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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/how-writing-credits-work).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 193 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, you and I both this week were working on rewrites. How did yours turn out?

**Craig:** So far so good. I made it to the end. And —

**John:** That’s always a good place to end?

**Craig:** Well, but, you know, I’m fond of saying that “The End” are the two biggest lies that we can tell ourselves as screenwriters. So, all I’ve really done is reach the end. So, now, Lindsay Doran has the whole draft. I will be spending next week with her going through everything. And then off it goes to Scott Frank and to Working Title and to Universal. So, you know, high hopes. High hopes. How about you?

**John:** Yeah, I was doing the paper edit this week. And so, I like to print out the script and sort of go through it page by page, really read it, you know, do all of that sort of noticing of typos and mistakes, and then things I could cut, things I could change. And then as I’m going through it, and then figuring out like these are the new scenes, this is what’s swapping out there. I will sort of write on the left-hand page the new stuff that goes in there. So I’m just now typing in those changes. But I feel good about it.

**Craig:** Well, listen, man. I would like [laughs] for our movies to be out at the same time. They’re both family movies, I believe.

**John:** Oh, the same weekend.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re both family movies. So I think we should go head to head. It’ll be the ultimate Three Page Challenge. It would be a two-hour challenge.

**John:** That would be fantastic. It would be a two-hour challenge. Speaking of hours, did you buy yourself an Apple Watch this morning? We’re recording this on Friday. Did you buy an Apple Watch?

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs] So I don’t —

**John:** Me too. I wasn’t planning to, but I did.

**Craig:** No, I was actually planning on not doing it. So I was planning on buying the Apple Watch. Then I checked some reviews and things. And The New York Times was very favorable. There was a pretty good in-depth review that someone else wrote that didn’t seem quite as favorable. And then I remembered that I don’t care about reviews. So then I just thought, “Oh, you know what, I guess maybe I’ll wait. I’ll wait, I’ll check it out. I’ll hear from my friends.” And then, suddenly, there I was at midnight tapping away like a monkey hitting a bar that —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Spits out cocaine-wrapped bacon. It should be bacon-wrapped cocaine.

**John:** Yeah, I guess so. Because it’s really hard — you could dust bacon with cocaine.

**Craig:** Oh, I like that.

**John:** But you can’t wrap it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m hitting the bar like a monkey —

**John:** Or like a tempura sort of thing. Like a cocaine in a tempura batter.

**Craig:** Yeah, like cocaine battered bacon. So there I am. And so, I did it. Now, which version did you get?

**John:** I got the cheapest one I could get or almost the cheapest. I got the larger size. I didn’t get the little teeny tiny one. But I got the larger one with the sport band, space gray throughout. So it was like $399.

**Craig:** Is that the Watch Sport? Is that that version or —

**John:** I think it’s Watch Sport, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. I went for a standard watch. So not the —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, the [laughs] absurd collector’s item. It just —

**John:** You went for steel rather than aluminum.

**Craig:** There you go. So I went for the standard watch, the larger size with the Milanese Loop.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, that should be a nice watch.

**Craig:** We’ll find out.

**John:** So mine is just to see what the watch is like. I haven’t worn a watch in 20 years, but this might be a watch I’ll wear. We’ll see.

**Craig:** I know. That’s the thing. I haven’t worn a watch either in 20 years. But, you know, I remember when I put my wedding ring on, I was like, “What the — what is this? I don’t wear jewelry. What am I, a gypsy? Now I’m wearing jewelry?” And —

**John:** And now it’s bizarre not to have my wedding ring on.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** I was the same way.

**Craig:** It’s just, it fits, right? So it’s just there and you feel it all the time. And I know that the watch will be that way, too. The real question is, from the summaries that I was reading, the great blessing and curse of the Apple Watch is that it uses this Taptic Engine to notify you when things are happening. So, little taps on your wrists of different kinds. Like here’s a tap for email, here’s a tap for text, here’s a tap… — well, sometimes, you’re just getting a lot of texts and you don’t want to and it’s annoying. So, it’s about adjusting how you get notifications. I don’t want my phone tapping me on the wrist every time some Facebook thing happens or something, you know, so.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’ll be a lot of customization.

**John:** A lot to learn.

**Craig:** Yeah, but it’s fun. And you and I are pretty hardcore dorks. So, it’ll be exciting.

**John:** Absolutely. One day, you’ll be able to like sit down in your fancy car and the car will recognize you that you’re in the car and will just start.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. I mean, it kind of already does that.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Yeah, my car does that [laughs] because —

**John:** Well, I mean, you have to have the key fob in your pocket to do that, correct?

**Craig:** Yes, I do have to have the key fob in my pocket.

**John:** And soon, it’ll be just your watch.

**Craig:** Yeah. But the nice thing about the Tesla is you don’t have to actually turn the car on. There’s no on button. You sit, you close the door, you put it in gear. You’re off. And there’s no gears, actually. You put it in mode.

**John:** Mode.

**Craig:** Mode.

**John:** All right, this podcast, this episode is in the education mode. Because this podcast, we’re going to be talking about screen credits. We’re going to be talking about how writing credits work. So this is going to be one of those really long in-depth episodes. I don’t really want to say long. I don’t know if it’s necessarily going to be long, but it’s certainly going to be in-depth. We talked about screen credits way back in episode 20. That was back when we had like five people listening to the show.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s way back in the archives. And I’m sure everything we said in there was accurate. But my goal with this episode, and I think together we can do this, is that I want to have so much knowledge imparted that if you listen to this whole episode, you will understand more about screen credits than 90% of working screenwriters.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** Do you think we can do that?

**Craig:** I know we can do that. We are going to basically deliver the definitive walkthrough of credits, which I hope is not only listened to by members of the Writers Guild or prospective members of the Writers Guild, but also people who write about credits. Because, frankly, they often get a ton of stuff wrong.

So, we can really walk you through the whole shebang here, which is complicated but interesting in its own way so that whether you’re a fan of movies, or you’re a writer, or you write about movies, you will understand exactly what this credit arbitration thing is. How it actually works from top to bottom. You will be an expert when we’re done with you.

**John:** I hope so. And it was reports in the news this last week that sort of prompted this discussion. Because this last week in Deadline Hollywood Daily, there were articles about the arbitration process over the new Jurassic Park, Jurassic World is the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the final decision came down. And the final credits for Jurassic World when it opens in theaters will read Screenplay by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver and, A-N-D, Colin Trevorrow & Derek Connolly. Story by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver, based on characters created by Michael Crichton.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** At the end of this episode, we will understand what that means and sort of how they got to this place. We will also understand why writers are sometimes frustrated and confused, and sort of unhappy about the writing credit determination process.

This is what Trevorrow said about this whole process. “I have spoken with Rick and Amanda several times over the past few days,” Trevorrow told Deadline. “Though we may not agree on specifics of the ruling, we share a disdain for the arbitration process and the ugliness that it often breeds. Our conversations ended in a spirit I’d like to think the Guild would support — that a credit should be equally shared. Jurassic World is a special film, and I’d rather acknowledge these writers as co-designers of this adventure than bitter enemies who must be avoided at parties. That kind of animosity isn’t in the spirit of our craft, or our organization. Though I remain a proud member of the WGA, I encourage my fellow members to work together to find alternate ways to evaluate our contributions.”

So that is Colin Trevorrow, one of the writers and the director of Jurassic World talking about it. And I think by the end of our podcast, we’ll have a better understanding of what he was going into and sort of what the reality is of getting your name up on that screen really involves.

**Craig:** Well, let’s begin by taking a close look at something he said here which isn’t quite specific enough. And in doing so, I’m going to kick a little bit of a hornet’s nest. Because the WGA or the Guild does not determine credits the way people —

**John:** What?

**Craig:** Use those, huh? In fact, the WGA West or WGA East determines credits. So we have two unions, West and East. Now, a lot of people will immediately say why? And the answer is, don’t know, it was that way back in the ’40s when long distance was, you know, super expensive. It makes no sense now. That’s a whole other episode.

**John:** Wouldn’t the whole history, though, be that television was largely based out of New York and features were largely based out of Los Angeles and overtime that sort of changed. But that was — originally, they were very different beasts. Is that accurate in any sort of historical context?

**Craig:** No, kind of not really.

**John:** Yeah, I’m probably wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean a little bit, but no. I mean, it doesn’t matter. The truth is, it’s one of those things we live with now and in an age where we’re constantly revising the world around us to be better this has resisted revision for political reasons essentially. But it is important to understand here that in this case, the credit determination process was messy, from what I can see. It did contain a very strange inaccuracy. There was a second review of it. And it was conducted by the Writers Guild East.

Now, let’s talk about who determines credits and why it matters. So, the Writers Guild West or the Writers Guild East determines credits. Here’s the way the rules work. If a majority of participating writers on a project are West members, the West handles it. If a majority of the members on a project are East members, the East handles it. If there’s exactly the same number, tie goes to the West. The West handles it.

Well, aren’t the two unions governed by the same collective bargaining agreement? And aren’t they governed by the same Screen Credits Manual and guidelines? Absolutely. So what’s the big difference? Well, the Writers Guild West has well over 7,000 members. And more importantly, it has probably 50 or 60 attorneys working at the Guild. The credits department of The Writers Guild West handles the vast majority of arbitrations and most of the principals in that department, principal staff members, are attorneys. And they are very, very good at what they do.

Now, I’m not a Writers Guild East member, but I can tell you this. I believe, last I heard, a few years ago, they had one lawyer on their staff. Their staff is something like 20 to 30 people. They really don’t like when I say things like this. They get very, very fussy about it. And generally speaking, this is my opinion, if I could choose which guild would be managing my credit arbitration, I would really, really want the West to do it.

In this case, a very strange decision came down initially where there wasn’t a story credit. There almost had to be a story credit. It was by the rules. I couldn’t begin to explain what they did or how it worked out that way.

But important for you guys to know out there, the West handles most credit arbitrations, but there are cases where the East does. So, be aware of that. In this case, I don’t know who the participating writers were beyond the credited writers, but I believe Colin is an East Coast guy. I don’t know Rick and Amanda.

**John:** I believe Derek is as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. So that’s an East Coast team. If there were no other participating writers and except for Rick and Amanda, then I presume they must be East Coast because this was an East jurisdiction. So, that’s right off the bat. There’s a funky little thing.

**John:** Yes. So let’s talk about why determining credit matters and sort of why we have this system at all. So if we didn’t have the Writers Guild West or the Writers Guild East determining credits, how would we figure out who got screenplay credit?

**Craig:** Well, we don’t have to ask. We know, because in our inception as a union, we did not have credit protection. And so credits were determined by the companies. And in fact, that system still exists today for feature films that are not covered by the Writers Guild, most notably animated films. So when you go to see a Pixar movie, there are credits up there for writing. And those credits are at the sole determination of Pixar. And if they think you deserve it, you get it. And if they don’t, you don’t. If they love you, probably that would be good. If they do not love you, probably that would be bad.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Similarly, if you have an arrangement in your contract where you are set to receive a bonus should you get screen credit, it would obviously be in the company’s interest to not give you screen credit if it would cost them a lot of money. And, of course, there are issues of abuse where they could theoretically put, particularly in the case of writer-directors and writer-producers who just say, “Look, I want this credit for myself and we’re all chummy here. You know, just give it to me.” So that’s the major thing we’re avoiding.

And then there’s also the secondary thing that’s actually written into our collective bargaining agreement that says that the WGA is in the business of protecting the dignity of the credit. We want our credit to mean something. It is a special credit. It is not like other credits on a movie, other crew credits. It is both a credit that says I wrote this movie and it’s a credit that indicates proper authorship of a movie. Even though we don’t have copyright, there’s an implication of authorship there. So our credits mean something and we want to protect their dignity.

**John:** Absolutely. So, while we’ve often talked about on the show how filmmaking is an incredibly collaborative process. So, at every level, everyone involved in the film is helping to make that film possible. People who are writing the film, people who are directing the film have an interest in defining some authorship, defining that their work is the principal creative driving force behind this film existing.

And it’s one of the reasons why, you know, you might see 15 different companies listed in the visual effects in a very visual effects intensive movie. But you should hopefully only see one writing credit that reflects who the individual or the team that was principally responsible for this movie. Even if more than one writer wrote it, there’s been a determination of who is most responsible for this film. And that is the process that goes through arbitration.

**Craig:** That’s right. And our credit isn’t manipulable the way that a lot of crew credits are where you could say, “Well, here’s 100 people that worked on visual effects. But these people are artists, these people are supervisors, these people are producers. The person is the, you know, the ultimate, the visual effects master.” Writing is writing. And so we don’t have junior writers, senior writers or stuff like that. We just have writers. Did you author this movie or not?

Directors are shielded from this to almost exclusive extent because the job of directing a film is singular. We don’t direct. I mean, by the way, it used to be that they would have three or four directors on movies, but we’re talking about back to the ’20s and ’30s. In modern filmmaking, one director makes the film. You cannot successfully replace that director once, twice, three, or four times on any regular basis.

So you will not really, I mean, there are occasional times where directors are replaced. And there are director credit arbitrations. They’re exceedingly rare. But because of the nature of what we do comes before production, it’s obviously quite common.

**John:** So the crucial sort of third piece of that creative triumvirate is the producer. And producer credits have, as we talked about on the show before, proliferated. And so one of the things you will start to see increasingly in films these days is a credit after the person’s name saying PGA, Producers Guild of America.

And the Producers Guild attempted to do something like what the Writers Guild already had for writers’ credits. It’s basically to identify who are the producers who were principally involved with the actual creation of the film. And so that if there are 12 producers listed, the ones who have that PGA credit are the true principal producers behind it. And that same sense of authorship. They are the ones who deserve some creative ownership, some creative recognition for what they did for the film.

**Craig:** Right. They recognize that if you have 14 people that say producer, then the credit producer means absolutely nothing. The PGA is not an actual guild. It’s not a labor union. It’s a club. But they do a good job of their primary goal, which is protecting the dignity of that credit.

So the PGA comes up with their own rules as they wish. We can’t do that. Because we are a labor union, the Writers Guild derives all of its authority and jurisdiction from its collective bargaining agreement with the companies. And so while most writers in the union will never look beyond our Screen Credits Manual, which is the manual the union publishes for its writers and arbiters to list all the guidelines. In fact, all that stuff derives from our collective bargaining agreement. It’s in an area called Theatrical Schedule A, which sounds sexy. It is. It’s —

**John:** It’s such good reading.

**Craig:** 50 Shades of Schedule A.

**John:** I just love it.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s pretty hot. So if you’re ever feeling randy.

**John:** Well, the fact that it comes from this collective bargaining agreement would explain why it actually feels so lawyerly when you go through it. So most writers will encounter these restrictions, these regulations, these, you know, they’re not even guidelines. They really are rules in something that’s called the Screen Credits Manual.

And that is when you are seeking credit on a film or if you are involved in arbitration either as an arbiter or someone seeking credit, you get the Screen Credits Manual. And it really lays out in very clear language exactly what the requirements are for different kinds of credits.

This is important for lots of reasons because this is how we’re going to determine the credit. And if we didn’t use those rules properly, writers would be up in arms. And writers would be not just disappointed, the way that Colin Trevorrow was disappointed, but might sue or might take actions that would potentially break the whole system.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s unfortunate because there are things in the Credits Manual that are clear. There are other things that are as clear as mud. And it is. It all derives back to its origin as a legal document and a legal document that is the product of negotiation with companies and lawyers on both sides.

So a lot of times, writers will look at this stuff and think, “My guild is ridiculous. They’ve printed this impossible to understand booklet. And they’re so legalistic and they’re treating me like, you know, I’m in court, and they’re the judge. And it’s very off-putting and it’s very disconnecting.” But it’s not the Guild’s fault. They have no choice.

This was the devil’s bargain. We get to do final jurisdiction over credits but we get to do it within the framework of a large document drawn up by a lot of lawyers.

**John:** If it were nicer and squishier, it wouldn’t hold up in court.

**Craig:** It would not.

**John:** And then we would be in a real bad situation.

**Craig:** It would not hold up in court. And ,in fact, a number of writers have sued the Writers Guild because they felt that they were unhappy with the outcome of going through the credits process for one reason or another. And in the Writer Guild history — Writers Guild’s history — they have never lost. They have never lost one of these credit cases.

And they have never lost in no small part because the credit staff at the Writers Guild West, at the very least, is full of lawyers who specialize in this area of law. WGA credits [laughs], that’s their area. And they follow those rules. It can, at times, be distressing when your own guild seems to be applying rules to you with no sense of mercy or fairness or rationality. But that is the job they’re tasked with, unfortunately.

**John:** So before we get into the process of determining the credits, let’s make it clear what we’re talking about and what we’re not talking about. So you and I both have a lot of experience with screen credits for feature films. And that’s mostly what you and I have done. I’ve done some TV, we’ve done some other things, I’ve served as an arbiter in some TV situations.

But mostly what we’re talking about here is theatrical films. And that’s really our sort of bread and butter. That’s where we have the most experience with. And you’ve also served on the screen credits subcommittee for the WGA. You’ve had like a lot more intense first-person experience with how these rules are made, is that right?

**Craig:** That’s right. I am the co-chair. There are three of us along with — I’m the co-chair along with Robert King who currently is a television guy because he and his wife, Michelle, have created and run The Good Wife. But prior to that, he was a feature guy.

And it’s a joint committee for West and East. So our East co-chair is Stephen Schiff who wrote a number of fine films as well, a sequel to Wall Street being one of them, Deep End of the Ocean I think. Maybe the other —

**John:** Yeah, that sounds right.

**Craig:** Great guy. Awesome guy. Very, very smart. So we have this joint committee. And over the years we have been tasked to take a look at our rules, consider revisions, put those revisions to the membership to vote on. And happily, they have approved all of our proposals. And I think we have done a very good job of fixing some things that needed fixing.

I also, because of the fact that I serve on that committee, I get calls all the time. People call me all the time with their problems, complaints, questions and suggestions.

**John:** Yeah. I will confirm that behind the scenes Craig is a go-to person for questions about is this how things are supposed to work. And if things are working improperly, Craig is the person who can help steer people towards better answers.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** The other thing I want to make clear that we’re not talking about is we’re not talking about copyright. So if you think back to the Gravity lawsuit, if you think back to other copyright claims, this is not copyright. This is… — copyright on feature films, the kinds of things we’re talking about, it’s the people who made the movie are going to own copyright. They are the people who are considered the authors of the film for copyright purposes.

So this is determining whose name shows up as written by or screenplay by or story by. We’ll get into specifically what those mean. It’s important for those writers because sometimes it is a form of compensation. It can influence what they are paid for the day the movie comes out, but it’s also a huge impact on what the residuals will be down the road.

So even though this is not copyright, it’s incredibly important, both creatively and professionally but also financially.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’re right. So we work on a work-for-hire basis. The screen credit is the as if version of your name on your book. And residuals are the as if version of getting royalties on your book. So we don’t have the legal copyright. But that’s so much of what credits are about are essentially compensating us for that and allowing us to have attribution which would be one of the moral rights that go along with copyright.

**John:** Great. Let’s walk our way through the process. And so let’s imagine a theoretical film that has gone into production, it is finishing production, maybe they’ve wrapped, or maybe they’re about to wrap. Let’s talk through the process and what the stages are of figuring out who should get credit on a given movie.

So Craig, start us out. What’s the first thing that’s going to happen?

**Craig:** Well, interestingly enough, the first thing that happens is the studio says, “This is what we think.” It begins with the studio. They get a chance to propose what they think the credits ought to be. They are restricted really only in one sense. They cannot propose credits that are essentially illegal or impossible.

For instance, there can be no more than three writers listed as credited for screenplay with a writing team counting as one writer. There can be no more than two writers credited for story by, again with writing teams counted as one writer. So they can’t propose something with three story bys and five screenplay bys.

So they report to the Writers Guild and they say, “Here it is.” And it’s a fixed form that is defined down to the letter in the collective bargaining agreement called the Notice of Tentative Writing Credits Theatrical.

Now, while this is going on, the companies do have a little bit of flexibility. You may, out there, have noticed that you went to go see a movie, and in the lobby saw a poster with some names on it for credit. And then months later, when the movie came out, the names were different.

Aha. Well, the companies are allowed to use their tentative writing credits for promotional purposes when they need to do things in advance. One of the rules that we have is that if they credit a director on something, they have to credit the writer. So if they put a poster out there and say, “From Jim Blue,” they need to also say, “Written by Alice White.” Well, they may not know the final credits, they’re allowed to use their temporary credits.

Once the credits are fixed and placed by the Guild, then those are the only ones they can use. So it’s all kicked off by the studio.

**John:** A tiny sidebar here. As we talk about those posters, those sort of teaser posters, it’s worth noting that the rules stipulate that the director’s name has to be equal to the writer’s name. So it has to be the same size, the same color.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** The director’s name cannot be highlighted in a way that the writer’s name is not highlighted.

If you know this rule and you start looking at posters, you will notice some really interesting trends. So the teaser poster for Big Fish says “From the visionary mind of Director Tim Burton”. And so Tim Burton is big there and it’s in the blue sky and brown letters. And then it says, you know, “Based on a novel by Daniel Wallace, Screenplay by John August”. And our names are also in that same type size and they’re also in brown.

But our names are like on top of like some dirt. [laughs]

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it’s actually much harder to see our names. But technically they met every stipulation that we are the same font, the same size, same color.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes, they will do things like that. Sometimes it’s a little embarrassing. When the promotional stuff for the second Hangover came out, they made a big deal about Todd Phillips’ name because he was so, he directed the first one, it’s his franchise. So his name was really big. So then suddenly my name and Scot Armstrong’s name were really big. And people were like, “Dude, who do you think you are?” [laughs] And I was just like, “It’s a rule. I didn’t ask for it. It’s a rule.”

So here’s what you get. The Writers Guild will receive this Notice of Tentative Writing Credits Theatrical and then send copies to the participating writers or their current agents if the participants so elect. And the sheet will list all of the participating writers that were involved, the title of the movie, the executive producer, producer and director, other production executives and their titles if they were participating writers.

And then here’s what we think the credit should be, here’s what a source material credit will be, like based on a novel by. And that’s basically the deal. And it kind of ends with this will become final unless a protest is communicated by this time. So that’s what the company thinks.

**John:** Let’s define what production executive means because that trips a lot of people up.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** So production executive does not necessarily mean a studio employee. It means somebody who was involved in the production of this movie with a different title or a different sort of controlling interest. Producer is often one, but so is a director. There may have been cases where an editor or somebody else has a —

**Craig:** No, no.

**John:** That was production executive. No? Is it only producer and director?

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s defined and it’s basically defined as anybody that has a producing credit or anybody that has — and it’s an onscreen producing credit. Or anybody that has a directing credit. And it is strange that they call it a production executive because in the real modern world production executives are basically studio executives who never write on movies. Well, extremely rare, rare exception.

But it’s quite common for there to be writer-producers and writer-directors. And so their presence in this process will — well, you’ll see why it matters. But, yeah, the way that they define these things is, yeah. You got to be a director or producer.

**John:** So let’s say you are one of the writers of this theoretical movie and you receive a Notice of Tentative Writing Credits. So hopefully, it went to your agent, your lawyer, hopefully, it went to you. And you see this and you say, “Well, I don’t think that’s actually the appropriate credit for this film. I believe I deserve, for example, screenplay credit.” Or, “Something about this does not strike me as being right.” Or perhaps there was a writer whose name was left off the list of participating writers. This would be a time for me to say, “Something here is not correct.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, first of all, let’s hope that you actually get the damn thing. So that’s been an issue.

**John:** It has been.

**Craig:** They should be just emailing these things directly to us. I think now they can do that, but they still need to send copies to your agents or your managers. You need to make sure if you’re working on a movie that the Guild has your current representative information. Must have it.

I have spoken to writers who have suffered because they didn’t get the statement in time. And it is a disaster. So make sure, if you’re working on a movie, the Guild has your proper information. But, yeah, basically, you’re looking at this. And if you agree, great.

And by the way, if everybody agrees, guess what? Done.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** If one person, one single person says, “I don’t like this,” all bets are off and now you go to arbitration. So like I said, any participating writer can ask for a protest. We should probably define who exactly is a participating writer. Aha.

**John:** So a participating writer is anybody who wrote on the movie, was paid to write on the movie, correct? Because if they were just, let’s say, somebody’s niece wrote one scene and they weren’t paid for it, they shouldn’t have been writing the movie anyway, but they would not be considered a participating writer, is that correct?

**Craig:** I don’t think — well, probably, because she’s not a professional. But if you are a professional writer and you do write literary material, in the absence of a contract, I think what happens is the Writers Guild will go back and say, “Okay, they’re a participating writer. But they must — ” you have to go pay them. You have to get a contract put together for them.

