Search Results for: 3 page challenge

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/only-one-of-us-can-be-the-hero).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** This is Episode 592 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, why are action heroes named John and not Craig? We’ll think into the mystery of the J names and why you see so many Jacksons, Jakes, and Joes, and so few Craigs. I’m sorry.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Can you think of even one action hero Craig?

**Craig:** Literally, not only are there no Craigs, but do you remember when we were kids and you would go to a theme park or something and there would be the big rack of personalized miniature license plates?

**John:** License plates, yeah. You’d find Bort but no Craig?

**Craig:** Right. You could find Bort, yeah, exactly, but Craig was rare. Even back when Craig was a name that some people had, it was rare, whereas you never had a problem.

**John:** Never had that any issue. Was there an H? Was there not an H? Both options were always available.

**Craig:** Exactly. You literally had variations on your name. I had nothing!

**John:** After that discussion, we’ll get into another round of the Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at pages sent in by our listeners and give our honest feedback. We’ll also be answering listener questions on research, options, and work for hire. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, Craig, let’s talk anesthesia.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** I recently went under the knife, and wow, Craig, those drugs are good.

**Craig:** Yes, they are. Happily, we don’t have access to them.

**John:** No, and the people who do have access to them, like the Michael Jackson people who have access to them when they shouldn’t be using those, that’s bad.

**Craig:** That’s bad. We’ll get into that. We’ll get into that. I don’t want to give this away to the people that don’t spend the $5 a month. You know what? You don’t get it.

**John:** You don’t get it, but you know what you get? A quality show full of many other things, which we’ll dive into right now, starting with some follow-up. A previous episode about villains, we talked about the tied to the railroad tracks trope, that mustache-twirling villain who ties a damsel in distress to a railroad track.

Chris Csont, who does the Inneresting newsletter, sent through this great article that actually went through the history of the tied to the railroad tracks trope. It’s fascinating, because it’s not what you would expect. I thought it started with silent movies, but when we see them in silent movies, that was already a parody of an existing trope that came from stage plays.

**Craig:** Oh, really? That’s interesting. People were tying damsels to train tracks on stage?

**John:** Yes, and it became such a cliché. It became an early copyright lawsuit, because there’s a famous play that did it. Then other plays started having the villain tie the damsel in distress to a railroad track. Then it became actual copyright lawsuit things happening about that, whether you could copyright that action in a play, which seems crazy.

**Craig:** That’s crazy.

**John:** This article we’ll link to says that at some point there were six plays in London that all had that trope in it at the same time.

**Craig:** What I like is that the folks who did it first, so looks like Augustin Daly’s 1867 play, Under the Gaslight by American, apparently that was first, contained a scene “where a character named Snorkey is tied to the rails by a man named Byke.” What I like is that Augustin Daly wrote this play, probably thought, “This can be cool. That’s a fun idea,” and then everyone went insane. Everyone was like, “Dude, that’s the greatest thing we’ve ever seen.” Everybody went, “People are clamoring for other people being tied to railroad tracks.” Why?

**John:** It’s wild. It happened on stage before it happened in real life. Then after it happened on stage and in movies, there are a couple examples of it happening in real life. I think the other example that this article gives talks about how the idea of cement over shoes, like the mafia casing your feet in concrete, then throwing you into the lake. That was in fiction first, and then there were a couple cases where it happened in real life.

**Craig:** Where they thought, “Oh, that’s a cool idea.” It did always strike me as just very involved, really involved. Concrete is difficult, because the moment you pour it, it starts to set. That’s why concrete mixers are always turning. You gotta get some Quikrete. Then it’s messy. It’s all over the place. They’re thrashing around probably, so that’s annoying. Why didn’t you just shoot him? Just shoot him.

**John:** Just shoot him.

**Craig:** Shoot him. What’s hard about that?

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to this article by Karl Smallwood, which talks through this. I just really enjoyed reading the backstory of how we got to this trope. I was just fascinated to know that it was already a jokey trope by the time we see it in silent films.

**Craig:** No one’s ever taken it seriously.

**John:** No, it’s never been taken seriously. Two other bits of follow-up. Actually, related follow-up. In that same villains episode, we were talking about Annie Wilkes from Misery. I said, “Oh, would Annie Wilkes have even been a villain if this guy had not crossed her doorstep?” Two readers wrote in to remind me that it’s set up in the movie that he discovers that she was actually involved in a series of baby murders when she was a nurse. She was a bad person before James Caan’s character shows up at the house.

**Craig:** What if those babies were jerks?

**John:** What if she knew they were gonna grow up to become future Hitlers?

**Craig:** Exactly. You don’t know what she’s capable of. I totally forgot about that. It did strike me that, look, if you are the sort of person who upon reading a novel that kills off a character you love, goes so crazy as to hit the author’s shins with a hammer, there’s no way that’s your first crazy thing. Nobody just starts there at the age of 53. Something happened.

**John:** It’s a ramp up to that.

**Craig:** Have you seen the movie Pearl?

**John:** I haven’t seen Pearl yet. I’m eager to see Pearl. I haven’t watched it yet though.

**Craig:** It looks to be a fascinating portrayal of just good old-fashioned nuts. I want to see it. It looks intense. Looks terrifying.

**John:** It’s hard for me to see a terrifying, intense movie. I just don’t have a space in my life or a time in my day where like, “Oh, you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna watch a terrifying, intense movie.” There’s just not a lot of opportunity for me, the way my life is set up right now.

**Craig:** How’s your life set up? You know what? Don’t go into it.

**John:** We watched The Last of Us in an afternoon at 1 p.m., because Mike does not want to watch a scary thing before bed, which I get.

**Craig:** I get that.

**John:** Mike has watched most of your show with his back turned to the TV so he can’t see what’s actually happening on screen.

**Craig:** That’s how we intended it. Boy, we could’ve saved a lot of money if we knew that everyone was watching facing away. Just a really nice, tight radio play.

**John:** Nice radio play.

**Craig:** That’s what we were going… You know what? The show sounds really good, so hopefully he enjoyed the sound.

**John:** It’s good sound mix quality here. We have a last bit of follow-up here. We talked before about European script consultants. Hillevi [ph] wrote in with a really good overview of the Swedish system. Hey Drew, can you talk us through what Hillevi wrote for his involvement with the Swedish system?

**Drew Marquardt:** Hillevi writes, “My day job is as a screen industry strategist for a regional talent development fund in southern Sweden. This is an organization that gets its money from the state and acts under the broad decisions made by the regional and local governments in terms of what their priorities are. A filmmaker will apply to us for money to hire a dramaturge to help them develop their script. We don’t really have development execs here. If we grant them the funds, we are not involved any further in that process.

“The idea is that the public funds will ensure that less commercially viable films will be able to be made and also so that people who have money are not the only people able to make films. In Sweden there is a democratic mission in the way public film funds are distributed. At the same time, any government influence is kept at, quote, ‘arm’s length.’ However, this paradigm is being tested more and more at the moment.

“The Swedish Film Institute was criticized by an independent oversight report for being too politically angled for launching initiatives to increase diversity and green filmmaking in the films being funded by the Institute. While those ideals are good, there is a danger in violating that principle of arm’s length. Since our last election, when the far right party got more power, there’s been a lot of talk about, quote unquote, ‘reviving Swedish culture,’ in a very specific way.

“If the arm’s length distance is no longer the norm, then there is a risk that the public funds for film development and production do become more of a propaganda tool for the state. If European filmmakers are being squeezed by global streamers on one hand and regressive far right governments on the other, color me concerned about what that will mean for the future of independent cinema in Europe.”

**John:** Thank you, Hillevi, for this good overview. I think it brings to light both what we’ve talked about in previous episodes, about how there is meant to be an arm’s length distance between the government funding and the actual filmmaking. They can use the money to hire [inaudible 00:08:56] not deliberately telling the people what they need to write, what their films can be about. That’s all meant to be there. That’s all part of the structure. The minute you try to introduce any kind of ands or qualifications or other things, it could also fall under political influence. That is a genuine worry.

**Craig:** That’s basically I think what we were concerned about. Any time a government is funding the arts, there is always the concern that they will bring some sort of governmental interest to bear, even if it’s done subtly. Hillevi points out something that we probably don’t think about much, and that is that governments change. If you set up a system that is run well or honestly by one administration, that is no guarantee that it will continue that way. Another administration may want to do something else with it.

We do have some public funding of the arts here in the United States, but precious little, not enough compared to how wealthy our country is. It’s limited enough where it never struck me that the government was influencing the content.

This is definitely something to keep our eyes on, because as he says, the paradigm is being tested more and more. Even when they are doing things that progressives might consider to be a positive, other people won’t, and then those people will come along and do things that conservatives think is positive and other people won’t. Suddenly, the arts have become a football, which no one wants.

**John:** The arts are traditionally associated with the left, and that’s why you always see when Republican governments take over, this talk about defunding the National Endowment for the Arts or defunding PBS, which of course mostly hurts educational outreach kinds of things of those institutions.

Just always be mindful that these things can happen, especially when you have any shifts in how government is structured. We tend to see these in the US and in Europe as shifts to the right, but you could also theoretically imagine shifts to the left, where suddenly, what was considered standard is now not considered acceptable for a new leftist government.

**Craig:** It’s odd bedfellows, as they say, government and the arts, especially considering what the mission of the arts is. I continue to be concerned about this method. I think even though our method isn’t perfect, it’s not terrible. That’s my full-throated defense of America.

**John:** We’re talking from the bias of a wealthy country that can spend a lot on the arts because we are a wealthy country, not as a nation, but just because we have the market to be able to drive a lot of things.

I think the goal behind these film funds was to make sure that you had a local arts scene or it is possible to make movies in your country. That’s the concern is that without the governmental funding, it may not be possible to really make a local film industry.

**Craig:** We wish everybody the best with that. Hopefully, it goes better than it goes poorly. What else can we say?

**John:** This is not really follow-up. It’s news, 20 years of follow-up. Andy Baio, who writes a great blog at waxy.org, for the last 20 years has been following the leaks of Oscar screeners. Basically, when movies come out for an award season, we get sent screeners. WGA gets sent screeners. The Academy gets sent screeners. These used to be DVDs. Then they went to Blu-rays for a little while. Now they’re all online.

He was tracking how quickly it’d go from this DVD was sent out to potential voters to it’s now leaked online [inaudible 00:12:32] that actual screener leaked online. It was incredibly quick. A large part of the high-quality movies you could find online were from these linked screeners. He was charting how many of those leaked each season.

This last season, not a single screener linked before Oscar night, for the first time in the 20 years that he’s been tracking it. He looks at why that has changed. It really comes down to the end of physical media, so moving more things to online services, and just the fact that by the time screeners have shipped out, there were already good online versions people could download that didn’t have to use the screeners as their source material.

**Craig:** I have a suspicion that that is one of the larger reasons why. That doesn’t bode well, because I think that the theatrical experience continues to come back, maybe not as quickly as some people want, but it’s coming back. That means that once again, as we head into the next year, that a lot of those movies will not be available on Netflix or any of the streaming services, they will be in theaters only, which means that there will be more of an interest in pirating them. Is Hollywood even trying? Nobody even tries, right?

**John:** Here’s what Hollywood tries to do. I think they are concerned about in-theater rips of things. Literally, the weekend that it debuts in theaters, if it’s available online, they hate that. They will try to do things to stop that. They can watermark the bejesus out of things. I’m sure they actually can do a pretty good job of figuring out what copy of what is the thing that is now on some sharing site, so maybe they can get some of those knocked down.

The huge worry over Academy screeners leaking and that being the way that piracy started I think can be put to bed, because that’s not the source of online leaks these days. The Academy app is great. I think that did a lot to help there. Even if we were still shipping DVDs around, I don’t think it would be the main source of piracy.

**Craig:** Here’s hoping, because while there are a decent amount of Oscar-nominated films that are from big studios and big movies, a lot of them are small. A lot of them are the kinds of movies that actually get damaged and the artists get damaged by this stuff.

I don’t know, it’s just a rough one. There’s so much copy-fightism inherent in what I’ll call the youthful left and not a lot of thought through on it. I think it’s easy to want everything to be free until you make something. Then you realize that you need to make a living. It’s not about defending the rich. It’s honestly about defending the people that are scraping by as artists more than anything else.

**John:** The films they are debuting at South by Southwest this week, some of those will be giant hits. Some of them will become Everything Everywhere All at Once, which was a South by Southwest debut. A lot of those films will have limited theatrical runs or will have to debut on streaming someplace or an exclusive debut on some platform. If you’re not watching it there, but instead you’re watching it through a pirated copy, those filmmakers who you say you want to support are not going to be supported. It’s making it harder for them to make their next film and everything else. All the previous speeches about the horrors of piracy are still true.

Craig, you are destined to be many things in life. You’ve achieved a lot, but you will probably not be defending the White House from attack. You’re not going to be stopping the runaway train. It’s not your fault, Craig. It’s your parents’ fault. They named you Craig. Mazin is a perfectly valid action hero name, but Craig is just not it.

**Craig:** No, it’s not. It’s mild.

**John:** It’s mild. You need to start with a J. You need to be a John, a James, a Jack, a Jake, Joe. This data supports this. We’re going to link to an article by Demetria Glace writing for Slate. She’s taking a look at, it feels like Johns and Jacks and Joes are over-represented. They are actually hugely over-represented among the characters when you have a single action hero in a movie or movie franchise. They’re way over-represented. As soon as you take out the James Bonds and the characters where they have 15 films in their history, the Js just run away with it. Is that surprising to you?

**Craig:** No. I think we’ve all seen this. There’s something that feels punchy and tough about the single-syllable name. These names, John, James, Jack, Jake, Frank, Joe, these are incredibly generic American tough-guy names. They’re also names that are not current. They’re names that have been around forever. They’re names that go back to the Old West. Because America doesn’t really have what the Europeans would call history, we have just have this whatever, short 400 or 500 years, these are the names that we have mythologized, and so it’s not surprising to see them come up over and over and over again.

When you look at the villain names, you notice that even though there are a couple of repeats, like James and Jack, most of the villain names are multiple syllables. Victor, Michael, Robert, Ivan, Simon, Eddie, Gabriel. Then there’s Ernst, which is just a straight up Nazi thing. Eddie in particular has a skeezy vibe to it. Eddie, he just seems like he might be a scumbag. Obviously, Ivan is your generic Russian terrorist.

Victor is one that always gets me. That always makes me laugh. I don’t know what it is about Victor. As a name, it’s a perfectly good name. It signifies victory. I think maybe Victor Frankenstein was it. I think it’s doomed.

Also note that villain names tend to feel a little bit more erudite. Simon feels like he’s a bit learned, and we don’t like bookworms.

**John:** No, none of those. None of those eggheads in our movies. Those eggheads are always plotting things.

**Craig:** They’re scheming, whereas a simple man, John, he’s just John. He’s a man of the earth. John. You know what you never see? You never see any of the what I call new American names, Jaden, Braden, Hayden, Maiden, Saden, Daden, all those. No, they’re not there.

**John:** My theory is they’re probably too new. They’re also, in many cases, ambiguously gendered. They can be used for male or female, so they don’t feel as strongly identifiably this is your male action hero star, so you’re not gonna give them that name.

**Craig:** You may be right. It really just strikes me how old-fashioned these names are. No one’s naming their kid Frank anymore, right? Are there still people naming their babies Frank? I’ve never met a baby that was Frank. That’s hysterical. Actually, now I want to have another baby and name it Frank, because that’s kind of cool. It’s a great name. Bruce.

