Search Results for: 3 page challenge

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/intelligence-vs-charisma).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name’s Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 541 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, which trades are the most important when it comes to a career in screenwriting? We’ll wade into the discourse to help you maximize your stats.

**Craig:** Awesome. It’s like the Elden Ring of screenwriting. I love it.

**John:** 100%. We’re going to min-max the heck out of you.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Then it’s a new round of the Three-Page Challenge, where we take a look at entries from our listeners and tell them it doesn’t really matter because it’s all a social game anyway.

**Craig:** Wait, what does that mean, it’s all a social game anyway? What does that mean?

**John:** We’ll get into that. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, you know who doesn’t do a lot of their own writing?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Composers. We’ll take a look at film and TV scores and how they’re written and ghostwritten.

**Craig:** I want a ghostwriter.

**John:** I want a ghostwriter.

**Craig:** [Cross-talk 00:00:47].

**John:** A ghostwriter feels pretty good right now. Craig, mixed news on the labor front this past week. Gizmodo, which is represented by WG East, reached a new contract with Kotaku and the other websites that they write for. That’s great news. They went on strike. They were picketing around. They got a new contract. Congratulations to them.

**Craig:** Very good.

**John:** We like when writers get contracts, union contracts. Meanwhile, we still don’t have a deal for the Animation Guild, which represents folks in animation, including animation writers. There’s still ongoing efforts to try to get a new deal there. I recorded a video in support of animation writing, reminding everybody that animation writing is writing. I’m frustrated. I really hope that we can get a better deal for the folks who need to work under the Animation Guild contract. I will remind everybody that writing under a WGA contract is a good way to improve your life as a person who is writing for features and television.

**Craig:** This is going to be a tough one, for all the reasons we said before. In case people are just checking in now, the Writers Guild does represent some animation writing, notably primetime television animation box. The Animation Guild represents most animation writers, story artists who do narrative work, who are unionized at all. The Animation Guild is part of IATSE. There are also a lot of people writing in animation without unique contracts at all. Pixar, for instance, non-union. It’s a tricky fight for the Animation Guild, because they very much are a small Rebel force facing up against a fairly large Death Star, but as you know, there is one exhaust port that leads directly to the reactor.

**John:** A thing I just want to remind our listeners is that if you are creating a new animation project, you got a choice. You got a choice whether you are going to sell that project to a place that will force you to take an Animation Guild deal or a non-union deal, or you can say, you know what, I’m going to take a Writers Guild deal or bust. I think you’re going to find more writers who have the leverage to say that just say that.

**Craig:** You’ll also find a lot of people getting bust. They’re going to be tough about this. I don’t want to make it rosier than it is. I was able to do this once. I was successful in doing it, because what they do is they just can create a company.

**John:** That’s all they have to do.

**Craig:** That is a signatory to the Writers Guild. They create companies all day long, the way that we all generate laundry for ourselves. They can do it, but it’s a precedential issue for them. It’s a big fight. You just have to be aware that when we say… You might have to go in there and say it’s WGA or bust. That bust is a real option.

**John:** Bust is a real option.

**Craig:** They may just say, “Okay, then we’re not doing it.”

**John:** That’s always a choice. Craig, did you follow any of this story? This is a screenwriter who is suing their management company for breach of contract. We’ll put a link from the show notes to this. This is really interesting. This is a writer who had created a project, and his management company said, “Oh, you should sell it to this company. Here’s the deal you’re going to be able to make,” and had not apparently fully disclosed that they were actually a producer and an investor in this company. It feels very breach of contracty to me. It feels like people were not doing their fiduciary duties as managers, to me. Not a lawyer, not a lawyer, reminding everyone, but I can see what the arguments are here.

**Craig:** The problem is, managers don’t hide what they are. I’m not sure it is a breach of contract of fiduciary duty, because they are literally telling you, “We’re not talent agents. We can’t procure you employment,” although they do that all the time, and also we do produce things that our clients do. There is an inherent conflict of interest in that. It’s wide open and blatant for everyone to see, which is why I get so frustrated when anyone recommends managers as the solution for whatever problems we may have with agents. They’re not.

I think management as a whole is a deeply problematic profession in our business, particularly as it relates to writers, for this very reason. They tell you up front that it’ll work out great for you if they produce the work you do, because you won’t have to pay any commission on the money you make. The problem is, once they’re producers, they’re management. They are deeply incentivized to have you be paid as little as possible. You never want to decouple your income from your representative’s income.

I just find all of management, the entire thing to be problematic, and so I am entirely on Kurt McLeod’s side. He’s the writer who’s suing here. I am concerned that a court may look at this and say, “Oh, you went to murderers and then they murdered.” That’s what they do. I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know how to clean up the management business. It’s inherently troubled.

**John:** We can’t clean up the industry as a whole, but what we could do for a writer in this situation is to say, you need somebody else looking at your deal in your contract. That person who actually has by law, clear fiduciary duties to you would be a lawyer. I do feel that if a lawyer had looked through these contracts and really examined them, would have been in a better position to say, “Listen, this does not feel right, and the cap they’re trying to put on this does not make sense. This does not track with my own experience with what these budgets are going to be. I think there’s a problem here.” I would just urge any writer who’s dealing with a manager who may be involved in these productions to get an outside opinion on this from a lawyer who actually knows what there doing.

**Craig:** Just caveat scriptor. We’ve said it many times. They’ve told you what they are. Believe them. I am extraordinary wary of managers. I had one once.

**John:** Yeah, you did.

**Craig:** I fired him.

**John:** You like to fire managers. That’s a thing Craig likes to do.

**Craig:** Did it once, felt great.

**John:** Let’s have some happier follow-up. We had Jack Thorne on the podcast. He was talking about the need for accessibility coordinators on sets on productions to make sure that folks who need things on set or things in production to let them do their best job would have someone that they could go to for this. It looks like in the UK, ScreenSkills is stepping up to help fund this for productions of a certain size.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Accessibility coordinators will be a thing happening at least in the UK, soonish, the same way that we have intimacy coordinators to make sure that sex scenes and sexual material is handled in ways that are appropriate to the performers and everyone else on the set. We have COVID coordinators who are there to make sure that the sets are safe for COVID protocols. Having an accessibility coordinator feels like a right, smart step for everyone involved in production to make sure that we are thinking ahead about really just fundamental things like where are the bathrooms and are the bathrooms accessible for everybody.

**Craig:** That’s great. We are currently shooting an episode with a deaf actor, the child. We have all sorts of folks that have come and joined us so that we can do this right, including a director of ASL and translator. It’s shocking to me that people wouldn’t have done this already in the first place with anyone who has a disability. Now, with unseen disabilities, we talked about invisible disabilities with Jack, and those are tougher, because sometimes you just don’t know.

When you think of how much money productions spend on things that are just a bit wasteful, honestly, weird decisions, bad decisions, confusion, “Oh, you only wanted one car? We got you 80 cars,” all things like this, the expenses for people to help other people feel welcome and capable and cared for and thought of is nothing. It’s negligible. We should always be doing it. Jack is a terrific person. He’s a saint and he’s done the saint’s work here. I think it’s great that UK has stepped up to fund the training, because that’s the most important thing. We can’t just send people in there who have a title. They need to actually know something, because everyone’s going to be relying on them.

**John:** It’s making sure that these coordinators are actually trained, you’re hiring a person who really knows what the heck they’re doing.

**Craig:** Otherwise you’re just handing somebody an extra $500 a week to pretend to do something.

**John:** Jack is a person we spoke to on the show, but of there’s a bunch of other people behind the scenes doing this. We’ll link after the article that really highlights the work that they’ve been doing too.

**Craig:** I only give credit to Jack. [Cross-talk 00:08:56].

**John:** Craig, this last week my daughter was working on a rewrite for an essay she was doing for school. She was doing an essay on Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It was a pretty good essay. She’d done a rough draft that she turned in, and then she had to do a rewrite. She had to do revisions on it. I was talking through with her what my process would be on revisions, and she rolled her eyes, because that’s what a teenager should do. She was rolling her eyes.

