade In has a similar thing where it’s not kerning. And I think actually both Final Draft and Fade In have kerning, which is the amount of space in between letters —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Horizontally.

**John:** Which you would never want to —

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Never change that.

**Craig:** No, because that really does affect readability. This thing is about tightening up the vertical space in between successive lines. And —

**John:** So cramming more lines on the page.

**Craig:** Correct, cramming more line in the page. So your writers’ group teases you about this saying it’s cheating. Is it cheating? Yeah, it’s cheating for sure. In fact, I think a lot of — I think in Fade In they might even call it cheat. [laughs] Because that’s what it is. Of course it’s cheating.

Is it acceptable by the industry? Yeah. If you write a brilliant script with tight formatting, they’re going to make your movie and you’re going to be a millionaire. [laughs]

They’ll reformat it before they put it through the budget process. And they may come back to you and say, “Hey, per the AD and the physical production department, your 119-page script is actually 138 pages. And we need to discuss because we may have to make some cuts.”

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** But at that point you’ve won and you can deal with it. I know lots and lots of writers who do this. Scott Frank, I think, has not not done this, ever, you know. It’s like — because he’s always over, you know. Always.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So —

**John:** I think what we should do is we should have to weigh the blank pieces of paper and then weigh the pages, the piece of paper with toner on them. And therefore, we can see how many actual — how much the weight of the script. That’s how we’re going to start budgeting now. It’s on — based on the weight of the toner on the page.

**Craig:** That’s the most John August solution to a problem ever.

**John:** So let’s talk about acceptable cheating.

So I don’t think you should use tight and — because I can always see tight and I can always tell that you’re cheating and therefore I say like, “Well, this script is actually long.” I just — you could — it’s very easy to see when someone is using tight.

Here is acceptable cheating in my book. As you go through your script, if there is a word, especially in dialogue that is breaking to the next line, you can sometimes cheat the little margin on that dialogue block to pull that word up. You do that enough and do it cleverly enough, you can sometimes pull a page or even two pages out of a 120-page script.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** That to me is acceptable cheating. You may even find yourself carefully rewriting a line of scene description so that it doesn’t break across a page. That is a thing that is acceptable cheating.

**Craig:** I agree. That’s not even — to me, that’s not even cheating at that point because —

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You know, the idea is you don’t want to get penalized for a word, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The only thing about tight, I will say, is that I’ve used it once. I’m not a fan, in general. I did use it once and I used it because my producer, Lindsay Doran, said, “You know, it would be great if this script seemed a little shorter, but I don’t want you to make it shorter. And the thing about your pages is there’s more white space on your pages than any other writer I’ve ever read. It’s just like seas of milk.”

Because I like — I hit that return key all the time. I like spreading my stuff out, you know. And so she’s like, “Given that, go for tight.”

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** So that was like, okay. You know, if you — if you really are writing a very kind of expanded style, then probably it’s okay. Tight in bricks of text is going to be brutal.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And tight in Fade In didn’t even seem — it was hard to actually notice. I did a real careful comparison. Tight in Final Draft I think may be nastier.

**John:** Andrew wrote in to ask, “I have set Microsoft Word up with all the styles and formatting so I can choose slug line, dialogue, or parentheticals, and automatically format them as required. I have headings throughout so I can click a button and number the slugs. Or pages, I have code built in to sort out the continueds in pages. I can do any format I want and it’s free.”

It’s not really free because you already own it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “I have tried various formats out there, including Final Draft, and really can’t see any advantage over my system.”

Well —

**Craig:** So, good. [laughs]

**John:** So, good.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** So let me — let’s talk about that. So my very first script, Go, was written in Microsoft Word. And I think people used to use Word a lot more often to do screenwriting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The reason why they moved to Final Draft or other screenwriting applications is there are some things that a dedicated screenwriting app can actually just do better.

And here’s an example of something that’s coded into Highland, but also because it’s coded into Final Draft and all the other ones, too. Let’s say you’re approaching the bottom of a page and you have some scene description that’s going to have to break between — from one page to the next page. A screenwriting app is smart enough to detect, okay, this is what’s going to happen. Can I cheat this line up onto the previous page or can I add an extra line to the bottom of this page? Or if I can’t do that, can I break this paragraph at the period —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So that it can flow better across the page? And it’s one of those things that screenwriting apps just do behind the scenes to make your pages look better, so you are never starting page three in the middle of a sentence. You’re always starting page three at the start of a sentence.

With a lot of macros, you could probably get Microsoft Word to do that. But it’s not its natural way of handling things. And when it comes time for revisions, starred revisions, or the more complicated things, you’re going to very quickly run into some obstacles in Word where it’s just not built to do that kind of thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not sure why Andrew wrote in. He seems to be incredibly confident and satisfied with his system. So, cool. I mean —

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** If you’re happy doing it the way you do it, just keep on doing it, you know. I don’t have any problem with that. I mean, I wouldn’t do it that way. I remember, like you, in the old, old days before I drove down to Santa Monica to buy Final Draft that I had to use Microsoft Word, and it sucked. And yeah, you can totally customize it and trick it out, but why? I mean, I don’t know. He’s happy. What am I going to do?

What am I going to do with you, Andrew? You’re happy. What do you want?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Here’s one from — ooh, Arieto and Rowie from Wellington, New Zealand.

Wellington, New Zealand. Arieto and Rowie. “My writing partner and I use WriterDuet. The feature we like most is that it allows us to both edit the same document simultaneously.”

Yup, that is in fact what they do over there.

“We really love this way of working together. Could you talk about some other work flows for writing teams to write collaboratively?”