**John:** Bruce, love it. Now, we’ve talked a lot about naming characters on the show and how I will stop and not continue writing until I can find the right name for a character, because it’s so crucial to just defining how I feel about the character and therefore how the audience hopefully will feel about the character too.

Arlo Finch, I spent a lot of time figuring out Arlo Finch’s name. I knew the rhythm of the name. I knew what it needed to do. Until I found that name, I couldn’t continue to write the story.

It does feel like something about the short, the John, the James, the Jacks, they are short, they’re punchy, for a character who literally will probably be punching some. In many cases, maybe a Joe or a Jack, they are a shortened, more familiar version of a longer name. That’s why you see a Joe. You don’t see a Joseph as a hero. There’s something familiar and next door about them.

These are also largely very white names. I think it’s important to keep in mind, this is looking back over the last 40, 50 years. We had a lot of white male action stars, so they were gonna have these names. If you look at the trends in the last 20 years, the J names have fallen a lot, and I think you’re gonna see a lot more names that are not these classically white names in those action male roles, because you’re not gonna write a character who could only be played by a white male.

**Craig:** Also, some of these names are names that I know Black people have these names. I know Black people who are named John or James or Jake or Jack or Joe. I think honestly, when you see a movie and the trailer says, “Jake Bronson was,” you’re like, “This movie’s gonna probably be bad,” because they didn’t even get past that. It’s pretty cliché. The best argument I think we can give people out there as they’re doing this is probably just avoid these now. They feel weak.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to this article. What I liked about it is she really did go through and pull the Occam’s razor. Is it just because those are the most common names? Is it because screenwriters are named with J names and then are picking those things? Is it because of Keanu’s hypothesis that when you say a J name, your mouth forms a certain hopeful place? It’s not really that. Probably a little bit all of the above. Each might be nudging a little bit closer there. I think there’s also an inertia in that we had a lot of J names and this became default for what we thought of as that one solo hero in an action movie.

**Craig:** I think also while you’re doing your villains, maybe give your villain one of these names. That’s kind of interesting.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Why not? Flip the script.

**John:** Flip the script. Let’s flip the script on some Three Page Challenges. It’s been a minute since we’ve done this. For folks who are new to the podcast, every once in a while, Craig and I will do a Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at the first three pages from somebody’s script. It could be a feature. It could be a pilot. They sent those in. We give our honest feedback.

If you would like to read these three pages, you can look at the show notes. You can click there, see the pdfs, and read along with us. Drew will read us a quick summary of things, so in case you’re listening in your car, you have some sense of what the heck we’re talking about.

Reminder that everybody volunteered for this. They signed a little form. They went to johnaugust.com/threepage, filled out a little form, and attached their thing. We are not picking on people randomly. These are people who asked for our feedback, and we are happy to give them our feedback. Drew, this is your first time doing this. Are you excited?

**Drew:** I’m really excited. I’ve read these before with Megana, and I haven’t gotten to do this yet.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** Let’s start with your first pick. What is it?

**Drew:** Let’s start with Flotsam by Sam Darcy. A montage of news clips informs us of the death of the neo-Nazi terrorist named Clifton Calwell. He was given a burial at sea to deny his supporters a place to mourn him. The sound of waves brings us to a Maori child, Jai, nine, looking at Clifton’s bloated corpse washed up on a beach. Jai puts the corpse in the basket of his bike and takes it to his backyard, where his two friends investigate and decide it’s the body of a pirate.

**John:** Flotsam. Flotsam starts with an image on the cover of a bottle and a thing on top of it. Cute cover page. Looks great. Just an email address on the front for our writer, Sam.

Then getting on to Page 1, I really liked how we did this montage of getting us up to speed on who this Clifton Calwell was, how we’re finding out about this. They are very short little news hits. We are bolding and uppercasing these little moments, but we’re not going to [inaudible 00:24:18] all this stuff, just a blast of images and video going past, dialog where we need it. Establishing this thing which we’re very clearly meant to be thinking it’s like bin Laden, how they buried bin Laden at sea so there couldn’t be a place to mourn. I get it. You’ve created this alternate universe where there was a neo-Nazi person like this who was a big enough threat that you would’ve done this at sea.

Then we are arrived at Australia on the beach, and here’s where it did not work as well for me. Craig, I want to get your initial opinions on how this first page worked for you.

**Craig:** Pretty well. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before. It’s the montage of lots of different people describing a news event, so multiple anchors. We have a character, Australian Anchor, American Anchor, and Another Anchor. I liked Another Anchor. Aw, what country are they from? There’s a Government Official, and there’s also a Late-Night Host. The Late-Night Host was doing a monologue, so that helped initially to give you a sense of, okay, this is some sort of bin Laden type thing.

Where I got a little nervous was… This is just a hard thing to do. I would say to Sam, when you are writing monologue jokes for fictional late-night hosts, they have to be good. They can’t be bad. Sometimes late-night hosts do have clunky jokes or super generic jokes, but you’re writing it, so people are already like, “You wrote that. It’s not real.” Therefore, it has to be legitimately weird or funny.

This one was very clammy. “Yikes, that’s a face only a Fuhrer could love.” I don’t really think that’s getting a laugh out of an audience. If you’re gonna do it, you gotta do it, for sure. Otherwise, you’re gonna put yourself a little bit in a hole right at the very top.

**John:** Agreed. That did feel like an unearned laugh there. I got nervous coming out of this. Don’t think we really stuck the landing.

“Camera flash. Sound of waves further encroaching.” The Government Official says, “The stench of neo-Fascism has been tempered today,” dash, dash. “Now the crashing of water, propelling us to: Clifton Calwell (30s). Bloated. Discoloured skin. Very much dead.”

The Government Official’s line was not especially helpful, didn’t tell us that we were coming to the end of this montage. Most importantly, I wanted to see the behind-the-scenes footage, the army footage of them dumping the body over, just that video footage. I didn’t want to see just… I needed a stronger image for this guy is dead and now he’s being pushed into sea. I wasn’t getting that in these delivered lines, so it didn’t feel like the end of this montage to me.

**Craig:** I agree with you, although I have a suggestion, because typically when they do this sort of thing, they don’t have footage of it, because they don’t want anyone memorializing it, basically.

What you could do is, one person could say, “There are reports that the body is being taken to so-and-so.” Then you could have another person on a panel saying, “I guarantee you they’re just dumping it at sea. That’s what they do in these cases. That’s what I’m hearing they’re doing. We’ll never know. No, we will never know, but I’m pretty sure.” Then somebody can disagree. “You’re an idiot,” blah blah blah. It’s a talk show. Then boom, the body washes up on shore. Clearly, the one guy was right. There’s a way to do it. It’s unlikely that they would film it and show it.

**John:** This is a probably entirely false memory, but I thought I remembered seeing something of bin Laden’s body being dumped into the water. Maybe that was a re-creation footage I saw. I feel like I saw something there. I definitely saw the equivalent of body cam footage of storming the compound.

**Craig:** Definitely, yeah. I remember that. I’m looking it up, dumping body ocean. Let’s see. There is a video, but it is a video that I don’t believe has been released.

**John:** There is a question of are we breaking the seal by showing this thing that would not be a part of the international news coverage to show that one thing. I don’t know. It’s a choice to make. I think you could go either way. What Craig pitched also works. I think we needed some stronger… Stick the landing here before we’re getting into more normal movie, because we’re changing our time and our tempo a lot.

**Craig:** You sure you want to say normal movie here?

**John:** The choices that are being made here are really fascinating. I don’t think they all work. I’m so happy we have this as an example, because we can talk about what’s working and where we got off the train.

“Exterior beach – early morning – continuous.” It’s not continuous. This is a whole new thing, so not continuous. Scratch that out. “Calwell’s legless corpse slumps in a cracked plastic capsule upon the sand. The tide froths then recedes around him.” You could do this where you could start with his body. I think that’s not gonna be your strongest choice.

I think your stronger choice is to start with Jai, our boy, who’s at the beach for some reason, because he doesn’t know that he’s looking for a body. He comes across this thing. Then we could gradually reveal, oh, it is actually this body and this corpse. I think this could be weirder and funnier, but by starting on the body, it makes it seem like the body is more important than this kid, who is going to be our hero for this story. Give us some moment of Jai before we find the body. That’s my pitch. Craig?

**Craig:** I kind of like this way, if we had stuck the landing on coming out of that montage. I think there’s something shocking about seeing that body. It is a startling cut, which I like, which then makes the reveal that a child is calmly looking at it also shocking and somewhat funny. Like I say, it has to feel like the cut to it is earned. If the cut to it is earned, I think it could be really interesting to see this kid.

Right off the bat, I will say, tonally there’s some nice things here. The fact that Jai [jae] or Jai [jai]… I’m not sure how to pronounce that name. I’ll go with Jai [jae]. Jai is wearing a Wrestlemania beach towel. I like it. There’s something already that feels very darkly comic about all of this.

Especially with what’s about to come, it reminded me of Peter Jackson’s early stuff. I suspect that our author, Sam, is either Australian or from New Zealand because of some of the spelling and the specificity of the location. Peter Jackson, obviously from New Zealand, some of his early stuff was just funny and disgusting. There’s a specific tone.

**John:** The body horror is a big part of this. What we’re seeing in these next two pages, just this disintegrating corpse that these kids are trying to examine, is fun. The way it falls out of his basket and just gets smeared on the road, love it.

**Craig:** People are gonna shriek. I’ve never seen this before in my life. “Calwell,” that’s the body, “draped in Jai’s beach towel, squeezed into the front bike basket like Norman Bates’s homage to ET.” That’s really funny, this nine-year-old kid biking along with a human torso corpse shoved in his bike basket. I’ve just never seen anything like it. It’s really fucked up and funny to me.

Similarly, “Calwell’s insides fall out of his torso.” That’s so gross. Look, I don’t know if I would watch this, but I appreciate that it doesn’t care whether or not I’m gonna watch it. It’s doing its own thing. It’s, woof, yuck.

**John:** Oof. Bottom of Page 2, we have two paragraphs here. I would flip the paragraphs. Right now we’re talking about Calwell’s insides falling out of his torso before we actually get to setting up where we are at. I think it’s gonna be funnier if we’re establishing this place and then coming back to the body keeps falling apart, which is great.

“Weatherboard beach shacks, scattered Norfolk Pines, and scorched lawns permeate our ride through Aussie suburbs.” Great. It’s a really good description. Give us a start there, and then let us get back to the body and the melting of it all, because after it’s falling out of the basket, “Jai’s created a Hansel and Gretel trail of neo-Fascist entrails. We linger low on some organ as he pedals off.” It’s gruesome. The movie knows what it is, which is fine and fun.

On Page 2, there’s also a link out to a song, Rocky Raccoon covered by Charlie Parr. I wouldn’t know what that was. We had a link here. We can play it if we want to play it. I support that as a choice.

**Craig:** No problem whatsoever. Where I was most pleased was with the third page of this, because now we’re getting into this interesting Australian/New Zealand, probably New Zealand is my guess, Stand By Me. It’s like a weird alternate universe version of that. You’ve got these kids, Jai and two of his friends, Toni, who’s 10, and Daley, who’s 8. Toni is Samoan, and she’s reached puberty already, and she’s tall and she’s broad. I love the words, “She’s a broad girl.” I think that’s terrific.

Then Daley is white, and he “is the Donny Kerabatsos of this Lebowski trio. Bug-eyed, feeble, and malnourished.” Malnourished is such a great… I appreciate that the script so far has maintained its tone in such a way that I see that a kid is malnourished and I am laughing. This was really funny.

Now he’s got 3 kids, 10, 9, and 8, are staring at this horrible vision of a dead neo-Nazi’s torso and head. Then Daley says, “I’m telling!” He runs. “Jai and Toni give chase. The camera remains. Rather, we hear the ensuring struggle. The three return, Daley caught in a Toni-induced headlock. Daley: ‘Okay!'” This is a pretty great juxtaposition of childish hijinks with absolute disgustingness.

Then there’s this last little bit here at the end of Page 3 where Toni asks, “Who is he?” which is this nice little bit of innocence. She doesn’t know, even though it’s been all over the news. He says, “A pirate,” which he doesn’t know either. I only can imagine where this is going. Do they think he has buried treasure? Who knows? It made me laugh. It was sick, and sick on its own terms. I thought these were quite successful.

**John:** I thought it worked really well too. The part you mentioned on Page 3 where the camera stays behind as they run off and struggle and then it gets dragged back into the shot, it felt a little… I never want to say directing on the page, but it felt like it was a little much for me, and yet the whole script is a little much, so I’m totally fine to go with it. Also, it establishes that this is going to have a very certain style to it. There were lines that would’ve bumped for me in other examples and didn’t bump for me here.

**Craig:** I didn’t mind it. I saw the moment. It helped me see the moment. I laughed. I laughed.

**John:** Obviously, what I’m looking for on Pages 4 and beyond is really establishing specificity of the characters and their voices and what they’re actually about, rather than just their basic descriptions. I feel like I didn’t know Jai as well as I knew the other two, even in this little brief moment. I’d love a little bit more sense of that.

I’d be curious to read where this goes next. Luckily, now with this innovation we have where people send us the log line, Drew can tell us what actually happens next in the script. Drew, what happens?

**Drew:** “When the body of an international terrorist washes ashore following a botched burial at sea by US forces, an enterprising child fabricates tales of pirate mutineers and buried treasure to his peers in an attempt to monetize his corporeal find. A short film.”

**John:** It’s a short film. Then I’m probably even more intrigued, because I was really wondering how this was gonna stretch into a full feature and where this was going to go. As a short film, I can see the closure it a little bit more easily. Craig, what are you thinking?

**Craig:** Look, short films are tough, but they are at least easy to make, although this one won’t be easy to make. You’ll need a body. A fake body. Please, Sam. God. Stand By Me, even though it was a full feature film, it started life as a novella or a short story, one of four short stories. This one was called The Body by Stephen King. I could absolutely see a short-ish version of that sort of thing, for sure.

**John:** Cool. Drew, help us out with our next one.

**Drew:** Next is Sockfoot by Jesse Allard. Autumn, late 20s, finishes having a one-night stand with a mid-20s punk boy on a mattress on the floor. He criticizes her for wearing socks during sex, so Autumn quickly decides to leave. The two have a drawn-out, awkward goodbye. Autumn drives to her nice, spacious apartment, where her burn-scarred cat greets her. Slumping on the bed, Autumn takes off her socks, only to reveal another sock fused to her foot.

**John:** Great. Craig, what’s your first impression of Sockfoot?

**Craig:** Putting the sock-foot aside, which we don’t really understand quite yet, it just felt very broad and under-baked in terms of characterization, dialog, relationship, action on the page. Multiple issues. A bit clunky. The sentences themselves were a bit clunky.

Let’s just start with the very first couple of paragraphs. “A vinyl spins on a turntable.” No. A vinyl record spins on a turntable. “The sounds of a hard hitting punk song blast through the speakers.” Hard-hitting should get a dash. “The sounds of a” we don’t even need. Just a punk song blasts through speakers.

“Another sound seeps through the music growing ever louder as we follow a path of clothes that litter the floor of the apartment leading to the bedroom.” We’ve got prepositional overload.

Really, there’s just a better way to say all this. We’ve got a punk song blasting through the speakers. What punk song? First of all, what punk song? You can’t just say punk song. Second, there’s moaning. Just say over it or through it, we hear moaning.

Then the clothing continues. We’ve seen the whole thing of the hastily discarded clothing leading up to two people having sex a million times, but to keep it going… It was, “A band shirt, a modest bra, a pair of black jeans. Men’s underwear, a pair of women’s underwear to match,” one pair of socks. “Only one pair of socks — black, holes in the heels and toes.” First of all, we’re not gonna notice that there’s one pair of socks. It’s just gonna be laundry to us.