As I was thinking about this, I came across this article that Jeffrey Lieber had written about his rewrite map. It’s basically when he gets notes on doing the next pass on something, he tries to avoid that paralysis of just not doing anything by actually really thinking systematically about, this is the work I need to do, creating a separate document that’s like, here’s the checklist of what I have to do. Here are the scenes. Here’s how it’s going to affect every scene. I thought we might spend a few minutes thinking about that in terms of how you approach a rewrite, how you approach a significant revision, so that you are actually doing what you need to do and not moving commas around.

**Craig:** It is its own organizational task. I can see here from what we’re looking at that lists are important, a list of tasks, to-do lists. Those are very good for what I would call the more easily or focused notes to achieve, having to go through this list, ah, in this scene I need to make sure that so-and-so appears, in this scene I need to change that line from this to this. Then there’s just a conceptual rewrite kind of thing which I think comes first. We have your big things and we have your little things. The little things go into lists gorgeously. The big things don’t. The big things just need to take the same kind of time and thought that initial preparation does.

**John:** In some cases, what you may need to do for those bigger rewrites is really think about, okay, what is this episode, this movie, this series, what does it want to become, where is it trying to go to, and really think about where are the big strokes things that I need to do. Once you have this overall plan for this is what the movie’s going to become, then you will be able to make some sort of task list things for the new stuff that needs to happen, new stuff that will change.

I do often find that, and I’ve said this on the show many times, is that it’s going to be most helpful to really think about this from a new document point of view, and what are you going to bring from the current document into this new document versus trying to just make the changes in that original document, because so often then you will find yourself saving too much. You’ll be so concerned about this perfect sentence that you had, that you won’t be looking at what the overall goals are of this brand new thing that you’re creating. It’s really an adaptation of your previous work into the next work.

**Craig:** I think sometimes all it needs, and I feel for Amy, because I suspect she didn’t get this, is time. You just need time to let the other one go a bit, the way that sometimes if you’re working on a puzzle and you get stuck, you come back the next day and you just see stuff.

**John:** You see where all the jigsaw puzzle pieces really want to go.

**Craig:** No, I was talking about a puzzle, John, a puzzle that you solve.

**John:** Yeah, exactly, a jigsaw puzzle.

**Craig:** No. Sorry.

**John:** With all the pieces that go in. Sometimes you get like, oh here’s the bumps and here’s the connects.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** You’re like, oh does that row actually fit into that row?

**Craig:** It would never happen.

**John:** [Cross-talk 00:12:00] similar?

**Craig:** Literally would never happen, because it’s just this rote task of just pushing pieces of cardboard into each other. It’s not a puzzle, and time won’t help you. Nothing will help you. Nothing. It’s not a puzzle. It’s a smashed picture.

**John:** Here’s what did help Amy with rewriting her essay is that she came up with her new thesis statement and she went and talked to her teacher about like, “This is what I think my new thesis statement is.” That was a five-minute meeting. She’s like, “Yeah, that’s great. I can see how your essay’s going to revolve around that.” She picked a new thesis that could actually find evidence that was supported in the text and could bring in the stuff that was useful in what she’d already written. Many times really what you’re doing with a rewrite is going back to what is the thesis for this new thing that I’m trying to write.

**Craig:** Yeah, going back to basics. You are writing a new thing, but you get a huge head start. You’ve learned a lot of lessons from the first thing. It’s important to also not forget the good stuff. You don’t want to leave the good stuff behind. There are things that people connected to. It’s fair to want to try and preserve things as you go.

Rewriting is, like everything in writing, a product of experience. The more you do it, the better off you get at it. You get faster. You get smarter about what to keep and what to not keep. You get I think more efficient about not having to go backwards and forwards quite so much. With all the stuff, just doing it… I know we do a podcast, and I know that the point of the podcast, in part, is to help people, but there’s only so much we can do. Really, if you listen to all these podcasts, I think we might save you 1 year out of 20 years of experiencing, which is a lot, by the way, I think.

**John:** Which is a lot.

**Craig:** I think a year is an enormous amount.

**John:** It’s a good amount. I’ve been thinking about, listen, if she could tolerate listening to any podcast, she hates podcasts, but if she could listen to any podcast that was about writing essays for high school, she’d have listened to the podcast and listened to a whole bunch. She could listen to 541 episodes of that, but it wouldn’t get her all that much closer to actually writing her thesis, because you just actually have to learn how to like, okay, how am I going to get these thoughts to stick together, how am I going to make transitions between stuff?

As a person who reads all the stuff she writes, I do see her progressing tremendously in terms of just fluency of sentences and ability to get thoughts to connect right and link this paragraph to that paragraph. It’s still hard work for her in a way that’s just not hard work for you and me, because we have craft. We just have the ability to make these little pieces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle that she just doesn’t have yet.

**Craig:** Again, just to be clear, that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is far more complicated than a jigsaw puzzle, which is just moron’s work. What’s happening is her mind is growing. Her brain is growing. Neural pathways are forming, that we have reinforced over and over and over, over many years. Think of all the things that our daughters have to study in school. We don’t. We’re in one class. Everything else we do is an extracurricular, but we’re in one class.

**John:** I have forgotten everything I knew about chemistry, and that’s okay.

**Craig:** It’s okay.

**John:** It’s okay.

**Craig:** We’re in one class, and that class is screenwriting and deadlines. Her brain’s still growing. Part of parenting is having the humility to say, actually, I’m not doing much here really, which is, again, waiting, and waiting for their brains to finish. Then we’ll see what we got. She’s got a good one. I like the fact that she rolled her eyes at you. I think that’s great. It’s appropriate.

**John:** That’s her job and her function.

**Craig:** It’s appropriate.

**John:** Let’s get to one of our marquee topics here, because this was part of a Twitter discourse. We actually had a good listener question. I think it sets up a lot of this. It’s a long one, but Megana, if you could start us off with what Patrick wrote in to say.

**Megana Rao:** Patrick writes, “Your conversation last week got me thinking about the recent online vitriol about peer writing versus networking as competing imperatives for advancement in this competitive industry. In my own view, these two capacities constitute the inalienable double-helix structure of any viable screenwriting career. It’s fundamentally a false choice. We’ve all known either A, an incredibly talented writer whose command of prose and story craft is undeniable, but simple can’t wrangle a useful meeting or make a constructive social connection to save their life, or B, an average or underwhelming writer possessed with such charisma, social gravitas, and yes, just occasionally connections. They’re able to effortlessly secure prized business opportunities that stubbornly allude most.

“It all got me thinking, what if one applied the timeless RPG character leveling framework to the enterprise of screenwriting. Screenwriter A above, for example, might be a chiseled level 65 tyrant on dexterity, but a paltry level 2 on charisma. I’m curious how seasoned nerds of our distinguished hosts pedigree would rank themselves and what their dream allocation of attributes would be in crafting the ideal questing screenwriter.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** I think Craig and I are going to fall back to what we know best, which is the six attributes which you use in Dungeons and Dragons.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** There are three physical attributes, which are strength, dexterity, and constitution.

**Craig:** We don’t need those right now.

**John:** Those are pretty self-explanatory. Strength is how much you can lift and move. Dexterity is how nimble you are. Constitution is your just overall fortitude, your ability to take a blow, keep going, your workhorse-ness. Those are the physical ones. The mental ones would be intelligence, which is your overall genius, wisdom, which is your ability to recognize patterns, to see things as they truly are. Charisma, which has probably been the most retconned in the DnD world, which is your force of personality, your personability, your ability to inspire either admiration or fear among those around you. Safe description of what those six stats are?

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that’s about right.

**John:** I think we could all agree that charisma is what we’re talking about in terms of a person who’s really good at networking and playing that social game.