**John:** All right.

So I know that David Wain and his whole group on Children’s Hospital, they tend to write in Google Docs. And so they will have a Google Doc which will be the script or the ideas for the script, and they’ll start working on it. And each of them will write in a different color, I think, so they can see and they can leave notes for each other in different colors. They’re using Fountain for that, so they’re just writing it Fountain and then they bring it into Highland or another app to make it into a screenplay when it’s all finished up.

So Google docs is at least, it’s free, and everyone sort of has it, so that’s a way you can work. But I know a lot of writing teams who are even in the same room, and they will be, like they will just have two monitors hooked up to the same computer, and they’ll literally be working on the same screen so they don’t have to look at each other, but they can both be looking at what’s on the screen, which seems crazy, but people do.

**Craig:** But is one person driving on the keyboard or are they both looking at the same Google doc?

**John:** Sometimes they’re actually not even using Google docs. Sometimes they’re actually just using, it’s like, it’s literally up in Highland or Final Draft, and they are both looking on their own monitors at the exact same document at the same time.

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** Or they’re doing screen sharing so they’re looking at the same. So, either one could control it at a time.

**Craig:** Yes, there’s lots of ways to do this, I mean we have now, we live in a time now where document sharing and multiple editing, multiple simultaneous editing is doable. That is relatively new, so most of the modalities go back to the times before that. Very typically, the old school way of doing things, so for you, Arieto and Rowie, one way was Arieto would write some pages, and he would email it over to Rowie, Rowie would revise those and send them back to Arieto along with some new pages that Rowie had written. Obviously, they have an outline so they know what they’re doing, and they’re just editing back and forth and asterisking, and coloring, so they know, okay, this is the change, or that’s the change, and then kind of like the way two chambers of legislature get together in conference, then everything gets molded together and decided together.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a very common way for writers to have worked in the past. I personally, I find the idea of working simultaneously with somebody where both people are on a keyboard controlling something like WriterDuet or like Google docs, I find it anxiety-ridden for me, the idea that I’m typing something and someone is changing what I’m typing while I’m typing it. Oh my god, I need a moment, you know, like I need a moment or at least a chance to get a line out so we can both look at it.

So like when Todd Phillips and I write together, we do both, we do what I just described, the write and swap, and then we also sometimes will sit together. Once we — when we’re rewriting, we’ll sit together and I’ll usually drive because I type faster, via Apple, what do they call it, AirPlay to a TV in the office over there, and we just do it like that line by line. But at least there’s like, there’s something that’s already been written. Don’t you immediately start to feel nervous about somebody writing over you while you’re writing?

**John:** Yeah, it does seem strange and difficult. So what I was describing with Children’s Hospital like that seems to make sense where you’re just like you’re spit-balling out ideas and everyone is just sort of like throwing stuff around in it and that would make more sense, but when you actually know what you’re writing, I feel like the classic technique of like you do this, and I’ll do that and then we’ll page it together is probably going to be a better solution for you.

The few times I’ve written with somebody, like I wrote a script with Jordan Mechner, we had our outline and we just like broke up the scenes and he wrote those, I wrote these, we put them all together. He did a pass through, I did a pass through, and that was the script. And when you talk to people who are in TV writing rooms, I hear a combination of systems that they’re using.

So sometimes they all have to work together and we’re not going to use that word that we used to use for working on a script together, but if they’re all working together, sometimes they’re all staring at a screen, but more often, they’re breaking off and different people are doing different things and they’re pasting it all together.

**Craig:** Absolutely true.

**John:** And your point about writing on the same document at the same time, my limited experience with it is actually how we do the show, and so we’re both looking at the same outline which is in Workflowy, and there are situations where like you’ll be adding something while I’m adding something, and it is really confusing. While it’s remarkable that we have the technology to do it, I find it really disorienting.

**Craig:** Yes, especially when you have two people that are very good at typing or actually even worse if one person is really good at typing and the other one isn’t, like if Rowie is awesome at typing and Arieto is not, and then Arieto is like, come one, let me just get my sentence out. [laughs] Rowie’s like, “Sorry, sorry I’m on the next page. Your sentence is no longer applicable.” Oh, it makes me nervous.

**John:** Yeah, it makes me nervous, too.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right, Patrick, our final question about screenwriting software, he writes, “My first question is for John. Are there any plans to port Highland or any of the Quote-Unquote Apps project to Windows or PC? I work out off a PC simply because that’s all I’ve been able to afford and would like to support the Scriptnotes/Quote-Unquote brand.” The answer is no, we’re not porting anything over to PC mostly because we don’t know how, we don’t have the expertise to do it, but also all the apps we make are using kind of very specific only Apple stuff and so it would be very hard for us to do it. So the simple answer is no, they are going to be Macintosh or iOS for the time-being because everything is sort of built on technology that only exists in the Apple universe.

**Craig:** I use Mac like you do, and I have Parallels installed because occasionally I run into a program that is Windows-only and it works gorgeously because when Apple switched over to Intel, it became sort of academic to do that. Is there something that goes in the other direction for people that are on PC where they could use an emulator?

**John:** That is a great question that I do not have the answer for. So if you are a listener who knows the answer to that question, let us know. My hunch, my guess is going to be no, because if you look at sort of how Windows works, Windows is software that you install on a computer versus Macintosh is the computer and it’s a software altogether and Apple doesn’t really sell that stuff separately, you don’t just go and buy it off the shelf and put it in whatever computer you want.

**Craig:** Well, we’ll see what happens.

**John:** Someone will tell us.

**Craig:** Yeah, someone will tell us. I’m just wondering like maybe even — I bet like I’m sure it’s easy enough for things like terminal apps, you know, I mean, Unix stuff. I’m sure there’s some kind of emulator.

**John:** Yeah. The second question is for both of us. What writing software would you recommend for playwriting, would it be Fade In or something else? You’re doing some broadway kind of things. What are you using for that?