But the way it’s defined in our collective bargaining agreement, it says, “Contributed literary material or employed under a WGA contract” which means, by the way, somebody could be employed and not actually write anything, and then suddenly they’re a participating writer. But it’s an exceedingly rare circumstance.

Typically, all the participating writers are people that were paid under a contract to write on the movie. Sometimes, though, there is an argument about that and we’ll get to that in a second. But let’s say nobody protests but one of the participating writers happens to also be the director. Automatic arbitration.

**John:** Yeah. If one of the participating writers was a producer or director, it automatically kicks into arbitration.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And talk to me about the rationale behind why that is, that rule exists.

**Craig:** Well, the notion is that if you are a lowly writer — let’s say you’re just starting out, you’re 26 years old and the producer is a legend. And the producer comes to you at the end of the process and says, “By the way, you know what, I want credit on this movie.” “Uh, well, you didn’t write anything.” “Yeah, I want credit. I’ll tell you what, I’m going to put my name on there for credit and don’t arbitrate. Because if you arbitrate, I’m going to have to destroy you. I’m going to ruin you. Everywhere I go, I’m going to ruin your name.”

Well, that’s potentially quite horrible. And I wish I could say that there aren’t people that behave like that in Hollywood. But I think we all know that there are.

So the Guild’s solution quite elegantly is to say, “If anybody is in a producer or director position that is participating in this process, there is going to be an arbitration. Nobody has to make a choice. There’s no ability for anyone to say don’t do it. It’s happening no matter what.” So you will remove the potential for undue pressure —

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** From people with authority.

**John:** So going into these situations, if you are writing on a movie that has, you know, a writer-director or you wrote something and a writer-director came on board and re-wrote your script and it’s now going into production, you should know that will automatically trigger an arbitration.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And so the situation with Jurassic World, Colin Trevorrow was hired on to direct this movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** He ended up re-writing the movie. That was always going to be an arbitration.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** There was no way that could have avoided arbitration.

**Craig:** That is exactly right. So that was a necessary arbitration. An arbitration will occur if any of the writers protest. An arbitration will not occur if all the writers agree.

And by the way, the writers don’t have to agree necessarily with the studio. If none of the writers are directors or producers, they can agree amongst themselves. They can come up with their own agreement. It happens quite rarely but it is possible.

**John:** It’s happened to me probably on three or four different movies. So, you know, I try to always have open discussions with any writers involved in the movies I’ve worked on, to talk through those issues before we get to arbitration.

And in some cases, we have decided like, “Oh, this would be a fair way to split the credit.” And that’s great and we all agree and we sign off on that and that’s done.

In other cases, we’ve had that conversation and disagreed but it was actually incredibly collegial. And we explained very clearly where we were coming from, what we thought the credits should be, we disagreed, and we went to arbitration. But there were no bad, hurt feelings. It was actually a pretty happy process.

So I would just encourage people to try that discussion if it makes sense.

**Craig:** Now, in the cases where you guys agreed on things, did you still have to write statements for an arbitration because it was an automatic arbitration or —

**John:** In those cases, it was not an automatic arbitration. I do recall writing a letter saying, “I believe these credits should be this credit.” And we basically all sent that in at the same time.

**Craig:** Yeah. So that would have been an automatic. So sometimes, in the case of an automatic arbitration where everybody really does agree, they can all send in one joint statement. And we’ll get to participating writer statements.

But before we can get to that, first, we can’t get to an arbitration if there is a disagreement about who is supposed to be in the arbitration.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So what happens if somebody says, “I should be a writer and I’m not listed,” or somebody says, “That guy didn’t write anything. He shouldn’t be listed,” or if someone says, “Well, wait a second. She’s listed as the third writer but she was really the second writer,” or somebody says, “Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, that guy is submitting that material? That material wasn’t before me,” all sorts of issues.

So there is a procedure in place called a pre-arbitration. It’s also at times known as a participating writer investigation when that is the focus of what it’s doing. And these are the things that a Writers Guild member, hopefully a seasoned, well-informed Writers Guild member under the careful watch of the staff makes a decision about what material should or should not be included in the arbitration, who is or is not a participating writer, is the project really an original or is it an adaptation of source material, what is the chronology of the material. All of these fussy, fussy questions will get hashed out before it even goes to arbitration.

**John:** Now, this is a unique situation and it doesn’t happen all the time. But this is really an investigation. And so they may actually call you in to say, “Can you talk us through what actually happened here? Can you explain what this is? Where did this come into existence?”

And so I’ve been in some of these situations where I have had to literally go in and talk in front of some people and they would ask me some questions. I wasn’t there opposite the other writer who was seeking credit, but there were things that needed to be figured out. And so I’ve had to physically go in and do these kind of things.

**Craig:** They were somewhat rare when you and I started. They are growing increasingly more common, because the way that studios develop movies now has gotten loosier and goosier.

It’s actually quite common for studios to purchase spec screenplays and repurpose them as sequels to things. And there are quite a number of notable examples. For instance, Ocean’s Twelve started as an original screenplay written by George Nolfi and was then repurposed.

Well, what do you do about that? Is that still an original or is it an adaptation? There are all sorts of things that need to be figured.

Sometimes, studios will purchase a screenplay from another company. They’ll buy a company. That company has screenplays but they weren’t Writers Guild screenplays. What happens to those? By the way, answer, those become source material not subject to Writers Guild credits.

But there’s all this stuff that needs to be figured out. And as companies get stranger and weirder about how they suck up material from the culture and spit it back out in the form of movies, these pre-arbitrations will become increasingly common.

**John:** So there’s a lot to figure out. Especially, studios now are doing these kind of bake-off competitions where they’ll hire two writers at the same time to work on different drafts of things —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which to me just feels like a disaster waiting to happen. And yet the studios are banking like, “Well, one of those drafts we’ll shoot, or if there’s things we like in both of them, we’ll piece it together.” And God bless them, but that makes it very, very complicated. And this pre-arbitration hearing could become a very important part of the process of figuring out who deserves credit, when stuff happened, which characters originated in which draft.

**Craig:** Absolutely, absolutely. And to be clear, as we go through this section, as we walk you through this section, the Writers Guild has a duty of fair representation. That’s a fact of law. They have to represent all participating writers equally, even when one of them is the director or one of them is a producer, or one of them is new, or one of them wrote a spec, or one of them is a re-write, it doesn’t matter.

At times, writers will feel like they’re siding with one person or another. And that’s only because they are [laughs], because somebody has to be right, you know. This is where, unfortunately, people get really emotional and upset about this because nobody wants to lose. And when you think you’re getting jobbed, it’s a terrible feeling. But, alas, it’s a dirty job, someone’s got to do it.

**John:** So, Craig, as we come out of the pre-arbitration hearing, as we come out of the participating writer investigation, what information should be agreed upon? It’s basically these are the writers who participated in this draft, this is the order in which the scripts sort of come in. And at that point, do we start to impanel real arbiters?

**Craig:** Yeah. So now we know that we have a number of participating writers. There are no more participating writers than these and no fewer. These are they. We have a chronology for the work that they’ve done.

And each one of them gets a letter because everything’s done anonymously. We’ll get into the why of that. And we have material assigned for each one of them. So we know what material has been allowed and what material is no longer there.

And now, we reach out to three writers who will become the arbitration panel. Before the guild can select them, all the participating writers receive a list of all the screenwriters in the guild that are eligible to be arbiters. And the participating writers can red-pen through people they don’t want.

Why would you want to strike people’s names? You may have had a bad experience with some of them, some of them you may not like, some of them you —

**John:** Some of them you may know that they are just a dummy.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You may just realize like, “You are not a clever person and I would not want to trust your opinion.”

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Now, keep in mind, you as the participating writer, you should be anonymous. They shouldn’t know which was your draft. So they shouldn’t be able to hold any personal bias against you. But in the Internet era, it’s very hard to have no idea of what a movie is or who might have been involved with it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So there’s lots of reasons why you might want to, you know, not select certain people.

**Craig:** Correct. It’s virtually impossible at this point to presume anonymity.

The way the process is set up, the writers obviously are familiar with each other. But the writers will not know the identities of the arbiters. And that’s easy —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because they’re not going to see them or address them.

The arbiters receive materials and all the participating writers are identified by letters. So there’s writer A, B, C, D and E. They don’t know the names of the people who have written them. But if they go on IMDb and there’s only writer A and writer B, they’re probably going to be able to figure it out.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The great hope is that they don’t do it. And certainly if they indicate at any point that they have, then they’re bounced. The double blind anonymity — arbiters don’t know each other, arbiters don’t know the participants, participants don’t know the arbiters, maybe triple blind, that has essentially been the cornerstone of the Writers Guild’s defense of itself.

Essentially, they’re saying, “We have fulfilled our duty of fair representation because the process excluded the possibility of some people being favored over others for any reason other than the material itself.”

**John:** So let’s talk about the requirements of an arbiter, because you and I both served as arbiters on screen credits decisions.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So to be an arbiter, you’re supposed to have been a member for five years, you should have had a minimum of three on-screen credits. So you should know what it is you’re talking about. You should have been through this system before. You should know what, you know, a movie looks like when it’s written down on a page. And you hopefully sort of have some exposure with what this whole process is.

Now I get the call to be an arbiter probably five times a year.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I say yes maybe twice a year based on sort of like how busy I am. It’s a tremendous responsibility. And I will credit the guild as being very upfront about how much work it’s going to be and how many drafts there are to read, how complicated it is, how many writers there are on board. They will tell you the name of the project just so you would know, like, oh, I can’t do that because I know exactly who wrote. I know too much of the history of it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or like that was the thing I wanted — I was up for that job but I didn’t get it. Like, there would be really obvious situations where you should not be involved with it. But my instinct is to always say yes if I can say yes, because I know how incredibly important it is that smart and dedicated guild people take these arbitrations seriously.

**Craig:** No question. And so the struggle is always when they call and they say, “Well, there are seven participating writers, so seven drafts, plus a novel.” Oh, and you know you have a deadline and it’s just, you know — I try not to automatically say no to those. I have done a couple of those monsters. Generally, when they call me, I tend to get problem cases. [laughs] I’ve noticed.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They haven’t indicated this but I tend to get complicated ones. I tend to get big ones. And I often get comedies. So I don’t know if they’re doing that on purpose or not. It’s just the way it kind of comes.

Not everybody can be an arbiter. There’s three rules that govern this. One is, okay, you can be an arbiter if you’ve been a current member for five years, or you can be an arbiter if you have a minimum of three on-screen credits. So if you’ve gotten that in fewer than five years, Mazel tov.

And then the other issue is that of the three arbiters, two of them have to be what they call experienced arbiters. Meaning that two of the three have served on at least two other arbitration committees which you start —

**John:** Oh, I wasn’t aware of that. Wow.

**Craig:** Yeah. So there’s an interesting bottleneck there of experience. So in every arbitration, they can only put in one rookie. So every time — so once they put in one rookie, they’re like, “Okay, they can be a rookie one more time and then we get to use them as experienced.” But you can see how the pool of available arbiters is fairly compressed.

The Writers Guild struggles endlessly to find arbiters willing to do the work and willing to do it in the short amount of time we get. And the amount of time, that window has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk and shrunk and shrunk over time because post-production has taken longer and longer and longer and longer, there’s additional writing going on.

And then of course the studios are turning around. The release is incredibly quickly. And they’re saying, “My God, we need the credits because we got to do the — literally put the credits on the movie. We’ve got four days.” It can get really bad.

**John:** Yeah. And in television, just imagine everything is about 15 times faster.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So as tight as the schedules can be in features, television is nuts.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the great boon for televisions is that in television the credits are often decided before the arbiters even get them, because in television when you work on staff everyone’s going to get a credit. It’s not the, you know, I would say that movies are like basically one episode television series. So, yeah, the credit is super important. [laughs] It matters. And if you don’t get it, you’re never getting it.

**John:** Yeah. So these arbiters and impaneled. They are receiving the scripts that are labeled writer A through writer F. Sometimes there will be multiple drafts given by a writer if the writer thinks it’s really important to show the progress from this thing or that thing or an idea that was taken out of a draft but then appears later on in a different writer’s script. There may be a reason why she wants to show that.

But the arbiter gets this big stack of scripts. The arbiter also gets a statement from each writer. And those statements can be long and detailed. Those statements can be short. But in that statement, the writer is laying out a case for why they believe the credit should read a certain way and hopefully making a good case based exclusively on the Screen Credits Manual why they believe that the credit should read a certain way.

**Craig:** This statement is essentially your only day in court as a participating writer.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It’s your one chance to express to the people deciding your fate why you feel the way you do. And so naturally this document becomes loaded with all sorts of emotion. And that’s unfortunate because this would be the last time you’d want to do that. This is when you want to be as rationale as possible. Since you and I are both arbiters, I assume you like I have read some terrible, terrible statements from writers.

**John:** Absolutely. And you read these statements which are basically just explaining the hardship that they faced and sort of what the struggle was to make the movie and how unfair things were. And it doesn’t matter because that doesn’t help me reach my decision in which my decision is based on the words on the page.

So the great statements that I really enjoy are the ones that very clearly explain why the writer is seeking the credit that she’s seeking and can provide some roadmap for how she gets to that decision. Will I get to the same decision? Maybe yes, maybe no. But I at least one want to be able to see what the writer is thinking as I’m going through this.

In some cases that statement may help elucidate something that I might have missed otherwise. And so as I’m writing my own statement I try to provide just that same kind of this is the roadmap that gets me to this decision, maybe you will want to follow the same map. And thank you so much for your service. I think any statement that doesn’t acknowledge the incredible amount of time that the arbiter is putting into this is a foolish statement.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. Well, I would argue that the most foolish statement is the one where the writer has paid somebody to write it for them. This is a scourge and I’m sorry to say it exists. And if you are in the Writers Guild and you’ve heard of people doing this and they’ve had success, yes, much the same way that Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc works in homeopathic medicine and so forth. It’s a disastrous idea and an enormous waste of money.

There are people out there who charge thousands of thousands of dollars to write a professional statement for you as you, analyzing all the material, making their case. These statements tend to be quite long which arbiters don’t like. But more importantly they’re the same. They’re the same. You’re getting ripped off.

So what will happen is for instance I did an arbitration recently. And when it was done and the decision had been rendered I then called the staff and said, “So I don’t know if you’re able to tell me but this particular statement smelled like a professional statement to me. It didn’t impact my decision one way or another. But it just smelled like it.”

And they said, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we see that statement [laughs] with like various versions of it.” I mean basically these people — you know how it works. You know the way the world works, right?

**John:** Absolutely. I will say that as friends go into an arbitration situation they will invariably email me saying like, “Hey, can you share one of your statements with me?” And I will usually do that but I always caution them that each statement needs to individually, you know, reflect the needs of that project. And so I’ve written long ones for things that really, truly were complicated where I came on and off the projects several times. And like without some sort of map it could be very easy to forget sort of what happened along the way.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I’ve also written like the two-page statement. I’ve written the half a page statement that basically says, “This is how I think it should end up. I thank you for your service. God speed.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It really depends on the situation. So I would never urge people to write the long statement to spend, you know, six days writing a long statement because people will go crazy writing it.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I mean, look a bad statement from you is always better than any professional statement. The arbiter will understand whether they realize the statement is a “professional” or not, they can feel a personal touch on a personal statement.

So I’m going to give my advice to people on general advice when they’re writing these statements what I think makes a good one. And then I guess by elimination what makes a bad one. Generally shorter is better. If you can keep it under four pages, you will be loved, you will be loved by your arbiter.

Avoid math. A lot of the guidelines refer to percentages. You will get screenplay credit if you hit 33% of a screenplay or 50% of a screenplay. Well, we actually don’t do math on our end. We’re kind of just 50% to I think a lot of us is half or more and 33% is a good amount, you know, I mean. So we’re not counting words or lines so don’t do it for us.

Don’t be a jerk. No matter how you feel about who rewrote you or who you rewrote, be polite and be professional about it. Don’t treat the arbiters like they can’t read. This is my biggest complaint about participating writer statements. They will go and on about some obvious point. And while I’m reading their statement I’m thinking, “Can’t I just read the screenplay? I’ll read it and I’ll know that. I don’t need your chart.” You know what I mean? Like I know how to read, I can do — yes there are certain things that it’s great that you track for me. But other things like a whole page about how this one thing is really just like this thing. It’s a scene, I’ll read it.

Context in small doses is helpful. It’s helpful although not determinative for to me to understand how you came on the job, what your task was, how you approach the writer’s material before you, how you may have been replaced. It doesn’t change necessarily what I’m reading but it can place it in some sort of meaningful context. It doesn’t matter that you’ve spent 12 months on it as opposed to another guy spending a week. But I think it’s at least interesting for the arbiter to understand some of that sort of thing.

And lastly just to remind people, they try this all the time and the guild has to bounce it back to them. You can’t send in recommendation letters, so the producer can’t send a letter saying, “Yeah, we’re backing this guy.” And other than that you’re free to write anything you want in your statement with one exception. You can’t breach anonymity. You can’t identify yourself and you can’t identify any of the other participating writers.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** And as the arbiter you get all these scripts, you get these letters. I tend to — I go both ways. In some cases I’ve read all the letters first. In some cases I’ve read all the scripts first. Both ways make sense. If you read the letters first, you have a sense of what the individual writer thinks is important about that draft. But if you read all the scripts first, a lot of times I’ll end up with like, you know, well, this is what sort of makes sense to me and then you’ll sort of see which writers are completely insane and which writers are like, “Oh, I can see how they got to this place.”

**Craig:** Right. And that’s part of the shock of doing the job of being an arbiter is that you will read the scripts and then you’ll look back again at the statements. And someone who’s truly contributed nearly nothing to the final screenplay will have written a seven-page passionate creed about how they really wrote it all. And it’s scary but I understand it.

It’s not — that is not a schizophrenic delusion. That’s just part of being a writer. They’re inner world is rich and fulfilling and everybody else is just a bunch of words on paper. And so this is why sometimes I think people are shocked.

There are ways to process the work if you have a bunch of scripts. You can choose to read the final script first, that’s the shooting script and then go backwards or can start from the beginning. It doesn’t really matter. The only thing that matters is you read all of it.

And while you’re doing that you’re in touch with somebody who’s called a screen credit’s consultant. That’s not a staff member. That is another Writers Guild member. Often they are emeritus. They’ve been doing it for awhile, they may be retired, they may live somewhere else.

And their job really is to just — they’re not reading the material. They’re just there to advice you on the applicable rules. Because there’s all sorts of rules depending on what kind of project it is. So they’re there if you have any questions about things. And they’re also there to collect your decisions. Because once all three arbiters have rendered their decision, if it’s unanimous, that’s it. It’s done.

**John:** You’re done. Yeah. You’re almost done. Each of those arbiters is going to be asked to write up their decision. But it is done. There’s not going to be any further discussion.

**Craig:** Correct, as long as that decision is in fact a legal one. And so staff is — the screen credit’s consultant will then convey to staff, “Okay, awesome. All three of them on their own came up with the same decision.” Staff goes, “Yes, that is a legal decision.” And then off we go.

**John:** It’s a permissible decision. It meets the requirements of what a screen credit can be.

**Craig:** Permissible, perfect word. There may be a case where all three arbiters have three different versions of the credits. So the screen credit consultant will sort of kind of horse trade a little bit and say, “Well, how firm are you on that? Would you be at all? Could you entertain the idea of adjusting your decision to be more like this person or this person?”

What they’re trying to do is see if they can avoid a stalemate. A stalemate is kind of a disaster. It’s incredibly hard as I mentioned to get three people to do this. If all three of them disagree, they got to basically toss them and start again with three new arbiters which they don’t want to do.

**John:** No one wants to do that.

**Craig:** Nobody wants to do that. But on the other hand, they don’t want to force writers into making decision they don’t want to make. So they’re very gentle about this. They just say, “Okay, well, could you or would you consider this?” And if they say, “Absolutely not.” “Fine, no problem. We’ll do another panel.”

If there are two writers, two arbiters that agree and one that doesn’t then what we do is we have teleconference. All three arbiters get on the phone along with staff monitoring. The arbiters are identified to each other only as arbiter 1, 2 and 3. And they talk it out.

And the reason they talk it out is to see if they can actually achieve unanimity because two to one is sufficient. Two to one means, yeah, that’s the decision. But if you can be unanimous it frankly sits better with everybody. So it’s worth taking a look to see if you can get to unanimity.

And there have been times where, you know, the person standing there in the one slot has pointed out to the other two, “Hey, you know, you actually probably agree with me more than you agree with each other.” And so interesting things can happen there. But it’s a chance for arbiters to agree more closely than maybe they would have before.

**John:** And so the arbiter teleconference is a relative innovation or something that’s happened new. It’s the last six or seven years?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** How long has that been around?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s about probably coming up on five years. This is something that we cooked up in our committee and brought to the membership and they approved. And it’s been extraordinarily successful.

**John:** And it really is. Thank you Craig for doing it. Because it actually does make the process much better. Because there’ve been times, twice in this last few years, I’ve been in one of these teleconference situations and it’s great to hear what the other writer, arbiters are thinking and sort of why they reached their decision.

Sometimes I’ve been able to sort of persuade people over to my side. Sometimes we’ve ended up in the two-to-one, but I’ve at least understood why we got to this two-to-one. It wasn’t just like who could possibly think that that, you know, it should be shared story credit. Like it seems impossible to me. It helps you really understand why they got to that decision. So I think it’s a really good process.

**Craig:** It also comes with another benefit. The staff is on the phone listening. And it’s their opportunity to hear the arbiters talk and defend their own positions. And if they’re hearing that one of them is a dummy or is nuts, or is ideological in a prejudiced way then they know not to ask that person to arbitrate again. So it’s another nice side effect of that.

**John:** Yeah. Because otherwise they would have the written decision but that’s not necessarily clear about what the thinking was behind it. The written decision that each individual arbiter makes is very carefully constructed to be sort of unassailable. That like you’ve reached this decision based on exactly these points and nothing more is said.

You’re not talking about the nature of the project. You’re not talking about the history of things. You’re talking about how you reached your decision. And at times the Writers Guild staff will ask you to adjust something in your statement just so it’s absolutely clear that you understood what you were doing.

**Craig:** That’s right. The statement is your — I think that is the evidence of your good work as an arbiter. In your statement, you know, certainly this is how I do it. I cite the rules, I go carefully through story and screenplay. I go carefully through why I felt some writer deserved something or some writer did not.

Some no nos. You cannot refer to anything that one of the participating writers put in their statement because other participating writers can view your decision statement. And we need to keep those statements completely walled off.

I think as an arbiter you need to really make a clear judgment because participating writers can ask to see your statement. They don’t always have to but they can ask if they are contemplating a Policy Review Board.

**John:** Uh-oh.

**Craig:** Uh-oh. Policy Review Board, what’s that Craig? I’ll tell you people. A PRB, a Policy Review Board, is essentially an appeals. Well, wait a second, how would the guild ever manage to that because everybody that loses will want to appeal, right? Isn’t that what’s destroying our nation’s court system as we speak?

Yeah. Well, here’s the deal. The Policy Review Board is an appeals process. Three different writers are now on that Policy Review Board. They are the new judges. But here’s the deal, they can’t read any of the scripts. They’re not there to decide if the arbiters had good opinions or good judgment or good taste. All they’re there to do is determine if any procedural errors were made or misapplication of rules. That’s it.

**John:** Yeah. So unlike a court of law where an appeals court can examine the facts of the case, can examine sort of testimony and other things. In this case the appeals process is only about like did they follow the rules. And that’s it.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right. So, you know, if an arbiter writes something in their statement that’s seems fishy or strange and a participating writer asks for a PRB. Well, what will happen is the people at the PRB will call the arbiter and say, “Explain this. What did you mean by this?” And if they say something that’s wrong, the PRB will throw out the decision. It happens very, very, very rarely. Have you ever gotten called by a PRB as an arbiter?

**John:** Never.

**Craig:** I got called once.

**John:** You got once.

**Craig:** I’ve had PRBs before, you know, where they just go, “No.” One time I got called. It was a very, very complicated arbitration with so many bizzarities in it. I know it’s not a word but I don’t care. And but they did call and they just said, “We’re picking up this one line from your statement and we’d like you to explain it more.” And I did.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I [laughs] very clearly remember I explained it. And then I heard one of them go, “Yeah, I knew that’s — it’s obvious that’s what he was going to…” It was like, “Duh.” But they had to do it, you know. And then the PRB was the, you know, the appeal was denied.

**John:** So in most cases a Policy Review Board will not happen. It did not happen in the Jurassic World decision. In most cases, the arbiter’s decision will come in, the arbiters will file their statements and then what is the document that the Writers Guild East or West will produce that says, “These are the credits.”