**Craig:** That’s right. That will be charisma. I suppose we could argue that pure talent would go under intelligence, which is a dump stat for most classes in DnD, but if you’re a wizard or a screenwriter, it’s the one that directly influences your magic.

**John:** Intelligence, it’s not a perfect thing, because you could be… Stephen Hawking is probably not a very good screenwriter. You can be very smart but not a good screenwriter. We’re really talking about verbal dexterity. It’s the ability to string words together. Intelligence is about as close as I guess we’re going to have for that, even though it’s not a writing skill.

**Craig:** It’s not a perfect fit, because intelligence as an attribute doesn’t mean pure IQ per se. Then there’s this wisdom thing, which is the third thing that I think everybody left out in this whole debate, which look, the debate basically boiled down to what’s more important or do you need both. Look, I will go down with this ship. You don’t have to be good in the room. You don’t have to be good at networking. You could have a charisma of zero as far as I’m concerned. You could have a charisma of negative two. It doesn’t matter. If you’ve written a great script, that document, which is completely detached from you as a human being, is going to circulate around and someone’s going to buy it.

Now, if you are a weirdo, that may limit you to some extent, but it won’t limit you completely. We’ve all known let’s say an incredibly talented writer whose command of prose and story craft is undeniable but simply can’t wrangle a useful meeting or making constructive social connection. I know people like that who are very rich from screenwriting, because they’ve written excellent screenplays. Everybody just knows, okay, that’s the way they are. They have their function, and then at some point somebody else may need to come in to help. Yes, there are also people who can, for a while, surf entirely on charisma, but eventually they cost someone money and that’s the end. It’s wisdom that I think has been left out of this debate.

**John:** Wisdom is a tough attribute to say, because you could start your career with a certain amount of wisdom, but really that wisdom will grow as a function of your experience. Experience is that level 65 of it all. You and I have leveled up enough times that we could just see how things work in ways that it’s very hard to at the start of your career. We got hit by the sword more times and have a sense of when to dodge and when to duck and when to parry, in ways that a brand new screenwriter may not recognize. We should also know, oh, let’s maybe listen at that door before we open that door, because there could be monsters inside.

**Craig:** That’s right. Wisdom helps people decide what should I write. What would be a good thing to write right now? Whose advice should I listen to, and whose advice should I ignore, which is a huge one. A lot of young writers, new writers have low wisdom. Because they have low wisdom, they can be easily charmed by agents who tell them this is what you ought to be writing, and they believe them. Agents don’t know what you should be writing, at all. At all. No one actually knows what anyone should be writing. The only thing they know is that when they read something exciting that’s awesome, they want it. Simple as that. Wisdom.

**John:** What I think we’re saying is all three of these, the mental aspects of DnD, do play very important roles. Intelligence, wisdom, and charisma are all factors there. You could maximize one of them and maybe have some success. People who have maximized their intelligence and are really good at writing that script can be great, but if they don’t have the wisdom to see what they should even be writing, that’s a problem. If they don’t have any social skills at all, that can hold them back to some degree. Trying to maximize for one of those stats is not great.

What I don’t see in this discourse is that, as we know in any adventuring party, it’s good to complement each other’s strengths. That’s why sometimes you’ll see people who, our writing teams, where one person is a really fricking good writer, and the other person’s really good at chatting people up and doing that stuff, and together they are a real force of nature. That may be a situation where if you recognize that you are really not great at one aspect of this, that’s an opportunity for you to partner up with somebody.

**Craig:** Even if you are writing solo, a good agent is serving that role and a good producer is serving that role for you, usually. They can help. That’s why they are there. The original that kicked this all off was someone said, “The screenwriting advice that, quote, you just need a good sample, quote, to, quote, cut through the noise, quote, really isn’t true. At least half of the business is about relationships and it’s better to recognize that and plan accordingly. Lots of people have good samples.” Then David Iserson, a fine writer–

**John:** Who’s been on the show.

**Craig:** He has been on the show, and also a fellow graduate of Freehold High School system–

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Said, “With respect to the stranger on the internet, no. Write a great script. Everything else is secondary.” I agree with David Iserson. I think that is correct. I think everything else is secondary. I think that the notion that half of the business, or as this person said, at least half of the business about relationships, is not correct. I think when we start off, we don’t have any relationships. I didn’t. In fact, writing a good sample that cuts through the noise is true. It’s just incredibly rare. I know that what people want is to believe that if you have enough wisdom and charisma, you can make it. Intelligence is your key stat. Every class has one key stat.

The key stat for screenwriters is screenwriting talent. That is your key stat. Load as much of your upgrades into that as you can. The next two, which are secondary, but important, are wisdom and charisma. I would probably load as much into charisma if you can, because it does help. Wisdom you can accrue along the way. Hard to be pre-wise, although some people I suppose are. You will not go long and last without that key, which is being able to write a good script. That is the rarest thing there is in Hollywood, the ability to write a good script. Lots of people have good samples. Wrong. They do not. I wish that were true.

**John:** I stayed out of this discourse pretty much entirely, but I did see [unclear 00:24:03] tweeting along the way. I think Franklin Leonard was one who pointed out that people overestimate how many great samples there are out there, how many great scripts there really are. I think people see, oh, there’s The Black List, there must be a zillion good scripts. Those scripts never touched the light of day because of some other problem, because that screenwriter has some other deficiency. No, there’s actually fewer of those than you believe they are. They do get passed around when [unclear 00:24:28] is really good. I had that experience with Go. Go got passed around a lot because it was a good script. That helped make my career. Don’t think that you’ll write something that’s pretty good and then your charm will make it happen. That’s not been our experience.

**Craig:** No. What are you supposed to do about it anyway? You’re supposed to sit there and start making relationships or forcing this terrible calculated networking? Honestly, how many people on the internet giving advice about screenwriting are professional screenwriters? Of those, how many have actually been consistently produced and have lasted? I think you and me, and I don’t know, there are probably six others, maybe.

**John:** There are some others. There are some people who are genuinely trying to help, and there’s also producers who are weighing with their experience. That’s great. That’s fantastic.

**Craig:** There’s just a lot of people who, they just want something to be true, and they also just like the sound of themselves giving advice.

**John:** Let’s give some of our own advice to–

**Craig:** Segue them in.

**John:** Folks who have written in with their Three Page Challenges. For folks who are new to the podcast, welcome. Every once in a while we do a thing called a Three Page Challenge, which is where we take a look at the first three pages of people’s scripts, sometimes their pilots, sometimes their spec screenplays. We offer our unfiltered advice on what they’ve written and what could be improved and what we’re loving and what maybe they should take another look at. These are all volunteers. These are folks who went to–

**Craig:** They wanted this.

**John:** They wanted this. They went to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. They filled out a little form. They said it’s okay for us to talk about their scripts on the air.

**Craig:** We’re going to.

**John:** It’s all in the spirit of fun and sporting. These are brave folks who have written in. Megana, how many samples did we read this week, did you read this week? I’m sorry. As if I did any of this work.

**Craig:** No, we didn’t do any of it.

**Megana:** I read through about 150 submissions.

**Craig:** Good god. Whoa. 450 screenplay pages.

**Megana:** Correct.

**Craig:** That’s just too much.

**John:** That’s a lot. That’s a lot.

**Craig:** You could probably read through half of those but tell John you read through all of those. He doesn’t even know. In fact, that’s probably what you did. You read through five.

**Megana:** Yeah, I actually only read five.

**Craig:** You read 5, and you were like, “I’ll just tell him I read 900.” We won’t know.

**John:** She made a sampling of these. Remind us, Megana, what is your filtering mechanism? What are you looking for in things that you want to discuss on the air with us?

**Megana:** I’m looking at things that I personally would not be embarrassed if they were out there, so things without typos, things that I think are formatted correctly and promising. I’m reading through a lot of these submissions, and so things that I think are exciting and I’m into the premise, I’m into the world. Sometimes the pages aren’t quite doing it, but I feel like with a few fixes or advice from you guys, you might be able to really help improve the work.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Let’s see how we do.

