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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/undervalued-simplicity-and-wga-coverage-for-videogames).

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

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

**John:** You are listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, you are sick aren’t you?

**Craig:** I am sick. I have got the late November virus.

**John:** Is it a cold? How would you describe your illness?

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s definitely a cold. I am one of those… [clears throat] people. I am going to do this throughout the podcast, please forgive me.

**John:** Yeah, I am going to have Stuart go through and cut out every cough. It would seem like —

**Craig:** [coughs]

He’s not going to cut out that one, is he? [laughs]

Sorry. I am one of those people that rolls their eyes whenever someone says “Oh, I have the flu.” You don’t have the flu. You have a regular virus. You just have an upper respiratory infection, 99 times out of a 100. I think we have covered this before.

**John:** Yeah. I had a bit of a cold situation two nights ago, where it was one of those things where you can feel your body starting to… like my skin, I could just feel something strange about it. I will always know if I have a cold because if I try to take a shower, the water just feels really weird on my skin.

**Craig:** That is weird.

**John:** So I had that happen. I am not crazy. You have had the same thing, right?

**Craig:** I have not had that, I must admit. Not even in the worst illness have I ever experienced any kind of… I don’t know what you would call that.

**John:** Oh, whenever I get a cold I can always tell like the cold is coming on because like my skin just feels a little bit different. It’s not the surface of my skin, it’s like a few millimeters underneath my skin feels wrong and different.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So anyway, I had that. The cure for that cold, just in case anyone is curious, is Maker’s Mark. Maker’s Mark bourbon whiskey is how you fix that. So I broke out the bottle and had a little Maker’s Mark and now I am fine.

**Craig:** That is essentially what Nyquil is. It’s just Maker’s Mark with a decongestant.

**John:** It’s cherry flavored Maker’s Mark.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** So other than being sick, have you had an okay day?

**Craig:** Yeah, pretty good. I have got a script due out in a few weeks, so I have been cranking pretty hard. On Friday, by the time you get to Friday if you have been doing a good steady five page clip a day, you kind of start feeling a little bit like a melted chunk of ice or a puddle of disintegrated brain goo. So I am excited that it’s Friday.

**John:** You get that candy-bar-in-the-car quality.

**Craig:** Yeah, kind of soft, damaged.

**John:** I did no writing at all today. So here’s my day, since we were talking about people’s workflows. I started today with a meeting with Todd Strauss-Schulson, who is a director who did the Harold and Kumar movie, which I loved.

**Craig:** The most recent one?

**John:** Yeah, the most recent one.

**Craig:** Alright.

**John:** It was great. So I had followed his short films that he made before this and this was a chance to sit down and have coffee with him. So when people talk about like “Oh, what is a general meeting?” That is a general meeting. We weren’t talking about any specific project down the pipe, just like “Hey, who are you” and “Let’s get to know each other a little bit.”

So I had that coffee. I had a meeting at the WGA to talk about… Every year, or every two years, they try to do a survey of working screenwriters to figure out what the big issues are. So this was a test run on the survey for what this next survey is going to be so that they can ask all of the feature screenwriters what the issues are about late payments and sweepstakes pitching.

This writer, Craig Mazin, was originally supposed to be there but he didn’t make it.

**Craig:** Yeah, he didn’t show up because he was writing and coughing.

**John:** He was a candy bar melting in the car.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So it’s always encouraging to be sitting down and looking at the issues ahead. Also nice to be able to think about the issues ahead without having to think about how to fix them because so many of those creative issues are really intractable. We are not going to wave a magic wand and suddenly fix sweepstakes pitching.

**Craig:** Yeah, unfortunately, most of the things that they ask about and get responses on are sort of evergreen problems. So we keep asking what are the problems and screenwriters keep saying “This, this and this.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s a little frustrating. At some point the survey itself almost becomes this weirdly mocking thing.

**John:** Yes, this is self-fulfilling prophecy.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What’s potentially interesting about getting the data on this is that you can maybe start to recognize what studios and what mini-majors are the worst at some of these things and possibly you can effect some change based on the report card aspect of that.

So if studio X is notorious for bringing in 20 writers on a project that they don’t ever end up even making, then maybe that could be more publicly disseminated and people will know to not go in for every one of those crazy sweepstakes pitching situations.

**Craig:** Well, that would be nice. Unfortunately, I think the way that the business is right now and the economy and the level of development that is going on, writers will go in on those sweepstakes pitches. I wish they wouldn’t, but I can’t tell them not to. I certainly can’t judge anybody who needs a job who is trying to get a job. They are not illegal.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** They are just obnoxious. I would argue counterproductive. To me, the way to get studios off of that is to just make a compelling argument that the scripts will be worse because of them. I could make that argument, I just don’t know if they agree or care.

**John:** Yeah, because you are never going to be able to show that the script was worse because of it because you can’t fork the universe and show the two different development paths you took, one of which you brought in like eight writers to try to beat something out and one which you just hired the best writer who showed up.

**Craig:** That’s right. You can’t actually prove it. But the primary argument that I make about these things is when you force writers to jump through that many hoops in that kind of gladiator-style audition for work, you can be assured that when you do choose a writer and that person sits down to work, they are spending half their time working on your script and the other half doing the exact same thing they had to do for you for someone else to get the next job.

**John:** Exactly. You create a culture in which writers are only giving partial attention to the project in front of them because they have to keep looking for that next job, because the process has been drawn out for so long.

**Craig:** Exactly. I get why they do what they do. But the truth is between that factor of bifurcating the attention of the writer, the other factor is frankly, there is really no demonstrable connection in my mind between who does the best song and dance in the room and who is going to actually write the best script.

If you find somebody that you trust who has a good track record and you believe in them and they have a basically good take on it, that should be enough. But hey, I don’t run a studio.

**John:** One day, but not now.

**Craig:** One day. [laughs] God forbid.

**John:** So the rest of my day, jumping ahead, was spent working on, we suddenly have a Macintosh app that we are going to be releasing fairly soon. We were working on a different app which we will get to eventually. But along the way, there’s something I actually did for the Big Fish musical that I said “Hey Nima, we should be able to do this, right? I am not crazy. This is actually a pretty easily solvable problem.” Of course two days later he had it figured out.

**Craig:** That guy is a genius.

**John:** It’s because Nima’s a genius. Nima Yousefi, he is a listener and a friend of the show. So Nima worked on this thing and it looks like, “Hey, it’s actually really great and useful, and actually a much more useful app for many people than what we were originally working on.” Which brings me to a larger issue that came up a couple of times since last two weeks, is that this most recent project was actually really easy. It kind of feels like too easy. It feels like you are cheating because it’s just actually too simple.

In a weird way I think we undervalue things that come to us really easily because we have been through so many times where it’s been a struggle and conversely we overvalue those things. A better example might be for the Big Fish musical, we have been working on it for years and years and years. So there is maybe 20 songs. Not all of them are singing songs, but there’s 20 pieces of music. Some of them we have gone through like 14 different versions and drafts of them, like classically the “I Want” song, where the character sings about what he or she really wants. That’s the one we keep going to again and again. Or the opening number will be something we go to again and again.

There is one number that everyone loves in the show. But literally Andrew and I — it was late in an afternoon and we just banged it out three years ago. It kind of feels like cheating because we know we have worked so hard on every one else — on every other number — but that one just clicked and it was right and it was simple.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a frustrating thing, frankly, that your success as a creative person isn’t as simple as work in, quality out. It just doesn’t work that way. You are right. It kind of violates our weirdly Calvinistic work a day ethic.

