Search Results for: 3 page challenge

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-contract-between-writers-and-readers).

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

**Craig Mazin:** I am Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 132 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So, Craig, as we’re recording this on a Friday afternoon there are still tickets left for the great Nerdist Writers Panel/Scriptnotes crossover episode, which is taping live on April 13. And I don’t know how I feel about this.

**Craig:** Mm. I mean, I’m a little shocked.

**John:** Yeah. Because usually we sell out incredibly quickly. So, I don’t want to put all the blame on Ben Blacker and the Nerdist Writers Panel people, because it’s possibly that they’re just slower on the uptake. Or maybe because April is actually a ways away — there’s not the urgency.

**Craig:** But, I mean, we are the Jon Bon Jovi of the podcast world. And when Jon Bon Jovi doesn’t immediately sell out he throws a tantrum. I will throw a tantrum.

**John:** You don’t want to see Craig hulk out.

**Craig:** I will go crazy. I will go nuts.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a cross between Bruce Banner and Jon Bon Jovi…

**Craig:** And Patti Lupone.

**John:** Throwing a tantrum. And it’s just —

**Craig:** It’s Patti Lupone.

**John:** It’s Patti Lupone.

**Craig:** When she — have you ever heard that audio of Patti Lupone singing and then she’s interrupted by the sound of a cell phone ringing in the audience? And she goes bonkers?

**John:** Yeah. There’s another Patti Lupone story where she believes that someone is taking her photo and it’s actually the photographer who is supposed to be taking the photo.

**Craig:** Gorgeous.

**John:** There’s basically a lot of Patti Lupone stories it comes down to it.

**Craig:** This one is great. I guess it’s the second podcast in a row where I’m talking about celebrities going nuts on audio. And she just goes, “How dare you! Who do you think you are?” And what’s so great about Patti Lupone, among other things, is that even when she’s yelling who do you think you are, it’s in great voice. It’s just a wonderful belted full-chested wonderful tone. “Who do you think you are?”

**John:** I love it.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, anyway, that’s what I’m going to do. If people don’t buy these tickets I’m going to go full Lupone. Boy!

**John:** Yeah, but see, Craig, people are going to be wanting you to go full Lupone because it just seems so incredibly amusing that they may actually delay just so they can read the stories of Craig going full Lupone.

**Craig:** Can I just say again —

**John:** Well, actually maybe we’ll find some way to antagonize you there at the actual event.

**Craig:** I hope so!

**John:** Therefore everyone will get to see it. Oh, I think we should invite back some of our favorite guests, favorite recent guests, like people who have come from a company to visit.

**Craig:** Oh right! [laughs], so I can go full Lupone.

**John:** That could be great. A live version of that.

**Craig:** John. If people didn’t know and you just said, “Listen to a bunch of our podcasts and then tell us which one of us is gay,” [laughs], how many votes — I think I actually — I think I would win. I would get 70% gay.

**John:** You might.

**Craig:** I mean, just Patti Lupone. The Patti Lupone reference alone. Wow. I got to rethink stuff.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a lot.

**Craig:** I’m this close to going…

**John:** I think you’re perfectly happy in your life and your wife and all that stuff is good.

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh wow!

**John:** Today on the show —

**Craig:** Wow. That’s mean. [laughs]

**John:** The contract formed between writers and audiences. Basically sort of what is the deal you are making with the reader as the person sits down to read the script and ultimately when the audience is going to sit down to watch the film.

And we’re going to talk about three Three Page Challenges. Brand new Three Page Challenges, which I’m very excited about.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** And we’re going to start off with a question. So, should we just start?

**Craig:** Yeah, why don’t we just roll right in.

**John:** First question. Sleepless in Los Angeles writes, “So, I’m a fairly new writer who was hired to do a studio rewrite, which I recently delivered on. It was the usual route. Producers first, then to the studio. My reps have seemed beyond gobsmacked the producers didn’t have any notes for me to do at the producer’s pass before it went to the studio. It’s now been with the studio for almost two months. I haven’t been paid for delivery. And when I inquire about this the general thinking is that the studio is going to want to have a meeting, give notes, and since I didn’t do a producer’s pass they’ll more than likely want me to do some extra (free) work before the delivery check.

“Sorry for the preamble. Here’s the question. Is this how it works? And if not, what can I do about it? The whole don’t rock the boat, this is how it is thing that my reps are laying on me seems absolutely crazy as well as unhelpful.

“I know free work and late payments are in issue with the WGA, so I’d like to be part of the solution, not part of the problem here. But what is the solution? Dig my heels in? Play the diva? Start burning bridges? Hardly seems like a good option at this stage in my career.

“I’m assuming more established writers like you guys aren’t put through this process, but I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that you’ll have some advice. Any and all bits of advice are welcome. I’m feeling pretty powerless.”

Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m a bit puzzled by your agents. I’m as puzzled by your agents as you are, I suppose, question-asker.

**John:** I’m angry at a lot of people in this situation actually.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m angry at almost everybody other than Sleepless, and I’m actually a little bit angry with angry with him or her as well.

**Craig:** Well, I understand. This is a mess. But it’s a mess that doesn’t even need to happen. We work in a business where messes occur every day. So, you try and avoid the ones that don’t have to happen. This one just makes no sense. It’s really simple. The script was turned into the person that’s listen in your contract. That’s it. Invoice. Period. The end. No discussion. Just invoice.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** There’s really no explanation — asking to be paid for the work you’ve done is not rocking the boat. What agency is this? I mean, that’s embarrassing.

**John:** It’s really embarrassing. This is late payment. This is what we talk about when we’re talking about late payment which is essentially you’ve turned in the work and they have not cut you a check.

Now, you haven’t asked for the check. Or, maybe your agency hasn’t actually invoiced, but they should have invoiced because you turned in the work. You did the work. The agency also wants to get paid as well. So, there’s no reason why this hasn’t been invoiced. So, I think your first step is to talk to your agency and say like, “Have you invoiced for this work?”

If the answer is no, I think you need to have a serious conversation with your agency about why not. Why have you not sort of asked for the money that I’m owed for this thing? And really listen to their answer. And if their answer is sort of Namby Pamby, “we don’t want to rock the boat,” well, it’s sort of their job to rock the boat. It’s their job to get you paid, for starters.

Second off, if there’s any problem with — any more heel-dragging about getting paid, the WGA has a late payments desk. You can call them and say, “I’m delivered this thing. I’m supposed to be paid.” And they can start harassing on your behalf. You’re not, ugh, this is maddening.

And also the setup for this in the preamble, this is a studio rewrite. So, this wasn’t like, you know, a pitch that they sort of barely bought and things were still sort of getting sorted out, or there were contracts. This was a project that you probably had to compete with other people on to get. You got it. You delivered it. Be done with this.

**Craig:** Yeah. To give people context, there are legal hoops that we have to jump through to get paid. It didn’t used to be that way, but then there was this big WGA arbitration about free rewriting and all the rest of it. And what came back to us was this: in our contracts there is a person called the delivery agent. They oftentimes are somebody that’s very highly placed at the studio and it’s always a studio executive.

Until you deliver the script to them, you haven’t delivered it. So, you could write five drafts for the producer and everybody assumes — what you’re really doing is just working on your first draft. And that creates plenty of opportunity for abuse. In this case, you’ve actually jumped through all the hurdles, the people that needed to get the script for you to be paid got it. That’s it.

Now, we’re living in, what, some new lunatic era where jumping through all the hoops doesn’t qualify as jumping through all the hoops anymore? I mean, it’s ridiculous. They have to pay you. They’re legally obligated to pay you. It’s done. It’s done.

**John:** I have a hunch that Sleepless’ producers delivered the script to the junior executive who was not actually the person listed on the contract. And so therefore the technical person you’re supposed to deliver to hasn’t gotten the script or there’s been some sort of delay. Or, we’ll pretend that they have not gotten the script. Whatever.

You can deliver it to the executive directly yourself. Your agency can make sure that the executive got the script. This is not your fault. It’s only Sleepless’ fault to the degree that like two months is a long time. And for them to like not be even acknowledging they owe you money is crazy. Because essentially here’s what’s happened is whatever studio this is, they have taken a loan from you as the writer. They’re taking it as basically a zero interest loan, even though they’re supposed to be paying interest. They’re taking a zero interest loan from a broke writer when they’re making $60 billion. That’s crazy.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. This is also a circumstance where we’ll tell you all that really matters under this is the quality of the script.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** If you’ve written a script that nobody likes, none of this matters. They’re going to eventually pay you, but there’s no amount of good boy behavior that’s going to mitigate that. Similarly, if you’ve written a good script that everybody likes, then demanding to be paid now isn’t going to ding you at all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If anything, they’re going t be happy to pay you and frightened and upset that they’ve upset you because they want to keep you on the project.

So, with that in mind, you’re not powerless. You are powerful. You’re just behaving in a powerless way out of fear, which I understand, and a desire to try and control the outcome. The only thing that’s going to control the outcome is the quality of the script.

Today, pick up the phone, call your agent, and say — and your lawyer, if the agent won’t do it, and say, “Submit this script to the executive. It’s been two months. Get me paid. And that’s that. And if they like it, I’m excited to keep working. And if they don’t, well I guess we’re all moving on.

**John:** So, let’s talk about the buried subject here as well which is the free pass. So, essentially “my reps were gobsmacked that I wasn’t asked to do a producer’s pass.” The producer’s pass means —

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** You have finished the script, you gave it to your producers, the producers read the script, loved some things, had questions about some things, and therefore went back to you and told you to do more, asked you to do more work.

That is troubling but actually fairly common. And it’s up to you as a writer to decide to what degree are you going to take some of these producer’s notes and incorporate them. That’s great. But, the studio doesn’t get that free work. It shouldn’t be getting that free work.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** The deal is that when it gets to the studio that is you delivering the draft. Now, you may choose to do little tiny things, that could be your choice, but you shouldn’t be waiting around writing draft after draft in hopes that at some point they’ll just say, “Oh, this is the real draft and now we will pay you.” That’s crazy time. And that’s, unfortunately, all too common. And by putting up with it for this period of time, or honestly like just sitting around waiting for them to ask you for free work is incredibly self-defeating.

**Craig:** It’s bizarre. Yeah, that the agents are gobsmacked that their client wasn’t abused. “Huh? That’s weird. Well, what can we do to get you abused? I know, let’s do nothing.” It’s so strange. I would be very angry at my agents right now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Very, very, very angry. And, you know, my big advice about agents.

**John:** To fire your agent.

**Craig:** Fire your agent. Yeah. Fire your agent. [laughs]

**John:** Here’s the good news. Sleepless got this assignment. And probably did an okay job.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I mean, likely there’s nothing wrong with the script itself. It’s likely the reason why the next step hasn’t happened has nothing to do with the actual script you turned in. It’s because it became a much lower priority at the studio. And everything else became a higher priority and they just haven’t focused on it. Well, that’s not your fault.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s just the nature of what’s actually happened. If it’s two months ago then it’s entirely possible that the holidays came and then there was new stuff after the holidays and they’ve kind of forgotten about you. But they shouldn’t forget to pay you. And maybe asking to get paid will remind somebody like, “Oh, that’s right, this thing exists and we need to do something with it.”

**Craig:** This is something that I’ve been talking a lot about. When I go as part of the WGA Screenwriter Rights Committee group and I go with Billy Ray and Damon Lindelof and we visit the heads of studios. What I try and impart to them is, look, if you’re paying a writer a million dollars, let’s all agree that this is a very lovely affair in which people are being well taken care of. And there’s no need to stand on ceremony.

But if you’re paying somebody anywhere near scale or, you know, $100,000 or $200,000 for what will amount to a year’s work, here’s the reality of the money they actually get in their pocket. Here’s the reality of how that money comes to them. Here’s the reality of how much work they’re having to do for that. Please don’t treat them like this.

And this sounds like this may be, that our question-asker is early on in his or her career, so I’m going to guess this isn’t a million dollar situation.

**John:** Exactly. And by delaying this payment two months now, they’re making it much more difficult for this person to actually make a living as a screenwriter.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, this person probably I’m assuming this person got scale or somewhere near scale for what this assignment is. It’s actually not a lot of money.

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** And I worry that we’re overall by trying to sort of nickel and dime these moments and stretch out this process, we are going to make it essentially impossible for a person to have a living wage as the entry level screenwriter. It’s going to have to be sort of your part time job. And like this person is going to have to have a job somewhere else that actually has regular paychecks because he or she can’t count on getting paid by the studio when they actually deliver their work.

**Craig:** That’s right. And then the studios will get what they paid for, which are temps. And the other thing I’ve said to a number of studio heads is why would anyone that is very, very smart and has the potential to earn a lot of money many different ways opt for this very difficult career if they’re going to be mistreated in this way, in a way that is profound and much worse than when you and I started. They just won’t do it. They’ll just do something else. They’ll become lawyers. I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah. They’ll become lawyers or they’ll write for television which is, I think, part of the reason why you see a generation of writers who at first I think were sort of splitting their time between features and television, but ultimately like television at least pays regularly.

There’s a lot of problems in television. There are problems of exclusivity and options and there’s structural problems in television, too. But, you’re more likely to get paid. This writer wouldn’t be waiting for a long time to get a check from ABC Studios.

**Craig:** That’s right. They’ll have a job. They can plan their lives. I mean, we’re talking about young writers who are generally in their twenties. These are people starting their lives and trying to create a career path. And we’re starving the farm system. We’re beating up the rookies. It’s just really bad management. Bad management and bizarrely bad management because, frankly, if you’re paying somebody $100,000 for a rewrite and you’ve given them $50,000 of that for commencement, the $50,000 for the delivery is cushion change at a major studio. It’s irrelevant. Just give it. Pay it.

**John:** Pay it.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, look, first call — agents. And draw a picture of balls for them, scan it, and email it. And then just say, “Remember what these look like?” Jerks.

**John:** Yes. Jerks. If you don’t have a scanner you can just take a photo with your iPhone and just send them that. Just text them a photo of balls and then they’ll have some balls.

**Craig:** [laughs] You should make an app for that.

**John:** Ha-ha. That would be very good.

So, Craig, I should have actually had a discussion with you, but I’ve turned down employment on our behalf.

**Craig:** Oh?

**John:** So, in these last two weeks I was hosting the Film Independent Director’s Close-Up Series. And so I got to do a Q&A with Alfonso Cuarón, and I got to do a Q&A with Julie Delpy, Bob Nelson, and Scott Neustadter talking about their movies.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** And I love doing Q&As. I love moderating things. And so before the second one a guy from a TV network said like, “Hey, have you ever considered just doing this on a TV show, a sit down TV show. Like maybe you and Craig could do like a Scriptnotes thing with like cameras.” And I said, no. I was really flattered for the offer, but I didn’t really see myself doing that. I didn’t see myself doing a television show.

I enjoy doing our podcast, which we have control over. So, I hope I didn’t speak out of turn and I didn’t ruin your dreams of hosting a show on a minor cable channel.

**Craig:** No, no, you preserved my dream of keeping my face away from people.

Look the one thing I’m super comfortable with and happy about is that neither you or I, neither you nor I are doing this for fame. [laughs]

**John:** Neither — neither… — Oh yeah, you are right. I was going to say neither you nor me, but you actually were using it as the subject of the sentence.

**Craig:** Yes, correct.

**John:** I almost corrected you and now I feel embarrassed.

**Craig:** Good. This is the sort of — boy, this would be great TV.

**John:** Yeah. This is [laughs].

**Craig:** Neither you nor I are in this for fame. And neither you nor I need this to be anything more than it is. I think that’s part of the charm of our little podcast is that we get to have a conversation once a week and it’s simple, and it’s easy, except for Stuart. And, yeah, you know, because here’s what happens: television just, you know, then television is about, inevitably, oh, it’s that thing where they make the end of year lists of the best screenwriters and most of them are actors because that’s what people are interested in. And suddenly, you know, nobody wants a guest that’s not famous or something. I don’t know.

**John:** And as I was doing some introspection on sort of why I was saying no, I realized that as much as I enjoy sort of moderating these panels, I don’t kind of want to be a panel moderator. I want to be the guy who is like being asked the questions on the panels. I sort of want to be the filmmaker who gets asked questions sometimes, too. And I don’t want to be just the guy who asks questions.

So, in getting to host this last session with Julie Delpy, and Scott, and Bob Nelson, one of the things I wanted to talk about was the nature of the contract you make between you as the writer, the filmmaker, and the reader/audience about what kind of film this is. Because I thought all three of those films were incredibly smart about saying this is what our movie is and this is how our movie is going to work.

And right from the start they felt very confident in what the edges of the movie could be and sort of what journey you were going to take.

So, you look at Nebraska, right from the very start you see this is the nature of the world. It’s essentially funny but it’s not like hilariously funny. And you know that it’s essentially going to be the story about a father and a son.

You look at The Spectacular Now and you see that this is going to be a love story of a boy and a girl. It’s going to do high school movie type things but not do them in a high school movie kind of way.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or you look at Before Midnight, Julie Delpy’s film, and it’s going to be a lengthy exploration of — or long conversations about the future of a relationship.

And so in all of these movies quite early on you establish the kinds of things that can happen in the world and the kinds of things that can’t. You’re not going to have aliens or terrorists invade. Someone is not going to suddenly die. Someone is not going to pull out a gun. It’s not those kinds of movies.

And so I want to talk about the contract you form with a reader, with an audience, and sort of how we establish that on the page.

**Craig:** Well, when we talk about, this is why I’m glad that when we do our Three Page Challenges, even though we’ve never requested or insisted that they be the first three pages, those often are the best three pages to send because those are the pages that are establishing the contract. And when we talk about that we mean the rules of the movie and we mean the tone of the movie I think more than anything. Those two things. Rules and tone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s why people tend to go along with the first ten minutes of any movie. I don’t care what it is. Every — I’ve been in god knows how many test screenings of comedies that I’ve worked on and when the movies get to the place where they’re working all the way through, people laugh all the way through.

But early on, typically your first test screening, what you’ll see is the first five to ten minutes just absolutely kill, people are laughing all the way through it. And then trouble. Because the audience psychologically comes in, sits down, and says I’m going to roughly give you five to ten minutes to teach me what this movie, how this movie works. And I’m with you on it. But then, if anything should stray from what you’ve taught me, I’m going to start to get annoyed. I’m going to get confused. Because there’s an inconsistency — I want you to take me by the hand and lead me out of your world and into yours.

So, like the first day of school, everything is new, I assume any discomfort of disorientation is my fault. But by the second day or the fifth day or the 20th day, if it changes again at school, this school is weird.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, that to me is so much a part of that contract is understanding that you have a limited amount of time to scramble the audience’s mind as you wish, but then that time ends and you have to stick with what you’ve done.

**John:** I would sort of phrase the contract this way. As the writer I’m asking you, the reader, to give me an hour and a half of your time. And I’m asking for all of your attention reading this script. And I will take you on a journey. And you will be rewarded for your careful attention to this script that you’re about to read and I’ll get you to a good place.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to get you to a happy ending, but I will establish questions in your mind and those questions that I establish in your mine I will address and answer down the road. I may surprise you sometimes, but they’ll be surprises that you’ll be delighted about because they fit and they feel correct within the universe of our movie.

The same thing happens as you go from the page to the actual film. And sometimes when films falter, when you read a great script and you watch the movie it’s like, “Ah! That didn’t quite work,” is something changed in the nature of filming it that that same contract was not established. There was a lack of — the audience lost faith. The audience lost confidence in how the story was going to be told.

Sometimes it’s like those initial images. That’s why as we go through cuts of films and as we even work on our first couple pages, we’ll change those a lot because you’re trying to establish what the expectation is for the audience. And example I have is Charlie’s Angels, the first Charlie’s Angels, which was notoriously a really challenging shoot. Other writers came in. Every day was sort of a scramble. There were really good moments, but as we you put the first cut together and we’re seeing what it was, it didn’t feel — it didn’t land.

And so one of the things I was able to do was go in with McG and with the editors and we built an opening title sequence that sort of showed this is the nature of the world. This is how we’re going to move from place to place. This is who the girls are. This is what it feels like. This is what Charlie’s Angels feels like.

And as long as we were consistent there everything stuck together. But if that opening title sequence hadn’t worked we wouldn’t be in the right place.

**Craig:** It’s interesting that you mention title sequence because I got into a little bit of a debate over at Done Deal Pro, which I occasionally stop into. It’s like my three times a year stop in.

And somebody was asking a question about writing, it was a simple formatting question really. When you write a credit sequence at the beginning of your movie, how do de-notate it. And for me it’s as simple as begin credits and then when you’re done with that part, end credits.

Somewhat predictably a few less than fully informed individuals said, “That’s not your job. Your job isn’t to talk about credit sequences. Your job is just to write the movie. That’s the director’s job. That’s somebody else’s job. Nobody cares what you think about the credits.” And I totally disagreed.

Because to me while it is not — certainly a valid choice to not write a credit sequence and perhaps more often than not I don’t — it’s just as valid a choice to do it. And, in fact, for this very reason that a good credit sequence, which must be written as a credit sequence — it’s hard to covert a non-credit sequence into a credit sequence — a good credit sequence does precisely what you’re talking about: teaching the audience how this movie works. And by credit sequence I don’t mean just the titles. I mean to say action and movie occurring while titles are going across it.

That’s one way. It’s far from the only way, but one important tool that we have in our bag to help instruct the audience.

**John:** Some of the best title sequences are just showing you imagery that indicates what the universe of the movie is. And so a long time ago I wrote an adaptation of Tarzan. And the adaptation I did for Warner Bros. was modern day Africa. And so there’s some old sort of mythic Africa in it, but there’s also sort of modern day Africa. And the juxtaposition of those two was really important.

So, the title sequence I wrote for it made it really clear that we’re in present day but there’s all this sort of relic Africanized is still an important part of it. And it was teaching you how to watch the movie. It was teaching you what the movie was going to feel like and foreshadowing some of the things that were going to happen ahead. Even the Spider-Man movies, which are just imagery and noise and rock-n-roll, that’s also telling you what the movie is going to feel like.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The David Fincher sequences for Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, none of the stuff that you see there is specifically referenced later on in the movie, but it feels dirty sex in a way that is important for you to understand as you start to watch the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. James Bond sequences also do this. There’s the prologue, which won’t have credits, the cold open as it were. And then when they go to their very famous traditional credit sequence, you will start to get glimpses of things. And I call these overtures. Just as in old Broadway you would get a good overture at length where you’d get little snippets of all the songs and all the melodies and then the show would begin. Sometimes a credit sequence can do that as well.

But this contract and the negotiation where the audience gives you this grace period where you’re allowed to basically build a world for them does require enormous attention. And it’s why I said a number of times I will spend twice as long on the first ten pages as I do on the last ten pages. The first ten are enormously important because they are teaching you so much.

I mean, the script that I just finished up for Universal is a very — it’s got a very high concept that is adapted from a graphic novel. And it involves a hero who has a certain mental illness. And how his mental illness manifests is cinematically disorienting.

And so much of the first pages is about how to reveal this and then once you reveal it how to do so in a way that lets the audience feel comfortable with it as it plays out over the course of the rest of the script. You’re building that contract so that they don’t feel that you switched the rules around.

See, why — constantly, you’ll hear this all the time, very common studio note: what are the rules, what are the rules? Well, why is it so important that we stick to the rules? What’s that about? In some movies it’s not that important. Some movies you’re not dealing with a traditional narrative and violating rules is part of the fun. But, for a traditional narrative the reason that we get so worried about breaking the rules is because when you do the audience, whether consciously or subconsciously, calculates that you’ve done so because it was convenient for you.

And if it’s convenient for you then it’s no longer that impressive, is it? It’s a little bit like you want a guy to fall into a vat of whipped cream. Well, you can get him up the ladder in an interesting way, or you can just have him say, “Huh, this ladder doesn’t look that study. I think I should test it out.” Well, you’re just cheating. You know? And that’s what you’ve got to watch out for.

**John:** Yes. There’s a longer talk I do sometimes on expectation. And it’s really that same idea which is that an audience approaches a film with expectation. So, if you have a western, the audience comes in with e expectations of a western. And that’s largely very helpful, because you get a lot of things for free. You don’t have to explain how horses work or how gunfights work or how a lot of that kind of stuff works.

If you’re going to change some things about how the Old West is, that’s awesome, but you have to do that pretty early on so we understand that, okay, it’s everything we know about western but change these variables in this movie.

If you were to try to change those variables quite late in the movie, we would be flustered, the same way like a vampire movie. In a vampire movie we have expectations about what happens in vampire movies. We know enough about vampires so you don’t have to explain everything to us. But if you are Twilight and the vampires can be out in the daylight and they’re radiant and beautiful, you have to establish that quite early on because if you were to save that for three-quarters of the way through the movie we’d be going, “What? That’s not vampires. You’re just making stuff up.”

**Craig:** You’re just making stuff up. [Crosstalk] Yup.

**John:** Exactly. You would have lost confidence in the filmmaker. You’ve lost confidence in the screenwriter whose script you’re hopefully going to finish.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because the natural psychological consequence of that feeling that they’re making stuff up is that, well, I guess what I see next is just something that they’re going to make up. I don’t feel — because in my world things aren’t just made up. There are actions and consequences and they’re knitted together logically.

So, again, you are allowed to bring somebody to a completely different planet that they don’t understand, but once you’ve given them enough time to understand — and you don’t get that much — you can’t violate their natural human sense that the universe is ordered to some extent.

**John:** So, what I should stress is this does not preclude surprise. And surprise is still wonderful and amazing. And if your movie is firing on all cylinders, some surprises are great, and good, and you should look for them.

A mild spoiler here for Spectacular Now, so if you haven’t seen Spectacular Now, close your ears for about 30 seconds while I talk about this one little moment. So, in Spectacular Now the hero of the story is a drinker, he’s a drunk, and he is driving all the time. So, we have this expectation like he is going to crash. He’s going to crash and the girl is going to get hurt and it’s going to be terrible.

What actually happens in the film is he pulls off to the side of the road, they have a fight, she gets out of the car and gets hit by another car. Something that was not his fault — he wasn’t sitting at the wheel. And so we, as an audience, are taken by tremendous surprise like, oh my god, I didn’t see that happening. I can’t believe that just happened. But it’s in the universe of possibility for a movie. It’s a genuine surprise but it’s not breaking the rules of our world.

And they could do it only because we had invested so much in the reality of these characters. If they had tried to do that quite early in the story it wouldn’t have had an impact.

**Craig:** That’s right. This is not only do you not want to shy away from surprise and subversion. You want to move towards it. You’re constantly looking for those things.

And what you’ve just described there is the difference between improbably and illogical. Improbable is okay. Illogical, not so much. And improbable is okay, particularly if the audience understood that they got fooled. Because they will understand that they were in your control. They want to know that the person telling the movie is in control of the story and not just lashing out at stuff to happen because it would be convenient for it to happen, that that was a careful choice.

Similarly, there are movies with twists that recontextualize the entire world of the movie and turn all the rules that you thought you understood upside down. That’s also great. As long as when you do it the movie retroactively makes sense in the re-contextualization.

**John:** Yeah. I would also stress the movies that are going to pull the rug out from under you and re-contextualize everything, it only works if you are along for the ride in the first version of it. So, if you’re watching The Sixth Sense and you are with it from all the way through and you’re completely accepting it on its own surface level, then the twist and surprise is meaningful and helpful. But, if you bailed on the journey before then you’re just going to be annoyed by the twist.

**Craig:** Well, it’s interesting. One of my favorite films is Fight Club. And the first time I saw Fight Club I was a little annoyed. I was annoyed. Fight Club is an example of a movie where it’s, for me, it was difficult to enjoy it the first time through because I did not understand the twist. And then the second time I watched it it was awesome. But I couldn’t get to that second time without experiencing the first time.

But, now we’re talking about a high degree of difficulty here. [laughs]

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And, look, you know, like The Sixth Sense is a movie that I actually did enjoy all the way through and the twist was great and it was extra, you know. But it’s always a risk. When you do a big twist movie there’s always a risk that people are going to be just too confused and too detached from what’s going on to connect with it that first time through.

**John:** Yup. Well, let’s talk about how movies start right now, because we’re going to look at some Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Oh yeah!

**John:** I thought we would start with Blake Armstrong if we could.

**Craig:** We can.

**John:** So, Blake Armstrong, by the way, so Stuart picked this script randomly, but Blake Armstrong is actually a person who works on Chicago Fire/Chicago PD. He works on the Chicago shows that Derek Haas does.

**Craig:** He works on —

**John:** He’s a gaffer.

**Craig:** I think he’s a gaffer or grip. He’s a crew person who works for the Chicago Empire. And what that means is he spends a lot of nights freezing in sub-zero temperatures while actors are being warmed in their tents.

**John:** Before we get into the script, we should really talk about Derek Haas’s Chicago Empire. Because I know the next spinoff is, I think, Chicago Municipal Services, which is basically the people who like fix traffic lights and stuff like that. There really seems to be no limit to what they’re able to do in Chicago.