**Craig:** Well, the screenplay I’m writing now is a musical, so I actually had to think about how am I going to do this, because I’m writing these songs, but I’m describing songs and putting in sample lyrics but there is no music yet that comes, you know, I’m sort of providing this as grist for the music mill, and then we’ll go back and forth.

And so I just thought like, you know what, I think I’m just going to stick within my regular — because so much of it is regular screenplay, and then when I get to those moments, I’ll call it out, and I’m just going to put everything in italics, and that’s the song.

**John:** That’s a song.

**Craig:** And it’s just sort of in its own kind of formatted existence. If I were writing a play, particularly a non-musical play, yeah, I think I would probably just use Fade In or you know, why not?

**John:** Yeah, there’s really no reason not to and especially because you’re familiar with it. I’ve written a lot of movie musicals and before I even built Highland, I would just stick those lyrics in italics and that’s just sort of how you do it. And so, dialogue blocks but with everything in italics, you can tell it’s being sung. For Highland, we actually have a built in lyrics format, so you start a line with a tilde and it becomes lyrics. And so if you’re using a template that is designed for a screenplay, it does exactly what I described, so it looks like a dialogue, but it’s in italics. If you’re doing something that looks like a stage play, it puts the lyrics over on the left hand margin in all uppercase, just the way you would do it in a real stage play.

**Craig:** Well, there you go.

**John:** There you go.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right, some non-screen writing software questions. Matthew Cain writes in, “Given that Hollywood is notorious for its flexibility in the definition of producer, what exactly does Stuart Friedel do?”

**Craig:** What does he do?

**John:** Can you tell us what Stuart does?

**Craig:** Yes, I can.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Matthew Chilelli, our editor, our fine editor, edits the show, and then Stuart listens for errors like audio proofreading, prooflistening, he prooflistens, he builds the list of links in the show notes, he actually uploads the show to the Internet, and Interweb tubes so that you can all get them, he edits the transcripts. That’s a big one, actually.

**John:** It is a big one. It takes so much more time. I don’t — because he’s doing that down stairs I’m not sort of watching him do it, but that’s hours each week he’s going through the transcripts.

**Craig:** Because the transcripts are being done overseas, I assume.

**John:** They’re being done somewhere. We’re deliberately not asking who’s doing them.

**Craig:** It’s children, isn’t it?

**John:** It’s probably children in Nigeria.

**Craig:** Well, you know, of all the things that children are pressed into, work-wise across the world, you know, transcripts is probably one of the safer gigs. So we get these raw transcripts and then obviously there are a ton of mistakes and so Stuart goes through and edits those very carefully. And I love the fact that we have transcripts. To me it’s terrific. And Stuart also, big thing is, he reads all the emails that we get and we do get a lot of them. Obviously he goes through our Three Page Challenges and picks those, and Stuart coordinates with the outside world. For instance, oh, I didn’t even know that this happened. Craig’s audio from Adam McKay and Charles Randolph’s Big Short discussion.

**John:** Absolutely. So a few weeks ago on the podcast, you had mentioned that you had done this session for Writers Guild Foundation, and we said, “Oh, we should get the audio,” and neither of us did that, and so I just told Stuart, “Please get that audio,” and he got that audio, so we’re going to be putting that up in the premium feed.

**Craig:** Fantastic, that’s great, that was a fun night. So Stuart actually does quite a bit. It’s distressing, actually, how much he does.

**John:** Yes. So even though Stuart is actually away while we’re recording the show, he is in Toronto, I think seeing a basketball tournament, he’s somewhere else, but he will be listening to this audio probably on Monday, and generating the list of links and so therefore the show will go up Tuesday morning as always. So we record the show usually on a Friday, sometimes a Thursday, sometimes a Saturday, but it’s Stuart who does the work on Mondays so that it could actually go up on a Tuesday.

**Craig:** I like that. I like that Stuart’s week begins with our nonsense.

**John:** Yes, indeed. A guy in your Twitter feed asked, “I went for a general meeting on one of the studio lots last week. They had valet parking. Should I tip these valets?”

**Craig:** Yeah. So Paramount has valet, you’re right, Warner Bros, usually I’m there to see Todd so I park like in one of his spots, but if you’re there for a general meeting with a Warner Bros executive, they do have that little area in front of their fancy building where they have valets, and then Sony has a valet, if you’re parking on the lot as opposed to — because every lot has like a structure or like — so Paramount doesn’t have a structure, they have this just massive huge parking lot in front of this crazy big wall that serves as a giant blue screen. But most of the other places have a parking structure, and then if you get fancy enough, you go like to the cool place and there might be a valet.

Here’s the thing, like somebody said, well, why wouldn’t you — why not tip? Why would you even pause? I do tip, but the reason I pause is because I think, am I insulting them? Like do they think like, dude, this isn’t a restaurant, we’re paid well by the studio. But they’ve never been upset about the tip, so I think it’s okay.

**John:** I think it’s okay. The reason why I think I pause about it is because Sony used to have a sign saying like, gratuity is already included, basically saying like don’t tip. It was actually right by the stand. So I was like, oh, okay. So these are Sony employees, they’re not working for somebody else, like you wouldn’t tip the receptionist, but it does feel like in a general sense in Los Angeles, anyone who touches your car, you kind of give them a tip.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I guess I’m pro tip on this, but I don’t soft of, I don’t know. And if somebody from one of the studios wants to reach out and tell us like, no, no, no, you should never tip these people because they are actually paid in a way that’s not supposed to be a tipping —

**Craig:** But even then like, okay, so how much are you paying them, really? What are you paying them, $90,000 a year? I mean, they’re not — my whole thing is, I don’t care what Paramount thinks. If the valet guys aren’t like, dude, you know, then yes, I’m tipping them.