**Craig:** Well, they will send — first they will call. If you’re in an arbitration, the staff member assigned to your case will call you and say, “The arbitration has reached a decision. And the screen credits will be as follows.” And then you go, “Yay” or “Huh,” or “Nah.”

And then they send a letter to the studios and to you that confirms the precise wording with a bunch of legalese about how it has to be presented and so forth. And those are the credits, period, the end, forever.

The IMDb has a deal with the WGA. Once the WGA credits are confirmed, it’s also piped over to IMDb. And those become the official IMDb credits. And then we have working rules as writers that govern us. Once the credits become final, we have to abide by them, we can’t contradict them in public and the studios must abide by them as well.

**John:** Yeah. So, what are some take homes we should have from this whole discussion of screen credits? So, one thing we need to really sort focus in on the end is we’re determining written by credit. And written by credit is of course two different credits combined. There’s screenplay by credit, there’s story by credit. If a writer receives both of those things and there’s no other people who will get a portion of those things, they collapse and become written by credit. Those are the two basic areas that an arbitration will be determining. But every once in a while, there will be weird, fluky kind of things that will show up on screen. Adaptation by for example.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What are the other —

**Craig:** There are screen story by.

**John:** Screen story by.

**Craig:** Which is common. Adaptation by is extraordinarily uncommon and it also isn’t what it sounds like. It’s probably why it’s extraordinarily uncommon. Generally speaking, the credits that you’ll see are story by, screen story by, screenplay by, written by. Those are the various versions and various combinations.

**John:** Those are the permissible credits.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And in permissible credits, a writing team may share one of those slots or share one those credits. That’s why you see the ampersands. So, in the case of Jurassic World, you see two writing teams, you see they’re joined by ampersands then the word and, A-N-D, combining the two of them to indicate that there were two writing teams involved in a film.

So now as you look at any poster, you will be able to determine which people who are credited as writers were working as a team and which people are working solo. In some cases, you will find weird situations where a person was writing solo and then they joined a team and so they have multiple credits in strange ways. But generally, the ampersand is the indication that those people were a team from the start.

**Craig:** Yeah. And these things I would imagine most — most Writers Guild members probably know, surprisingly — surprising number of them don’t. The arcane stuff almost no writers know which is always shocking to me because that’s the stuff that’s you’re subject to. You kind of need to know. So, you know, an appeal to — oh, do you want to play stump the ump? Want to play stump the ump? Let’s stump the ump. All right, John.

**John:** Great, do it.

**Craig:** Okay. John August, we have a case of a remake, a 1978 film written by some guy, he’s dead now. And they come to you. You write a draft of this remake and then they go to a second guy and he writes a draft. Then there’s a third guy who comes along and says he actually wrote a treatment before the two of you. Who is A, B and C?

**John:** I will ask you a question first.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Was the movie originally produced under the Writers Guild contract?

**Craig:** It was.

**John:** If it was, then writer A is the person who wrote the first movie.

**Craig:** The dead guy is writer A. What did he win? What did he win?

**John:** I hope something.

**Craig:** Nothing. You know what you won?

**John:** I get nothing.

**Craig:** You won my goddamn respect, sir. [laughs]

**John:** I would say that the treatment — if the treatment guy can prove that he wrote that treatment beforehand, that treatment guy became writer B, is that correct?

**Craig:** The treatment guy became writer B, yes. And then the treatment guy is basically vying for a shared story credit with the dead guy, I believe.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If there’s going to be, you know, if he can show that he significantly changed the story. So, yeah, there are cases for instance, the remake of The Omen, sole screenplay went to the writer of the first Omen because they felt that the remake just didn’t change it enough. So anyway, see, these are the things you know. You’re smart.

I’m saying to our fellow writers out there, be smart like John August. Take a look at the book before you go into the movie. If you’re working on a project and you’re not the first writer, read the book. If you’re going into the project and you’re the first writer, and then somebody comes to replace you, read the book because it’s common. Right? Know what’s going on.

And similarly, if you do know what’s going on and you’re a smart writer, please do arbitrations. Serve as an arbiter. Let the guild know, if they haven’t called you, that you are volunteering, that you want to be an arbiter. But please, only do it if you’re smart and you’re rational and you know the rules.

**John:** The other take home I would like to urge our writers to keep in mind is if you’re going into a situation where there are preexisting materials, know that it could get bumpy down the road and I see so many people who they’re so excited to sign onto this movie and they’re going to get going and they were the person who wrote it in production and they’re like, “But what’s happening now? I was the person who wrote the movie, how could there be all this hubbub and Sturm und Drang?

Well, you weren’t the original writer. And those original writers, they feel the exact same thing you do. Like, “Well, I was the person who created that movie. You were just the person who delivered it over the finish line.” Very likely there’s going to be some issues down the road. And so as long as you go into it knowing that those could happen, that’s great. It doesn’t mean you need to change a single word of what you put on the page. You can’t — that’s never going to serve you well to try to change more things on the page. Just know that it could happen down the road so it does not blindside you. And you don’t feel like it’s some vast conspiracy against you. It’s the situation, it’s going to happen whenever there are multiple writers on a movie and the movie’s been in development for a while.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean this is — this is our court system guys. You’re a fool to walk in a court not knowing how court works. And you’re a fool to walk into credit arbitration not understanding how credit arbitration works. It is an awkward, ungainly, overly legalistic, rigid, and occasionally infuriating system, but it’s probably the best system that we can offer ourselves at this stage of the game.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So learn it.

**John:** Whenever I read an article that’s like the Jurassic World decision, it’s always the filmmaker who feels incredibly frustrated by how this all happened. And they are wishing and pining for a better system, a more fair system, a more just system. The frustration is, I don’t know what that system would be and no one has ever been able to articulate what that more fair system would be.

There have been overtures towards, “Well, what if we had professional arbiters so you knew the quality of the people who were going to be doing the arbitration?” Certainly that’s an idea. There’s been a discussion of, “Well, maybe credits should reflect all of the writers who worked on a film to acknowledge that there were other writers before this.” That’s certainly a possibility as well. For each one of these suggestions, there are many negatives that come along with it too. Any proposed change to the system is going to have a whole host of problems as well. So this is where we’re at. And Craig is on the committee trying to make this work as well as it can work.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s this thing that happens where people perceive a problem in some system. Their local schools, the way their town is governed, the Writers Guild. And they see something and they go, “Isn’t it obvious what to do? Just do this. Everyone would agree on this.”

Now, actually, finding things that everybody agrees on is extraordinarily difficult. And when it comes to credits, nearly impossible. Simple common sense changes that we made took months and months of diplomacy and discussion and negotiation. And people should also be aware, there are some things that we can’t change on our own. We have to renegotiate those with the companies if we want to change any term that’s in the collective bargaining agreement. Well, we have to ask them for it. And you know what they say? “No.” [laughs]

**John:** They’ll say no. They’ll just say no to spite us.

**Craig:** They will say no to spite —

**John:** Because the negotiation committee —

**Craig:** Absolutely, they — if you said to them, “Well, we want the right to give you guys some nice warm tea,” they’ll say, “No.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** “No.”

**John:** Absolutely. It would be struck the very first day.

**Craig:** That’s right. You ask for it, you want it? No. Then the answer is no. It’s a —

**John:** Yeah. It’s absolutely no.

Craig. Yes. So, people have to understand, this may be the best we can do. Maybe it will get a little bit better. But it’s pretty much it is what it is. Again, just my personal bias, it’s not up to you. But I’d root for getting the Writers Guild West to run my arbitration.

**John:** Yeah. I’d also just, again, urge any smart writer who’s eligible to serve on an arbitration, serve on an arbitration. And Craig, I have a question for you. If a person has never been asked to serve on arbitration but they are otherwise eligible, can they reach out to the guild saying like, “Hey, I would love to do that?” Will they actually take an incoming call?

**Craig:** Yes. Absolutely. You just call up the credits department and they will check your eligibility and they will note your interest and they will put you in the hopper. They’re careful. They don’t want kooks, you know, and unfortunately, a lot of our members are nuts.

**John:** But if you are WGA member and you are — this podcast has encouraged you to try to do this. And you believe you’re eligible and you believe you could do a good job, call them and tell them that John and Craig urged you to do it because we really do want smart folks doing it.

**Craig:** [laughs] Only for smart. So, you really got to look in the mirror here people, really look in the mirror.

**John:** Yeah. We do. Maybe they’ll be emailing us to look through like previous people’s comments and things they sent in to make sure like, have they asked really stupid questions on the show?

**Craig:** Yeah. How many times in the last month did somebody call you stupid? More than two? Don’t call them.

**John:** Yeah, don’t call them.

**Craig:** Don’t call them.

**John:** I believe it’s time for One Cool Things.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is also WGA-related because it’s just sticking with the theme. The WGA redid the residuals site. Basically, if you’re a member and you sign in to check your residuals, it’s much better than it used to be. And I’m not quite sure when they updated the whole system. But you can finally sort things by individual movies, by studios, by total amounts of checks. And so I spent, you know, a good hour on it this week looking through stuff, making sure that everything had actually gotten paid out right.

And it’s really fascinating to see what percentage of really my income comes from it. Like, when you actually see your residuals totaled up you realize how incredibly grateful we should be that the residual system exists and that we are paid for our work in the time after we’ve, you know, delivered it.

Not surprisingly, the single film that’s paid me the most residuals is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was, you know, successful out in the theatre but also of course sells really well on home video. The least successful by far is my film, The Nines, which has, you know, made almost nothing in residuals. And yet, it still gets tallied up. And I’m just incredibly grateful to the people who built this new system and who keep the system up-to-date to make sure that we are paid accurately and quickly for our residuals.

**Craig:** Huh, I wonder which one — I guess we should — do you want to guess which ones of mine are the most? And I’m looking at it right now.

**John:** I’m going to say Hangover II is your most rewarding residual.

**Craig:** Okay. All right. I’m looking career view by project.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Had you seen this new whole thing?

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. Yeah. They sent me a beta of it. I just never actually thought to ask questions. So, no, you’re not right.

**John:** Oh, what is your most successful project?

**Craig:** Well, because here’s the thing. Remember, on Hangover II, I was splitting three ways.

**John:** Oh, that’s right. I forgot.

**Craig:** So, for me, it’s Identify Thief. Although I guess the total, if you’re looking at the total pie, Hangover II would probably be the biggest total pie. And then the lowest, well, poor RocketMan, it’s my first movie, RocketMan. You know, and it’s interesting, RocketMan came out actually — it was like pre-DVD era. So it wasn’t even out on DVD for a long time. It missed the boom. [laughs]

**John:** It missed the boom.

**Craig:** It missed the boom.

**John:** Just ranking through mine, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which obviously a successful movie, I’m also solo credit so I get 100% of that pie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, I share with the Wibberleys, and so that also did well, but I’m sharing it with the Wibberleys. Big Fish is a solo credit but it is not anywhere near the success of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Then we can down to Charlie’s Angels, Go, and the rest. Including my TV show, D.C. which only aired three episodes in the U.S., it aired all seven episodes overseas. And so I will tell you that I made a total of $23,000 in residuals on a horrible, disastrous fail of a TV show.

**Craig:** That’s cool.

**John:** So residuals do matter folks.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If you are a writer in WGA and you want to look up your residuals, I would say that the menu system to find this page is not the most straightforward. So we’ll have a link for this in the show notes. But if you’re on the WGA site, wga.org, it’s in residuals and then residuals look up is the page that we’re looking at now.

**Craig:** Yeah. Pretty cool.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** God.

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

**Craig:** Yeah. What? [laughs]

**John:** What?

**Craig:** Huh? Hmm? What? Huh? No.

**John:** Your One Cool Thing can be my One Cool Thing. Bruce Joel Rubin, we did a whole episode about Ghost.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And I’m going to host a WGA screening of Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder on, what’s the date? April 25th?

**Craig:** It’s April 25th. Yeah, right there.

**John:** Yeah, you’re looking at the same thing.

**Craig:** I’m looking at the same thing you are. Yeah.

**John:** On April 25th, I will be hosting a screening and a Q&A with Bruce Joel Rubin. We’ll be looking at two of his films, Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder. So if you’re a WGA member, you can RSVP for that now because it may very well sell out. If it doesn’t sell out, there’s a chance that they’ll open it to the public, which would be great too. So, if it looks like it’s going to be available for other people to come to, I’ll let you guys know on the podcast or on Twitter. But it should be really great and Bruce is really wonderful and smart. And especially after our discussion of Ghost, I’m looking forward to sitting down with him and really talking through everything terrific he did in that movie.

**Craig:** Great. Awesome.

**John:** It’s time for our boilerplate. Our outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth who has written some of our great outros. Thank you for that. If you have an outro you’d like to send in, you can send it to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send questions. We love to answer questions, so please send those through.

On Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. You can find us on iTunes and we just love it when you give us ratings.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So if give us some stars, that would be awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just search for Scriptnotes. You and also search for Scriptnotes to find the Scriptnotes app which lets you download all the back episodes back to episode 1 or even episode 20 where we first talked through screen credits. So you can see what we did then and what we did now. We also have an Android app. You can search to the Android app store for that as well. Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. And we will be back next week to talk through more stuff.

**Craig:** Oh, we got a —

**John:** Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** We got a good one next week.

**John:** Oh, it’s going to be really good.

**Craig:** We got a good one.

**John:** If next week’s works out the way I hope it works out —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think it’s going to — it could easily be in the top ten.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Craig, have a great week.

**Craig:** You too.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes, Ep 20: How credit arbitration works](http://johnaugust.com/2012/how-credit-arbitration-works)
* [Jurassic World Script Credits Resolved; Helmer Colin Trevorrow Speaks On Arbitration Process](http://deadline.com/2015/04/jurassic-world-script-credits-resolved-colin-trevorrow-speaks-on-arbitration-process-1201406086/) on Deadline
* [WGAw Screen Credits Manual](http://www.wga.org/subpage_writersresources.aspx?id=167)
* [Big Fish poster](http://netdna.webdesignerdepot.com/uploads/2013/04/BigFish.jpg)
* [WGAw Credits Department contact information](http://www.wga.org/subpage_whoweare.aspx?id=809)
* [WGAw residuals look up](https://my.wgaw.org/home/Login.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fhome%2fresiduals.aspx)
* [RSVP here for the April 25 WGAw screenings of Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder, featuring a Q+A with Bruce Joel Rubin moderated by John August](http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=229)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-perfect-reader).

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

**Craig Mazin:** [laughs] My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 173 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today, we are going to be talking about the perfect reader, loan-out companies, and how to record a podcast. But, Craig, all of our listeners want to know first and foremost, how was your heritage turkey?

**Craig:** I got to say home run.

**John:** Oh, fantastic. Glad to hear it.

**Craig:** Home run. So changed up a couple of things this year for those of you playing the home turkey game. I got a heritage turkey from a company called Mary’s Turkeys, about a 17-pounder because I had a lot of people. I brined it — I always brine but this time, instead of brining it in a bucket or a cooler, I went with a brining bag.

**John:** Ah, those are the dry briners —

**Craig:** No, no, I’m a wet brine guy. I believe in the wet brine. But that’s a whole north/south, east/west civil war but I’ll —

**John:** Yeah, which is the right barbecue sauce, too, while we’re at it.

**Craig:** I mean, I don’t even get in the middle of that.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** But, no, I’m a wet briner. But the nice thing about the brining bag is that you put the turkey in this big — it’s basically an enormous super heavy-duty Ziploc bag. So it goes over the turkey, you fill it up with the brine, and the nice thing is you can put it in your fridge. Because, otherwise, you got to put it outside in the garage with a bunch of dry ice in a cooler. It’s a big pain in the butt.

And the other thing I did this time was I added some brown sugar into the brine. By and large, you know, people throw in, like, what I call potpourri into their brine. You know, like lemons and sprigs and things. That stuff, all those oil-based things, like, from citrus, that’s not going to dissolve in the water and it’s not going to go into the turkey. You’re wasting your time. Anyway, it came out fantastic.

**John:** That’s great. And how long was your bird in the oven?

**Craig:** This is also the simplest oven-cooking of all time.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** I went with no basting. I did an olive oil rub.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Put it in at 325 degrees.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** 3.5 hours later, it was done to perfection.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Did not do anything.

**John:** So this year, I did what I’ve been doing the last couple of years which is the high-heat method.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So you think yours is simple. This is how simple mine was. A little olive oil rub into a 475-degree oven.

**Craig:** Woo.

**John:** For two hours. Done. And so not only do you not have to do anything other than sort of clean and dry the bird —

**Craig:** It’s faster.

**John:** Yes. And you don’t even truss it. You sort of deliberately untruss it. So you have to stick forks in to sort of hold the legs out away from the bird so the heat can get everywhere.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** And it worked really well.

**Craig:** Yeah, I did fail to mention that I trussed. I’m a trusser.

**John:** You’re a trusser?

**Craig:** Yeah, my method is —

**John:** Well, that’s really your bondage thing coming through there.

**Craig:** Yeah, Fifty Shades of Grey’d that thing.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Yes, the turkey will see me now. I did the slow-and-low method. But the truth is that if you put it in, you know, as long as you don’t have to do stuff with it, it doesn’t really matter.

**John:** It doesn’t matter. Time is irrelevant as long as —

**Craig:** Time is irrelevant. But I have to also, well, I’ll save my One Cool Thing because I did a — I made a lot of different things. I made a pumpkin pie. I made an apple galette, I made acorn squash, I made garlicky green beans with roasted pine nuts. I made a ton of things. But one thing I made, oh, pumpkin scones, which were spectacular.

**John:** Oh, good. Yeah.

**Craig:** But I’ll save my favorite thing for my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah. How about you? So did you have a great Thanksgiving?

**John:** We had a great Thanksgiving. We had some friends come over. We had a good simple outdoor Los Angeles Thanksgiving.

**Craig:** I know. My sister is in town with her husband and kids and, you know, it’s freezing in New York and they’re swimming today, so they’re super happy.

**John:** Yeah, life is good.

**Craig:** Life is good.

**John:** So life is also good on December 11th. That is the live Scriptnotes show in Hollywood. So as we record this on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, there are still some tickets left. I don’t know if they’re still really out there, because you, Craig, are bringing in a whole entourage. So I know that you requested, like, 20 tickets for you and your posse so —

**Craig:** I believe I’ve requested four tickets.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A lot.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s too much. That’s way too much.

**John:** Way too much. You’re disrupting everything.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Our other guests are going to be, so it’s me and Craig, Aline, Jane Espenson, B.J. Novak, Derek Haas, actress/singer/funny person Rachel Bloom, all those people will have entourages as well. So we’re not sure how many tickets are going to be left but if you would like to come, you should come. So go to wgfoundation.org, click Events and you will have the option to purchase the tickets. Come join us on December 11th at 8:00 pm.

**Craig:** Let me do a little hard sell on this, by the way.

**John:** All right, sure.

**Craig:** For those people that listen to the podcast but haven’t been to one of these things, they’re great. It’s just a more relaxed, fun atmosphere. There’s something about it just being all together in a room is fun. You also get to meet other people that listen to the show and people have made friends at these things. You know, it’s like a little community.

**John:** Yes, and we’ve had some babies created out of —

**Craig:** We must have had some podcast babies. I probably made a few podcast babies. I mean, don’t tell anybody. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Don’t tell Melissa. Does Melissa listen to your show?

**Craig:** Hey, Melissa, I made, like, 14 podcast babies. [laughs]

**John:** That’s absolutely not true and is the worst.

**Craig:** Not at all true. No.

**John:** Not at all true.

**Craig:** I don’t do that.

**John:** But the shows are genuinely fun and while we’ll, of course, ultimately have this show up for listening, it’s not going to be same thing as being there because we will cut it down and we will cut out, the audience Q&A will probably get cut out.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So that’s why you kind of want to come.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s a great Q&A. I’ll probably do 40 minutes on She-Hulk again [laughs], so that should be terrific.

**John:** Oh, don’t, no, don’t.

**Craig:** Oh, I shouldn’t do that? I shouldn’t?

**John:** No, no more She-Hulk. I think we’ve banned that discussion ever happening again. What I will say what’s interesting is because for my Kickstarter I had a video of me talking about it, some people wrote in and said, like, “Wow, you look nothing like I thought you would look like.” And that is a strange thing about listening to podcasts is that —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You have, just human nature. You form an image of, like, who you think goes with that voice, and apparently, I don’t look like my voice at all.

**Craig:** I also don’t look like my voice. Neither of us look like our voices.

**John:** Yeah. That’s a good thing.

**Craig:** I remember as a kid, you know, it’s funny, podcasts have kind of brought back an experience that you and I had when we were kids. And then I felt like it sort of went away because radio started to go away.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When I was a kid, I remember wondering like what does Howard Stern look like? And what does Robin Quivers look like? What do any of these people look like? And then that sort of went away because — and now, it’s back.

**John:** I remember being in Los Angeles, well, as I first moved here and listened to KROQ, and there was Kevin & Bean in the morning. And I had this image of who I thought Kevin and Bean were.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then I saw them at some live event and like, wow, that’s not even remotely what I thought that would be. It’s jarring.

**Craig:** They looked pretty much like I thought they would look like.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah. I used to listen to Kevin & Bean every morning. Kevin & Bean, and you know, people don’t know, like, that’s where Adam Carolla came out of, that’s where Jimmy Kimmel came out of.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was a great show but, you know, it’s radio. What are you going to do?

**John:** Yeah. I remember when Go was being launched, I mean, that was an incredibly important platform for us to get our actors and I think Doug Liman may have even been on that. And like Doug Liman on the radio, it’s just, “Why would you do that?”

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

**John:** But we were promoting our show. But, like, Breckin Meyer, Jay Mohr on that kind of show killed it.

**Craig:** Right, absolutely. Yeah, I know. It was a big deal back in the ’90s, yo.

**John:** Yo. Another thing we talked about on the previous show was Franz Kafka and we had a reader, Kevin, from Tokyo wrote in with a long response to that and I thought it was great so I thought I would read this aloud. “It was a pleasant surprise to hear Franz Kafka come up on the podcast. I spent many years studying his work and life, visiting the places he lived and wrote, archives, holding his manuscripts and so on. I’m writing to let you know that Craig’s literature professor lied to him.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm, liar.

**John:** “The mention that Kafka’s works were only published after his death and against his wishes is a persistent myth. The truth is, Kafka oversaw the publication and translation of many of his short stories and novellas, including Metamorphosis. He fretted over details and illustrations, cover designs, and tracked the sales records of his books.

“It is true they asked his friend Max Brod to destroy his unpublished manuscripts in fragments which he considered incomplete. One justification Brod later gave for ignoring this was that after making the request, Kafka continued to actually publish his work. He was working on correcting his proofs for the collection that contains The Hunger Artist when he died. I certainly do not mean to criticize you since Craig brought up Kafka as a springboard for talking about writers’ feelings about their work. Your podcast is not about Germanic literature and the whole thing started by Craig’s professor lying to him.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “I guess the professor wanted to leave out the facts to make a juicy story like the entertainment journalists who were the target of your umbrage. Thank you for your entertainment inspiration. Kevin in Tokyo.”

**Craig:** Well, thank you, Kevin in Tokyo. You know, this does happen. Sometimes these myths persist. And look, we are trusting Kevin because Kevin sounds informed. He could be lying to me also, [laughs], right? I mean, we now know that I am susceptible to these kinds of lies. But in this case, I think Print the Legend, that’s my theory.

**John:** I think it is a Print the Legend situation. So I was doing just a little bit of cursory research and it does seem that Kevin has other people in his corner backing him up. There’s a book by James Hawes and there’s a review I read by Joanna Kavenna in The Guardian, and I’ll read a little quote from her because I thought it actually really summed up sort of what we’re talking about. “Hawes strongly believes the myth surrounding Kafka has clouded the perception of his writing to the extent that his translators believe he should sound like some ghostly, plodding sub-Sartre rather than someone whose, ‘black-comic tales of what happens to modern people who can’t give up on the Old Ways’ could hardly be more timely.”

And I think that’s actually a really fascinating aspect of the Print the Legend because when you print the legend, it’s going to influence all the choices you make about that person’s work.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And in the case of Kafka, you are translating these things and so if your image of the person you’re translating is, like, “Oh, he’s dark and it’s all about, you know, gloom,” then you’re going to make choices that support that thesis rather than try and define, you know, the funny or the satirical aspects of what it is that he’s writing.