**John:** We should remind everybody that if you would like to read these pages, we’ll have links to them in the show notes. Also, if you’re on an app listening to this podcast, you can probably just click through and get to the pdf. If you want to read through these with us, you’re welcome to. Megana, if you can give us a quick summary of this first one.

**Megana:** The Man Who Could Be Macbeth, by Daniel Bracy. We open on a call center in the middle of the workday, while Bill Wangley’s coworkers chat and answer phones around him. Bill is haunted by a witch. Bill seems to be the only one who can see or hear her. Bill’s about to confront the witch in the break room when he’s startled by his boss instead. Bill’s boss remarks that Bill’s after-work activities seem to be affecting his performance in the office, and advises Bill to cut back. On Bill’s drive that evening, he tries to play the radio in his car, but instead hears the witch’s voice again. We see a script for Macbeth open on the seat next to him, with Bill cast as the character Lennox.

**John:** Great. Anyone who’s [unclear 00:28:10] is going to quickly realize, oh, it’s like the witch from the start of Macbeth. That’s the witch that we’re hearing. It’s one of those haunting witches that’s setting up the premise of Macbeth. Here’s a plug for the new Macbeth with Denzel Washington, which I thought was terrific. That is not the script that we’re reading right now. Megana, there were more typos in this than I would normally expect. That said, there was something that was interesting, that I think it’s good for us to talk through, because I think there’s also examples of we hears and we sees that I would probably trim out. Craig, what is your first take on The Man Who Could Be Macbeth?

**Craig:** I really enjoyed the concept of this. This is an interesting concept. I think I know where it’s going. There were so many awkward descriptions where there could’ve been elegant, simple descriptions, that it was hard to get any rhythm as I read. I can walk through a few of these. Right off the bat, the very first words, “Heads of hair.”

**John:** I circled “of hair.” What is this?

**Craig:** What is a head of hair? Now, I understand where he was going. He said, “Heads of hair,” I stopped and went, what? “Stick out over the walls of a cubicle asylum.” Now, what he means is we see a bunch of office cubicles, an open office space, and we see all those little cubicles, and we see people’s heads sticking up. One of them is balding, but instead we get, “Heads of hair stick out over the walls of a cubicle asylum.” Asylum is not the right word. “One balding round head,” which I think we need a comma there, “One balding, round head stands out from the rest.” By the way, the odds that only one person is balding… Is two bald guys just a lot? “Phones ringing and light chatter is heard among the workers.” There’s this passive voice that happens, “is heard.”

**John:** Take out the “is heard” and it’s fine. That’s a case where I’m happy with a sentence fragment, “Phones ringing and light chatter.”

**Craig:** Then the next line is, “Over the cluster of office noise.” That’s not the right word again, cluster. Just, “Over the noise.” Then it says, “The deep gravelly.” That should be deep, comma, gravelly, “Voice of a woman is heard.” Again, passive.

**John:** “Of a woman,” not “a women.”

**Craig:** “Of a women is heard.” My brain fixed that typo before me. Well spotted. “The deep gravelly voice of a… “ Also, if you are describing the voice of a woman, and it’s deep and gravelly, you need that to come second. You say, “We hear,” and that would be a perfect thing, “We hear the voice of a woman. Oddly, it’s deep and gravelly,” or, “We hear the voice of a woman–“

**John:** “Oddly deep and gravelly.”

**Craig:** Yeah, just something that sets apart deep and gravelly as interesting, as opposed to the average deep and gravelly voice of a woman. Then we do have a formatting disaster here. You and I are pretty good about formatting disasters. Look, nothing is ever going to kill you, but “witch” and then in parentheticals below the character name is says “V.O.,” then it says the dialog. We just never do that.

**John:** No. V.O., continues, O.S., O.C., we stick this up with the character name, just because they’re not a true parenthetical.

**Craig:** Also, it’s V period O period. It’s not V period O. If V gets an abbreviation, so too does the O. Anyway, this goes on. There are comma issues. There’s a lot of just overwrought, clumsy action description here. Hard to see what was going on, and yet eventually I did see it, and this is a testament to the concept, because I wanted to keep figuring it out, because Daniel had me interested, which is the most important thing.

**John:** Here is the premise to me. It’s like what if Office Space but Macbeth, basically where this guy is cast as a minor role in Macbeth and wants the major role in Macbeth, and so he’s obsessed that there’s a witch haunting him throughout this. Sure, I get that. The office was too generic. I’m happy with the cubicle form. That’s great, but I need some specificity about what it is this company does that makes it not just Dunder Mifflin or whatever the business was in Office Space. I need something there, a little bit more. I was also frustrated that we never got a proper introduction to Bill. Bill’s our main guy. He never gets his name put out in upper case, so we can see this is Bill. What’s his deal?

**Craig:** He’s bald. That’s it.

**John:** He’s bald.

**Craig:** That’s all we know. He’s bald.

**John:** That’s all we know. Craig, you and I are identical, because we’re both–

**Craig:** We’re both bald.

**John:** Two bald white guys.

**Craig:** We don’t even know if he’s white.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** All we know about him is that he’s bald. He could be 80 or 12.

**John:** It’d be fascinating if he was 12 years old.

**Craig:** I know. It’d be cool.

**John:** A 12-year-old bald guy working in an office.

**Craig:** Alopecia.

**John:** That would be specific.

**Craig:** Alopecia.

**John:** Alopecia. It’s a real thing.

**Craig:** Child labor law violations. Also, he’s in a call center. No one’s talking. There was no action in the call center. When it says light chatter is heard, the people are going to be like, “What should we say?”

**John:** Everyone, light chatter amongst yourselves. Both Bill and his boss, they need actual proper introductions and they need specificity, because right now the boss just appears in a line of dialog. These are all problems. The other thing which I would say is an overall thing for our writer to work on is recognizing run-on sentences and when to chop sentences into two bits or when to use the gerund to continue the idea. “He’s an older man with large-framed glasses, his eyes scan over his cubicle wall.” “His eyes scanning over his cubicle wall.” You can’t just stick two independent clauses together and join it by a comma.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** It reads weirdly. If we were to read this aloud, I think you would recognize, oh yeah, there’s something wrong there.

**Craig:** That was one of the common problems. I apologize, he is an older man, so he cannot be a 12-year-old boy. The boss is named Boss. That’s pretty bad. There’s a moment, a cool moment where the witch appears, but we see her, then we see her make a cool motion that makes her neck crack, and then it says, “Bill suddenly stands upright in response. A shiver rolls down his spine as his eyes widen, the witch still behind him.” Shouldn’t we flip that around? Also, “suddenly stands upright,” I think “stands upright in response” implies suddenly. It would be better for us to be with Bill, to hear a sound, for him to stand, for him to turn, for us to see the witch when he sees the witch. This is a little backwards. Boss, his first line is, “Hey Bill, how’s it going?!” What? Why is there, “How’s it going?!” What’s happening? Why?

**John:** It’s fun that Bill screams in response and drops his water. Great, but is that the out of the scene? Probably not. You need some beat to react to that. What does the boss do? What is that next moment?

**Craig:** He screams back.

**John:** Yeah, because then we’re going to stay in that break room, which is fine. We could stay in that break room. We’re jumping ahead in time. It’s just a weird out on that moment. The other thing I want to point out is, we see, we hear. Craig and I are big fans of we see and hear when the time’s appropriate.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** At the top of page two, “We turn slowly to see, in the opposite corner of the room, a witch staring at Bill from behind a chair.” We turn slowly to reveal? I’m just a fan of more specific words than “see” when it’s helpful, and revealing is a good choice for this.

**Craig:** It is. Also, we don’t really turn. We can hear things. We can see things. We can notice things.

**John:** Slowly reveal.

**Craig:** Or pan slowly to see something like this. It’s very, very hard, by the way, as you guys walk through these things, to have a scene in a break room and then to cut to a scene in the break room later is extraordinarily difficult to do production-wise without looking bad. How do we know time passed? You need to very carefully describe something. Look back at the episode we did on transitions and think of one, because you’re going to need one. That’s hard enough to do that I try as much as I can to avoid it.