**Craig:** Chicago Board of Ed. Yeah, Chicago Sanitation.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Chicago DMV.

**John:** Yeah. They were going to go for Chicago Parks & Rec, but they thought that would be too confusing with the NBC show called Parks & Rec.

**Craig:** Eh, you know what? I think they’ll do it anyway. [laughs]

**John:** They’ll do it. They we’re going to do a hospital show called Chicago Hope, but it turns out there already was a Chicago hospital show called Chicago Hope.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** At some point they’ll reach a barrier, but it’s sort of like, you know, the limits of what they’re going to — the limit is pretty high, so there’s only a certain number of hours in the day, but people will watch whatever shows they want to set in Chicago apparently.

**Craig:** The one show, Chicago Chicago, which is going to be —

**John:** Perfect. It’s about the Chicago production — the city of Chicago putting on a show of Chicago, the musical. And it’s sort of a behind the scenes thing. It’s going to be great. It’s like Smash, but in Chicago.

**Craig:** Yup. They also have Chicago Smash.

**John:** That’s going to get confusing. I think they just crossed the line there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let me recap Blake’s script here. So, these are three pages by Blake Armstrong. We don’t know the title of this script, so we’ll just say Blake’s script.

We open on a glossy white spaceship leaving a planet. There’s chunks of busted ships and debris surrounding it. In the captain’s quarters we meet Specialist Kat Powell. She’s in her late 20s. She’s naked under the sheets.

The captain is Ben Drake, mid-30s. We see him in the bathroom with a ring box. He’s going back and forth about — back and forth dialogue about should they quit, should they get out of this game.

Ben is trying to work up the nerve to ask her to marry him, that’s what seems to be happening. Kat gets paged by the doctor, Rachel Galvin, to go the med bay. She’s gone before Ben has a chance to ask her.

In the bridge, Drake gets an urgent message from mission command where Director Ayers tells him that the mission is over. Ceres can be tera-formed faster than they thought, so they need him there now to lay claim. He’s got 20 days. And that’s what’s happened at the end of our three pages.

Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, I like the opening here. I thought we had a good opening. I like this contrast. We begin with an image we’ve seen a number of times in movies, a spaceship in space, but I did like that the spaceship was moving past a lot of junk. So, there was a nice view — a little more realistic view of what space looks like, which is full of all this junk. Obviously we’re in the future because there’s lots of ships out there, including this one.

And obviously I always get excited, Patti Lupone aside, about seeing a naked woman lying on a bed. That was great. Quick — we’ve got some typos in here. For instance, “Glimpses of her skin peak out.” You want P-E-E-K, not P-E-A-K. But, I enjoyed the contrast of —

**John:** If it was a boob, maybe one of the boobs is sort of — I just talked over you. If it was a boob I would say the boob could be like a peak, a mountain peak, peak out.

**Craig:** I don’t know how to say this without sounding weird. Boobs don’t really work, [laughs], they tend to not go upwards. You know, when you’re lying on your back…

**John:** Well, if they’re fake boobs. And maybe that’s really what he’s going for her.

**Craig:** Really fake. Like those hard —

**John:** Really fake.

**Craig:** Like bolted on. Yeah.

**John:** Nice hard Pamela Anderson boobs.

**Craig:** Right. Like, yeah, god, poor Pam. Anyway, but I enjoyed —

**John:** I think that’s really what Blake was going for.

**Craig:** Yeah, probably. But I enjoyed the contrast of junkie space to this presumably beautiful woman lying naked in a bed. It was an interesting contrast. And I also like the way that we got into this conversation with her and her lover who is off-screen. It’s sort of a mid-conversation thing. “Let’s quit.” We’re not really sure what they’re trying to quit. But that’s always good. I always like little bits of mystery here.

When we catch up with this guy who’s in this connected bathroom, he’s looking at this ring in this box that clearly is an engagement ring. Couple of things. One, I’m just going to put aside the fact that even in the future people are still spending two month’s salary on rings at some intergalactic Robins Brothers. But more importantly, this just goes on too long.

This is one of those things where the audience gets it immediately. You see a man privately looking at a ring and not quite sure what to do. We know everything. So, we don’t necessarily want to have him open it, close it, open it, close it. We’re just going to get annoyed, I think.

And, frankly, what’s easily — perhaps more interesting way to go about this is to have him talking back with her. He seems occupied, preoccupied, or nervous. And then at the very end reveal that there is this ring on the counter. And then he’s about to pick it up when she’s called away. It’s just one of those things you want to hold back, I think.

She gets called away by — it’s, by the way, I-T-‘-S, it’s the crew doctor, Rachel Galvin who is on a filter saying, “Paging Specialist Kat Powell. I need you at the med bay, now.”

Eh, we don’t want to talk like that. Nobody talks like that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It doesn’t seem — unless Rachel is also a robot, that’s not — I think if we just heard, you know, “Kat, I need you at Med Bay now,” that would enough.

**John:** It’s always dangerous when someone calls out with like their job title. I never kind of believe it.

**Craig:** Exactly. It felt very forced. Similarly, I didn’t — I don’t think it’s satisfying when you have a man with a ring and he’s considering whether or not to propose and make a commitment to this woman, and it’s interrupted because she has to get up, put her pants on, and leave. I would much rather see him make that choice. I think it’s just more powerful. I don’t want to take my choices away from these guys.

Let’s talk about what we’re teaching people about our movies. So, what did I learn from this moment that she walks out and as it says here on the pages, “Like a whirlwind, she’s gone and he’s missed his chance.” Well, the movie has taught me that this is the kind of movie where somebody can be stopped from proposing to somebody because somebody else is putting their pants on and walking out a door.

**John:** She didn’t go that far, I don’t think. They’re on a ship.

**Craig:** They’re on a ship. And you could just as easily say, “Wait, hold on.” [laughs] So, I don’t want to lose the choice.

We now go into the bridge and we have some syntax errors here. “Two walls displays instruments, meters, data, etc. taper into a V…” There’s typos and missing words here. Similarly, “The screens fade to black and white text blinks across them.” Something is missing there as well.

These pages have, for me, I have a very low threshold for this kind of character cheating where you describe a character, we meet them for the first time, and you tell us about how their personality works even though there’s no evidence for it. I know that you have a little bit more of a tolerance for it, but there’s a lot of it in here. Everybody is getting it at this point.

Drake, for instance, I presume our hero: “He’s really easy going for a guy in charge. He can’t help it that he sees the crew as friends, not subordinates.” I mean, I’d love to see that instead of having you announce it. And then he gets a message, “Urgent message from corporate mission command.” No, that’s pretty cheesy I think. It doesn’t feel like this movie is lived in. It feels like that is just a — that feels very contrived to me. He says, “Answer call,” and then we have his boss who very brusquely begins, “Mission’s over, Drake.”

And Drake says, “But — ,” when I think probably the appropriate response to that would be, “What?” Or nothing. And then he says a bunch of stuff here and then he says a bunch of stuff that’s science fiction-y stuff.

So, I think there was good contrast in the beginning. I’m intrigued by the promise of the mystery of this romance between these two. I generally advice people to clean their pages up before they send them to us so there’s not a lot of errors. A little concerned about some of the on-the-nose stuff. What did you think?

**John:** I share almost all of your concerns and your praises. So, a few things right from the start. In terms of the typos, obviously, the pages that blank sent through had a blank title page on them with like “Name of Project, Name of First Writer,” like basically the Final Draft title page thing but not filled in.

Again, that’s just like open the PDF before you send anything to somebody and make sure it’s actually what you want to send. Because basically he forgot to take the tick box off for include title page. And so it’s just one of those things where it made me from the very start realize like he never actually opened this PDF or else he would have gotten rid of that first page.

Getting into it, I agree with you. I like the contrast between space and then we’re in a sexual situation. But that space shot, I was missing, I had no — by the end of these three pages I didn’t have a sense of, am I on the Starship Enterprise or am I on the Millennium Falcon? I have no sense of the scale of the ship that I’m on. We’re talking about a crew but I’m not seeing anybody else. I’m just seeing these two people. And then when we get to the bridge, I didn’t know if he was alone on the bridge or if there were other people on the bridge, too.

When he described the V of screens it sort of focused on his chair. It’s like, oh, maybe it’s like a one-person command thing. Maybe it’s more like Serenity, like the Joss Whedon show. All of these are good, I just don’t know what universe I’m in in terms of the ship. And clearly the ship is very, very important.

I, too, really like the idea of going from space to a bed. Can be good, but like a girl in bed and talking to a guy who is out of the room, if you’re going to get to a sexual situation I would love to have them be in bed and just let that be the moment. Because if it’s about the relationship, I’d love to see them together. Not just like talking in different rooms.

The wedding ring to me just feels like the tropiest, tropiest, trope.

**Craig:** It’s pretty tropey.

**John:** Yeah. And it’s like, so a guy looking at a wedding ring, trying to decide whether to propose, it just feels — we just know what that is too much and too well. And it doesn’t feel interesting.

I actually like Blake’s description of sort of who these people are. I think they are going to be interesting characters. I just wasn’t seeing them do anything that would tell me that. So, like, facts not in evidence. It’s there on the page, but they’re not actually doing anything that would let me know that this is who these people are. Their dialogue isn’t telling me that. They’re not taking actions that let me see sort of who they are. I just see them being kind of annoyed to being called out to do their jobs. And that’s not giving me a lot of confidence.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s interesting that this is following our discussion about the contract. Because your point about the nature of the ship is dead on. Typically when you do enter a new environment, one that’s not natural to our world, you want to give the audience, you want to give them a tour. The opening of Serenity, in fact, does this brilliantly. You know, a good tracking shot where one guy is moving through the ship and doing stuff. You start to learn — you see faces of people. You learn the scale of the ship. It is junkie, is it smooth, is it high tech, is it low tech? Size? And also the way that these people interact with each other. All that stuff comes out. You want to build, I think, for a science fiction movie, these pages feel a little bit more like maybe they would happen on page five and that pages one through four would be a little more of an exciting — we’re inside a freaking spaceship and here’s what it’s like.

**John:** So, I point us back to the start of Alien. If you look at how Alien begins, it doesn’t start with an alien. It starts with a bunch of people waking up and just establishing normal life on the ship. And these characters believe that they’re in a movie called Space Truckers. They have no sense that they’re in a movie called Aliens. And they’re just going through their normal life. They’re going through the normal stuff that sort of happens.

And we get little snippets of conversation. But we get a sense of who the people are in the world, what’s going on, and that it’s a very working class ship. And I’d love to see better evidence of sort of what kind of ship we’re on right from the start here. Because right now I don’t have a sense of like are there three people on the ship? Are there 300 people on the ship?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I don’t really have a good sense. And when we get to the later section, like the mission is over, like they were on a mission? I don’t know what their mission was. So, that mission is over — I’m confused not in a good way. So, I was excited to see that there’s a place that they’re going to be going to and by the end of page three a good thing I will say here is I did have a sense of what to expect next.

As we talk about a contract between the writer and the reader, the bottom of page three, like you’re going to go to this planet and start tera-forming, or get there and stake your claim. Ah, okay, so that is a thing to look for. And so I should be looking for them going to this planet and I will be basing my expectations around this journey to this planet or being at that planet.

**Craig:** Yeah. Absolutely. And in the discussion between our woman and our man, whether you have them separated or together, that is also an opportunity, I think, to get a little bit more character and conflict out of it. It was a little — there are times in movies where you can have a kind of a lazier conversation. But this wouldn’t be one of them. I think in the beginning you want to really try and pack a lot of dramatic information in. I don’t mean spell out a bunch of exposition. I mean, even if it’s looks, or somebody is slightly thrown off by something the other person says, you just want to get a sense of — a little bit more of an emotional sense rather than a circumstantial sense of the conflict between these people.

**John:** Yeah. Remember, you’ve got to hook us. And so I just feel like you have a beautiful woman in bed. I think you can do a better job hooking us in there and making us really invest in the nature of these two people.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. What shall we do we next? Do you want to do Hearts and Minds or Brood?

**Craig:** Well, Brood is kind of fun. Can I summarize Brood?

**John:** Summarize Brood for us.

**Craig:** Brood is by Sandra Lee Slotboom.

**John:** What a great name, by the way. I’m not sure I believe it, but it’s a great name.

**Craig:** I absolutely believe it. You don’t fake that. You don’t fake Slotboom.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Slotboom. Fantastic name. Brood by Sandra Lee Slotboom.

Okay, so, we open in the woods at night. There’s a primitive log cabin hidden sort of in the forest and inside we hear a grunting and then a slap and then the wail of an infant, obviously newly born. A man, a bearded middle aged man, emerges. He’s dressed in 19th Century garb, so we’re at some point in the 1800s. And he walks out with a candle lantern. He has blood up to his elbows and he’s carrying a swaddled baby.

Inside a young woman is screaming, “No, Papa, come back. Not our baby.” He carries this newborn into the woods. He digs a hole. He puts the baby in the hole. Shovels dirt on the baby until the crying stops. Oof. And then he lifts the lantern above his head and we see that, in fact, he is in a vast cemetery littered with hundreds of unmarked graves.

Okay, so that’s our cold open. Now, we’re in the Ozark forest. It’s modern times. And a young couple, Lisa and Aaron, are hiking together with their dog. She has to go pee. She wanders off behind a shrub. A twig snaps somewhere behind her. Her dog growls.

We now cut to the inside of an upscale kitchen and a woman named Sloane Robertson is bathing her infant, Christopher, in the sink. And she’s cooing to him, but then she opens up the hot water tap and this scalding water comes out and she drowns her baby. And then the baby — apparently not dead — reaches up with arms, grabs her around the throat. She wakes up. It was a nightmare. She’s there with her husband, Michael, in the middle of the night and there is an infant, in fact, very alive in another room crying. Michael says he’ll take care of it.

And before he goes to leave the room he says to her, “You can do anything, Sloane. You always have. It’s who you are.” She cries. And she cries.

Sandra Lee Slotboom! Baby killer.

**John:** So, I loved the opening image.

**Craig:** [whispers] Baby killer.

Baby Killer is not a better title, by the way. Brood is a good title.

**John:** Brood is a good title. So, I loved this opening image. I loved the opening little moment. The guy burying a baby. Horrifying. That’s great.

I liked the second opening. Not quite as much, but that’s fine. Hikers in the woods. A twig snaps. By the time I got to the third opening of the movie, which was this fake out — it was a nightmare. I drowned my baby — I lost some faith in this movie. And so as an example of, I thought actually the writing line by line was pretty good. But we had three openings in three pages. And I started to get a little bit unsure of the journey that I was going to be going on.

Because am I going on — I could take a cold open that takes place in the past. Great. I’m totally down and good for it. But when we get to the Ozarks and we’re hiking, okay, great. So, we’re in this world now. Oh, a twig snaps, the dog growls, oh, it’s that kind of thing. It’s that kind of movie? Great. I’m totally good.

But when we cut to the upscale kitchen I’m like I cannot make that leap to make those two pieces connect. And I started to — I didn’t have enough time with those hikers to know what degree I’m supposed to be investing in them. And then that jump to another present day thing was just bizarre to me. And to be jumping to a present day thing that’s actually in a dream felt really strange to me.

How about you, Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah. Look, the first — the prologue — is awesome. That’s the kind of scene that people will read it, put the script down, and say, “Come in here. You’ve got to read this.” Great opening. Terrifying. Ballsy. And it also had — not only did it have this terrible image of a man burying his incest baby alive. I presume it’s his incest baby.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** But then there’s a kicker on top of it that this has happened hundreds of times, which is just like what’s going on here. It’s really dramatic. It’s really well described. The only mistake I think that occurs, frankly, in that prologue is the young woman inside her dialogue is too on-the-nose. I would have just preferred, “Papa, no!” I think we can actually start to let our gears move on our own to figure that stuff out. People screaming and in pain are never quite this expository.

But, wonderful opening. And like you, I’m now great with, okay, I’m in the Ozark forest. I presume this is — we’ve jumped ahead in time, but maybe the same place. Wasn’t thrilled with this dialogue between Lisa and Aaron. It was very cutesy. It felt fakey to me.

And then —

**John:** Oh, she said — the dialogue here, for people who don’t have these pages in front of them, Lisa is like, “Mr. Kovachavich?”

And he says, “Yes, Mrs. Kovachavich?”

“I have to pee.”

“God, I love it when you talk dirty.”

And, it’s only okay. And it’s the first things these people are going to say. They could say anything. They should say something better than that.

**Craig:** Yeah. It doesn’t work. They don’t seem like actual people. This isn’t a conversation that two people have. She goes to pee and he for some reason says to her, as she’s wandering off, “Lisa, stay close.” I don’t know why. They’re just hiking and it’s not like — they’re in a trail. It seemed like a… — If we’re in a horror movie, you know, people are supposed to be a little less cautious than the average person.

There’s an uncomfortable expository moment here. Once again, we have the trope diamond, from trope jewelers. As she’s peeing she holds out her left hand to admire her diamond wedding band glinting off her finger, which I just felt was — we just had the two of them tell each other that they’re married. And now she’s looking at how they’re married. I get it. They’re married. And, frankly, I’m not sure how any of that matters now.

Her dog growls. Something is in the tree behind her. Okay. Fine. Then we cut. This cut is unacceptable. It is absolutely unacceptable. And you will rarely hear either John or I be this firm about something. You cannot cut away now into this dream sequence. We will not know where the hell we are. We won’t know why you’ve cut away from that scene at that moment. It makes no sense. You’ve drawn our attention to something and now you’ve pulled it away bizarrely.

That said, terrifying dream. Gorgeously written. It’s like I feel like there’s two different people writing this. Because the horror moments are really well put together. And this, again, you have this terrible baby and I was really shocked. I thought, by the way, I didn’t realize it was a dream until the very end. I actually thought she was killing her baby. And then this baby has eyes like black marbles.

Ooh, good, it’s creepy, creepy, creepy. Okay, it was a nightmare. Fine. We see this frequently. That’s okay.

Then, we have this moment now with her and her husband. It’s the middle of the night, so now I’m really confused. Now we jumped ahead to night from day. And he says the following. “Sloane?” She’s listening to the baby. The baby is crying. “I’ll take care of it, darling. Go back to sleep.” No. I’ve been there a number of times with both of my kids. We don’t call each other darling at that moment.

And then, before he leave he says, “You can do anything, Sloane. You always have. It’s who you are.” What?

**John:** Yeah. I have no idea. I assume that was something to do with like maybe she has postpartum depression or something. He’s basically saying it’s going to be okay, we’re going to work through this, it’ll be okay. But, that’s not what he said. He said this thing about you can do anything. You always have.

And it’s like, what?

**Craig:** No one ever says that. Ever. Ever, ever, ever. You would say that maybe on page 100 if you’re Mr. Miyagi and it’s the big moment before the fight. But certainly not now. If you’re portraying a woman with postpartum depression I would think that just a helpless look from her husband and maybe he just gives her a squeeze, but she turns away, and he kind of gives up we would understand. But this was a fascinating — these were among the most fascinating pages I’ve read in all the time we’ve been doing this because it was such a Tale of Two Cities. Two really, really frightening, well written scenes. And then two clunky scenes. And the order was just kooky. Kooky McCuckoo.

**John:** I had a theory that I’m not sure is accurate or not accurate. But perhaps these were longer scenes and then she compressed them down so she could fit more into three pages. Because I feel like I could imagine the longer version of that Ozark thing actually making sense and actually building to something in a way that was useful or meaningful and that we’re ultimately going to find out that the hiker girl who dies or whatever is somehow related to these people. There’s something going on here that makes this all meaningful.

And maybe Sandra Lee Slotboom compressed these down to sort of try to get more in. But it wasn’t a compression that was helpful at all. It was just jarring. And I would read the next page, and maybe the page after, but I got — I have a lot of concerns because I don’t know whose movie I’m watching at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that in a moment where a woman in a horror movie, putatively a horror movie, wanders off the trail to pee. And there’s a snapping twig behind her and her dog is growling. We need to see something happen. Even if it’s here turning, seeing something, and screaming, and then we cut, we need to know that something happens.

**John:** Yeah. Even if you were to do something crazy like recontextualize what that was, and then you realize like, oh, that’s actually a scene that’s happening on a monitor. This is actually a soundstage or something else, you could move to other stuff, but you have to address that thing that just happened or else we’re going to be going, “Huh? Did that happen? Did the reels get mixed up?” It doesn’t feel connected.

**Craig:** Exactly. What we’ve been presented is a scene that absolutely has no story purpose. None. It has given us no information. It’s given us information about characters, but no information about story whatsoever. And, yet, there’s story elements in it. So, it’s beyond confusing.

But, look, that said, those are fixable. What’s not fixable is an inability to write, and I think that Slotboom — BOOM — wrote a great cold open. Is onto a very chilling, very frightening topic that I’ve never really seen before. It’s risky as hell. And this is one of those areas where some people will just put the script down. They’ll make it halfway down page one and go, “Oh my god. I can’t watch a movie where babies are being buried alive.” But, I’ve been waiting my whole life for that.

So, I think that she can write. And she can do this. And she seems very comfortable writing in horror moments. Not so comfortable writing dialogue. Not so comfortable writing moments that aren’t horror. So, those are some areas to work on.

**John:** I think she has a great title. I think that title fits very well with that opening image.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Because what I got from that title and that opening image is like, okay, these undead babies are going to come back and seek vengeance. And they could be like an undead baby ghost movie. I love it.

**Craig:** No question. Yeah. And I’ve always wanted to see babies kick ass.

**John:** Yeah. Our third script is called Hearts and Mind by James Stubenrauch. And I’ll summarize this.

We start with a male voice asking, “So, you wanna go save the world?” And then what’s labeled as a flashback we are at an army recruiting office where Bree Foster, 19, is talking to a military recruiter. The recruiter changes tactics. Maybe she doesn’t want to go save the world but rather get a paid job. Seems more like it.

As they’re talking, Bree is watching this homeless man though the window. She ultimately grabs the recruiter’s cigarette’s and gives them to the homeless man who asks her if she’s joining the military to run away. She says, “It can’t be worse than here.”

We cut to the present time, or 2011, where a snow-like ash is falling. There’s explosions. We are in Kabul, Afghanistan. We move through streets and alleys to a blown up apartment building. We see Humvees, US soldiers, and Bree is among them. She’s in a medic’s uniform. She’s scared to death but hiding it. She’s very much a rookie in this world.

And that’s the end of our three pages.

**Craig:** Hey, James. James, guess what? You’re a pretty good writer. I think you did a really good job here. I have some comments and some thoughts for you. Most of them occur on page two.

But, let me tell you what I really liked. You built me a character. And you built me a character without cheating. Here’s what I see: “Bree Foster (19): a woman with nothing to lose.” Okay, that’s cheating. Except —

**John:** That’s cheating.

**Craig:** Except it’s not. It’s almost not cheating because she’s sitting in an Army recruitment office. And if you’re sitting in an Army recruiting office my guess is probably, you know, something interesting has happened to you, particularly if you are a 19 year old girl with “long dyed black hair. Black on black thrift store clothes, a homemade nose piercing… something both hard and innocent about her.”

You’re built an interesting — I can see her. And there’s no substitute for suddenly being able to see somebody. Not only can I see her. I’m starting to think of actresses. That’s a human being that you described and I love that.

And this guy is talking and she’s not paying attention. Instead she’s looking outside through the window and we see this Midwestern main street and this old homeless man reaching for a cigarette pack in the gutter. And she’s watching this guy, while this recruiter rambles on with all this nonsense about serving your country and being all you can be, we’re watching this homeless person finally, finally get the cigarette pack only to find out that it’s empty inside.

And I don’t think you can really teach stuff like this. People just have an understanding that you can create a small moment that is instructive in a metaphoric way and without being — slam you over the head. And I really liked it. I thought it was nice. It was calmly, quietly poetic.

My issues with what’s going on page one and two really have more to do with the cocky recruiter, because he goes off the rails pretty quickly. He’s just too broad. And, again, let’s talk about it as we’ve discussed — we’re world building here and we’re setting a tone and instructing the audience. He’s too “funny.” He is a recruiter. He may be cocky. He may have a patter. But at some point it gets off the rails.

He says to her, “Married? No? Awesome. What about babies?” Babies is a weird one. I would think children would be a better word there. She tightens up at this and he says, “Babies? Yes? No? It’s not a trick question. Yay or nay on rug-rats?” That’s quippy. It’s not real. That’s not how anybody in that position would talk. Not only is it not how anybody in that position would talk. It’s cutting against his job which is to get her to sign on the line that is dotted, right? It’s just bad salesmanship.

She says, “No.”

“Even better. You’re ready to be all you can be,” which is, again, it’s too — he’s getting too jokey. “Now the most important question.” He holds up two brochures — Soldier and Medic. “Wanna give shots, or get shot at.”

No. No, no, no military recruiter is going to tell you you’re getting shot at. [laughs] And give you a choice about it. It makes absolutely no sense.

So, that character I really think needs to be brought into the world that Bree’s character is in, and the homeless character is in. It’s fine to have him droning on. It’s fine to have him be canned and to be following the copy of a Department of Defense mandated script. It’s not okay to have him go that awry.

I love that she steals his cigarettes. And I love that she gives them to this homeless guy. And where I really got excited — although I wasn’t happy that he burns the cigarette down in one drag and tosses it into the gutter, because that’s not how smoking works, unless it’s a cartoon.

But where I was really happy was at the rest of page three, when we jumped ahead to present time. I thought, James, that you did a beautiful job of painting a picture here. Where a lot of people would have just said, “Chaos. We’re inside a building. It’s blown up. There are people…” You, you gave us a transition. You brought us in with sound. You brought us in with image of ash, which was quite beautiful. You had some terrific descriptions in here.

“We follow the ash toward its source — TRACKING through narrow, filthy ALLEYS. No signs of life. Only ghosts tonight.” I love that.

“A BLOWN-UP APARTMENT COMPLEX. Its insides disemboweled into a BLAST CRATER.” Great. So, I could see all of this. You are telling me a story. You are guiding me. I was watching a movie. And that is why I think you can write.

So, I would fix that cocky recruiter character, but very encouraged by this. What did you think, John?

**John:** I agree that once we get to Kabul, that scene setting, that painting of the world is really terrific. I had more problems with these first two pages than you did in that I didn’t get to see anything that Bree did. Basically all I got was a description of what she’s wearing and then this really annoying guy was talking the whole time. And I didn’t really get to see her. I got to see — the first two pages were basically being driven by a cocky recruiter we’ll hopefully never see again and a nameless homeless man. And that wasn’t a rewarding way for us to start.

Even if you have a character who is essentially passive, let’s see her be doing something even in her passivity. So, rather than being talked at by this recruiter, she’s like trying to fill out this form. Get us further into this process because I didn’t believe — like you, I didn’t believe that this guy was real. I didn’t believe that this was really her signing up.

It can be just about the paperwork. But let her speak something in here because she’s going to be our main character. So, let her try to explain herself at least to some degree to this guy. And if it’s even about a very small thing, like “When do I get my first paycheck? How does this all work?” We can understand her perspective on this more than what we’re getting from right here, which is basically canned spiel from a guy who I don’t want to see again.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that what I would suggest — I get the idea that Bree is a little dead inside here. And I’m okay with that tone. If the more grounded, realer recruiter said, “Now, do you have questions? I’m sure you have questions about salary.”

And she said, “No.”

“All right, well, do you have any questions at all?”

“No.”

Then I would know something about her. So, there are ways to show passivity in an active way. I did think that —

**John:** I would also say —

**Craig:** Yeah. I was going to say I thought that her thing with the cigarettes was — she was doing something during the scene. So, I give her a little more credit there than I think you are. But I agree that we need a little bit — I think fixing that guy is going to fix her.

**John:** Yeah. I think she has to drive the scene, though, ultimately. Even if there’s another guy who is asking the questions, we have to believe that she is essentially in charge of the scene. I would love to see her try to be giving an answer but really she’s paying more attention to the homeless guy up the street. And like that, I think, is an interesting dynamic where we see her start to talk or start to form an answer, but she’s really more paying attention to what that guy is doing.

I agree that the homeless man doing the pack of cigarettes stuff is interesting. It’s a good visual image that helps establish our world. And ultimately when she makes a choice to go out and see him, it’s great. But I didn’t really believe the moment of her grabbing the cigarettes and sort of walking out the door. I was like, well, did she leave the recruiter’s office not doing it, signing up? I more wanted to see her sign on the dotted line and then as he’s filing the paper, whatever, then she takes the pack of cigarettes. Some completion on an action, because right now I didn’t necessarily really believe that she had joined the military.

**Craig:** I agree with that. I think that’s right. The part of this that isn’t working is essentially the nuts and bolts part, which is her signing up for the military. But, the mood of somebody that’s a little dead inside, answering questions and doing something that is an enormously radical thing for somebody to do and a big life choice for somebody, and yet doing it in a way that seems distracted and sort of dead inside and misplaced focus. That’s all great. You just have to take care of the nuts and bolts end of it a little bit better.