They were having sex, and then we arrive there and we meet Autumn, and she’s done. She rolls off. Somehow, the camera arrived, but we didn’t even know she finished. It wasn’t like I was hearing people having an orgasm or finishing or anything. It was just moaning and then suddenly rolling off. She “cuddles up to Logan. They play footsie as they catch their breath,” which is not really how it works for me, but that’s fine. Maybe other people do that.

Then this was where I just felt like I was being hurdled off the planet. “After a moment, Logan looks a bit concerned. He looks downs,” so looks and looks. “He looks down at their feet,” and there’s a comma there which shouldn’t be there. “He looks down at their feet pulling back,” there should be a comma there, “pulling back the blanket to reveal their toes. Autumn is wearing socks, he is not.” His line is, “Did you just fuck me with your socks on?” Her response is, parentheses, “(confused,” semicolon, “a frightful air in her breath) uh… yeah… ” “Logan (playful but serious): Don’t ever do that again.” What?

**John:** I don’t understand those lines. I think, “Did you just fuck me with your socks on?” is a great line. I think it’s the outline of that moment. I think that moment I would pitch differently.

I get while the following their trail of clothes to a bed is a tropey, tropey, tropey trope, in this case I would allow it because it is about the fact that she cannot remove this sock which is permanently fused to her foot. I’m going to allow it, but I think we need to get to the bed more quickly.

They may have already been finished and were pulling up the covers or something, and he sees her socks. “Did you just fuck me with your socks on?” is a funny out. I don’t need the reaction from her or from him. Just let that be the thing. Then we get to the awkward going away, getting out of that house moment. There was just too much there. It’s like the moment had passed and we were still talking.

**Craig:** Also, they just met. They’ve just had sex for the first time. Who cares? Honestly, who cares that she fucked him with her socks on? Oh yeah, sorry if I was in the heat of the… We were rushing to have sex, because that’s clearly what happened. It wasn’t like we carefully took our clothes off. We threw our clothes everywhere and started fucking, and so whatever. Fuck, who cares? I don’t even understand. He says “playful but serious.” Excuse me? What does that mean?

**John:** Hard to do.

**Craig:** Hot but cold? Close but far. Then he says, “Don’t ever do that again.” What? That’s what he chooses to say?

**John:** I would love to see a great actor deliver that line in a way that’s playful but serious. Someone could do it, and it would actually completely work, but I’m having a hard time visualizing it, because even internally I’m not the great actor who can make that line work.

**Craig:** I just don’t know what the motivation would be. Again, just who gives a shit? It’s your first time together. It’s almost like she’s anticipating this question. It’s as if he looks down and goes, “Wait, do you not have feet?” Then she’s like, “Sorry, no.” He goes, “Oh, okay.” Then she goes, “Oh, no, he noticed.” Or, “Do you have hooves for feet?” Socks? Is it a crime? I don’t know. It just seems like such a weird thing.

Because it is the way that Jesse is introducing the problem for our main character, it’s just not… Everything that comes after it feels pretty off, because I don’t understand what the problem is. It’s like the script is saying, “Right? This is bad?” I’m going, “No, it’s not. It’s not that bad, not yet.”

**John:** We have a larger problem. After three pages, I don’t know what the tone of this is actually supposed to be. I think it’s supposed to feel bad for her because she has this injury, this sock fused to her foot because of a fire, apparently, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel and what the tone of all this that I’m watching is, because was this kind of sexy and then kind of funny and then she’s getting herself out of there? I just don’t know how I’m supposed to be feeling about this situation.

We’re not hearing the name of the punk song at the start, but then bottom of Page 2, “Everybody Hurts by REM begins playing over the Bluetooth.” Wait, is it playing ironically or is it playing seriously? I just don’t know how to take that song, because that song is so loaded that I am lost.

**Craig:** At the bottom of Page 1, “Autumn breaks a bit inside. This isn’t going to work out.” I don’t know why. I don’t believe that moment. I believe neither what Logan asked, nor do I believe her response.

Then the next scene says, “Living room – moments later. Logan and Autumn stand at the door.” This is what I call a dead start.

**John:** So hard to do.

**Craig:** They’re just standing at the door. It’s not one of them is getting the clothes on while the other one’s waiting. It’s not one of them looking for her keys. It’s not him helping her find her underwear. It’s nothing. It’s just two people just, boom, standing, bah. It’s a dead start.

Then what I also don’t understand is, the scene before, he says, “Okay, I don’t like that you had sex with me with your socks on,” and she’s like, “Uh-oh, this isn’t gonna work out, because he’s noticed the sock thing,” and then the next scene is him really being like, “Hey, I would like to actually keep hanging out with you.” She’s like, “Nope. Nope, gotta go.” I don’t understand what’s happening. I’m so confused. The emotional math is not adding up at all. Then Everybody Hurts happened, and I got very, very concerned.

Then we go to Autumn’s apartment. This, if you were counting along, is the third consecutive interior. Interior, interior, interior. Where are we? I don’t even know if we’re in a city, a town, big city, America. I don’t know where we are. I don’t know where we are. There’s a lot of description of what this building is like, and yet I don’t know what city it’s in.

**John:** There’s too much description of her place. The “apartment is very nice, a one bedroom with an open kitchen/living room area, fairly spacious and trendy with it’s exposed brick wall.” It’s is the wrong its.

**Craig:** Correct. Then another it’s happens.

**John:** “Recently been converted into an apartment, the kind of place most people in their 20s would struggle to afford on their own.” I don’t know ho to take that. Does it mean she has independent money? Maybe. Maybe she got money out of the fire, I guess, but that’s just a lot to be dumping at me in scene description that doesn’t help me understand this character.

**Craig:** I particular because I don’t know where we are. Is this a one-bedroom, nice, spacious, trendy, exposed brick walls apartment in Kansas City or Manhattan? That’s a huge difference.

“Autumn’s greeted by her cat, Luna,” and then quite a bit of description about the cat, and then a little bit of a burn scar there, so okay, we’re getting that there’s been some fire issues. Autumn says, “Sweet baby,” doesn’t say her name, doesn’t say Luna’s name, so we don’t know that it’s Luna, but fine. “Sweet baby. She pets Luna and heads to her room.”

I want to imagine this. She enters her apartment. Everybody Hurts is playing. A cat walks up to her. She says, “Sweet baby,” pets the cat, and then walks out. This is not a scene.

Then even weirder, after she says, “Sweet baby,” she gets to her bedroom and “slumps on the bed in defeat.” What was “sweet baby” about? Is she happy? Does Luna make her feel good? All of these questions are just piling up.

Screenplays are like the Titanic. They have lots of watertight compartments. They’re designed so if you puncture one of them, the rest of the boat can stay afloat, but if you puncture a whole bunch of them, it’s over. You’re sinking. Every single one of these moments of disconnect are creating a flooding of watertight compartments. The script is sinking here. This final line is not strong.

**John:** I can read it. “At least you love me even though I’m a monster.” This is after we’ve seen her fused together foot and the sock-foot, the titular sock-foot.

**Craig:** I don’t know what’s happened here. Drew will tell us. Initially, we’re like, okay, there was a fire. The sock was melted into her foot. They can’t remove the sock. It’s part of her foot now. I think it would be fair for her to say, “I was in a fire, and so I have to cover my foot.” That’s fine. She’s not hiding 666 or a Kuato. Do you know what a Kuato is, John?

**John:** Kuato from… It’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, Total Recall.

**Craig:** Total Recall, yeah. She’s not hiding a Kuato. She doesn’t have a foot Kuato. If the sock-foot fused thing is a Kuato, then that’s different. Even then, I think we need a different vibe. We just need a different opening. I just didn’t understand what was happening here. Help.

**John:** I do think the takeaway is that if you have a character whose central, initial dilemma is the fact that she has this sock-foot, this may be the wrong way to establish it, or you just picked the wrong character, this guy is not the right guy to be exposing that thing, because the scene as we saw, it feels like, why wouldn’t she tell him? We don’t have any understanding of why this is such a big deal to her at this moment. We just don’t believe it.

I do want to go back to one moment. I thought it was the right idea. On Page 2, this familiar moment where, “Logan goes to hug her. (It’s one of those awkward post one-night-stand hugs where there’s this question of do we kiss goodbye? Is that too intimate? Too personal?) His face lingers towards her for a split second while he contemplates what to do. Autumn saves him the trouble, quickly whipping her chin over his shoulder.” Overwritten, yet I got that moment. I was familiar with that moment. It felt like a nice thing to show, if it would’ve been a different scene getting into it.

**Craig:** Right, if I had understood why any of it was happening, because it seemed like in the scene before, she wants to be with him, and he doesn’t want to be with her, and then we cut to she doesn’t want to be with him, and he does want to be with her. I just don’t know why, but yeah, absolutely, it was an evocative moment. I didn’t even mind the overwriting because I understood it.

**John:** Yeah, understand it all. Drew, help us out. What is this about?

**Drew:** The log line is, “Autumn Cassidy is a woman with a secret, a woman with a sock-foot. Autumn is working as a preschool teacher with her best friend Sam, as they and their group of friends navigate the transition into true adulthood. However, Autumn’s secret, if exposed, threatens to destroy her relationships and her life, that is if she doesn’t do it first herself.”

**John:** I don’t believe that premise. I’m sorry. I don’t. I think it’s weirdly regressive. I don’t know. If I were a person who had one foot or something and I’m seeing this story about, oh no, her foot doesn’t look normal, I don’t get that. I’m frustrated by that premise.

**Craig:** I don’t understand it either. It is a challenge for people to have a situation like this, but it’s not something where it threatens to destroy every… I’m with John. I don’t believe it. Even if it’s causing a problem, it doesn’t cause a problem instantly like that. It’s just not that thing.

Look, if this turned supernatural and it did become a Kuato, then I would understand. I just don’t believe it’s a Kuato. I don’t. No, no, no, no, no, no. No. I think there’s something wrong. There’s something just fundamentally flawed here in this bit.

**John:** I want to thank Jesse for sending through these pages, because sometimes the pages that aren’t working give us a lot more to talk about and things people can recognize in their own scripts, like, oh, that thing you’re trying to do can’t work for these reasons. I do want to thank Jesse for sending these through, because I don’t want it to just be this slam on, “Hey, it just didn’t work for us.” Instead, let’s look at what we actually were able to take from this and discuss.

**Craig:** I would also say that it may be that after reflection and listening to this, even though it might hurt, Jesse, that you may find that there is a different story to tell with a similar premise. There was something that drew you to this in the first place. I think you need to dig into what it was and why and then ask how would this actually really, really go and what is it about this that you think could work in a more realistic way.

It may also be that you listen to this and say, “These two guys are out to lunch. This thing does work. They only read three pages. Screw them.” You might be right. You might be right. Either you will take constructive thoughts from this, and meaning you will create your own constructive thoughts, because I’m a big believer in destructive criticism when giving notes, it’s better than us telling you what to do, or you may be more convinced than ever that you’re on the right path. Either way, go forward, young man or woman or nonbinary.

**John:** Young man. We now know the preferred pronouns for all the people.

**Craig:** We do?

**John:** Yeah, because it says on the form now, so people tell us how to refer to them.

**Craig:** Oh, great.

**John:** An innovation which it only took us 10 years to figure out, oh, we should probably ask what people are, so we don’t have to guess based on their names.

**Craig:** Great point. Sir, take this and move forward. I believe in you.

**John:** Drew, give us one more Three Page Challenge, please.

**Drew:** Sure. Last we have Spark by Rachel Thomas. Winnie, 12, wakes up her sister, Lucy, 10, in the middle of the night, excited because it’s October 1st. The two girls jump out of bed and rush downstairs to find their mother, Clara, 40s, reading a book and using magic to bring a plate of cookies to them. Clara makes the girls wait until the neighbors are asleep before using her magic to decorate the house for Halloween. Giant spiders really move. Life-size skeletons dance with them. The girls are thrilled. When Clara takes them back to bed, Winnie makes it clear how badly she wants her witch powers, but her mother warns her that her powers may never come.

**John:** Great. I’m glad we’re talking about this sample, because we haven’t done anything quite like this before. This feels to me like a Disney Channel movie. It feels like a bright, poppy, made for TV kind of thing. I don’t mean that in a pejorative way. I just mean it felt very innocent. I want to approach that with I think the spirit in which it’s written. It’s very wide-eyed through the whole thing. It feels kind of innocent.

That said, my problem started at the very beginning, where I didn’t believe that these two girls were asleep and then waking up and then one is showing them a watch. That all felt really clunky. Either they know what day it’s gonna be or they don’t know what day it’s gonna be, what hour it’s gonna be, what hour it’s not going to be.

If one girl is asleep and her sister wakes her up, the older sister wakes her up, then I believe. Like, “It’s after midnight. We can go down.” It’s like, “Oh my gosh, yes.” Then we’re excited to get started in what is the equivalent of this family’s Christmas. It is finally October 1st and we can do all the Halloween things.

**Craig:** You’re getting at a problem that I think permeates these pages, and that is a lack of familiarity among people that are supposed to be the most familiar with each other. They’re family. This is not the first time this has happened. This happens all the time.

First of all, Winnie has a remarkable ability to wake up at exactly midnight. That’s pretty strange. It would make more sense, I think, to begin with a little girl just staring at this pocket watch, watching the second hand going until it finally turns midnight. Then she turns and she “taps Lucy gently on the nose,” and Lucy opens her eyes and says, “Is it midnight?” “It’s midnight.” Then they’re like, “Yay!” They know what’s going on. When they go outside to join Clara, who’s sitting on the front steps, where are they? Where are people?

**John:** Where are people?

**Craig:** Where are people?

**John:** I think it has to be Salem, Massachusetts, because all things with witches have to take place in Salem, Massachusetts.

**Craig:** That’s fine, but what part of the neighborhood of Salem, Massachusetts? Help us see things. Then Winnie says to her mother, “It’s my favorite day of the year besides Halloween.” Her mother says, “You’re definitely my kid.” Have they met before?

**John:** I think they’ve met before, yeah. I think they should have.

**Craig:** What’s happening? That’s not what happens. It just doesn’t feel like they are all really connected as family. There is a tonal thing here where it’s getting very juvenile, particularly when endlessly patient parents giggle at their children bothering them at midnight. These characters all feel like they’re saying exactly what they’re thinking. Do you know what I mean?

**John:** They do. I’m willing to let them have it a bit, because I placed it in this simpler, made for basic cable kind of universe. I think there’s a place for that kind of thing. There’s an innocence there that works. Yet this is a very pushed version of this. I think we could step back and sophisticate this a little bit and still retain the joy, still retain the innocence.

**Craig:** It doesn’t even require sophistication. “I can’t wait anymore. Let’s get started.” “You know the rules. We need to wait until all the neighbors are asleep.” Nobody feels real. They just feel like information bots at this point. It immediately goes into a lesson. “Can’t you make him go to bed?” “Winnie, using magic on other people has consequences.” It just feels so corny.

**John:** It does feel corny. Again, I’m willing to give it some of the corny because of just genre assumptions, the same way that in a body horror thing I’m willing to go there a little bit more. I definitely hear you, Craig. Let me validate you there. I did feel that too. I was just being more forgiving of it. Let’s talk about some things on the page that are just basic screenwriting things that need to be worked on.

**Craig:** Let’s.

**John:** Parentheticals go on their own line. In US screenplays, British screenplays for that matter too, your parenthetical goes on its own line. In this case, they’re just touching the dialog. That’s not how we do it here.