I frankly am guilty of… You know there are days when you sit down, and suddenly you have this great run. Five pages pour out of you and they are really good and you feel great about it. Then you think “Well, I am not going to work the rest of the day.” You feel guilty. Whereas I feel curiously proud of myself if I beat my brain into a mush to get three pages out over the course of the day because they were really hard.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s kind of dumb, frankly. I should stop doing that.

**John:** Yeah, you should stop doing that because one of the other dangers, I think, is that those pages that were really hard to write, you are overvaluing how good they are because you know how hard they were to write. If they are only even kind of okay, you are more reluctant to change them because you know how hard they were to write. Sometimes you are willing to throw a perfectly good scene under the bus because you just dashed it off. But you are not really aware of the actual quality of the scene. You are so keyed into how much work you put into it.

**Craig:** Yeah, that is right. I think directors get that better than anybody because you could go out and direct a scene for three days at night in the cold and it’s dangerous work and it was brutal to even get it up on its feet and you argued to get the money for it. You could pile on an enormous amount of circumstances. Then if you watch the movie and it needs to be cut, you cut it out. That is a good lesson. You are right, just because you poured in a ton of effort doesn’t mean it’s valuable.

**John:** There’s a few of my movies, Corpse Bride was a pretty quick work but Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was sort of famously, was really three and a half weeks to get to my first draft. It was like “Oh, that wasn’t enough work.” I felt kind of guilty turning it in, but it was done. It was ready and they needed to shoot the movie. Most of the scenes I never went back and touched again. So you compare that situation and that movie was really successful to other movies that I have killed myself on that were either never shot or they were shot and they were a difficult process the whole time through.

You don’t know. I think you should probably just celebrate the times that they have worked out great rather than killing yourself on the times where it was a slog.

**Craig:** I totally agree. Let’s give ourselves a break.

**John:** Yup. Let’s also answer some questions because I…

**Craig:** Yes. I have got my question list right here.

**John:** I was in New York for two weeks and was away from the actual question bag. So a lot of stuff stacked up here.

So let me get to the first one here. Shannon, in Tucson asks, “I am a man with the name Shannon.”

**Craig:** Ha-ha. [laughs]

**John:** “As you may imagine, this has caused me some difficulties and embarrassing moments. I have come to think that choosing a different first name, I am thinking Andrew, would solve the problem. Is this a good reason to choose a pseudonym, or am I overreacting about my name?”

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, Shannon, it’s a personal thing. If it’s uncomfortable for you and awkward, then yeah why not change your name. It’s your name. It’s who you are. I had a friend in high school named Kevin Zeidenberg. Kevin’s mom was Filipino and his dad was Jewish. Kevin looked pretty Filipino. So he would get that look, the “you are not what I expected when I heard the name Kevin Zeidenberg.” I think some people sort of relish that slightly Ricky Gervais-style awkward moment and some people don’t. It’s your name; it’s your career. If you want to change it, do it.

**John:** Yeah, I agree. Pick a new first name, use your initials, whatever you want to do. It’s absolutely fine. As people who would look me up on Wikipedia would know, August is not my original last name. You knew that, right?

**Craig:** I did. Your original last name was… [laughs] sorry, I was going to make a joke that would get us kicked off of iTunes.

**John:** Yeah, that would not be good. It was a Germanic last name and really tough to pronounce and simple to look at, like “Oh, I could say that.” Then you actually try to say it like “Oh, wait. I don’t know what my vowel sounds are in this name.” So I recognized as I came through, having this name my entire life up through college that the first 15 seconds of any new conversation with somebody would always be about correcting how they mispronounced my name.

So I was doing myself a favor and everybody I would meet in the future a favor if I would just pick a simpler last name. So I just picked my dad’s middle name and it’s been cake since then. I legally changed it.

You don’t have to legally change your first name to use a pseudonym, but it just became easier for me to do that before I moved out to Los Angeles and started a new life. It’s made running from the police much simpler.

**Craig:** So much simpler.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, good point.

I have a question for you.

**John:** Alright.

**Craig:** This is coming from… do we say their names?

**John:** Yeah, we do.

**Craig:** Yeah like Shannon, we can talk about Shannons, we can say this because this is Mike Amass.

Question: “To flip the coin on the helpful Movie Money episode of our podcast, would you like to air your thoughts on the current state of self-distribution. John, I know you watch the team behind One too Many Mornings, and might still be entertaining the notion of self-distribution for future personal projects. Could you shed any light on how filmmakers like Kevin Smith and Edward Burns are enjoying total freedom, total freedom, John, to create and maybe, just maybe, might be making some decent money at it?”

**John:** Yeah, I have seen this question, I racked my brain to think of who is actually doing this now. So Kevin Smith, clearly with Red State, which is a movie he made, I think, basically on his own money. Then he famously took it to Sundance, and then obviously wasn’t going to really sell it, he was going to self-distribute it.

Edward Burns, we were on a panel with Edward Burns, weren’t we?

**Craig:** In Austin, two years ago.

**John:** I had to sit next to Edward Burns, and he’s a handsome man. You don’t feel uglier then when you are sitting next to Edward Burns.

**Craig:** He is dreamy.

**John:** He is dreamy. See, objectively dreamy, and a really nice guy. He made a movie called Nice Guy Johnny, which I saw, which was good and really, really small. It has the stakes of a postage stamp, but really charming, and sort of the way he made it at a really small budget, and made exactly the movie he wanted to make.

Then the Polish Brothers, who I was on a panel with many years ago, and they have done many and bigger movies, but they did a tiny movie called For Lovers Only, which was sort of a fantasy of the kind of movies they do. They just traveled around France and shot in black and white with this beautiful actress. It looked good. I saw the trailer, I haven’t seen the movie yet.

There are some directors who are doing this, and hopefully some of them are making money. You are sort of vertically integrating yourself, so rather than going to someone to give you money, you are raising the money yourself. Rather than going to a distributor and signing over most of your future income on something, you are doing all that work yourself.

It’s a tremendous amount of work, so a movie like The Nines, I guess we could have self-distributed it, but then you have to become a master of all these things you don’t really want to have to know about, like how you book theaters, and how you collect money from theaters, which is really hard.

Because how are you going to get the money back out of the theater? You are just counting on their goodwill to report honestly and give you the money that you are owed? The advantage a distributor has is they have the next movie. If you are not paying them for the previous one, they are not going to give you the next one. You have nothing else to pull that money out down the road.

I think iTunes is one of the better ways to think about doing it. With The Remnants, which was a web series pilot that I shot a few years ago, we got the rights back to it, and we had some discussion about doing it as a teeny, tiny feature. Who knows, at some point we might still do it. I discussed with the people at iTunes what that business model is, and what cut we get, and how we could make that all work out. Also, had a conversation with Hulu about it.

There is probably ways it could work, it’s a little bit easier if you have some name and reputation, like Kevin Smith, Edward Burns, the Polish Brothers, so you could have a little bit of leverage with the distributors, the online distributors, and that you can actually generate press. That is one of the challenges you always have with an independent film, is like how are you going to get mainstream media to pay enough attention that people are actually going to find your movie?