**John:** What has become more challenging is I find I don’t carry as much cash as I used to.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I often will not have small bills and so then I’ll be in situations where like, I don’t have any small bills, so I’m not going to tip the guy a $20.

**Craig:** But my move is always to say, “Hey, do you have blank back?” And then they give you, you know what I mean?

**John:** Yeah. So then you’re actually — it’s a weird negotiation.

**Craig:** I never had a problem with that. The thing that freaks me out is, because I’m like you, like most people, cash economy is dwindling, so I pull in, I get out, and then blah, blah, blah, I come back to get my car, and it’s like, oh how much is the valet? It’s $6. And I look at my wallet and I have exactly $6.

**John:** Oh no.

**Craig:** And then I’m like, this guy is looking at this jerk in his Tesla, who’s not tipping him. And I am always like, I’m so sorry, I only have $6. And they’re like, it’s okay. But it’s not okay, it’s not.

**John:** Okay, I think I may have hit on why it feels so different on a studio lot. All the other situations where you’re valet parking, basically, you are paying for that service already, so the tip is on top of whatever the fee was for valet, and so you’re breaking whatever that unit of money is, and money was already exchanged and so you’re giving a tip on the money exchange. Here, there wasn’t any money exchanged. And so it feels a little bit strange to suddenly be bringing money into this relationship.

**Craig:** Maybe that’s what it is, is that that’s why I feel like sometimes they might turn to me and go, “What am I, a hooker to you?”

**John:** And that’s also a sort of situation I run into with tipping in Uber because you can tip Uber. And I think actually considering how low they’ve been pushing their drivers for their rates, it’s actually a nice idea to tip Uber. But it feels weird to tip Uber because there was no cash being exchanged before that moment. So unlike a taxi where you’re paying the person cash, or like swiping your card and putting a tip on it, there wasn’t an automatic way to do that.

**Craig:** But wait, I thought the whole thing with Uber was the tip’s built in?

**John:** The tip’s not really built it, but the fare is negotiated, but the tip isn’t built in. There’s not an automatic 20%.

**Craig:** That’s not what I was told. I was told that the tip is built in, and you don’t tip them.

**John:** Well, I will tell you that over the last three months, we’ve consistently been tipping our Uber drivers and they’ve been very appreciative.

**Craig:** Of course they’ve been appreciative. What I’m saying is —

**John:** Of course the valet people at the studios have been appreciative.

**Craig:** I know, but come on, the Uber guy, when you’re like suddenly you’re getting jammed for $110 because of their whatever, hold on, I’m looking this up. I feel like, yeah, there’s no need to tip.

**John:** Okay. Should you tip Uber?

**Craig:** I’m looking at the Uber website.

**John:** Well, at the Uber website, they don’t want you to tip.

**Craig:** They don’t want you to tip because it’s priced in.

**John:** Right. Let’s see what else.

**Craig:** Should you tip your Uber driver? This is great. People are now — this podcast is a great podcast.

**John:** By the way, we’re going to pause the podcast for a little while, while we do some reading on screen, so we would welcome your thoughts on whether you should tip at studio valets, and more importantly, whether you should tip Uber and Lyft drivers. I think Lyft actually has an easy automatic way to build in that tip.

**Craig:** That’s different.

**John:** Let us know what you think. You can write to us on Twitter, or actually, this would be a great use for our Facebook feed. So just go to Facebook.com/Scriptnotes, just search for Scriptnotes there. And on this episode, let us know what you think about tipping in these situations.

**Craig:** That sounds fine, but I think I’m right.

**John:** Yeah. All right, let us go down to our next big topic which is this Twitter feed that sort of blew up this week. And when I said it blew up this week, it’s like it didn’t exist before this week. This thing is only like only like three days old, and it almost has more followers than Craig Mazin on Twitter.

**Craig:** Well you know, it’s a credit to a good idea. I mean, what this — I assume that this is a — is this a real name? Ross Putnam?

**John:** It’s a real person who Stuart knows.

**Craig:** Okay, so Ross had this idea to just start posting, tweeting the character descriptions in screenplays he was reading, and specifically character descriptions of female characters. And all he did was just replace every character’s name with the generic name, Jane. And what became clear after about seven or eight of these was just how bad these character introductions were. And, obviously — well, I don’t know how obvious — I think the point was, look, there is a kind of just a rampant clumsy sexism in the way that these, I assume, mostly male screenwriters are calling out their female characters. And that is true. Although beyond it, what was of even greater concern to me was just how crappy the writing was.

And these two things are not unrelated. The isms, and the bad writing, are not unrelated. So, I thought it might be a good idea for the two of us to take this topic on and talk about how to write a good character intro.

**John:** Let’s do it. So we’ll start with a little teaser sampler of some of the tweets that he put out. Basically, these are the character descriptions, and then we’ll look at some other things, both from our Three Page Challenges and from some of the award nominated scripts from this year, and see if we can tell one from the other.

So I’m going to start at the bottom of his feed, his very first tweet. “Jane, 28, athletic but sexy, a natural beauty. Most days, she wears jeans, and she makes them look good.”

**Craig:** [laugh] That’s just terrible. Here’s this one. “A gorgeous woman, Jane, 23, is a little tipsy dancing naked on her big bed, as adorable as she is sexy.” And then he writes, “Bonus points for being the first line.” That’s the first line of the script. I love it.

**John:** “This is Jane, she’s live, leggy, spirited, outgoing, not afraid to speak her mind, with a sense of humor as dry as the Sonoran desert.”

**Craig:** “His wife, Jane, is making dinner and watching CNN on a small TV. She was model-pretty once, but living an actual life has taken its toll.”

**John:** Yeah. Let’s do one last one. “Though drop-dead beautiful, Jane, 40, has the appearance of someone whose confidence has been shaken. She’s a raw sexual force impeded.”