**Craig:** That’s true. And I suspect that this is all accurate because I know that I didn’t study Kafka anywhere near the extent to which Kevin has, obviously, but I did do a lot of Nietzsche studying in college and there are a ton of myths surrounding Nietzsche as well, that he had syphilis, which is not at all the case, that he was an anti-Semite, which is not at all the case. There’s just a lot. It happens, you know, and all these guys lived well before the time of over-examination. No more myths can possibly exist, it seems to me. Unfortunately, we repose mythology now.

**John:** Yeah, it’s very possible we are. I can think back to Columbus, for example, if you want to talk about a person who is sort of built around a myth. And so you and I grew up celebrating Columbus Day and, like this was the day of discovery and there’s all this imagery about sort of who Columbus was and now as we sort of discover more things about, like, “Oh, you know what? Maybe Columbus wasn’t such an awesome guy.” We have to sort of look at all this text we’ve read as a kid and say, like, “Wait, huh? Is this really the right thing to be talking about with Columbus?”

Or Thanksgiving, for example, Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday. I would not want to change anything about the modern celebration of Thanksgiving. But if you look at sort of what is the legend behind it, it probably wasn’t anything like what we want it to have been.

**Craig:** Oh, no question. America itself, essentially, is the product of, I mean, the American dream, the American stories, all mythological. I see mistakes cropping up all the time. In fact, I was listening to, somebody had put on Facebook this bit that David Cross does in an audio book where he’s rebutting Larry the Cable Guy who was complaining about him. And at one point, Larry the Cable Guy is complaining that America’s on the verge of banning Christianity which David Cross correctly finds absurd and says, “You know, this is a country where, you know, George Washington was christened.” Actually, most of those guys weren’t Christian.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Most of the Founding Fathers were Deists. They weren’t even Christians.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s just a lot of bad info circulating out there. And now, I’m circulating it as well. So good. Tune in next week for more disinformation.

**John:** Well, speaking of David Cross, David Cross’ frequent collaborator, Bob Odenkirk, is associated with our next —

**Craig:** Segue Man. [laughs]

**John:** A follow up. So on the last episode, we were talking about Simon Cowell and the aspect of, like, criticism and how criticism itself becomes a form of entertainment. And I said, like, “Oh, well, somebody should make a show where they just like criticize a stick of gum and it should be all about that.” And Jonathan Bell, a reader, wrote in, a listener wrote in and pointed us to this great Bob Odenkirk sketch which is on Funny or Die, which is all about — it’s called American Contestant.

And it’s a spoof of American Idol but it’s really just about the judges criticizing this woman who thinks she’s on a singing competition. It’s, like, “No, no, this isn’t about the singing.” It’s, like, “Well, I really want to go to Hollywood.” “We want to see that you want to go to Hollywood but, you know, you have to prove it.” And it just becomes about the nature of criticism and how criticism becomes a popular culture. So of course, I did have a good idea but about six years ago, Bob Odenkirk did a funny series of sketches about it.

**Craig:** Once again, trumped by Odenkirk.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not going to be the last time, I suspect.

**Craig:** No. No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Did you see the new Star Wars teaser?

**John:** I did. So we we’re recording this on Friday. So as we’re recording this it is a big deal because this new teaser came out so —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, how erect were your nipples when you saw it?

**Craig:** Like I could’ve cut glass with those things.

**John:** Yeah. I’ll pause for a second. When did cutting glass with nipples become a thing? Because it is a common phrase. How did it happen?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know how it happened out there. I cut glass with my nipples all the time. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Indeed.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** Basically, whenever you need to do a jewel heist, you have to get really, really excited so you can actually cut through the security glass and steal the jewel.

**Craig:** I have to sort of rotate my torso in a planar, circular fashion. Yeah. No, I do it all the time. I loved it. But rather than talk about the teaser trailer, I just want to tie in to what you were saying that it just seems like these things come out and then there’s just this horde of people just waiting to say, “Meh,” and “I don’t like it.”

**John:** I have to say, as we’re recording this on Friday, I have not heard a single “meh.” I’ve heard a lot of sort of like, “Holy cow, that was much better than I was expecting it to be.”

**Craig:** Well, look, it is exactly as good as I was expecting it to be but then again, as we know, I’m a positive movie-goer. I expect every teaser trailer to be awesome. I truly do. And then, you know, I start from a place of hope and then, you know, we’ll see what happens. But yeah, there was just a bunch, but you know what, sometimes when I’m on the Internet and this is a weird thing for somebody who does a podcast to say, I just want to — I wish there were a button like a shush button, and I could just shush the Internet, just shush. Everybody shush.

**John:** You can. You can close the window.

**Craig:** No, no, no, no, I want other people to shush. [laughs] I want everyone to be quiet, even on their own.

**John:** So on a previous episode of Scriptnotes, we talked about this list that a guy put out saying, like, you know, a list of reminders, sort of an open letter to J.J. Abrams and a list of reminders about Star Wars. And it is interesting that, J.J. Abrams is not a stupid person and it seems like he did a lot of the things on the list not because that list existed but because, like, they’re the right kind of ideas.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So the universe does definitely feel old. It doesn’t feel new and shiny. And, like, the helmets look battered and damaged. It definitely looks like it takes a place on a frontier.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It looks, you know, like there’s mysterious things happening.

**Craig:** Well, it also looks like it is part of the universe of the first three movies. It has the palette of the first three movies, those wonderful Ralph McQuarrie illustrations. It looks like those. The colors are like those. Obviously, we know from advanced publicity that he’s been erring towards the side of practical objects that are maybe enhanced by CGI as opposed to pure CGI creations. It just looks like a Star Wars movie whereas the other ones just didn’t, you know, so —

**John:** Very shiny.

**Craig:** Yeah, they were shiny. So, I’m super excited. I do believe that this movie will be the biggest. I believe it will be the biggest movie. I think —

**John:** It could be the biggest movie of all time.

**Craig:** I think it will be. I think it’s going to outdo Avatar.

**John:** Yeah. I think you’re probably right.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Hooray for everybody involved.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Last bit of follow-up. On the last episode, I asked if there were listeners who had insights about retail that could help me out as I’m trying to figure out Writer Emergency Pack and in 2015 we’re going to try to put it out in the world, both retails like physical retail and online retail. And about half a dozen people wrote in with like really, really good helpful suggestions. And so I just want to thank everyone who’s written in and if other people have thoughts about that.

And it’s a good segue to our first topic which is, I recognized this last week that we’re actually going to have to put Writer Emergency Pack in a whole separate company because right now I’ve been running it through my own loan-out company and it should not, for accounting reasons, it should just not be part of the loan-out company. So I thought we’d start by talking about loan-out companies.

**Craig:** The loan-out company, which is a quirk of the entertainment business. It really is, you know. It’s not something that anybody really should know about unless they are considering becoming a writer, an actor, a director. That is to say an individual who sells their own art that isn’t — and they’re not objects but rather us, our expression, our individual expression. So what happens is if you achieve a certain amount of success and you want it to be success that you expect to be repeated, not just a one-time deal, then everybody, every tax person, your agent, all of the people around you, your lawyer will say, “You need to form a loan-out company.” What is that?

It is a corporation. Typically, it’s an S-corp. Some people do a C-corp. And you become a company. So for the sake of argument, you’re the Joe Smith Company. The Joe Smith Company is controlled entirely by Joe Smith. Joe Smith owns all the stock. Joe Smith is the sole officer of the company. When you are hired to do things, let’s stick with writing because we are Scriptnotes, the studio makes a deal with the Joe Smith Company, not with you. The studio pays the Joe Smith Company. The Joe Smith Company, in turn, warrants that it is there to provide the services of Joe Smith. And then, of course, you set up something where the Joe Smith Company then pays Joe Smith.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** What’s the deal with all these hoops? What does it come down to? No shock, taxes.

**John:** Mostly taxes. So let me back up and make sure that a few terms are clear along the way. So when we say success, it’s not, like, “Hey, you got an Academy Award nomination.” Success means that you are earning a certain amount each year.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And so when I first became a corporation, that threshold was about $200,000. They said, like, if you’re making more than $200,000 a year, then you should incorporate so that you could have a loan-out and things would just become much simpler. That bar may actually be a little bit lower now just for —

**Craig:** That’s what I read, yeah. Now, I think maybe even $100,000. But back when we were starting, yeah, $200,000 was the number that I heard as well. So every actor you see in movies, pretty much every working writer, every director, everybody has a loan-out company.

**John:** So some of the advantages for this are taxes. And so it’s a way of, Sony is paying through a loan-out corporation. Your loan-out company has that money. Your loan-out company can take write-offs against that money for things like your agent and things like your manager and things like your lawyer. Some of the things are going to being paid as a corporation, so they’re not being charged to you individually. That’s very useful.

In almost all cases, the overall balance of your company will be zeroed out of a year. So they’re ultimately going to pay you but it’s a way of delaying paying you as an individual writer for a little bit longer, and that can be very, very useful. It can also be useful because if you have legitimate research that you need to do, trips you need to do to study something for something you’re writing, if you have an assistant like Stuart Friedel, that person can be paid out of your corporation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s generally much better to pay things from a corporate perspective than to pay as an individual.

**Craig:** Yeah. As an individual, taking business deductions is arduous. It is often a red flag. A real simple thing, for instance, I have an office in Pasadena. That’s where I am right now. If you’re an individual and you have a home office, the IRS is, like, “Do you really? Because that’s something that a lot of cheaters say they have but don’t really have. Is it really just your bedroom?” But if you have an office-office and it’s a corporation, it’s an office. They don’t have a problem with that. They expect that.
So you’re right. And there’s something called the alternative minimum tax where as an individual they’re like, “You can deduct a bunch of stuff but then where if you deduct too much, we’re just going to add on a new tax because we don’t really believe you.” That gets circumvented when you’re talking about the — having a corporation.

The other huge tax benefit to having a loan-out is that you can then access different levels and expanded levels of tax-deferred savings. I’m talking about retirement plans. So you can save, you know, as an individual, you have your IRA where, I don’t know, they let you put in $2,000 a year. As a loan-out, you can put in six figures. You can put in a lot of money in tax-deferreds for retirement. You will pay taxes on it one day but it gets to grow without you having to pay the taxes upfront and it’s better.

**John:** Absolutely. And I think we should stress for writers is that if you were a screenwriter, you’re going to be a member of the WGA. And so there will be a WGA pension. The WGA pension, while good for most industries, it’s probably not going to be sufficient for you to be carrying on for the rest of your life. And so socking away money as a screenwriter during your most productive years is really quite important. And to be able to do that in a tax-deferred way through a corporation is fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a must-do.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a must-do. I mean, it’s not just silly, it’s actually dangerous not to do that.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Well, an interesting that’s happened to me is like I’ve had some employees long enough that they have actually become vested in the corporation and therefore, like, they have retirement plans with me, which is just weird but also kind of great. So assistants who’ve been with for, like, five years —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Where now they have a pension, which is wonderful.

**Craig:** That’s amazing. Yeah, that’s terrific. You have all sorts of options and flexibilities when you are a loan-out corp. Some people will say that the other benefit is that, you know, you’re shielded a little bit from some legal issues. Not really.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The truth is that if you do something wrong as an individual, you can’t really hide behind that loan-out corp. That’s so easy. They call it piercing the veil. It’s so easy to say, “No, it’s really just you.” The other thing is that when we sign contracts with studios, one of the things we sign is a certificate of authorship that says, “We’re going to write this.” The individual is going to write this. That’s what the loan-out company is promising. And as an individual, we are warranting that we’re not ripping anyone off. We’re not infringing. We’re not making any, you know, bad mistakes.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about this from a newer writer’s perspective. And people might be listening and saying like, “I’m an aspiring screenwriter. Do I need to form a loan-out corporation?” The answer is unequivocally no.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So it’s one of those things like getting an agent, getting a lawyer, getting all that stuff, it’s all stuff that happens down the road. And when it has to happen, it just has to happen. Actually, here’s the best parallel. It’s the kind of thing like joining the WGA. You don’t need to join the WGA until you need to join the WGA. Like, at the minute you sign to write a script for a studio that’s a signatory or you sell a script to a signatory, then congratulations. You have to join the WGA and you are now a WGA member. The same kind of thing holds true for incorporating is that at the minute you need to incorporate, your agents, your lawyer, your manager will tell you, “Oh, about that time. You got to incorporate.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And there will be a whole process to do it because literally thousands of people have done it before you.

**Craig:** That’s right. There’s a fee involved to incorporate in the State of California. You know, it’s tempting to think, “God, what I should do is incorporate in Nevada because they don’t have taxes there the way that we have taxes here.” Yeah, it don’t work that way. You got to —

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Incorporate where you live, in the state you live. But they will tell you — it’s good information though to have in your pocket for those of you, especially if you’ve just sold your first thing, if you’re on the verge, this is something you should start talking about with your attorney because it’s a huge benefit to you. You will actually save a lot of money. By the way, do you, question.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Do you use a business manager?

**John:** I do use a business manager. So I will get into that. But first I want to back up one step and say that the first thing I sold, Go, was the first, actually, that wasn’t my biggest sale. I sold two things which I was paid as an individual, neither of which got produced. And those were just paid to John August. And I sold Go and that was just paid to John August. It was after Go that I incorporated. So I still get checks sometimes for just John August money. It’s not my loan-out money.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And it’s fine. It’s just a little bit weird that there’s some stuff that falls outside that veil and falls outside that —

**Craig:** I’m in the exact same boat. My first two movies, RocketMan and Senseless, were both —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I didn’t have a loan-out.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So the residuals go to me personally for those. But everything else, they go to the corporation.

**John:** So actually back to your question about a business manager, yes, I do have a business manager, Carrie, and I love her to death. And so she is responsible for keeping track of the corporate money and keeping track of sort of the individual John August money. So I get quarterly statements. She files, you know, the estimated taxes, the quarterly taxes that have get through and make sure that all of the stuff happens.

And again it goes back to the heart surgery thing. She does this for a lot of other writers, a lot of writers that you and I both know. And because she’s seen all the stuff before, it’s just gets done, and it gets done right. But you do not if I can remember correctly.

**Craig:** I don’t, no. Because I kind of like this sort of stuff. I mean, some people have different arrangements. Some business managers do everything for people. They pay their bills. You know, they talk to, “Oh, I need to switch my, the guy that does my exterminating.” Okay, we’ll handle it. So I don’t do any of that. I pay all of my bills. I like Quicken, you know, I’m a Quicken guy. I do have a tax guy that I work with and I have financial investment managers that obviously I don’t , you know, I don’t know what stocks or anything like that. I don’t do that sort of thing.

But the other stuff I handle, you know, it’s not that bad. It’s pretty simple. And, you know, with computers now, it gets even simpler than it used to be.

**John:** So the conversation I had to have this last week with my business manager and with my accountant, and ultimately with my lawyer is that my company, my loan-out company, has been doing all the stuff we do for apps and it’s worked out just fine. So I have employees and we do stuff. The challenge is the company works, the corporation loan-out, works as a cash-based business. That’s fine when you don’t have inventory. But once you start having inventory —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Things get a lot more complicated. So the only inventory we’ve had to date, has been literally like our 150 episodes Scriptnotes drives and our t-shirts and those just sell out and then they’re done and nothing sits around.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But these will sit around and there will be orders coming in and orders going out and there’ll be this whole timeline thing, and first in, first out. And it’s just going to be very complicated and wrong to try to bend this company to deal with that kind of situation. So it will end up being, I think, a whole separate company that will end up being the distributor of Writer Emergency Pack and other things we hope to make.

**Craig:** As well as it should, yeah, because when you have — I remember talking with my late father-in-law about this. He was a Burger King franchisee. So he owned a couple of Burger Kings and you would have to do the same thing with your new company if they get in to profit and loss statements.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just a whole other world. See, the loan-out company exists and can exist because it’s so simple.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, we don’t have stock, we don’t have inventory. We don’t even have profit and loss because our overhead is such a joke, you know. I mean, let’s put it this way. If your overhead is so great that it’s eating up all of your money, I mean the idea is whatever your overhead is as a writer, that plus the money you pay yourself should equal all of the money you’ve earned.

**John:** Exactly. The goal is to zero out everything, every —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Every year, every financial year. And as a writer, that’s really simple to do. As someone who has inventory, that’s just not going to be possible.

**Craig:** Right. Because if you don’t, then ultimately you end up paying taxes twice.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because the corporation is making money, it has to be taxed. And then it’s going to send it to you, and then that’s going to be taxed again. Anyway, this is something that you, I know it’s all wonky, money, annoying stuff. But if you want to be a screenwriter, you kind of got to know about it.

**John:** You do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And you need to think about it at the time that you need to think about it. And so awareness of it before it happens is great. And then when the time comes that you need to do it, you do it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So my questions are mostly the writers I know from loan-out companies are feature writer people but it happens in television too.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And at a certain point you’re getting paid enough money, and you’re being paid as both a writer and producer, and that’s going to be enough money that that will happen. But I wonder, are professional athletes a loan-out company?

**Craig:** I believe they are. Yeah, I can imagine —

**John:** And musicians are probably the same. Like Taylor Swift, I’m sure is.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** She is a multibillion and whatever. But I think any time that you’re being paid a lot of money as an individual —

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** That’s when you want to be paid as a loan-out.

**Craig:** And particularly when you are essentially an individual actor not performance actor but an individual person doing something. So, you know, it’s the difference between now becoming an employee of a company temporarily as opposed to a corporation that’s being contracted and providing a service to somebody. It’s just a better thing. By the way, a little bit of advice for those of you out there who are successful enough to incorporate and have your loan-out company. Don’t name it something stupid.

**John:** Because that name will stick with you for the rest of your life.

**Craig:** And it’s super hard to change it. So —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When I started out, I was working at Disney. And when I had to set up my loan-out, I remember that my business card from Disney, it said The Walt Disney Company. I thought, “Oh, if it’s good enough for Walt Disney, it’s probably good enough for me. I think The Craig Mazin Company is probably, that sounds like a good name.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Did you pick something silly?

**John:** I picked something good, it’s Quote-Unquote Films Inc.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, that’s totally fine, it’s respectable.

**John:** But unfortunately, it doesn’t actually make sense with things that aren’t films, so —

**Craig:** True.

**John:** You know, the new company name will be something different that it makes more sense for that. And if you want a good advice on picking a good name, I would go to the recent South Park episode, I think it’s Go Fund Yourself where they actually picked names for their startup venture. And it’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Those guys are the best.

**John:** So our second topic is the Perfect Reader. So this is the third installment of our Perfect series. We have no idea how many installments there’ll be. Craig, how many installments will there be? Thousands?

**Craig:** Thousands, yeah.

**John:** So we previously talked about the perfect studio executive. We talked about the perfect agent. Today, we want to talk about the perfect reader. And by reader, we really kind of mean two different things. We mean a reader who is a professional gatekeeper, somebody who is the difference between your script moving on some place and not moving on some place.

We’re also talking about the sort of casual reader which is the friend or acquaintance or compatriot who you’ve given your scripts to and that person is reading your script and they’re both looking at your script and judging it and hopefully giving you some feedback on your script. But there are very different goals behind it.

So we just want to talk about what it’s like to be a great reader.

**Craig:** Well, why don’t we start with the friend version?

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** And then we’ll get to the professional version. So I do this all the time. Just in the last month, I’ve read a script by Scott Silver. I read stuff by Koppelman and Levien. And the first thing that I think that the perfect reader has to do is make sure they understand what the person giving them wants.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And you don’t always get it right, you know. Sometimes you get it wrong. But it’s important for me to know, okay, has anyone read this before? Are you looking for a wide open what do you think? Or is this something that is already set up and you’re having questions about A, B, or C?

Is this targeted? Do you want to know what I think about what I would call like inside the scenes or do you want to think about the total thing? And you try and get a sense of that so that you don’t, so that you don’t go too far or just bore them with stuff that’s irrelevant or that they can’t do anything about.

**John:** I sent a script to a friend and her first response back was, “Do you want me to tell you that it’s really good or do you want notes?” And it was such an honest response. And I sort of split the difference saying like mostly I want you tell me that it’s really good. But if there’s anything that sticks out that says like, uh-uh, that part doesn’t work, please let me know. And it was such a wonderfully, upfront way of addressing sort of what I was looking at —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** For the experience.

**Craig:** That’s the other thing is that sometimes people send you something and that’s what they want. They want validation with some little bon mot of easily done work.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Sometimes people really do want shotgun to the face. In general, when I read things, what I say to people is, look, my default position is what I would want which is shotgun to the face. But if you’re not looking for shotgun to the face, let me know, and I’ll adjust.

And again, you know you don’t — everybody’s different. Like not every reader is right for every writer. You know, so like Scott Silver and I, we have a good, like I really like reading his stuff and I feel like I have a good, and the same thing with Brian and David. And Scott Frank and I read each other’s stuff. And so you find people that you’re like, okay, yeah, this is actually working, this is a good deal.

Then other people maybe you’re like I don’t think I helped them or whatever. But when you’re doing this for somebody else, the most important thing, I think, the perfect reader does is not think how would I rewrite this, which is a mistake I think a lot of writers make. And it’s natural because most of the time when you’re a professional writer and you’re reading someone else’s script it’s because the studio has given it to you and said, “Would you rewrite this please?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So your natural instinct is to go, all right, I’m going to read this now and imagine what would I do. That’s not helpful for your friend. What’s helpful for your friend is, I’m just going to read this and then I’m going to say to you here’s where I got confused. Here’s where I wasn’t sure what to think. Here’s where I thought what you wrote didn’t feel good. You know, it’s all about just pure audience style reaction. And then ideally you offer some solutions. They don’t have to be hard and fast solutions or overspecific because you want the writer to feel like they’re going to write their work.

But it’s not enough to say, “You know, this scene felt a little bit too much like that other scene.” It’s better to say, “You know, this scene, when these two people talk like this, these two other people are talking the same way in this other scene. So what if instead they did something like this or this or this, just so I didn’t feel that repetition because I like what’s happening in the scene. I just feel maybe, it felt repetitive to me.” That kind of thing.

**John:** So it’s a different experience when you know the person whose script you’re reading and when the person is a stranger. And so I love reading scripts from friends who are tremendously talented writers. A lot of times I’m reading scripts for things like Sundance, The Sundance Institute. And so I’m reading their scripts and but the first thing I always think about is, “What movie are they trying to make?” And I’ll never sort of — it’s dangerous — you should never ask that question first because that just sets you off on a path of like talking about things rather than talking about the movie itself.

But again, I don’t want to think about, “What movie would I want to make?” I’m saying like, “What movie did they seem to be trying to make on the page?” And when I think in the sense of what movie is it that they’re trying to make, then I can really look at it from perspective of like, “Are these scenes helping them tell the story that they seem to be wanting to tell?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which scenes best encapsulate this vision of what they have and which scenes stick out because they’re not actually getting to where I think they want to be going. And that way, I can sort of start the conversation with them, saying like, “Here’s what I think is so awesome and amazing. Here’s where I think this movie is. Tell me if I’m wrong, tell me if this is the right thing you’re aiming for. And if so, then let’s talk about how well these things are working and why these things might not be helping support that vision of what you have for your movie.”

In general, if you can talk about your reactions in terms of this future thing, the movie rather than this thing that’s sitting there in front of them that they’ve been slaving over, they’re going to be much more free to extrapolate and expand and move away from decisions they have made because it took them so long to write that moment.

**Craig:** That’s right. And I think what you’re zeroing in on is that when we are reading things for our friends, we have to read them like we’re producing the movie rather than that we’re rewriting the movie, you know. And a good producer is there to say, “I’m going to tell you how I felt not as a writer because I’m not a writer. I’m an audience member. I watched this movie in my head. Here’s what I thought of the movie. Here’s where I thought it worked, here’s where I thought it didn’t work. Here’s what I think, like you said, the movie is or wants to be. Here’s something that I loved and wish there was more of.”

It’s just an honest expression of your reaction. And it is not at all clouded by anything other than a pure audience member rooting for the movie as opposed to, “Oh, I don’t like this sort of thing,” or, “I don’t write like that,” or “Why would you? Your character, you know, is always like the way you do action.” No one needs that, you know. And particularly when it’s a fellow professional, one of the nice things about reading scripts from fellow professionals is that I never worry that there’s a subtext of, “I’m evaluating you as a writer.” Because I’m not. We’re all good writers, we all are professionals. I’m just evaluating the movie.

**John:** So let’s talk about the other kind of writer, the other kind of reader, I should say. This is the kind of reader who is working for a production company, for a studio, for a producer, a director. Is reading through a bunch of material and has to render a decision about like, “This is a script that I think is worth this next person reading or I think we can pass on this right now.” And I used to have this job. I think you used to do some reading as well.