As we got into the montage on Page 3, where the house is being decorated, there are some fun elements in there. I would encourage you to break some things up a little bit more there and let these moments land separately, because the risk you have with these four paragraphs is people may just start skimming or just start skipping over some things. I would say break those moments out a little bit more. You might even want to do some bolding in there. Just do some things where you get a sense of what it is that we’re establishing and what has changed.

Going back to Craig’s earlier note, I don’t have a sense of what this house is normally, other than it’s a Victorian. I don’t know what neighborhood we’re in. I don’t know what I’m seeing and what I’m looking at. I have no sense of how close the neighbor’s house is. I just need it to be placed and anchored in a space more clearly from the start.

**Craig:** I agree with everything you just said. Rachel, when you have a montage like this, where you’re showing them decorating the yard with Halloween stuff and mom using a little bit of magic to help it go along and make it go faster and fun, and then you follow it up with Lucy asleep and Winnie saying to her mother, without prompting, without any prompting whatsoever, “I’ll definitely have my powers by next Halloween,” I think you’ve missed an opportunity to show that she does not have her powers.

Does Lucy have her powers? If Lucy has powers and Lucy’s using magic and mom’s using magic, then I could see Winnie getting frustrated. If Lucy doesn’t have her powers, but she doesn’t care, but Winnie keeps trying to do it and does care and doesn’t like that her mom has to do it. I want to motivate her character problems.

She literally says, “Winnie looks out over her neighborhood, having the time of her life.” Then the next thing she says is, “I’ll definitely have my powers by next Halloween.” “Win, some witches never get their powers.” You can just see where this is going.

**John:** It is called Spark.

**Craig:** Look, here’s the thing. It’s fine to do a straight up formula movie. Children in particular really enjoy them. They can be done beautifully. Pixar at this point has mastered a kind of formula. It is gorgeous.

This scene right here feels so blatantly setup-ish that it is bordering on somebody reading out loud, “Interior attic bedroom – later. Winnie doesn’t have her powers yet, and she really wants them, and her mother is saying, ‘You might never get your powers and you might need to accept that you are special as you are.'” It is literally that setup-ish here. We gotta do better, just for pure entertainment sake. Otherwise, it will feel perfunctory.

**John:** I would say you would find scripts of this genre that do similar, really clunky things and [inaudible 01:00:31] “I should write a script that is like that.” I think the challenge we’re both arguing for is how do you write the better version of that that gets you the job to write the thing that does get made? I think this as a writing sample needs to be above the minimum level that you see in that kind of genre.

**Craig:** Completely agree.

**John:** Cool. Those are our Three Page Challenges. We want to thank everybody who sent in their Three Page Challenges, especially these writers, for letting us talk about them on the air. If you have three pages you want us to take a look at, go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. There’s a form there. You will say that it’s okay for us to talk about them. You will attach your pdf. It’ll go into Drew’s queue for next time. Drew, thank you for reading through all these with us.

**Drew:** Thank you. Thanks, everyone, for sending it in.

**Craig:** Drew’s Queue is a great name for a Blue’s Clues type of show.

**John:** Drew’s Queue.

**Craig:** Drew’s Queue.

**John:** Until this very moment, I hadn’t realized how much Drew Marquardt feels like he could’ve been one of the Blue’s Clues guys, 100%. If he put that sweater on, he absolutely could be a Blue’s Clues… You could have Blue as your cartoon dog.

We have listener questions that we won’t have time to get to this episode, so we’ll save them for next episode. Craig, I do think we have time for some One Cool Things. You got a One Cool Thing for us?

**Craig:** I do. This One Cool Thing actually comes from my assistant Allie, who like my assistant Bo before her, is quite the foodie. She was talking about a place that sounds amazing. I gotta go. She had a very specific recommendation. If you do like Indian food and you happen to find yourself, I believe it’s in the Los Feliz or Silver Lake area, it’s called Pijja Palace. Pijja Palace?

**John:** Pijja Palace.

**Craig:** Have you been?

**John:** I’ve been. Pijja Palace is built into a strip mall that’s connected to a mid-budget hotel. It’s very unpromising from the outside. You go inside, it looks like a sports bar, and yet the cuisine is actually Indian-inspired, non-Indian dishes. You have listed here the Malai Rigatoni. There are just pizzas and other things, but they all have Indian flavors and not Indian traditionally foods.

**Craig:** She got me the description of the Malai Rigatoni, which instead of a typical Bolognese, it’s in more of a masala sauce. It sounds delicious. I’m gonna have to check that place out. I just like the name of it. Pijja Palace.

**John:** Pijja Palace, it’s great. Definitely check that out. My One Cool Thing. We’ve talked before on the show about GeoGuessr, which is this great game where you are plopped somewhere in a Google Maps situation, street view of Google Maps. You have to figure out where the hell you are. You only have a certain number of guesses. Basically, once you make your guess where you are, it’s how close you were to the actual place. My daughter loves to play it.

I want to link to this YouTuber named Rainbolt, who is just really, really good at GeoGuessr. The video we’ll link to shows this meme, this Vine from many, many years ago, where this guy, he’s stepping off this curb, he says, “So no head?” It’s a five-second clip. The clip went viral. In this video, he tries to figure out what curb this guy was stepping off of. The way he can figure this all out is just masterful. It’s very Sherlock Holmes in terms of using the cues of just what the fire hydrants looked like, how many bars are on the telephone poles next to him, what other metadata he can find for this user who has these videos. Really, really smart. It’s no surprise he gets it down to the exact street, within one foot of where this video comes from.

**Craig:** That’s awesome. I love that.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Unknown.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Richie Molyneux. If you have an outro this week, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on anesthesia. Craig and Drew, thank you so much for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, guys.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, when was the last time you were under anesthesia?

**Craig:** I would say it was probably eight months ago. It was the last time I had a spinal epidural injection.

**John:** That doesn’t sound good at all. I was under anesthesia just last week. I had these weird bones growing underneath my tongue, it’s called mandibular tori, that was making it hard for me to speak. The oral surgeon cut them out. To do that, they had to knock me fully out. There was an anesthesiologist. It wasn’t just a little drug. It was fully knocked out.

I remember talking to this guy about skiing, and then suddenly, much time had passed, two hours in fact, and I was waking up and being moved to this recovery room, and no idea what had happened, didn’t feel a thing. Later in that day, I realized, wait, how did I get home? Mike told me that I had fallen asleep while we were walking to the car. I asked, “Why is there a trashcan here?” Apparently, I had asked for a trashcan to be brought into the room.

At the time, I had felt like I was actually completely fine, but I realized I was not forming memories of that time. It was fun. It was such a different experience than I’ve had in quite a long time.

**Craig:** Yes, amnesia is cool. It is a very strange thing. The history of anesthesia is a remarkable thing and is inextricably linked, as far as I’m concerned, to the kinds of surgical advances we’ve been capable of. Without anesthesia, there just simply is a vast category of surgery that is impossible. It’s just not possible.

**John:** We used to do amputations without anesthesia. They could hold somebody down, but there’s no way someone could’ve sawed these out of my mouth without anesthesia.

**Craig:** There is. It would’ve been very difficult, and you would’ve been in horrible, horrible pain. What we can’t do, for instance, are things like a heart transplant or kidney transplant or anything involving lungs or kidneys, internal organs. Those things are really hard to do because people just keep writhing around. It’s just hard to do. Amputations is just a straight sawing. The trauma of that kind of injury is insane.

The crudest anesthesia was ether, chloroform. Those things were pretty brutal. Prior to that, back in the old, old days, it was just basically alcohol. I don’t think there was much else going on there. Then just holding you down in misery. Anesthesia is magical.

**John:** It is magical. A question for when you see in vintage things or post-apocalyptic things, it’s like, oh, some alcohol as I pull this bullet out or whatever. I don’t fully get that, because I can drink a couple shots of something. It’s not gonna make things hurt less. I guess I could be less combative, I guess, or are you drinking to the point where you’re actually blacking out, and that’s the goal? I’ve never blacked out from alcohol. In the old days of alcohol, how much alcohol were they using?

**Craig:** Quite a bit. Obviously, they would’ve used alcohol as a topical antiseptic as well. Drinking-wise, we do know that alcohol affects the GABA pathway, gamma-aminobutyric acid, I believe, which is connected to our pain pathways. When you are very, very drunk, you don’t experience pain at the same level that you do when you’re not. You’re more confused. It’s harder to tell what the hell’s going on. Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant, which means that it can in fact knock you out, and if you’re knocked out, you’re knocked out.

Now, knocking you out without killing you is a trick. Alcohol is a toxic substance that we know can kill people in excess, and so is every single anesthetic that we use for surgery, which is why we need anesthesiologists, medical doctors, who very specifically administer this and monitor you and your breathing. Now, for a procedure like yours, my guess is you had an IV and they used propofol.

**John:** They did.

**Craig:** Propofol is wonderful. They used to use Versed.

**Drew:** It’s magic.

**Craig:** Propofol’s magic. They used to use Versed a lot. Propofol is better because it wears off much faster. Propofol actually gets metabolized by your body really quickly, so it’s perfect for these shorter procedures, because you don’t spend an hour or two hours groggily coming to. I believe Versed is more of a benzodiazepine, I believe. That’s the whole Valium family. That stuff is great.

When you’re dealing with serious surgery, where you have to be out for a long time, they can’t just keep hitting you with Propofol. Propofol is actually quite irritating to the veins. That’s when they give you the old mask on the face. Often, you’re intubated, which means that they have to breathe for you or need to be able to breathe for you if it comes to that, because so much of what they do to you is also paralytic.

**John:** Drew, you were saying propofol is great. You’ve had experience with it?

**Drew:** Yeah. I had a procedure last fall. I had a colonoscopy last fall. They injected it into my hand. It was interesting, you saying, Craig, that it’s hard on the veins, because one of the things I remember before I went under-

**Craig:** It burns.

**Drew:** … was that there was a weird pain. It burns.

**Craig:** It burns.

**Drew:** Saying to the anesthesiologist, “Hey, is that normal?” I think he got out the Y-E of yes before I was out.

**Craig:** It does tend to burn. Sometimes they will put a little bit of lidocaine in there with it to reduce the burning sensation, I believe. Yep, colonoscopy is a perfect example of a propofol nap. When I get those injections, propofol nap. Depending on the position you’re in, it’ll go right in the back of your hand. That’s where they have their IV.

Because I’ve had the procedure done a lot, on average once a year now for about, I don’t know, four years, five years, different anesthesiologists do it differently, I’ve noticed. Some of them push it in slowly, and those are my heroes, because you get to feel awesome for about five seconds.

It seems lately the new ones are like, “You know what? We actually don’t want you feeling awesome. We don’t want you coming back to enjoy your five-second propofol holiday. We’re gonna push it in much faster, so you’re gonna be fine, fine, fine. Bye-bye.” There’s not that euphoria. I have experienced the euphoria. It’s almost like your brain is inflating like a balloon with happiness and then you’re gone.

**John:** I’ve had a bunch of colonoscopies in my life, because my whole family gets colon cancer. In those cases, I don’t know what they’re using. Maybe it’s propofol. I’m just in a twilight state, so I actually am aware and conscious during it. It’s not been a problem. They’re giving me enough of something that I just don’t care at all, but I am actually awake for it in ways that were so different than my experience here.

This is much more like… I had to have my nose fixed, have my deviated septum fixed. In that case, you’re just completely out. You wake up completely like, “What just happened?” In this case, I was talking about skiing, and suddenly just a whole bunch of time had passed.

**Craig:** The fact is, when we say we go bye-bye, we don’t actually know what’s going on, because I think with propofol, a lot of times, like you say, you’re in this weird in and out state. They call propofol milk of amnesia, because it looks milky. You just don’t remember. You may have been talking throughout the whole thing. You don’t remember, because you’re just-

**Drew:** Oh, that’s horrifying.

**Craig:** … totally doped up. Yeah, but it’s not like you’re in pain. You’re not shrieking and going, “Oh my god, take this camera out of my ass.” You’re like, “Hey, what’s going on? My nose is weird.” You may be talking, but you don’t remember later.

**John:** When my daughter had the same surgeon take out her wisdom teeth, she was goofy on the drive home in the way that you love. We have video of her asking goofy questions. That wasn’t me at all, at least not to my recollection of it. I seemed perfectly normal. I wasn’t actually forming memories, in ways that were surprising to me and also made me think of, oh, you hear stories of date rape drugs. It feels like, oh, I can see why that is so problematic, because I didn’t have agency over my own memories, which was strange.

**Craig:** I’ve had that experience too, where I even realize, I know I was in the car with Melissa, we drove home. I know we talked about stuff. I don’t remember any of it. Any of it. I was awake, perfectly awake. Propofol definitely messes with the whole memory system.

**John:** It’s not sleep. Every night we have the experience of what it’s like to fall asleep and what it’s like to wake up. It was the suddenness of the change that was so striking to me. Not that I remember falling asleep every night, but I get the sense that you go down the ramp and then you come back up out of the ramp. This was just like lights off, lights on. It was just a very different experience for me.

**Craig:** It’s very fast. One thing that strikes me as really interesting about the propofol nap is I do dream vividly during it every time it happens. When I’m coming out of it, I’m coming out of dreams. Then there’s just that confusion for a moment of like, “Where… Oh, right. Oh, yeah, that. All that happened.”

Here’s an interesting thing. Talk about the amnesia. When you get this epidural injection, I’m on my stomach, and they put a needle all the way into the epidural space in my spine, and they inject stuff into it. Then they take it out. It occurred to me once, I was like, “How do you get me out of there?” because it’s not like I wake up in there. I wake up on my back in another bed in a recovery room. They were like, “Oh, you just wake up, and we help you down, and we get you over onto this other thing and wheel you out, and then we get you onto this thing and you do it.” I’m like, “Okay, so I’m awake. I have zero memory of that.” I have never once formed one memory of any of that.

**John:** That’s wild. Hey, speaking of knocking out, something I’ve been meaning to ask you is, in the last episode of The Last of Us, one of the characters is hit with a back of a rifle and knocked out. Talk to me about your decision to do that and how you feel about that as a thing that is done in movies and TV, because in real life, people shouldn’t do that.

**Craig:** No, you should not do that.

**John:** In movies and TV, it happens a lot. What is the reality of hitting somebody over the head like that? What does it really do? What is your decision making process of showing that or not showing that?

**Craig:** There was a lot of head hitting in the game. People get hit in the head a lot and get knocked out a lot that way. We avoided most of it. That was an area where just story-wise we just needed someone to get knocked out. We had done it earlier, actually, as well, when Joel knocks a guy out, and then he comes to, and Joel’s torturing his friend. I’m not a big fan of it.

I’m gonna try and avoid it if I can next time, because you can absolutely knock people out. You’re giving them a concussion. You can knock them out. You can also just kill them by giving them a subdural hematoma that just swells in their brain and then kills them. You can do all sorts of stuff. You can fracture their skull. It’s a terrible way of knocking somebody out. You shouldn’t do it. Nobody should be knocking anybody out.

If you hit somebody hard in the back of the head, first of all, you may not knock them out at all. You may cause brain damage, and especially if you’re hitting somebody in the back of the head. You could blind them. There’s all sorts of terrible things that can happen. It is not something you should do. I’m gonna try as best I can to avoid people hitting people on the back of the head with the stocks of guns for Season 2, but Season 3 will be nothing but that, just one after another.

**John:** All head injuries. They’ll suffer the consequences of those head injuries. That’s gonna be the real change. That’s gonna be the shocking revelation there. Craig, thank you for your answer there, because I suspect that there was a debate there, because you’re so concerned about portrayals of things in the real world.