**Craig:** Yeah, well.

**John:** I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** You know what, listen, how many times have you sat through an acting class and done the exercise of exhibiting raw sexual force impeded? It’s a classic. It’s right up there with the you be a mirror of me. That’s crazy. There is a real problem. So it’s a problem, it’s a sexism problem, and it’s also a bad writing problem. So we should talk about — we have our own examples by the way.

**John:** Yeah, let’s go through some of our own examples because I wanted to look at some of the Three Page Challenges that we’ve actually already done on the show, and in some cases we did single out the descriptions, in other cases, we didn’t. But I went through and did the same thing with some of our Three Page Challenge samples. So should we just do a sampling of these?

**Craig:** Yeah, we’ll do a smattering, yeah. So from our Three Page Challenges, we have — and you know what, I’ll do a guy so you can hear what guys sound like and girls sound like. “Jack, 33, skinny and ferret-faced, and Joe, 21, chubby and baby-faced, sit atop two ragged-looking horses staring down a stretch of two-lane black top baking in the relentless Texas sun.”

**John:** All right. “Jane, mid 20s, sits at her desk, meticulously sketching in a notebook. Her doe eyes and cardigans would suggest she’s probably drawing a unicorn.”

**Craig:** [laughs] I kind of like that one actually. I like both of those so far. So far we’re doing pretty well. “Jane, early 20s, darts around her mildly cluttered bedroom, half-dressed in khakis and a white tank top as voice mail messages play on speaker.”

**John:** Hmm, okay. “In the last row of the plane sits Jane, 20s, redhead. Breathless and frantic, she keeps her eyes on the front of a shadowy cabin as she shoves a small digital camera into a Ziploc bag.”

**Craig:** The redhead is maybe —

**John:** Yeah, the redhead is the question.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right, let’s take a look at some of the Oscar-nominated scripts from this year.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And so I won’t tell you who they’re from and I’ve replaced everything with Jane so you won’t know.

**Craig:** Right. “Jane, an intensely smart 15-year-old, curious and strong, but not jaded, walks through the seedy sprawling park.”

**John:** “One of the front doors opens and out slips Jane, early 20s, open faced and pretty without knowing it.”

**Craig:** There’s pretty without knowing it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Jane, the same age as Jenny, but large and simple-minded. Her mouth is usually open indicating her lack of comprehension at more or less any given moment.” That is so good. I love that. [laughs]

**John:** All right, do you know which — those last two are from the same movie. Do you know which movie that was?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Brooklyn.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Yeah. All right, let’s take a look at some men.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So these are also from nominated films. “Jack, late 30s, good looks, so-so haircut, sits at his unholy mess of a desk.”

**Craig:** “Jack, 40s, good looks, quick with a story and a smile, walks into the posh room, finds Sasha and Robbie.”

**John:** “This is Jack, dark, attractive, white teeth, muscular.”

**Craig:** “Jack, a young-looking intern, puts a green tea down in front of Diana.”

**John:** “Jack, 34, a guy with the attitude and libido of a 15-year-old, sits on the end of the couch and stares blankly at the Carol Burnett Show on the TV drinking a Schlitz beer.”

**Craig:** You know, this is perhaps evidence that the problem here may be more of just the way that people approach this task of writing these things than it is a question of isms because the males ones, and these are from nominated screenplays, the male ones are seemingly falling — I mean, how many attractives and good-lookings and, yeah, so it’s quite a bit of attractives and good-lookings there.

**John:** So as I was putting together these things from the nominated scripts, one of the patterns I did notice is like, a lot of times, the characters were not actually described, like they were not physically described at all. And so I didn’t have anything to put in here because the characters just started speaking.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that can be a lovely choice. It doesn’t create the image for your reader, but in some cases you don’t need that because you’re going to give them a strong action to begin with. So I was struck by how many of the scripts basically did none of the standard line of sort of setting a person up.

**Craig:** Well, the standard lines are hard to do well because there are 14 billion screenplays in the world, 99.9 of which are terrible, and they all are chunked with these things, all of this detritus of character descriptions that have become so cliché and so tropey.

**John:** Let’s look at what makes a bad intro.

**Craig:** Yeah, okay. So I’ll start with a couple of the obvious ones, cliché, and what I call a cliché with a twist. So what are clichés for these things? Hot chicks, gorgeous guys, stunning, handsome, beautiful. These things show up all the time. We are aware that generally speaking the men and women in movies are better looking than the rest of us. We know. If their physical beauty is not mission critical to the story itself, then I’m not sure we need to even say it anymore. I don’t think it’s necessary.

**John:** Yeah. There could be situations where the beauty actually is important. And if you didn’t understand that this character was beautiful, you might not understand what was going on in the scene or sort of how — why characters were acting to that character in that way. So it’s not a blanket statement that you should never describe a person as being attractive, but there has to be a really good reason for why you’re saying that.

**Craig:** Precisely. And always remember, you have the option of revealing something about that character through another character’s actions and reactions and responses. So you don’t have to — any time you’re pelting somebody in the face with this fourth wall breaking comment, which we don’t do anywhere else in the screenplay, really, you’re robbing yourself of a chance for the reader to discover this on their own through the behaviors of other characters, which is a more interesting way of getting it across, I think.

The cliché with a twist which we’ve seen even in the nominated thing is hot but doesn’t know it, handsome without trying, beautiful if only she’d smile, menacing but with gentle eyes. You see this more than anything. The fake pretense of the false contradiction. I don’t know how else to put it.