But that said, I thought, again, that James understands how to write a movie. And that is a very encouraging thing to see from three pages.

**John:** I would agree.

**Craig:** Yeah. Great.

**John:** So, again, thank you to all of the people who submitted pages this week and every week to the Three Page Challenge. If you would like to follow along with these examples, or any of the other ones, for every podcast we do a Three Page Challenge in the show notes we’ll have links to the PDFs for those three pages, so you can follow along.

If you would like to submit your own three pages, it’s at johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out, and there’s little rules there about sort of how you send stuff in and what you should put in your email and what you should not put in your email.

And we’ve been getting a lot of them. So, Stuart goes through the pile and sorts them out and finds some really good ones for us to look at. And, again, thank you to Blake, and James, and Sandra Lee for sending them through to us this week.

**Craig:** Slotboom!

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

**Craig:** Yeah I do. Do you want to hear it?

**John:** Go for it. I want to hear it so much.

**Craig:** So, I feel like I only have three categories of One Cool Things and one of them is medical stuff. Very interesting invention that is currently being tested out and is on the verge of being manufactured. It’s called the XStat syringe. And it’s an example of how modern thinking is changing the way we approach problems. It just seems like such a modern solution to a thing.

Bullet wounds. Incredibly common wound to deal with, not only on the battlefield but also any municipal hospital in a city is dealing with bullet wounds all the time in trauma. And the immediate problem with bullet wounds is bleeding. And basically the way you’re taught when you’re dealing with first response to a bullet wound, and a bleeder as they often are, is to basically shove a bunch of gauze into it, which is what they were doing in the 1800s. Shove gauze in there. The gauze gets quickly soaked. The blood keeps coming out. And then you also have to pull all the gauze out, which can be very painful. Shoving the gauze in is very painful. It doesn’t really do what it’s supposed to do.

So, this is so brilliant, this company called RevMedx has come up with what looks like basically a syringe. It’s a plastic syringe shaped a bit like — it’s kind of like basically a tampon. It’s like a big tampon applicator. And it’s got a silicon tip at one end and a plunger at the other and it’s filled with tiny compressed cotton balls.

And they look like, you know like Smarties, the candy Smarties? Like little — did you get those in Colorado?

**John:** Yeah. I know — yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah. Smarties. So, they look like little pills, like little aspirin pills, but they’re just compressed sponges. And so you stick this plunger into the open bullet wound and you push in these little tiny sponges which fill the space and then the blood essentially makes them expand and they seal the wound up, almost instantly, which is pretty remarkable.

There’s some issues with it. You’ve got to pull all those things out later. But by that point theoretically somebody will be stabilized and anesthetized and so forth.

But, it’s just one of those things where you look at it and you’re like, oh yeah, I guess —

**John:** Yeah. We could do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like I guess we just sort of gave up on bullet wounds for awhile, like for 300 years, and now we realize maybe it would be a good thing to kind of fix that. Because the other option is tourniqueting which causes all sorts of problems. It’s a last resort. You can damage a lot of healthy tissue with a tourniquet. And tourniquets are incredibly painful.

So, hopefully this ends up being cleared by the FDA. The syringes themselves are $100 each, which is a huge deal, because that means that they will be available not just for first world use but all world use. And hopefully they save some lives…of good people.

**John:** That would be great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** When you said syringe I assumed it was going to be something like an epoxy, like an epoxy polymer that you would squeeze in that would actually seal the thing. But, that’s maybe chemically not wise to stick epoxy into people’s open wounds.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t want that in the bloodstream. That’s probably a bad idea.

**John:** They do — they use super glue though for cuts and that does work.

**Craig:** Yeah. They have some surgical adhesives and things like that, but an open wound where you’re injecting it pretty deep in and sometimes even into an organ, epoxy also hardens and then it’s a — yeah, that would be a problem.

**John:** As always, we like to give a lot of medical advice in our podcast because we are experts on so many topics.

**Craig:** I am.

**John:** You are. Craig is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is just a simple game that you will download on your iPhone and waste a lot of time with, because it’s great, called Threes! Have you played Threes! yet, Craig?

**Craig:** No!

**John:** Threes! is really good. It’s really straightforward and simple. And it goes to your basic need to sort of neaten and straighten things.

**Craig:** Oh, no, I have that need.

**John:** So, essentially you’re given a grid of numbers and you are trying to add up — merge these numbers and you’ll have a tile with a three and a tile with a three. You merge them, they become a six. And you’re trying to build up to bigger and bigger numbers. But, of course, there’s limited space on the board, so you’d have to plan strategically for how you’re going to combine these numbers and therefore not fill the grid. And the game is over when you fill the grid.

It’s just a very well thought out game with terrific little mechanics. It’s just smart enough. It’s just cute enough. It’s a good game to play and a terrific time-waster for playing for 30 seconds or for six minutes, but a really good game.

**Craig:** I just bought it.

**John:** On the App Store right now.

**Craig:** I just bought it.

**John:** Done!

**Craig:** I bought it while you were talking.

**John:** That’s how good it is.

So, our show is now complete. If you would like to know more about the topics we talked about, Craig’s medical syringes, my game, any of the Three Page Challenges, you can find the Show Notes at johnaugust.com/podcast.

You can subscribe to us on iTunes. We are there. Look for Scriptnotes. And you can leave us a comment while you’re subscribing there.

If you’re on iTunes you can also find the Scriptnotes app which is for sale. Not for sale there — it’s free there. You can download the app to your phone or other iOS device. Through that app you can access all the back episodes, which is fun and good for you to do.

Weekend Read, the app I make for reading screenplays on your iPhone is also there, so you can download that for free.

We will be back next week with more things to talk about. And if you have questions for Craig, he’s @clmazin on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Longer questions like the one we got about late payments go to ask@johnaugust.com.

And that’s our show.

**Craig:** Slotboom!

**John:** Done. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* Get your tickets now for the [Scriptnotes/Nerdist Live Crossover episode](https://www.nerdmeltla.com/tickets2/index.php?event_id=791/) on April 13th at Nerdmelt, with proceeds benefiting [826LA](https://826la.org/)
* Patti Lupone [interrupted](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WruzPfJ9Rys)
* Film Independent’s [Directors Close-Up series](http://www.filmindependent.org/event/directors-close-up-2014/#.UwuxjkJdVxo)
* [Chicago Fire](http://www.nbc.com/chicago-fire) and [Chicago P.D.](http://www.nbc.com/chicago-pd)
* Three Pages by [Blake Armstrong](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/BlakeArmstrong.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Sandra Lee Slotboom](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/SandraLeeSlotboom.pdf)
* Three Pages by [James Stubenrauch](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JamesStubenrauch.pdf)
* [How to submit your Three Pages](http://johnaugust.com/threepage), and [Stuart’s post on lessons learned from the early batches](http://johnaugust.com/2012/learning-from-the-three-page-challenge)
* The [XStat syringe](http://www.revmedx.com/#!xstat-dressing/c2500) by RevMedx
* [Threes!](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/threes!/id779157948?mt=8) on the App Store
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Betty Spinks

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 131 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, how are ya?

**Craig:** You know, I’m — do you ever get this thing, John, I’ll bet you you don’t. I bet you you don’t. But every now and again, and sometimes for stretches of days at a time, I’ll get that butterflies in the stomach anxiety thing.

**John:** For no good reason?

**Craig:** For no good reason. And I just sit and I wake up in the morning and there it is. And it kind of lingers all day. It’s really uncomfortable and I feel anxious and I don’t know why. I believe this is called Generalized Anxiety Disorder.

**John:** Yeah. Sorry to hear it.

**Craig:** Do you ever get that?

**John:** I do get that sometimes.

**Craig:** Oh, you do?

**John:** And, in fact, I will talk about a little section of my life. These last two weeks have been really busy with the contract negotiations. And then we were supposed to take a trip this weekend. And then the next week was going to be chaotic for different reasons. And I finally just had to say I cannot possibly take a trip this weekend. It just was going to be impossible.

So, we ended up staying home and it’s a lovely weekend in Los Angeles and it’s so much better and more fun.

But, yes, I sympathize with your Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I don’t know, is it technically some sort of like fight or flight instinct that has no basis? Do you know what it is?

**Craig:** It seems like it. I mean, every now and then I get that. It’s the feeling that you get when, I don’t know, you’re nervous or scared, except that there’s nothing to be nervous or scared about. So, you just get that fluttery — and I guess physiologically what’s going on is that adrenaline tends to divert blood flow and oxygen from your gut to your muscles and that what you’re feeling is the result of that. But it’s unpleasant and I’m not really sure what’s going on. And I just want it to stop.

And the problem with anxiety is that you — then what happens is you feel okay but then you get a little twinge of it again and then you suddenly worry, oh god, it’s happening, and then that’s why it’s happening. You know, it perpetuates itself.

**John:** Yeah. With me it’s usually I have convinced myself that I’m having a heart attack.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a panic attack. That’s a whole other…

**John:** Well, that’s true. That’s a whole extra discussion.

**Craig:** Yeah. I never had that. But people who get checked into emergency rooms all the time, with every symptom of a heart attack except cardiac damage.

**John:** Yeah. Well that’s me twice. I’ve twice had to go to the emergency room with all those symptoms.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And they said like, “Yeah, it was good that you came in. But, no, you’re not having a heart attack.”

**Craig:** Right. You’re just panicking.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh my god. The two of us are so panicky!

**John:** We’re so panicky.

Well, this week let’s talk about some psychological issues. Specifically I want to talk about procrastination and pageorexia based on partly a great article you sent through that we’ll talk about.

But we have a lot of other sort of follow up and bits and news and things. I want to talk about sort of all the changes in the industry with the Aereo lawsuit and the Comcast merger. So, let’s just get to it, okay?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, as long as I don’t freak out.

**John:** All right. Don’t freak out. I’m here to keep you company.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

First off, we can freak out just a little bit because we have a live show coming up. We have a live crossover episode with the Nerdist Writers Podcast. And I’m so excited because we’ve talked about doing this for a long time. The Nerdist Writers Podcast is potentially the other great screenwriting podcast or writing podcast you should be listening to and we’re going to have a joint show. We’re going to have a joint live show — they do all their shows live — April [13th] at 5pm. It’s at Meltdown Comics. And tickets are available right now. So, you can go get them.

We have a link in our show notes, but if you’re listening to this on Tuesday I would really recommend you get tickets now because they’re $15. They will sell out. And then you’ll be sad that you weren’t there in the audience for us.

**Craig:** Once again you and are the Jon Bon Jovi of live screenwriting podcasting events. So, yeah, you got to get these tickets.

**John:** I guess we are the Jon Bon Jovi. I don’t even know what the Jon Bon Jovi means though.

**Craig:** Well, Jon Bon Jovi keeps selling out — he sells out everything. You, Jon Bon Jovi is a huge — people love Jon Bon Jovi.

**John:** See, I’m learning things on this podcast even right now.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I should say that this podcast, like all the stuff we do, we’re not making any money off of this. The proceeds from this benefit 826LA, the non-profit organization that sponsors writing programs in Los Angeles. So, it’s another good cause to support.

**Craig:** I mean, you’re familiar with Jon Bon Jovi in general?

**John:** Oh, in general I am. But I’m familiar with him as being a thing from the past.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, for us to be like the current things, that makes me feel really weird like, oh my god, we’re like some ’80s relic. And I don’t feel like a relic whatsoever. I feel vital and young.

**Craig:** So does Jon Bon Jovi.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** [sings] Shot through the heart, and you’re to blame.

**John:** We also have some follow up. Last week on the podcast we talked about —

**Craig:** Just the best.

**John:** [laughs] I said, “Oh, there used to be this place called The Office where people would go and write.” And I spoke of it in the past tense and that was completely incorrect because it still exists. And so they sent a nice tweet, which I retweeted, saying like, “We still exist, we’re out there.” And I recommend people check it out.

There’s another place called Writer’s Junction which does the same function. So, I did mean for those to rhyme. But, if you are looking for a place to go that is not actually a coffee shop but is more like an office that you can go to and write, those are two options for you there.

Also, last week, Craig said The New Girl instead of New Girl for the TV show on Fox.

**Craig:** Sorry!

**John:** And I get it. I mean, it’s so easy to say The New Girl. But, it’s actually called New Girl.

**Craig:** And, by the way, my current television obsession — I shared this with millions of people — is True Detective. And about, I don’t know, 80% of the time I’ll say True Detectives with an S at the end.

**John:** Yeah, because there’s two of them.

**Craig:** There’s two of them and I’m basically a yokel.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. I can’t get this stuff right.

**John:** You’re the Cletus of the show. You’re the Cletus and Jon Bon Jovi of the show.

**Craig:** Cletus. Cletus is the greatest character.

**John:** He’s so good. Because clearly he was meant to be just a one-time throwaway and they just loved him so much that they brought him back.

**Craig:** Did you ever see the one where Marge is trying to find a designer dress at a discount price because she has to go to this fancy party?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they offer her, [laughs], they tell her that they don’t have anything right now, but in her price range there is a shipment expected of partially burnt Sears sportswear coming in. And she’s not interested. And Cletus walks up and he goes, “What time and how burnt?” [laughs]

Perfect line. Ah! He’s slightly discriminating.

**John:** [laughs] He is. Yeah, so it’s a character that you couldn’t get away with — if he had like a race associated with him you couldn’t possibly do it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But because he’s just white trash it’s still safe.

**Craig:** Oh, 100 percent. I talk about this with Malcolm Spellman all the time. We try and track what races are now safe to do. Like what racism is okay. I mean, poor white trash racism, thumbs up. Huge thumbs up. Irish people. Yeah. Green light. Green light.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Asians, I think, are successful now enough where it’s starting to get to be a green light. Bad news for Asians.

**John:** Yeah. But then you’re generalizing a whole giant category of people rather than being specific.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I mean, but that’s the point of racism. [laughs]

**John:** That’s the point of racism. It should not be precise enough in your description.

**Craig:** That’s it. The whole point is it’s a very clumsy, ham-fisted way of getting a laugh, a cheap laugh out of an entire billions of people. But, yeah. I think that they are successful enough, powerful enough that it’s happening. It’s happening.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I feel it.

**John:** Craig, so we recorded — the last show came out on Tuesday and Tuesday afternoon we put out this new app and I sort of didn’t want to talk about it ahead of time, I just wanted it to be a surprise upon the world, but it wasn’t actually a surprise to you because you’d seen the build of this app quite early on. This is called Weekend Read.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s an app for reading screenplays on your iPhone. And can you summarize what your reaction to the app was when you saw it?

**Craig:** [laughs] Look, you don’t have to set a trap for me. I’m perfectly happy to just jump into your spikes and poison. I have no idea.

**John:** And told-you-sos?

**Craig:** And, by the way still — and told-you-sos. I still have no idea why anyone would want to read a screenplay on their phone. On their iPad, sure, I get it. On their phone, it’s just tiny, and I frankly don’t want anyone reading my screenplays on their phone.

So, you sent it and I’m like, “Why would anybody?” It’s perfectly — you did exactly what you set out to do and you did it well, but why would anybody want this. Well, apparently, I’m just, once again, totally marginalized by existence. Everybody wants it. I think it’s your biggest seller, right?

**John:** Which has really been remarkable. So, Weekend Read is a reader for your iPhone. It basically takes a screenplay and melts it down so you can make it look good on an iPhone, so basically you can take a PDF of a screenplay, sort of like what Highland does, it melts it down and just gives you the text so you can change the size and make it actually readable on your iPhone.

You and I both — well, you said you’ve never ever had to read a script on your iPhone, but I’ve had to. And you basically end up squinting and pinching and it’s terrible. That’s why you would never want to read a script on your iPhone.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And now you suddenly can. So, we launched the app on Tuesday and within like four hours we’d sold — we’d shipped more copies of Weekend Read than we did of FDX Reader, our first app, which has been out for two years. So, that was remarkable.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** It seems to be quite popular among people. I just feel like many listeners of the show probably do read screenplays and many of them probably do have iPhones, so if you would like to try it out it’s free in the App Store right now. So, you just download it.

**Craig:** Look, congratulations. That’s spectacular. One thing that occurred to me when you were talking about how successful the launch had been is that you had — the app is a great name.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** It’s a really good name, you know. And it’s one of those names that manages to both say what the thing is but also sound interesting. It sounds like an actual name and not just a description.

**John:** Yes. So Weekend Reading in Hollywood lingo is classically the scripts that a development executive would read over the weekend. And so essentially a bunch of stuff will come in over the week and then they will sort of assign out the weekend read which is basically everyone on the team is supposed to read these scripts over the weekend. And so it felt like a very natural thing to call a script reader Weekend Read.

**Craig:** And now they’re going to read them on their phones. “Oh, good for you!” That’s my Christian Bale yelling at Shane Hurlbut. “Good for you!”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Have you ever heard that?

**John:** It’ll be nice.

**Craig:** Have you ever heard that?

**John:** Oh, yeah, that great audio of Christian Bale ranting at people?

**Craig:** That’s my favorite part. “Good for you!” [laughs]

**John:** Good for all of us. What Kelly Marcel pointed out, which I think will be interesting to see if it actually kicks in, is that a lot of times actors going out for auditions get sides. And those sides are just a PDF. And so it’s fantastic for them just like, well, it’s now on their phone and that’s kind of all they need. So, we’ll see if that works as well.

**Craig:** Oh, good, now the actors will just be reading their parts. “Good for you! Oh, good for you!” We got to throw a little clip of that in at the end of this.

**John:** It’s going to become a meme.

**Craig:** Did we ever talk about which side of that you come down on?

**John:** Both of them came out horribly in it I would say.

**Craig:** Interesting. I disagree.

**John:** You think Christian Bale came out — ?

**Craig:** I back Bale 100 percent on that one.

**John:** Okay. Here is my perception of what actually happened, being the person who was in Shane Hurlbut, the DP’s perspective. For people who don’t know what the hell we’re talking about, this was on the set of Terminator Salvation which was — Christian Bale played John Connor in a Terminator version. And he had a complete flip out on the set against the DP who was Shane Hurlbut I think is his name.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it was recorded because people were already wearing mics. So, Christian Bale initially came off really badly in this and sort of had to do some penance to dig himself out of this hole.

My gut feeling is that Christian Bale was incredibly frustrated by the situation and he couldn’t flip out on the director, McG, and so he flipped out on the nearest person who he actually could kind of flip out on, which was probably Shane Hurlbut. That’s my perception.

**Craig:** My perception is that Shane Hurlbut was doing something that I’ve never seen any DP do which is go and tweak lights in the middle of a take. And I guess the deal was it’s coverage, so the camera is aiming at Christian Bale over someone else’s shoulders. Which means all the lights are behind the camera pointing out at Christian Bale.

And you try and clear the eye line for actors so they’re not being distracted. They can perform in the moment. And then while he’s talking here comes this guy that just starts wandering in behind the person he’s talking to and starts moving stuff around.

And I guess he had asked him a bunch of times, “Please don’t do that,” and then the guy just kept doing it and he flipped out. “Good for you!” I’m sorry. This is the weirdest tangent. Like a weird old tangent.

**John:** It’s a fine tangent.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But let’s get to the meat of today’s podcast.

So, you had sent this great article by Megan McArdle which is from The Atlantic on procrastination. And I loved a little piece of it, but it’s worth reading the whole thing because I thought it was a really smart piece and it’s actually part of I guess a bigger book about sort of the importance of failure.

But, tell me why you sent it and sort of what you got out of it.

**Craig:** Well, first I got excited because I thought that the child star of Annie had written this, but that’s Andrea McArdle. Megan McArdle — boy, I’m in the craziest mood today.

**John:** That’s all right.

**Craig:** I promise you I’m totally sober.

Megan McArdle wrote about procrastination which in and of itself is nearly impossible to do, because it’s been written about 1,000 times, but what I liked about this was that she zeroed in on why writers — I mean, this is the title — Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators. And she has a theory.

Look, I’m not sure if her theory is correct. But at least it’s a theory of why it seems to be so much harder for writers than for other people. And essentially her theory is that writers were likely the kids who found writing easy. That is to say writing relative to their peers. So, you’re in English class, you’re doing creative writing, you’re discussing a book, you’re doing a book report — you have to write anything. And everybody pats you on the back because being able to write instinctively and write cohesively and interestingly turns out to be fairly rare. I mean, just walk around. Go into any business and read what people are writing. It’s just hard for most people.

It’s a little bit like singing. Most people can’t sing, but a lot of people can. And people who can sing it comes easily to them, that’s great.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And her point is that this unfortunately starts to — this creates a bad lesson for this kid, because they associate writing with something that is innate and fixed. That is to say this isn’t something I’m going to develop, it’s something that I was given. You have a gift as they say.

It turns out, of course, in the real world, no. You do have to develop your skills. Just because you have natural ability or a “gift” doesn’t mean that you are now ready for primetime or that there are other people that aren’t doing a lot better than you are. You have much to learn, much to learn. And you always will. You always will.

So, what happens for a lot of writers is that procrastination becomes the psychological extension of the fear that they don’t have anything more than what they have.

**John:** Yeah. I described it on the blog as the best scene is the scene you haven’t written yet. Or like you can’t fail at a scene you haven’t written yet.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There’s every chance — every time you sit down at the typewriter it’s a chance that you’re going to write something terrible. And so therefore maybe I just won’t sit down at the keyboard and I will do something else instead.

What I think is interesting about writing is you compare this to really kind of anything, like athletics, and so let’s say you’re a kid who is like really naturally athletic and great. And so you are very good at basketball or whatever. At a certain point it’s going to become objectively clear whether you are great at basketball or you were just good compared to your peers. Because you can actually see how good somebody is at basketball.

Writing is actually so much more amorphous. It’s really hard to say who’s a good writer, who’s not a good writer, who is a fantastic writer, who’s an okay writer. But weirdly the writer, him or herself, at a certain point develops a sense of like what is good and what’s bad. And they can recognize sometimes when they’re not writing their best. And there’s always that fear like, well, I might write something just awful. And everyone may — this is, again, the imposter syndrome — everyone may realize that I’m actually not that good of a writer at all.

And so by procrastinating, by putting off that writing you are delaying, you’re protecting yourself. It’s really self-preservation through procrastination.

**Craig:** That’s right. Because if you’re one of these people that falls into this category that there’s — Ms. McArdle sites Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck who is doing some research on this, and so professor Dweck has this idea that there are people who have the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. The fixed mindset people, basically when they do something they look at it as an indication of essentially what my ability is. Period. The end. That’s it. if you have a fixed mindset and you sit down, and you start writing, and either you don’t like what you wrote, or other people don’t like what you wrote, this is going to shatter some fixed part of your identity. People might as well be looking at you and saying you have an ugly face, you know, you’re far too tall, and I don’t like your eyes. You can’t change it.

Whereas the other kinds of writers, the growth mindset writers, don’t look at their writing ability as some sort of fixed capacity tank. Do you feel like you have both of these or just one, or — ?

**John:** I think I do have both of them. But I think I definitely am guilty of sometimes picking the easier — that sounds wrong — but in her article she talks about self-sabotage. I’ve definitely witnessed myself self-sabotaging by creating a situation where it was impossible for me to sort of succeed. And so therefore I have an excuse for why that thing wasn’t the best thing I could possibly do.

So it’s like, well, it’s the best I could do in that circumstance. Well, I put myself in that circumstance so therefore is it really my best work?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or, not doing that thing that is so incredibly risky because I wasn’t sure if I could write it.

I would say over the last ten years though I’ve been much more aggressive about picking the thing that I’m both sure I can write and also not sure I can write. The thing that’s sort of outside of my comfort zone.

And even I guess sometimes at the start of my career, definitely going from Go to Big Fish, which are not sort of natural progressions, I really tried to push myself to do both of those things.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s very —

**John:** Are you a growth or a fixed? I perceive you — I’ll diagnose you first, but I think I’ll be wrong. I perceive you as a person who is fixed in the sense that you perceive yourself as a comedy writer and yet you very much also want to stretch beyond those boundaries of just a pure comedy writer.

**Craig:** I, yeah, well the thing is the genre that you pick is probably — it’s probably a symptom of your desire to stay safe and to succeed.

I don’t feel that I’m a fixed person. I do feel like I am always trying to get better and challenge myself, which indicates that I don’t have a philosophical belief that I’m just capped at a certain level. But certainly like you, I’ve made choices to protect myself and like you, lately and particularly lately, I’ve been making choices that do the opposite, that essentially put me out there in an area — I think you said it perfectly. I can do this and I can’t do this. That’s a good place to be. That means you’re not trying to fly, but you’re definitely taking careful steps somewhere. And that’s a good thing.

**John:** Yeah. And I would say beyond just my pure writing stuff, I think in public speaking and sort of my moderating of panels and my doing stuff at the Academy has been also an expansion beyond what I’m comfortable and safe doing, because it’s just so much easier for me to stay at home and just write on blog. And to go out and have to be in front of a big crowd of people was not natural for me. And yet I’ve gotten much more comfortable about doing it.

I think I’ve told this story on the podcast before, but I’ll summarize it here because it actually fits really well with this sort of fixed versus growth mindset. I was on set and I was watching Spielberg direct this scene. And I was looking at sort of how he was doing stuff and how stuff was going. And I had this momentary flash where I realized like, oh, he’s just working really hard.

You associate these great directors as being these visionary talents who are born with these gifts. And while clearly he has gifts, he’s also just worked really hard. And I could see him — he’s Steven Spielberg, but he’s figuring out all these shots and he’s telling all these people what to do. And he’s really good at doing that, but he’s also just really focusing on it and he’s really working.

And it was one of those moments that was both sort of sobering in the sense that, oh, it’s not magic. But it was also like, oh, it’s not magic. Like I can work really hard, too. And that was actually greatly encouraging for me to see like, you know, it’s really, really hard work but I know I can work really, really hard.

And I think it gets back to Megan McArdle’s point is that oftentimes the people who succeed are the ones who just kind of aren’t afraid of failing. The ones who sort of can benefit from failure or benefit from struggles and learn how to sort of struggle.

**Craig:** That’s right. It puts you in a tough spot because most people on the planet don’t do jobs where failure is likely. They don’t. I’m not sure — most jobs are fairly safe things. This one isn’t one.

**John:** You can’t fail at a spreadsheet.

**Craig:** No, you can’t. I mean, you can, but it’s a different kind of failure. It’s not a failure of you. You can make mistakes but it’s not a failure of the expression of your point of view, your taste. Our brothers and sisters in the film review community, how do you fail? How do you fail?

If you can give Her a terrible review and still be at work the next week, how do you — there’s not failing there. But what we do, there’s failure every day. In fact, it’s built in. When we are hired, the contract is built around the notion that we’re going to keep failing. That’s why there is more than one draft even if it’s just optional. The entire editorial process is built around that. The reason you shoot more than you’re going to keep in the movies, because directors make mistakes all the time.

Why do actors get more than one take? Failure. Failure. Failure. The whole thing is a parade of it. And you have to make your peace with it, or it will absolutely destroy you.

**John:** It occurs to me that this kind of procrastination that a writer faces sitting down at the keyboard is really just a form of stage fright. It’s that fear that I’m going to get there at the keyboard and I’m not going to be good. And everyone is going to see that I’m not good and it’s going to be awful.

And so therefore I just won’t sit down at the keyboard.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the difference with stage fright is that eventually you have to get on. They’re going to call your name and you’re going to have to get up on stage and you’re going to have to start singing. And that’s, I think, ultimately what you have to face is a writer is that I have to sit there and I have to type this thing. And even if it’s terrible, I have to get through it because that’s my job. That’s what I’m here to do.

So, let’s just talk a little bit about sort of how you get past those humps and sort of what you find.

**Craig:** Well, I try and remember, and this is something that McArdle points out. I try and remember that there is no percentage for me to compare what I’m about to do or what I’m doing with finished products, which I think is the demon that plagues us constantly. I’m going to sit down. What should I write? Well, if I write this, that’s been done before. If I write this, somebody else already did that better. If I write this is it too much like that?

Constantly comparing the process, the messy process of cooking, to already completed perfect meals. You have to get ultimately to the place where it’s done. And, of course, we’re all trained to watch and appreciate the best of all those completions. So, I try and remind myself that there is nothing permanent about what I’m about to write. I can always hit delete.

It’s not like I’m expending resources, you know, rare resources to generate three or four pages, only to throw them out. I’m not building a wall, you know, where it’s going to cost me money to build it again. So, I give myself a break in that regard.

**John:** I think what you’re saying is exactly right in terms of recognizing that the finished product is not what you’re working on right now. You’re working on the process and in McArdle’s piece she points out that we always read, when we read like the great authors, we’re reading their final drafts.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We’re not reading everything they did along the way. We’re not seeing all their mistakes. We’re not seeing everything they threw out. We’re seeing the finished product. And it would actually be very helpful, I think, sometimes if we saw all the drafts that led up to it so we could see this.