I would have enough of that now that I could probably do it, so it’s something I am really thinking about doing. It’s just it ends up being a tremendous amount of time and effort that may not have the best payoff and reward. You may not be able to put it in front of as many people’s eyeballs as you really hope.

**Craig:** Absolutely correct, a big, uphill battle there. I should also add, I think that when Mike suggests that Kevin Smith and Edward Burns are enjoying total freedom to create. I would argue that they have less creative freedom than Gore Verbinski had on the last Pirates movie, because the biggest restriction on creative freedom is money. When you are stuck with a micro-budget, you really are squeezed. Sometimes wonderful movies come out of that because it requires tremendous discipline. But it’s a mistake to think that there’s more creative freedom with less money. It’s just a different set of problems.

**John:** I will push back a little bit on that. I think creative freedom doesn’t mean that you get to do anything you possibly ever want. Creative freedom isn’t anything you can possibly imagine you can make. To me, creative freedom is no one is going to tell you no. With a smaller budget, even on The Nines, which wasn’t as small a budget as some of these things were, I did have a lot of creative freedom, because we were fewer people around to tell me no on things.

**Craig:** I get that.

**John:** When something wasn’t possible because we didn’t have the money, it was always, “Then how is the movie changing to accommodate our actual limitations?” I didn’t have to change anything to meet someone else’s taste.

**Craig:** You chose to make a movie that would fit within the preexisting constraints of your budget.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** That’s why, Mike uses the phrase “total freedom to create.” Really, I am just quibbling with the word total, and nothing else.

**John:** Yeah. I see your point now. Total freedom to create versus total creative freedom, slightly different things.

Let’s move on to Daniel from Oakland. He asks, “My brother claims that studios don’t like to see a film do better overseas, because they see less of a cut overall than if a film does better locally, in the US. Is there any truth to this?”

**Craig:** I don’t think so, unless a studio is splitting the domestic and foreign distribution with another entity. I don’t see why they would be particularly concerned. There are quite a few movies that do better overseas than here. In fact, this year, the best example I can think of is Kung Fu Panda 2, which underperformed at the domestic box office, but was an absolute blockbuster overseas.

Another great example is in fact the aforementioned Pirates of the Caribbean 4, which also underperformed here, but was even bigger overseas, it was unreal overseas. I think in the case of Pirates, Disney has a domestic distribution arm, and an international distribution arm, in Buena Vista Pictures International, sees a huge cut of that money. I don’t know, maybe I am wrong.

**John:** I would imagine in the past, probably, that could have been more of a case, where they had a harder time pulling the money back in from overseas markets. That is possibly like, once upon a time that was actually true, but now it’s actually not as true, because given that the bulk of big movies’ money comes from overseas, I am sure they have gotten much, much better at pulling that money back in.

I will say that psychologically, I think the executive at whatever studio in Culver City, would kind of prefer that the movie making a ton of money here, just because people pay attention to that. Feeling like you have a big hit is better than having a movie that underperforms.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s absolutely true. There is kind of a weird stigma about a movie that is soft here, but plays big overseas. It’s got almost an underlying xenophobia, like, “Your movie was for people that don’t even speak English.” [laughs] People that didn’t get the prior intent of the movie because it’s all color and noise, or something like that.

Look, there are other examples of movies that do extreme splits, pro-domestic and anti-overseas, and that’s also damaging. Talladega Nights comes to mind. I think it made $100 million here, and literally something like $12 million in the rest of the world.

**John:** Yeah, the thing was that it doesn’t translate, or it doesn’t travel. That can also be the case, and it was the knock against African-American actors for a long time, until Will Smith came along and broke all those barriers too, is that the Eddie Murphy comedies would do really well here, but overseas, people wouldn’t go see them. That seems to be something of the past now.

**Craig:** Seems like it, yeah. Here is a question for you from Tom. “A number of movies have made it to Broadway, and I understand Big Fish will as well. As the writer of a screenplay, what do you ask for to keep you in the mix should your script move on to the stage?”

**John:** Here’s the messed up thing about writing a Broadway show that is based on a movie, is the screenwriter of the movie has zero claim or stake to anything in his or her script. Just nothing, because the studio is considered the author of the screenplay, and that is one of those separated rights that we are not holding on to in the ways you might hope that we could hold on to. Separated rights, actually holds the story, that’s part of the whole mess.

The truth of Big Fish is that if Sony had wanted to make a musical of Big Fish, they could have gone to any other writer they wanted to, that writer could have taken any words from my script, and put them into the Broadway musical, and used them without paying me a cent, and without my name being anywhere on it, it is kind of messed up. With Big Fish, it was honestly me grabbing hold, and saying, “I really want to make this musical,” and having to get the rights back from Sony, and having to get Daniel Wallace’s book reattached, so that we could do it.

As the screenwriter, you have very little hold on the Broadway musical version of your movie, unless it’s an original screenplay that you have the retained story credit.

**Craig:** Yeah if it’s an original screenplay where you retain story credit, or if it’s an adaptation where the story of the movie was unique, to the extent that they awarded you Screen Story by.

**John:** In retrospect, I should have tried to get screen story credit on Big Fish, because if you actually compare the book to the movie, they are so different in so many ways that I suspect I probably could have gotten it.

**Craig:** Right, it sounds like you did a workaround anyway, so that’s good.

**John:** Yeah, next question. Adam asks, “As someone who wants to write/pitch comedies, what value do you place on being funny during meetings? I am not referring to acting out hilarious scenes/characters, but perhaps an anecdotal story or joke interspersed to help build rapport. In other words, how do you try to sell your own comedic brand with the expected level of professionalism?”

**Craig:** I don’t like this question very much. Look, here’s the thing. If you are funny, you are funny, and if you are not, you are not. This question, forgive me Adam, it sounds like the kind of question a not funny person asks, because you shouldn’t be trying or calculating any of that.

The idea of a pitch meeting is there’s two parts. There is the meet, where you are actually pitching the movie, and you are correct to suggesting that acting out “hilarious scenes” and characters is a tricky thing to do. The other part is just you, talking to the people who will employ you, and giving them a sense of the kind of person you are, and what it will be like to work with you, and what you think funny is, and the quality of your wit, or lack thereof.

You can’t calculate that, you shouldn’t even be thinking about calculating it. Just be yourself, and if you are a funny person, let that come through. If you are not, probably shouldn’t be working in comedy. Sorry, I hate to be a bummer.

**John:** [laughs] I can understand his concern, it’s that when you go in to pitch a story, and you are trying to tell a story that you think is funny, you really want to have laughter come back, but studio executives don’t laugh a lot. They are not hysterically entertained people. You will hear stories of like, “Oh my God, there was this hysterical pitch, and everyone was laughing. People were crying, they were laughing so hard.” That is more the exception than the rule. You want people at least nodding and smiling, and acknowledging, “Oh, I see why that would be funny.”

**Craig:** Yeah, the thing is I like being funny just in the regular I am myself, and let’s just chit chat and be funny. That’s great. When it comes to actually pitching a movie, typically what they will say is, “Look, we know that you are a funny writer, we have read your scripts. What we are interested in is what’s the story, what are the characters, what is the theme, what are the ideas behind it?” In that regard, it’s a little bit like pitching a drama.

You are not required to do vaudeville or standup for them, because like you said, they are frankly not that interested. It’s like you are talking to somebody who represents standup comedians. They have heard it, they get it. [laughs] Just act like you have been there.