**John:** Yeah, men are always ruggedly handsome.

**Craig:** Ruggedly handsome, but —

**John:** Yes, yes.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s the thing. Women are always, yeah, just gorgeous and sexy, but…

**John:** Or, so many times, I have seen the “was once was hot, but now is a mom.”

**Craig:** Like first of all, what the F? Like, because moms are so gross?

**John:** Moms are gross.

**Craig:** Like I’m married to one, okay? I mean, what is that? And I know part of it we’re going to go, well, it’s 24 year old dudes writing about what they know and what they like, and moms are gross to them and everything, but then, don’t write mom characters if you think moms are gross. You haven’t grown up enough. You’re not allowed to write screenplays. Beat it.

I mean, there are some things you can’t — like this is one of those areas where I’m not going to say check your privilege. Check your biases, just check them. Like really think about what you’re doing here because these characters, you’re supposed to be caring for them, you’re supposed to know them, they’re supposed to be real to you.

You don’t walk up to your mom’s friend and go, “You know, you’re not hot anymore, but you once were, I bet.” You would never do. It’s a horrible thing to say, and it’s crazy, and it’s reductive, and it’s probably not even accurate.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** She’s either still hot, or never was.

**John:** So if you’re describing the character in that situation, there could be a very good reason for like, you know, if she’s crying her mascara off, well, that’s telling you about the scene that she’s in, that’s great, but as a general blanket statement about who a person is as she likes walks into an office, that’s not going to be your good friend there.

**Craig:** Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, and again, that’s the difference between this news bulletin of this character’s blah, blah, blah, and the screenplay unfolding through action. So then we touched on this a little bit, the ism crimes. So sexism, racism, ageism. Even if you take the moral component out entirely, the problem with those kinds of introductions, and we see quite a bit of them in Ross’ feed, is that they’re boring. They’re super-duper boring. The first rule of screenwriting is don’t be boring. If you write something like she’s sicko-hot with like a smoking bod and blah, blah, blah, I’m bored to tears. Yeah, you’re a sexist, that’s bad. But worse, you’re boring.

**John:** Don’t be boring.

**Craig:** Don’t be boring.

**John:** Alright, let’s take that, what makes a good intro. What are the things you look for in a character introduction that says, ah-ha, this is going to be a character that I’m eager to follow, or I get this person. What helps?

**Craig:** Well, interestingly, you brought up an important point. Sometimes, almost nothing. Sometimes, you want to let people discover this person on their own, which is a wonderful way of doing it. I look back through a lot of my scripts, and look back and I found an interesting pattern emerge. And I think I do an okay job of these things or at least I think better than some of the things I read on Ross’ feed.

So here’s what I’ve noticed, there are physical essentials that I will sometimes include if they are important for context for the reader. And those include gender, age, race, height, and body type. Body type very rarely, usually and height very rarely. It’s usually gender, age, and then I try and imply race through choice of names, but occasionally, I will call it out. Sometimes I don’t want to specify, sometimes I want it to be open.

But the thing that I have found and I did not realize this until I went back and did this. Over and over and over, and I see it in a lot of the scripts that we cite here from the nominations as well, are wardrobe, hair, and makeup. They talk about wardrobe, hair, and makeup in these character introductions, constantly. And these are three things that I think a lot of screenwriters never think about at all. So wardrobe, hair, and makeup, seems maybe superficial, but they are three key production departments. Some of your best professionals on your movie, and certainly some of your most important professionals on your movie, are going to be the people in charge of wardrobe, hair, and makeup. Costuming is critical. It tells you so much about somebody, what they’re wearing.

Not every character wears definitive clothing, but a lot of them do. It’s a great tool for you to visually get across something about somebody right away.

**John:** So what I think you’re calling out for is not to be specific about every hairstyle and every wardrobe choice, but to give a sense of who that person is so you can tee off those other departments so they can do their best possible job. And when there is a need to be very specific about something, be specific about it. If you’re going to make a joke about a guy’s mustache, give him a mustache when we first see him so we’re not visualizing the person without a mustache and suddenly we have to like re-contextualize him so that this mustache joke works.

**Craig:** Exactly. And I think the idea is to call out things that are noticeable, right? If I turn on a movie and I see somebody walking down the street and they’re wearing khakis and an Oxford, and a blazer, there’s really nothing about it. I may say, you know, “Oh, they’re preppy,” but I don’t really know. But if there’s something specific, and specifics are good things, call them out. Hair, I’m not necessarily all about saying what color the hair is, or how long the hair is, but hair is, and unfortunately for you and me, hair is one of the things on the human body that indicates current physical status better than anything else.

Bedraggled, tussled, muscled, sweaty, coifed, gelled, hair is such a quick imparter of information. And so I’m always thinking about hair. And I should mention that, and a lot of people don’t know this if they haven’t gone through production. When you make a movie, the very first thing that is shot on every major motion picture is a wardrobe, hair, and makeup test. And there’s good reason for that.

Everybody else, everybody else involved in the making of the movie, is obsessed with that these people are going to look like because that is going to be in the audience’s faces for the entire run of the movie.

**John:** And in the trailers. So, people are going to make up their mind about whether to see this movie based on the trailer and based on the hairstyle that you have put that actor in.

**Craig:** And the wardrobe, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So sometimes I’m always looking for these areas where screenwriters begin to segregate themselves through lack of choice, and this is one of those areas. We should be completely on top of this and thinking about this all the time. Wardrobe, hair, and makeup. Makeup is not, “Okay, well, she has eye shadow and mascara.” No, makeup is are they tan, are they dirty, do they have a scar, are they aged, weathered, is there a bruise, all that stuff, that great, great stuff.

These things are as important to movies as sound. And so if you’re thinking about how to approach introducing a character without falling down the pit of clichéd or clichéd with a twist, just stop and think about wardrobe, hair, and makeup for men and women.

**John:** So right now, I fear that a lot of aspiring screenwriter are going, “Oh, no, I have to go back through my script and describe all their hair and makeup and wardrobe.”

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**John:** And that’s not at all what we’re saying.