One of my first jobs in Hollywood was as a reader at TriStar. And so I would have to read — I was reading 14 scripts a week and writing up coverage on them. And that’s a very different kind of reading because while you’re still flipping the pages and sort of taking notes and looking at what’s working and what’s not working, ultimately your audience is not the writer who wrote that script, but it’s some other decision maker. And so what your job is is to encapsulate, well, this is what is actually here and this is what’s working about what’s here. This is what’s not working about what’s here.

And there’s a third thing which I think is also really important which is a thing you don’t do when you’re talking to an individual writer is you’re saying, “Here’s the good writing and here’s the bad writing. Here’s strengths I see in this writer and here are the weaknesses I see in this writer.” It’s a very different experience because you’re not trying to think about being supportive, you’re just trying to be kind of blunt.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And honest about sort of an assessment of what this is in front of you.

**Craig:** And these people not only read, I mean we’re all familiar with the notion of new writers who are sending their work in and it’s getting coverage somewhere, and they’re hoping that it gets passed to somebody, and that’s true. But frankly, for you and for me, this also occurs where studios, internally, have work that they’ve commissioned to be covered by their own readers. They want that as well.

So we all live in the world of these people. And by and large, I think they do a good job. I’ve read some, lots of coverage, some of my works, some of other people’s work. And what I think is the best kind of gatekeeper reader is not so concerned with jamming the movie into a box. They’re not a production executive, they’re not trying to figure out what would be good in our slate or would this make a lot of money or any business concerns. They just concern themselves with the script and with the craft of the script and whether or not the script is true to itself and is well written. So they avoid some of that stuff.

I find that the good ones tend to leave out what feel like personal axes. If you don’t like violence, if you think that violence is distasteful, don’t cover bloody R-rated action movie scripts. They’re not for you and that’s just not an appropriate, you know, reason to ding a script. So you leave out your personal ax grinding.

I remember Todd Phillips showed me coverage that was done of a script that he and Scot Armstrong wrote many years ago and it was really, I really like the script and so did the reader. But then the reader — there was one joke. It was a 9-11 joke and it was, I think it was — the script was covered like on 9-12. And the reader was just outraged and wrote an entire paragraph about how this joke was the worst thing ever. And I just thought that’s a bad reader because that’s not relevant.

The joke will be cut — if it doesn’t work, guess what, it gets cut. We don’t even shoot it at all. That’s not why you’re there, to argue about a line in the movie, you know. So that’s less than ideal. But, you know.

**John:** Yeah. So quite earlier in my career, when I think I first had an agent, I was working at a production company and I had readers who worked for me. And so there was a slow week and there really wasn’t quite enough to cover. So I’ve slipped this reader, who I thought was a really good reader, my own script under a different cover page. Just to see like, oh, let’s see what he thinks about this. And he slammed it. He just really ripped it to shreds. And it was so fascinating. Both to see what he wrote, but also to sort of internally look at my own reaction and sort of like how I was gauging my own work that other people really liked because this one reader has sort of slammed on it and it sort of gets to the nature of all criticism. But I will tell you that that never actually kind of stops.

And there’s one project that I have that is dormant at a studio. And I’m pretty sure one of the reasons why it’s dormant is because someone snuck out the coverage, the internal coverage at the studio. And it’s really negative coverage on this project that they paid me a lot of money to write.

And it’s just so fascinating that after, you know, being employed to write this thing and having people like it and, you know, getting directors on board, this one piece of coverage apparently does, I’ve heard from other people, continues to hurt it.

**Craig:** When you say snuck out, you mean put it online?

**John:** No, no, no. Like somebody at — I think my agency or someone else’s agent said like, “You know, the coverage there is really bad.”

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. And this can, this is a real problem because you would think, “Well, look, all of these people are paid a lot of money to decide what movies to make. They’re the president of a studio or the senior vice president or whatever.” And then there’s a guy that they pay, I don’t know what readers got paid, but not a million dollars a year. And this person takes a dump on the script and they all go, “Well, it got bad coverage.” And that becomes kind of the path of least resistance to sort of yield to that.

**John:** Yeah. I think it has been a bit of a momentum killer on this particular project. Now is that insurmountable? Hardly. We can totally get past that and getting one director or one piece of talent on it will completely change everything. If Cowboy Ninja Viking gets bad covered someplace and then it gets, you know, Chris Pratt attached, well who cares about that coverage.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But it is a piece of momentum, you know, early on in the process.

**Craig:** It’s true. And frankly, you know, I was — happily Cowboy Ninja Viking got very good internal coverage. If it hadn’t, the problem is there’s just suddenly less of an impetus to get the script out to agents, and managers, and big actors because internally they kind of lose a little bit of their love for it and that’s a weird thing. But it’s a true thing, and I have to say that those people, we don’t know them. They’re very powerful.

There’s one reader at Universal, in particular. I don’t know him, I don’t even know his name. I just know the legend of him that he’s kind of their guy. And he’s a very powerful person. And, you know, in a way I’m glad he’s there because he’s like that silent, unseen person that is in the back of my head when I’m writing. I’m just thinking, you know, you can’t really get away with stuff because one day that guy is going to read it. And that guy isn’t thinking about marketing. He’s not thinking about the schedule or, “Oh, we need a movie that fits into this particular box because we don’t have anything like that.”

He’s just going to read the script and say is this good or bad and I like that. Actually, if you’re writing a script that’s off the beaten path a little bit, then that reader actually could be your best friend which, let me just say is another thing that I think the perfect gatekeeper reader does. They don’t shy away from different or ambitious. They kind of like it.

**John:** Well, I’m going to disagree with you on a bit of this because I worry about mythologizing this terrifying reader as the person who is going to stop you from being able to make your movie. I know I just said that it was a momentum killer on this one project. But I don’t want to sort of ascribe too much power or fear among this one person because if your studio executive loves the project and it gets bad coverage, yeah, you’re going to be fine. So it’s not the one sole gatekeeper. It’s the person who’s writing their opinion down and therefore it matters.

I will say as the person who was reading at TriStar, so you know, I looked through my coverage when I left and I had just covered like 110 scripts. And I had given two really enthusiastic recommends on two things. And in both cases I was called to the matt for having wasted people’s time.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** With these enthusiastic recommends. And that was incredibly frustrating. One of them was a really good Billie Holiday biopic and they were just like, “Well, who would want to see a Billie Holiday biopic?” And I was like, “You know what, I bet you can make a really good one now and I bet it could be really kind of great.” But I got called to the matt for wasting people’s time.

**Craig:** Really? See, to me that’s outrageous. Because I mean, and this is why I — look, I wasn’t a studio reader and I would have been fired immediately because I would have said, “That’s not my job. My job isn’t to tell you who would go see this or why you should make it. My job is —

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** “To tell you is this good or not? How about this, you didn’t waste your time. You’re not going to make a Billie Holiday pic but look how good this writer is. Do you have something else you want to make that this person could write? You know, she’s really good, read her stuff.” That’s just dumb.

**John:** The other one I remember recommending was a script called Full Honeymoon. It was by a writing team. And it wasn’t perfect but it was a very good solid romantic comedy. And you could sort of see where it was going but it was a very good version of that. And the ability to say like this is a really good version of this kind of movie. So, while you may not make this movie, these are writers you should probably consider hiring for other stuff. And I remember being called to the floor for that too. So I have tremendous sympathy for readers as well.

**Craig:** Yeah, I do, too.

**John:** And many screenwriters are going to be readers along the way. And my recommendation is reading is really a great way to learn about scripts and learn about sort of what things never work on the page. But you have to get out of being a reader before you just get that hole burned in your brain. Because it’s impossible to read 15 scripts a week and actually write your own.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. I totally agree. I think that any overconsumption of something is bad for you. Overconsuming movies the way that critics do because they have to is bad for them. It skews their appreciation of movies because they’re not intended to be consumed that way. And the same thing is true for scripts.

If you’re writing, I mean, I know, I don’t know about you. But when I’m writing something, sometimes someone will say, “Hey, do you want to read this script? It’s kind of in a similar vein.” I’ll say, “Absolutely not.” That’s the last thing I want to do is read anything that’s in the same tone because I just know the way I am. It’s going to bother me, it’s going to affect my choices. I want to be able to choose freely and not worry like, “Oh, but they kind of did a thing that was sort of like that. Or I didn’t like the way they did that, maybe I should do something else.” I could see where it would become a little toxic.

**John:** Yeah. And I have a hunch, though, as we do with Perfect series we’re going to come back to the same characteristics for every perfect person. But I think they’re going to come down to honesty, clarity, kindness/forthrightness, the ability to sort of to speak the truth but speak it in a way that understands what the audience for it actually is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And as we talked about a studio executive, those are the characteristics to look for. As you look at an agent, those are the same characteristics. And the same is true for a reader, be it a professional reader who is, you know, deciding which movies the bosses should read or it’s a friend reading a script. You want those people to take their jobs seriously and be able to communicate effectively what it is that they’re seeing.

**Craig:** I agree. And I guess I would throw on there another unifying quality to all these perfect professionals is a lack of cynicism. That they approach their tasks with a rooting interest and a desire to see success occur as opposed to the opposite which I think does affect quite a few people.

**John:** I agree. So our last topic for the today is Dan Benjamin who runs the 5by5 podcast network has been doing podcasting really from this whole new area of podcasting. You could trace a lot of the stuff back to him and sort of the shows that he created on his network. And so when we started to do our show, I remember looking for like what equipment should we use. It was one of his blog posts that became the go-to for sort of which microphone should we use, how should we do this. And so this last week he updated his blog posts with some new recommendations and so I want to point to that because it’s really, really good.

So if you’re thinking about doing a podcast, this is probably the first place you should look in terms of hardware and software recommendations. So it’s Dan Benjamin. The URL is podcastmethod.co and it’s just a really terrific expert’s opinion on sort of how stuff should work.

**Craig:** Are we still doing it right?

**John:** We’re doing it right. And so it’s interesting because we are using a lot of the stuff that he is recommending. And so let’s talk about our microphones. So we used to use these accent microphones. So you still use the Audio-Technica 2020?

**Craig:** I don’t. I now use the Apogee —

**John:** Ah-huh.

**Craig:** Something, something.

**John:** All right. And so you are using a condenser microphone. And a condenser microphone classically records voices really well but also records the surrounding environment, which in your case, your office is pretty well padded, so there’s not a lot of —

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Bouncing around happening.

**Craig:** Right, yeah.

**John:** So other than the sirens, it’s all good.

**Craig:** If there were no sirens, it would be perfect.

**John:** And so I used to use the Audio-Technica 2020. I just switched three episodes ago to the Heil PR-40 which is a dynamic microphone. And that is because my office is really bouncy and noisy and so my side of the audio I always felt was a little bit too live and a little too present and echoey. And so after some negotiation and discussion, we switched to this microphone. And I think I’m happier. So I’m going to give you an example of what’s so different about my microphone.

So here, I’m talking into the microphone. And if I move a little bit off to the side, my voice really completely fades away.

**Craig:** That’s right. Whereas if I do that same test, I’m over here, I’m over here, I’m over here, it’s probably the same.

**John:** It’s about the same.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So that is one of the useful differences. And because I’m working in a busy office, honestly the guys downstairs can have a conversation, you wouldn’t hear it up here. So it’s really useful this dynamic microphone. If I’m directly talking into it, it’s awesome, otherwise you can’t hear me at all.

**Craig:** Well, I’m glad that our setup is still pretty good for what we do. But, you know, it’s not about the setup, man. It’s about the content, bro.

**John:** It’s all about the content. I would much rather hear a poorly recorded podcast that has interesting things being discussed than a terrifically recorded podcast that’s boring.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So we are recording this on Skype. So you and I are very rarely in the same room together. So we are on a Skype call. You’re recording your end locally on your own device, I’m recording my end locally on my own device. Just QuickTime, hit record. Recently we started using Call Recorder, so we actually are recording the Skype call as well. So when Matthew Chilelli edits the podcast together, if he needs to, he can grab this Skype recording of the whole thing together and use that if anything goes wrong on one of our sides.

We cut the show, I believe Matthew’s he’s cutting it on Logic these days, but we still end up going back to GarageBand because GarageBand let’s it put in chapter markers. And I want to step up for chapter markers for a second because so many podcasts don’t do it. I think they’re so useful.

So in our podcast, in most podcast players, you can hit the jump forward button, it’ll jump to the next topic. And so Stuart puts in those little chapter marks, so if you really don’t care about loan-out companies, you can skip over that whole segment.

**Craig:** But who doesn’t care about loan-out companies?

**John:** Everyone should care.

**Craig:** You know what we should do? On the chapter marks for this, under loan-out companies it should just say sex tips.

**John:** That’s nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. Everyone will check that out.

**John:** So GarageBand is also where you put in all your metadata, so information about the show itself. And that’s what shows up when you are in your podcast app and you want to see what the episode is about, it’s all there.

**Craig:** You know who loves sex tips?

**John:** Who?

**Craig:** Sexy Craig.

**John:** I walked right into that.

**Craig:** Hey, dude, how was your Thanksgiving, man? Did you stuff that turkey? Did you stuff it?

**John:** So it’s time for One Cool Things.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** My One Cool Thing is A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. It is a great Iranian vampire western. Did I say Iranian?

**Craig:** You said Iranian and I thought maybe you meant Randian like Ayn Rand had written a vampire Western.

**John:** No. Iranian, Iranian, both of those would be better choices than what I just said.

**Craig:** Iranian. Yeah, Iranian.

**John:** Iranian vampire western. It’s by Ana Lily Amirpour. It’s just great. It is black and white. I saw it at Sundance. It is terrific. It is, you know, set in Iran. It is a vampire movie. It is a western. It is sort of period, it’s black and white. It’s just terrific. And so I highly recommend people go to see it. It’s in five theaters in the Los Angeles area, including the Sunset 5. And so if you have a chance to see it in a real theater, I would definitely go and see it in a real theater. If not, come see it when it comes out on video. It’s just great.

She’s really talented. And I don’t think all the details about her next movie are released yet. I am fascinated to see what she’s able to do with it because it’s really ambitious and could be really, really cool.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** But this movie that she made is a great example of picking things that, you know, you can do and letting your limitations be empowering. And so she didn’t shoot this film in Iran, but she was able to find places in Southern California that looked like Iran. And by shooting it in black and white, she can create this really unique and special world that supports, you know, just cool things we’ve never seen in a vampire movie before. So I highly recommend it.

**Craig:** All right. That’s good enough for me. I’m there. I’ll go check that out.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is something that you need to file away for next year.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** It’s a recipe.

**John:** I love it.

**Craig:** I don’t know if I’ve ever cited the best recipe as my One Cool Thing. It should be. The best recipe is the big Omnibus Cookbook put out by Cook’s Illustrated and America’s Test Kitchen where they take lots and lots and lots of recipes of things and they basically do every version they could find, get a hold on and then say to you, “This is the best one and here’s why.” And they’re very scientific about it. They love to talk about molecules and things. It’s great.

However, sometimes the best recipe is not the best recipe because one size does not fit all, you know. However, I did make the best recipe stuffing, specifically the bacon, caramelized onion, sage, and apple stuffing.

**John:** Well, that sounds great.

**Craig:** It was spectacular. Rave reviews from everybody. Best stuffing I’ve ever made. Best stuffing they ever had. If you’re looking for a good stuffing, and I’m not a stuff inside the turkey guy. I don’t do that.

**John:** No, no.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s just —

**John:** Dangerous.

**Craig:** It’s dangerous, it’s going to dry your turkey out because your turkey takes too long to cook, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, the point is it’s not easy to make, it’s annoying to make, it’s spectacular. It’s really, really good. That is the stuffing recipe.

**John:** And Cook’s Illustrated could probably point out the reason why it’s so successful is you’ve combined, you know, smoky, salty, sweet —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Carby.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because it is stuffing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Whatever you quality you want to say sage has, it’s —

**Craig:** Savory. You’ve got the tartness of the apples, a little sour from the apple because you’re using Granny Smith’s. It really does hit every part of your tongue. And texturally, it’s super crunchy because you start with a baguette that you slice up and leave out overnight. Then you chop that up into cubes and leave that out overnight and then it burns really super hard, which is great because then as it cooks, it sucks up some of the liquid so it’s still crunchy but soft. It’s just perfect.

**John:** So I have two stuffing related bits of follow-up. First off, Ike Barinholtz who is a talented writer and actor on The Mindy Project, he Instagrammed today, “Oh, this is my breakfast.” And so he basically took leftover stuffing and then cracked an egg on top of it and baked it with some cheese on top. Is that not a genius idea?

**Craig:** I mean, generally the day after Thanksgiving is when you’re trying to unclog your arteries, but yeah. [laughs] That sounds awesome.

**John:** And so my only stuffing modification this year, because I had a very classic, you know, celery, onions stuffing — cranberries. And just, you know, we had fresh cranberries. And so I microwaved them a bit so they softened up, added some sugar so they weren’t incredibly tart, and mixed those into stuffing. Delicious.

**Craig:** Well, spectacular.

**John:** Spectacular.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** If you would like to know more about the things we talked about on the show, join us at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. There you’ll find show notes for this episode and all of our other previous episodes. You’ll also find transcripts for our previous episodes. We’re one of the few shows that does transcripts, so please look those up if you’re curious.

If you would like to find us on iTunes, just search for Scriptnotes. You can also search iTunes to find the Scriptnotes app for your iOS device or also on the Android Store and the Amazon Android Store. And that’s where you can find episodes of our premium show. Premium subscription is $1.99 a month.

**Craig:** That’s it.

**John:** $1.99. A bargain.

**Craig:** So easy.

**John:** Let’s you get to all the back episodes and bonus episodes that we put up as well. If you would like to come to our live show on December 11th, go wgfoundation.org and join us for that. If you would like to reach Craig Mazin, find him on Twitter. He’s @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. Longer questions, go to ask@johnaugust.com.

And our outro this week is provided by Betty Spinks.

**Craig:** Yeah, Betty.

**John:** Thank you for running that in. Yay, Betty. I think Betty Spinks is a pseudonym for somebody but —

**Craig:** Okay, all right.

**John:** Thank you, Betty Spinks. If you have an outro for our show, something that uses the [hums theme] in a clever way, please write it and please send us a link to that so we will know to find it and use it as the outro to our show. And that is our episode this week. Craig, thank you for a fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** All right, talk to soon.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Mary’s Heritage Turkeys](http://www.marysturkeys.com/)
* [Get your tickets now](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-holiday-show/) for the Scriptnotes Holiday Show
* [American Contestant with Bob Odenkirk](http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/da114dc7e4/american-contestant-delicia)
* [Dan Benjamin’s podcast guide](http://podcastmethod.co/), and [Marco Arment’s](http://www.marco.org/2014/11/29/easy-listening)
* [A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night](http://www.analilyamirpour.com/#!untitled/c13ay) by Ana Lily Amirpour
* [Bread Stuffing with Bacon, Apples, Sage, and Caramelized Onions](http://heatherhomemade.com/2011/11/bread-stuffing-bacon-apples-sage-caramelized-onions/) from [The New Best Recipe](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0936184744/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Betty Spinks ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/ghost).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 163 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, on previous episodes we talked about Raiders of the Lost Ark.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We went deep on Frozen.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We talked about Groundhog Day.

**Craig:** And The Little Mermaid.

**John:** And The Little Mermaid. Actually, The Little Mermaid was our first one.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, it’s another one of those, and this was your idea from last week.

**Craig:** It was my idea?

**John:** I think so. We said Ghost and you said we should do that.

**Craig:** Yeah, we should do that.

**John:** We should do that right now. So, our episode this week is talking about the 1990 film Ghost.

**Craig:** Ghost.

**John:** And talking about it in sort of the kind of depth that only we would want to talk about it in.

**Craig:** Only we can do what we’re about to do.

**John:** Yes. We will unchain our melodies and get into Ghost.

**Craig:** [sings] Ooh…my…

Okay.

**John:** But first a little bit of follow up. John Miller wrote in and said, “What is the 12 Days of Scriptnotes I see on the back of the sexy new t-shirt?” So, he’s talking about the Scriptnotes t-shirts. Craig, we sold a whole bunch of these Scriptnotes t-shirts.

**Craig:** I’m not surprised. It’s a great t-shirt. I think everybody should own one, whether they listen to the podcast or not.

**John:** Well, it’s the softest t-shirt we’ve ever made. And if you remember the first batch of t-shirts we made, they were supposed to be just the world’s softest things. And they were really incredibly good. But I challenged Stuart Friedel that, you know what — we need to make an even softer t-shirt. And Stuart’s sense of softness is just remarkable. And so he found the t-shirt. He says the paragon of softness is this American Apparel shirt from 2008 that doesn’t exist anymore.

**Craig:** That was the 10 on the scale. That’s the diamond —

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** Yeah. And so like nothing can actually, like if you were to scratch something against it, it couldn’t even scratch. It can scratch nothing.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s maximum soft.

**John:** I think the reason they don’t make that t-shirt anymore is they use it to swaddle newborns.

**Craig:** Because air scratches the shirt.

**John:** Yes. So, the closest we were able to come to it is actually not an American Apparel shirt. It’s the next level shirt. It’s a blend and it’s kind of great. And so I tested it and it’s really a wonderful shirt. So, we’re making them only in gray, only with or sort of Sons of Anarchy tour band, just sort of world tour logo kind of thing. So, they’re only available for one more week, so people need to click on them to get them. So, store.johnaugust.com and you can order them.

And they run sort of in American Apparel sizes. So, if you are between a medium and a large, you get the large, so aim up is what we’re saying.

**Craig:** And what is it actually — do we know what it’s made out of? Is it some kind of chemical? How else is it so soft?

**John:** It is a blend. And so that’s the thing, to make really soft t-shirts they can’t be 100% cotton. They have to be a blend of cotton and two other fibers. So, it’s a tri-blend.

**Craig:** But they won’t say, because those fibers are — they’re made in a lab, deep in a lab under micro —

**John:** No, I think actually, I’ve listened to another podcast that was talking about sort of how fabrics were made, because I listen to a lot of other podcasts, and so it’s actually not —

**Craig:** Wait, there are other podcasts? [laughs]

**John:** There are other podcasts in the world.

**Craig:** I thought this was it. I thought this was the —

**John:** There’s us and the Slate Culture Gabfest, then one that we’re —

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

**John:** October 8.

**Craig:** So, there’s two now?

**John:** So there’s now two podcasts.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** And so it must have been on the other podcast where they were talking about how fabric is soft or hard, sort of how fabric works is really about the way you’re twisting the fibers. So, it’s not about the things that it’s actually made of. It’s how you’re twisting it that makes the biggest difference.

**Craig:** Well, I’m educated.

**John:** You’re educated now. So, remember, pre-orders. If you want this t-shirt, you have to order this week or else you’re not going to get one because we’ll only print as many as people order for them.

**Craig:** Now, what is the answer to this question? What is the 12 Days of Scriptnotes on the back of the shirt?

**John:** So, we were trying to figure out what to put on the dates. The back of the t-shirt has all of the live show dates that we’ve done in the past and in the future, because we didn’t want this to sort of immediately be out of date, because a real tour shirt is talking about the future events, the future live shows.

And so we knew we had Austin, so that’s on there. We knew we would have the Slate Live Culture Gabfest. But we knew there was going to be some kind of Christmas show, and so we had to figure out what to call that Christmas show that would be funny on the t-shirt. And so we had all sorts of discussion around the office, and so one of the top contenders was The Passion of the Craig.

**Craig:** I can’t believe that didn’t…

**John:** So, my argument against The Passion of the Craig is that that’s really an Easter thing.

**Craig:** Well, that’s true.

**John:** So for the Easter show we can call it The Passion of the Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s true. Technically, theologically, that’s correct. Although —

**John:** I want to be a theologically correct podcast.

**Craig:** I mean, as long as I’m compared to dying Christ, then I think it’s accurate. It’s fair.

**John:** Craig died for our sins.

**Craig:** Every day.

**John:** Every day.

**Craig:** Every day.

**John:** Another correction. On the last podcast we were doing questions-and-answers and there was a question from John Schurmann, the Playwright, but it wasn’t John Schurmann, The Playwright. It was John Schurmann the TV Writer. So, he had deliberately in his question said, “I’m not the playwright, I’m the TV writer, and I completely reversed it. So, anyway.

**Craig:** Well, that’s a disaster.

**John:** Yeah, so I apologize to both John Schurmanns.

**Craig:** I assume we’re getting sued?

**John:** Well, actually we fixed it in the transcript so that when they Google it it will never actually show up wrong.

**Craig:** Oh, thank god.

**John:** So, I should say, the reason why we sell t-shirts in the first place, sort of to back into this whole the thing is we are a money-losing podcast. We don’t have ads or anything like that. So, we sell t-shirts, and the t-shirts really help pay for things like the transcripts, the hosting, and for Matthew who does such a great job of cutting our shows. So, it’s kind of the only way we kind of pay for what it is that we do.