As I was looking at the scene, I was thinking, okay, because a thing happens before that, there’s other ways you could’ve gotten that one character knocked out, and yet this made sense for the characters in that world and in that moment. [Crosstalk 01:17:39].

**Craig:** It made sense, but it’s not great. When we play DnD, as you know, if you are attacking someone and you don’t want to kill them, you want to leave them just alive enough to interrogate them, all you have to do is say to the DM, “I want to deliver a non-lethal blow here.” If it takes them to 0 HP, they don’t die, they’re alive, you can interrogate them. In this case, this was not that. The guys that came up, they didn’t know who Joel was. They were like, “We’re gonna knock you out, and if you die, you die. If you don’t, we’ll be able to ask you questions. Either way, it’s fine.”

**John:** Exactly. There was a movie I’ve really liked recently where the central character I think is knocked over the head three times, knocked out over the head three times. I was like, “She’s paralyzed now. I don’t think she’s coming back and fighting for victory here.” I loved the movie, but that was a thing that [crosstalk 01:18:27].

**Craig:** You gotta stop hitting people on the head. I agree. To the extent that we have contributed to the head hitting, I apologize to all of culture.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** I’ve got a colonoscopy coming up. I’m gonna try and take notes. I don’t remember. I’m just gone.

**John:** You can ask them. You can ask them. You can tell them, “I’m an absolute pro at this. You can give me less.” Maybe not, because they don’t want you talking.

**Craig:** Oh, no no no, I’m not gonna ever say that. Ever. Ever. I’m a baby. You want to run a garden hose up my butt? Do it. I don’t want to feel it. I don’t want to be awake. I don’t want to know about it. Just do the garden hose. It’s not a garden hose, by the way. It’s incredibly slender.

**John:** It’s slender. It’s fine. People may way, way, way too big a deal of colonoscopies. They’re fine.

**Craig:** All they do is save your life. That’s all they do.

**John:** That’s all they do. Easiest thing you could do to save your life.

**Craig:** Get a colonoscopy, people. Thanks, guys.

**John:** Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

**Drew:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Has Anyone Ever Actually Tied a Damsel in Distress to a Railway Track?](https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/01/has-anyone-ever-actually-tied-a-damsel-in-distress-to-a-railway-track/) by Karl Smallwood
* [Pirating the Oscars 2023: The Final Curtain Call](https://waxy.org/2023/03/pirating-the-oscars-2023-the-final-curtain-call/) by Andy Baio
* [Why Are All Action Heroes Named Jack, James, or John?](https://slate.com/culture/2023/03/john-wick-james-bond-action-heroes-j-names.html) by Demetria Glace for Slate
* Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections: [Flotsam](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2023%2F01%2FSam-Darcy_FLOTSAM_Three-Page-Challenge.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=0ef4e278ecbe1687ad1a36c0a96f0e3b01a8d282ed17845879114ca368c0cfcd) by Sam Darcy, [Sockfoot](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F12%2FSockfoot.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=bb72643a11a5d302f96bbc96947d57ffcd0f01f96147767cb10acca002f51e59) by Jesse Allard, and [Spark](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F12%2FSpark_ScriptNotes_ThreePageChallenge.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=2781befc01a890bfd2e53921356d178f96a1486a558300228375a8808edcf804) by Rachel Thomas
* [Pijja Palace](https://www.pijjapalace.com/)
* [how I found the ‘so no head’ vine road in 15 minutes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfdwjleF7nY) by RAINBOLT
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* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/) on Instagram
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
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* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Richie Molyneux ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Drew Marquardt](https://www.instagram.com/marquardtam/) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/592standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/do-muppets-bleed).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 585 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what are the unique characteristics that allow you to distinguish one writer’s writing from another’s. We’ll talk about writer fingerprints, voice, and situations where you may need to mimic someone else’s style. Plus, we have a lot of listener follow-up.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we often answer writer questions about producers, but here we have one from a producer asking about how to best handle a writer who can’t seem to finish or deliver on a script. If you want to know what advice Craig, Megana, and I have for this producer, you can find out as a Premium Member in about one hour when we get to that segment.

**Craig:** That’s worth the five bucks right there.

**John:** Right there. Right there.

**Craig:** Right there.

**John:** You know what’s worth more than $5?

**Craig:** What, Segue Man?

**John:** A spot on Scriptnotes if you are a writer, because we are the number one podcast for getting Oscar nominees to happen. That’s what I’ve decided.

**Craig:** I think you might be right about this.

**John:** Our track record this year, pretty darn good. Sarah Polley, Oscar nominee. Rian Johnson, Oscar nominee, Daniels, Oscar nominees. You count them as one or two people?

**Craig:** I count them as one bi-person duology.

**John:** Absolutely. Although she wasn’t on the podcast this year, she’s a previous guest, Pamela Ribon, and she was a One Cool Thing, so I think that counts for her animation nomination for My Year of Dicks.

**Craig:** Absolutely. It’s so funny, Year of Dicks triggered something in me.

**John:** The title or the film itself?

**Craig:** The title. I’m so glad I got to say that and it’s preserved eternally. Have you watched Poker Face yet?

**John:** I haven’t watched it yet. I’m excited too.

**Craig:** I saw the first episode of Poker Face last night, which is the new show from Rian Johnson and the great Natasha Lyonne, who by the way, have we had Natasha on the show?

**John:** No, she was never on the show.

**Craig:** We’re going to change that momentarily. It was a delight. There was a line that was said not once, but twice, possibly thrice. “Cloud of dicks.” It made me happy. I think we have entered the dicks phase of language.

**John:** Yeah, 100%. Now, I worry though that the success of these writers who came on the Scriptnotes podcast is only going to make it worse for Megana. I don’t know if you know this, Craig, but publicists are flooding her inbox.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** We need to stop that.

**Craig:** There’s nothing we can do about that really. They’re going to find whoever they can find, and I don’t blame them. I honestly don’t. The thing about these awards seasons is… You’ve been involved in one. I’ve been involved in one. The publicists are constantly looking for these angles. The ones that they love the most are the inside baseball ones, where they know you can go and talk to people for an hour, it’s actually a fun conversation, it’s not brutal, and it’s going to be over-sampled by the people voting in the Guild Awards and for the Academies.

I get it, but also, dear publicists, we’re not a talk show really. This is my favorite kind of show, me and you alone with Megana. Alone with Megana. That’s a great song title. Didn’t Air Supply do that one?

**John:** I do want to acknowledge that most of the people we’ve had on the show who are writers who get awards were people we just knew independently of publicists. There have been a couple cases where the only place that we could find these people were because of publicists, and some of those have turned out great too. The Greta Gerwig episode is a fantastic episode. I don’t know Greta Gerwig from anybody, but because of publicists, we were able to be connected together. I’m not digging publicists. They serve a great function. I just want to make sure that we are true to our goals of not becoming just a talk show.

**Craig:** I think we really do try and limit it, even among our friends. We have friends that still bug me, like, “Why haven’t I been on your show?” Because that’s not what we do. It’s not our thing. Then every time we do have a guest, I’m like, “I’m going to hear from people.” It’s honestly not our focus. We are not a come on and plug your thing. The reason that we talk to people almost always, not always, but almost always, is because there is a personal connection. Even the Daniels was just down to, I’d had a nice chat with one of the Daniels on Twitter. There was some connection there.

**John:** I met them up on the mountain at Sundance.

**Craig:** There you go. There you go.

**John:** There was some connection. The person we’ve not been able to get on the show, and we’ve kind of tried, we haven’t tried that hard, but James Cameron is a get that we’d love to get, because not only his most recent work, but how incredibly influential his writing style for films like Terminator and Aliens. Action writing is different because of him. It would be great to have him on the show.

**Craig:** I am a huge, huge fan of the script for Titanic. I just love it. I love it. It would be great to talk to him for my own interest. I’m that selfish. If other people want to listen, fine, but I want to talk to him.

**John:** We’ve been trying to make that happen. At some point, maybe we can make that happen. In the meantime, if you want to read any of these scripts that are nominated, you can now, thanks to Megana Rao, read them on the Weekend Read beta. Weekend Read is the app my company makes for reading scripts on your iPhone. We have a beta for the new version. It’s really good. It’s really fun. We now have all the For Your Consideration scripts up in there if you want to read them. The new version has notes. It has a read aloud feature, which is fun.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** If you would like to try the beta on that, we’ll put a link in the show notes to that. It’s just a simple test flight. There’s still kinks that we’re working out, so if you want to try it out and tell us what’s working and what’s not working, that would help us out a lot.

**Craig:** Don’t kink-shame.

**John:** No. Kinks are good. Kink-celebrate.

**Craig:** I’m giddy today. I’m clearly giddy.

**John:** You are giddy. Let’s talk about why you’re giddy, because you had a rough start to your day. Do you want to tell us what happened this morning?

**Craig:** It was an up and down sort of day.

**John:** Literally.

**Craig:** Exactly. Upside, The Last of Us has been renewed for another season.

**John:** Hooray!

**Megana Rao:** Congratulations.

**Craig:** Thank you. I was very happy about that. Then on the downside, there’s some businessy, contracty nonsense. Every now and then, you just get a call from your lawyer where you’re like, “Wait, what? What?! What?!” I just got grouchy about that. It’ll all be resolved. Nobody freak out. Then I went and took a shower, and I was moving quickly, because I didn’t want to be late for this show.

**John:** You don’t want to break your perfect streak of being on time.

**Craig:** Exactly, because I’m always so punctual, and I really felt like it’s important to not blow it. That’s obviously really important to me, and so I raced. Coming out of the shower, I slipped and I fell in the bathroom. As I was falling, I did a pretty good job of… Time slows down, and you basically get spidey senses. Your body knows somehow, something terrible is about to happen, so your brain goes into a mega state. Everything got slower. I was able to get my hand out to slow things down. I was also able to turn. I took all of the brunt of the fall on my hip, which as you know, is something that old people break all the time. Now I know why. I did not break my hip. I was on the floor, and for a second I was like, “Did I just… No, I think I’m okay.”

There’s a comedian, Alonzo Bodden, who does this bit about how when you’re in your 20s and you fall, you just pop back up and your only concern is, “Did anybody see me? Because I looked really stupid.” When you’re in your 50s and you fall, people tell you, “Whoa, don’t get up. Stay down.” Then he said when you’re in your 80s and you fall, people fly in from out of state. I decided to stay down for a bit, and then I was like, “Everything’s fine.” Then I got back up, and I was just like, “Oh, for God’s sakes, what a start to the day.”

**John:** I’m so sorry, Craig. I had a fall at the end of last year. We were skiing. Skiing is inherently kind of dangerous. You’re going to fall while you’re skiing.

**Craig:** At least you fall on snow.

**John:** I was going in to change my gloves or something. I’m walking in ski boots, which are perilous anyway. I hit some wet concrete, slip, and start to fall. Yes, again, time starts to go more slowly. In fact, they think what’s actually happening is that time isn’t moving more slowly but your memory of it is moving more slowly. It takes more slices. That’s why it seems like-

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** That’s why you remember it happening slowly.

**Craig:** I like that.

**John:** I start to fall. I end up falling and hitting my ribs against this row of seats. I bruise my ribs. They’re still now recovering.

**Craig:** Are you sure you just bruised them?

**John:** If I’d broken them, it would’ve been harder to breathe.

**Craig:** It’s probably true.

**John:** Also, there’s not a lot they can do for broken ribs [crosstalk 00:09:12].

**Craig:** There really isn’t. You can’t cast them. You just basically tell people don’t take deep breaths.

**John:** The rib I bruised the most is one of the ribs in back that’s not actually connected to anything. It free floats, which is kind of great, but also they could just remove it like they removed Cher’s ribs. I was thinking, “Maybe they can just remove the rib.”

**Craig:** Did they really remove Cher’s ribs?

**John:** I think that is not just a Snopesy thing. We’re going to look it up right now, because I don’t want to put false information out. Snopes Cher rib.

**Craig:** I’m doing it too, Snopes Cher rib. “Did Cher have ribs removed to make her waist smaller?” False.

**John:** False.

**Craig:** False. The claim was Cher had her lowest pair of ribs surgically removed to achieve an ultra-small waist. That is apparently false. In fact, it doesn’t seem that really anyone has done that.

**John:** I’m looking up Marilyn Manson too, the other thing I’ve heard.

**Craig:** For a totally different purpose. We could say auto-fellatio on the show. I don’t think that that violates any… Marilyn Manson, who apparently is a horrible person, from everything I’ve read… Am I allowed to say that on the show?

**John:** Yeah. I think we avoid libel by saying you’ve heard people say that he’s not a good person.

**Craig:** I don’t mean to slander anybody. I’m just saying I’ve read things online. It sounds like he’s a horrible person. Some terrible claims have been made against him by people that I have no reason to doubt. The rumor that had been out there is that he had ribs removed so that he could perform auto-fellatio, which it can’t possibly be true.

**John:** No, it doesn’t seem like it’s true. People apparently are asking him, and he’s giving vague non-answers, probably because he wants the story to continue. Anyway, circling back to-

**Craig:** Boy, have we gone off… Wow.

**John:** Craig and I both fell down and hurt ourselves, and we’re older, but we’re okay.

****Megana:**** Aw.

**Craig:** I like that Megana’s like, “Oh, you guys are so cute, falling down.” Megana, you’re the one that’s going to have to take care of us.

**John:** Megana has a sore throat.

**Craig:** Oh, you have a sore throat?

****Megana:**** I have a sore throat, yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, dear. Oh boy.

****Megana:**** It’s normal. It’s a cool thing to have.

**Craig:** Is it?

**John:** It’s a very useful sore throat.

**Craig:** Megana, I gotta push back on that. I don’t think it’s cool at all.

****Megana:**** It’s not cool, but I got it from being social and fun, not from the two stories we just heard.

**John:** At a party.

****Megana:**** I got it at a party.

**Craig:** Not from some pathetic old man lost his balance thing. Cool. Cool cool.

**John:** We actually have a PSA, not really a question or a follow-up, but from James, which is also about medical-related things. Megana, would you help us out with that?

****Megana:**** James says, “This isn’t a question. It’s a reminder for all writers to look after their tools. For the last couple of years, I’ve been struggling to write. I would feel mentally drained whenever I started writing. Depression and writing became synonymous in my mind. I wasn’t looking at things clearly, literally. I got my eyes checked a few weeks ago, and it turns out that I needed reading glasses. That’s all. The effort required to read was causing me stress and fatigue. These glasses have given me a new surge of creativity, and it’s a joy to write again. If we’re sighted, our eyes are a key tool for our job. Please look after them.”

**Craig:** That’s fantastic, James.

**John:** That’s fantastic. I feel very seen by James, because a thing I’ve noticed over the past last few months is some days I wake up and my eyes are just not working quite right. It’s not that I need my reading glasses on or need them off. Just my monitor is hard to read. I actually have an eye appointment to go in and see if I need some sort of medium distance glasses. Right now, as we’re recording, eyes are crystal clear, everything is so sharp, but there’s times where it’s hard just to read, and writing’s tougher.

**Craig:** You don’t wear reading glasses?

**John:** I wear reading glasses only for very close distance things.

**Craig:** I see. John, alas, that is changing. John, your body is going through changes. Have a seat. Let’s talk about what’s happening with your body. Your eye muscles are dying, and so are mine. I will say the more you use reading glasses, the-

**John:** More you depend on them.

**Craig:** Oh my god, because your eye muscles are like, “Thank you. We’re done. Everybody go home. We retire.” I think it’s fun actually. I am enjoying this part of being old. I feel like this is the best old time. What follows this is not good old time. This is fun old time, like, “Oh, I need glasses. Oh, I slipped and fell, but really nothing happened, lol.” The 20-something that I work with on my show laughs about it, and that’s funny. In 10 years it’s going to be sad.