**Craig:** It is not.

**John:** But I think what Craig is calling for is, in your head, you need to be thinking about those things and visualizing those things. And if there are specific details that are going to help inform that character, be specific about those details so that they can be there so they can actually help ground this character in the reality of your situation.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it may also give you ideas for scenes or for business within scenes that are really appropriate. So two people having a conversation can sort of happen anywhere, but two people having a conversation while they’re trying to fix their hair might be appropriate for your movie. There might be a reason why you’re going to be able to use some of the physical aspects of your character to really help sell a scene and therefore help sell your movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m going to read you a few of these character intros from the nominated screenplays and now process it through what I’ve just talked about with wardrobe, hair, and makeup.

“Angela’s mother, Jane, 47, sits in the second row of the packed sanctuary, her petite yet chunky frame loaded with enough costume jewelry to furnish a mall kiosk.” Wardrobe. Wardrobe.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Then let’s do some guys. “Here is Jack, 50 but looks 70, unwashed, hair stringy, granular thickness everywhere, forehead barnacled with scars, fingers mangled in a permanent curl as if gripping a ball.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Hair and makeup.

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** Can you tell me which movie that last description was from?

**Craig:** Why do you going to do this to me? [laughs] No.

**John:** That’s Concussion by Peter Landesman.

**Craig:** Oh, I didn’t see that one.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s why.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** That makes sense.

**John:** You missed it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But it’s specific. And that was actually an important specificity for the nature of that movie because what that guy looks like is incredibly important for your ability to understand what is happening to these football players and what’s up next.

**Craig:** Yeah. And so John’s admonition here is well taken to heart. You don’t want to now go bananas about this, right? But when you’re talking, I’m just telling you what I care about as a reader. And particularly, what I think people that direct movies and produce movies care about as readers. I don’t care how super sexy hot she is. If that comes out of a relationship or the actions of the movie, then that is sexuality expressing itself the way it does in the world. And that’s interesting to me.

But when you’re giving me the news bulletin, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to ask yourself, “Do I need to say anything? And if I do, what’s the hair like? What’s the clothes like? What’s the makeup like?”

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** It tells more than you think.

**John:** I think you’re right.

All right, let’s wrap that up and quickly get to our final question of the day which came from Samuel Davis who writes, “I’m currently halfway through my first screenplay. I’ve been marching along just fine until this other idea for a completely different script started creeping in. So I gave it a quick outline. I’m very excited about that new one. So should I write both at the same time? I’ve heard it is good to write two projects at once. I guess my question is, is this normal to have multiple ideas flying and stowing away for later? I feel like I’m cheating on my serious girlfriend script with this hot new idea script.”

**Craig:** Because you are. [laughs]

**John:** You are. You totally are, you bad boy.

**Craig:** That’s what you’re doing, yeah. You’re like, “Oh, who’s this?”

**John:** All right, so first off, let us say that every writer I’ve ever met has had this situation where the thing you’re writing is fine, but this new idea is so much better. And mostly that new idea you’ll find is better because you’re not stuck in the middle of it. And it’s tempting because you see all the problems with the current script you’re writing and the new idea has no problems because you haven’t started writing it yet.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** That is almost always the case.

**Craig:** This is basically why marriages end, too. [laughs] I think you’re basically describing infidelity of all kinds.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s absolutely true. The other thing that happens to me, I don’t know if this happens with you John, but right now I’m on page 94, so I’m steaming towards the conclusion here. And inevitably a certain kind of depression starts to seep in. And I don’t know if it’s the result of just the end of the long journey, but sometimes I think it’s because all of the world of open possibilities is narrowing down until it disappears. Because when you type ‘The End,’ that is the thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And when you consider this new sexy idea, Sam, well, there’s the world of possibilities there. Anything can happen instead of all the things that are supposed to happen in this one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But you got to go through and finish, man.

**John:** So let’s address this whole writing two things at once. Should you write two things at once? No. You should not write two things at once. Whoever told you that is telling you something wrong.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** You cannot put two things first. It’s actually impossible to put two things first. So right now, I’m writing something. I am in first position on this thing. It is most of my brain and time because that is the main thing I’m writing. But there are some things I have to go back and do some quick fixes on. And that is inevitably the life of a working writer is like there’s times where like I’m going to spend two hours so I can fix this thing that is about to shoot or there’s something else coming up that I’m going to need to deal with. But I’m not trying to write two first drafts at the same time because if you try to do that, you will make yourself miserable. And both drafts will be worse for it.

**Craig:** I can’t even describe what that would be like because I haven’t even considered trying to do it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It just sounds like madness. Like you, there are times when I have to put what I’m working on aside to go do something else. Like last week, I had to go and tweak a little bit of voiceover for The Huntsman. So, you know, I thought, “All right, this is no big deal. I’ll do this little voiceover tweak. It’ll take me an hour. Then I’ll go to the office and go back to my script.” Nope, that day was done because that was it. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was like gears had shifted, they weren’t shifting back and that’s that. And so I try my best to really just work on one thing at a time.

**John:** Yeah. And it’s a lovely luxury when you can just work on one thing at a time. And so if you’re at the beginning of your career and you can really just focus in on that one thing, enjoy that. Like it be all consuming while you’re writing it. And then you can get to this other idea afterwards.

Now, there are times when that new idea is genuinely a better idea, so if you’re not very far into that first project, I would say if you’re a person who feels comfortable describing the things you’re working on, tell both ideas to a few friends, try not to color them and make them think one is better and just like ask your friends which one was more appealing to you.