**John:** Yeah. Good advice.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Craig, in the lead up to the show you had said that something you wanted to talk about was videogames, because you are kind of a connoisseur of videogames, especially now, it feels like everything came out at the same time.

**Craig:** It is that season. It’s the holiday season, and they dropped the big, the big, big, big ones. We had two huge ones come out within a week of each other.

**John:** You are talking about Scribblenauts for iPad, right?

**Craig:** [laughs] I am talking about Scribblenauts for iPad, which has moved $14 billion worth of app money. No, I am not talking about Scribblenauts. I am talking about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, both of which pulled in nearly Avatar-sized grosses within a week of their initial release. They are absolute monsters out there right now.

**John:** Here’s where I am aware that I don’t watch all that much real television, because I have seen enough Modern Warfare commercials and billboards and stuff that I have some sense of what it is. Now, correct me if I am wrong, but you get to play Jonah Hill. So, can I play Jonah Hill and can I pull a grenade and just like sit on it?

**Craig:** I, I don’t…

**John:** Watching the commercials, that’s what I am getting is I get to be actually Jonah Hill and I could run into a line of fire if I chose to?

**Craig:** You can absolutely, yes, sit on a grenade if you want. You can sacrifice yourself. I mean…

**John:** But, can I be Jonah Hill while we are doing it?

**Craig:** You mean, actually be Jonah Hill?

**John:** I want to see Jonah.

[laughter]

**John:** Can I have Jonah Hill die frequently in front of me? That’s really my goal.

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**John:** That’s what I feel like I have been promised in your commercials is…

**Craig:** You can’t.

**John:** …I can be like the guy from Avatar or I can be Jonah Hill.

**Craig:** You cannot be Jonah Hill. There’s only one Jonah Hill.

**John:** Because I don’t play any of the sports games but like Madden Football, you get to play like a famous athlete, right?

**Craig:** That’s right. The idea there, yes, in Modern Warfare you are playing some grizzled secret Black Ops dude.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes. In Skyrim you are an elf.

**John:** And in Skyrim you are an elf. So, you said you wanted to talk about that. I heard the name but it’s just like I thought it was like the new James Bond movie. I didn’t know what is Skyrim. I thought it was bizarre so I finally found the trailer. It looks great.

**Craig:** It is great. It’s pretty cool, and this is something that I have been kind of on about. I am getting a little wonky guilt here for the end of the podcast. This is something I have been talking about for literally five years. Our union…let me back up for a second and talk about what it means to be a militant. There’s this understanding that militants are the people that go out there and fight the companies hard to win gains and moderate are the people that just sort of talk and, maybe, get the crumbs off the table.

**John:** So, the moderates are the Scribblenauts and the militants are the Modern Warfare.

**Craig:** Correct, exactly. I have often been viewed as a Scribblenaut. [laughs] The truth of the matter is I think that I am, in fact, a real moderate…I am sorry, a real militant. I am a militant in the sense that if I see an opening where I think fighting will work, I want to fight. I think that the people we call militants in the union, sort of the Patrick Verone wing, are not actually militants, they are really suicide bombers because they just throw themselves at stuff that we can’t win at all.

They talk about sort of the glory of incinerating themselves for the cause. But as you and I both know, suicide bombers don’t ever achieve anything other than spraying themselves over a street.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, here is where we have been a suicide bomber. In organizing, we have gone after such impenetrable suicide bombing targets like American Idol or feature animation. Why are those impenetrable? Because American Idol, one can make an argument that there is writing going on, but one can also make an argument that there isn’t writing going on.

It’s basically Ryan Seacrest chatting with judges and then people sing. Somebody, producers are nudging it towards narrative but it’s a fuzzy case. In animation, obviously, animation is written but there’s another union that already has jurisdiction over it. That’s IATSE, I-A-T-S-E, and the Animation Guild 839.

So, these are suicide bomb targets, pointless. What is not a suicide bomb target are videogames, particularly videogames that are made here in the United States.

There are some huge videogame companies that are not U.S. companies and we can’t really get jurisdiction over people that aren’t working here in the U.S. It’s just a federal labor law. So, Enix I think and Squaresoft and Ubisoft, these are all big overseas companies. But, ZeniMax and Bethesda, the companies that make Skyrim, that is an American company.

They are in Maryland, in fact, and Skyrim and the Elder scrolls before it, Oblivion, are the most obviously written videogames ever because they are based on quests. You meet characters. They have storylines that they present to you with dialog. Let me go one step further. The videogame contains hundreds of readable books that the videogame writers wrote. It’s so obviously written, and I have been talking about this for a while. I just feel like…

Okay, here’s what kills me: Skyrim just made, it just grossed in one week, I believe, $700 million worldwide. That’s in a week.

**John:** Yes, a lot of money.

**Craig:** A ton of money. The writers of the game have no credit protection. They have no residuals or income from reuse. I don’t know if they get healthcare. I don’t know if they get pension. Most importantly, I just don’t know who they are. I feel like that is a great target for the guild to try and organize, same thing with Infinity Ward which makes the Call of Duty series, same deal.

**John:** Yes. I can tell that, particularly the videogames, to me that feel like they are actually movies. You look at the Sony one I never forget, the Naughty Dog, one they also just released, the one that will actually play this Christmas because I have a break, Uncharted.

**Craig:** Uncharted, that is a very narrative videogame, yes.

**John:** Yes. I mean, it deliberately feels exactly like a movie. There are movie people who are writing that. So, it feels like that is the kind of situation where you should be able to get some people protected. Yes.

**Craig:** Frankly, what does it cost? We go to Bethesda. By the way, I believe Les Moonves sits on the board of ZeniMax. It’s not like we don’t have these sort of pre-existing relationships. We go to them and say, “Listen, we want to organize your shop. As is our right by federal law, we want to be able to talk to the employees and let them know about the union and have them take a vote.”

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I mean, in the end what’s it going to cost that company? Are they really going to get a huge chunk removed from their $700 million of gross proceeds in the first week? Hell no, hell no. But, you don’t see us trying, and you don’t see us trying because we are repeatedly distracted by nonsense and suicide bomb targets. I really wish we would stop.

**John:** I am here with you.

**Craig:** We rant. I love it.

**John:** We rant. So, what is the next step? So, the next step is to find…

**Craig:** The next step would be for the guild to open its sleepy eye and say, “Okay, we are actually going to assign an organizing effort to this.” We would have to talk to the Writers Guild East and do it jointly with them, I suspect. Then the next step would be to actually reach out to those writers, visit the company, sit down, see if we can’t come to an agreement ahead of time if the writers are so interested, and help to find that process and to find some credits for them and get a contract in place.

Rather than doing it sort of game by game, Bethesda and ZeniMax and Infinity Ward are shops. They make a lot of games. They make incredibly successful games that are clearly written. So, let’s organize those shops.

**John:** Do you go in with, “This is the contract we would like to see” or do you go in with like, “We will figure this out but this is…” Basically, do you already figure out what exactly you want these people to be getting?

**Craig:** No. First, what you have to do is get the employees to essentially agree to allow the Writers Guild to become their collective bargaining agent. Once you have gotten to that point, essentially, it becomes a union shop. Then, the next step is to negotiate a contract.

**John:** How do you distinguish out between people who are doing writing work and people who are doing producing work?

**Craig:** Well, in the case of what we do, it’s very simple. The test is we create literary material. I would argue that it should be the exact same thing for these videogames. Are you putting words down on paper?