**John:** You try to avoid it. An example would be, if in that being startled, he drops his water and water goes everywhere, and then we cut to he’s on his hands and knees, cleaning up the water with paper towels. That’s an example. We jumped forward to time to do that. That can work. You got to be specific about what it is, because just staying in the same place and jumping forward in time is a real beast there. A lot here to work on. It was actually nice to start with one that actually had some stuff on the page that was a problem, because I feel like our next three, we’re not going to be so focused on mistakes on the page and we can really talk about what we’re getting out of them.

**Craig:** Take a look as you go through, Daniel, these sort of things that may not get through your spell check. Top of page three, “This isn’t the first time its.” Wrong, “it’s.” “Effected,” wrong. “Affected.”

**John:** “Affected.”

**Craig:** Also, Bill’s in his car and he’s listening to the radio. It appears to be FM. He’s pushing the buttons to the presets. What year is this?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Megana wouldn’t even know what that is. She would not know what that is.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** Very end, below the title, is a list of the actors’ names. That should be “actors’,” S then apostrophe, as it is a possessive plural. Anyway, lots to do there. I think get simpler, get clearer. There’s certainly an interesting premise here, so well done.

**John:** I’m looking at the log line that was provided. It says, “Bill, an unsuccessful local theater actor working in a call center, is pushed by a mysterious Shakespearean presence into stealing the titular role in a production of Macbeth by whatever means necessary.” We did get the setup. We understood what the premise of the story was.

**Craig:** That’s really smart. Macbeth is a bad ambition. This makes sense. Hopefully he has a girlfriend who convinces him to stab someone. Anyway, so onwards we go to Pizza Boy written by Mick Jones.

**John:** Pizza Boy. Talk us through, Megana.

**Megana:** Dimitri and Clara flirt over dinner at a Beverly Hills restaurant. Their banter slowly turns to dirty talk. Suddenly, Claire’s voice warps into a man’s voice, asking Dimitri to confirm. We cut to Dimitri’s car outside the restaurant, where Dimitri sits in the driver’s seat. He’s picking up a brown takeout bag of food. The waiter has interrupted his fantasy to confirm that Dimitri has picked up the order.

**John:** Great. This is an example of a surprise situation where it’s not a Stuart Special. What we just saw was a fantasy and now we’re coming to the reality of it all. Are we going to name this for Megana? Does Megana get to claim this trope?

**Craig:** We need something that implies… A Megana Mirage.

**John:** A Megana Mirage, of course. It’s all a Megana Mirage.

**Craig:** This was all a Megana Mirage.

**John:** Spoiler, we’re going to have another Megana Mirage in a future three-page challenge here, our next one. Let’s talk about what Mick Jones did here in Pizza Boy and where we’re at in the course of these three pages. The idea of a guy picking up food at a restaurant and fantasizing that he’s at the restaurant, sure, I get that. I was a little bit frustrated that I didn’t feel like his flirtation with Clara was being paid off really, because Clara’s not in our scene. Clara does not appear to be the waiter who he’s talking with or the person who’s coming to confirm the order. I just got a little frustrated by the end of page three, that everything I’d been through wasn’t… I didn’t have an immediate payoff. There didn’t seem to be a pattern that was being fulfilled here.

**Craig:** This is the danger of the Megana Mirage is that the mirage has to, in and of itself, fascinate you and interest you and work for you, without you knowing it’s a mirage, because if you know it’s a mirage, it’s boring and it doesn’t matter and the stakes are irrelevant. If you don’t know it’s a mirage, but it’s not working on its own, the reveal that it’s a mirage just makes you go, oh, okay, that’s why that was that way. That’s not what you want from people. You don’t want them going, “Oh, okay. Okay, I guess that makes sense now.” Making sense isn’t the same as good.

The issue here is that the flirtation between Dimitri and Clara, it’s very arch. It feels very written. You could argue, Dimitri is writing it in his mind, which is fine. When people have fantasies in this way, I tend to find that it’s most interesting when one of them seems very grounded and real, and the other one is exciting, smart, interesting. In this case they’re both doing this thing that it’s sort of like bad porn writing, where everyone’s clever and everything is a double entendre and all the answers are witty. There’s some difficult description that happens early on.

**John:** “Manner born.”

**Craig:** Manner born is correct.

**John:** It’d be M-A-N-O-R.

**Craig:** Actually, the first use was… Manner born, M-A-N-N-E-R, is how it started.

**John:** Oh, wow.

**Craig:** Yeah, in Shakespeare I think, but then manor born, it may have even been a pun. I was reading about this actually the other day. It’s the weirdest thing that the manner born thing happened in this thing. Manner born may have been a pun on manor born. I tend to use manor born. They are both fine.

**John:** Is that appropriate for a Beverly Hills crowd?

**Craig:** No, it’s not. If it were, you would still want a dash in there. You wouldn’t want “manner born crowd.” “Dimitri is aloof, feigning interest,” but he also grins and “never breaks eye contact with Clara.” Now, how do you do that? You never break eye contact, but you’re aloof and feigning interest. That’s just impossible. Basically, I was annoyed by the conversation. I didn’t like either of them, because I didn’t believe either of them. It all felt fake. She said that he’s funny. He hasn’t done anything funny. There’s an example of a good Megana Mirage in, I believe it’s the first… I think it was the pilot episode of Ozark, yeah, maybe the second episode, where we see Jason Bateman’s character having a Megana Mirage with a woman in his car and she’s saying all these things to him. You believe it. He’s a wreck, and she’s telling him these things that he needs to hear. It’s lovely and then you realize that she’s a prostitute and it’s not working like that. You need to believe in the scene itself. I think that was the biggest issue I had here with this particular, I’m just going to keep saying it, Megana Mirage.

**John:** A thing I noticed on the page here, on the bottom of page one, Clara says, “Why don’t you just imagine that I’m not?” The “imagine” is not underlined, but it has asterisks around it. Sure. In Highland or other apps, the asterisks would actually create an italic.

**Craig:** A markup thing.

**John:** A markup thing, yeah. That’s fine, but also people do speak with little asterisks around them, so it didn’t bug me. It’s another way of creating a sensation of like there’s a spin on that word. Great, I’m happy to see that. I think English is constantly evolving, so using things like that is absolutely fine. The joke at the bottom of page two, which goes into page three, Dimitri says, “And what do you find attractive?” He says, “Confidence, red, curly hair, a beautiful smile.” She says, “Do you want to F me or Carrot Top?” Carrot Top, the visual works, but also Carrot Top is not a person you refer to in 2022. It felt like a clam.

**Craig:** It is a clam. Also, weirdly, there is that… I had no problem with the asterisks as well, but then suddenly he is emphasizing words not with asterisks, but with italics and underlines at the same time, which is a very strong emphasis. I think a simple italic there would be fine. I tend to find those underlines seem a bit yelly to me, whereas italics feel like stress. I think, “What do you find attractive?” just could’ve taken an italic, and simply later then when it says, “Then I’m going to pull your panties off with my teeth.” Oh, Dimitri. Which actually just is awkward. No need for the underline there.

Here’s my advice. Let’s be positive and constructive for a minute here, Mick. I think my advice is this. Clara can be this person. She can be tricky and she can be mean and negging him and she can be beautiful and she can suddenly be seductive. She can be all these things, as long as Dimitri is as confused and low power status as I am when I’m reading it. Do you know what I mean? She scares me and I want him to be scared and I want him to be confused and I want him to not be able to follow her. Then I want her to take a little pity on him or decide that he’s adorable enough for her to take home. That’s what I want. I want something that feels real and will help me learn something about Dimitri, since he’s our character.