Shakespeare actually weirdly, we do get to see all the different versions of things, and that’s kind of useful. You can sort of see how things grew and how things changed.

When I find myself procrastinating I, you know, the classic rule is you sort of set a timer. And it’s like for the next 20 minutes I’m going to write and I’m not going to do anything else. I’m just going to write. Jane Espenson calls this a Writing Sprint, which is basically no matter what, the next 20 minutes, the next 40 minutes, I’m going to write and I’m not going to stop writing until the timer goes off. That’s a great trick.

Freedom for Mac, the utility that we’ve talked about before on the show, which basically turns off your internet connection for a period of time, also really helpful. So, if you’re sitting there and you can’t get on the internet you’re more likely to be able to focus on the work you’re doing.

Anything else for you?

**Craig:** Yeah. The other little trick I do is to think about the scene that I’m supposed to be writing and then say, okay, maybe I’m scared to start writing this because I just don’t love it yet. There’s nothing in it that’s getting me super excited. And so I just try and think about it in different ways. Or just let myself think.

If it takes all day I’ll just think all day. If I have to take a walk, or you know me, a long shower is always great. But, when you find that thing that suddenly gets you excited then it’s a lot easier to sit down because it doesn’t feel quite so grindy.

And, by the way, interestingly enough, a lot of the times those things that got us motivated, they come out. It was something that we just needed to do it to not feel bad about moving our fingers over the keys. And there are days when you can take a walk and you feel like you can walk from one end of the earth to the other. And there are days when taking five steps just feels tough.

You have to actually honor that and not punish yourself for having one of those days. It’s totally normal.

**John:** Yeah. Agreed.

I want to sidestep to another sort of psychological thing which I actually witnessed this week in the negotiating room.

So, basically during the negotiations there is a lot of time where we as the screenwriters are just sitting there waiting for the next thing to happen. And so people are writing, which is great. So, you’re shoulder to shoulder with all these writers writing, which is fantastic.

But one writer who was sitting close to me was struggling to — his script was 116 pages and he really wanted to get down to 114, or 112. And he called it Pageorexia, which I thought was just the best term. And this wasn’t like a newbie writer. This was like a guy with multiple awards and nominated this year for awards. And I just thought it was hilarious that this is this guy who is getting paid a tremendous amount of money to do whatever he wants to do. And he still sweats all of these little details to try to get it down one more page.

He described it as, “Well, if they love it at 116 they’ll love it even more at 114,” which is such a classic anorexia kind of comment. It’s like he’s looking in the mirror and he’s not seeing what the script truly is.

**Craig:** Right. He’s got script dysmorphia.

**John:** Yes. But I would argue that in some ways that’s related to the procrastination thing that we’re talking about. It’s a perfectionism as a way of fearing failure. Rather than fear stopping him from writing, fear was getting him gripped into this sort of OCD must make everything perfect.

**Craig:** Yeah. We are constantly deluding ourselves that we have control over the response to our screenplay when we don’t. We write what we write. And we then give it to entirely different sentient organisms with completely different tastes, experiences, moods. And either they like it or they don’t. But that stuff is about trying to control that which we cannot control.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It does not — they will not like a 114 page script more than that script at 116, ever. [laughs] It’s never going to happen.

**John:** Yeah. What it’s doing is it’s crossing the line between like sort of professionalism, which is basically like making that look as good as it can. And perfectionism, or sort of needless perfectionism where you’re just moving commas around so that it breaks a little bit differently.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** This is a very smart man. So, I can tell him, and he knows that the 114 page script and the 116 page script will shoot exactly the same. You’re not changing the movie whatsoever. You’re just changing the words around on the page.

And yet sometimes we get obsessed about the words on 8.5 x 11 paper, not remembering like, oh that’s right, it’s actually just a plan for making a movie.

I heard a story, which may be apocryphal but it sounds absolutely true, because I feel I like I may have seen this in one of his scripts, that James Cameron when he got to — this is back in the time where you actually would type scripts or they were sort of printed out of things, so they weren’t PDFs. So, he would number it from 70 to 79 and when he got to 80 he would start it again at 70 to 79 again, so he could squeeze an extra 10 pages in. And no one would sort of notice that like it was doubled up there. Isn’t that a great idea?

**Craig:** [laughs] I totally believe it. I mean, the “it’s too long” is the traditional problem of the screenwriter. I’ve really never had a problem of a script that was much too long. The current script that I am doing is more of an action movie, and so I’ve given myself more length than a typical comedy. And it’s in at 119. And that’s 119 with proper margins and double spaces before the slug lines. And I feel good about that.

I called up Scott Frank in a little bit of a panic —

**John:** Scott Frank will tell you to turn in a 180 page script. Scott Frank writes long…

**Craig:** Scott laughed at me and then slapped me around and said, “No one gives a damn. I’ve never turned in a first draft that was shorter than…” Yeah. Exactly. “If it’s under 150 it’s a hallelujah for me.”

The one thing that I do spend time on, and I know Scott does — a lot of writers do — is page breaks at important moments.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I do look and see, okay, look, if there’s a big reveal or a moment, I don’t want that to be split up by a page break. If there’s an interesting speech. In fact, I don’t want any dialogue split over page breaks. I hate it. So, I try and — I mess around with stuff like that. But, you know, that’s when the script is done. And that’s just a fun hour or two.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s segue to our next topic which is a bunch of stuff happened this last week and it’s going to be happening in the next few months which could make everything quite a bit different in the next couple of years. So, I just want to give a little sense of what’s gone on and forecast — a very murky forecast — of what could happen in the weeks ahead.

So, this last week it was announced that Comcast is buying Time Warner Cable, which will create the largest cable company in the universe, I guess.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, it was the number one cable company, Comcast, buying the number two cable company, Time Warner. It raises just a lot of questions about sort of how powerful can one company be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Also, happening soon we have Aereo, the company that’s being sued by the broadcast networks. Aereo essentially retransmits over the air broadcast via the internet. And it’s a whole question about sort of what is possible there. What’s going to be legal there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then we also have, you know, this is the new season of House of Cards starting. A real question about Netflix and Amazon and now companies are making things that are like television but are not classically television. And how are we going to write for those and how are we going to get paid for those? And that’s a big thing.

**Craig:** It’s a mess out there. It’s a mess.

**John:** It’s a mess out there. And they’re actually all kind of related because — so, let’s go back to the Aereo lawsuit.

So, essentially Aereo’s lawsuit is — the broadcast networks are suing this company, Aereo, which provides television, a local channel television, but what they do which is very clever, they have these tiny little antennas and essentially as a subscriber you are renting this tiny little antenna which is often hooked to a tiny little hard drive which allows you to record the over-the-air broadcast in your market and so that you can look at it on your iPhone, your iPad, your computer.

It’s a way of getting your broadcast television to your computer or your other device. And it has this sort of geofencing on it and stuff so you’re not supposed to be able to get it outside of your region. Classically that would be called retransmission.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so when cable companies come into a market, or cable companies are in a market, they have to pay the broadcast channels for the right to retransmit their shows.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, they have to pay, the classically New York, CBS, and I guess it was Comcast had the fight over basically how much Comcast would have to pay CBS in order to rebroadcast.

**Craig:** It happens all the time. Yeah.

**John:** And so if you lose a channel, like basically for awhile CBS wasn’t on Comcast, and that was because they were fighting over the price. And the broadcasters make about $4 billion a year in those retransmission fees. So, if Aereo were to succeed the broadcasters would feel like, well, we’re going to lose all that money.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I don’t understand how this is legal at all. Anyone that watches a baseball game has heard, or any sports event, “This telecast cannot be rebroadcast or retransmitted without the expressed given permission, blah, blah, blah.”

Yeah, how do they do this? It doesn’t seem…

**John:** I’ll tell you exactly how they get away with it. It’s because of Comcast itself. So, Comcast won an earlier Supreme Court decision with their basically personal DVRs. So, what Comcast was letting it do, and I remember blogging about this a zillion years ago and actually coming down on kind of maybe the wrong side of it. But, so Comcast, the DVR decision, was essentially Comcast wanted to say like, “Okay, so we have this cable subscriber. And rather than having a DVR in their house, they can have their DVR at the cable company.”

**Craig:** Right. A cloud-based DVR. Right.

**John:** Exactly the same thing. But it’s one DVR per household, so it really is an individual’s DVR. And so the retransmission is public retransmission, not private retransmission. So, that is the very fine line that Aereo is trying to go for. And apparently the reason why they introduced service in New York City is because it was already in the second court, the second district court when it had that ruling for Comcast that was beneficial. So, it’s going to be fascinating to see what happens.

This case, and now I think it’s supposed to be heard by the Supreme Court in April, so we’ll have a ruling there.

The question is, from a writer’s perspective, and an industry’s perspective, what happens if the Supreme Court says you can do this sort of private rebroadcasting? Well, I think if you’re a cable provider you’re going to say like, well, I’m not going to pay this local channel all this money for this. I’m going to do this thing with the antennas and it will be cheaper for me just to do this thing with the antennas.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m always fascinated by these businesses that operate like fatal viruses. There’s the classic question in epidemiology. Why didn’t say small pox just kill everyone? What stopped it? And the answer what stops it is it’s too good at killing people. And it just kills at its hosts in an area too quickly and can’t transmit itself.

I’m fascinated by these companies that their business model is to feast on the corpse of the thing that’s giving them life until there’s nothing left.

**John:** Well, here’s the thing though. I think from what Aereo would argue back, and I’ll just play devil’s advocate for Aereo here, is that it’s essentially the same thing as what the Cablevision decision was. The subscriber is still getting exactly the broadcast that they would have gotten with their own rabbit ears.

And so they’re still getting all of the commercials. They’re still getting — Nielsen still measures those people. So, technically it’s not that they’re stripping out commercials. It’s not that they’re taking the content away. They’re just giving it to them in the way that they want. And so Les Moonves of CBS said, “Well, if this lawsuit happens maybe we’ll just become a cable channel.”

Well, maybe they’ll just become a cable channel. Or maybe they’ll just start offering on CBS.com all of your shows for a subscription.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which then raised the question of like, well, does that mean that five years from now, CBS, NBC, everything we associate as being broadcast television could ultimately become a subscription service?

**Craig:** Well, yeah, it could. I mean, the fact that anything is broadcast over the air anymore is, obviously, it’s archaic. But it is so much part and parcel with the way that networks work. And there are still a bunch of places in the country where people use antennas and pick signals out off the air.

**John:** Yeah. And complicating these things even more, when we switched over to the digital channels — there’s piggyback digital channels. There are basically secondary channels that can go along with this. And so you’ve seen like My Network TV in certain markets or there’s another thing with like Axion or something, that’s considered a piggyback. It’s a secondary digital channel. And the rules for how we treat those are still kind of amorphous. Are they broadcast? Are they not broadcast? Do they fall under those rules? Do they fall under some sort of digital distribution rules?

That’s all strange and complicated.

**Craig:** Mess. It’s a mess.

**John:** It’s a mess.

So, but let’s talk about Comcast because what’s so weird about Comcast is if the merger happens, it’s already the nation’s largest internet service provider. It’s the nation’s largest video provider. It’s one of the biggest home phone providers. It controls a movie studio, because Comcast owns NBC Universal, so it controls a movie studio, a broadcast network, and a whole bunch of cable channels. That’s a big company.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, where do you stand on big companies?

**Craig:** Well, my feeling is that as a professional writer who makes a living from these big companies, that I want them to survive but only to a point. I want them to survive with robust competition.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** So, I have no problem. I know the Writers Guild immediately freaks out every time this happens. They absolutely lose their minds over vertical integration and multi-national corporations consolidating the business. My feeling is, good, I’m okay with that. As long as there’s not one or two of them, you know.

We currently have Sony and we have Comcast Universal. And we have Warner Bros. which will exist with its networks and its movie studios and its television production regardless of the cable situation. We have Disney and we have Fox and we have Viacom. There’s big companies out there all fighting with each other. Those companies have the resources to not only make large scale entertainment but they also have the resources to pay us and to negotiate pretty good — pretty good deals with our union, as you’re in the middle of right now.

I think the Writers Guild, this is an area where I’ve never understood the Writers Guild’s full blown paranoia. Paranoia, yes. Hysteria, no. They’re constantly looking at Amazon and Google as some sort of rescuers. I keep screaming to everybody they’re the opposite. They’re the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Non-union shops that are used to bullying everybody out of everything.

I mean, we have five major movie studios, right? Five?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How many major search engines are there on the planet? One. That’s the way Google works.

How many major e-tailers compete with Amazon? I’m going to go with none.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I have no problem with these companies doing what they need to do to survive as long as I have options. Frankly, in my house I don’t get my internet from Time Warner or Comcast. I don’t get my phones from Time Warner or Comcast. I don’t get my television from Time Warner or Comcast. You know what I get from Comcast?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** I get paid because I’m working for Universal. [laughs] That’s what I get. I get paid.

**John:** Ha-ha! You get checks.

**Craig:** I feel like I’m still living — I get checks. So, I’m still living in a world where these companies have vital, large scale competition and I support their — I back their survival as long as there’s enough of them to keep each other honest. How about you?

**John:** All right. I’m concerned about this merger because it’s literally like, it’s just like number one and two, it’s like 75% of cable in the country would be controlled by this one giant company which doesn’t feel like a lot. And cable is also one of those weird things.

So, broadcasters are subject to these regulations because the broadcast spectrum is there are limited resources, therefore we have a lot of controls over sort of what you can do there and how many players you can have because it’s a limited resource.

But cable is actually a limited resource in the sense that every community had to make deals with the companies who are bringing in this wire. And basically because, so you’re not ripping up the streets a thousand times, they’re sort of near-monopolies in a lot of these markets.

And I do worry that because they are the fastest pipe into the house and it’s essentially only end up having one or now maybe two choices, a duopoly situation where AT&T is the other way you can get the stuff. It could just become really problematic.

And I’ve sympathized on both sides of the net neutrality debate, but I think it becomes a little bit more pressing when you have this giant company that controls the access to households, to so many households, and is making its own content and can therefore in the world of no net neutrality prioritize its content over anyone else’s content. And that is challenging to me.

**Craig:** In my mind, I don’t see that the company would do that. I don’t think that Comcast/Time Warner would — their merged cable system — if they were to tier stuff would say, hey, it’s going to cost you more to watch these other channels. It’s going to cost you less to watch the ones that we control.

**John:** But that’s exactly what they’ve done in cable. Cable is tiered. I mean, it already is tiered right now. You can get these channels with this. You can get this, a higher tier, you get these channels.

**Craig:** But in the way its tiered, they don’t — in other words, Time Warner never gave you a break on HBO. They charge you more for HBO because it’s worth more. My point being that they never — they know the consumers — the demand from consumers is what drives the market price. And if they try and use monopoly pressure. Well, first of all, they’re going to run into anti-trust problems if they start bundling, because that’s basically bundling. You’re not allowed to do it.

But also they’re just going to run into marketplace problems because people are not going to want that. Where I kind of see benefit for professional writers on these non-net neutrality side is if these companies said things like, “Well, we’re going to start charging a premium for super fast delivery of movies. All movies. Not Universal movies. All movies.” And then we would get better residuals. So, that — I could see that as a benefit for writers. But, I don’t, I mean, look, I personally suspect that cable has got another 10 or 15 years left. Physical cable. Because I think ultimately —

**John:** Before there is some sort of pervasive Wi-Fi?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s inevitable. It’s inevitable. So, I mean, this merger I don’t think is a cause for us to twist our underwear up.

**John:** All right. We’ll see.

We have some questions. Let’s go to some questions. So, Mark in Portland asks, “If pagination isn’t that important,” I think he’s talking about last week’s episode where I ranted on pagination. “If pagination isn’t that important, why use Courier or Courier Prime font?”

I would say that use Courier because Courier is what is expected in screenplays. It’s not that it’s better, or that it’s perfect, or that will exactly match the one page per minute guideline. It’s just what we’re expecting in a screenplay. And anything that’s not that will be met with an “Uh-huh? That’s not what a screenplay should look like.”

**Craig:** Yup. It’s basically tradition. Simple as that. It’s the tradition that comes from an old school way of thinking about stuff as being a page a minute and all that. And really it was way to try and — all of these things were really ways to foil writers who were trying to cheat either by not writing enough, or by jamming too much into a space. The studios got wise to all of our tricks.

It’s an easy way for them to go, “Oh, okay, well at least we’ve eliminated one variable. They can’t use the super tiny font. They can’t write everything in Times 12, you know.” But, yeah, it’s tradition.

**John:** I think we use Courier and Courier Prime, even though we have better fonts now, or different fonts that you could use, simply for the same reason why when you’re turning in those papers in college or in high school they wanted you to use a certain font so you wouldn’t cheat.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And it’s style sheets. I mean, Warner Bros. I think still includes all that stuff in the contracts. Margins and all that.

**John:** Scotty Shumaker writes, “I’m a 22 year old recent college graduate working as a night shift janitor at McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica.”

**Craig:** Awesome!

**John:** “I came here to find some adventure and pay off student loans. Because I work alone in a deserted science lab for 60 hours a week I’m able to pass the tedious hours mopping and scrubbing urinals by listening to you guys. I have probably listened to over 100 hours of Scriptnotes in the past few months as well as all seven Harry Potter books, all three Lord of the Rings, and about 100 episodes of a podcast called Inside Acting. I just wanted to say thank you and let you know that your wisdom and umbrage has made its way down to the seventh continent.”

**Craig:** That is amazing. I mean, first of all, there’s something — doesn’t that sound like the first five pages of a movie? You’re the guy —

**John:** Oh, come on, it’s a great setup.

**Craig:** You’re there at the science base on the south pole, but you’re not a scientist. You’re a janitor. You’re just the janitor.

**John:** You’re the janitor.

**Craig:** And you’re just scrubbing stuff. And then one day you come out of the bathrooms and everyone is dead.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And there’s something — yeah, I mean, it’s great. Anyway, my former college roommate, Eric Leech, I believe worked down at that very station. He’s an astrophysicist. And I think he was there for a year. It’s dangerous down there. When they have their winter, and our summer, you get like 15 seconds or 30 seconds to walk around before they make you come back in. It’s brutal.

**John:** It’s bad.

So, Craig, I’m hoping that over our many, many episodes of the podcast I’ll get to know all of your college roommates who have all gone on to become famous people.

**Craig:** Well, Eric and I share a common opinion of the junior senator from Texas.

**John:** A third roommate.

**Craig:** Ted Cruz. Yeah.

**John:** A question from Khrob in San Francisco.

**Craig:** Khrob?

**John:** Khrob. K-H-R-O-B .

**Craig:** Oh, Khrob.

**John:** Khrob. “Where’s the line for things in your script that are very clearly referencing the specifics of another project? If the Tae Bo movie had a shot — ” So, last week we talked about the Tae Bo movie, or the theoretical Tae Bo movie. I guess it was a real Tae Bo movie.

**Craig:** It was an actual Tae Bo movie.

**John:** “If the Tae Bo movie had a shot of the protagonist clearly doing Daniel-san’s Crane Kick practice, but was otherwise its own film, at what point would that cross from reference to homage to plagiarism? If a show like Futurama or The Simpsons builds a whole episode around a known property, the Futurama episode of Titanic, for example, do they pay for that or are they allowed to use specifics given their status as satirical shows?”

**Craig:** Well, I mean, you can reference any movie you want.

**John:** Yeah. That’s fine. It’s fine to reference the movie. And I would say like that whole thing about doing the shot, the Crane Kick position, that’s obviously a reference, we get the reference, you’re not stealing anything.

But I will tell you in a very real sense it does happen sometimes where people get uncomfortable, even not a legal standpoint, but sort of like, “I’m not sure we’re in a parody spot here. I just feels like too much the same movie.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It does happen. That’s a conversation that happens all the time.

**Craig:** Yeah, look, if you’re trying to parody something, parody is generally protected under the copyright law and fair use. But, let’s say you’re just making a reference so that the reader understands the kind of thing you’re going for, you know, you say something like, “The two of them begin fighting in the elevator. It’s like From Russia with Love,” but you know, something, something.

**John:** Over peanut butter.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, just so that people understand what you’re going for. That’s okay. I mean, don’t do it lot. You know, it starts to get a little weird. But it’s fine if you feel like it’s going to help convey your intention. You’re not copying something, but you’re saying it’s a little bit like this, but imagine that in this new circumstance. Just, you know, underline the film title and keep going.

**John:** Keep going.

Hope writes, “I’ve heard you and Craig mention several times on the podcast that now more than ever people should try to shoot their own small projects, like a short film. This helps them learn about filmmaking, see their words on a screen, and has a slim but real possibility of getting them attention either online or at festivals.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Would this advice still apply if you have no intention of becoming a writer-director? Is an award-winning short that you wrote a useful calling card as an aspiring screenwriter? Have there been any screenwriters, not counting writer-directors, who have gotten their first success in the industry through a short?”

**Craig:** Oh, I’m sure.

**John:** I’m sure there are. But I would say my general advice about like shooting your own stuff is not just as the calling card for yourself, while it can be really great as the calling card, it’s just so you actually understand what it is like to make something as a finished product rather than just a screenplay. And so that’s why — I think that’s why we talk about the importance of going out and actually shooting some stuff, just so you have a sense of what that is, because that is incredibly useful.

But if you wrote a really great short film, and even if you didn’t direct it, I think that is good for you. I think it is great exposure.

**Craig:** No question. Yeah, the whole point of making your own thing is to be a better writer. And if you say, “Well, I actually don’t want to direct, I just want to write,” which is completely noble and that’s pretty much what I do, then just do it anyway because it will make you a better writer for the person that is going to be directing it.

**John:** Yeah. A question from Oscar. “A script of mine was optioned by a producer over a year ago. It was a one-year free option. Nothing came of it, even though the producer pushed it and still wants to try to get it made. I don’t want to pull the rug out from under him, but several other producers have asked me to send them the script if nothing was done with it at the end of the option period. How do I handle this? What are my ethical options?

“I realize that legally I can do with my script whatever I wish because the option has expired, and wasn’t formally renewed. But I’d like to do what is right by the initial producer.”

So, what’s your advice for Oscar in this situation?

**Craig:** In this situation I don’t think the ethics are — there’s no shadowy ethics here. the ethics are that you made a business arrangement and the term of the business arrangement is up and it is now your choice. And you are able to ethically, guilt-free, do whatever you want with it.

The only question I think you need to ask is do you want to give this producer more time? Do you think that this producer actually can get it done, that their passion sets them apart from these other people? And that if they have another three or four months something terrific is going to happen and that’s the person you want producing the movie.

**John:** I agree with you. I would say — it’s not clear entirely whether this producer has had the option and no one else has been reading your script, because you need other people to read your script. I mean, you want people to read your script. And so no matter what, make sure it gets out in the world so people can see it.

If these other producers are asking about it because they have some plan for how they’re going to do it, I think honestly at this point you listen to their plans and if they sound like interesting plans you let them pursue it.

Now, it could come to a situation where they start to get some stuff moving and this initial producer gets upset and just the whole awkward terrible conversations, but those are awkward, terrible conversations that are happening because there’s movement and because there’s things that are going on with your script. So, that’s only a good thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s an interesting — I was talking about this the other day with a fellow writer. There is an interesting psychological phenomenon in our business as it relates to the relationship between writers and executives or producers. We writers are expected to be rejected constantly. And either rejected off the bat or hired and then replaced and fired.

We are meant to expect this and to absorb it politely and without fuss. They are not at all expected to handle rejection politely or without fuss. And very often are nasty about it. And I think you just have to remind yourself they — while the day that they’re complaining to you that you somehow have rejected them, they rejected five people before they got on the phone with you.

**John:** Yup. It’s absolutely true.

**Craig:** Part of life. Circle of life. Lions and gazelles.

**John:** And as a circle of the podcast, because it’s now time for One Cool Things.

Craig, do you want to start, or should I?

**Craig:** Oh, you should totally start.

**John:** Okay. I actually have two Cool Things, so I’m going to give both of them here.

First one is The Fog Horn, which I thought we had talked about on the podcast, but maybe we haven’t. Many episodes ago, god, 90 episodes ago we probably talked about Popcorn Fiction which is Derek Haas’s short fiction website.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The Fog Horn is an app. It’s a thing that you can find in the iPhone App Store, the iOS App Store, which is sort of like Popcorn Fiction, but it’s just short stories that every month they put out a new batch of short stories. It’s one of those sort of online magazines. And some of the short stories are terrific, so I would recommend you check out The Fog Horn online. It is a very good experience both as an app and some really good writing in there.

My second Cool Thing was something that, we’re recording this on Saturday, so this happened Friday, was Ellen Page’s coming out speech. So, Ellen Page, star of Juno, came out this week. And if you just saw the headline, like Ellen Page comes out. It’s like, oh, fine, good for her. But I actually — I really strongly recommend you watch the video. We’ll include a link to it if you haven’t watched it yet. Because it’s really just terrifically well written and terrifically well presented in terms of why she feels — why she hasn’t come out publicly before now, why she thinks it’s important to come out.

And last week we talked about sort of a hero sort of needs to be in charge of his or her own story.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s really very much about that. It’s basically until you can claim your own sort of self-identity you can’t actually control anything else in your life. And so it’s a really smartly done thing and I just sort of — I want to vote for her for something, because it was just an incredibly well presented, incredibly articulate and heartfelt description of both what was keeping her from being public. It was basically the lie of omission. And why she was excited to not be lying anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, I strongly recommend you check that out.

**Craig:** It’s great. Chris Nee, the creator of Doc McStuffins —

**John:** We love Chris Nee so much.

**Craig:** We love Chris Nee. And Chris made a really good point that one of the great things about the way that she came out in this video was that it was about a minute of “I’m gay” and really seven minutes of her acknowledging that all the people in the room didn’t need her to come out. They were already doing great work. They were already doing great stuff.

She said at some point, “So you guys are doing this, you’re doing this, you’re doing this, you’re doing this, and the truth is you didn’t need me to tell you any of it. That’s the weird part of this.”

And I love that she didn’t — it’s so easy for celebrities to turn everything into me, me, me, and frankly coming out of the closet is a me, me, me, and somehow she made it into a you, you, you, which was awesome.

**John:** It was really smart. So, the context of this was HRC’s Time to Thrive conference which is this sort of youth and teachers conference they were doing. And it was exactly what you described. It was five minutes of you, you, you, this is the nature of the struggle, and it’s because of what you’re doing that I’m able to come out. And so it was just a thank you.

And it was just perfectly done. Perfectly delivered.

**Craig:** It was. Well, you know, my One Cool Thing is also a person and it’s, I’m sad, I’m sad John because we found out this week that this coming baseball season will be Derek Jeter’s final season.

**John:** I can’t tell you how incredibly heartbroken I am to hear this.

**Craig:** Well, you should be, and I’ll tell you why.

**John:** I did know that Derek Jeter was a baseball player, so I get some points for that. [laughs]

**Craig:** Allow me to extend what his value is. Are you a Simon & Garfunkel fan?

**John:** I’m aware of who they are. That’s the best…

**Craig:** They are not baseball players. The famous folk singing songwriting duo of Simon & Garfunkel.

So, in their song Mrs. Robinson there is a lyric that says, “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you. What’s that you say Mrs. Robinson? Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away.”

And apparently this drove Joe DiMaggio nuts because he was a notorious grump. But Joe DiMaggio is in that song because he exemplified a kind of purity of a time. He was a class act playing America’s game. He was remarkably talented. And he just managed to do it all right. And we love that in our heroes. I mean, he had his stumbles and his falls, and he had his injuries and his mishaps, but he was classy. He was the Yankee Clipper.

And baseball has had lots of heroes and lots of great guys and lots of goats. God knows, so many goats. And in a time when America’s pastime has just been about the most tarnished it has been since the Black Sox scandal of the early part of the century, Derek Jeter has exemplified what it means to just be a classy, great baseball player. He’s done it right the whole time. He’s enormously respected.

And more importantly, now I feel old because Derek Jeter isn’t going to be out there anymore manning shortstop for the New York Yankees. This is going to be a tough season. He’s a shoe-in first ballot Hall of Famer. Never one iota of concern that he was on steroids. He wasn’t that kind of player. But, he has hit some magic benchmarks, well over 3,000 hits and a career average of slightly over 300 which I know is something that you always look for.

**John:** It’s really my first criteria, career average.

**Craig:** It’s sad because one of the greats is riding off into the sunset. One of the truly great, great players of a great, great game celebrated by a great, great country. So, Derek Jeter, today and for many months to come you will be my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Now. Craig, is it possible we’ve pinpointed the source of your anxiety. Was it his retirement that is causing your anxiety?

**Craig:** No. No. I’m not quite that, [laughs], I don’t like Derek Jeter at all, actually.

**John:** Not that much. You appreciate it more from a distance. And that’s our show. So, if you would like to know more about the things we talked about today, the show notes are always at johnaugust.com/podcast. You can see the things we’ve talked about. You can see some sort of article that Stuart will find about Derek Jeter. You will also find Ellen Page’s coming out stuff. Many of the articles we talked about today on the show.