****Megana:**** Also, just because most people on the podcast don’t get to see this, you do have quite a flourish when you put your reading glasses on.

**Craig:** I do?

****Megana:**** Yeah.

**Craig:** I like to snap them open and slap them on. Everybody knows when the reading glasses go on-

****Megana:**** It’s business time.

**Craig:** It’s business time. Decisions are about to be made.

**John:** A trick for people is that if you are starting to use reading glasses, like I am, get on Amazon. You can get packs of 10 that are basically all the same. You just leave them around places in your house, so you don’t have to worry about, “Where are my reading glasses?” Your reading glasses are everywhere, and that’s a really helpful thing you can do, just like pens. Just have a pen everywhere you need a pen.

**Craig:** Try and make as many friends as you can in their 50s and 60s, because they’ll always have reading glasses with them also. I used to look at people 10 years ago in a restaurant with their glasses and their phones with the lights on, looking at menus. I’m like, “What is wrong with these people?” It me.

**John:** You’re the problem.

**Craig:** I’m the problem.

**John:** We have another question that I think we can actually maybe answer, about Apple Podcasts and Siri. Megana, help us out.

****Megana:**** Anthony writes, “I had a weird change in my normal listening habit when I upgraded to a new OS on my phone. I’m using an iPhone 12 Mini and I just upgraded to iOS 16.2. I’m subscribed to the show via Apple Podcasts, and when driving, I used to be able to press a talk button and say, ‘Play Scriptnotes podcast,’ and it just started playing the latest episode or wherever I left off. Now after this update, if I say, ‘Play Scriptnotes podcast,’ it says you have to blah blah blah Apple Music to do that. I tried changing it to say, ‘Play Apple Podcast Scriptnotes,’ and it didn’t work, starts playing Apple Podcasts but other shows. Without boring you to tears, I’ve managed to verbally get it to play a couple of times, but I can’t remember the exact phrasing that worked.”

**John:** This is a form of prompt engineering. It’s almost like what ChatGPT is, like what am I going to say to this device to get them to do what I want. We have the same kind of problem occasionally. In the morning, we ask Siri to play us the news. We say, “Play the news from NPR,” or just, “Tell us the news.” Sometimes it works like that, and sometimes it doesn’t.

What I think Anthony needs to do is be a little bit more specific. I think the real trick here is that the podcast we’re listening to is not Scriptnotes, it is Scriptnotes Podcast. For whatever reason, when we first set it up, we called it Scriptnotes Podcast. If he says, “Play Scriptnotes Podcast in Podcasts,” it should work. I listen to Overcast, and I’d test it, that, “Play Scriptnotes Podcast in Overcast,” will pull up Overcast and it’ll play in there.

**Craig:** Is there a way to change that, so that just saying Scriptnotes would work? Is there somebody we could talk to?

**John:** I think we would probably break… It’s too risky. There’s too many things that could break because of it.

**Craig:** What if I talk to Tim Apple? Would that help?

**John:** Tim Apple could fix all of it.

**Craig:** I’m telling you, this is going to… John, hang on. Just hang on, because this is going to be a show. It’s going to be a show, buddy. It’s going to be a show. We’re going to have a great time.

**John:** Also, what’s important for people to understand is that we think about Apple controlling podcasts, but they really don’t. It’s just an RSS feed, like your old website, Craig. That RSS feed has really nothing to do with Apple. It’s just people tend to use their iPhones to listen to podcasts.

**Craig:** I just wanted to say Tim Apple.

**John:** Tim Apple. Craig, we have talked before about IP-based movies. I think one of the things we got to was there was going to be a Pet Rock movie at some ponit. The moment has come. I was talking with a writer who’s going to pitch on the Pet Rock movie. We had a great conversation about what the Pet Rock movie should be.

**Craig:** I don’t hate it. Did you have a Pet Rock by the way?

**John:** I didn’t have an official Pet Rock bought at the store. I got a rock out of the garden and drew some eyes on it.

**Craig:** Oh my god, that’s the saddest thing in the world.

**John:** I don’t know what to tell you.

**Craig:** You were too poor to have the $4 Pet Rock?

**John:** Yeah, it’s true.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** Basically, my parents said no.

**Craig:** That is the most Eagle Scout thing I’ve ever heard from you, and you have quite a bit of Eagle Scoutness as an Eagle Scout. I had the actual branded Pet Rock, and I’ve got to tell you, it’s superior to your homemade faux rock.

**John:** Tell me why it was better.

**Craig:** No, it wasn’t.

**John:** What are the characteristics of a real Pet Rock? Are their googly eyes glued to it?

**Craig:** Yes, there are googly eyes glued to it. That is essentially what it was. Megana, have you even heard of Pet Rock?

****Megana:**** I’ve heard of Pet Rock. I’ve never actually seen one. I haven’t held one.

**Craig:** There’s probably a few out there still in the wild. The joke of it was I think it was invented as a novelty to make fun of consumerism. It was like, “Look how stupid everyone is.” People would buy a Pet Rock. It’s a gag gift you’d give to somebody on their birthday, “Ha ha ha, I bought you a Pet Rock.” Then it just became a fad, a real fad. In the ‘70s, fads happened in the weirdest ways. We watch fads happening now live on Twitter or Instagram.

These things would just emerge in these crazy, organic ways until eventually they filtered down to people on Staten Island. Then it subverted the whole point. The whole point was look how ridiculous it is. Then actually people were like, “We want Pet Rocks.”

What we have now are a lot of people running Hollywood who are in their 50s and 60s who are remembering Pet Rock. This to me is the epitome of pointless in that nobody who’s going to… They’re not making the Pet Rock movie for people in their 50s and 60s. They’re making it for kids. Kids don’t know about Pet Rocks. Zero cache for them. It could be good though. It could be.

**John:** It could be good. It could be good, just because there’s literally a blank slate, as the writer said. There’s many rock puns you can get to.

**Craig:** I get it. Slate.

**John:** Here’s what I’ll say. I think the idea of this thing that should be completely inanimate being the central character of a story is interesting in the wake of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On and the moments in Everything Everywhere All At Once which are about two rocks just sitting and watching the end of time. I kind of get it, but they’re going to want it to be a big, four-quadrant movie. They’re going to want it to be Minions, and that’s going to be challenging, but somebody’s up for it.

**Craig:** If you made a movie called Rocks and it was about animated rocks, that would be perfectly… We know that you can make a wonderful animated movie based on almost anything. It’s just the fact that they think Pet Rock has some kind of value.

**John:** I’m curious whether Pet Rock is a trademark, whether they held onto a trademark for that or if it’s just [inaudible 00:20:40].

**Craig:** That’s a great question. I don’t know, although now I’m seeing that apparently there is a Pet Rock that is introduced in Minions: The Rise of Gru. Perhaps this is why. It may be that the Pet Rock has been revived via Minions.

**John:** The other revival of the Pet Rock of course is Elmo’s longstanding beef with Zoe on Sesame Street about her pet rock. Zoe wants to save a piece of pie or a piece of pizza for her pet rock. Elmo’s like, “It’s just a stupid rock.”

****Megana:**** His name’s Rocco.

**John:** His name’s Rocco, the pet rock.

**Craig:** Does Elmo physically fight Zoe? Do they fight? Is there blood? Do muppets bleed?

**John:** Do muppets bleed? We’ve got a title for the episode.

**Craig:** Hey, Siri, do muppets bleed? I just triggered a lot of phones out there.

**John:** We will follow the development of the Pet Rock movie. The other thing, which I don’t know if we talked about on the show before, is I was curious why is there not a General Mills cereal movie. Why is there not a Franken Berry movie? Why is there not a Count Chocula?

**Craig:** Why isn’t there?

**John:** I looked it up, and there was a whole plan to make them, and it all fell apart.

**Craig:** Things do tend to fall apart a lot in Hollywood.

**John:** Things fall apart.

**Craig:** That is true. Hold on a second. I just had a cool idea for a movie.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** It’s an animated movie. It’s basically a battle royale between all of the cereal mascots.

**John:** The mascots, yeah.

**Craig:** All of them. There’s so many. Right off the top of my head, there’s Cap’n Crunch, there’s the Trix are for kids rabbit, there is the Lucky Charms leprechaun.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Snap, Crackle, and Pop. There’s the Honey Smacks Dig ‘Em Frog. Was it Honey Smacks?

**John:** Dig ‘Em Frog, yeah.

**Craig:** There’s the Dig ‘Em Frog. There’s the wizard from Cookie Crunch or Cookie Crisp. It was a wizard.

**John:** Cookie Crisp wizard. We obviously have Boo Berry.

**Craig:** Franken Berry, Boo Berry, Count Chocula, the bee from Honey Nut Cheerios. What else do we need to say?

**John:** It’s IP-alooza. It feels like it could be Laff-A-Lympics, which is great.

**Craig:** Or Space Jam.

**John:** Space Jam is really the comp for it, although those were all within one studio. Getting them all together would be a little bit tough, but completely doable.

**Craig:** You just have to settle the great Kellogg’s/Post war. That’d be fun. Somebody get to work on that.

**John:** Easy done. Craig, we’ve talked before about the preface page or whatever we want to call that page after the title page, before the script itself starts. Thanks for Adrianne Cespedes who wrote in with this preface page Tár. Craig, would you mind reading the preface page from Tár?

**Craig:** Sure. Here’s what it says. “Based on this script’s page count, it would be reasonable to assume that the total running time for Tár will be well under two hours. However, this will not be a reasonable film. There will be tempo changes and soundscapes that require more time than is represented on the page, and of course a great deal of music performed on screen. All this to say, if you are mad enough to greenlight this film, be prepared for one whose necessary length represents these practical accommodations.” That’s great.

**John:** I really like this. I like it because here we have Todd Field warning the studio distributor that the film is going to be long, but also it feels very Tár-like. It feels like it’s in keeping with the spirit of the film, which is going to be like, “I am going to set impossible standards that are going to make you a little uncomfortable. Let’s get started.”

**Craig:** You can feel the intelligence radiating off of this. The formality of the language is setting you up for Tár. It’s wonderful and I think probably wasn’t necessary, but additive. If Todd hadn’t put this there, the people would’ve read it and said, “Wow, this movie’s great.” Then you would’ve said, “Terrific. Now, if you want to make it, I gotta tell you, blah blah blah blah blah.” I like that he put it in anyway, because it sets the table.

**John:** That’s what a preface page does is gets you ready for the read. We have a question from Lorenz in Vienna here.

**Craig:** Should I read it?

**John:** Megana, do you want to read this?

**Craig:** I don’t want to take Megana’s job.

****Megana:**** I appreciate that, Craig.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

****Megana:**** Lorenz from Vienna writes, “In Episode 582, Craig briefly mentioned paid script consultants and what he thought about them. I then went back to the transcript of Episode 71 and was surprised to read that essentially you seemed to consider them a waste of money at best and dangerous quacks at worst. I’m an early career writer-director in Europe, and over here, script consultants are an integral part of the industry, with dedicated state funding for them during script development.

“My own experience with consultants has been very positive, and judging from what I’ve learned about writers’ rooms on your show, the relationship feels a bit like a mini room, with the consultant acting as a conversation partner and providing outsider’s perspective on the script. Most of the consultants I know are screenwriters themselves, but the relationship between the quality of their feedback and the measurable success of what they have written is not necessarily linear, similar to how someone might be a successful artist but a terrible arts teacher and vice versa. I’d be curious to hear if this is a completely different kind of consultancy to what you were talking about, what you think about it, and if this kind of relationship exists at all within the Hollywood system.”

**John:** This ties in actually really well to the Bonus Segment we’re going to be talking about, because that is a British writer and producer, and they have a whole thing called a script editor, which is not a thing we have at all here. Craig, let’s open our minds and think about, what if there were a person who came in to sit down with a writer to help them get their script better? What do we think about that person?

**Craig:** It sounds like things work quite a bit differently there. I’m trying to dig under the hood of this comment from Lorenz, because it almost feels like script consultants with state funding are operating the way our development executives operate over here. It’s quite a different thing. We’re talking about people that other people pay, like the government, to help develop screenplay and art in Europe.

Lorenz, here in the United States, these people that I’m talking about, writers pay them directly. They are out there saying, “Hey, hire me on a private basis. You pay me this much per hour or this much per read, and I will give you notes,” and things like that. Writers are essentially paying for the thing that in your country the government is funding. To that extent, there’s the problem. You end up with a lot of… When you drive down a city street and you see, I don’t know, store fronts for psychics, you can go in there and pay them if you want. It’s probably not going to work.

**John:** I agree with you that I think the real corollary here is probably development executives, which is a little bit different than producers, so we should talk about what the difference there is. A producer is a person who’s trying to get your film made.

Craig has talked a lot about working with Lindsay Doran, who is a great producer and has also worked as a development executive in times. She is a person who you can really have very in-depth conversations about your script and what you’re trying to do and how this scene’s working and how that ties into the next. She’s not a writer. She’s a person who works really well with writers. If that is what the script consultant is for someone like Lorenz, that’s great.

Really though, we’re getting back to what is the paid relationship, and is the person really any good. I think so often we’ve just encountered terrible, terrible people who are billing themselves as script consultants, who really have no business doing that at all. That’s I think the reason why we’re so gun-shy about recommending any script consultant is because we’ve had so many bad experiences or people coming in to us with terrible advice, terrible notes. People are just taking their money.

**Craig:** People are just taking their money. Our operating principle here is that there are perfectly good positions in Hollywood where people are paid, and often quite handsomely, to do the job of helping writers develop a screenplay. The executives who work at the studio are paid by the studio to obviously help the studio, but in doing so, try and give the writer advice and feedback. Then there are producers who are more entrepreneurial, but they too are being paid by someone else, certainly not the writer. That’s fine.

If your goal is to give writers notes and shepherd and develop, then you should be trying to be a studio executive or a producer. If you can’t, because say you’re not good enough, then perhaps you decide instead, “Oh, I know what I’ll do. I’ll just go out there on my own and just start making writers pay me for this. In order to convince them, I will talk about how brilliant I am and what wonderful insight I have.” Eugh.

**John:** Thinking back to my time up at the mount in Sundance, the Sundance Institute works a lot like this. The consultants, the advisors they’re called for Sundance, they’re not paid. They’re volunteering their time to come up there to sit and work with these writers about their projects. It is not a governmental thing, but it has an organizational integrity quality to it. People are doing it for the best possible reasons and trying to make the best possible films.

Hopefully, that’s what you’re finding there in Austria, Lorenz, is someone who’s doing that. I want to make sure that when we are talking about script consultants negatively, we’re really talking about our experience of Hollywood hucksters who are taking writers’ money and making things worse.

**Craig:** Hollywood hucksters, that’s a great way of describing them.

**John:** Great. One last bit of follow-up here. Megana, we have Jake from Dallas.

****Megana:**** “I was listening to John and Craig talk to Sarah Polley, and it reminded me of how supportive and nice the three of you are.”

**Craig:** Aw.

****Megana:**** “Each of you are very smart and insightful people, which probably means you could be the ‘actually’ person to always correct others, who always tries to one-up those around you or the one who’s just waiting for their next opportunity to shower the conversation with their magnificent oration instead of listening to the people we’re sharing our time with. The Sarah Polley conversation was another example of you behaving in a supportive, constructive, and nice manner. Have you learned this anti-‘actually’ trait over your careers or do you think you always had the capacity to listen and contribute?”

**John:** It was very nice of Jake to write in with that. I thought it was a great episode too. A lot of people [inaudible 00:31:18] how much they enjoyed the Sarah Polley episode. Craig, what do you think? Actually, what’s going on here?