**John:** Let’s take a look at the log line that Mick provided, which is, “To pursue his dreams of becoming a comedian, a young man must endure untold humiliation as a delivery driver in Los Angeles.” We got delivery driver in Los Angeles in these first three pages. That’s great. I wouldn’t have known that he’s a comedian. I think there’s an opportunity for this. If we see him trying jokes in this, I think there’s… I could imagine a version of this scene where we see that he’s trying to make her laugh and he’s trying material on her. There’s something you could do in this that would get us to that he’s actually a comedian, because I think that’s important information for us to get out in these first three pages, and I don’t see that happening.

**Craig:** No. The first few pages tell us what’s important to somebody. I think we’re starting with our I want song, in a way. What this tells me is that he wants a girlfriend.

**John:** Clara, yeah.

**Craig:** He wants a girlfriend. He wants to be a Romeo. He wants to be that guy that all the women want to date. What it’s not telling me is that he wants to be a comedian. If you did the same exact concept and it was a party and we’re in a backyard of this beautiful mansion and Dimitri is the center of a group of people, he’s telling a really funny story and he’s really good at telling it. He’s confident, and everyone’s laughing. Then you cut to or reveal that he’s actually standing there on the edge watching somebody else doing this who’s an actual comedian.

**John:** He’s going to hand the bag of food to take somewhere else.

**Craig:** He’s just there to deliver something for the party. That guy is the guy whose life he wants. Then I would understand what this movie is. I would get it.

**John:** Let’s go to our next Three Page Challenge. Can you talk us through Evergreen by Heather Kennedy?

**Megana:** Great. Frank Harrell, 80s, white, swims in the pool of the Evergreen Estate, a 1950s Bel Air mansion. A member of the staff, Joel Garner, 50s, Black, reminds Frank that he’s not supposed to swim alone. A woman’s cry calls him inside, where they find Margaret, 80s, white, has just discovered the dead body of Joe Johnson. Joel calls the police and tells them a guest has been shot dead. We pull back from the estate as an ambulance appears, revealing that we’re actually in modern Los Angeles.

**John:** That’s the Megana Mirage. We thought we were in a period movie, but it’s actually modern day Los Angeles.

**Craig:** I don’t know if that’s a mirage. This could be something else, because it’s not a fantasy where the bubble gets burst.

**John:** It’s a Rao Reveal is what it is.

**Craig:** It could be a Rao Reveal. That’s exactly right. This could be a Rao Reveal.

**John:** A Raoveal.

**Craig:** A Raoveal. This may have been a Raoveal. Just a quick disclosure, I’m friends with Heather.

**John:** Oh, nice.

**Craig:** She and I are both puzzle solvers.

**John:** You’re puzzlers.

**Craig:** We’re solvers, John.

**John:** When you’re putting pieces together.

**Craig:** She lives in Austin.

**John:** Shaking that puzzle dust out of that little box.

**Craig:** Never. We’ve done some escape rooms and we frequently talk to each other about puzzles. Lovely person. There’s something that could be excellent here. There’s a Pleasantville possibility I think is what’s going on. We have trouble in these first two lines. This is where I think so much could be solved, because I’m not sure what I’m actually seeing. Okay, some possibilities. One, that when these people are walking around, they’re delusional and they think they’re in a 1950s black-and-white movie, because they’re old.

**John:** Some sort of memory care thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, or this is a weird bubble of reality, where once you cross the line you are in 1950s black-and-white Hollywood, or this is just a funny opening to introduce us to what will be a story about a regular old age home. I’m not sure. I would love to know better somehow. The first few lines say, “As the first light flickers onto the screen, we discover this is an old Hollywood black-and-white film.” There’s not much discovery there. You could just say, “This is a black-and-white film.” Black-and-white. Or you could just say, “Black-and-white.”

There is an interesting tonal issue that occurs, because on the second page we meet Margaret. “Margaret speaks in that mid-century, mid-Atlantic movie accent prevalent at the time. Oh Joel, it’s awful, just awful.” She’s great. She also says, “Oh Gwennie. Please. You mustn’t,” which made me laugh out loud, because that’s just so funny.

In the prior page, which is in the same black-and-white universe, Frank, who is floating in a pool, says, “I can’t be blamed if Joe didn’t see fit to join me this morning. Asshole’s afraid he’ll lose.” No one said “asshole” in these 1950s black-and-white movies. That was just simply not available to them, and it wouldn’t fit.

Also, he says, “Did I ever tell you that Johnny Weissmuller taught me how to swim?” “Yes, sir, once or twice.” Now, that makes me think, okay, so that was a long time ago, but Johnny Weissmuller was… “Johnny Weissmuller’s teaching me how to swim,” might help, because then I would think, okay, I’m in that… It was hard to pin down exactly what the concept was here. I know what I want the concept to be here. I just don’t know if it is.

**John:** Like you, I enjoyed the things that felt like ‘50s period and I enjoyed the mid-Atlantic accent. I enjoyed that kind of voice of it all and recognizing that race was a factor here as well. Starting as a black-and-white movie just felt kind of like cheating. Am I watching The Artist? I just didn’t know what I was actually experiencing and how seriously to take it. I didn’t know when I was going to transition to full color to show that we are in present-day time. Just remember, Sunset Boulevard, which you’re also referencing here at the very start, you don’t need to shoot things black-and-white to make them look old. You could actually just shoot them in present-day things and if the production design feels like 1950s, we’re going to believe it’s 1950s until you break that illusion. That’s going to be a better solution for you for most things.

**Craig:** I couldn’t agree more. To me, costume and hair and makeup and speech patterns, dialog patterns, furniture, all these things can absolutely convince me that I’m in period Los Angeles. The reveal is not from black-and-white to color. The reveal is period Los Angeles to 2022 Los Angeles, which is not at all like that. Once you get past the gates of this place, you realize, oh, we’re in the middle of now. Again, the question will remain, is this just a memory care type facility, where people just think it’s in the ‘50s, or is this some weird time bubble? It’s hard to say.

I love the fact that there’s a murder mystery in the offing here, because those are always wonderful. I thought things were fairly well described. I could see things. I saw, for instance, the bottom of page one, “A woman’s scream startles them. They pick up their speed.” That’s great. That’s a nice transition. “Interior Evergreen Estate. Joel and Frank follow the commotion.” I thought, okay, I’m going to go to the next page, but what is this living room, and boom, there it is, the interior of the mansion. She lets you know. Then there’s a very funny line. Then I could see exactly the body. I could see what the body looked like. I could see how he was shot. I love that there were feathers everywhere from the pillow. All that stuff felt great. It’s just conceptually we need to know what we’re supposed to understand, because kind of don’t.

**John:** It gets back to our confusion versus misdirection, and I just got a little confused. Don’t name a character Joel and a character Joe. We’re going to get those names confused.

**Craig:** I wouldn’t even name a character Joe and a character John. We got to watch that. Also, there is an errant I-T-apostrophe-S when we should have an I-T-S at the bottom of page three. I know that Heather will be kicking herself at that. I know her well enough.

**John:** As a puzzler.

**Craig:** Yes, solver.

**John:** Fortunately, we do have an answer about whether this is a time-space bubble. Her log line that she submitted says, “When LAPD homicide detective Keiko Sanjiko [ph] discovers the bigoted elderly residents in a home for the stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age won’t answer her questions, she hires the spitting image son of their beloved TV private investigator to be her proxy. The two uncover a decades-old feud and love affairs, but will that help them solve this locked-room mystery with a surprising emotional twist?”

**Craig:** That’s a really fun concept. I think that concept is terribly served by beginning this in black-and-white. In no way, shape, or form should that be what you do there. You just start it, we think we’re in the ‘50s, and then we realize, oh, these people, it’s just a memory care thing. I think there’s an opportunity to actually have a secondary reveal, which is Interior Evergreen Estate Office Day. This is Joel, who’s looking after them. “He walks into his office, closes the door behind him. Now that he is alone, he is visibly shaken.” He would be visibly shaken also seeing a dead body prior. He’s not an actor. “He walks to a nearby desk and dials 911 on the rotary phone. Someone on the other end answers. Yes, I’m… My resident, a resident has been shot. He’s dead.” To me, if he walked into that office and we were like, “Oh, whoa, this office has a computer,” that’s [cross-talk 00:53:15].