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** If you are putting words down on paper that are being used to make moving images on a screen in the case of these videogames, we clearly have the capacity to cover you and define your work. Nobody else is. It should be us.

**John:** I am for it, I am for it. Done.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** Resolved.

**Craig:** Resolved. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Mostly this podcast we are just talking about stuff. But, here, like clearly we fixed this whole system and we paid money for the guild. We paid health and pension for videogame people who wouldn’t otherwise have it.

**Craig:** Yes. I mean, I feel really good about myself right now.

**John:** You absolutely should. So, Craig, I am not going to be able to play all these videogames. So, which videogame should I play?

**Craig:** Because I know you, I am going to tell you, you should play Skyrim and you should be aware that I have just given you a small little piece of crack for free. If you like it, come back and get more.

**John:** Because you know I had a World of Warcraft problem that actually I had to like stop cold turkey.

**Craig:** Here is the thing: This has everything that World of Warcraft has in terms of…the stuff you liked about World of Warcraft is here. But, it’s not endless. Really what it is is probably 200 or 300 quest lines that crop up and interact, some of which are very involved, some of which are one offs.

So you get pulled through this thing because, essentially, it’s combining your love of videogames and, maybe, your love of fantasy with a writer’s need to know how the narrative ends. So, right now, I have, I don’t know, maybe, 15 active quests or more. It’s killing me because I wonder how they all end but I can only do one at a time.

**John:** Yes. See, I was banking my fantasy videogame jones for Diablo III which is going to be coming eventually from Blizzard.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s in beta testing now. But, I would say the advantage of Skyrim…are we playing on X-Box or PS3 or what is it?

**Craig:** I am playing on the X-Box but it’s available for PC or PS3 as well.

**John:** Okay. So, the advantage to these games is that it wouldn’t be on the main computer, so therefore, I would know that I am not writing because I would know that I am not sitting on my chair at that computer.

**Craig:** Oh, yes, no question. We have a little out building on my property where it’s like a little rec roomy kind of thing that’s sort of standing.

**John:** It’s where you keep the Gimp, right?

**Craig:** It’s where I keep the Gimp, occasionally, when, yes, [laughs] when a little fly wonders into my web. I take the Gimp out and we have a party. But, it’s also where I play videogames. I told my wife and my kids, after 10:00 daddy goes away. Daddy goes to Skyrim. But my son, Jack, who is 10, it’s a great bonding experience for us. He just sits next to me and just watches and exhorts me to kill everyone. [laughs] It’s great. Sometimes I have to explain, “You know, daddy can’t kill this person. I need this person alive.”

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** He looks at me just in disgust, the way that Patrick Verone looks at me, like a Scribblenaut. [laughs]

**John:** Years from now when your son turns to horrific violence, they will try to know why. It’s like, “I sat beside my father and watched him kill and kill and kill.”

**Craig:** Kill and kill and kill. Yes. Actually, there is one of the quest lines is there is something in Skyrim called the dark brotherhood where you join this group of assassins and your job is to go out and kill people. There’s, maybe, 20 quests just for that alone. I just did one with him where I had to go to a wedding. [laughs]

I had to kill the bride while she was addressing her guests. It had to be while she was addressing them. I don’t know why and I did it, and he was so delighted and he kept sort of playacting it over and over. Like, “She was standing there and she was like, ‘Oh, thank you for coming to my wedding …’ and then ah” [makes sound] . It was great, great father-son moment.

**John:** I am sure as he related the story back to your wife she was charmed and delighted.

**Craig:** He probably understands already that she wouldn’t care. So, I don’t think he talks about Skyrim to her. I have no doubt that the other kids in his class are getting an earful. I will likely be called into the principal’s office.

**John:** Yes. But, a small price to pay for the enjoyable saving or destroying of some fantasy kingdom.

**Craig:** Yes, I get to play videogames and my son loves me, win-win.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Win-win on the podcast. You did that, Craig.

**Craig:** Good podcast.

**John:** All right, and we will talk to you soon.

**Craig:** Thanks a lot.

**John:** Take care.

**Craig:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/kids-cards-whiteboards-and-outlines).

**John August:** Hello, and welcome to another installment of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Hello, Craig.

**Craig Mazin:** Hello, John.

**John:** That’s Craig Mazin, my name is John August. This is our third installment of the show. We are now listed on iTunes, which is a feeling of kind of legitimacy.

**Craig:** Yeah, we are big time now. You know in my day, podcasts were carved into wax disks and sold.

**John:** And really it was the job of the fastest young man in the village to carry those wax disks from one village to the next village, and all that sort of noble tradition has really gone away since we grew up.

**Craig:** Yeah, you and I grew up in the 1500s in England.

**John:** Yeah, talk about the 1500s. My daughter has no sense of history whatsoever because kids aren’t born with that — they don’t realize that the world existed before they were born — and I remember showing her Curious George, one of the stories. Curious George is at the hospital and he climbs on this record player and starts spinning around, it’s like a merry-go-round and he falls off the record player.

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

**John:** And my daughter thought that was great and I am like, “Do you know what that thing is he climbed on?” She had no idea. “It plays music.” She is like “No, it doesn’t play music.”

**Craig:** Right. Why would it, it seems ridiculous.

**John:** So that was one of the charming good things about having a kid, but we have a follow-up question from last week and so I thought we would talk about it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “I wanted to ask you about something that was touched upon by you and Craig during the last podcast on how to find a manager or agent. In the opening, you both mentioned that having children can be difficult for a screenwriter and at one point you even humorously stated that ‘children are the death of all screenwriters.’ You have got me thinking and I was wondering if you could elaborate on your experiences as a screenwriter before and after having your kid.”

He goes on to say that he and his wife are hoping to have children and —

**Craig:** Oh good, I thought they may be contemplating killing their children.

**John:** Hopefully yes, so it’s a pre-father wanting to have our experience as a screenwriter with and without kids, so what’s different about having kids than not having kids as a screenwriter?

**Craig:** Well, I suppose this should sort of go without saying, but having kids is a far more impressive achievement than writing a screenplay, and creating a human being is the most creative thing you can do. That comes first.

I mean, don’t get us wrong. We are not advising you to not have children. You should have children, but certainly when you have a kid, your energies and your tensions are divided. You are now living to support another person and they have their own demands of your time.

And I think we all walk around with a kind of tape playing, especially screenwriters. I mean if you are a screenwriter you have written at some point in your career a movie where the main character is a dad who is not spending enough time with his kids.

So that’s constantly playing in the back of your head as you deal with your own kids. And so you just don’t want to be a bad dad, you want to be a good guy, you want to spend time with your kids and you love them. And it just so happens that when you do all that stuff, sometimes you find yourself tired and kind of creatively exhausted and you don’t want to do it.

**John:** Screenwriting is inherently kind of a selfish activity because you are going off by yourself and insisting on some form of quiet time to just be staring at your computer and writing these things. And that works really well through a lot of your 20s where you can basically be selfish and you can sort of go off or you can stay up all night working on a draft because you are inspired to work all night. And with a kid, you just can’t do that.

If you pull an all-nighter, you have ruined the next day, and whereas in your pre-child days you could just do a cover and go be a zombie all day, if you actually have to get your kid off to school in the morning that becomes much more challenging.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there is all these opportunities for procrastination. I mean I love — my son plays baseball — I love going to his baseball practices and his baseball games and getting him ready for baseball and taking him to baseball lessons and I do love all of that. It’s also fantastic procrastination, but I get to procrastinate under the guise of being the best dad ever. Just very seductive.