Also, back on Episode 100, I gave my sort of standard advice. If you’re deciding between two projects, write the one that has the better ending because that’s going to be just the better movie overall. It’s so easy to think of good ideas for how things start, it’s very difficult to think of great ideas for how things end. So write the one with the good ending because you will actually finish that one and it’s more likely to be a good script.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Cool. Let’s do some One Cool Things. Craig, oh, I’m so excited. I see this on the document here. I don’t know what it is. But it sounds miraculous.

**Craig:** [laughs] It is. It is. So this actually comes via my son who came home from school and his science teacher had run this little experiment with the kids in his class and it involved this thing called the miracle berry. So the miracle berry is an actual berry. I don’t know its real name. It’s native to West Africa. And they’ve known about it for decades now. It contains a compound that when they isolated it, they called it miraculin because they can do stupid things like that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Here’s what miraculin does. So they take miraculin out and they mix it with little potato starch, turn it into a little tablet. You stick the tablet on your tongue, you let it dissolve, it takes about a minute. It doesn’t in and of itself taste like anything.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Here’s what it does. It appears to bind to the taste receptors in your tongue for about an hour and it essentially converts sour and bitter flavors to sweet.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** So what happens is anything that you eat is now suddenly sweet. Sweet things are unbearably sweet. So my daughter and I just did an experiment the other day. It’s amazing. So for instance, tomatoes taste like grapes, but they also taste like tomatoes, but they taste like grapes. It’s freaking amazing. The other thing that it worked great on were berries. Because, you know, sometimes berries can be like tart, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so people do frequently sugar them. It’s like, you know, like when you get that one magical strawberry that’s perfectly sweet, that’s the way they all taste. All of them, every last one of them, even like the weird hard green one when you use this miracle berry thing, it’s kind of amazing. And then you just go around your kitchen trying different things. Like okay, let me try an onion. Oh my god, it tastes like an apple. Let me try — like we have an orange tree in our yard that makes the sourest oranges on the planet.

**John:** Yeah, I know what that is. Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh my god, they were the best tasting oranges ever. In fact, they even warn you. They’re like, look, if you take lemon juice and drink it, it will taste like lemonade but don’t do that because you’ll burn your insides. I loved it. I just thought it was the most fun. You can buy it on Amazon. It’s expensive. Like a pack of these things is like $15 or $20 and maybe get like eight of them. But, you know, it’s worth it just for funsies once. I wouldn’t use it every day, but I thought it was great.

**John:** It does sort of feel like an Instagram filter for food. It’s just like, you know.

**Craig:** Yeah. Basically, yeah.

**John:** Like I want my flavors to be just like a little bit more idealized.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s like airbrushing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s flavor brushing.

**John:** Yeah, indeed. My One Cool Thing is Christians Against Dinosaurs. And so it is a website. Click through, Craig, now. Because I’ll be fascinated to hear what you think about it. It is a site that is describing a Christian point of view against the belief and study in dinosaurs. And I find it fascinating, but I also genuinely don’t know.

**Craig:** It is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. [laughs]

**John:** So here’s the thing. It’s like it could be completely real or could be a really brilliant satire parody. And what I find so fascinating is the tension between those two things, it could be both sort of simultaneously. I just found it wonderful and maddening at the same time.

**Craig:** It’s got to be a parody because they’re linking to a video called “Heavy Metal and Dinosaurs – what’s the connection?”

**John:** Yeah. But look through the other stuff. It’s done so remarkably deadpan that I just found it —

**Craig:** Yeah, no, it’s definitely a parody. I’m looking at their sign, “Stegosaurus, not in my name.” Yeah, no, that’s a parody. But it’s really funny. This is the problem, what are they called, Poe’s Law, when you can’t tell the difference between extreme position and its own parody? Teaching others to deny the dinosaur lie and accept the Lord. That is great. [laughs]

**John:** So it’s really well done. It’s fascinating, if you click through on YouTube and to any of the videos and stuff, you’ll see all of these downloads saying like you’re stupid, you’re an idiot, like this is real. And people believe it and I sort of half believe it. Here’s the thing is: I think that there are people who are liking this who generally do believe it’s real. My suspicion is that the Christians Against Dinosaur site is a parody. And yet, it’s done so perfectly that a person who believes in sort of the biblical story of creation and that dinosaurs don’t fit into that might genuinely ascribe to a lot of these beliefs so I just found it great. And so I invite people to click through and weigh in with your own opinions on the site.

All right. And that’s our show for this week. So as always, our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli. It is produced by Stuart Friedel who does all the things that Craig described in the podcast above about his difficult job, so thank you Stuart. If you have a question for us like the ones we answered, you can write into ask@johnaugust.com. If you have short things for me or for Craig, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin on Twitter. The longer things would also be great on the Facebook page. We promise we’ll actually check the Facebook page. So if you have opinions on tipping, let us know. Just leave us your opinions on the Facebook page for that.

Our outro this week comes from Adam Lastname. That’s how it shows up in the feed. But Adam wrote three brilliant things, so we’re going to be hearing three brilliant things from Adam Lastname over the weeks to come. If you have an outro you’d like to have us play on the show, write to ask@johnaugust.com and provide us a link and we will gladly listen to it. So that is our show. Craig, thank you so much. Have a great week.

**Craig:** Thanks, John. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Katering Show](http://thekateringshow.com/) is fantastic
* [Notes for last week’s release of Movie Magic Screenwriter 6.2.1](http://support.screenplay.com/filestore/mmsw6/docs/MMSW_6214_ReadMe.pdf?utm_source=Email_marketing&utm_campaign=Wednesday_February_10_2016&cmp=1&utm_medium=HTMLEmail)
* Ross Putman’s [@femscriptintros Twitter feed](https://twitter.com/femscriptintros)
* [mberry Miracle Fruit Tablets](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001LXYA5Q/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Christians Against Dinosaurs](http://www.christiansagainstdinosaurs.com/)
* [Poe’s Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law) on Wikipedia
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Adam Lastname ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))