So, if you’d like a t-shirt, it helps us pay for the whole show.

**Craig:** And just be aware, if you buy five shirts, if everybody you know buys a shirt, don’t worry, we’ll still be losing money.

**John:** We will still lose some money. Even if you are a premium subscriber for $1.99 a month, we will still manage to lose some money.

**Craig:** Yeah. That is our promise to you, the customer. We will never be profitable. [laughs] We will always lose money.

**John:** Yes. We will always meander for a long time before we get to our actual stated topics and we’ll always lose money.

**Craig:** [sings] Ooh…my love…

Okay, so Ghost.

**John:** The film Ghost is written by Bruce Joel Rubin and directed by Jerry Zucker, which I always forget that he directed this movie.

**Craig:** It’s Jerry Zucker [pronounced Zooker].

**John:** Oh, Z[oo]cker’d it instead of Zucker’d it.

**Craig:** It’s Z[oo]cker. I don’t know, okay, so I have the new iPhone, this is awesome. I have the new iPhone 6 and you know how they have this thing where like you can tell Siri to start talking to you without pressing any buttons?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, I said something that made it think that I wanted Siri to come on and it, oh well, that’s interesting.

**John:** Jerry Zucker sounds like Hey Siri.

**Craig:** It’s Jerry Zucker.

**John:** Zucker. I’ll never get —

**Craig:** Zucker. So, the first time I met David —

**John:** So, David is David Zucker.

**Craig:** David Zucker, his brother. I was talking to a guy who works for him and I said, well this is very exciting meeting David Zucker and he said, “It’s Z[oo]cker. Rhymes with Hooker. If you say Zucker it’s going to go poorly.”

**John:** Ah! Yeah. Because Zucker rhymes with another word.

**Craig:** It does. And they’re very finicky about it.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** They’re very finicky about it. So, it’s Jerry Zucker. Yes, directed by Jerry Zucker, coming off of all the spoof movies.

**John:** Airplane!

**Craig:** Airplane! And Top Secret! And I don’t know if The Naked Gun had — had The Naked Gun come out prior to this?

**John:** I think Naked Gun is after that, because Naked Gun happened after the TV show, didn’t it?

**Craig:** It did. Yes. So, this was after Police Squad and Kentucky Fried Movie. So, obviously not at all continuous with his other work with David, his brother, and Jim Abrahams.

**John:** So, this movie comes out in July 13, 1990. It’s a long movie. It’s 126 minutes. I looked up budget and box office for it. So, back in 1990 it was budgeted at $22 million, which inflations up to about $40 million.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Box office, it made $505 million, which in modern terms would be $900 million.

**Craig:** Wow. Unbelievable. And that is a worldwide number I assume?

**John:** Uh…yes. I think it’s a worldwide number.

**Craig:** That’s just unbelievable. Can you imagine a $40 million movie today making nearly a billion dollars? Wow.

**John:** So, Whoopi Goldberg went on to win the Oscar, the BAFTA, the Golden Globe for her performance, and Bruce Joel Rubin, the screenwriter, won the Oscar for Best Screenplay.

**Craig:** Well deserved by both.

**John:** So, I also wanted to look and see how was this movie perceived when it came out. And so challengingly it’s actually kind of hard to find the reviews from that time, because a lot of times there will be links to those old reviews and they’ll be completely dead. So, when you try to go through everything sort of disappears.

But I was able to find the Ebert review and Peter Travers. So, Peter Travers first. His little quote, he talks about sort of the antecedents for Ghost, which I think is actually useful framing for this. He talks about “Blithe Spirit, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, just to name three classic movies with the same theme. And there have been many sentimental botch jobs, including Kiss Me Goodbye, Chances Are and Steven Spielberg’s dreary Always.”

Ooh…

**Craig:** Yeah, okay. All right, Peter.

**John:** But I think it’s worth noting that Ghost wasn’t the first time we ever had the sort of romantic movie with the Ghost and the living woman.

**Craig:** No, it is not. And The Ghost and Mrs. Muir probably the closest, although they’re not — what this, this one is very different than The Ghost and Mrs. Muir because she’s sort of inherited a ghost. And she falls in love with a ghost because it’s like she has a meet-cute with a ghost and then they fall in love. Peter Travers says, and I quote, “Ghost belongs with the treacle…Zucker dutifully pushes all the buttons — romance, thrills, laughs, tears — that have been pushed before by more assured hands…There is little else to admire other than Whoopi Goldberg, except for some nifty special effects,” which in the lens of today not at all nifty. “For the rest, Ghost succeeds only at being insubstantial.” And I think with this review we can say that Peter Travers, once again, has succeeded only in being insubstantial.

That’s just a dumb review of a much better movie than what he’s talking about.

**John:** I think it’s a better movie than he’s seeing, but we do have the benefit of knowing that it became this incredible phenomena and sort of touchstone movie. And he had to review it in the week that it came out. And so sometimes —

**Craig:** But then to be fair to us, we were alive in 1990. We were young adults. I was 19 years old. And I loved this movie. I remember loving it in the theater, crying and laughing in the theater, and feeling like it was one of the best movies I had seen ever. And it wasn’t my kind of movie. And I loved it. I just loved it. And I watched it again in preparation for this, and I still love it, and it’s so — I mean, we’re going to talk, obviously because we’re a screenwriting podcast I want to talk mostly, I’m sure you do as well, about Bruce’s script. I’m going to call him Bruce even though I never met him, and how good it is, and how sad it is to read some dumb review like this.

This review, you have to dig up and find in some dusty archive, look at it and laugh at it as an absurdity. And happily the movie lives on and I haven’t shown it to my daughter yet, but I bet she will love it. This is her kind of movie. She will love it.

**John:** The thing that really struck me as I watched the movie again is you can take a look at the movies that came before it, but what I think this really paved the way for is movies like Twilight. It’s really one of the first breakout supernatural romances that sort of had audiences, especially women audiences, going to see it ten times in the theater.

And it just hit all of those notes exactly the right way so that people loved it and that people wanted to see it again and again. And they wanted to sort of live through all of those experiences again and again with the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. Ghost, to me, is a masterpiece of tone. Bruce Joel Rubin is writing and his entire oeuvre seems to be centered around questions of death. So, he wrote Jacob’s Ladder, and I believe there was another movie called My Life I believe which was also — which are meditations on death and how we handle our own mortality.

And obviously this movie has a supernatural fairy tale approach to death, but it concentrates on the living to some regard. So, you have this very deep tone of a dead man and the woman who loved him and they cannot be apart. And it’s a tragic romance. You also have a comedy. You also have sort of a crime/caper mystery. All of those things are handled perfectly well by his script. And where I think Ghost triumphs is in its precision point tone.

**John:** I agree. One of the criticisms of the film as I looked through sort of people who are not fans of it, they say that it shifts gears too often, or shifts tones too often. But what I think is interesting is you talk about the different things that it needs to do. It needs to have this much plot so that it makes sense. It needs to focus on the romance in these ways. It needs to have humor so that you can sort of have the relationships between Whoopi Goldberg and Patrick Swayze, and Whoopi Goldberg and Demi Moore, and sort of what’s going to happen. And it manages to do those very deftly.

The comedy works in the ways it needs to work without going so big that it eclipses the actual threat and it makes it feel like this isn’t a serious movie where people could be facing true harm.

**Craig:** Well, what Rubin does so well is avoid — so he avoids a mistake that I see all the time in screenplays that I get sent. And he embraces the opposite. And that is a question of reorientation to extraordinary events. A character faces an extraordinary event and the — sometimes I read scripts and the characters simply don’t behave in ways that you or I would behave in the middle of an extraordinary event like that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s no time for them to behave. This movie takes its time and has no problem saying, okay, you’ve just been killed. We’re just going to spend 10, 15 minutes with you absorbing that. We’re going to spend 10 or 15 minutes with your not-wife but your girlfriend, your surviving girlfriend, absorbing what this means.

When you discover someone who can actually hear you, and a wonderful choice to make the psychic a fraud until this moment, she’s going to spend time just absorbing the fact that this is real. He’s going to spend time absorbing that she can hear him. Everything is allowed to just breathe and people are allowed to react the way I think you would normally react. And that’s why we go along for the ride, even when it gets wild.

**John:** It would be fascinating if we could somehow take a development executive and remove Ghost from their experience, so basically they’ve never seen Ghost, they have no idea Ghost exists. Then give them the script, because I really do feel like their instincts are going to be to make huge cuts to the first act and really the start of the second act. And basically get plot started much faster. And they would want Patrick Swayze’s character killed as soon as possible.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** They would want to skip over a lot of the little sort of comedy beats and sort of get things going and really ramp up the tension and the stakes and all the things that you’re supposed to do. And it would really be to the detriment of the film.

**Craig:** I think also that they would force a genre on it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They would say, look, either this is All of Me, which was, you know, All of Me was a similar kind of movie that was all about being a comedy.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And all about a dead person moving inside of a live person’s body. So, either do All of Me and make it a total comedy, or so this is a sad, weepy tragedy. But what’s this whole thing about where you want to have your cake and eat it too? Well, you can, as long as you give the characters time to absorb what’s happening. [laughs] Then I think it’s okay.

**John:** So, let’s start in. I have the movie here in front of me. I’m going to be skipping through some things, but I really want to see how the movie unfolds as it plays because it’s not what I remembered it being, and it begins in a very different way than I expected.

So, it’s a Paramount movie. You’ve got the stars flying in. Then we’re fading into what seems like we’re in a scary movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I did not remember this at all. And I don’t know if you remembered it when you saw it, but it’s dark, it’s shadowy, we’re not quite sure what this place is that we’re in. It’s a pretty font, so it doesn’t look like scary murder font, but it’s one of those long opening title sequences.

So, it’s dusty and what we’re ultimately going to see is that Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, and Tony Goldwyn are sledge-hammering down this wall to open up this new loft that they’re going to be moving in to.

**Craig:** Right. And as we’ve talked about, these opening moments, this is why even though we don’t insist that your first three pages be the pages you send in for a Three Page Challenge, it’s good often that they are because those are the pages that are teaching us how to watch the movie. So, when the title comes on, it comes on with a jarring jump scare tone. And then the credit sequence is giving you a horror movie vibe. And by doing so it’s saying, hey, take this seriously. This is not going to be what you’ve expected from Jerry Zucker before.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** It’s not the just light romance or romantic comedy. We’re actually taking this real. When we say Ghost we don’t mean like Wocka Wocka Ghost. We mean there is going to be some serious stuff going down. And when the credit sequence ends, what we are revealing is essentially three of the four people that are in this movie. And this is a movie with very few characters.

And here we are meeting three of them and learning very quickly that Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore’s characters, Sam and Molly, are together. And then there’s this friend that they have, Carl, who is played by Tony Goldwyn.

**John:** Yes. So you see the three of them smashing through the wall. Essentially they all have weapons. They’re not using them on each other quite yet. It’s sexy. I mean, Tony Goldwyn is in really great shape here.

**Craig:** I mean, both of those guys are ripped.

**John:** They’re ripped. I mean, Patrick Swayze you always sort of knew was the, but I mean Tony Goldwyn, this was his moment. And so it’s going to be this love triangle between the three of them is the sort of central drama of this thing. And the music sort of threw me, but I think you make a good point is that starting in this movie, if you had sort of the more romantic sort of music, or if you had the comedy kind of music, you would be expecting this to be a funny movie right from the start.

So, in a weird way the misdirect of sort of the — it’s not Aliens, but so it’s Maurice Jarre, sort of his more sort of mysterious — it’s an interesting way to start the movie. And it sort of gets you taking the movie seriously.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We meet our three main characters. So, Patrick Swayze’s character is named Sam Wheat. Wow. There’s a name.

**Craig:** It’s just a bad name. It is, especially because it’s said over and over and over. I mean, look —

**John:** Has anyone in the world ever been named Wheat?

**Craig:** I mean, I’m sure there are people named Wheat, but Sam Wheat sounds like a bad cereal. So, I mean, look, these are the things you point out when you love a movie because there’s like little things that stick out as wrong. And there’s very few of them, but I’ll point them out as they come. But Sam Wheat is just a dumb name.

**John:** Molly Jensen, which is sort of a perfect name for a Demi Moore character.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And then Carl Bruner.

**Craig:** I mean, what a great villain name, right?

**John:** It’s sort of a great villain name. It sort of tips that he might be a villain.

**Craig:** Everything tips that he might be a villain.

**John:** And it’s Carl with a C which is especially — you don’t really see that in the movie, though.

**Craig:** It’s like a Nazi name, you know, Carl Bruner.

**John:** Yes. So, she is an artist. We don’t sort of know that she’s a potter yet, but they are living in scary New York, not sort of modern New York. And it’s going to become important that they’re living in a not yet gentrified neighborhood.

**Craig:** Right, so in the late ’80s, or this movie comes out in 1990, so they shot it in the late ’80s, downtown areas, downtown that we think of as super hip now like Meatpacking or even Tribeca or so, were kind of scummy. Alphabet City, totally off-limits. And it seems like they’re living down there. Yeah.

**John:** So, we see their new loft and sort of the plans for the new loft. They’re moving in together for the first time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Next scene we’re seeing Carl and Sam in the elevator. They’re dressed up in suits and we see that they work in Wall Street banking, some sort of financial thing. It’s a first comedy bit really which is faking that Carl has a terrible disease in a crowded elevator and they make everyone really uncomfortable. So, we’re seeing that they’re buds, and they feel like kind of frat boy buddies.

**Craig:** That scene is the one thing I know for sure is that that was not Bruce Joel Rubin’s idea. That was something that Jerry, and Jim, and David would do themselves in elevators to entertain each other. I think that goes all the way back to their time in college. And I’ve actually been in elevators when they’ve done it now, which is even scarier because they’re older now. So, god knows what they’re hacking up. So, Jerry just has these two guys do it.

But what I love about it is that it is essentially pushing a button in the audience’s brain. And it’s saying here’s kind of a cliché scene of two guys yucking it up. And while it is cliché and has nothing to do with story, doesn’t move the plot along at all, what it’s doing is it’s tapping you in a spot that goes, oh, these two fit into this cinema box of wacky buds. And that’s going to help kind of misdirect us until the movie can’t bear any more direction in part because they seem to be missing one character. [laughs] I feel like the movie is short one red herring character.

But, regardless, that does help quite a bit.

**John:** It does. So, the elevator takes us into the financial offices which are the saddest financial offices I think I’ve seen in this kind of movie. It’s just such a little set. And it feels more like a bank in Wichita than a high stakes financial office. Partly, the fault of movies is movies really kind of, from the time of Wall Street, but really as long as we’ve always thought about big New York City corporate movies, they always have the glamour shot, like windows that look out over the city.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s always this high power thing, and this is not that at all. It’s like they sort of ran out of money for like trans lights or things, so that you don’t really see out the windows. It was odd to me that it was just such a boring office set.

**Craig:** It is a bizarre space. There’s a weird lavender carpet. It probably actually is more accurate to what those spaces look like, because real estate is a premium in New York and only enormous firms can afford these super fancy looking places.

But, I have to say that while sometimes the movie does seem a little cheap, and frankly it wasn’t made for a lot, I mean $40 million today is not a lot of money to make a movie like this, there was some already — even before we got to this point, or maybe, I’m sorry, just following there’s going to be some really nice directorial touches. You can see that Jerry is pulling some cool moves.

But in this sequence, we learn a couple of facts that are fairly nicely layered in.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** We learn that Patrick Swayze’s character, Sam, seems to be a little more senior than his buddy, Carl, and that Sam is in possession of certain codes that allow the transfer of money and, in fact, he’s changed one of those codes and maybe there’s a little bit of that later, but we’re learning at least there’s a hierarchy here. They’re in charge of money. And Sam has a code.

**John:** Exactly. And so this ability to put stuff into accounts is something that Sam has and something that Carl needs. And we’re going to learn down the road that Carl put some money into an account and then can’t get it back out. And that is the reason for the plot of Ghost in terms of the villain plot of Ghost is just about this code got changed.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So, we see their offices. We see what that is. There’s the Japanese. We are coming back to the beautiful loft apartment which Molly is fixing up.

**Craig:** And is this where the angel is being…?

**John:** Yeah, the angel.

**Craig:** Right. So, it’s a nice little visual thematic thing. They’re hoisting this wooden angel up. You know, and listen, foreshadowing comes in all sorts of flavors. Sometimes it’s punch you in the face foreshadowing, but I didn’t mind it so much here. There’s a nice moment where we see Sam go to help get the thing in and you almost think like, oh my god, is he going to die here? But he doesn’t die here.

There’s a very nifty little shot that Jerry does with a mirror. I don’t know if you noticed that or not. I liked that one a bit. But, again, we see they’re all together and they’re all buddies.

**John:** Yeah. It is actually a very clever shot. I was playing it right as I’m watching this right now. So, essentially Sam’s helped get the angel inside and there’s a shot which you think is real but is actually in a mirror that’s being carried back away from you. And that took probably half a day to choreograph, but it does help give you sense of the space really nicely.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So this is our first apartment together. It’s all about sort of their love and sort of their being together. It’s the first time we have the I Love You words spoken, I believe.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And the lack of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, there’s this exchange that they do here, and we’ve talked about this before. You can’t write great dialogue. You can’t. You can write dialogue that becomes great. But you can’t sit down and say now I’m going to write an iconic line. I can’t sit down and say I’m going to write, “You had me at hello.” I love you and Ditto became a thing.

It was just so perfect because it wasn’t as blatant as I love you and then, “Oh, you know, you mean so much to me, too,” and this very on the nose thing. He’s saying ditto and she’s laughing. It’s their gag. But there’s a little something missing there and transitions into this very interesting expression of pessimism from this character. And maybe that pessimism kind of gives a hint as to what his little journey is going to be all about. But essentially saying every time things are going well for me it seems like — he’s kind of discussing the sort of Damocles and the idea of the other shoe dropping and he’s worried just that the good times will end.

**John:** Yeah. If I had a criticism of the movie up to this point is that I haven’t had a very good perspective on what he wants. And I know he has a job. I know he has this beautiful wife — or not wife — girlfriend. This is one of the few moments where he’s talking about his inner life, but we don’t get a lot. And it would be better to see sort of what his flaws are before this moment. But, movies only have so much time.

**Craig:** Well, that’s true. And I would also say that I’m not sure how I would have done it differently, because in the way the movie is going to work we know that what he’s going to want is such a big want. I want to save the woman I love from a terrible end, that that would dwarf anything that comes before it. And so what he’s expressing here is an inability to just be happy with what he has.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I think that that’s a nice thing to do for a character that’s going to lose everything and then appreciate even the smallest thing, like being able to just touch the person you love.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I thought that was a good choice actually.

**John:** So, 13 minutes in is where we have our iconic pottery scene.

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**John:** And so what’s so funny, obviously everyone knows this scene. But watching it again, I had never realized how incredibly phallic it was. Because I always think about it being like sort of sexual touchy, but you realize she’s crafting a giant penis in front of her.

**Craig:** That’s right. Uh-huh.

**John:** And then the penis will collapse.

**Craig:** Yeah. What she’s doing is she’s jerking him off in this scene.

**John:** Yes. She is. And the young me did not recognize that.

**Craig:** No. I don’t think young me recognized it either, [laughs]. But in watching it now, it couldn’t be more obvious. She’s masturbating him. But, so a very — there’s just so much about this scene that’s fascinating to me.

Okay, first of all, again, does absolutely nothing to move the plot forward. And when we talk about rules and how rules are rules until they’re not rules, this is a great example. This doesn’t move the plot forward. It doesn’t even really move the information of their relationship forward because we already know he loves her. Or, he may be conflicted in not being able to express it, but he certainly likes her a lot. They’ve moved in. They’ve been hugging and kissing.

So, what is this for? And ultimately it’s for a feeling. It is a scene that evokes something that is more than just information. It makes me believe that these two people are soul mates.

**John:** Well, the moment is actually genuinely cinema. It’s not just story. It’s the thing that can only be captured by sight and sound and the great music playing underneath it. It’s all those things put together as a package.

And reading this on the page would not have anywhere near the impact of seeing these two attractive people rubbing their hands all over this clay and being intimate with that song playing. It is truly a cinematic moment.

**Craig:** It’s gorgeously done. I love what she’s wearing. It’s so sexy. You know, that kind of like overall but no shirt underneath. It’s great. And the music — when you get a song like this, and it doesn’t happen often. This is an old song, Unchained Melody, had been around forever. It was from the ’50s. And yet it was one of those “what’s old is new again” songs. I love the way that they have the old style jukebox moving the record around, which is gorgeous.

But, a song like that you get like I Will Always Love You, from The Bodyguard, My Heart Will Go On, from Titanic — it’s just one of those things that is so right for the moment that the movie becomes defined by it, you know?

**John:** 100 percent. And so sometimes they’re songs. Sometimes they are poses. Sometimes they’re just little snippets. I mean, Flashdance, she pours the water down on herself. That’s the iconic image from it. It’s not that it was the one sheet, but it sort of had to be the one sheet, because that is the thing sort of encapsulates what the experience of the movie is. And the pottery/clay moment is that moment here. And it’s interesting because if you look at the posters for it, a lot of times it’s like Patrick Swayze all glowy, but that’s not really what the movie is about. It’s about the two of them, and touching is what you want to see them be able to do, because of course we’re about to take away their ability to touch each other.

**Craig:** And, again, you could play the what would the studio executive say game, and they would probably say, “Well, yeah, but this should end in a fight. Somehow move the story, Make a change in this.”

But, no, this scene is why the movie works. I really believe that in my heart. We would not care so much if we didn’t see the two of them actually have sex without having sex. And it’s like great sex. It’s great movie sex. It’s spectacular. And it’s the buy-in for women, for men, for anybody that knows what passion is, this is the thing that gets your heart pumping for these two characters so that when they are rendered asunder it matters.

**John:** Yup. Immediately after this scene it is daytime and we’re going to a new plot moment. So, like we’ve had our love and now it’s plot. We are close in on a green CRT monitor and someone is trying to access an account. And stuff has been changed. And so this is where Patrick Swayze suddenly looks like, wait, something is wrong. There’s too much money in this account. He has to change the codes on things. So, he’s going to fix this thing and he’s going to tell Carl, huh, I’m going to have to stay late tonight to figure out what is wrong with these codes.

**Craig:** Right. And Carl is asking, oh, I could do it for you. No, no, I’ll do it. No suspicion there whatsoever. I don’t think we’ll ever understand, we’re ever made to understand why there is extra money in the account, where it came from.

**John:** Yeah. The sort of thrown away explanation is that Carl is laundering drug money. And so whoever the people are, they’re incredibly dangerous. But, we never see them. They never become a real threat. Apparently they’re enough of a threat to Carl that Carl is willing to do terrible things. But, we don’t know this yet.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the fact that we never see them is probably a good thing because it would just end up being a guy. Carl’s plan to use these accounts to launder money is not a particularly good one if it could be that easily discovered, plus in order to launder the money I would think you would need to be able to actually move money around, which he doesn’t have the ability to do. So, there’s a lot of issues with that and we don’t care.

**John:** We don’t care.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s one of those things where it has to be — it’s movie logic. Do you believe that it could kind of happen? Yeah. Is it crucial to your understanding? Nah.

**Craig:** I mean, yeah, it’s like one of those things where, well, it’s possible that if you work for the SEC this movie just wouldn’t work for you, but most of us don’t. And we understand essentially that there’s a crime going on here and it doesn’t flout logic, it’s simply leaving things out. Essentially the movie is saying you don’t need to know.

**John:** Many science fiction stories sort of do that sort of shorthand with science where it’s like, okay, we’re skipping over 15 steps and because we’re skipping over all these things it’s actually impossible, but most people say like, “Yeah, that feels good enough.” And that’s what it probably feels like to anyone who has any sort of accounting background. It’s like, wait, no, no, that’s impossible. And yet…yeah. Because it’s not important.

Because what’s going to happen next is that Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore are walking through their dangerous neighborhood. A guy comes up to them, insists on his wallet. He’s going to hand it over, but a scuffle breaks out and suddenly Patrick Swayze is collapsed to the ground.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** He gets up. He chases after the guy. And as he returns he sees Demi Moore huddled over his body and he is not himself.

**Craig:** Right. So, a good misdirection here. There’s a struggle. We’re on Demi Moore when we hear a gunshot go off. And then the next thing we see is the bad guy running away, followed by Patrick Swayze chasing him. We presume in that moment perhaps the gun just didn’t hit anyone and was just a random.

But then when Patrick Swayze comes back, he experiences something on his face and then we see what he’s experiencing. That’s the way to write movies like this, I think, so that everything is through the perspective of a character and we’re watching them absorb this. And this is the first moment where I was so grateful that the movie said what would people actually do. You know? What would they actually do?