**John:** Yeah. We also have the luxury and curse of having very little structured time, so at any given moment we probably could be doing parenting things. So there is no reason why you couldn’t drop off your kid at school every day and pick him up every day and be a room parent and be doing all those things except for the fact that you are supposed to be writing and being creative. So I definitely want to come down on the pro-child side, but it definitely is a huge adjustment.

And I find that I have to be much more rigorous about, this is the time when I’m writing, this is the time when the door is shut. When the door is shut, she is not allowed to come out and bother me because this is the time I’m doing that. And other times during the day where I really can go in and play, I’ll go in and play.

**Craig:** Yeah, I have an office that’s about 15 minutes from my house. And that’s made a big difference. I used to have, we have a little log cabin on my property that was built there way back in the old days. The guy who used to live there, I guess he wanted to gamble, and his wife wouldn’t let him gamble in the house, so he built a cabin. He’s a cool guy.

And so I used to have my office back there. And my son would just wander in, fling the door open, fling the bathroom door open, sit down, and start using the toilet with the door open while talking to me while I was writing. That was when it occurred to me that — he was young; I don’t want to give the impression that he’s 19, and he does that — and I realized I had to get an office. And I do feel like, if you have kids at home, there’s some kind of physical separation has to — I mean you have like a little, some kind of back house or something, right?

**John:** Yeah, so we built a room over the garage. And so for the first three-and-a-half years of my daughter’s life, she didn’t understand that when I went off to work, I was actually just going up 20 steps. And so I’d make the big show, like, going off to work. So sometimes she’d realize, oh, he forgot to take his car. But she didn’t put it all together. And then eventually one day she discovered, oh, he’s actually right out there.

And she had constructed some alternate narrative about why my assistant, who at that time was Matt, was working downstairs. He was just like a guy who was there sometimes. She didn’t understand that he worked for me, that he worked for us. He was just a guy who sat at a computer out there sometimes. So she would see him, but not understand that I was right upstairs, because I was being quiet.

**Craig:** Yeah. I tell people, if I meet somebody who’s right out of college, and they want to be a screenwriter, I’ll say, look, here’s the good news and the bad news. The good news is, I’m better at this than you are just because I’ve been doing it longer, even if you’re the greatest screenwriter in the world, still, I’ve just done it so often and I’ve navigated the system so often, I’m just, I have the benefit of that experience. And you just don’t have it yet and it’s going to take you time to get it.

On the plus side, you’re way less tired than I am. You should be able to write three screenplays for every one screenplay I write.

**John:** Yeah. You have, in your youth, in your 20s, you have, just, energy. You can just keep going. You have that sort of un-killable serial-killer-from-a-movie kind of quality where you can dust yourself off and keep going. And your energy does flag a bit when you’re trying to raise a kid as well.

With time and experience and craft, my first drafts are much better than my first drafts were when I was in my 20s. I really know how to do it now. So I don’t have to pull as many all-nighters because I can just get stuff done the right way the first time more often. But it’s a very different thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, have the kid, but…

**John:** Have the kid, yeah.

**Craig:** …But sorry, it’s going to put a crimp in. By the way, there’s a few other things it puts a crimp in. So add screenwriting to a long list.

**John:** Let’s go on and talk about our main topic today, which is outlining. We’ve been talking about WGA politics. We’ve been talking about career-y kind of stuff. But I want to talk really more, sort of words on the page, and sort of the daily thing of writing that screenwriters are supposed to theoretically be doing. And outlining is an important part of that.

And by outlining I mean it in a very general sense, all the sort of pre-planning you do about what’s going to happen in your script before you actually start, or even while you’re writing your screenplay. So it’s not the scene work, but the other work that doesn’t look like a screenplay but ends up becoming important for figuring out what’s happening in your story, when it’s happening, and what’s going on.

How do you start? Are you a whiteboard person, are you an index card person? How do you start beating out a story?

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m kind of an index card person. And I say kind of an index card person, because I feel like there’s actually a step before the index card person. I mean really, I’m a shower person. In thinking about it, all the fundamental breakthroughs that occur usually happen because I’m standing in the shower for 20 minutes thinking. And I don’t know why. That’s just where it happens, mostly.

**John:** That’s exactly where it happens for me, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. Shower. I don’t know, there’s something about that. And it’s sort of my little sacred place where no one can come in, and I’m alone, and I can just let my mind wander. And ideally I like to try to figure out the biggest things.

Beyond the idea of the movie, what does this main character want? What is the dramatic argument of the movie, the theme, whatever you want to call it, and what would be the most interesting story to kind of get this person from where they are to where they need to be? And I just start thinking there. But yeah, eventually I’d go to note cards.

**John:** The main ways I see screenwriters breaking stories is either index cards where each index card has one or two, or maybe it’s up to 10 words, that describe an important beat of the story. So, it’s not necessarily a scene, but it’s a thing that happened. So, if you write an action movie, it would be an action set piece. If it were a thriller, it might be a major reversal. So, some way of breaking down the important moments of your screenplay.

And those could be, you might have 30 cards for a movie, you might have 10 cards for a movie, you might have 100 cards for a movie. If you have 100 cards for a movie, you’re probably making too many index cards.

**Craig:** Too many cards.

**John:** Too many cards. But cards, here’s what I’ll say that’s good about cards is that it’s very easy to take up a beat and move it someplace else, and sort of lay them all out on a table and figure out how stuff works. A lot of people like to tape them up on the wall, or use Post-It Notes. When I do index cards — and I don’t always do index cards — I really like to have a big, flat table that it’s just much easier to sort of move them around. And, if you’re having to write with somebody, the table is good, because you can both stand there and take a look at this map that you’ve laid out. It’s like, this is how we would go through it. So, that’s index cards.

You can also do different colors for different kinds of beats. So, if you have action beats that are always on red cards…

**Craig:** Yeah, some people — and they color code them for the characters, so you can see, I haven’t been with this character in a long time.

Lately, what I’ve been doing is kind of short-circuiting the card thing entirely, and actually just recording my voice. I’ll sit with my assistant, and I just start talking through what I want to do. And I record it, and in talking, just as in the act, the physical act of writing, you can start writing.

There’s something about talking it through, where you can arrive at things, it unlocks you a little bit. The enemy of writing is silence, and inactivity. So, talking it out loud seems to be a big help. Now, I’ll take that, she’ll sort of take everything that I’ve recorded, summarize out the crap where you know, I’ll say, “You know what, not that — this,” and then she puts it into Microsoft Word and now I have an actual outline outline.

**John:** And then 20 years from now it’ll be like The Raiders of Lost Ark sessions, and someone will unearth the original audio and the original transcripts, and say, like, “Wow, that is how the Hangover III got figured out.”

**Craig:** Right. Except the opposite of that, in terms of its interest to people. Like, “Wow, this is the least interesting recording of notes ever.”

**John:** And that’s one thing I was using more when I was doing TV shows is the whiteboard. And the whiteboard is sort of ubiquitous in television-land as you’re figuring out your episode. You might be figuring out your season arcs, and you’re really figuring out this given episode, what’s happening in your episode. Generally, if you’re writing as a room, or all the writers in the room are trying to figure out how to do stuff, they’re all staring at one whiteboard, and they have everything marked down in terms of this is what’s happening.