If you are on iTunes looking through the App Store you can find the Scriptnotes app which lets you listen to our most recent episodes, but actually our entire back catalog as well. You’ll also find Weekend Read there while you’re there.

If you have iTunes open and you want to leave us a comment or a rating, that’s awesome as well. You can subscribe to us there in iTunes.

And so, Nerdmelt, so we should say the live show at Nerdmelt, the crossover episode with the Nerdist Writers Podcast. Tickets are available now, so don’t wait too long for that because that will sell out. There will also be other live shows coming later on in the spring, but we’ll have those details when they come.

**Craig:** “Good for you! Good for you!”

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

**Craig:** You too, man.

Links:

* [Generalized anxiety disorder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_anxiety_disorder) on Wikipedia
* Get your tickets now for the [Nerdist/Scriptnotes Live Crossover episode](https://www.nerdmeltla.com/tickets2/index.php?event_id=791/) on April 13th at Nerdmelt, with proceeds benefiting [826LA](https://826la.org/)
* [The Office](http://www.theofficeonline.com/intro.htm) and [the writers junction](http://www.writersjunction.com/) are both open
* Weekend Read in the [App Store](http://highland.quoteunquoteapps.com/wr-podcast)
* Christian Bale [gets upset on set](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0auwpvAU2YA) (very NSFW language)
* Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators by Megan McArdle in [The Atlantic](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/why-writers-are-the-worst-procrastinators/283773/)
* [Freedom for Mac](http://macfreedom.com)
* Comcast/Time Warner deal will [face antitrust hurdles](http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/13/technology/comcast-time-warner-antitrust/)
* The [Aereo lawsuit](http://upstart.bizjournals.com/companies/media/2014/02/14/aereo-vs-the-broadcasters-six.html?page=all) on Upstart
* [McMurdo Research Station](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station) in Antarctica
* [The Fog Horn](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-fog-horn/id778971478?mt=8)
* Ellen Page’s [coming out speech](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hlCEIUATzg) at HRC’s Time to Thrive conference
* Wallace Matthews on [Derek Jeter announcing 2014 will be his final season](http://espn.go.com/blog/new-york/yankees/post/_/id/68961/for-once-jeter-can-savor-the-moment), and Jeter’s career on [Baseball-Reference.com](http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/j/jeterde01.shtml)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Kim Atle

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

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

**Craig Mazin:** Argh! Ah! My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, Episode 130, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, last week there was some controversy and both you and I got sucked into it. So, I feel like maybe we should just start off with this and just get a clean slate here. Okay?

**Craig:** Fine.

**John:** So, this happened on February 3. Justin Marks, who is a screenwriter and colleague of both of ours — a friend actually — he tweeted something. He tweeted this: Screenwriters, use two spaces after a period, unless you’re writing scripts in Times New Roman which means you’re not a screenwriter.

So, Craig, I ask you, do you use one space or two spaces after a period?

**Craig:** One space.

**John:** Yeah. And so I feel like I am complicit in this controversy that has happened because Justin actually cited that I had said two spaces after a period, which is in fact true.

**Craig:** But what year was that? [laughs]

**John:** That was in 2005.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, in 2005 I made a blog post about how to change, basically saying that mono space fonts like Courier traditionally use two spaces after a period. Everything else — everything else — should be one space after the period.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But mono space faces use two spaces after the period. Even back in 2005 I said it’s not a must, I’m just saying it’s a thing that you can do.

Now, if a person were really carefully observing of my behavior they would notice that if you look through the script library at johnaugust.com at a certain point I actually switched to a single space after the period. And even you and I on the podcast have discussed it. I looked it up and in 2012 on episode 65 we actually talked about the fact that I was sort of leaning more towards using a single space.

But the truth is I have to sort of come out and say this: like most American screenwriters my feelings have evolved and I have become a single-spacer.

**Craig:** Mine too. I learned how to type in high school on a Brother electric typewriter. It wasn’t even the kind of electric typewriter that stored any of the words. It was just more of a clack-clack electric typewriter.

**John:** Did it have a little tiny display before you hit the thing, or just straight to paper?

**Craig:** No, nothing. Straight to paper. It was a disaster and also, therefore, a great way to learn how to type because it really forced you to learn properly.

And in 1985 I was taught two spaces. It took me awhile to get out of the two space habit because I am a touch typer, but I did. And there is absolutely no call for it. Most screenplays I read are one space. It seems very weird now to see something with two spaces. It’s old school. It’s unnecessary. I think it look worse. And Justin Marks is just wrong. He’s wrong!

**John:** [laughs] I won’t go so far as to say that Justin Marks is wrong. Or, actually, no, I’ll say he’s wrong in the sense that to be declaratory that it should be a certain way is wrong.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If he chooses to still use the two spaces, the world is not going to come crashing to an end. But, I would encourage you if you are not set one way or the other way to just use the single space, because for everything you’re doing in your life a single space will go great. It will look fine in Courier.

And here’s what actually pushed me over the edge is when we were working on Courier Prime, the type face of Courier that looks better than sort of normal Courier, we sort of put the punctuation in a place that looked really good with a single space after it.

**Craig:** Good. Good.

**John:** So, I would just encourage you to try single space and you probably won’t ever go back. And it’s sort of like when you stop smoking, I suspect, that you’ll suddenly notice other people smoking a lot. You will start to notice double spaces that annoy you to some degree.

**Craig:** You never smoked.

**John:** I never smoked. But you did.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t know what you’re talking about. [laughs]

**John:** If people go back to the early episodes of Scriptnotes you can hear Craig smoking while we are recording the show.

**Craig:** Well, I never smoked cigarettes while we were —

**John:** Oh, you did your little e-cigarettes.

**Craig:** My e-cigarettes. Yes. But that’s not smoking either.

**John:** So, one last tip, if you make your change midway through a script or if you’re going back to an old script that you’ve double spaced, the simple solution, of course, is to do a find/replace. Just do Find “period-space-space” and just swap it out for “period-space.” Run that through a couple times. You’ll get rid of all the double spacing and you’ll be happy.

**Craig:** You will, in fact, be happy.

I think it’s better looking, and you’re right, two spaces isn’t going to end the world, but certainly you can’t go on record with something as outrageous as the suggestion that two spaces is preferable and one space is verboten. Not true.

**John:** Not true. It reminds me of Animal Farm. If you remember that the animals, when they took over, they said like two legs bad, four legs good. And then, of course, they end up manipulate itself so that two legs were better because the pigs started walking on their back feet.

So, I’m just basically saying, “Justin Marks don’t be a pig.” Or, maybe I’m the pig in the example. It really wasn’t a well thought out example.

**Craig:** No. This was McKenna-like in its clumsy analogy with nature.

**John:** [laughs] I’m a squirrel in a rocket ship headed towards thieves.

Today on the show we obviously have to talk some Final Draft follow up.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because that was just a thing that happened.

**Craig:** That’s what everybody thought you were talking about when you said we got sucked into a controversy.

**John:** So, we want to talk about that. I want to talk about writing in public spaces, because it’s something I’ve had to do a lot this week. I want to talk about keeping your hero in the driver seat of your story. I had sent you this link to this blog post, this sort of regular column by Heather Havrilesky which I thought was just great because it was really talking about being in the driver’s seat but in real life.

We have a question that I haven’t even sent you yet but I’ll just read it and you’ll have a great answer for it.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We have people suing Tom Cruise for a billion dollars.

**Craig:** This is a big show.

**John:** It’s a big show. I want to talk about this thing called Time Tailor which I didn’t even tell you about but you will be annoyed when I tell you what it is.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** And so it’s a big show. We’ve got a lot to do here.

**Craig:** Big show.

Well, I guess we should start with Final Draft. We had an interview last week, or we welcomed as our guests on the show two gentlemen from Final Draft, one of whom was and is in fact the CEO of Final Draft.

**John:** That was Marc Madnick.

**Craig:** Marc Madnick.

**John:** And then Joe Jarvis who’s the Final Draft Chief, sort of, he’s the person who is the product manager of Final Draft and I think does more of the technical stuff.

**Craig:** How would you say — I’ve been looking around at Reddit and Twitter.

**John:** I haven’t actually seen you on Reddit but I heard through Stuart that you have actually been engaging with people on Reddit which is really dangerous, Craig.

**Craig:** It is? I mean, it’s in Reddit Screenwriting, not in Reddit, I don’t know, [laughs], whatever else Reddit.

**John:** Well, Reddit is nothing but timely threads. No, maybe it’s good. Maybe it’s good you’re engaging.

**Craig:** I mean, I’ve only posted a few things. Everyone has been very polite. What’s the feedback that you’ve sensed from the interview that we did?

**John:** People have written to say that it was incredibly uncomfortable to listen to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which it was uncomfortable to be in that room. So, I’d like to sort of paint the scene and sort of what happened when we did that. We were sitting around a folding table in our little office set with like two towels on the table to sort of muffle some sound. And I was manning the board, poorly, for the four microphones, which we’d just gotten the four microphones up and working.

As it turned out me and Joe Jarvis, we didn’t really need microphones because we weren’t going to be doing very much talking.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** It was mostly going to be Marc and Craig and I knew that it was mostly going to be mostly Marc and Craig which is why I sort of sensed that my role would be the let’s make sure no one flips the table over. That was my function to sort of calm things down.

And I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to challenge him on certain things that I thought were not entirely accurate because things were actually already pretty tense in that room.

**Craig:** They were a bit tense. But they were…I guess I would say they were civil-tense. In other words, everything was about Final Draft and about the product and how they conduct their business. I don’t think that Mr. Madnick did himself many favors, frankly.

You know, anyone can do what they want when they come on a show like our show and talk about what they have to talk about. I was really surprised, honestly surprised. I expected that he… — If it were me I would have come on the show and say, “Look, let me just be humble about this. Let me listen to your complaints and let me address them in that spirit,” because no company does everything right and certainly Final Draft hasn’t done everything right, and then kind of work back to a place of, “But here’s how we’re trying to get better.”

Not really the case. He was pretty defensive, I thought.

**John:** He was sort of more the Ballmer mode, the Microsoft Ballmer Chief, the “I know this is the right thing” kind of mode, versus the responsive way. Evernote, which is a product I use, the CEO or the president or whatever it was sort of very recently said like, “Listen, we know that our syncing and a lot of our services have slowed down a lot. We’re not satisfied and this is what we’re doing to fix it.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That wasn’t what I heard from him. I didn’t hear that he was responding to things. He was more sort of just defending what had happened.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you know a lot of the feedback that I saw on the interwebs following the posting of our show commented on his reliance on a couple of talking points, one of which was they had 40 employees, which I’m not sure is particularly relevant.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** One of which was —

**John:** Well, I would like to parse one second for 40 employees, because does 40 employees mean that you’re a giant or you’re small? Because I think to almost everybody listening were like, “Wow, you have 40 employees?” That felt so much bigger. And to him it’s like, “We’re a small company. We’ve got 40 employees.” And so it was a weird disconnect in terms of what I think — he didn’t seem to have a very good sense of who the listenership of the show was.

**Craig:** I agree, particularly when one co-host of the show has his own software company that puts out very good apps and I believe you have three employees.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** The proprietor of Final Draft I believe has one employee, himself. I think WriterDuet is two guys. This is sort of the way things are going. So, I think you’re right. There was a disconnect there. And there’s a question of how many of those 40… — Well, part of the problem is then you start saying, “Well what are those 40 people doing?” And I think it’s probably true that the minority of them are actually coding software. And then, of course, what that means is many of them are doing other things like promotion, and marketing, and other stuff.

So, that talking point was repeated a lot. I’m not sure if it helped him, or his case. The other thing that people picked up on was that both gentlemen were essentially saying we’re old software and we’ve been out of date for a really long time, so you just have to — that’s why it took us a really long time to issue this fairly expensive upgrade that accomplished things that should have been accomplished awhile ago.

I’m not sure that’s a great defense either.

**John:** I would agree. And so Kent Tessman recently wrote a blog post talking about sort of his experience as a software developer listening to this episode and sort of working through sort of point by point. And so do you want to walk through what Kent wrote about it, because I think that might be a useful start.

**Craig:** Yeah, so he makes some really good points here. And in the moment it was kind of hard, you know, I had to sort of battle to get in there. Marc is certainly an impressive talker, you know. I mean, I think I’m an — impressive meaning volume. So, you know, we couldn’t get into anything, nor could we rebut point by point. But, also, I’m not a software developer and Kent is, and so he had some interesting comments to make about the things that the Final Draft folks were saying.

First, Retina. So, we brought up the point that Final Draft 8 was not Retina-compatible, nor did they release a Retina-compatible patch. You had to wait I think it was the four years. Was it four years?

**John:** It wasn’t four years. It was essentially 14 or 18 months after the Retina —

**Craig:** Between 8 and 9?

**John:** Yeah, but no, essentially Retina became available and it was 18 months later that they actually supported it.

**Craig:** So a year and a half.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it was considered a feature of their $100 upgrade. And his point was, hey, you can’t say that Apple somehow shocked you in a way that nobody else was shocked. Every software developer is in the same boat, particularly guys that are smaller than the 40 employee shop. And what he did was he said all he did was just go into a thing called Quartz Debug and there’s a Graphics Tools folder and he turned on the “Simulate high DPI text demagnification” and, voila, he was able to… — He said he went over to Best Buy, downloaded the Fade In demo on a Retina MacBook that was there on display and it looked great.

So, why couldn’t they have done that? Well, the problem he says is not that they were somehow surprised by Retina. The problem is that they’re using not just old code but nearly ancient code.

**John:** Yes. He’s saying they’re specifically using QuickDraw techniques which were really from ancient Macintoshes to sort of do all the screen rendering. And specifically Kent is saying that likely in order to — every build they were doing, every time they opened up X code to actually build Final Draft they were getting these warnings saying, like, “You’re using things we don’t let you use anymore, you should switch to newer libraries.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And they didn’t and they couldn’t because everything else was dependent upon it.

**Craig:** Yes. So, QuickDraw goes back to the ’80s. And I’m a Mac-head, so I remember QuickDraw being a thing that they were promoting in the ’80s. But I also remember that when Mac OS X rolled out around 2000, 2001, that one of the things that they were really proud of was this Quartz technology and how — it’s the thing that allows print to look better, everything, the graphics/guts of the system software had been upgraded. And this is really — this has been around for a long time.

And one thing that’s puzzling, but more frustrating than puzzling is that Final Draft sat there knowing full well for decades that they were using deprecated software and they didn’t do anything about it. And they didn’t do anything about it because they didn’t have to. And that’s just poor planning. I’m sorry, it’s poor planning.

So, then for them to say, “Oh my god, we suddenly had to rewrite everything.” Well, you didn’t suddenly have to rewrite everything. You only suddenly had to do it when finally it seemed clear that you could no longer drive your Edsel down the freeway.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, that was an interesting point. He also makes the point that for Windows users this upgrade is even less valuable than the upgrade for the Mac people because they don’t even get the Retina stuff, or the full screen. He also points out that Unicode, which is something that they’re talking about jumping on the bandwagon with, this newfangled Unicode is something that has been available for 25 plus years.

**John:** Yes. So, let’s talk about what Unicode is. So, Unicode is a way of representing character sets, so languages, the glyphs of languages, letters that go beyond sort of a standard small roman subset of characters. And it becomes incredibly important for international support. So, if you’re going to be writing scripts in other languages, Unicode is what you need to be able to use in order to render those letters or characters in some cases on the screen. And they still don’t have it.

And it’s one of those things that essentially you get free in Macintosh right now. Like if you write any sort of text editing program that’s not a thing that you have to sort of carefully wrestle with and bake in. It comes free. The challenge is that everything you’ve done up until this point hasn’t used it. And so for Final Draft they have to sort of just do everything differently because it’s not the way they’ve been doing it. And yet it’s not that hard. And it was frustrating for me to hear Marc Madnick to hear sort of how their international users and all this stuff and how they’re doing all this stuff around the world.

And it’s like, well, how are people using your app? Are they only writing scripts in English? Because with Unicode support it’s going to be much more challenging for a writer in Greek to be using your app.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s really no excuse. The only excuse is, well, it’s not our focus. Our focus is to market our software, to market our competitions, and to make our deal with Writers Guild, and advertise. But to not feature something that’s over a quarter century old, which in computer terms means is 14 million years old is mind-boggling.

**John:** And to be fair, Unicode could be 25 years old. It doesn’t mean that everything was Unicode 25 years ago. But like the standard has been out there and now it’s standard. It’s actually genuinely standard.

**Craig:** It is genuinely standard and it has been standard for awhile. Kent makes the point that Carbon and Cocoa were meant to sort of work simultaneously but that moving to Cocoa isn’t something that people just recently decided is something they ought to do. It’s something that basically they’ve been aware they had to do, they should do, for what, ten years? I mean, that sounds —

**John:** That sounds about right. It’s essentially like the doctor says at some point you’re going to need to have this surgery. And, yeah, yeah, but I’m not going to do it this year. I’m going to wait another year. And so like you’re wearing down your joints and suddenly, “Doctor, I can’t move.” Well, yeah, you needed to have this surgery ten years ago. You needed to go and do this and now this is the repercussions of this.

**Craig:** Right. So, suddenly you can’t make the easy fix to have Retina. I don’t know if this is what impacted their application of Unicode, although I doubt it since Unicode pre-dates Cocoa. I doubt it.

And lastly, I’ll just pull up this point. You should read his — he has a very thoughtful piece here — but the last thing he mentions is Fountain. And there’s an exchange that occurs where Joe says, you know, “Fountain is not something that we support but it’s something that we could easily do.” And I said, “So then do it.” [laughs]

You know? And this is something where Kent says, “Fountain is something that they could implement in an afternoon.”

**John:** Easily.

**Craig:** And why aren’t they? And answer certainly can’t be lack of manpower. And I doubt it’s lack of interest. I think they’re not doing it because they are internally, I believe, it’s my opinion, see a defensive position in the proprietary nature of their code, or their format rather, their file format. They don’t want it to be easily translatable between other software programs. But, too bad, it is. And “we have a proprietary format” — that’s a mountain that so many companies have died on. Why would you want to be another one?

**John:** Yeah. I think that really comes down to my central frustration of their defense of sort of what they do. And it comes down to early on in the exchange Marc Madnick says, “We’re the only company that does pagination right.” And that statement really reveals sort of how he perceives his company. Because he built Final Draft because he got frustrated with sort of how hard it was to do his screenwriting, but he had this vision that a page is a page is a page, and it’s a minute per page, and I think he genuinely believes — and I think the company genuinely believes — that one page of screenplay is one minute of screen time. Not just a rule of thumb. I think it’s like a fundamentalism.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think they genuinely deeply in their bones believe that that’s how it is and that therefore maintaining that one page — maintaining that page on the Mac being a page on the iPad being a page on the PC, you know, no matter which platform you’re opening on that file will still open exactly the same way — is the fundamental thing that they think they do right and do better than anyone else can. And they believe that their one way of doing it is the precise right way.

Now, like any sort of fundamentalism there are really easy ways you can sort of poke that belief which is, well, if that’s true then why are you letting people set like tight or loose spacing?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Why are you letting people touch the margins at all? So, it gives lie to the idea that this rule of thumb is anything more than just the Crassus rule of thumb. And, of course, we are writers. We recognize that if I write “Atlanta burns” that’s not —

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s not a minute.

**John:** That’s four minutes of screen time in one sentence. So, but I genuinely think he believes that. And so I can understand from his perspective that pagination is the most important thing. And understanding that he believes that pagination is the most important thing, Fountain is an incredibly frustrating thing for them to deal with because pagination is fixed. Pagination is sort of how things are going to be when they’re printed on paper. And I think Final Draft is still fundamentally concerned about getting stuff onto paper.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so while they’ve been able to generate PDFs, they really still think about printing stuff out and they want stuff to print in the exact same page breaks and everything like that to be the same.

But, file formats and sort of the editable file formats are not fundamentally fixed that way. They’re fluid. And so FDX, which is the format that they use, is an XML format and doesn’t have any sense inherently of where the page breaks are. I know this for a fact because we deal with FDX all the time. And the only way that Final Draft is getting their page breaks to be the same way every time is by some really kludgy methods.

And so they sort of brute force it to fit onto a certain page and then if they have to do it on a PC that’s why they have Courier Final Draft which is a sort of made up font they have that is different on the PC, works differently on the PC than it does on the Mac so that all the words will end in the same place basically.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So it’s this really kludgy way of doing it. So, both Fountain and Courier Prime are big annoyances to them because it means the one thing they think they’re really good at isn’t important anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah, it struck me — it’s so funny when he said that this was their thing, that this was what set them apart and this was their obsession as a company. I was shocked because it’s not mine.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And I’m a screenwriter. This is supposed to be for me. Yeah, sure, I want a document that I’m writing on my Mac to have the same page breaks if somebody else opens that same document with the same software on their PC. Absolutely. And in that case Final Draft accomplishes that and so does Fade In.

They’ve extended that fetish to their app for iOS. Now, interestingly their app for iOS, another thing Kent points out is that they initially released it as Final Draft Reader. It was read-only, not write, and cost $20. And it was buggy. And then later they dropped the price from $19.99 to zero for Reader and then created the Read-Write app which I guess has a fee connected to it. Which isn’t great business practice to basically charge $20 to your early adopters and then go, “Eh, now it’s free.”

But either way I certainly don’t need my iPad to have precise pagination like that. And I was wrong. In the thing I said, oh, the iPad app for Fade In does that. It doesn’t have any pagination. You just read it. Because, as Kent said, you can tell who’s not a screenwriter on set? It’s the guy with the iPad. Either way, for me pagination is not this holy grail of things. That’s so ’90s to me.

**John:** It is. And I think it reinforces that obsession that you see in sort of beginning screenwriting books, too, which is that like this thing needs to happen by this page.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that obsession about that kind of thing — that’s not actually writing. And that’s the thing that I think I felt more than anything else is that they fundamentally believe this as a way to write a script. They believe this as a way to paginate a script. And I think they’ve sort of forgotten about the actual writing process. So, I did a video awhile back about why I like writing in Fountain. And one of the things I really stressed is that because you’re not thinking about like where the margins are you can actually just sort of focus on what the words are.

And I don’t think Final Draft has focused on the words for really quite a long time.

**Craig:** I agree. And this, I guess, I know they’re listening. This is my big advice.

**John:** I’m not sure they’re listening, but I think they’re going to read the transcript after it’s transcribed.

**Craig:** Fair enough. My big advice is to not — whatever resources you’re expending on developing your software, first of all I would increase them and maybe decrease some of the other stuff, Yeah, I guess I’m saying spend a little more on R&D. Sorry. I understand you’re not in business to go out of business — we heard that a lot. I don’t think spending more on R&D will push you out of business. I’m guessing you guys are in a low margin business, particularly because you’ve been charging premium prices for legacy software for well over a decade, nearly two decades now.

But I would say design. Concentrate on design and features and have less of an obsession over pagination. Pagination doesn’t matter. When you go into production the first AD and the line producer sit down with the screenplay and they start to break it down. And they break it down by content. They don’t care.

That’s why — they always catch you anyway, first of all. If you ever try and fiddle with kerning, or line spacing, or margins. They’re going to catch you anyway. And they read it and they’re experienced. They know how the words will translate into days and they start carving things up by day. And that is entirely about content. It is not about pagination.

That is a weird, weird hill to die on.

**John:** I agree. The last thing, you mentioned it briefly while they were there, but I think it’s worth everyone sort of taking a look at and I’ll put a link up to it, too. You mentioned QuarkXPress, which I thought was such a great example of a software that was completely disrupted by a newcomer. And I think they could be QuarkXPress. And they could essentially become marginalized by someone else just doing their thing better. And so in the case of QuarkXPress it was Adobe who came in with InDesign. It’s like, oh wow, it does all the stuff we need to do and it was just better.

And it wasn’t better at the start, but ultimately it was better and it got disrupted. And I just feel like it was fascinating to be conducting a roundtable interview thing with a company that I don’t think really understood that their whole world was being disrupted.

**Craig:** I agree. I don’t think they get it. I think part of the problem frankly is, and I’m happy to say this to Marc, and he’s invited us to go visit them. I think he’s the wrong CEO for this company.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** He’s not the guy that wrote the software. That’s Ben Cahan. So, he’s not the technical guy. And he’s not a screenwriter. And I wouldn’t expect him to be. So, then what is he? I think what he is is a very, very good promoter. A very good marketer. But that’s not enough anymore. And particularly because the CEO isn’t connected to the technological underpinnings of the product he’s selling, when he’s talking about it you can tell — first of all, how does he even keep his own guys accountable?

**John:** I don’t know. I mean, there’s a thing in software developing called “Dog Fooding” which is basically you have to eat your own dog food. And because I sense that most of them were not screenwriters, I don’t think they were using Final Draft to write screenplays and therefore had no sense of what that was. But refresh my memory. I don’t think they were actively involved in the screenwriting, sorry, in the software development world either because they’re just not making choices everyone else would have made five years ago.

**Craig:** Right. I think that’s right. And I think if what he has been promoting from the top down is pagination, pagination, pagination above all, well no wonder things like, I don’t know, like the fact that their dual dialogue system is ridiculous and clumsy, or the general design of the program looks ugly, or the amount of time it takes in between updates. All that stuff falls away.

The fact that they don’t have a proper way for two people in two separate places to collaborate at the same time on a shared document, that should be — that’s what they should obsess over, to the exclusion of everything else. That’s all —

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** That would — if they solved that, and legitimately solved it, I would think that they could survive.

**John:** Yeah, I agree.

**Craig:** But, you know, hey, look, he thinks that we’re nuts. Look, right now they’re like, “Eh, we own 95% of the market. Bring it on.” I remember that —

**John:** We’ll see if in two years, in five years, if they’re 95% of the market. We’ll see.

**Craig:** Well, I remember when the iPhone came out Ballmer said, “Right now Windows supports 60% of the phones that are being sold,” or something, and “Apple sold nothing.” Well, let’s see where they are in 18 months. Well, there they are.

**John:** There they are.

**Craig:** There they are.

**John:** Moving on.

**Craig:** Moving on!

**John:** Next thing. I want to talk about writing in public spaces. So, this last week we’ve had WGA contract negotiation, and while I can’t talk about the substance of what’s happened in the rooms there I can say that like you described it is sort of like jury duty in that there’s a lot of downtime. And so there’s a lot of time where I’m just sitting in rooms with a bunch of other writers. And it’s very tempting to just like trade war stories. Like Carl Gottlieb is right across the table from me.

But I’ve been actually just working. I’ve actually put in my headphones and started working. So, I want to talk a little bit about writing in public spaces because I didn’t grow up writing in coffee shops. Did you? Did you write in public spaces or did you always go someplace quiet?

**Craig:** No. No. I always just found a little, even when I had — I was sharing a tiny apartment with my then girlfriend now wife. I would just find a little corner.

**John:** So, I think we are sort of the exceptions to the rule. Most — my belief is that many aspiring screenwriters have found themselves out in public spaces and that’s where they feel naturally sort of drawn towards writing.

So, I’ve been one of those people increasingly I would say over the time, partly because of Big Fish. I’ve just been in New York so much. And that process of sticking in your headphones, staring at your screen, and just being someplace else.

What I’ve found — I mostly like it. And what’s so interesting about the process is that whether you’re alone in your office or you are in a public space, ultimately you put yourself wherever those characters are. And so you put yourself in the scene of where those people are.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that can be a really great thing. The challenge for me I find is I have to find exactly the right music or other sort of noise to drown out everyone else around me talking. I have to remind myself not to try to jump right into writing the scene but to sort of give myself some notes about what it is.

So, I find myself writing fragments of things. Like not even really an outline of a scene, but these are things that happen. This is ways to start. And just really sort of visualizing the different ways the scene can sort of get started and get going.

It’s really been kind of a great week. I’ve gotten much more down this week than I would have predicted because I’ve just sort of been forced to be outside of my normal environment where I have all of the distractions of my big computer. I’m just at this one table surrounded by other people. And Susannah Grant is right behind me and she’s just pounding away. So, it’s been a great week for me.

**Craig:** I think that’s the part, occasionally if I feel jammed up not creatively but jammed up motivationally I will occasionally take a road trip down the street. And I’ll sit outside the cigar shop and work or I’ll go over to the Coffee Bean. For that reason. You are now accountable to everybody that’s around you.

First of all, I love that everybody thinks I’m just some guy, [laughs], that’s wasting his whatever meager money he has chasing a stupid dream of being a screenwriter. I actually like that. It reminds me of what it was like when I was 21 and starting out. And I like the fact that I have to write. I can’t just sit there and stare at the screen. I’ll look like an idiot.

And porn is totally out of the question.