And what they would actually do is spend a lot of time doing nothing except watching and feeling what’s happened to them. And that’s exactly what this movie does. A great choice by Bruce Joel Rubin.

**John:** Yeah. So, a moment of glorious light comes. Patrick Swayze has the opportunity to follow that light and leave, but he does not want to leave. And so he stays with Demi Moore. And ends up in the hospital, which is where we’re getting a little bit more of the sense of the rules behind things.

**Craig:** A little bit, yeah. So, what we see is that another person dies and he goes into the light. So we understand that that’s an option. And Patrick Swayze encounters another ghost, so we know he’s not the only one. Which, again, you’d think like, well, okay, there’s this other ghost that shows up. He’s like an old Jewish man. It’s played for comedy, which I love by the way that it’s played for comedy.

But it’s a very smart choice. It’s not just a random thing. Because these are the little questions that sometimes we forget to ask when we’re writing a movie. We know the movie is about a ghost and da-da-da. Well, here’s a question: is he the only one?

**John:** Yup. Can ghosts talk to each other? Can anyone see ghosts? Can ghosts walk through things? Yes. But it’s not easy and it’s not necessarily easy to walk through things. They can’t magically appear places. They actually have to travel and walk places.

**Craig:** Right. And all of those things are answered in the scene without really being expository. It’s a very different kind of scene than what we saw, for instance, in Beetlejuice, where they go into a place and someone delivers a whole bunch of exposition to them. They literally sit at a desk and are told things.

This is much more impressionistic. Somebody just sits down and just starts talking to them, an old man starts talking to Sam as if he’s known him his whole life. Says a bunch of things that are cryptic and yet informative. And then he’s gone.

**John:** Yeah. So we see another patient die. The patient goes up into the glorious light. The old man says, “Oh, it’s better than the other way.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So the sense of like, oh okay, so there is a heaven and a hell concept in this universe. A guy with a gurney walks right through Sam and it’s horrifying, because he sees sort of all inside the body. And then we’re not rushing the plot ahead. We’re not — Sam’s not looking for his killer. He’s just sort of hanging out with his wife.

**Craig:** He’s doing exactly what somebody would do. The whole point is I’m not ready to move on, and by the way, I don’t believe in any of this baloney, but it’s fun for the movie. He’s not ready to move on, so what would you do? You would stay there and just stare at your girlfriend while she cries. And that’s exactly what he does.

And by doing that, our heart already starts to go — because we’ve put ourselves in our shoes. And every person in the audience was imagining this with their partner. Guaranteed.

**John:** So, we are — this is classically the end of the first act, start of the second act. And this is sort of where you would expect this to be time wise in the movie. We’re about 30 minutes in. And so Patrick Swayze is dead. He is in this new land of being a dead person and sort of having to learn new rules which is what it’s like to be a ghost among these living people and what other ghosts are like.

He is looking at his life from the outside, so he sees his beautiful girlfriend going through his stuff. He sees his best friend there to help her out. He is sad. He’s lonely. He’s despondent. Demi Moore is sad, and lonely, and despondent. And neither is able to help the other one.

**Craig:** Exactly right. And we feel it and we buy it, we believe it. We have absorbed with ease the supernatural incursion. And we’re perfectly happy.

**John:** One bit of rule logic we’ve encountered is that their cat is able to sense him. And so the cat knows that Sam is around and does not like it one bit. So the cat will hiss and snarl at him. This becomes important because Demi Moore and Carl, or Molly and Carl go off, leave the house. They leave Sam in the apartment. And the guy who killed Sam shows up at the apartment. He’s going through things.

So, suddenly we are back in a thriller. This is actually a point of danger. Who is this person? Who is this person who is in our house. Molly comes back. She is now in danger. He is powerless to keep her from being in danger.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that sense of really emasculation is incredibly frustrating. So, he’s able to use the cat to scare off the intruder, but it’s the first sense that the A plot has not ended because he’s dead.

**Craig:** Right. So, obviously some big information is learned here. The person that mugged him and killed him was not just a mugger. Something else is going on. He was- – this was intentional. And if you haven’t at this point already figured out that Tony Goldwyn is involved, your brain isn’t functional well because, again, he’s the only other character in the movie. Who else could it be.

But the emasculation you describe, that’s dead on. And a lot of what’s going to happen now is watching someone be frustrated their inability to save the person they love. And this is a very lovely escalation because when you die that’s enormous, right? That’s a huge problem. How do you top that?

Well, I’ll tell you how you top it. You’re going to have to sit there and watch the person you love mourn you. Oh my god. Well, how do you top that? Ah-ha, you’re going to have to watch passively as somebody tries to hurt them.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that’s a great escalation. I mean, talk about how do you escalate something that’s already fairly well escalated? And, of course, the wonderful concept of stakes comes into play. When you have a movie where your hero is dead and cannot die what are the stakes? Somebody that he loves dying.

**John:** Yup. Just thinking aloud here, I mean, if you look at this first half of the movie as basically being the emasculation of Patrick Swayze’s character. It’s all about sort of like he’s bringing this big statue into his apartment, building this clay phallus that collapses. He’s being killed. He is powerless to stop this person from hurting his girlfriend. And he’s giving chase to this guy who he can’t even sort of stop.

So, it’s a frustrating thing. And I think you’re exactly right. You would think like, well, there can’t be anything worse than dying. It’s like, oh yeah, there actually can be something worse than dying. It’s dying and being powerless to fix the things around you.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. And this is also where I think when you talk about a movie that makes what the equivalent of today’s billion dollars, you don’t make a billion dollars off of one gender or the other. This is where I think men are watching this movie and completely involved.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because there’s this protective instinct that has been — either it is innate or it is a gender role and a construct. I don’t care. All I know is that it’s there. And this is tweaking that in men. This protective instinct and the inability to protect is enough, I think, to make every man in the theater lean forward in their seat and be involved.

**John:** Yes. So, in giving chase to this guy who invaded his apartment, he goes into the subway. And so one of the weird rules of this movie is like he can take the subway to get around places. And it’s on the subway that he meets another ghost, a really crazy sort of aggressive ghost, Vincent Schiavelli.

**Craig:** Vincent Schiavelli.

**John:** We’re not sure [how to pronounce].

**Craig:** Well, Schiavelli would be the proper Italian pronunciation.

**John:** But we’ll see how he pronounces it.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** If he’s still alive. I have no idea.

**Craig:** He is not alive, sadly.

**John:** Sadly.

**Craig:** No, he died actually fairly young. Vincent Schiavelli’s character emerges here. And this is maybe my favorite scene in the movie and it’s very, very short. And it’s followed by another Vincent Schiavelli scene later, which is terrific, but I love this scene. I love the way that Rubin did it.

So, up until this point it’s been fairly procedural. Our ghost is wandering around, following people, and we understand that in some ways he has this omniscience. He can be anywhere and hear anything. But on the other hand he has this powerlessness. He can’t actually touch things or move things or impact the physical world around him. So, it’s an interesting collision of ability and disability.

He’s following this guy, but for what? What could he possibly be able to do? Well, he’s following him because he wants to know the truth, I suppose. And he’s on this train and we are completely in that moment and then suddenly out of nowhere this other ghost starts screaming at him in the most frightening way, “Get off my train,” and it’s frightening.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he pushes our guy, not only pushes him off the train, but as he pushes him off the train breaks physical glass, which is making us think, wait a second, perhaps there’s more that ghosts can do. Tonally speaking, it was a reminder for me in this movie that we’re dealing with serious stuff and potentially very scary stuff. And Vincent Schiavelli is so — his face is frightening. The way he yells at him is frightening. The whole thing is creepy and it’s very Bruce Joel Rubin. It’s the closest scene in this movie to the sort of creepy stuff we see a lot of in Jacob’s Ladder.

**John:** Yes. So, following the subway moments, we get to the mugger’s apartment where the mugger is on his phone, his sort of powder blue classic rotary phone, which is so great. It’s one of those things like your daughter would see it, it’s like, “But what is he talking on?” Oh, that’s a phone. Phones used to look like that before the iPhone 6.

And so he’s saying, he’s calling someone and saying, “I wasn’t able to get it,” and basically letting us know that he wasn’t a random — obviously we knew it wasn’t a random thing because it’s the same guy from before, but he’s in cahoots with somebody. And who that person he’s in cahoots with, that’s the question.

**Craig:** It’s probably the other character in the movie.

**John:** [laughs] Exactly. There’s almost no one left. And so —

**Craig:** There’s no one left.

**John:** And so if you were to add in, because I was thinking like sort of how do you put in a red herring there. I wonder if there is some way to take the character who is the banker, who is going to show up later in the story that Whoopi Goldberg has to deal with. If you could somehow bring him into the story earlier on, like somebody who is fulfilling that function so you think like, oh, there’s another person who it could be.

**Craig:** I’m with you 100 percent. That’s the way to do it. You take that guy and you put him in the beginning of the movie as a jerk. As a bad guy. And he should be a bad guy. He’s just not a criminal but he’s a jerk. And he’s sleazy. And there’s something off about him. And we just assume it’s him and it’s not him at all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You need, I mean, this movie really could have used that red herring because when the big reveal comes it’s such a, well yeah.

**John:** Well, yeah. There’s no, “Oh my god.” Even in the moment I’m sure it didn’t have that kind of impact.

**Craig:** No, we’re literally out of people that have names [laughs] by the time we get to that.

**John:** Another sort of small criticism, there are a lot of like single use characters in this. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but like Stephen Root shows up as a police detective and, well, he gets one scene.

**Craig:** Yeah, he shows up in one scene. And curiously in that scene he is accompanied by a female cop who has I think one line, which I don’t know, maybe they were doing somebody a SAG favor and then that was it. It just didn’t need to happen.

Although, because I know David and Jerry, I know that for instance the woman at the bank who — we’ll get to Oda Mae — does her signature card with, that’s their mother. And she’s always in —

**John:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** She actually does a very fine acting job I have to say.

**John:** No, she’s great. I have zero complaints. And so that’s not a blanket dismissal of using characters and then never seeing them again. That’s completely good and valid. I just felt like there was an opportunity to take one of these characters from later in the story, pull them back earlier, and let them be useful in your story.

**Craig:** I agree. It would have helped.

**John:** So, one of the things I found fascinating, which I hadn’t remembered until rewatching the movie, is that Patrick Swayze encounters Oda Mae, this is Whoopi Goldberg’s character — well, first off, he encounters her quite late in the story. We are about 40 minutes into the story before Whoopi Goldberg’s character shows up. And it’s just location coincidence. It’s right across the street from the mugger.

And you say like, well, that’s just really convenient, but it ends up becoming very, very useful because later on in the story she’s in danger because she’s right across the street from the mugger.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, it’s one of those things where it feels convenient in the time that you first introduce it, but then it ends up having a plot consequence that’s actually genuinely helpful.

**Craig:** So, Oda Mae Brown is this fascinating character. And, again, the confluence of good choices. Physics in movies, I mean, look, they could have just gone the easy way and he gets in touch with a psychic and so forth, but she’s a fraud.

She’s not only a fraud. She’s a fraud with a backstory. She’s a fraud, but her mother, and her mother, and her mother who we presume before her, the whole line was supposedly had the shining as they say. And she doesn’t. She’s never had it. She’s a complete fraud until suddenly she can hear Sam. And they play it for comedy. And we believe it because, again, they let Oda Mae, they let Whoopi Goldberg react as somebody actually would. And they let her play it.

Everybody in this movie is constantly denying the call to action as cowards would and then finally getting pushed into it reluctant. Everyone feels like a reluctant hero to some regard.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that was a great choice because we believed it. We also then understood that she had absolutely no idea how to navigate this.

**John:** Yeah. So, I think Whoopi Goldberg is fantastic in the movie. I think it’s a really good character. Looking back at the reviews at the time, and sort of the reviews since that time, there’s criticism that her character sort of falls into the magical negro problem. And very quickly summarized, it’s when you have an African American character in a story whose function is to sort of help the white people do their things and sometimes teach them a wise, valuable lesson. But they’re supposed to put their entire life on hold to help the white people.

And you can level that to Oda Mae Brown, but I think she actually transcends it in ways that are really interesting. She seems — she wants her own things. We don’t know her whole life, but she didn’t just show up at the start of the movie to help the white person. She would have had a whole story if Patrick Swayze had never entered into that room.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think she fits. I think that she fits only nominally in that she is African American and she is magical, which you would think would be enough to fit the checkboxes of the magical negro stereotype. But, she isn’t magical. The point is that she’s not magical until this moment. And so that surprises her as much as it surprises him.

She clearly has her own volition. She does not exist to serve this guy, and in fact, doesn’t want to. And is continually convinced to continue to help him because she’s in danger. She makes choices based on what is good for her. Granted, she’s presented as a kind of sexless woman living a spinster life with her sisters, which is — that is magical negro territory. But she’s not particularly wise. She’s not coddling this character. She doesn’t particularly like him for most of the movie.

What I was struck by, actually, was how different her performance was here than what we would come to see from Whoopi Goldberg as her career went on. And interestingly, I found at times that when she was doing some of the comic runs that at times she seemed like she was copying Eddie Murphy a little bit. Certain Eddie Murphy intonations and moves that she was doing, because he was like at the height of his powers.

And it felt like she was kind of doing some Eddie Murphy stuff here and there, particularly just the way she would say certain words, or kind of pull a couple of things. But so much of it then is her own deal and it is that — she is a unique character. And watching her relationship with him develop is one of the pleasures of the movie.

And one last thing. Another argument against magical negro-hood for this character of Oda Mae Brown is that she gets something from him. And that is a realization that she actually is more than she thought she was.

**John:** And that in helping people, ultimately she’s going to help not only him but sort of other ghosts who need to contact the living, she has a purpose to her life, which is a good thing as well.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** One of the other things that’s remarkable about her performance, which you sort of can easily forget because she does it so well, is that the rules of the movie is she doesn’t see him. She can only hear him. And so whenever they’re having a conversation, she has no eye contact with him. And so we have to believe that she’s hearing him and yet not seeing him and being fully engaged with the people around her instead.

And she does that incredibly well and that’s not a simple thing.

**Craig:** No it’s not. It’s completely believable. And you have to give Jerry credit for keeping everybody on point there with that and moving Patrick Swayze around so that Whoopi’s eye line doesn’t change, but Patrick’s position changes quite a bit. It’s done very, very well.

You know, occasionally the shtick between them gets a little recycled.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** She has a tendency too often to go to the well of the joke of I’m talking to you in front of somebody else who doesn’t know that you’re there, so I sound crazy.

But by and large it feels natural.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And so it doesn’t grate.

**John:** If I were to have a — this is a terrible thing to say about an actor who is no longer here with us, Patrick Swayze’s character I feel is better than Patrick Swayze’s performance. And watching this again, there were moments where I could imagine, wow, a different actor, that could land better than it did right there. He felt sometimes just a little light for the movie.

**Craig:** I agree. And it is — listen, never speak ill of the dead. This, at times, he was not able to convey what I would call the most convincing agony. He struggled with the agony part. The confidence part, the romantic part, nailed it. The agony at times felt a little forced.

Now, interestingly with Demi Moore, let’s talk about her performance for a second. It’s not screenplay stuff but… — So, I mean, a couple of moments here and there where, okay, particularly when he died she seemed a little too dead for the moment. But, throughout the movie she actually does what I think is a terrific job of quietly expressing this grief. And she cries better in this movie than just about any actor I’ve ever seen in any movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s about seven times where she very naturally produces like two or three tracks of parallel tears from her eyes, moving at like a perfect uneven — it’s gorgeous.

**John:** Her tears have this amazing viscosity of sort of how they fall. It really is remarkable.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. And she’s so beautiful. And I love her hair in the movie. And I talk with Lindsay Doran all the time about hair. Because Lindsay, you know, her whole thing is, you know, all the stuff that we do, if it’s bad hair the movie is dead. She’s got great hair in the movie. Much better than his hair. And her crying is just like, it’s so good. It’s hard to do that.

**John:** Have you met Demi Moore at all?

**Craig:** No, never met her.

**John:** So, my only experience with her was for the second Charlie’s Angels. And so while we were writing the first Charlie’s Angels I said if we ever make a sequel, the villain is, her name is Madison Lee and it has to be Demi Moore playing an angel from the ’80s. And everyone was like absolutely that’s what’s going to happen.

And so then we got Demi Moore and it was great. And so I had a meeting with her over at the Peninsula Hotel with McG and it was on my birthday I just remember because it was my birthday. And we were just sitting around the Peninsula Hotel and she managed to drink like three large Starbucks coffees. She’s just a person who drinks a lot of coffee.

But she’s really — she’s really cool and fascinating. She was ultimately I think, because it was at the time of the Bruce Willis — she had split from Bruce Willis. She was there with Ashton Kutcher. She ended up overshadowing the movie in ways that wasn’t helpful. But she’s still kind of great. And in the right things she’s an amazing actress.

**Craig:** Someone once said, I don’t know who said this. Ted Elliott told me this, but I can’t remember who he was quoting, that we don’t cry when we see actors crying. We cry when we see actors trying to not cry.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And when she’s crying, she’s trying to not cry. You can tell. So, it’s so real and so all that’s sort of — all you’re getting are the two tears that slop over the resistance, which is just beautiful. I mean, she just does such a good job. All right.

**John:** All right. So, we’re 47 minutes into the movie and Patrick Swayze has convinced Whoopi Goldberg to go to my apartment, tell my girlfriend what it is and I will tell you things that only I will know. And so this is a moment that happens. Whoopi Goldberg is yelling up to the apartment. Demi Moore finally comes down. Says Sam’s here. I’ve got this information.

And Demi believes him. I mean, Molly’s character does seem to believe that this is real in this moment.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so if everything had gone exactly this way, the movie would be over. Well, actually, Patrick Swayze doesn’t actually have information. Doesn’t know how her life is in danger. Just saying her life is in danger.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s still this plot that’s going on. But what we’re playing now is this reconnection between these two. And this is where I think Roger Ebert lost his mind in his review where he was complaining that, “Well, this is what people do when they’re dead? They come back and start telling people about what shirt they were wearing to prove that they’re really there?” Yeah. I think so. That’s probably what they would do, because they care about the people they love and they want them to know that they’re still there and they’re trying to warn them that they’re in danger. Yeah. It’s totally okay. I love this stuff. I think it’s great.

I mean, and by the way, absolutely necessary. I won’t like her if I think she’s just a nut that naturally believes in ghosts. I only like her if she’s convinced. Similarly, she becomes unconvinced when Tony Goldwyn’s character kind of does a number on her, and then also Stephen Root shows her that Oda Mae is basically a criminal. She’s a fraud with a record. And so, yeah, of course this is emotionally you’re going to be caught between wanting to — am I fool for believing this? Or am I fool for not believing this? It’s a very normal, Demi Moore plays it perfectly. I believed it the whole way. And so enough with these critics who don’t understand how the human mind works, frankly, or the heart.

Because, again, I’ll just point to a billion dollars of people loving this movie. I mean, it’s just.

**John:** Yeah, people who love it. Another example of how this movie feels like it’s missing a character is like Demi Moore has no friends. It does feel a little bit strange that like there’s no one else she can turn to for help other than the guy who is ultimately going to be the villain of the story, Carl, who comes by, very deliberately spills off his coffee, and takes off his shirt.

**Craig:** He does. So, here he’s going to do the seduction. But you’re making a very interesting point. This is under-populated movie in a large sense. As we’ve said, the movie opens on three characters. We’re going to add a fourth character in Oda Mae. And that’s it. There’s the bad guy, Willie Lopez, who is just, you know, he’s just a bad guy. He’s not a real character.

And there’s no one else in the movie.

**John:** Yeah. And this may be partly why it’s so successful.

**Craig:** I was going to say that. Exactly. Because really the movie is boiling down a certain kind of tragedy to its barest essence. It’s just mainlining it into your veins. There’s no reason for funerals. You know what I mean? There’s no funeral, no burial. Oh, there is, I’m sorry.

**John:** Oh, there’s a burial, yeah.

**Craig:** You’re right. They did a quick funeral and burial. And actually a very beautiful moment where this one ghost sort of smiles at him and walks off, which I loved. But there’s no like we don’t — all the people at that burial, we never meet them again. Although one of them is Jerry’s sister I know. [laughs] So, the Zuckers show up. The entire family always shows up.

But it’s under-populated for a reason and I kind of think it works that way. It’s very atavistic. This is the romantic man. This is the romantic woman. This is the snake. And this is the sage, I guess, you know. This is the wise — even though I’m now going against my whole thing about how she wasn’t that wise, but regardless.

So, now, in order to crank this thing up yet even more, not only is Tony Goldwyn a murderer who is placing her in danger, he’s now also seducing her sexually which is just like — and poor Patrick Swayze has to watch.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And now he realizes —

**John:** This is the hell he’s in.

**Craig:** And now because the stakes have been ratcheted up even more, and because the frustration is ratcheted up even more, he now pays off my favorite scene in the movie. He goes and he finds Vincent Schiavelli.

**John:** Well, importantly, before he goes to find Vincent Schiavelli, he’s so angry that he dives across and ends up knocking a photo off.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so it’s the first time where he’s actually been able to affect the physical world. And there’s a light bulb moment like, wait, this is something I can do.

**Craig:** It’s something I can do, but I can’t reliably do it.

**John:** Yeah. How do I do it?

**Craig:** I don’t know how I just did that. How do I — wait a second, where have I seen that before? That’s right, that lunatic ghost on a train who scared the hell out of all of us and this is Bruce Joel Rubin. This whole thing with Vincent Schiavelli is so Bruce Joel Rubin to me.

**John:** So this would the training montage. In other movies this would be sort of like the wax on/wax off, this is how you do your thing. There’s that moment that I think Patrick Swayze does a really good job with, because it suits his physicality really well. And so he’s learning how to move things, how to make things as a ghost affect the world around him.

So, kicking the can, hitting the signs. He’s gradually learning how to touch things.

**Craig:** Right. And I like that the movie makes a choice to reduce him down to this very, very tiny thing. You’re going to be able to just now move things around in small ways, but we’re going to force you to go through that. We’re going to start with a bottle cap and work our way up to bigger things. But, of all the scenes, I think this is the one that may be the most useful to consider for those of you who are screenwriting and getting into screenwriting and trying to make your scripts better.

Here’s a ghost, an angry ghost, who tells you, okay, if you want to learn, you stubborn son-of-a-bitch, I’ll teach you how. You have to focus all of your anger and emotion and then you push the thing. And Patrick Swayze pushes a thing and it’s a success. Good job. That could be pretty much the end of the scene. I think a lot of people would have ended it there and Vincent Schiavelli would have said, “All right, kid, go get ’em.”

That’s not how it ends at all. How it ends is that Patrick Swayze asks him have you been here, how long have you been here. And suddenly Vincent Schiavelli makes this angry speech about he was pushed and he was pushed onto a track in front of a train. And Patrick Swayze says, “You were pushed?” And Vincent Schiavelli says, “What? You don’t believe me? You think I jumped? You think I jumped!”

And you realize, oh man, this is what happens to you if you never resolve your life.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He obviously did jump. He can’t handle the fact that he killed himself, and now he’s stuck here forever. And that is scary stuff.

**John:** So, the lesson, I think, the take home for this is obviously the purpose of the scene is to teach Patrick Swayze how to do these things. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the scene needs to only be about that, or has to end there. It should have some other secondary story purpose as well.

So, not just functional, but really fill in the sort of tonal details, the themes of your piece. And ending it that way is exactly the right choice there.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can feel everything coming together and working hand in hand here. It’s not enough to give your character a tool. When we watch movies and somebody goes somewhere and someone says, “Here is the blade of blah, blah, blah that will slay the dragon,” and you walk out of the cave with it you think, oh, well, good. I’m glad I got the blade of blah, blah, blah. Was there anything else there except that you needed him to go get the blade of blah, blah, blah?

Well, this is that scene. He’s going to basically be taught how to move stuff around, but then you get this thing that impacts his understanding of his own circumstances and does so in a tragic way. And the tragedy of failure here as relayed through Vincent Schiavelli’s character is palpable. And it’s disturbing. And it’s exactly right. It’s so smart the way that Rubin wrote that and Vincent Schiavelli — it’s the performance everybody remembers. He was a character actor that was in so many things, including One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I think a lot of people remembered him from that. But this one, this is the one I think people remember and always will.

**John:** The other nice thing about sending off his character that way is we don’t ever expect to see him again in the movie. So, it’s a nice way to like that was his moment, he’s gone, he’s done, let’s keep going with our guy.