Usually one or two people are empowered with the ability to write stuff on the whiteboard, but others…actual, just simple screenwriters use it too. I know Joss Whedon is a big whiteboard fan. You feel free to sort of erase and make a mess on a whiteboard in ways that you might not if you were doing note cards. Like oh, I have to rip up this note card and do it again. On a whiteboard, everything is sort of possible. And you can sort of scribble and draw arrows, and move stuff around.

**Craig:** It just seems like it would get so messy. Constantly erasing and doing and erasing and doing. Because I like to — with note cards, I use a bulletin board and thumbtacks, and obviously this is all academic, people should do whatever they want, but I like that I can, with my thing lately, is that I can make two columns. Because actually, I’m like, I don’t know why, I’m one of the few people in the world that makes the columns go columnar instead of rows. I don’t go across, I go up and down. So, as the Act One proceeds, it starts at the top of the board and slowly goes down.

And then — oh, you do that too? Oh, okay. So, that’s … so, I have one column that’s whatever the scenes are, and then to the left of that, I do a column and next to each scene, I have a card that sort of explaining why that scene matters. What is the purpose of the scene, what is the character intention. How is the story actually advanced in a way that has nothing to do with the plot, but the relationship between the characters, or the internal life of the character, and I found that that’s really useful, because it forces me to always think, “What is the point?”

You know, it’s one thing to sort of say, “I have to get from here to here, let’s have a big chase.” Okay. Well now, how could that chase actually be purposeful for advancing the character ball. And I don’t know how you’d fit all that crap onto a whiteboard.

**John:** It sounds like you’re writing a lot more information on each of those beats right from the very start. Let’s say, you were working on something that’s happening at the end of the first act. So, you have an idea for what the action of that is, and you’re sort of — the idea of the location: there’s going to be a big event at a carnival. So does your card say carnival, and then you have a second card that has all the detailed information about what’s happening there?

**Craig:** Yeah, no, I would do one card that says “Carnival — Maxwell realizes that the bottle toss game is rigged.” And then next to that I would put a card that says “Maxwell realizes that he should never have trusted So-And-So. He should have been listening to So-And-So all along; she was right.” So this way, I understand, it’s sort of like one column is what, and one column is why.

**John:** That does make sense. It’s a lot more detail than I ever got, and I would ever get into with cards. I’m always the person with a Sharpie, and I write three words on a card.

**Craig:** Oh, Okay. I see.

**John:** So, it’s a very different way of going about it. And I’ve seen whiteboards where they really do kind of get into that kind of detailed information, and so there will be a headline in blue marker, and then detailed stuff below it and you have to really squint to see sort of what’s in there.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And it’ll be one of the assistant’s jobs — like the writers’ assistant’s job — is to take iPhone snapshots of all the boards at the end of the day, and transcribe those as notes.

**Craig:** What I’ve been doing lately is having my assistant actually write the content of the note card on a little Word template with some sort of Sharpie-ish font. And then we can print them. And then if we want to change something, you know, I can just scribble on the card, or I can just ask her to change it, and then she can change it and print it again. Because, you know, we’ve sort of all caught up.

But, the truth is, whatever — I mean, this is my whole thing about outlining: for everybody who is sort of wondering, “Should I do it?” Listen: however you want to outline, outline. If you want to outline in great detail or less detail, it doesn’t matter. But I do think it’s really important to at least approach writing with more than just, “Okay, I have an image of a woman walking through a forest. Fade in: Forest — Morning.” These are how bad screenplays are written.

**John:** I will agree with you that many bad screenplays are written with just like, I have this one kind of idea, and no idea how to extrapolate from it. What I will say is that a lot of the screenplays where I’ve had the most detailed outlines, I’ve been most frustrated by the final results, and that I kind of got sandwiched in by the outline. And so some of my very, very favorite stuff I’ve written never had that level of detail or thought. So, some of them feel very organic because literally, it was like, it’s what the movie wanted to do next, versus what I as the author said should happen next.

**Craig:** Right. And I do agree that, I guess the way I would put it is this: You should always feel free to ignore your outline. But if all you get from your outline process is the beginning, the middle and the end, then I think you’ve already done your job. That’s … you should have some sense that you know roughly where you’re going. And if you want to play discover as you go, absolutely.

**John:** I’ll usually start writing the first 10 or 15 pages of a script. Then I’ll jump forward and write some stuff in the middle, and I’ll always try to write the last 10 pages of the script pretty early on in the process. Because I find that I have a lot of enthusiasm when I start a project, and part of the reason why I think that people’s first acts of screenplays tend to be so good is they have a lot of enthusiasm, and also they went back and re-wrote those first act of 30 pages a lot.

But, I have a lot of enthusiasm. I have a lot of excitement about this project. And, as I get near the end, I just have a desire to get the damn thing finished.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so, I end up just kind of racing through the end, and not this last 10 pages, would otherwise not be written with the detail and care that they might be written with otherwise. So, by really focusing on those last 10 pages quite early on, I get a good sense of … it lets me write towards the middle, and it also makes that ending as rewarding as I think it could be.

A lot of times, I’ll get through this script, ultimately I’ll have to rewrite those last 10 pages.

**Craig:** Right:

**John:** But at least I knew where I was headed.

**Craig:** I don’t do that. I’m definitely a very linear kind of guy. In fact, I really can’t leap ahead. If I arrive in a spot where I feel like something’s wrong, I never just leap past it, I always sort of go back and try and figure out where this went wrong, because I sort of feel like — at least from my experience — whatever the little problem is now, it’s just going to get bigger and bigger and it’s just going to wobble more and more and more. So, for me, I just write really religiously in the order of the script.

But, I have to know what the ending is, so I guess that’s why I … in a way, I’m doing what you’re doing with my expanded note cards, I guess. Because that is me, sort of caring about the ending. I always know exactly what the ending is. If I don’t know what the ending is, I’m dead.

**John:** I’ll at least have a beat sheet, and by beat sheet, I mean, like, these are the main things that happened in the story, and sometimes I’ll do that as a spreadsheet document just so I can have neat columns and line stuff up. And one of the things I’ll do with the columns, is — especially if a movie has a lot of characters in it — I’ll keep note of which characters are in which scenes. I found this especially helpful for TV, in that you want to make sure that you’re really using your cast smartly.

So for like a TV pilot that I’m writing, I want to see: Where did I introduce this character? Did I get them in before this act break or after this act break? And so an outline that shows, “These are my scenes, this is where I think the act breaks are” — which in TV are really hard act breaks — “and this is where my characters are showing up,” is very important, especially in a pilot where you’re really introducing all these characters for the first time.

When Jordan Mechner and I were doing the Ops pilot, we would send back and forth a spreadsheet to really show and we could sign off like “You do scene 23 and I’ll do scene 36,” and pass off that way.

**Craig:** That’s how I worked with Scot and Todd on Hangover II. We sort of would assign chunks, because we knew what those chunks were supposed to accomplish. Then you swap them.

That’s the other thing: if you’re working with a partner, I don’t know how you can avoid outlining unless you’re literally sitting side by side playing the piano together, which is very strange to me.

**John:** There are some writers who do work literally side by side. I met a writing team — I can’t remember which one now — that they always write in the room together. And they essentially just have one computer that’s being shared with two monitors.