**Craig:** Actually…

**John:** It’s all Matthew cutting out all of our actuallys. That’s really what it is.

**Craig:** He has a filter now that just automatically strips everything of actually. I think that you and I learned this as we were starting out, because in a way, I think we were forced to, because of the way we were doing the podcast. This was obviously well before Zoom. We generally don’t look at each other when we’re having these things anyway. It’s all audio and certainly was at the start. When you are having a phone conversation with someone, which is what this essentially is, you need to give that person space. Also, I have to say I have occasionally sampled podcasts. I admit it. One of the reasons I struggle with podcasts is because people are constantly talking over each other, and it makes me crazy. What about you?

**John:** There are podcasts where that’s just the nature of how they work. It’s a tacit agreement between the host that that’s how it all works. It’s oneupmanship and who’s louder. That’s just never been us. My One Cool Thing actually ties into this.

**Craig:** Actually.

**John:** Actually. It’s basically how you set affordances so that people can say what they need to say or what they want to say, how do you ask questions that lead to interesting answers and continuing discussion. There’s some prep work there, but it’s also just mostly listening to what the person wants to tell you.

**Craig:** I think being interested in the people you have on your show is probably a good idea. I will also say that in a personal growth sort of way, it’s been made clear over the last few years by a lot of women that men in particular talk over them. You and I, I don’t think we ever talked over anybody when we had them on the air. I am certainly aware of just the general concept of not mowing people down when they’re talking. I like a nice, slow discussion.

The first scene of this season of The Last of Us is basically a Dick Cavett talk show. I am obsessed with Dick Cavett. I watch these videos of old Dick Cavett interviews, and it’s almost like from another planet of people talking and listening. They’re talking at length. It’s not about constantly entertaining the crowd. You can tell that the discussions haven’t been pre-organized and curated the way they are on talk shows now. I miss that, and to the extent that we can contribute to that sort of culture, I think that’s great.

**John:** I think also our guest selection is crucial. Sarah was a great example of that. Taffy Brodesser-Akner could take over Craig’s spot tomorrow.

**Craig:** Good. Please.

**John:** She definitely has that ability to just keep it all going. There have been times where a publicist has been insistent and gotten somebody onto the show, have been more of the frustrating times, where it’s like, I don’t have a thing to get to next. There have been a couple interviews, actually not that have been on Scriptnotes, but some live things, where the person was not interested in hitting the ball back. Man, it’s just tough.

**Craig:** It’s brutal. It is almost worse when people aren’t listening to each other. Turn on any news channel now. It’s just people yelling at each other constantly. Aren’t you amused when… It’s always two guys. Two guys are talking, and they’re angry at each other and they’re arguing, and neither one of them is willing to stop talking to let the other one talk, so they just keep going, like a game of chicken where the cars keep smashing into each other over and over. It’s remarkable.

**John:** They’re encouraged to do it because it generates conflict and it seems exciting. I hate it. A podcast I’ll recommend to everybody, and I think I talked about this on the show before, the Attitudes podcast with Erin Gibson and Bryan Safi is terrific and a great example of people who can talk over each other and yet they’re clearly listening at the same time, because their brains are synced in a way, and they’re improv people, so they can just keep building and building and building in ways that are delightful. I love it when I see people who are doing that really well. Cool.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Craig, our main topic here, this came from a recent issue of Inneresting. It was a recap of an old post of mine where I was talking about the things you do that make your writing unique, that you aren’t even aware that makes your writing unique. I also include a quote from Dara Resnick, where she was talking about how sometimes on a writing staff, one of your real goals is to lose your style and just mimic the showrunner style.

I thought I would talk for a few minutes about the kinds of things that are unique to one writer, where if a script dropped on your desk, Craig, and it didn’t have a title page on it, you could sometimes tell, “Oh, this was written by this person.”

**Craig:** Some of that stuff is magic and hard to parse out. Sometimes it’s almost scary to parse it out. I certainly don’t want to do that to my own stuff. Have you ever seen the Aaron Sorkin supercut?

**John:** I think I know what you’re talking about, which is basically just the dialog thing that does always happen in Sorkin dialog.

**Craig:** Exactly. There’s this collection that they’ve pulled from, all the years of West Wing and whatever the SNL show was and Sports Night and A Few Good Men and all the movies. There are these phrases and comments and styles and things that just keep coming up over and over and over. It’s not really self-plagiarism as much as it is just the fingerprint. It’s the style. Now, he’s a very stylistic writer. Part of knowing that it’s Aaron Sorkin is the hyper-literacy and the speed and all the rest of it. Everybody I think who’s good has a signature to them. Figuring out what comprises that is really interesting.

**John:** With Sorkin, there are words that you can cut together in a supercut. In other cases, it’s actually a little bit hard to parse. I’ll put a link in the show notes to this story about how they figured out how that Robert Galbraith, the writer, was actually JK Rowling. It was just basically forensic linguistics.

**Craig:** That was her nom de plume.

**John:** Nom de plume, her pen name. It was a secret that she was Robert Galbraith. There had been some rumors that it could be her. What they did is they went through and they compared the texts and they looked for sequences of adjacent words, sequences of characters, and a third test was on the most common words, and a fourth was about the author’s preference for long or short words. Basically, that’s what builds up that fingerprint. It’s like, “Oh, we are 90% certain that this is actually the same person writing these two things.” These were not deliberate choices that Rowling was making. It’s just that that’s just what happens. It’s just like you do things just because that’s how your brain works.

**Craig:** We can hear each other in our rhythm. Sometimes people will do an impression of me. When they do, I go, “Oh yeah, that does sound familiar,” but I’m not sure that if somebody had done that and not told me ahead of time that it was me, that I would’ve known it was me. Can you do an impression of me?

**John:** Not at all. I can’t do impressions of anything. That’s actually one of my biggest frustrations. You’re actually quite good at hearing and being able to do impressions or do accents. It’s just not a thing I’m good at. I can do it in my head. Can you do an impression of me?

**Craig:** Yeah, I can do an impression of you.

**John:** Let’s do it.

**Craig:** There’s a lot of stuff that comes out quickly, but yeah. Okay, moving on. It’s a rhythm thing. My impression of you, it’s not a great impression, because most of what makes you idiosyncratic is the speed of your speech and the rhythm of it. What people always do when they do an impression of me is they’re like, “So. Everything’s huge. Then when you talk you’re big.” I’m like, I guess. Maybe. I don’t know. Megana, can you do an impression of me?

****Megana:**** I think an impression of you would be difficult to do, because you do take these pauses, but then in order to do the impression of you, I’d have to also replicate the eloquence that comes after the pause, and that would be very difficult to do.

**Craig:** You know what? You’ve won my heart.

**John:** Just that was a very Craig, like da da, da da da da. You also pitch up. I think you have a much more tonal range than I do or that a lot of speakers do.

**Craig:** I’m a singer.

**John:** You’re a singer.

**Craig:** I like to sing.

**John:** You’re a natural singer.

**Craig:** I guess my point bringing all this up and having fun with it is I don’t make those choices and you don’t make those choices and Megana doesn’t make those choices, why we talk the way we talk and why we have the patterns we have. All of that then I think is translatable or at least analogous to the weirdness of the way we write, but I don’t think I necessarily write the way I talk. I don’t think you write the way you talk. It’s this whole other thing.

**John:** Honestly, we write more similar than you would guess, because as we were working on the Scriptnotes book, one of the big jobs is to take the Scriptnotes transcripts, as we’re having a conversation about scene length or something, and so you and I are having a back-and-forth conversation. When we try to just turn it into a chapter with just prose, literally our sentences do fit together pretty well. We don’t read that different on the page, which is useful.

**Craig:** We’re like an old married couple that starts looking like each other.

**John:** Let’s talk about things that are different between-

**Craig:** I just want to keep upsetting Megana, like, “Aw. Aw.”

**John:** Let’s talk about some of the things that are different that you can notice on a screenplay page about one writer versus another writer. This is a list I had in my blog post, but we may add to this. How you handle unfinished end-of-line punctuation. Are you two dashes? Are you an ellipses? What are the situations where you’d use an ellipsis versus two dashes. It’s personal style. There’s not one precise right answer.

**Craig:** You want to try and be consistent within your screenplay. What do you do, by the way?

**John:** I have two dashes if it’s literally cut off and ellipsis if it’s trailing off.

**Craig:** Same. I probably use ellipses more than most writers. I know I do. I’m a big fan.

**John:** I use ellipses less than I used to. I used to use ellipses for everything, but I now do a lot of two dashes.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** How much uppercase do you use within scene description? Some people just will uppercase a lot more for emphasis. Some people are really spare with the uppercase.

**Craig:** One of the things I’ve found over time is that my uppercasing tends to increase when I’m writing either… Usually when I’m writing action or something that maybe you wouldn’t define as action but is very physical, like physical humor or something like that.t

**John:** Absolutely. It’s sometimes that uppercasing can be a way to indicate, this is a shot, this is a shot, this is a shot, or there’s other reasons why you’re using it there. Parentheticals. Are you using parentheticals as say to mean a beat, for clarity, like joking, or how to play this in quotes, “Please die in a fire.” Basically, are you using it for all line things? Those are all valid choices, just different ways to use the parenthetical.

**Craig:** Some people never use them.

**John:** Never. Commas and comma usage, very distinctive. You can use them sensibly. You can use them in an Oxford way. You can use them in any way that makes sense.

**Craig:** The Oxford way is sensible.

**John:** Often using commas and whether you use them to break off any kind of phrase. If I’m going through and editing someone else’s script, I will move commas all the time and realize that’s just pointless, because they’re just using commas the way they use commas.

**Craig:** We aren’t writing articles for the New Yorker where there’s a style guide, although I will say that Mrs. Gilligan’s comma lessons in high school have stayed with me. I think about the proper, correct, and orthodox use of commas all the time.

**John:** Profanity. Is it a spaceship or a giant effing spaceship? Just how often are you using the F word and other words in your script is very distinctive. In the JJ Abrams universe, all those Lost scripts, they will use a lot of that. They’re very punchy and loud and take you by the shoulders and shake you. That’s just the style. If you’re writing in one of those shows, you should write in that style, because otherwise, it’s going to feel wrong for the show.

**Craig:** That must be really difficult to do. I’ve never had to do that to write in someone else’s actual on-the-page style. I can see how that would be very tricky to do. Then it also implies one reason why showrunners have to then run everything through their own typewriter, even if it’s minimally about let’s say improving things. Sometimes you just need to conform it.

**John:** That was the point that Dara was making there and what I’ll link to, is that especially that first script you turn in as a staff writer on a show needs to look as much like the showrunner’s script as possible, so they read this and they can actually read it without having to just immediately go, “This is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong.” They can actually read it like it’s their own script. That’s tough, but you gotta do it.

**Craig:** I’m imagining me reading a script for my show that wasn’t at all like my scripts, and I’m starting to sweat. It’s bad.

**John:** How characters see events within a scene. Do they clock them, spot them, notice them, spy them? There’s various choices you can make. Nothing’s wrong.

**Craig:** It’s okay to be repetitive or, I don’t know, self-copying there, because that stuff’s not going to be on screen literally. If it helps you to fall back on some phrases that work for you and help define for the reader what you see, that’s great. Try and avoid repeating them within the same script, but if you have some go-tos, there’s nothing wrong with that.

**John:** Transitions, is it a cut-to for every new scene or do cut-tos mostly go away? Just style. Also, I think cut-tos tend to vanish because we want to get pages shorter, but it’s really whatever you need to do.

Paragraph length. What is the upper limit in terms of numbers of lines? On this podcast, often in our Three Page Challenges, we’re urging people to keep those paragraphs short. Three lines or less is great for a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean they all have to be that way. David Koepp writes giant blocks of text.

**Craig:** He does.

**John:** It happens. It works.

**Craig:** He’s great. He’s great. I think we’ve probably said it so many times that it is maybe finally sinking in, although I doubt it, among all the people out there. All these things, there are I wouldn’t call best practices as much as better practices. Nothing that we do can make bad good, and nothing that we do can make good bad. That’s the deal. If it’s good, it’s okay to have that long paragraph if that’s the way you vibe.

Going back to the paragraph that Todd Field puts on the preface page of Tár, that is how many… It is a brick of text. One, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Ten-line paragraph. That’s not three lines or fewer. I loved reading that paragraph, because it was good.

**John:** Good paragraph. Finally, and this is probably I think a thing I can definitely notice from one writer to another, is how to handle simultaneous or overlapping dialog. Are they doing side-by-sides a lot, or are they doing a parenthetical for overlapping? Are they just making it clear that stuff is overlapping in the scene description around it?

There’s not one precise, right way to do it. Writers can get incredibly granular. When Greta Gerwig was on, she puts a slash in the first character’s dialog where the next character is going to be overlapping them. It’s incredibly precise. A lot of times, I’ll just say “overlapping” and I won’t worry about doing side-by-sides. It’s going to work in the moment.

**Craig:** I use the side-by-side, but I rarely, very rarely do simultaneous dialog. That’s not because I think it’s wrong. It’s basically stylistically, and perhaps this reflects the way you and I have these discussions, I like when people aren’t talking over each other, and other writers love when people are talking over each other. That’s okay. It’s a tonal thing. Similarly, how many words per sentence do characters say?

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Some people really love having characters talk at length. Tarantino will have characters talk at length at times. Other people listen quietly. They do not interrupt. Go to Samuel Beckett and read Waiting for Godot. There are just strips of pages where Vladimir and Estragon are saying two lines two words each, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. That’s part of the fingerprint.

**John:** We had Taffy Brodesser-Akner on the show. The dialog for Fleishman Is in Trouble, those are long lines. It’s not just that people have a lot of lines together. One of their lines could be much, much, much longer of a sentence than I would ever feel comfortable doing. It works because it works and because she has really good actors who can pull it off. There’s no right or wrong. You could recognize Taffy’s writing from someone else’s writing. It’d be hard to write in Taffy’s style.

**Craig:** It should be. That’s part of the sign that your style is unique, and therefore you are expressing your voice, is that other people… You can maybe do a goof version of it, a satire, but you can’t do it. If anyone could do it, then anyone would do it.

**John:** Let’s talk about situations where we have had to rewrite somebody or choose not to rewrite somebody and actually just blend in, because a lot of times, as feature writers, we would get scripts, and sometimes we are doing a massive overhaul on something. I’m like, “Okay, I see these scenes here. I’m the showrunner. Everything’s going through my typewriter. I’m going to put out a new thing that is in my voice. I’m going to clean it up and make things consistent.”

In some cases, I think that was helpful, because I wasn’t the second writer, I was the seventh writer, and there was a bunch of little pace jobs [inaudible 00:49:52] it wasn’t reading like one document. It was sometimes just me running through the whole thing. It just was a much better read for me having done that. In other cases, I’m just doing two scenes here. It’s doing no one any favors for me to try to change things or make this feel different.

I’ve had to adapt to people’s styles. I’ve done more things in caps than I would’ve put in uppercase, because that’s the rest of the script. What’s been your experience?

**Craig:** All over the place.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Honestly, all over the place. Sometimes, more often than not, when I’m doing the kind of work you’re describing, there’s also some preexisting work. A lot of these things, most movies that come out have either a preexisting film because they’re a sequel or they’re based on something, and so there’s other work that you can look back on and investigate.