**John:** Absolutely. Public space. You can’t get away with any of that stuff.

**Craig:** Can’t get away with porn at the Coffee Been. Well, some people might be able to.

**John:** But you can’t get away with a game either. If you’re just sitting at the coffee shop and you’re playing a stupid game then you’re clearly not doing work.

**Craig:** By being in a public space you put yourself — you begin to play the role of professional screenwriter or screenwriter.

**John:** I think that that’s a crucial thing. There used to be a place and I think it’s closed now but it was called The Office.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And it was just a place that basically rented workstations and you’d just go like you were going to the office. And literally it was a place for screenwriters or other writers could go and work and be in a public work environment. It just changes your perspective in terms of, like, I am in work mode. I’m not in home mode. And that can be an incredibly useful thing.

So, I was already sort of in work mode because I couldn’t wear jeans and a hoodie to the negotiations, so it was forcing me more into that zone.

**Craig:** Yeah. Any tactic that gets you to write more and write better is a worthy tactic short of hurting yourself or others.

**John:** Or addiction.

**Craig:** I include addiction as hurting yourself.

**John:** That’s true. That’s a fair thing.

So, one of the things I was working on this week, I had the revelation — which I’ve had the same revelation 15 times, but every time I have it it’s like, oh, that’s right, I forgot this thing that I remembered from before. I was really having a hard time getting the scene short enough. And I recognized that I had a minor character who was doing a lot of talking and sort of setting up the story and I remembered like, oh that’s right, you’re a minor character I don’t care about at all. You should not be driving this scene at all.

And once I sort of demoted him and said like, no, you’re not allowed to say many things because you’re not the hero of the story, the whole scene changed. So, in general I just want to — it was reminded to me and I’m reminded that we had talked about on the podcast is to keep your hero in the driver seat of the scene. And occasionally you will encounter scenes where like the hero is not in charge of the scene. But almost always the hero needs to be taking the focus of what’s happening on screen at a given moment.

**Craig:** No question. Obviously we’ve come to this story because we’re interested in how the hero is going to develop, and change, and deal with his enemies, deal with the world around her, whatever it is. But let’s also point out most of the time your hero, if your movie gets made, is your movie star. And don’t you want to see the movie… — The word we would always use, I remember when I started working on movies with David Zucker. He would always caution against giving good jokes to day players.

Day players are actors that are there for a day. So, you have a scene where somebody walks into, Harrison Ford walks into a Starbucks and asks for coffee and the woman behind the counter has a couple of lines with him. That’s a day player. Well, don’t give the good stuff to the day players. Generally speaking your movie star will be better and even if they’re not people want to watch the movie star anyway.

**John:** It reminds me a little bit of — so, this last weekend we had a second session of this D&D game that we’re playing, Dungeon World, and one of the rules of Dungeon World, one of the reminders of Dungeon World is make characters take the action. The Game Master doesn’t take the action, the characters take the action. And sometimes that’s really challenging when you’re facing like a monster or something. It’s like I feel like I want to roll an attack role for the monster, but I’m not supposed to.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I’m supposed to let you guys as the players, the heroes, do the work and if your attack fails then I hit you. But if your attack succeeds then you’re the winner. And it’s a very good reminder that the heroes, you guys, are supposed to be the ones who are in charge of the narrative and in charge of the story.

That doesn’t mean that everything should go your hero’s way. Not at all. It just means that they should be the ones who you are following. What they’re trying to do should be the focus of the scene, not them being rebuffed or what the other character is trying to do.

**Craig:** And here’s an example that comes to mind of how you can do this — sorry, I’m fighting a little cold over here.

**John:** Both of us.

**Craig:** How you can do this even when you’re in a scene where your character, your hero, isn’t saying anything. Two other people are having a conversation or one other person is imparting information, opining, philosophizing, but you want your hero to drive it.

Scene that comes to mind: in The Godfather Michael decides he’s going to go and kill Sollozzo in the Italian restaurant. And he goes into the bathroom, finds the gun that’s been stashed for him. Comes back. Sits down.

For the next probably 40 seconds or so Sollozzo rambles, rambles on in Italian about why Michael should make a deal, why this, why that, and the entire time he’s talking we’re on Michael’s face and he’s thinking to himself. Do I do this? Should I do this? Am I capable of doing this? I’m going to do this. And then he does it.

**John:** If he didn’t have the gun that scene would be a completely different scene. It wouldn’t be his scene.

**Craig:** Correct. And I like that there are always ways to contextualize stuff through your hero. There are a lot of scenes where your hero is wandering into a room and they know less than everybody around them. Great. Don’t just shower the guy with information because then the information givers are the ones driving the scene. Let him piece it together. Let him uncover it. Let him be distracted by something that’s important to him.

We’ll still get the information filtered through. But very good reminder from you, John August, to all of our listeners, to keep your hero in the driver’s seat.

**John:** This is a good segue to a piece of advice that I read on The Awl this last week which I thought was actually terrific.

So, a woman named Heather Havrilesky writes a column called Ask Polly. And it seems like very standard sort of like relationship advice questions except they’re really long questions. Because usually when you think about relationship advice questions it’s the Dear Abby length where it’s two paragraphs, it’s really brief, and then the person responds. It’s very common sense. It’s all very boilerplate.

What I love about the internet is that there’s no reason why the question has to be short. And so this woman writes in with a question that’s just endless, or a situation that’s endless. It’s not even really a question. It’s just like this is the situation I’ve gotten myself into. Please help.

And this one was particularly great. So, the one I’m going to link to in the show notes is called “I Moved To A New City To Be With An Emotional Vampire.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which is a good headline. But essentially this young woman describes the situation where she got into this long distance relationship with a guy who is fantastic. He was going to move to her. She ended up moving to his city. He still hadn’t broken up with his current girlfriend but eventually did, but then there was this other girl who was always still around. And it was sort of strange.

Every time she tried to confront him then it made her feel bad about things. And so she details it. And as you’re going through you’re like, “Oh my god, how can you not see what you’ve done? How can you not see what has happened to you?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And why I bring this up is she is no longer in charge of her own narrative. She has taken herself out of the story of her life. She’s given this other guy — he has the important story and she’s like a bit player in his life rather than being the hero of her own life.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** And so I thought Heather’s advice was fantastic essentially about, first of all, you’ve got to get away and you’ve got to fix yourself, but it’s useful I think to screenwriters for two reasons. First off to recognize that there’s real life people who make just terrible choices like this. And so she as a character is kind of fascinating — maddening but fascinating. But also if you were to write from one of your character’s perspective, if they were to write into an advice columnist what would they write? And what would the advice be given to them?

I thought it was just a great example of sort of how people and characters can lose control of their story.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this particular story was rough to read. The woman who answered said, “Go back and read what you just wrote.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “And then you tell me how crazy does that sound.” Delusion is — I mean, now we’re just sadly exploiting this woman’s pain for fodder, but delusion and delusional behavior is a fascinating character trait and it is one of those things that does add very realistic texture to characters.

The trick is to make the delusion connected to something that we understand. And that usually is an emotion. True delusion, like schizophrenic delusion is boring, but delusional behavior and thinking that comes about as a result of fear, self-loathing, these things — we understand fear. We understand self-loathing. So, we can start to understand the delusion.

There is a way to understand how this woman got herself into that mess. That’s the fun of the screenwriter is putting your character in a mess that’s fascinating, and relatable and believable and then watching them wriggle out of it.

**John:** Yeah. I feel like the woman in this article who wrote in this letter, she would be a challenging character to have at the center of a feature, but she’d actually be a great character to be in like a one-hour drama.

If this character was going through this situation in a one-hour drama and like it wasn’t just her story but it was sort of her and the people around her, it would be fascinating because you can see why she made each of the individual choices, and yet having made that choice she is deeper and deeper and deeper to the point where she’s essentially like an addict who keeps going back for another hit of this thing.

And everyone around her must see what she’s done and she’s driven away everyone else who was a friend or could sort of help her out of this situation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I would say, again, because she’s lost control of her narrative she’s not really the hero of a movie, but I thought she’s a great character within a bigger context.

**Craig:** I think you’re totally right about that. One of the things about delusional behavior like this is when you do read it as one long story from beginning to end the weight of the insanity and the bad choices overwhelm your connection with the person who made them. But if you watch them happen one by one then you’re with somebody as they just slowly sink into quicksand.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And that’s understandable.

**John:** It is very much understandable. On the topic of delusional behavior, let’s talk about the $1 billion lawsuit that was recently filed against Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible 3.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And so these happen all the time. And so whenever one of these things happen you and I both get tweets saying like somebody is suing about this and they stole his idea. It’s like, well first off, that’s just crazy town. No one stole his idea. And then when you actually read — we’ll put a link in the show notes, too.

**Craig:** It’s a good one. It’s a good one.

**John:** This complaint. Like he’s clearly representing himself and basically he saw the movie and he’s like, “Well that’s just like this script that I sent to William Morris eight years ago and therefore it was lifted from me.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, it’s delusional behavior. And so when you actually read through his, the plaintiff’s — what he’s arguing — it’s like, well, you have no understanding of sort of what copyright law. And I don’t want to slam on him, because I think he’s probably not entirely there.

**Craig:** All there.

**John:** The fact that no one is willing to even represent him or take his case means that there’s not a there there.

**Craig:** Generally speaking that, yeah, pro se litigants aren’t your strongest litigants. [laughs] Yeah.

**John:** But the delusional behavior, it’s real to him. And that’s, I think, one of the interesting things about him as a character is to him this really is a real thing that was stolen him. And he, at the center of his whole inner narrative, this is a wrong that was done to him. This movie that had come out that he finally watched on video it’s like, “Well, wait, that’s my movie.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Someone stole my idea for my movie even though it’s called Mission Impossible 3 and it’s basically the third element of a franchise.

**Craig:** The thing that jumped out for me from his complaint was that he seemed to feel that producing proof that he had written what he wrote was enough. Generally speaking in a complaint you need to actually show how the defendant has infringed on your unique expression and fixed form. He doesn’t even bother with that. He just shows that he envelopes and things.

By the way, I’ve read other complaints that did list alleged examples of infraction and I wasn’t really swayed by those either, or infringement I should say.

But, you know, here’s what goes on. I talk about this a lot of times when I’m talking to writers about the credit process. Sometimes the arbitration system, the Writers Guild credit arbitration system, just blows it. Sometimes they get it wrong.

I would say a good chunk of the time when writers are infuriated by the result the arbiters have gotten it right and that what’s going on this: I write a screenplay, I live it. I see it in my head. It is not only connected to the effort that I put in, but it is vivid to me. I have felt it.

So, that’s my entry into this. And so then somebody hands me another thing and I read it and I go, “Eh, this is just words. I’m just reading this.” There’s nothing else behind it but the reading. And so, yeah, I see all of these things that are connected to my incredibly vivid thing. But they’re not. They just seem that way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We are tricked by the complete asynchronous nature of our experience of what we’ve written and what we read or watch. I can come up with 20 movies that have scenes that are very similar to the scenes that you’ve seen in Mission Impossible, whichever the one he’s complaining about, because it’s an action movie with a secret agent in it.

**John:** Yeah. I often call it silent evidence. The sense that you’re seeing these two things and you see them like, well these two things are similar so therefore they must be related. One is the cause of the other.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But you’re disregarding all of the other things that are similar to those two things which would indicate like, oh, it’s actually just a very common idea.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so let’s take Pitch Perfect. Let’s take a movie where it’s about a singing competition or a girl joins a singing competition in college. And so let’s say I wrote a script about a girl who joins a singing competition in college and then I see Pitch Perfect. I’m like, “They stole my idea.” Well, if I’m only looking at those two examples I would say like, well, that feels kind of true. The best defense against that to me would be if someone presented 12 other scripts that were written at the same time that were about singing competitions at college.

And if were shown those other 12 scripts I would say like, “Oh, well, I guess other people had kind of similar ideas. It wasn’t stolen from all of these things. It was idea that was out there.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then I would stop and think like, “Oh, you know what? I guess I did read that article in someplace about singing competitions. Or I guess I was in college and I did go in competitions. I guess there were other people who were in choirs, too.”

And you start to realize, “Oh, you know what? The whole universe does not revolve around me and my ideas.”

**Craig:** Ah-ha. Your ideas are not as unique as you thought. And, frankly, a lot of this stuff that these people are complaining about being stolen isn’t property that can be stolen anyway. For instance, there is — I can’t remember the name — but there was a movie that came out in the wake of the Karate Kid’s success. And it featured the guy who did Tae Bo. Remember Tae Bo?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** So, he’s a fitness trainer and he kind of invested this fusion exercise martial arts thing called Tae Bo.

**John:** I have a hunch that Stuart Friedel, our illustrious editor of the podcast, probably has a whole bunch of like Tae Bo stuff, because that feels like the kind of thing that he’d focus on.

**Craig:** Billy Blanks I think was his name.

**John:** I think you’re right.

**Craig:** And so after the Karate Kid’s success somebody went and made a movie where Billy Blanks played a janitor at a high school, just a humble janitor, and there’s this kid who’s just been — he’s a new arrival to the school and he’s getting beaten up by the bullies in the school.

**John:** Well that’s just terrible.

**Craig:** Yeah. And he’s really into this girl but she’s dating one of the bullies and what is he going to do. And one day when he’s getting beaten up the janitor pops out of the janitor closet, whoops everyone’s ass with Tae Bo, and then says I’ll teach you Tae Bo.

Well, you know, [laughs], you could say, “Well, oh my god, they’ve stolen Karate Kid.” No. They haven’t. And people don’t understand what is protectable and what isn’t. Ideas aren’t protectable. Tropes, character archetypes, these things are not protectable. And Karate Kid didn’t invent that stuff either anyway. It’s the specifics that are protectable. And, frankly, it’s the specifics that are the value. There’s a reason that the Billy Blanks Tae Bo movie wasn’t a big hit.

And there’s a reason that Karate Kid was, because Karate Kid is a better movie. It’s way better, you know.

**John:** Craig, that’s the most controversial stand you’ve taken today.

**Craig:** Thank you. [laughs] So, I just feel like people don’t even understand how this stuff works. Anyway, here’s an example. A couple of women are suing the folks who created New Girl, The New Girl, the sitcom.

**John:** Oh yeah. I remember seeing that lawsuit, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I read the complaint.

**John:** A girl moves in with three guys? That’s a revolutionary idea.

**Craig:** As if that’s something you can even own. But regardless of that, one of the examples that they cite of infringement is they have a character named Cece and in The New Girl there is a character whose initials are C.C. but doesn’t go by C.C. So, it’s like Catherine Cummings. And then they’re like, “Get? C.C. Get it?”

Well, that’s just delusional. Why would somebody who — think about it. The whole premise of a lawsuit is you intentionally stole my stuff. If I’m intentionally stealing your stuff why would I be encoding references to your stuff that are unnecessary to put in, to leave a breadcrumb trail back to my crime? It’s just bizarre.

**John:** So, what caused me anger about this and why I sort of want to address it with the Tom Cruise, but especially now with The New Girl, is that it creates this pall, this shadow over an original expression. So, Mission Impossible 3, fine, it’s a sequel that made a billion dollars. But the idea that Liz Meriwether copied somebody else’s script to create The New Girl is just absurd and I don’t want to say it’s like libelous, but it’s kind of libelous, honestly. Because I know Liz, I know what she did. That was incredibly difficult. She’s an established playwright. She did this thing that was great.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And for someone to say like, “Well, she clearly stole it from me,” it’s like, no. And I feel like the good sound evidence thing could come into pass which basically like let’s pull up all the pilots from the three years surrounding The New Girl that have guys and girls as roommates. And you’re going to see so many similarities in general because it’s guys and girls living in a house together.

**Craig:** How many metric tons of pilot scripts exist prior to whatever those women wrote and whatever Liz wrote where a woman was living with three guys, or a guy was living with three women?

It’s a sitcom. For the love of god, I mean, it’s like —

**John:** It’s Three’s Company.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s Three’s Company! [laughs] You know, it’s like come on! That’s not why people watch that show. People don’t watch that show because —

**John:** It’s execution.

**Craig:** Yes! Thank you. Nobody tunes in because, oh my god, they’re doing it again this week! She’s still living with three guys! Oh my god!

That has nothing to do with the value of the show. It’s so weird to me. That the initials are the same? Just none of that makes any sense to me at all. And, you’re right, it does cast a pall. And frankly it puts studios in this awful position of constantly, constantly having to waste attorney hours knocking away these Looney Tunes lawsuits. Even in The New Girl lawsuit they cite the fact that the studio offered them ten grand to go away.

**John:** Yeah. Because ultimately and frustratingly that’s what they do because I’ve been… — It would cost them more to try to fight it.

**Craig:** It would cost them so much more to try and fight it. When they offer you $10,000 what they’re saying is, “Oh my god, you will never win, because if you turn down our $10,000 we’re willing to spend $5 million because you’re that wrong.”

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Ugh, so annoying.

**John:** The other annoying thing I want to point out this week which I didn’t even spring on you because I didn’t know this even existed until a friend pointed this out and said that this is something that she was facing on a show that she was working on.

So, it’s a thing called Time Tailor. Have ever heard of Time Tailor?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So, it’s a TV thing that will horrify you. So, essentially what it is, it’s a service. And so if you are doing a one-hour drama or a half-hour show, after you’re done, you’re locked, color timed, everything is perfect, you think you’re ready to go to broadcast, the network takes that episode and they give it to this service called Time Tailor.

What Time Tailor does — I’m looking at their website which I’ll put a link to the show notes — “It reduces run times up to 10%, all without deleting scenes or alternating original content virtually undetectable to the viewer. Single pass repurposing makes a clean copy of your program with sophisticated digitizing to scan every single frame, then redundant fields are removed and adjacent fields are blended.”

So, essentially they’re snipping out scenes, or not scenes, they’re snipping out frames and blending frames to make everything tighter, basically to shrink it down so they can fit one extra 30 second spot into a show.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** Sometimes more than that.

**Craig:** Oh, you dicks. You know, I mean —

**John:** And the thing is, you don’t know this, but all the broadcast TV you’ve seen has had that for awhile. And a way that you could test for it is generally the iTunes version of it, if you downloaded that, it’s going to have a different runtime than what was actually broadcast on the air.

**Craig:** Time Tailor. So, in the old days when people would cut film on Moviolas, maybe I’d get this. You know, obviously the two technologies would not exist simultaneously. But now we have non-linear digital editing. We’re all capable of making the edits precisely to the frame we wish. And then you Time Tailor dicks come along.

Listen, man, what can I do? It’s like, this is the part of TV that I know everyone keeps telling me, “Oh, TV, TV…” And I’m like, yeah, yeah, but I have to say there’s some things in movies that I’m still happy I’m in movies.

**John:** So, my friend, I’m not saying, this isn’t like a basic cable kind of thing. She’s writing on a giant top-rated one-hour drama. So, she finished her cut with her director, editor, and then they’re like this going to happen. It’s going to go through this process and it’s going to be not what you turned in.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And that just would drive me crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. Umbrage.

**John:** Umbrage.

**Craig:** Umbrage.

**John:** Time for One Cool Things. Do you have one?

**Craig:** I do!

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** This one came from I think someone on Twitter and I love this. Do you like to cook, John?

**John:** I love to cook.

**Craig:** Okay. Then you’re going to enjoy this.

**John:** Is it an expensive gadget that I will only use once?

**Craig:** It is not, although I have those, like a nice French lemon zester. No. It’s called SuperCook.com.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** SuperCook.com. And what it is is a database site with lots of recipes, which there are many of, however this one is fun because what they offer you is the ability to just type in the ingredients you have. You type in everything you’ve got near you and they spit back a bunch of recipes that use nothing but those ingredients. Very clever.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s very clever. And their database is very extensive, so you can really get specific about what you’ve got.

**John:** Cool. That sounds fun.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is B.J. Novak’s book, brand new book, called One More Thing: Stories and Other Stores. So, B.J. Novak is a writer and performer from The Office. You also see him on The Mindy Project. He’s great and really, really funny.

**Craig:** Saving Mr. Banks.

**John:** Saving Mr. Banks.

**Craig:** Excellent in Saving Mr. Banks.

**John:** He is great in Saving Mr. Banks. Unlike most of these books where it’s essentially like an autobiography with some like lists thrown in and other stuff, it’s just short stories he wrote and they’re really good and really funny. And he’s a terrific writer, so I would highly recommend that.

**Craig:** I met him, I met B.J., at a Saving Mr. Banks event.

**John:** You went to the sing-along that I didn’t get invited to.

**Craig:** To the sing-along. Oh, you weren’t invited to it?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Well, you’ll be invited next time.

**John:** [laughs] For Saving Mr. Banks 2?

**Craig:** Uh-huh. Yeah. For Saving Mrs. Banks.

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** And he was a delight to talk to. And it’s funny, sometimes you meet writer-actors and you walk away and you think, “You’re an actor who does some writing.” Sometimes you meet them and you’re like, “No, no, no, you’re a writer who does some acting.” He’s a writer that does some acting. He’s a good actor, a very good actor, but he’s a writer. He’s got a writer’s soul.

It was very nice talking with him. He’s a very cool guy.

**John:** I’ll do one extra One Cool Thing. I tweeted about this. But he actually was on the Nerdist Podcast this last week, talking about him, about the writer, and actor/performer. They talk a lot about sort of the process of writing jokes versus writing comedy, writing characters. And it’s a great lesson in sort of how that all works. So, we’ll put that up as a little bonus One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** So, a few last bits of news. The Big Fish cast album is out. So, you can download the songs. It’s on iTunes right now. I think by the time this podcast is up the physical CDs will be shipping.

**Craig:** [sings] “Time stops, suddenly I’m….” Am I going to have to pay for this? [hums]

**John:** Yes. Andrew Lippa will get some royalties on that and that will be good.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just from that little snippet.

**John:** That’s good. I think both the CD and the iTunes are excellent. So, the CD gives you a really good booklet, which I had to sort of copy edit a lot, but it’s nice and has pictures and lyrics and all that lovely stuff. So the physical copy is good.

The iTunes version, you get some bonus tracks. You get an extra bonus track of Magic and the Man, This River Between Us, so it’s hard to say. I would really recommend you buy both.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** But anyway that’s out there so we’ll have links to both of those two things in the show notes.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** We also have a few last t-shirts. We don’t have all sizes — for Scriptnotes t-shirts I should say. But if you go to store.johnaugust.com we have a few last Scriptnotes t-shirts, the black ones, in various sizes. So, if you are still waiting on a Scriptnotes t-shirt you are maybe in luck if you’re just the right size.

**Craig:** And what size is that?

**John:** I don’t know. But if you go there it’ll show you what sizes are left.

**Craig:** You just have XXS and XXXL.

**John:** Yeah, we have the extra-large small shirts is really all we have left.

**Craig:** Extra-large small shirts. [laughs] I love that. Are you extra-large small?

**John:** Indeed.

Standard boilerplate stuff here. If you would like to write to me or Craig something short, Twitter is your friend. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. There is a question that somebody wrote in that we didn’t even get to this week, but we’ll get to it next week. So, that’s the place to send those longer questions.

If you are on iTunes buying the Big Fish cast album you could also go over to the Scriptnotes podcast page there and leave us a note because that’s lovely. You can subscribe to our show as well if you’re not subscribed to us right now.

In iTunes you can also find the iOS app that we have for Scriptnotes which lets you download all the back catalog. We have now 129 previous episodes. You can download those old ones and get all the show notes and stuff for them there.

Show notes for this episode and most episodes are at johnaugust.com/podcast. [motorcycle in background]

**Craig:** Motorcycle show up at the very end there.

**John:** That was very good, that motorcycle. Keeping it real.

**Craig:** Keeping it real, yo.

**John:** Craig, thank you again for a nice podcast. It was nice to be back in a normal situation.

**Craig:** Whoa. I want to know what happened in that gap. There was like a really cool gap where I feel like you just went away.

**John:** Did I disappear?

**Craig:** Yeah, you went into a fugue state and then you came back. I love it when you do stuff like that.

**John:** [pause] Like that?

**Craig:** Yeah. That was it. Oh my god. That was great.

**John:** I do it. I have these little silences. I think it might be a small stroke, but it’s all okay.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s an extra-large small stroke.

**John:** Craig, if I see you next week then I see you next week. If not, it’s been a pleasure.

**Craig:** [laughs] I can’t wait to do this alone.

**John:** [laughs] What if it’s always been alone. The whole time through it’s all been a monologue?

**Craig:** Yeah. I believe it.

**John:** All right. Thanks Craig. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Slate](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html) on why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period
* John’s [2005 blog post](http://johnaugust.com/2005/fixing-double-spaces-after-periods) on fixing double-spaces after periods
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 65](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-next-117-pages), in which John and Craig discuss their period-space preferences
* [Courier Prime](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 129: The One with the Guys from Final Draft](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-one-with-the-guys-from-final-draft)
* Kent Tessman’s [Notes on Scriptnotes](http://www.kenttessman.com/2014/02/notes-on-scriptnotes/) blog post
* [How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/quarkxpress-the-demise-of-a-design-desk-darling/)
* Heather Havrilesky’s [Ask Polly: I Moved To A New City To Be With An Emotional Vampire](http://www.theawl.com/2014/01/ask-polly-i-moved-to-a-new-city-to-be-with-an-emotional-vampire) on The Awl
* The AV Club on [Tom Cruise being sued for one billion dollars](http://www.avclub.com/article/tom-cruise-is-being-sued-for-allegedly-stealing-th-107570)
* THR on [The New Girl lawsuit](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/fox-wme-peter-chernin-sued-671788)
* [Time Tailor](http://www.visualdatainc.com/time_tailor.htm)
* [SuperCook.com](http://supercook.com/) tells you recipes to cook with what you have on hand
* [One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0385351836/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by B. J. Novak
* B.J. on the [Nerdist Podcast](https://www.nerdist.com/2014/02/nerdist-podcast-b-j-novak/)
* The Big Fish cast album on [iTunes](https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/big-fish-original-broadway/id816289324?ign-mpt=uo%3D2) and [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H3UKZ6E/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* We have a few shirts left in [The John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Matthew Chilelli

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-holiday-spectacular).

**Franklin Leonard:** Hello. My name is Franklin Leonard.

**Rawson Thurber:** Hi, my name is Rawson Thurber.

**Lindsay Doran:** My name is Lindsay Doran.

**Kelly Marcel:** Hey, I’m Kelly Marcel.

**Richard Kelly:** Hey, my name is Richard Kelly.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** Hi. My name is Aline Brosh McKenna. And this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

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

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

**John:** And this is the Holiday Edition of Scriptnotes. And I am so happy to have six of our favorite guests here with us tonight to talk about things that are —

**Craig:** They are, in fact, our six favorite guests.

**John:** Ooh.

**Craig:** Not “of our.” These are our favorite guests.

**John:** Wow. Right now people are doing the calculations like, oh god, who got left off of this list.

**Craig:** Everybody that’s not here.

**John:** Wow. People are going to feel really bad about that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So we actually have, obviously you can tell, a lot of guests. We have three topics — that’s common for Scriptnotes. We have a microphone back there so we’re going to do a Q&A at the end of this. So, we have a lot to do tonight.

So I thought we wouldn’t dilly dally too much, Craig, unless you have some holiday topics you want to talk about.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wanted to talk about the eggnog situation.

**John:** Okay, let’s talk about some eggnog.

**Craig:** And how disgusting it is.

**John:** Yeah. I didn’t see you drinking any eggnog.

**Craig:** No. But I noticed people were nogging it up. Noggy mouths.

**John:** Okay, a show of hands. Who out there actually tasted the eggnog?

Oh my god, that was a lot. And so by applause who liked the eggnog?

Yeah. That’s only about half the audience who liked the eggnog. So, a lot of people tasted the eggnog and did not enjoy it.

**Craig:** Gross. It’s drinking mayonnaise. It’s disgusting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s it. I’m done with dilly dallying. Let’s go.

**John:** Craig has done his contribution to the weekly podcast. So, Craig…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pick on you.

**Craig:** No. That was accurate.

**John:** Yeah, I sort of nag on Craig and I shouldn’t. Actually that can be a resolution for the New Year is I won’t nag on you so much.

**Craig:** Don’t patronize me, August.

**John:** Because it is. Actually when I say I’m going to do nice things, it actually comes across as patronizing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because it is.

**John:** That’s how it is.

So, Craig, this will be our 123rd episode of Scriptnotes once this goes live on Tuesday, which is a lot. So, thank you all for listening.

And I realize while we talked about a lot of topics on the show, one of the things we never actually spoke about is what happens when people say yes. What happens when people say like, “Oh yeah, I really like your script. I want to buy your script.” We haven’t really talked about that process.

**Craig:** Yeah. It seems like all you do is hear no, no, no, no, no, no, and then one day you hear yes and it’s not the fake yes, it’s the real yes. And go out to dinner and you tell all your friends and you get drunk. And then the next morning you wake up and, oh no, here comes trouble.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a lot of stuff that happens when someone says yes. It’s a luxury problem, but let’s talk about some luxury problems. And who would be better to talk about luxury problems than Franklin Leonard. Come on back up here.