**Craig:** That’s right. And thank god the imaginary studio executive that we keep proposing didn’t exist, because that person would have said, “And then at the end of the movie can we see him come back and he’s happy now and he goes into the light?” No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** [laughs] No we can’t.

**John:** So, Patrick Swayze now with the ability to move things goes to find Oda Mae Brown and Oda Mae Brown has a very crowded room because a bunch of other ghosts have shown up now because with her ability to really see ghosts and talk with ghosts now, a bunch of ghosts want her help to contact their loved ones.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. And she’s frustrated with this whole thing. And this is a scene where we learn some information. One of those ghosts occupies her body and it’s funny. We do bits, you know, again, this is an Oda Mae bit.

But when he falls out of her body, he’s on the floor, he can’t get up.

**John:** Exhausted.

**Craig:** He’s exhausted. And another character says, “Don’t you know that occupying bodies wears you out, and that’s not good.” That was a not good moment where somebody just announced a rule that we just saw. And announced it in a way where we thought, right, so Patrick Swayze will be doing that later and it’s going to be a problem.

**John:** It’s hanging a little lantern on that.

**Craig:** And I’ve got to say, also, not necessary.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think if we had never seen that happen and if she had just said, “Why don’t you come into my body and let’s try this,” and he had done it, and then been exhausted from it we would have just assumed it’s part of it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It just didn’t need it.

**John:** I agree. We can’t sneak in there and cut it out of the movie.

**Craig:** Well, no, we could.

**John:** We could. Totally can.

**Craig:** I spent time with Jerry and David and Jim talking about how they were re-cutting Top Secret!

**John:** Good.

**Craig:** Yeah, maybe we can re-cut this, too. [laughs] Just get rid of that line.

**John:** So, meanwhile Carl Bruner is back in the really boring office and he’s freaking out. He’s sweating. He’s on the phone and he’s got to get that money. He’s got to get that money transferred. He has a plan for transferring that money which involves putting it in this other account and he’s going to open an account with this other name. So, that plot is still happening. But things are ticking.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, here’s where, I mean, at this point in the movie you would imagine the plot sort of starts to take over. And it does. And it’s all fine. It works out well. Basically, he goes to the apartment, gets the code that he was looking for. You know, a little convenient that he just walks in, opens a box gets it. But fine. He then follows instructions to put the money an account under the name Rita Miller. And that he’s going to transfer it at this certain time. And, of course, Patrick Swayze is there to hear it, so when he goes to Oda Mae he’s able to say, look, I have a plan.

And their plan is simple. And, again, it involves comedy. Pose as Rita Miller and following the instructions I’m going to be whispering into your ear, go ahead and essentially withdraw all that money so that Carl won’t have it and then he’s going to face a terrible end. And that’s exactly what happens.

**John:** And what is fascinating about this moment is that it’s played as comedy. There’s suspense in the sense of like will she get found out, but race underlies all this as well. So, not only is she really flamboyantly dressed, but she’s this black woman impersonating a presumably white person, or fictitious person, in this all white establishment bank.

This is a case where like the bank really looks like a bank. You know, that stock office didn’t look like a good stock office, but this totally feels like a bank, and a big old, fussy bank. And she is the bull in the china shop in the ways you sort of want her to be in this comedy/suspense moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this is the scene where I felt most like she was kind of doing a version of Eddie Murphy because it felt very Beverly Hills Cop. A black guy in the middle of wealthy white territory kind of flimflamming them and with sort of a fast talking attitude and getting away with it, but it works.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, it works. It’s the funniest stuff in the world, but there’s so much charm to her, you know. It’s remarkable how charm can get you by. And she’s so goodhearted. You can just tell, like the character and Whoopi Goldberg herself is just so goodhearted about it. There’s a wonderful moment where she smiles this beautiful smile and it just makes the whole scene work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think it’s to Jerry Zucker’s mom, I think. She just smiles this great smile.

**John:** So, they’re able to get the money. They get a cashier’s check for the money that was in the account and Whoopi Goldberg thinks she’s rich and Sam convinces her, no, no, you have to give it to the nuns because it’s not your money.

Now, I don’t think you would necessarily give it to the Catholic Church.

**Craig:** [laughs] And that actually did feel very Jerry Zucker to me. The idea of nuns. Those guys have always found nuns funny. And just the idea of nuns on the street somehow representing the best use of a $4 million charitable donation. But, you know, it’s a little dated. The moment is dated. And there’s a button on it that is, you know, you can see coming a billion miles away. But, again, it’s charm. You know, there’s just a charm to it.

**John:** Yes. Well, with the money withdrawn, Tony Goldwyn’s character is not happy. He’s looking at this monitor and all the money is gone. And he’s going to smash his monitor. Now, that monitor probably cost $3,000 in those days.

**Craig:** And incredibly expensive 10-inch green CRT monitor. But in this scene now, finally it appears that Sam Wheat has full possession of his Vincent Schiavelli learned powers. And he can knock things around. He can make his presence known and he uses the computer keyboard to let Carl know that he’s there. He says murderer and then his own name — Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam. So, now he’s all confident.

He feels like he’s done it. He’s won. And that carries through when Carl returns to Molly because now he’s freaked out and he wants to know if this is real, is Sam real, what did that lady tell you. And Patrick Swayze is kind of acting out here. He’s pushing him around. He’s proving to Carl that he’s real. And Carl makes this threat basically because now Carl knows that Oda Mae was at the bank and she took the money. And he says to nobody but assuming that Sam is there — I’m going to come back at 11 and if the money isn’t her I’m going to kill her.

So, now, once again, we have that final escalation. And we can feel that the movie is essentially presenting us with our climax. That at 11 o’clock everything will be figured out, for better or for worse, but before 11 o’clock comes Sam knows that the first thing Carl and his henchmen, Willie, are going to try and do is kill Oda Mae and get the money from her.

**John:** Yup. So this is a very classic sort of screenwriting thing you do is you state a destination or a time. And so you publicly say what needs to happen before this or we are going to this place. And it gives the audience a sense of, okay, I know where we’re headed. I know what to expect. And I can sort of forecast the time ahead of me and therefore the stakes feel increased because there’s a clock ticking.

**Craig:** Right. So, it’s not particularly great screenwriting to have a character say, “I’m going to come back here in four hours to finish this when I could just probably do it now, or maybe in an hour,” I don’t know why 11 is so important. But one thing that it really provides the audience with is comfort that this is ending. Just so that everybody knows like, okay, if you’ve gotten a little squirmy in your seat, don’t go pee now, this thing is pulling into the station. It’s going to happen. Everybody settle in for the big final showdown.

**John:** Yes. And this big final showdown is going to happen because Sam is going to have to go get Oda Mae. Oda Mae’s life is in danger. Of course, she lives right across the street from the mugger. The mugger is going to come after her. This is a moment where Sam Wheat gets to use his powers to harass and sort of throw the mugger around. Honestly some very clever sequences where opening doors, closing doors, riding on things, making this guy think that he’s crazy. Ultimately our mugger is going to get hit by a car, smashed, and he will himself die, be a ghost. And then we see what happens to a bad person.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They get dragged by the shadows into the abyss.

**Craig:** The Rotoscope shadows. And I have to say as cheese ball as the Rotoscope shadows are, it made me kind of yearn for those days because the more realistic you make those things oddly the less threatening they seem to be. I just find that like perfectly rendered CGI shadow demons are just not as scary somehow. I don’t — isn’t that odd?

But we can’t go back. We can’t show like lame-o Rotoscope shadow demons anymore, so we’re kind of in this weird middle ground. It is interesting that the movie very carefully follows a certain PG-13 ethic of only really bad people murdering. So, for instance, when Carl shows up and meets up with Willie Lopez for the first time in the least climatic reveal of the bad guy ever, he announces that all he intended for Willie to do was just to mug Sam and steal his wallet so that he could get the code. He never meant for him to be killed.

Similarly here, this is a classic movie trope. Good guy chasing bad guy. We want the bad guy to die, but we don’t want the good guy to kill him, so let’s have the bad guy run in front of a car. Which they always do. And he gets killed. But again, they let it play and I like the way they let it play. And they let Willie have his moment.

**John:** Yes. So, the witching hour has come. Sam and Oda Mae show up at Molly’s house, Molly’s apartment with the news “You in danger, girl.” And this is sort of the iconic moment of, oh, that’s right, she can be possessed. And this is the one moment in which Sam will be able to touch the love of his life.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, we bring back this little bit of nice foreshadowing. The very beginning of the movie when they break through the wall they find this old jar with an Indian head penny in it. And then sort of in the middle when Molly has had her experience with Oda Mae and then I think she’s already been to the police and they’ve told her that Oda Mae is a fraud and she’s starting to question whether or not any of this is real, she rolls that jar down some stairs where it smashes.

So it’s this idea of like the lucky penny and all the rest of it has kind of been going on through the movie. And here, in order to finally prove to Molly that he’s really there, he has Oda Mae push a penny under the door and he lifts it. And it’s beautiful. It’s just so small. Sometimes when you can focus all of this tragic loss and yearning into something as simple as this penny, and then as the penny is floating across to her, because we see him carrying it. And then the reverse is just the penny floating, because of course he’s invisible in her perspective. And she starts to do that perfect two-tear thing. That’s when I think everybody starts balling for the first time. It won’t be the last time in this climax.

**John:** Yeah. The original tag line for Ghost was Believe. And this is belief. I mean, it’s a way of visualizing that sense of even though I can’t physically see this thing in front of me, I believe it’s there. And it’s a way of just cinematically showing something that you cannot otherwise see.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, it’s love. It’s faith. But belief is sort of the combination of the two of them here. And so it’s a single shot in which the penny floats in towards her face. And, again, I’m watching this right now. She’s got the perfectly —

**Craig:** Perfect.

**John:** Viscous tears that are clinging in her eyes.

**Craig:** And they’re real, by the way. Those aren’t like glycerin. Those are real. You can just tell.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Even if they’re not real, then whoever came up with them is a genius. But they just seem so real to me. I mean, god, it’s so good. So good.

**John:** So, here’s the trick. You tilt your head up, the tear falls down, and right as it touches the edge of your mouth you sort of taste it a little bit. That’s a great cinematic tear.

**Craig:** So good. She just is the best crier. And we do believe it here. This is, by the way, one of those moments as a screenwriter that can be very frustrating for us because we see this so clearly. We understand that he will be there, we’ll see him lift the penny, we’ll see him carry the penny, and then we’re going to do a reverse shot — so she’s not in that frame. And then we’re going to come around and then he’s not in the frame that’s on her on her single. And the penny will float to her. And he’s invisible. And I cannot tell you guys how many times we will write scenes like this and people will go, “Wait a second. Why can we see him sometimes? Why can’t we see him other times?”

It’s like oh my god. This is where it gets so frustrating because you know, you’ve seen the movie, you know it works. Of course it works that way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, I’m so curious to hear if they ran into those kinds of frustrating discussion when they were writing this. Because it’s exactly the way it should be done. It’s gorgeous.

**John:** Yes. Because what it is, as you’re looking at the moment from Demi Moore’s point of view, that’s why he is not in the frame and the penny is floating by itself. And it’s so obvious.

**Craig:** So obvious.

**John:** And yet before you shot the scene, if you were to try to describe it that way, you would encounter resistance.

**Craig:** You would encounter resistance, confusion. It’s amazing how — look, there’s a skill to screenwriting and directing. And I would imagine that this is where it’s like, okay, if Bruce and Jerry together were like, “No, no, no, we’ve got this. Trust us on this,” everybody would be quiet. But when it’s only a screenwriter, sometimes people are like, “Wait, I don’t get it…”

It’s the worst.

**John:** Oh, the classic thing I stole from somebody and I say a lot is that you have to remember that as a screenwriter you’re the only person who’s already seen the movie. And so your job is to reflect on the page that movie that you see, but oftentimes you will have to go back many, many times and talk through people so you can make sure you are seeing the same movie that they are seeing.

In this case, clearly Bruce Joel Rubin and Jerry Zucker —

**Craig:** Well done.

**John:** Did see the same movie, especially at this one moment which is crucial.

**Craig:** Yes. So, following this there is this — we’ve been told that they’ve called the police. The police never show up, by the way, because again New York in the late ’80s —

**John:** [laughs] They’re in a bad neighborhood here, so —

**Craig:** There’s a bad neighborhood and there’s crack and, you know, they’re busy.

**John:** So the police never show up, the drug dealers never show up.

**Craig:** The drug dealers never show up. None of the people that are supposed to show up show up. But, in this pause, he occupies Whoopi Goldberg’s body. She lets him, which is a big deal because she’s starting — now that she knows that these two are together and they believe, you can see her just softening and giving herself up to it.

And in that moment it’s done perfectly. And, again, Roger Ebert completely wrong, felt that this should have been done with — the entire thing should have been done with Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg dancing together and caressing each other’s faces, which is ridiculous.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They did it exactly the right way, which is start with Whoopi’s hand and Demi’s hand intertwining to understand what was happening there. And then to go to a single of Demi, and then bring in actual Patrick Swayze, which we know is — her eyes are closed, which that’s key. That’s what direction is, by the way. That’s great direction. Bad directors would have had her eyes open and then it wouldn’t have made sense. And, by the way, I’m sure that Bruce called that out in the script as well.

And then , so this is her imagination, Roger Ebert. It’s her imagination! That’s why it works.

**John:** Yeah. It’s her point of view on what the moment is. And that’s crucial.

**Craig:** Right. Why would we give a damn watching her dancing around with Whoopi Goldberg? That would have been bizarre.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It just would have been so dumb. So, of course, now we’re just crying because finally at last they’re holding each other and they’re together. And, of course, what do they do? He starts playing — and it’s an interesting choice — he starts playing Unchained Melody. That is Jerry starts playing Unchained Melody. And now, what’s the word? Is it like…what’s that…Stochastic? Diacaustic? Diastolic? What’s the word for — ?

**John:** Oh yeah, when something plays in the scene.

**Craig:** Right. So the first time we heard the song it was playing on a record in the movie. Now it’s score. It’s imposed from above by god, which is an interesting choice. Regardless, it works. We all just start balling because it’s paying off that moment from before. And we believe it and it’s gorgeous. And then as we knew it happened because of the bad line, [laughs] —

**John:** I’ll be back at exactly this hour.

**Craig:** Exactly. He comes back at this hour and the other bad line that says when I fall out of a body I’m weak, he falls out of the body, he’s weak and helpless at the worst time because here comes the bad guy with the gun to chase Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg.

**John:** Yes. So, the chase goes outside the window up to another level. And I honestly got really confused at the geography because I started feeling like, wait, is this still their apartment? Is this the apartment above them that’s half done up? It felt like the set that I saw originally when they were first moving in. I got a little bit confused about where they actually were in this final sequence.

**Craig:** I had the same confusion. And I think what’s intended here is that it’s just this building is a lot of those rooms. Like old boarded up rooms. Again, different time in New York when there were just empty lofts available for anybody. But, I think that it was meant to say like, oh no, it’s on a floor above.

So there’s this chase and Tony Goldwyn grabs Whoopi Goldberg and he’s got a gun to her. And I want my money. We already know she doesn’t have it. He doesn’t believe her and he’s going to kill her. And then like Han Solo, here comes Patrick Swayze who has, I guess, gathered up enough of his energy. And he starts slapping Tony Goldwyn around, knocks the gun out of his hand, pushes him backwards. Tony Goldwyn tries to escape, or gets thrown into a window. And, again, I’m going to chase you and then you’re going to get yourself hit by a car —

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** I’m going to chase Tony Goldwyn and you’re going to get yourself gutted by a falling piece of plat glass which, folks, you really shouldn’t have.

**John:** You should not have plate glass. There’s a thing we’ve learned in movies. You should not have plate glass.

**Craig:** Plate glass, super dangerous. You got a put a film on that or replace it with tempered glass. [laughs] But anyway, he dies. He comes out of his body. He sees his friend. Patrick Swayze gives him an “Oh Carl,” like, “Oh, boy, this isn’t go well for you.” And the shadow —

**John:** The shadow comes and Tony is dragged back by a dolly and then handed over with shadows.

**Craig:** Dragged back by a dolly, painted over with shadows, and now we get our final moment where Patrick Swayze is okay with going into the light now because he’s done his job. And this is just about the best way to end the movie.

**John:** Now, it takes a while here. And so I will say that watching this movie again, looking at this ending, so Demi and Whoopi are sort of huddled together. And so Sam comes over. First he talks to Demi. Then he talks to Whoopi. Then he talks to Demi. Then the light comes. And then he goes. And it feels like a stutter step and yet I understand why ultimately they did it. Because you need to wrap up both of those relationships and it feels weird to sort of start with Whoopi.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** So you kind of had to do it.

**Craig:** That was the only way to do it. And, you know what? It was a stutter step but it worked. I mean, there’s a small uncomfortable moment when he turns to Oda Mae and sort of says kind of “I’ll miss you most of all, Scarecrow,” kind of moment. And you think, but your wife. Your almost wife, she’s still there. Why are you talking to Oda Mae, you just met her?

But then he comes back to her and delivers one of the great, I mean, first of all they kiss.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s so gorgeous because you know that they’re not really touching, but they are. And he’s now — now he’s a ghost. He’s not like fake ghost, but he’s like an actual glowy ghost, and she can see him, which is awesome. And they kiss. It’s so romantic and it’s just so right. And they’re committed to being super sentimental about this, which is what it should be.

And then he says this great, great final line, which I just love. “It’s amazing, Molly, the love inside you. You get to take it with you.” Which is a really nice refutation of you can’t take it with you, the idea of the things you can’t take with you, but that you get to take love with you.

And with at line, what he’s saying, and this is why it’s such a great line. Not only is it nice in and of itself, but he’s giving Molly permission and the audience permission to not be sad.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** To be happy that he’s going, because he’s taking all this love with him and it’s over. Naturally I feel terrible for whoever the next guy is that has to date the character of Molly Jensen, because how do you beat that?

**John:** That’s tough.

**Craig:** It’s tough! But it is the perfect end because he’s giving everybody permission to feel good about the fact that he’s leaving.

**John:** And he’s walking away into Close Encounters of Third Kind.

**Craig:** He walks away into Close Encounters of Third Kind, which is appropriate, because the movie is giving that moment dignity. It’s saying this should be awesome because the truth is after all the kooky stuff that’s gone on, we are suggesting that there is some great, beautiful thing waiting for us all. And the movie takes it seriously so that we can take it seriously.

**John:** Yeah. I agree. And we get the final Demi Moore tears, which are crucial.

**Craig:** Perfect.

**John:** Those are perfect. So, this is Ghost. And, you know, it’s so fascinating because I think we’ve — obviously when a movie is this incredibly successful it has an impact that resonates, you know, sort of kind of forever. And we are making movies differently because of this movie.

So, some things you can see in this movie is like, well, that’s obvious, but they weren’t necessarily obvious when Ghost was made.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re obvious because Ghost was made. They’re obvious now because Ghost did it. But like I hope that people get a sense from the way we’ve talked about this that there were a hundred ways they could have gone wrong. So, we see what’s right, we don’t see all the ways that it could have been wrong, whether characters weren’t reacting appropriately or at length enough to the moments. Or whether the rules had been discarded. Or whether some scenes had just been sort of on the nose like, here, let me teach you how to move things and not layered in with tragedy and that character being a real character.

All those choices made this thing great. And if there’s a lesson for today, I think it’s this: original movies can make a ton of money.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And this movie was not a book. And it was not a remake. And it was just original to itself and it connected in such a huge way. Romance has been taken over at the box office by YA. And this is an adult romance.

**John:** Yeah, it is.

**Craig:** And I would love to see some adult romance come back. I think it’s gorgeous.

**John:** I would argue that it’s an adult romance, but it’s not — I mean, their love is real and they’re kind of grownups, but they’re also kind of — they’re a little simplified versions of grownups. The same way that the movie feels like there’s not enough people in it. They’re somewhat perfected grownups. I think it’s part of the reason why it is so successful. This feels like a great YA novel before there were great YA novels.

**Craig:** Yeah, but they’re not teenagers.

**John:** They’re not teenagers. That’s exactly 100 percent.

**Craig:** They’re 30 years old in the movie I expect, something like that. They feel like they’re 30 years old. They have jobs and lives. You’re right. They don’t have children. They don’t have friends. They don’t seem to have like — they don’t go to doctor’s appointments or, you know, and they are idealized.

And, you know, it’s funny. As you go back, even 1990 which to you and I, I expect we feel similarly about this, that doesn’t seem like that long ago at all. It is long ago. It’s nearly 25 years ago. And just as movies 25 years before 1990 felt old fashioned and kind of fake, this feels fake in that regard, too. Like they’re not as real as we ask our characters to be now. But unfortunately this overdose of reality has kind of killed romance a little bit in movies.

So, it would be nice to see something like this again, I would think.

**John:** I agree with you. So, Craig, thank you so much for talking through Ghost with me. This was really fun. It was a good sort of spontaneous suggestion last week. And it’s still a good movie.

**Craig:** It is. It was fun to watch again. I thought that Jerry and Bruce did great work. The cast did great work. And, by the way, great to see a screenwriter win an Oscar for a movie that at least was partly a comedy.

**John:** And a movie that was hugely successful. Because so often the screenwriting award kind of goes to this was a really, really good movie that we’re not going to give other awards to, so therefore we’re going to give it to this. So rarely does the most commercially successful movie reward with Best Screenplay.

**Craig:** Yeah. We used to give Oscars to big Hollywood movies. And now we find that distasteful somehow. We have to give an Oscar to the small Hollywood movie, or the small not-Hollywood movie.

**John:** Exactly. And we give it to really great movies, but it’s also nice to celebrate great movies that are also huge successes.

**Craig:** Yeah. Fun. Fun. Good stuff.

**John:** So that’s our show this week. You can find us on iTunes. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there subscribe and also leave us a comment. We love those. If you would like to listen to all of the back episodes, including the Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The Little Mermaid, and Groundhog Day, you can find those at scriptnotes.net. There’s a subscription for $1.99, the premium subscription, that lets you listen to all of those back episodes and bonus episodes. You can also listen to it on the apps for Android and for iPhone.

I think there’s a new iPhone app coming, which would be great because the current iPhone app is not fantastic, but it’s out there.

If you would like to say something to Craig or I, Craig or me —

**Craig:** Say something. To Craig or me. To Craig or me.

**John:** I said that aloud. You can write to Craig. He’s at @clmazin on Twitter. I am @johnaugust. Longer questions are at ask@johnaugust.com.

You can find show notes for the things we talked about at johnaugust.com as well.

store.johnaugust.com is where you need to go if you’re going to get a t-shirt. Because you should get a t-shirt, because why not get a t-shirt.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** While you’re there, we still have a few more of the USB drives which now have the first 150 episodes of Scriptnotes on them.

**Craig:** Damn.

**John:** You can buy those all at once if you’d like to. Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. And we have outros every week, so if you want to give us a new outro, just send that to ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, baby.

**John:** Hooray.

**Craig:** Woo-hoo. By the way, this movie was edited by Walter Murch.

**John:** I know! Isn’t that sort of amazing?

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** Famous for many other things.

**Craig:** Many, many other things. Great book, In the Blink of an Eye. I believe it’s called In the Blink of an Eye. A great book on editing by Walter Murch.

**John:** Yes. He’s also one of the first proponents of Final Cut Pro. And so he was one of the first people to cut features, big features, on Final Cut Pro. Craig, thank you so much. We’ll talk to you next week.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Our episodes on [Raiders of the Lost Ark](http://johnaugust.com/2013/raiders-of-the-lost-ark), [The Little Mermaid](http://johnaugust.com/2013/the-little-mermaid), [Frozen](http://johnaugust.com/2014/frozen-with-jennifer-lee) and [Groundhog Day](http://johnaugust.com/2014/groundhog-day)
* New shirts are [available for pre-order now through September 30th in the John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Get tickets now](http://www.slate.com/live/la-culturefest.html) for October 8th’s live Slate Culture Gabfest with guests John and Craig
* Planet Money’s [T-Shirt Project](http://www.npr.org/series/248799434/planet-moneys-t-shirt-project) and the [Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt web app](http://apps.npr.org/tshirt/#/title)
* Get premium Scriptnotes access at [scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/) and hear our 1,000th subscriber special
* Ghost on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_(1990_film)), [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099653/), [Netflix](http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/60010395?strkid=619431081_0_0&trkid=222336&movieid=60010395), [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001B2CPH2/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) and [iTunes](https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/ghost/id218725367)
* Ghost on [Box Office Mojo](http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=ghost.htm)
* Reviews by [Peter Travers](http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/ghost-19900713) and [Roger Ebert](http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ghost-1990)
* [In the Blink of an Eye](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1879505622/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Walter Murch
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))