I don’t really get too worked up over how I do the things that aren’t spoken or aren’t on screen. The things that are spoken and are on screen, I try and stay consistent within the character. Sometimes, the reason that you’re there is because people aren’t happy with the voice, or you can also come and say…

As you’re saying, there’s this patchwork quilt, and someone has to make it all seem like it was from one mind. That is a challenge. It’s a challenge to do something like that without… The phrase I use is, sometimes you have to pull permits, it’s that kind of work, and sometimes you don’t. When you have to pull permits, that means we’re going to be doing quite a bit here. Then you have to undo a lot. It depends on the situation. The spectrum is rather broad for those jobs.

**John:** I’m thinking of once doing a job where the first half of the script was really great. I really did not want to touch any of it. There were some real significant things that needed to change in the second half. I had to make a choice, like am I going to go back and rewrite all this first half so it’s going to match what I’m doing for the second half, or am I just going to write this new stuff in the style of the first one?

It was a challenge to do, but it actually made sense. Hopefully, the characters’ voices I was able to be consistent, which is great, because we didn’t want to touch those. Even just the scene description making it just feel like it was one thing, that there wasn’t a sudden change in how the whole thing read and felt. Even examples of keeping whatever, their INT period versus INT not period style, sure, I’ll do that. I wanted it to feel like it was the same writer the whole way through.

**Craig:** If there’s a very idiosyncratic, clear style going on, I’m not going to be a jerk and just start doing… I’m not going to go through and be like, “Okay, first things first, all these two spaces after the period have to turn into one space.” That’s just evil, so I try not to do those things.

**John:** Obviously, the last thing is if you’re in a situation where you’re generating changed pages with stars in the margins, you’re going to be much more conservative about making that kind of stuff, because you’re not going to release a new page just because you’ve changed two dashes into a long hyphen. No one wants that.

**Craig:** No one.

**John:** No one wants that. What people do want are One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** It’s time for that. I referenced this earlier. This is an article by Adam Mastroianni on his Substack, called Good Conversations Have Lots of Doorknobs. He’s really talking about how in a conversation, you tend to have givers and takers. Givers are people who put a lot of stuff out. Takers are people who are just receiving stuff in.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** There’s an improv quality to a conversation, where you’re yes, and-ing and you’re keeping the ball up in the air. When you have two givers, that can be sometimes a little bit frustrating, because it can feel like no one’s actually receiving. If you have two takers, no one is actually throwing a ball out there to get things going.

What I liked about his discussion is, it’s not just diagnosing the problem but offering some solutions, which is basically affordances, which are the big, easily graspable doorknobs of the conversation. His example of an affordance, if you ask the question, “Why do you think you and your brother turned out so differently?” There’s a lot of possible answers to that. You would have to see how it goes on.

No affordance would be, “How many of your grandparents are still alive?” That’s a number. It doesn’t invite a further discussion. You can take that, “How many of your grandparents are still alive?” and do some judo on it to send it back through, to say, “Both my grandparents are still alive, which has really been remarkable because of this, because I can do these things, and I have these insights,” but it’s tougher.

Just always be thinking in a conversation, next time you’re at a party or whatever, Megana, as you’re getting another virus, think about how do you say things in a way that invites the person to build upon that, rather than just letting it drop there.

**Craig:** I love just this drive-by shooting of Megana, like that’s her problem.

**John:** All the parties she goes to.

**Craig:** I really like this a lot. What it’s prompting for me is how useful this concept is for people who are on the autism spectrum, because this is exactly the kind of… We lump these things into so-called social skills. Social skills is such a broad term it’s almost useless. There’s also this weird judgey-ness to that phrase that I don’t love. What I love about this is, if somebody has a hyper-analytical mind, this is a way for them to understand why certain things are more engaging and more interesting for other people, because that’s something that sometimes people on the spectrum have trouble with. I’m definitely giving this to my kid. I think she’ll be really interested in this. I think she’ll like this.

**John:** The other thing I would say is that everything that applies to real-life dialog applies to movie dialog as well. As you’re writing dialog scenes, be thinking about naturally you are doing this as a writer anyway. It may be helpful to think about how you are letting this character get to the next thing out of that character, the next thing out of this character, and by the same token, are they deliberately not doing that, and is that part of the frustration and conflict of the scene.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. This is really useful for thinking about characters, because we don’t want our characters to be fully actualized. All the foibles are what make them interesting. If somebody is trying to chat up a girl at the bar and he asks a dead-end question or as Adam calls it, no affordance, then it’s interesting. You can see the other person struggling with that. I love this. It’s very insightful.

**John:** Craig, in the second episode of your show, there’s a moment early on where Joel is having a conversation. They’re in that-

**Craig:** Salon.

**John:** … salon, and they’re having a conversation. He gives up on the conversation. I really liked that moment, because it felt true to conversations that I don’t see very often, where a person just buries their last line, like, “I guess I’m done talking, but nothing’s really resolved for me.” That felt like a situation that I just hadn’t seen so often on film.

**Craig:** I’m glad you liked it. Joel is a really interesting character to write, because how much he decides to say… He mostly doesn’t talk. It’ll be interesting for people I think if the season goes on, if they’re watching. He’s not going to always not talk. Let’s put it that way. It’s impactful when he does. When he starts talking, it’s impactful.

**John:** What do you have for us?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is The Case of the Golden Idol. Now this is a game that normally I wouldn’t be playing, because it’s not on iOS. It is currently on Steam. Neil Druckmann, my partner in crime over at The Last of Us, urged me to get the Steam Deck. Are you familiar with the Steam Deck?

**John:** Tell me what the Steam Deck is.

**Craig:** Steam Deck is a handheld game console, not dissimilar from say the handheld Switch, that is designed to tie into your Steam account and play Steam games. You can play them handheld. It’s got a touchscreen. The touchscreen isn’t iPad quality. It doesn’t need to be. It’s got multiple joysticks and buttons and other buttons and trigger buttons. It can basically cover the control system of any game. It’s very portable.

I bought it and played this game that Neil loves, called The Case of the Golden Idol, and now I love it. It’s fascinating. It’s one of those retro style games that’s very much about the pixel art, which generally I hate, because I’m like, I grew up with that crap.

**John:** We’ve moved on.

**Craig:** I want good graphics. It’s this very strange concept. Each chapter, there are 12 of them, is a murder has taken place. They’re all loosely connected by the story of this golden idol, which is cursed, clearly. Typically, each murder situation has two or three screens of stuff. On each one of them, there are clickable areas where you can just start collecting information. What you have to do is piece together what happened based on all the clues and bits of information that are there. You have to figure out who is this person, what’s his name, what’s her name, and what have they done and what is this and blah blah blah.

It gets increasingly challenging, to the point where sometimes I’m just sitting there just staring at this thing for 40 minutes, going, “What am I missing?” Then when you finally get it, you’re like, “Ah!” It’s a lot of fun. If you have Steam, check out The Case of the Golden Idol. If you have a Steam Deck, certainly do. I think it plays very nicely on that device.

**John:** Cool. Nice. Exciting.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Don’t know him.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Luke Yoquinto, who discovered this in the score to Coming to America by Nile Rodgers. What we’re playing is actually a clip from the score to Coming to America, but it actually has the Scriptnotes theme in it. We have time-traveled back to put it into existing movie scores.

**Craig:** Well done.

**John:** If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on advice to a producer. Craig, Megana, thank you so much for a fun show.

****Megana:**** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, here’s what I have. A friend of a friend is a producer in the UK and has a project for which he’s brought on a writer. The project is based on a true story. It’s required a lot of research. This is a relatively new writer but a really good writer who’s from the region, been doing the research, and everything’s very promising. The problem is the producer’s just not getting a draft out of this writer. He’s waiting. There’s whole machineries that it really looks like this movie could happen, but he needs a script.

The producer emailed me just to say, “Hey, do you have any advice for how I should not be an asshole but get the writer to deliver this script? The writer has had a lot of personal issues and things going on in their life that’s made it incredibly difficult. How do we do this?” I wrote back with some of my advice. I’m curious what your advice might be for this producer on how to get this draft out of this writer and what you think might be going on.

**Craig:** There could be all sorts of things going on. At the end of the day, is the writer being paid?

**John:** The writer’s being paid.

**Craig:** No matter what’s going on in our lives, if we are being paid, we are professional by definition, which means we have to behave professionally, which means we either hit our deadlines or we sit down with the employer and we say, “Here’s what’s going on in my life. Here’s why I can’t go through that deadline. I’m giving you the choice now of what to do. I would like to continue. I would like extra time so I can do my job. I need to let you know that this is what’s going on, because it changes the arrangement.” That’s how a professional handles things. It doesn’t sound like this writer is necessarily handling these things professionally. That doesn’t mean that I’m not incredibly sympathetic to whatever problems they’re having. I am, but it’s a job.

The question that I would ask the producer is, do you think that this writer is changeable or not, because there are some writers that it doesn’t matter what you do, they have a rhythm and a process that is unaffectable by you, the moon, anything. Nothing will ever change it. They are as they are. The only question that you have to ask yourself as a producer is, is it worth it or not, because that’s nothing I can do about this. It’s like I’m yelling at clouds.

If it seems like they are the kind of writer that would respond to change, then I think it’s fair to say, “Okay, because this is a professional relationship, I have to create boundaries. The boundary is I need a script by this date, which is already beyond the date that we agreed on. If it doesn’t come in by that date, I’m going to have to talk to another writer.”

**John:** I think ultimately you need to get to that ultimatum and to that point where it makes it clear. I think there are some steps before you get to that point that could be useful. That’s what I urged the producer to start at.

First off, to understand from the writer’s perspective, the writer feels shitty. I think the writer is aware that they’re late and that they’re holding things up, and they feel bad about it. Feeling bad about it is not helping them write the scripts. They’re not a writer who it seems that that bad feeling is motivating. It seems maybe it’s the opposite. Being late is not helping them get it written.

I think they may also be having a problem that they’re not willing to tell you about, which is that they may be struggling with a script with a story in ways that they are embarrassed about. They just cannot figure it out. They could probably use someone, either you or somebody else, to just talk to about what’s going on, because they may have lost hope or faith or any joy in writing it. That may be really the issue here.

Going back earlier in the episode, we talked about script consultants or that kind of thing. I think you may need to find some other writer who can sit down with them to talk to them about what it is that they’re writing, what’s exciting about it to them, where the problems are, and see if you can get a little of that shaken out.

There could also just be some actual… You’re saying this writer has some struggles in their life. You may need to help provide some structure for their writing time, which basically is like, “Would it help if I got you an office for a month? That way you could just come in on a daily basis and sit down and do your work, because maybe something’s going on at home that is making it really tough for you to write in your normal space.”

Just be aware that there could be some other way you’re going to be able to get them to do the thing. I would try those things first before bringing out the stick of, “If I don’t have it by this date, I’m going to have to cut you off.”

**Craig:** Certainly, it’s nothing anybody wants, but there are people that just need the structure of consequence. It’s not evil consequence. It’s not unjustified consequence. They just need to know that this is there. There are situations, again, where you may say to yourself, “I have a madman genius on my hands, and I need to just let him go through this insanity, and what’s going to happen on the other end is something great.”

One of the things that I’ve always tried to stress to people I worked with is, if I say I need eight weeks, and you’re telling me you really want it in six weeks, what you’re saying is two weeks of time is more important than you getting it right.

My response is always, those two weeks are going to cost you so much more time than two weeks, because if you get something that’s unworkable, unsellable, unproducable, unshootable, guess what? You’re back to square one. You’re going to have to start all over again anyway. First, you’re going to have to find another writer. That takes time. Then they’re going to have to do it. Then they’re going to run into trouble. You have to do the math in your head. One of the most frustrating parts of being a producer is how you are accountable to the outcome, but you are not in control of the outcome.

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** That’s tricky.

**John:** Craig, you’re talking about estimating the time it’s going to take you to do a thing. You’re an experienced screenwriter who’s been through this. You’ve written 50 scripts. This writer probably hasn’t and probably has a very limited ability to estimate how long it’s going to take them to do that work. That may be a situation too.

It looks like the producer has actually been able to read some stuff that the writer has done on the project, which is why the producer’s so excited to have the writer finish it, because it’s apparently really good.

I think one of the things that may be important in this conversation is to really stress to the writer how much you love what they’ve delivered so far, because sometimes writing feels hopeless. Just putting that hope back in there can really do it.

I definitely can remember meetings where I’ve been really bummed about a project, I go into it, and then in that discussion something comes up that’s like, “Oh yeah, now I’m actually genuinely excited to write this thing that I was dreading this morning.” That does turn around.

**Craig:** One bit of practical advice that I would suggest is to maybe, since currently most days I suspect the writer is writing zero pages, say to the writer, “Okay, here’s the plan we’re putting you on, and you must do it. Every day, Monday through Friday, you must write one page. That’s it.” You’ve now reduced the burden and the expectation, which can be crushing sometimes, down to something that seems very achievable. One page. One.

What will happen, almost always, is that once the writer starts writing their one page, they will end up three or four pages later. It’s how our minds work. It’s the starting that is so hard. If you can just give them this, because even if they write one page a day, five pages a week, in a couple of months, you’re going to be doing just fine, and certainly better than you’re doing now anyway. Maybe just smallifying things might help.

**John:** Megana, what perspectives are we missing here? Anything that is striking you as you listen to this?

**Craig:** Actually…

****Megana:**** No. I think you’re right. I love the advice that you gave about encouraging this writer, because I just remember when I was in college, I had a roommate who was a real perfectionist and was not sending their thesis advisor the chapters or whatever that they needed to be doing and was just getting herself into such a hole of perfection and misery and doubt. I was like, “You’re smart. I’m sure that the work is fine and good enough.” I think sometimes with a screenplay, it’s this big thing to figure out. I worry that this person is just in a shame spiral. I love the tactics that you offer this producer to help them out of that.

**John:** On the second Arlo Finch book, I fell behind. I was running late to deliver my first draft. Again, as a professional, I did reach out to my editor and say, “Hey, I’m running behind. Let me talk to you about what the problem is.” She’s like, “Okay, I get this. Let’s make a plan for how you’re going to finish it. Basically, why don’t you take two or three days to just outline the rest of this, figure out what those problems are going to be, and how you’re going to be able to deliver this on time. We’ll reset all the rest of the deadlines to make this work.” Starting that conversation was incredibly stressful, but at the end of it, I just felt such a relief, because I didn’t feel so trapped.

It’s possible this screenwriter feels trapped and stuck. They worry they’re not going to be able to deliver anything that’s going to nearly good enough or to do the job whatsoever. Having that conversation, being that editor in that situation, could be the way out.

**Craig:** That’s good advice.

**John:** Cool. Thanks, guys.

**Craig:** Thank you.

****Megana:**** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Scriptnotes episodes with 2023 Oscar Nominees [Sarah Polley](https://johnaugust.com/2023/the-one-with-sarah-polley), [Rian Johnson](https://johnaugust.com/2022/rian-johnson-returns), [Daniels](https://johnaugust.com/2022/the-daniels), [Pamela Ribon](https://johnaugust.com/2018/holiday-live-show-2018)
* [Weekend Read Beta](https://testflight.apple.com/join/zDf4Fw9c) Try it out — now updated with all FYC scripts!
* [Writing in another writer’s style](https://johnaugust.com/2014/writing-in-another-writers-style) on John’s blog with advice from [Dara Resnick Creasey](https://twitter.com/BadassMomWriter)
* [Algorithms were able to figure out that Robert Galbraith was JK Rowling](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-did-computers-uncover-jk-rowlings-pseudonym-180949824/)
* [Good Conversations Have Lots of Doorknobs](https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/good-conversations-have-lots-of-doorknobs) by Adam Mastroianni
* [The Case of The Golden Idol](https://www.thegoldenidol.com) game
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Luke Yoquinto, who discovered it in the score to Coming to America by Nile Rodgers ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/585standard.mp3).