**John:** He’s pulling out his iPhone, yeah.

**Craig:** Then he just picks up the phone, dials it, and he’s like, “Yeah,” and he just speaks without any kind of mannering and 1950s nature. He’s a more interesting reveal than the city. Then you can show the city, which is perfectly fine. A human and his mundane things. He could pull out his iPhone. He doesn’t need a rotary phone.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** He could be like, “I’m going to go get you your tonic.”

**John:** Bloop bloop bloop.

**Craig:** He goes to the room and goes into another room, and in that second room he unlocks the door and that goes into just a regular office and he pulls out his iPhone and dials 911. I think that would be more interesting.

**John:** I agree with you there. Let’s get to our final Three Page Challenge. Megana, will you talk us through Scavenger.

**Megana:** Great. Scavenger by Phil Saunders. A boyfriend records his girlfriend opening her birthday present from him, when the entire building is suddenly rocked by an earthquake. The footage cuts to black as we hear the room collapse. The handheld footage picks back up with quick shots of the couple running through the Santa Monica Pier as the earthquake wreaks havoc. The Ferris wheel falls and crushes the girlfriend. An office tower collapses. We pull back to reveal Edgar Corman in his 50s in a private jet watching the footage under the caption “10 years later, the quake through the eyes of its victims.” He video chats with Thania Redrick. They’re surprised that the footage was recovered. Thania tells him a scavenger found it. We cut to Fin Lorca in her 20s diving through underwater ruins. She swims past a barrier and discovers a sunken carousel.

**John:** Great. Craig, a thing I like about these pages is that it can be so hard to show a bunch of chaos happening. A bunch of chaos happens, and people just basically track what’s going on. I see this is all found footage. I’m getting a sense from these glimpses about what this must be. I felt like it was live and present in ways that did make me want to… It kept me actually reading through the stuff. Even if I didn’t have to read exactly, I didn’t need to look at each bit of time code, I got a sense of what was happening. That can be tricky to do on the page. I did like that about how these pages started.

**Craig:** It’s an interesting thing. I really enjoy the first page. I really enjoy the third page. I struggled mightily with the second.

**John:** I did as well. Let’s talk about why, because it’s when we get to this reveal, like, oh, here’s the person on the private plane watching, it’s like, wait, I don’t get why this footage is so important here. I just wanted that scene to go away and get ride to my scavenger having found a thing or jumping ahead to this is what the sunken city of Los Angeles is like.

**Craig:** I agree. There’s something very smart and very poetic about the way Phil has laid out his first page here. A young woman wakes up, stretches like a cat. 23, bedhead and bleary eyes.” Thank you. Wardrobe, hair, makeup. “Smiles at us as we get closer. The mirror behind her catches her boyfriend’s reflection.” I can see this. He says, “Happy birthday, lazybones,” capturing it on his phone. It’s “Corrupted like a bad copy.” I know something’s going on already. I like that it’s corrupted like a bad copy. “His hand reaches out with a wrapped gift. The size and shape scream jewelry. Lazybones, tired smile, wakes up.” That was really interesting, because he decided to name her Lazybones, even though her name is Young Woman, which I think is correct. It’s smart.

There’s this little banter back and forth with them that is very mild but believable, didn’t bore me. She says something that feels like the kind of thing people say. It’s not too clever. It’s not too boring. It’s just fine. The way the disaster happens is really interesting. It felt real. Then I had no idea what the hell was going on. To start with, it says, “Interior Aircraft Cabin.” It took me a while to understand that this was a private jet. It doesn’t say private jet. It just says, “The jet’s only passenger.” I’m assuming that he’s in a 747 when I see “Interior Aircraft Cabin.” The first action line is, “10 years later, the quake through the eyes of its victims.”

**John:** Where am I seeing that line?

**Craig:** Then it says underneath, “A tabloid website streaming on a screen in the hands of… “ When we say screen, do we mean tablet? What is that?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Tabloid websites streaming? What does streaming mean? Do you just mean that that’s the headline of a tabloid website? What tabloid website? Then we have this guy, who we’ve heard prior. There’s this prelap of people talking. By the way, it’s not V.O. In that case it’s probably something else, off screen. I don’t know if it’s V.O. Voiceover is when people are narrating things.

**John:** People are talking directly to the audience.

**Craig:** I think this is something else. Also, he has to figure out what to do here, because one of them is talking in a scene and the other one, her voice is coming over this feed. I have no idea what is going on. I don’t know what any of this means. I know I’ll find out later. Sometimes jargon as mystery makes me crazy, like, “You had to pull me out for this.” Pull you out, what does that mean, pull you out?

Then, “Someone made it in. How far? Far enough to recover that footage. Christ, this could save us. Who?” No one says, “Christ, this could save us.” No one, ever. I don’t know what they’re talking about, but John, if you and I know that if we had something that could save us, and we watched a video, and it seemed that somebody might have that thing, I would go, “Oh my god. They might have it.” I wouldn’t say, “John, that is the very thing that we have discussed a thousand times that could save us.”

**John:** “Christ.”

**Craig:** “Christ.”

**John:** “That could save us.”

**Craig:** “Goddammit.” No. I completely agree that I want to be in the next page. I just want to skip page two. I just want to go from this crazy moment of Los Angeles being destroyed to underwater, and then seeing this woman come through and having her scavenging. We get it. It’s many years later, because everyone’s a skeleton now.

**John:** Yeah, so cool. There’s something in this footage that is the McGuffin. There’s something that they are seeing in this footage that is important. I would say maybe spend that top of page two focusing in on that thing that is important, and that let us as an audience know that that thing is important. We don’t need to go to the guy to say that thing is important, because you’ve told us as an audience that thing is important. Great, we’ll be getting back to that. As long as you held on that, we’ll know there’s a reason why we held on that.

**Craig:** When we meet Aleta, who is scavenge diving, there’s all this really cool imagery and stuff. She’s looking at a driver’s license. “She pulls a driver’s license from a rotted walls, compares the faded image of a woman to a skeleton, as if trying to imagine it in life.” That’s wonderful. Such a great visual. “It’s one of many littering the ruins.” I can see it now. “Aleta traces a cross over the corpse and begins to rob it.” What a great sentence. Love that sentence. Then there’s this science-fiction thing happening. “A liquid electric fence known as the Barrier stretches sea floor to surface between high-tech pylons, emitting a deep bass thrum you can feel in your gut. It sparks and flashes warnings, restricted, keep out.”

Now I know it’s not actually saying those things, and I know that there’s no way for us to know it’s called the Barrier, but I get it, because I know when I watch it, that will be clear. A fish swims through it and dies. She sees something on the other side and takes the pain of reaching through that thing to reveal that there’s a carousel horse buried there, and that means something to her. In fact, it means so much that she forgets her arm is in this thing and she pays for it with some burns. She’s found something. She goes up to the surface. She’s going to tell somebody she’s found something.

This is all good mystery. It’s very beautiful and it’s visual and no one’s talking to each other with this stuff. I’m nervous, Phil. I’m nervous, because I think you’re a good writer. I’m just worried about your dialog, which is its own kind of writing, because the dialog was not strong here.

**John:** That’s a thing he could work on.

**Craig:** That is a thing that he can work on. It may be that his dialog is fine. It’s just that he’s trying too hard with these guys to be clever, mysterious, provocative, confusing. If you want to keep it this way, Phil, I would suggest making it clearer and just doing a little bit less. Do less here.

**John:** Actually, the dialog on the first page was appropriately less. I believe those moments as authentic. Here’s the log line we got sent for this. “In the sunken ruins of post-quake Los Angeles, a cursed salvage diver finds redemption when she goes up against a military epidemiologist to save her refugee community from a deadly outbreak.”