They’re a comedy team, so they have to write facing each other so they can see each other, but they’re facing their own screen. And either one of them has full control over the screen at any time.

**Craig:** That is weird.

**John:** Yeah, that feels like a three-legged race to me. But everyone works differently.

**Craig:** Yeah, whatever works.

**John:** Derek Haas and Michael Brandt, friends of ours, are never in the room together. One of them works on a draft and sends it to the other person who writes it, so 100 different ways to work.

**Craig:** Yeah, whatever works for you.

**John:** The outline that we’re talking about so far is really outlining for your own purpose. But sometimes you’re required to share those things with other people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s frustrating.

**Craig:** I kind of don’t. To be honest with you, I just don’t. I always say “Look, I have an outline and it’s in my own weird reverse Polish notation and you wouldn’t understand it.” I’m like “I wrote it in reverse mirror writing.”

So I’m happy to talk through what I’ve come up with. I always feel like they deserve that much, but I don’t hand out outlines.

**John:** I’ve generally avoided them, avoided handing in any sort of outline. But on a recent project with a director, it became really the only way to communicate with him was to say like, “This is really what’s happening.” And because he wasn’t available, I couldn’t give him a written document. There was just no way to get feedback on what was going on.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So it’s tough because you feel like you’re doing writing and you’re spending a lot of time writing for someone else’s ability to interpret what it is you’re trying to do. And so you end up having to, sometimes, generate, you know…

**Craig:** It’s busy work, a little bit.

**John:** It’s busy work, that you’re generating false details that might not really be the way you’d approach that scene when you really get to it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But you’re doing it so they can understand. And of course, the unfortunate aspect is they always have that outline. So if you vary from that outline it’s not going to be what they expect. And maybe they’ll love what you did that’s different, but if they don’t love it they’ll be able to point back to something you wrote before and say “Well, I thought this worked really well.”

**Craig:** Well, when you’re dealing with a director I feel a little different about it because theoretically they are sort of more closely aligned with some narrative sensibility and hopefully they can work through your outline with you.

I will say there’s one great benefit to sharing, even if you don’t give a document but you talk through a story. One of the great benefits is everybody does agree on it, or hopefully has agreed on it. And people can change their minds. But there’s a difference between, “You know what? We changed our mind,” and, “We didn’t expect that and we hate it.”

And if everybody agrees that it should go this way and you deliver that and they say “Okay, now that we’ve read it I think we all together made a mistake,” that’s a very different conversation than “What is this? What did you do? Why did you write it this way?”

And so I like to make sure everybody is on the same page. And if you do change something significantly, let people know. Just say “You know what? I think I’m going to change this significantly and here is why.” Get them on board before they read it and reduce the shock factor.

**John:** I should also…what’s the opposite of preface? I should post-note this last part of the conversation and say this is very much feature screen writing that we’re talking now. In television a lot of times you really do have to write out an outline that a bunch of people are going to read and give notes on and approve or not approve.

And it’s really maddening if you’re coming from a feature perspective because you’re used to being able to have a wider range of options ahead of you. But because of the schedule of American television at least, a lot of decisions get made based on outline level. And so the network and the studio could come back and say just basically throw out your next three episodes’ outlines, and you’re back to square one.

**Craig:** Yeah, I actually understand that. I mean, you’ve got so many episodes you have to produce, even if you…just now from the network side, just as a show runner, you have a staff, you have people, you have to assign tasks to them, if somebody’s outline isn’t quite right, and you know that you need a little extra help with the script that is right. You just need to know what the stories are, just to map out the season. Even just that you know you don’t have three action-y stories in a row if you have the kind of show that sort of goes back and forth.

I remember, Star Trek, I liked The Next Generation. I watched a lot of those. And there were some that were sort of war episodes, and there were some that were kind of science-y episodes, and then there were ones that about character. And I could see where you wouldn’t want three of any particular kind in a row.

**John:** Absolutely. I’ve just been watching the most recent series of Torchwood: Miracle Day — it’s the American BBC collaboration on it — which has been really fascinating. And it’s because it’s only a 10 episode order, I find myself doing things that’s not quite really fair. Which is saying, well, they knew there were only these 10 episodes, so they could have done things a lot differently.

And 10 episodes is such a weird in-betweener. Because it’s not like…if it’s six episodes, then clearly they could pre-write the whole thing, and block shoot it, and do sorts of special things. At 10 episodes, you’re kind of making a real TV show. You’re probably into production while you’re still writing the next ones, so you’re not quite sure what’s going to be working and what’s not going to be working. I have this temptation to write a blog post that’s sort of like, takes a look at everything that actually happened over the course of the season, and sort of proposes a different way of blocking it out.

Because, like all TV shows, you have an instinct about sort of when you’re going to make reveals of certain key information, and this felt like they missed some really good opportunities, too, or they delayed a little too long in revealing certain key information.

**Craig:** Hopefully, we’ll get our first angry response from the show Torchwood.

**John:** That’d be great, because I enjoy Torchwood, and I have enjoyed watching it. But it certainly had some ups and some downs.

**Craig:** So the quote is “John August enjoys highly flawed series Torchwood.”

**John:** Oh, I love highly flawed series. I am the only person who will confess to watch every episode of V, the remake of V.

**Craig:** The new V. Because I saw the old V, and the old V was awesome.

**John:** The old V was so good. With its barely concealed Nazi insignia.

**Craig:** I think at some point they stopped even trying to conceal it.

**John:** It’s just kind of gray.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was awesome.

**John:** Yeah, and Diana…and so, the challenge, of course, with the new V, is that they had me, because first of all, it was V, because V is fundamentally great. And Elizabeth Mitchell from Lost, she’s some sort of witch. I cannot not watch her. So, she could — I’ve said it before — she could just be boiling water all episode, I’d happily watch 60 minutes of that. It’s terrible.

**Craig:** I’m not — I haven’t seen any Torchwood. I’m going to, just as a counterpoint here and for the creators and writers of Torchwood, I think you guys did a fantastic job. I don’t know what he’s talking about.

**John:** Trust me, Craig literally doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

**Craig:** I literally don’t know what he’s talking about. I did not know there was a show called Torchwood. [laughs] So, there you go. I have the television-watching habits of a 90 year old woman.

**John:** Or, a father in his early 40’s.

**Craig:** That’s right. So I can tell you all about Phineas and Ferb and Adventure Time and cool shows like that.

**John:** All right. So, I think we’ve discussed the hell out of outlines.

So, outlines, as a summary and bullet point: Many ways to do it, the most common being index cards or whiteboards for generating the stuff of outlines. A lot of times, they’re a written document. You know, you could do it in a sort of spreadsheet-y format, you can do it as a just a text document. It’s whatever helps you sort of figure out and remember how you’re supposed to get through a story.

The one point I did sort of want to make, is — because I am a lot more sort of on the fly, off the cuff sort of changing stuff as I go along — as I finish a day’s work, I’ll always be that like, these are the next three scenes that happen. Because sometimes those aren’t what I had originally planned, but as I’m writing scenes, I have a very good sense of where I want to go next in this story, so I’ll always leave myself at the end of the day with some breadcrumbs for like, this is the trail of what happens next.

**Craig:** I usually, when I finish writing for the day, I curl up in a little ball and cry.

**John:** That’s another equally valid choice.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** And thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** And we’ll see you guys next time on Scriptnotes.