**Craig:** Impresario of the Black List.

**Franklin:** Hello. Hopefully I can get this part right since I screwed up the introduction.

**John:** No, don’t worry about it. We’ll do a take two and it will all be fine.

**Franklin:** Excellent. [Crosstalk]

**John:** Franklin Leonard, creator of the Black List, a person who deals with a lot of writers who are suddenly hot.

**Craig:** Suddenly hearing yes.

**Franklin:** That’s the hope, yes.

**John:** Our other guests for this segment would be Rawson Marshall Thurber.

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** Rawson Marshall Thurber who last time you were on the show you had this little indie film called We’re the Millers that ended up doing pretty well.

**Rawson:** Yeah. It did okay.

**John:** Yeah, you can set your wine anywhere. Don’t worry about that.

**Rawson:** Thank you. Sorry. Hi everybody.

**John:** Hi Rawson! So, Franklin let’s start with you because this year’s Black List just came out.

**Franklin:** It did. On Monday.

**John:** So, the Black List is an annual assessment of the scripts that development people liked the most. Is that —

**Franklin:** That is a perfectly accurate description. Yes.

**John:** And so talk to us about this year’s Black List. Were there any changes you noticed? What was the tenor of this year’s list?

**Franklin:** It was an odd list this year. I mean, I think fascinating subject matter. I’ll run through some numbers. There were two scripts about the making of Jaws. There were two scripts about Mr. Rogers. Two scripts written by identical twins, which I think is the first time that’s happened.

**Rawson:** That’s just cheating.

**Franklin:** I suppose it is. Right? It’s like two of the same brain generating one piece of material.

If there was a big trend I think it was bio pics. We saw a ton of adapted stories of a moment in a person’s life, with whom a lot of people are familiar.

**Craig:** We call that the Marcel.

**Franklin:** Ah, yes. Lots of Marcels. Are they as good as the original? Certainly not.

**Craig:** No. No. Maybe.

**Franklin:** I don’t know. I haven’t read them yet. There’s one about Stanley Kubrick faking the moon landing, which I’m particularly interested to read.

I think that was the big trend. But I think what’s really exciting as we’ve seen every year is that when you ask Hollywood development executives the scripts that they love, not the scripts that their boss loves, or the scripts that they think will make tons of money, it is a really eclectic list of really ambitious storytelling that very often succeeds in the execution of that ambition. And it’s not big four quadrant movies that don’t have a soul. It’s an attempt to do something that reminds us —

**Craig:** So there is a place for those.

**Franklin:** There is. No, there absolutely is. I’m a fan of those movies.

**Craig:** And everybody has a soul. But they still want to be entertained.

**John:** Now, how many of the scripts on the list this year are already set up someplace, like someone is trying to make this movie?

**Franklin:** A third of the scripts that were on the list this year already have a financier attached. About two-thirds have a producer attached. Leaving one-third having neither a producer or a financier.

**Craig:** Well, you know, when we think about the questions that we ask when we do a live show I’m always thinking about the folks that are here and coming up with questions that relate to where they are right now in time. And one thing I have to say, you know, I started out with the Black List where my position on it was “do not attack.”

**Franklin:** Which was still the greatest praise we’ve received so far.

**Craig:** But I really now am in favor of it. I am positively in favor of it.

**Franklin:** Wow.

**Craig:** It’s a great service that’s getting results and I like to think that there are people here, there’s somebody here, if not one, two, maybe even ten, who are going to write a script that will get on the Black List, will get them noticed, and then someone is going to say yes.

**Franklin:** Yes.

**Craig:** When you see this happening and I think you are in an interesting position to see it happening to people that may not know what the hell is going on.

**Franklin:** Yes.

**Craig:** What happens? Tell them what they’re in for.

**Franklin:** Yeah, I mean, look, I think it’s a case by case basis. But the way that the Black List website is set up, you know, someone downloads your script and reads it. And we sort of step aside at that point. We sort of joke about the website being eHarmony for people who make movies and people who write movies. And just like you won’t see that guy from the commercials at your wedding night being like, “Where’s my 10 percent?” you won’t see us after we make the connection.

So, a lot of times it can be an email out of the blue like, “Hi, I’m a producer at this company. I’m interested in talking more.” Or, “I’m an agent, I’d like to talk to you.”

And I think at that point, you know, get on the phone with them initially, and then I think trust-but-verify is probably a good rule of thumb. And then the other thing is we — our membership are all legitimate Hollywood people. Like if you’re getting an email from someone who says they read your script on the Black List, again, still trust-but-verify, but in all probability they are a legitimate person who can do something significant with your career, otherwise we wouldn’t have approved them for membership.

But, that’s actually a good time, especially if you develop relationships with other people in Hollywood, to then triangulate that information with them and say, “Hey, I just got a phone call from so-and-so. What do you know about this person? Would you like to read my script now that other people are interested?” I think taking advantage of that is always a good idea.

But I’m loathe to give blanket advice generally.

**Craig:** Yeah, but think specific now.

**Franklin:** But specifically in this case, I actually am loathe to, because I think it really does depend on each individual’s sort of circumstances and who it is that’s contacting them. But trust-but-verify is a good rule of thumb.

**John:** I want to just zoom in on that moment of someone says yes and they say we are going to make an offer on your script, because that’s a moment that sort of gets every writer’s heart pitter pattering. But what does an offer really mean and what is it that you would actually do when that situation happens?

So, Rawson, I remember you were working for me when Dodgeball sold. That was your first script sale —

**Craig:** You were like, “I’m out of here, August. Oh, up this.”

**Rawson:** “I never liked you!”

**Craig:** [laughs] I can’t wait for my turn.

**Rawson:** What did you say?

**Craig:** I said I can’t wait to also tell him I don’t like him at all.

**John:** Ah-ha!

**Rawson:** “I quit this podcast!”

**John:** Indeed. You need to direct like two big successful movies and then you’re totally free to do that, Craig.

**Craig:** Wow. Beat me down.

**Rawson:** Instead of write like half a dozen successful movies.

**John:** So, Rawson, what were those last — the last week, the last day, the last hours. Tell me what that feels like.

**Rawson:** I don’t know. I guess I’d always hoped it was going to be that. Like, you know, the balloons would fall from the ceiling and you’d get hit in the face with confetti. And then someone would hand you a big novelty check and you give everybody the middle finger and you’re gone.

But never, at least for me and for most people that I’ve talked to about this, it doesn’t really — it doesn’t usually happen that way.

**John:** So, Dodgeball, this was Ben Stiller’s company became attached to do it. And they made a deal at Fox because their deal was at Fox. There was like a competitive situation for that.

**Rawson:** Right, well it’s significantly worse than that. [laughs] Lots of stuff happened beforehand. Everybody sort of passed on it. And then we sent it to Ben’s company, Red Hour, and the receptionist there, Will, read it and liked it, who gave it to the junior executive, who read it and liked it, who gave it to Stuart Cornfeld, Ben Stiller’s producing partner, who read it and liked it, who gave it to Ben, who read it and liked it, who met me and liked me.

And then they — well Red Hour, his company, had just left 20th Century Fox and had just made a deal with DreamWorks. And DreamWorks said, “Look, we don’t really get it, but we just made this deal with you. And we want to start off on the right foot. So, here you go, here’s…”

I mean, I think it was whatever is like minimum and then a little less than minimum, [laughs], or as low as they could go.

**John:** So, not scale plus ten, but just scale.

**Rawson:** Yeah, scale. And then please wash our cars, you know, also. And I said, “Yeah, great. Whatever!” So, it was not — and then it was — so then it wasn’t even a sale, it was like a really low option. Like I don’t think you could buy a Kia for like the option price.

**Franklin:** I think the Kia Option is a car.

**Rawson:** Is that right? [laughs]

**Franklin:** I’m not sure, but it should be.

**Rawson:** At any rate. And the check, and then you get to the part where like you’ve got to actually do it.

**Craig:** Kia Option! [laughs] Sorry, he’s funny.

**John:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** And then that’s the weird part where you actually like go from prospect to employee and then you kind of have to — you got to step up and do the work. And I rewrote Dodgeball with Ben and Stuart for a year and a half. And we kept turning in drafts to DreamWorks. And Adam Goodman at the time was the executive and John Fox was the junior. And they were kind of saying like, “Wow, this is getting better.” And we’re like, yeah, it’s not like a homework assignment, like we’re trying to make a movie.

And then they said, yeah, we’re not going to make it. And then the very quick summation is we took it to Fox and we took it there because there was a fantastic executive named Debbie Liebling who was there. And she found — she had just come over from Comedy Central. She had found Matt and Trey. And she read the script and loved it and got it and sort of stood up in like the Darth Vader room at Fox and like the long black table. And at the time told Tom Rothman like, “This is the kind of dumb movie we need to make.” And so then they took it from DreamWorks.

**John:** So, let’s talk about this last week you set up another pitch which was a very different experience.

**Rawson:** Yeah. Completely different. Well, for me, a couple reasons. One is I was attached as the director, not the writer. Simon Rich was and is the writer, a very talented guy from New York, wrote for SNL for a few years, New Yorker, et cetera.

And so we went around town and pitched everywhere in town. He had this idea based on underlying material written by Steve Breen, a sort of comic — a collection of single panel comics. It didn’t really have a narrative to it. Simon came up with one and we went around town and pitched.

And the town was split in half with two different producers, which was really awkward for us, for everybody really. And then we pitched and people really liked it. And it was the first time that I had ever been involved in I guess what amounts to a bidding war. There was like, I think, five different studios wanting the same thing.

I’d always heard of this sort of thing, but I’d never actually been a part of it. And it was really cool. And also awful at the same time, because what I didn’t think about for whatever reason is that you can only say yes to one person. And at this point, you know, I know a lot of the people at the studios and they’re friends and we’ve done other things together and both producing entities are fantastic. And, yeah, it was great. It was bittersweet, I guess.

**John:** It’s like The Bachelor. You can only give the rose to one girl.

**Rawson:** We had the final rose ceremony. And it was —

**Craig:** It’s just like The Bachelor.

**John:** It’s just like The Bachelor.

**Rawson:** It is. It is.

**John:** Craig, have you had bidding war situations? Have you had like a thing where you went out on the town and had to meet with multiple people?

**Craig:** Yeah, early on in my career all I did was go and pitch. And that was all the movies that I was doing were based on pitches. And there was one that an executive that I’m very close with to this very day didn’t talk to me for three years because I didn’t pick him. And, you know, and when he was yelling at me I remember I said, “But you have passed on stuff I’ve offered to you before and I don’t yell at you.”

**Rawson:** That’s exactly right.

**Craig:** And they don’t care. They don’t care.

**Rawson:** I mean, that was part of the fun. The shoe was on the other foot this time, for once.

**Craig:** Here’s the thing and this is why it’s touch. We are actually just nicer people. I’m so sorry. We’re nicer people.

**Franklin:** By the way, I agree with you. I mean, it’s like you could have said —

**Craig:** Oh, don’t jump on our [crosstalk].

**Franklin:** You could have also said, “But they’re paying more money,” and I’ll bet he still would have yelled at you.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, probably. I mean, but it’s hard to make those choices. One thing that’s interesting about the first time you hear yes, and I get it from your story about the scale or the near scale, don’t — I don’t want anyone to think that there’s any such thing as breaking in. I know everybody thinks that there’s a rolling in. There is an endless dribbling in. [laughs]

The first movie that I pitched and sold was with a writing partner and our deal was for $100,000. So, I got $50,000, which means I got $45,000, but really means I got $42,500, I think. And then after taxes and it took like a year and a half. And they took eight months to pay me.

**Rawson:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Craig:** So by the end I think I got $20,000.

**Rawson:** Yeah. Gold Lobster. Let’s go. Awesome.

**Craig:** You know, and so I don’t want anyone to think that that first time is going to be some amazing thing. The angels don’t sing, usually.

**John:** The thing I’ve learned over the course of a lot of pitches being set up and stuff, and not really competitive situations usually, is that when you hear the words “business affairs,” that means like, oh, something is actually really happening. So, that’s just not like idle executives talking about stuff, like, “Oh, we’ll call business affairs.” It’s like, Ooh, they’re going to actually bring real people who make money deals into our situation.

**Craig:** Which is great, but then you find out that the business affairs people are awful.

**John:** They’re awful. [laughs]

**Craig:** All the passion, and the love, and the excitement about what you said and you did, that’s real for the people that really want to make a great movie. But then there is this other place that’s cold. And those people, their job is to pay you the least amount possible. And so somebody in a room — And it’s so schizophrenic, because you’ve seen it on your side.

**Franklin:** Oh, absolutely.

**Craig:** Somebody in a room will say to a writer, “You’re amazing. I’ve always wanted to work with you. I need to make this movie with you. We want this movie. Please, please, please. You’re amazing.” And then your agent will get a call from business affairs guys like, “We don’t think that they’re really worth that much. At all.”

**John:** Yeah. “We see this as a one-step deal for about half their quote.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah. That’s literally what —

**Craig:** “Oh, did someone tell you that they liked them? We don’t.” Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. And so the challenge of a writer — if it’s your first day you’re going to end up kind of taking whatever you can take, which is sort of the nature of it. But the challenge of it is that you felt all that enthusiasm in that room. You felt like, oh, this is going to be a thing. I sold a movie. And then it ends up being three weeks of drudgery while that thing gets figured out. And that can be a very long time.

**Rawson:** Three weeks if you’re lucky. Sometimes it’s longer.

**Franklin:** Yeah. I was going to say. Three weeks, you’re very lucky.

**Rawson:** That’s fast.

**Craig:** It can be a year.

**Franklin:** But I think the other thing that’s important to remember, and I say this as someone who is on the other end of the table —

**John:** You were an executive at Overbrook before.

**Franklin:** Yeah, I mean, I was an executive at Overbrook, which is Will Smith’s production company. I was an executive at Universal. I worked for Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company. I worked for Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella.

And on the other side of that table I think it’s important for writers to remember that the moment when someone is interested in your material but you still own it is sort of the apex of your power.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Franklin:** And once the studio owns it, you have virtually no power. And so essentially make sure that what you are getting for your work, whatever it is, is something that you are okay with seeding the power that you have over the work that you’ve toiled endlessly over to someone who then really won’t feel as though they owe you anything.

And that’s sort of the price that every writer, every person, whether you work as an accountant for a big corporation, or whether you work as a writer, has to determine for themselves. At what price your soul or in this case your writing?

**Craig:** And that is the moment when they will work the hardest to convince you that you have the least leverage.

**Franklin:** That’s absolutely right.

**Craig:** Because they’re smart. They are. Don’t underestimate these people. They’re not smart about story a lot of the times. But they’re smart about this stuff though.

**Franklin:** I would even argue that they’re not so much smart as that they have almost all of the power, because they have the purse strings.

**Craig:** And a total lack of scruples.

**Franklin:** Right. But like I would love to see, for example, an environment where if you had a spec script you could put it onto the market with a timeline and people would have to buy your script like eBay. Because there’s nothing that sort of throws me off more than this idea that the studio is blocking —

**Craig:** Buy it now.

**Franklin:** Exactly. Buy it now, at this price, and if the price goes up the price goes up. And you are as a writer able to see…

**Craig:** ScriptBay.

**Franklin:** …every single offer.

**Craig:** You should do that.

**John:** Well, no, what he’s really bringing up though is the idea of a deadline. And so we see the giant sales that happen, it’s usually because there’s been enough interest in the town that an artificial deadline has been set. Where the agents have called around and said, “We are taking offers until 5pm. And then we’re done.” And that’s crazy.

**Craig:** Is that what happened to you?

**Rawson:** Well it was almost the reverse or the inverse, I guess. So, the first studio N said here’s our offer and it expires at 6:30.

**Craig:** They love doing that.

**Rawson:** And Simon Rich and I share the same agent. And I got to — at the end of the day, we pitched Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Thursday night we went to CAA and we like sat in his office and watched as emails came in and he was on the phone. It was really kind of fascinating to watch. But I mean he’s done this before. So, he said, “Look, I can’t honor that. Don’t tell me that time because I can’t get to all the parties and get you an answer by that time, so that won’t work.”

He deflected it in such, I thought, a really elegant and sophisticated way. But it’s interesting when they put the other — and then they came back in after that. So —

**John:** Was it the first party who came in who ended up getting the script ultimately?

**Rawson:** No. No, no, it wasn’t. Yeah. That was tough.

**Craig:** Oh, good. I like it when that happens.

**John:** They have to squirm and sweat.

**Franklin:** But here’s the interesting question is that who cares who came in first at the end of the day? At the end of the day it’s like who are you willing to work with who is going to pay you the most money to do it? And I don’t — yes, I respect somebody who says I love this, here’s an offer. But if they’re going to explode the offer at a certain time, that’s a negotiating tactic. They’re trying to limit how much money you make.

**Rawson:** But I also made, oh sorry, I also made a mistake with that. There was another project that was like based on a graphic novel and I set it up and I had two different studios that wanted it. And I went with the one that was going to pay me more. They’re both great studios, great people, et cetera, and I went with the one that paid me more versus the one that said we really are going to make this thing.

**Craig:** Ah!

**Rawson:** And I regretted it. I regret it now. I completely made the wrong choice. And sometimes it’s hard to see that at the time where you feel like, oh, well these people say they want to make it, too.

**Craig:** It’s a mistake everybody makes.

**Rawson:** Yeah, it’s just, you never know I guess is all I can say on that.

**Franklin:** I think that’s true.

**Craig:** Nobody knows. So, that’s bleak.

**John:** A sobering thought of nobody knowing anything.

**Craig:** And we’re talking about success!

**John:** I want to thank our first panelists, Franklin Leonard. I’m sorry, you have a last thought?

**Franklin:** Oh, one thing.

**Craig:** Franklin has a little Christmas gift for everybody.

**Franklin:** I have a little Christmas gift for everybody.

**John:** A holiday present. I’m sorry.

**Franklin:** Craig mentioned that maybe one, or two, or ten people in the audience may have a script on the Black List and end up sort of oozing their way into Hollywood.

**Craig:** Dribbling.

**John:** Here’s a question for our audience right now.

**Craig:** Painful, burning dribble.

**John:** First off, is anyone in this audience on the Black List that was just published this last week. Do we have any people who got that award?

**Craig:** Oh, those people are way too busy to show up to this.

**John:** Yeah, they’re too busy. They’re fielding all the calls that Rawson’s agent was taking. Is anyone here currently on blcklst.com?

**Franklin:** Does anyone have a script on the Black List?

**John:** Oh yeah. Very nice. Very good. So, for people who don’t…

**Franklin:** For people who don’t, and everyone who does I’ll be standing outside afterwards with the coupon for a free month of hosting for a script on the Black List.

**Craig:** Woo!

**Franklin:** You get a script! You get a script! It’s my Oprah moment.

**John:** Franklin, you are our Oprah.

**Craig:** It’s like t-shirt gun kind of…

**Franklin:** I asked for a confetti cannon to shoot them out of and I got a response that I can let Craig clarify.

**Craig:** I talked about my confetti gun.

**John:** [laughs] And Craig made it pornographic is really the answer to that email chain. Franklin, Rawson, thank you so much.

**Craig:** It’s colorful.

**John:** Yay!

**Craig:** Who is next?

**John:** We’re going to talk a bit. So, Craig, I’m writing now. I’m actually writing a screenplay, which is such an unusual experience for me.

**Craig:** What’s that about?

**John:** It’s really fun to write a screenplay, but really hard because you have to have all these characters, and you have to like do stuff.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No, not at all? Oh, you write comedies, I forget. You basically make a little outline and then Zach Galifianakis says something funny.

**Craig:** That’s not entirely inaccurate.

**John:** All right. So, I’m writing this screenplay and it’s going good.

**Craig:** Oh, look. Look who is angry at you. My little pit bull.

**John:** Oh, Kelly Marcel is angry with me.

**Craig:** Well, Marcel will deal with you later.

**John:** She’ll have her moment.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I’m going to be totally honest. I’m having some challenges where I know I want to be able to articulate what the two main characters sort of want at any moment. Both what they would publicly say they want and what they sort of ultimately kind of inherently want. And I’ve been wrestling with it. And there’s stuff in the second act that I’m like leery about getting into because I don’t kind of know the answers to these things. I don’t want to write stuff that I don’t have the answers for.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** But, we have two panelists here who will tell us the answer and they’re going to come up and it’s going to be awesome because they’re going to be helping a lot. Lindsay Doran, the amazing Lindsay Doran.

**Craig:** Lindsay Doran!

**John:** And our inaugural guest, our Joan Rivers —

**Craig:** The Joan Rivers of Scriptnotes. Aline Brosh McKenna. And I should say that for all of the stick I give our brothers and sisters in the studio suites that Lindsay really is —

**John:** Lindsay is kind of amazing.

**Aline:** Let me talk about Lindsay.

**Craig:** She’s pretty amazing. I mean, she is — she is the exception that proves the rule, frankly, that people like you are terrible, but you’re not.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah, thank you.

**Aline:** I wanted to say two things before we started this topic. The first is this is a holiday party and I’m really glad you guys dressed up. And you can tell they’re dressed up because Craig is not wearing a hoodie.

**Craig:** No, my wife has it over there.

**Aline:** And John is wearing a hoodie.

**John:** I’m wearing a hoodie.

**Aline:** And that’s how you can tell that they’re all dressed up.

**Craig:** You really are the Joan Rivers of Scriptnotes.

**John:** We basically invite you on to insult us is basically…

**Aline:** Yes. The other thing I want to say to insult everyone is you’re very lucky to have Lindsay here, because she is the closest, one of the closest that Hollywood gets to having a guru.

**Craig:** She is.

**Aline:** And she is a guru.

**Craig:** She is.

**John:** Hooray.

**Aline:** So enjoy.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, guru, help me out. This is literally the problem I’m having right now. So, I have two characters who are sort of a key relationship. They’re not a love interest relationship but a key relationship. Each of them has different things they need to do. And in trying to articulate what it is, it’s like what would Sandra Bullock in Speed say her — what is she trying to do? If you’re carried along on a ride in a story, what does she say she’s trying to do? And how do I get that out? Does that make sense at all?

**Aline:** How does she articulate her wants.

**John:** How does she articulate her wants?

**Craig:** Isn’t she trying to just go faster?

**Lindsay:** “I don’t want to crash.”

**Craig:** Yeah, like, “I have to go faster than 55mph.”

**Lindsay:** Is that so hard?

**John:** Sandra Bullock was a terrible example.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, let me step back.

**Craig:** I’m feeling better about myself right now I have to say.

**John:** What does Demi Moore in Ghost want to do?

**Lindsay:** She wants to, wow, that’s hard, isn’t it?

**Aline:** Is she the main want though? Is Patrick Dempsey, oh Patrick Dempsey. Patrick Swayze.

**John:** Wouldn’t it be amazing if Patrick Dempsey was in that. Patrick Swayze has an easier —

**Craig:** Swayze wants to save her.

**Aline:** Yes, he wants to —

**Lindsay:** The good news is that it changes, right?

**John:** It does, yes.

**Lindsay:** At the beginning she wants this Whoopi Goldberg woman to go away and leave her alone to her grief. She wants her husband back. She can’t get that. She wants this woman to leave her alone. And then at a certain point she wants to believe. And that’s when we can break her heart and show that Whoopi Goldberg is just some fake con artist and then we have to win her back again. So, it’s a long bunch of stuff.

**John:** Does she want to believe? Does she ever consciously realize she wants to believe? Or is it an inner thing that sort of comes out? That’s a want/need question.

**Lindsay:** There’s a remarkable moment, something that we used in the trailer to great effect, where Whoopi Goldberg is trying to persuade her that she’s sitting there having a conversation with Sam and she gets up to leave. And Patrick Swayze says to her, “Tell her that I love her.” And he says it, “Tell her he loves you.” And she turns around and she says, “Sam would never say that.” And it’s so viscous and real when she says that. And in the trailer —

**Craig:** Because he didn’t in the beginning. He couldn’t say.

**Lindsay:** That was the whole thing. He would always say, “Ditto.” And it was in the trailer. It was like, oh god, this is a real movie about real people with real relationships. And then eventually, yeah, you do track points at which she really wants to believe. There’s the thing with the penny coming up into the air. And that’s the moment when she finally does believe.

But, yes, it is difficult. She’s not the protagonist. It’s really easy what Sam wants. But if it’s interesting to anybody, we had a really interesting thing with Ghost because in the pitch, which was very, very long, I had to as the executive in charge get that down to about a 30 second pitch for the head of production. And in trying to reduce it I realized we had a problem.

And I went back to the writer and said Sam wants to be alive, of course. He wants to tell his wife that he loves her, of course. But it’s not concrete. We need something that drives the story. And so it became he has to save her life.

**Craig:** The crime angle.

**Aline:** Right.

**Lindsay:** We have to do something with the guy sneaking into her apartment so it looks as though he has to save her life. So, that was the thing. He comes back from the dead to save his wife. And it’s in the trailer. [laughs] It was in the pitch. It’s barely in the movie. Barely. It was so scrunched in there. But it became, it was so concrete and important as opposed to something as misty as he wants to tell her that he loves her.

**Craig:** That was pretty misty.

**Lindsay:** And it made a good thriller premise as opposed to just a romantic —

**Aline:** It kind of hardened the wants.

**Lindsay:** Yes. It hardened the… — Ooh, that’s good. Harden the wants.

**John:** Oh my god. Aline Brosh McKenna. She nails phrases that become like iconic. Things about squirrels and robots. That’s why we have her on the show.

**Craig:** I mean she really is —

**Lindsay:** But I don’t know if any of that helps you.

**John:** It helps me tremendously in the sense of I always wrestle with the degree to which characters are aware of what they need, what they want and what they need, and the ability to have characters to articulate what it is they’re actually trying to do.

**Craig:** Well, I always feel like what they want and what they need should be in complete opposition in the beginning of any movie, of any story, because what they want is for the movie to not happen. And you’re going to force it on them. That’s why the movie is interesting. Something is forced on them.

And what they need is to go through this very painful thing. Nobody wants to get a splinter pulled out of their finger. Nobody. They want to just not be in pain. But what they need is for the splinter to be pulled out of their finger. So, I like to think of those things in opposition. I like to think of a movie as a progression where want and need slowly finally become the same thing. You know?

**John:** I like it. I like it.

**Lindsay:** That’s good.

**Craig:** Thanks. Yeah, I believe you.

**Lindsay:** I’m a guru.

**John:** Aline, talk to me about characters in films you’ve written. Devil Wears Prada, or as you have a protagonist, are they able to articulate what they’re going for at the start of the film? And is it true to what the actual story is or just what the character is feeling at that moment?

**Aline:** Well, I agree with Craig that the thing, the stated goal, is often not the actual goal. But one thing I’ve been thinking about lately that I think is helpful for this, and might be helpful for the people in this room, is when you first write a script you’re just trying to have it make some sense. You’re just trying to have the goals be really super clear so that, you know, there’s that — what was that song? Things That Make You Go Hmmm, or something.

You want your script to not be things that make you go, huh, and a lot of your first scripts are really that. Where you don’t really know what people want. That’s usually the issue. And then when you get some skill going you can sort of depict like what people want, but it’s a little flat. It’s a little bit direct, so people say, “I want to get the briefcase there by noon on Thursday.” And then you’re watching everyone do that. And it’s very flat. And one thing that I’ve sort of realized in my own writing is — I’m sorry, are we boring you, Craig?

**Craig:** No, no, no, just you.

**Aline:** One thing I’ve noticed is you want to have an evolution in what the want is and you want to have some sort of epiphany moment for the character but also for the audience. And I think a great example of this is in Frozen. In Frozen you kind of think you know what she wants. How many people have seen Frozen? A lot of people have seen Frozen.

**John:** Yeah, good.

**Aline:** I just loved it. And you think you know what she wants and I’m not going to spoil it for anyone, but you think you know what she wants and you see the guy going towards her.

**John:** Who?

**Aline:** The main character. The younger sister. And you see the guy coming towards her. And you’re sort of okay with that want. And you sort of have signed off on that want. And it would work perfectly well and it would track perfectly well and it’s in keeping with what her expressed goal was. And then the movie does this amazing thing where she has an epiphany, we have an epiphany, and it does something which I think is miraculous where it takes the theme and the character to another level that you hadn’t imagined. And I really think that’s what separates a good script from a great script.

And in that moment you have this incredible insight into her, but also this incredible insight into the world that she’s created thematically. And that’s the other level to get to. I think the first level to get to is just to make sure that the audience is not confused about what people want. And then the great thing you can get to is if there is an evolution, an epiphany for the character and for the audience. And if you can do that you’re really well ahead of it.

**Lindsay:** You have to think a lot about what does the audience want. That’s what I — it’s like what do you want the audience to want? Because in Frozen you want them to think they’re invested in that relationship, but you don’t want them so invested in that relationship when you turn the tables on them that they go, wait, what happened to that relationship? And I’ve certainly been in previews where you go, oops, they wanted — I bring up Pretty In Pink all the time. Oops, we wanted them to make the transition for her to be in love with Duckie and guess what, they never got there.

**Aline:** Right.

**Lindsay:** They wanted her to be in love with Andrew McCarthy and we had to change the ending. So, you have to be really, really clear. And a lot of decision making has to go into making sure that you’re tracking what they want and how you’re going to pull the rug out from under them and they’ll go with you.

**Aline:** And there needs to be an evolution in, as Craig said, the difference between the want and the need. There needs to be this evolution between what they think they want and the thing that they really need. And so that is often that little twist where the character makes a shift. It goes past what we think their actual goal is.

And that happens to Sandra Bullock in Speed. I mean, she thinks she wants a certain thing. She just wants to live. She just wants to make it through this day. And then she starts to really want to save this guy and want to save these people and it evolves. And your wants and needs should evolve. If they don’t, you’re going end up with something… — What happens I found once you clear the first barrier of trying to have clear goals is they become flat. And you’ll have these scripts which feel a little flat.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t want a movie where you’re just waiting for somebody to do the thing they said they were going to do on page five.

**Aline:** Exactly.

**Craig:** People don’t actually want to do what they’re supposed to do. Nobody wants to exercise. Nobody wants to eat better. Nobody wants to, you know, address the things that were uncomfortable or painful in their lives.

What we do want to do is take pills, and sleep, and do things that are generally papering over the problems that we have. We are really good at just taking the path of least resistance.

**John:** And so the challenge, the screenwriter needs to find ways that the characters are not going to be able to take those paths of least resistance, to continually escalate the stakes to burn those bridges behind them so they can’t go back to those safe [crosstalk].

**Craig:** That’s the fun of it. And Pixar does it so much better than everybody. It’s so simple to see what Marlin wants. Marlin wants to keep the one surviving member of his family alive. The one that’s the hardest to keep alive because of his bad fin. That’s what he wants. It makes total sense. To the point where he will refuse to let anything happen to that kid. But look where he is at the end. What he wants is to let him go and do these things, even at the risk of dying.

That’s, to me, that’s the fun of movies. That’s the fun of storytelling is watching somebody finally realize that what I want isn’t what I need.

**Aline:** And it’s fascinating to me that animated movies, lately, are the ones who really have dug into this storytelling thing in a way that’s really fascinating. I mean, they really kind of take it to the wire in terms of having these stories which are really interesting and complicated, where the characters change their wants.

In some ways I feel like they have a rigor. And it may be because they can do so many iterations.

**John:** That’s what I think it is. Because an animated film goes through scratch reel, so you’re seeing it being built up again and again. So, you get to watch the movie, it’s like, “Well that doesn’t work.” And so then you’re able to change a story and do it again and again.

Even Frozen changed tremendously over the course of their shooting. I remember the stories of new songs go in, new things come out. Suddenly the reindeer could talk, the reindeer can’t talk. You figure out what the movie really wants to be because you get to see the movie in front of you which is a luxury that we rarely have in live action.

Although you can reshoot also. You can —

**Craig:** Yeah, but much, much easier to do in animation. Plus, also, I mean, you have a lot of experience with animation. I mean, I would imagine one gift of animation in terms of making stories is when we make a live action movie the actor has an enormous amount of power on the day. Either I’m saying it or I’m not. You know?

And we, this is it, we’re here once, you know? And in animation we can just try. We can just try. Try it this way, try it that way.

**Lindsay:** Yeah, it’s true. And because I come from live action I’m always saying, “But why couldn’t somebody just write Toy Story and then make it? I don’t understand why it’s been four years getting to that screenplay. I don’t understand it.”

And the argument that came back to me originally from Chris Miller and Phil Lord was, yeah, but look at the number of great animated movies compared to the number of animated movies. And at first I bought that argument. But then I thought, wait a minute, when I’m working in animation, these are the goals: It has to be funny — laugh out loud funny; it has to make you cry; it has to be universal — it has to be so universal that kids all over the world will understand; it has to appeal to children and adults; and it has to have a theme that you want the whole world to understand.

Well, if that’s where you start, of course you’re going to make a better movie. Of course you’re going to have a better — because your goals are so high. They’re so high. On every single one I’ve worked on, and I’ve worked on about twenty now, that’s where you start. And you’re always articulate.

**Aline:** But I always think of that thing that Michael Arndt said in the New Yorker which is we work on our — he says, “We work on the Pixar movies for five years and they suck for four of them.”

**Lindsay:** Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It’s true. But I keep thinking, why can’t —

**Aline:** There’s so many times in the live action movie —

**Craig:** Just get it right the first time.

**Aline:** There are so many times in a live action movie where you’re thinking, oh, if we only had this line covered this way. If we only could reinterpret this. If we could only get him coming from this side saying this. And you just don’t have it and it’s so hard to get. So, the fact that they have this ability to make those changes is really such an advantage. But I don’t know that that accounts totally for — I think what you said, which is the goals that they set out with are so concrete and so specific and so really what storytelling is.

**Lindsay:** Well, I know when I was at Austin this year I was on a panel about theme. And somebody said, “Does every movie you work on have a theme when you’re starting out?” And I went, “Every animated movie does.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Lindsay:** It’s not particularly true of every live action movie, but when you sit down that first day on an animated movie, theme is foremost in everybody’s mind. Who does that?

**Craig:** I do it.

**John:** Craig does it.

**Craig:** I do it and everybody makes fun of me.

**John:** [laughs] I never make fun of you, Craig.

**Craig:** Nah.

**John:** Nah. Never.

**Craig:** I know.

**Lindsay:** Does that help you, John?

**John:** That helps me a lot. I guess my last question for you and writers up here as well is to what degree before you started writing the script do you have answers to all those questions about what the character would say he or she wants at this moment? Because this is one of the first times I’m really challenging myself to do it before I write those scenes. And do you have an outline that would really articulate that? Or are you just going by gut feeling that like, “Yeah, she knows what she wants.”

**Aline:** For me an interesting thing was in writing Devil Wears Prada was what she wanted was just to survive that year so that she could do something else.

**John:** And does she articulate that?

**Aline:** And survive that year is not an incredibly propulsive narrative goal. And so it was very difficult to always get to her through the thing where she’s just trying to get through this, trying to get through that. But that is a movie where she takes the thing that is the most important thing and she throws it in the fountain. She literally takes the thing which is her stated goal and just kind of forgets about it and moves on from it.

And that was a good sort of object lesson for me in exactly that thing which is the thing she needed was to see that the world was different from the way she understood it. And that was different from what she wanted which was to have everyone tell her she was a genius.

And so what I think is really interesting about the theme is you can start out thinking something in particular, but I always find that as I write it I think, oh, I thought it was about this, but it’s actually about this. That always happens after the first draft that you really kind of find your theme. And I have found that countless times.

It’s very interesting — that is one of the many weird intangibles about writing is, and it’s not that the characters say it, or they teach you or whatever, but there’s sort of an emerging message that comes out of the script and it’s sort of the script knows that that’s what it wants and the characters start to tell you that.

And it’s almost impossible to know that when you go into it.

**John:** It’s like you know what happens and then finally you realize why it happens. It is just like I know this thing is this way and then ultimately like, oh, this is the reason why it’s happening this way. This is why this character is in this moment.

**Aline:** One thing I would say though which is maybe a helpful crafty thing is if you find yourself, I was just watching a movie where they had a character that was there just so that the lead character could say this is what I want and this is what the movie is about. If you find yourself doing that, try and cut that person out completely. Because it should be completely visible in the action.

And if you find yourself wanting a character who is going to show up and explain, you know, the best friend character, or the kindly train conductor, or the super helpful telemarketer, or somebody who is going to try and draw out those thematic goal things, something is wrong with your storytelling often. And you have to try and get those… — You know, you can get so much about what a character wants from action and that’s really what you want to do.

And I think when you find yourself having people say, “This is all I want is…” there might be something a little hanky in the way you’ve set it up.

**Craig:** I got to tell you I do think about this from the start. I organize my story around this very thing. I really do think about the story as a hero who is not always heroic wants simply to maintain their life of acceptable imperfection. And then the movie happens to them and they slowly start to become aware that there’s something wrong with their organizing philosophy of life, the way that they have — what they have decided their life is about, and that there may be another way to live.

And they get glimpses of it and they get hurt by sort of moving towards it. And eventually must act in accordance with faith in that thing.

**Aline:** But does that change when you’re writing it ever?

**Craig:** It can. But what that — but at least to start with and I know this: my story is connected to my character fundamentally. And if it changes I will change it so that both change together. But there is not character end of story. That story is for that character.

And, by the way, I haven’t always done this, but I’m doing it now. It’s something that I’ve come to and I believe in. So, I would say to you if you’re thinking about that, think about how the only difference between your character in the first scene where we meet her or him and the final scene is that they’ve changed their mind about this most fundamental philosophical question.

**Aline:** And here’s a question I ask maybe Lindsay at what point in the writing process did they write, “I was a better man as a woman than I ever was as a man.” You know? I don’t think they wrote that on day one.

**Lindsay:** Well, when I was working for Sydney Pollack, but not when he was making Tootsie, after that, but he said, you know, when he was asked to do it, because it was supposed to be Hal Ashby or something, and pretty close to production Hal Ashby dropped out and suddenly Sydney was dropped in. And he said that was thing about being a better man by being a woman, that theme was when he sort of decided to do the movie.

He said, “Once I knew that, I knew what to do with everything. I knew there had to be a baby over here so we have a baby over there.”

**Craig:** It tells you what the story is.

**Lindsay:** Yeah. It was like I knew exactly how to —

**Craig:** It tells you what the challenges are. It tells you how it should end.

**Lindsay:** How to organize it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Aline:** But can I tell you a really interesting thing? Sometimes you go to make the movie and the director has a different idea of what the theme was.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Aline:** And I was just talking to somebody who wrote a movie which is a great movie and is up for Oscar buzz and stuff and he was saying that his idea of what the movie was about was different from what the director’s movie was about. And he said to me, “I think my movie is still in there.” But it really is this thing where because that is the intangible, you can always say to someone, well, they need to get the briefcase to Moscow by noon, but if you say to them this movie to me is about someone who understands that love is more important than money, you maybe be giving it to a filmmaker who thinks something completely differently.

**Craig:** Yup.

**Aline:** And what’s really interesting to me is I have made movies where I thought, oh, they’re still going to see what I wanted to do. They’re still going to see what I wanted to do. I know it’s in there. And it wasn’t in there. And it can be the same similar scenes and similar characters and similar dialogue and the thing that made you want to write the movie and the thing you were trying to say can disappear down the bathtub drain. And that’s one of the very strange things about being a screenwriter.

**Lindsay:** One of the things I’ve learned as a script whisperer, because I do all this consulting on things, when I come in on high level, high priority development, is I have everybody in the room, the producer, the writer, the studio executive, the director, whoever is there take a piece of paper without showing it to anybody else, say what is the most important relationship in this movie.

**Craig:** Oof.

**Lindsay:** And frequently I get four different answers.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Lindsay:** And that conversation is where you discover what everybody thinks the movie is about, what the last scene should be. You know, somebody said, your Devil Wears Prada, it’s about her and the boyfriend. You go, wow, that’s a different movie than if it’s her and Miranda, and that’s a different, you know what I mean? Or it’s Stanley Tucci. It’s like all of those are interesting movies, but everybody has to know who that last scene is about.

**Aline:** And I would actually say in some respects you know you’re in a good process when everyone is saying the same thing. If you actually looked at someone’s piece of paper and went like, “Ooh!”

**Lindsay:** And when that happens they don’t need me, because it means they are all on the same page. And it’s like only when —

**Craig:** What a bummer for you when they know and they’re like, “Get out!”

**Lindsay:** But usually the reason I’m there, the reason that everybody is having problems is that they haven’t quite all figured out that they’re making different movies. And then it’s about everybody figuring out what movie they want to make.

**John:** Well I know that we need you both very much. So, thank you very much for this discussion.

**Craig:** Thanks guys. Thank you.

**Aline:** Thank you very much.

**Craig:** Now it gets weird.

**John:** Now it gets weird.

**Craig:** Now it gets weird.

**John:** Because we know the history on these things.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, here we go.

**John:** You’re going to set this up because I don’t even know what to say. You like it when I’m drunk and you saw me drunk.

**Craig:** I love it when you’re drunk. Austin John August is the best John August. We just had the best time with these two. I would love for them to get married.

**John:** Oh my god!

**Craig:** Because then Kelly Marcel would become Kelly Kelly, which is so exciting.

So, we have — I’d like to welcome up here for a discussion of good and bad habits, mostly probably bad, but maybe a few good. Richard Kelly of Donnie Darko fame and Kelly Marcel of Saving Mr. Banks.

And normally, I mean, this is just working out great because I’m sure you haven’t been busy or anything.

**Kelly:** No.

**Craig:** Kelly’s film opens wide tomorrow.

**John:** Tomorrow! Woo!

**Craig:** And it’s really good. Really good.

**John:** Yeah, so Kelly when you were on our last live show in Austin I had not seen your film yet, and so I got to see it right after Austin. It was fantastic.

**Kelly:** You were my date.

**John:** I was your date. What was so wild is you’ve been basically promoting this film that entire time since we last spoke.

**Kelly:** And the month prior to Austin as well. Three months.

**John:** So, that’s a thing we have not really talked about on the show is what the writer’s function is in promoting a film, an award-caliber film that you’ve written.

**Kelly:** I had no idea that you had to do this much stuff to open a movie. I don’t know if it’s the same for every writer. And I think it’s been like this — I think it’s been this crazy because it’s a film that’s got a lot of award buzz. But, we worked out, John Lee and I worked out the other night that we’d had five days off including weekends in three months.

So, I’m a little bit tired. This is the last night of anything I have to do.

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** It’s Kelly’s last night everyone!

**Kelly:** I’m going to get so drunk…

**Craig:** Well, this means that we could probably get her to say anything tonight. I feel like this is the night.

**Kelly:** This is the night.

**Craig:** Where she calls Walt Disney a Nazi.

**John:** [laughs] Yes.

**Kelly:** [Gasps]

**Craig:** Tonight!

**Kelly:** Melissa! Beat him up.

**Craig:** Oh, no, she’s not going to help. No, no, she loves this chaos. She loves chaos. That’s my wife, Melissa, she’s over there. It’s my wife. I’m married!

**John:** She’s a real person.

**Craig:** Just wave so they know you’re real.

**Kelly:** She just said no. [laughs] No.

**Craig:** That’s it? We’re done?

**John:** She’s gotten embarrassed of this podcast.

**Craig:** We’re done? Yeah. All right. Well…

**John:** And Richard Kelly, we got to hang out some more in Austin, too, and I had known you before Austin but I didn’t kind of really know you until Austin.

**Craig:** And I still don’t know him really. Can you know Richard Kelly?

**Richard:** Yeah, it takes some time. Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** So, since we had a great conversation about Donnie Darko, but you like Kelly are sort of strongly identified with the films you’ve made. And so does it become exhausting at a certain point to be the ongoing representative of the Donnie Darko franchise, of this thing you made?

At what point are you allowed to sort of say like, “You know what? I made that movie, that’s awesome, and now I’m going to go be Richard Kelly over here by myself.”

**Richard:** Yeah, well I mean, listen, it’s a blessing to have a film that stays with people and it continues to haunt you and be tattooed somewhere on your body, or on other people’s bodies usually.

**Craig:** He’s so weird. So weird. I love it.

**Richard:** I’ll take it. I’ll take it. But, listen, it’s all about constantly just evolving and trying to reinvent yourself. And not write the same movie over and over again, or not direct the same movie over and over again. And I think that’s tricky in this business because they always want to, like I said, put you in a category or a box, so to speak.

And for me in sort of trying to evolve as a writer I’ve been trying to just venture out into different kinds of stories. And change things up. You know, it’s like when you work out at the gym you’re supposed to change your weight lifting habit every few weeks.

**Craig:** We do that.

**John:** Yeah, that’s us. That’s us totally.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You can tell here that this…

**Richard:** But it’s constantly just like changing the way you’re exercising your muscles or your brain. And I don’t know, it’s just switching up the process I’ve found.

**John:** Well, and we’re approaching 2014, so are there any things you want to change up for 2014, or any things that you see in yourself that you want to do differently for 2014, especially in terms of you’re writing, your craft, your filmmaking. Is there anything?

**Richard:** Well, I’ve been writing for myself for probably three years. I’ve written probably three or four scripts over the past three to four years of all different kinds of genres. And I’ve been pushing into new territory. But I think for me it’s about getting back behind the camera, obviously, but in terms of writing, I think venturing into a place where I’m doing like two to three hours a day of really essentially work and that’s it.

I used to try to think I needed to write all day.

**Craig:** Not possible.

**Richard:** That I needed to. And it was just a mistake. I was writing too much. I was over-thinking things. I was creating too many characters that were extraneous. And it was actually an unhealthy process. So, I think I’ve learned now it’s like you just need to make sure when your brain is the most functional, what time of day is that, what environment do you need to be in. It’s a very almost — it’s like a dietary exercise thing in a lot of ways. Not to be too physiological.

**Craig:** No, no, totally applies to us as well.

**John:** Not at all.

Kelly, how about you? Your 2014. Do you have any things you are looking at doing now or in this new year that are different?

**Kelly:** Having a little sleep.

**John:** Sleep is so good.

**Craig:** Sleep.

**Kelly:** Really just want to do that mainly. No, I think I’m going to do some television next year.

**John:** That would be great.

**Kelly:** There was a TV… — When I sold Terra Nova, that brilliant show, [laughs] I also sold another show, I told you tonight’s the night I can just say anything.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**Kelly:** I sold another show called West Bridge to Showtime which went into development but never got made and now because of Banks it’s been picked up. And so we’re going to do it as like a closed end series. So, that will be exciting.

**John:** So, talk about your writing though during this time, because you’ve been so busy doing —

**Kelly:** There is no writing.

**John:** There’s no writing at all?

**Kelly:** There’s no writing.

**Craig:** Very disappointed to hear.

**John:** But I’ve not done as much writing during the whole Big Fish thing as I wanted to, so it’s been exciting to get back into it. But are you on the Richard Kelly plan of a couple hours a day, or what’s your thing?

**Kelly:** I’m trying to do what you told me to do, [laughs], in Austin which is just do three hours a day. And it doesn’t matter which three hours that is. Just do three hours. But, you know, really the way my life works at the moment is I wake up, the phone starts ringing, I do press, I do phone interviews, all that —

**Craig:** Don’t forget the hair and makeup people.

**Kelly:** The fucking hair and makeup people. Swear to god if someone comes near me with another makeup brush! Um, yeah.

**Craig:** We also have a lot.

**John:** Yeah, you can tell. You can tell.

**Kelly:** They call it “grooming,” like I’m a dog.

**Craig:** Yes!

**Kelly:** You need to be groomed.

So, phone interviews happen all day and then I don’t think there’s been a night this week that I haven’t done a Q — I was on this stage last night doing a Q&A. It’s every single night.

**Craig:** And that is, I mean, I have to just say, one of the worst things about Q&As, when you’re doing Q&As for a movie is that you will be asked the same question over and over and over and you start to lose your mind. It’s a weird form of mental torture to be asked the same question over and over and over.

**Kelly:** Yeah. I started to make things up.

**Craig:** Out of curiosity, what’s the one? What’s the one that is driving you the most crazy so that I can now ask it.

**Kelly:** Ha! Normally the Banks questions are kind of what they are, but obviously everybody wants to know about Fifty Shades of Grey. So, I’ve started to tell everyone I’m a virgin and that I don’t really know —

**Craig:** You’re not? I bought that.

**Kelly:** No, that’s true. Yeah. And that a really good friend of mine had told me that, you know, when you have sex like what you have to do is sit on a rabbit or a duck and then you rub a bald man’s head. And then you either get pregnant or flowers. And that doesn’t seem to going down too well with the studio funnily enough.

**Craig:** Walt Disney is not impressed.

**Kelly:** No. [laughs]

**John:** Craig, are you a two or three hour, you’re a two or three hour work person. And what are your two or three hours, because I’ve started to try to make it the morning so that I can get stuff done. The first thing I do when I get in the office, I don’t do anything until I’ve written stuff.

**Craig:** I’m not that way. But what I will do is my plan is as I’m going to bed I’ve actually found a pattern. I didn’t realize I had one, but I found one. As I’m going to bed I start thinking about the next day’s work. And then I fall asleep. And I don’t worry about writing anything down because we all know when your dreams are nonsense.

But then when I wake up and I take a shower, I take a very long shower and in the shower I start to think about the scene. Once I’m out of the shower I should — I usually have a sense of what it is I’m going to write. If I don’t, I know it ain’t happening that day. But if I do, then I know I have all day to pick the three hours. And it’s just waiting for the moment. And then I do it.

**John:** So, Melissa, how long are the showers?

**Craig:** [laughs] She’s not in there with me when this is happening.

**John:** What’s a long Craig Mazin shower?

**Melissa Mazin:** Oh, I don’t know.

**Craig:** That’s my wife. There you go. 15? No.

**John:** Only 15? No.

**Craig:** No, no.

**Melissa:** 20 minutes. I don’t know.

**Craig:** Do you live with me? [laughs] It’s never when she’s there by the way. Here’s the other thing: She wakes up at 6:30 in the morning. I’m going to bed sometimes at 6:30 in the morning. So, she wakes up, she’s gone. So, now I’m talking like 9:30 or 10 I go into the shower. Easily sometimes I’ll go for a half an hour. Easily.

**Kelly:** Why does she get up at 6:30 and you get up at 9:30?

**Richard:** Uh, because he’s a writer.

**Kelly:** This is bullshit.

**Craig:** I got to go. [laughs]

**John:** Because she’s the parent who gets the kids off to school I bet.

**Craig:** She’s the responsible one.

**Kelly:** So you don’t help taking the kids to school or anything like that?

**Craig:** This is neither the time nor place, [laughs], to discuss this matter. We’ll talk about it later.

**Kelly:** I’ve got your back, Melissa.

**Craig:** I regret everything. Everything! This is kind of where it was eventually going to go.

**John:** You still have like the benefits of a bachelor writer life.

**Craig:** I do. Actually she’s great about that. Actually, I will say that if you have somebody that you share your life with who understands what you do and gives you the flexibility and space to do, that’s wonderful.

Now, if six years go by and you haven’t sold anything, that person is going to get super grumpy…

Yeah, she’s like, “Yeah!” She’s like, “I am super grumpy.”

**John:** What is the difference between like an aspiring screenwriter and a freeloader? It’s a really fine line.

**Craig:** It’s so…it’s right there. But, you know, assuming that you are actually earning a living then it’s nice to know that you’re living with somebody who kind of gives you the space you need to do the crazy job that we do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Kelly:** Like sleeping in?

**Craig:** I am so uncomfortable.

**Richard:** Well, the thing is if you’re only really required to work three hours a day, sleeping in is not that big a deal.

**Kelly:** Right.

**Craig:** Thank you, Richard Kelly!

**Richard:** And you need the sleep to rest your brain so you can make those three hours count.

**Craig:** Great point, Richard Kelly!

**Kelly:** No, but my argument is if it’s only three hours a day then there’s all the other hours in the day to help out, right?

**Craig:** That makes no sense.

**Richard:** There’s things like Angry Birds.

**Kelly:** And that’s how you make films.

**John:** And the gym. Don’t forget to go to the gym. That’s another crucial thing here.

**Craig:** Right. Although I’m also forgetting to go to the gym.

**Richard:** It takes a good hour and a half to go [crosstalk].

**John:** Yeah.

**Kelly:** Look at those guns.

**Craig:** I actually think I could fill enormous wads of my day with nothing. I don’t even know what happens. I don’t know what happens. But I do say, look, if you are writing a screenplay I will say this: I’ve never missed a deadline in my career. Not once. I am really responsible. I don’t know how. I just know that by this day it’s happening. And I’ve always gotten there, so I am very responsible. I’m very routinized in certain ways. In other ways, maybe not so much. What the hell! [laughs]

I mean, ugh…

**John:** Well, we’ll be able to ask more questions about Craig and his life during the Q&A.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But, Kelly, congratulations on your movie. Congratulations on all you’ve done with this part of it.

**Kelly:** Thank you.

**John:** Kelly Marcel, you don’t naively think that you’re done doing press?

**Craig:** Oh no.

**Kelly:** What?!

**John:** No, there will be more.

**Craig:** What?!

**John:** But for now you’re movie is coming out and congratulations, that’s awesome. Richard Kelly, thank you again for being here.

**Craig:** Richard Kelly. The great Richard Kelly.

**Richard:** Well, thanks for having me.

**John:** You guys can get up because we’re going to start our wrap here.

**Craig:** Get off. [laughs]

**John:** We have so many people to thank.

**Craig:** You especially. [laughs]

**Kelly:** Ha!

**John:** We need to thank the Writers Guild Foundation, the giant logo behind us. So, thank you very much for hosting us again. LA Film School for this venue, which was great, and so helpful —

**Craig:** Thank you LA Film School.

**John:** I need to thank Matthew Chilelli. Matthew, are you here? I never actually — he’s right there. He wrote a lot of the best outros you’ve heard. He also wrote the Christmas —

**Craig:** This guy is cool.

**John:** He’s pretty great. He also wrote the opening music that you heard tonight, sort of the holiday remix of the [hums Scriptnotes theme].

**Craig:** It’s amazing what you’ve done with such a mundane tune. Thank you so much.

**John:** Yes. It’s really remarkable what you’ve been able to do. So, thank you again for writing these for us. Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you. Wait, what about, are you going to get to them?

**John:** I’ll get to them eventually. We’ll thank Stuart Friedel. Stuart Friedel —

**Craig:** Stuart! Stand up, Stuart!

**John:** Tonight the role of Stuart Friedel will be played by this —

**Craig:** Stuart is played by this actor, Brett Goldfarb.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, he’s fantastic.

So, the Writers Guild Foundation who is this giant slide behind me, every year they have this holiday sale of Extraordinary Experiences, which you can find on their website, so wgfoundation.com.

**Craig:** This is the charitable. They are not part of the union. They are a 501c3 not-for-profit charitable organization. Great organization.

**John:** They do great work with veterans groups, with other aspiring writers, schools, all sorts of special programs. Once a year they do the sale of Extraordinary Experiences where you can have lunch with a certain given writer, or coffee, or someone will read your script.

So, if you go to the website you will see the Extraordinary Experiences that they have up for sale. This year some of our panelists will be also offering new special things after tonight, because we will strong arm them. So, I would encourage you to go there because it’s a great organization and it’s a great way for them to raise some money to pay for the eggnog you had here tonight.

**Craig:** Argh!

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** It coats your mouth.

**John:** Yeah. It’s good if you have like hot spicy food though. Insulation.

**Craig:** No, because you’re putting heat next to milk. It’s disgusting.

**John:** Well, at least we’ve bookended the show with the talk of eggnog.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, Craig, thank you, and have a very happy holidays.

**Craig:** I thought you actually meant that.

**John:** See! I can feign sincerity when I need to.

**Craig:** Merry Christmas to you, John.

**John:** Aw, thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** I always mean it.

**John:** And thank you all very much for being here.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

Links:

* [Aline Brosh McKenna](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0112459/) on episodes [60](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-black-list-and-a-stack-of-scenes), [76](http://johnaugust.com/2013/how-screenwriters-find-their-voice), [100](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-100th-episode), [101](http://johnaugust.com/2013/101-qa-from-the-live-show) and [119](http://johnaugust.com/2013/positive-moviegoing)
* [Franklin Leonard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Leonard) on episode [60](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-black-list-and-a-stack-of-scenes)
* [Kelly Marcel](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2813876/) on episode [115](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-back-to-austin-with-rian-johnson-and-kelly-marcel)
* [Lindsay Doran](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/movies/lindsay-doran-examines-what-makes-films-satisfying.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0) on episode [68](http://johnaugust.com/2012/talking-austen-in-austin)
* [Rawson Marshall Thurber](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1098493/) on episodes [100](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-100th-episode) and [101](http://johnaugust.com/2013/101-qa-from-the-live-show)
* [Richard Kelly](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0446819/) on episode [118](http://johnaugust.com/2013/time-travel-with-richard-kelly)
* The [2013 Black List](http://list.blcklst.com/story/7887) and [blcklst.com](http://blcklst.com/)
* The New Yorker on [live action versus animation](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/17/111017fa_fact_friend?currentPage=all)
* [Saving Mr. Banks](http://movies.disney.com/saving-mr-banks) is in theaters now
* Thank you to the [Writers Guild Foundation](https://www.wgfoundation.org/) and the [LA Film School](http://www.lafilm.edu/) for hosting
* Support the Writers Guild Foundation and get something awesome from their [Holiday Sale of Extraordinary Experiences](https://www.wgfoundation.org/holiday-fundraiser/)
* [Intro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Matthew Chilelli
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Fred Tepper