**Craig:** Whoa, that is a lot of stuff.

**John:** That’s a lot of stuff.

**Craig:** That’s a lot.

**John:** Deadly outbreak is a surprise to me. I like the universe that we’re playing in. I would certainly have kept reading to see what was going to happen next, because we haven’t heard Fin speak yet.

**Craig:** We haven’t. I think no matter how this turns out, Phil clearly has a way with words. He can do this. He can make pictures with words. That’s a huge part of this. He also understands the interesting contrasts of things. I’m hopeful.

**John:** I’m hopeful too. Thank you to everyone who submitted, all 150 people who submitted, especially these four who we talked about on the air today. Three out of four of these were written in Courier Prime, which is why the italics look so nice. Thank you for using some Courier Prime. This was a good exercise. Thank you, Megana, for going through all of these entries.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is The One, which was built as the most expensive house in the United States. I do not recommend anybody buy this house. It was originally sold for $295 million. I will recommend that people take a look at this video of the touring of it, because it’s a half-hour long, and I’ve never seen such an impressive building that I wanted to live in less. It is essentially, at a certain point you build what is like a museum, that is not an actual house. The primary bedroom is bigger than any normal person’s house would ever want to be. It looks so uncomfortable to live in this space. After you watch this video, I’d also recommend, I think this is a previous One Cool Thing, Lauren Greenfield’s documentary The Queen of Versailles.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** Is so amazing. It’s about this woman’s quest to build this giant house in Florida. You see her current already giant house and how hard it is to live in a giant house and how her husband just wants to live in this one little small room, because big spaces are not comfortable. I just wish people would understand that no one wants that kind of space and rooms of that scale. It was so fascinating and so uncomfortable to watch.

**Craig:** Obviously, John, if you do buy the house for 295 million, you know you’re going to spend another 30 or 40 million just fixing up the little things.

**John:** The small things, yeah, because I’ll be honest, the little golf course on the roof, it’s fine. It could be better.

**Craig:** Obviously.

**John:** The indoor saltwater pool, it’s fine.

**Craig:** It’s fine.

**John:** It’s not the best.

**Craig:** Because it’s Los Angeles, if you do buy it, and then you bring an interior designer or architect over, they will just explain to you why it’s all wrong and needs to be redone. Doesn’t matter what you buy, all wrong.

**John:** There’s four bowling lanes, but really, you’re going to have to split lanes, you’re going to have to share. Come on.

**Craig:** Just do it right or don’t do it at all.

**John:** I see what you have here and I have the same recommendation.

**Craig:** I can’t even get it out. My One Cool Thing this week is Elden Ring.

**John:** After we ranted about it last week. I switched classes and you switched classes. I think we made the right choice to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah, we did. I was really struggling, obviously. We could hear it last week. I was just so confused.

**John:** It is confusing.

**Craig:** It’s outrageous how they just don’t care about you in this game. It is undeniably gorgeous and massive. I was just feeling like, oh my god, everyone’s just saying it does get better. I did a little research, because mostly, I understand that even though the game requires dying, I don’t like dying. I am a coward. I’ve always been more of a ranged fighter than an up-close guy. I did a little research and finally understood that if you are a ranged fighter, there’s one class. There’s really one class to take, and it is curiously the best caster. Even though you could be a bandit and shoot arrows, not as powerful or as good as the astrologer, which is their name for wizard, essentially.

**John:** A wizard, a spell caster. I also switched and made myself an astrologer character.

**Craig:** So much better.

**John:** It’s so much easier to fire equivalent of [unclear 01:06:02] fireballs from a distance. You eventually run out of mana, whatever that mana is, but it’s just easier.

**Craig:** Some recommendations if you’re starting, choose the astrologer. The next screen will come up. You get to pick a name. There’s also a little starting gift you can have. Always pick golden seed. Always, because that gives you an extra jar of mana restoration.

**John:** Yeah, a little extra flask. Then you can set your flask so you regenerate two mana flasks and two life flasks [cross-talk 01:06:32].

**Craig:** I would actually go for three and one. I don’t think you need health much, because you’re not going to get close to anybody. Battles that were incredibly difficult for me became trivialized. I did even, in my first try at the big first boss, Margit the Fell, I did kill Margit the first try.

**John:** Congratulations. I’ve not tried to do that yet. I think it is the right overall approach. You’re spamming from a distance, but that’s fine too.

**Craig:** Look, I’m not playing this game to be humiliated, because mostly, here’s the thing. I am a story mode guy. I like the stories, which granted in this thing I don’t think are going to be particularly compelling, but still fine. I mostly like discovery. I like to go to new places and see new things. It’s hard to do that when you can get one-shotted by almost anything. It’s become way more enjoyable. I can tell I’m going to be into it. Astrologer. Take a little bit of time to level up.

**John:** [Cross-talk 01:07:35].

**Craig:** Get your intelligence to 20 as fast as you can. Get your mind to 20 as fast as you can. Intelligence increases the damage you do with your staff, and mind increases the amount of mana you have to cast, so you just cast and cast and cast.

**John:** The other recommendation I’ve seen is that dexterity is also helpful too, because that helps you just avoid getting hit. That could be another [cross-talk 01:07:55].

**Craig:** You hopefully aren’t so close that you’re getting hit. Once you get Torrent the horse, you can ride around to really avoid getting hit. Dexterity does impact how fast you can cast. After you hit, you send one glint, pebble, shard, whatever it is, how quickly can you send another one. Even with your dexterity being fairly low to start, you can cast pretty quickly. Vigor will help boost your HP a bit, which is nice, keeps you from dying too quickly. Again, you don’t want to get near anybody. You want to stay far away and just blast from a distance. Astrologer in Elden Ring if you are a baby like me or John.

**John:** In Elden Ring we are recommending that you maximize your intelligence, your dexterity, and perhaps your vigor. As a screenwriter we recommend that you maximize your intelligence, your wisdom, and your charisma.

**Craig:** Yeah, intelligence first.

**John:** Intelligence first.

**Craig:** Just like the astrologer.

**John:** Astrologer.

**Craig:** Then for screenwriting, you’re going to want to then go for charisma and then wisdom.

**John:** Wisdom, yeah. We love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Joe Palen. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. I will not get involved in the screenwriter discourse, but Craig might. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We also have hoodies that are wonderful. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, 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 supposed to record about composers. Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, that was an example of music being composed really unspecced, just for fun, by Joe Palen in that circumstance. I want to point you to an article that’s talking through the way in which film and TV music is written, because so often you’ll see this is the named composer, but there’s actually a whole stable of sub-composers who are working for that person who are doing the actual work of coming up with all the cues. Is this something you’re familiar with coming into this conversation?

**Craig:** Yes. The composer can’t do everything. Some composers also are not particularly good, for instance, at taking the music that they’re composing, which they often do on one instrument, and transposing it, or I’m sorry, I should say transcribing it into notation for an orchestra, nor are they expert in arranging it for an orchestra. Arrangement and instrumentalization and notation is a huge part of this.

Hildur Guðnadóttir, for instance, who did our score for Chernobyl and did the score for Joker, her husband is a guy named Sam Slater. He’s also a composer and a producer. He is very much this kind of partner for her to help take the musical thoughts and ideas and themes and then help her practically create tracks out of them and build them into larger things as need be and engineer them and produce them.

There are teams, certainly, of people. When you look at how much work some composers are doing, it would be impossible for them to be doing it all on their own. I could argue that if you’re John Williams and you come up with (singing), then you’ve done it. If you hummed the theme for ET or Star Wars or Jurassic Park and then told people to just spool it out for me and then listen to it and then you change some things, you’ve done the hard part. That is the genius part.

**John:** This article we’ll link to by Mark Rozzo from Vanity Fair, weirdly John Williams is apparently the person who actually does do all the stuff himself.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** He’s the exception. Hans Zimmer is the person who’s most known for it. It sounds like over the years Zimmer’s been better at crediting and acknowledging all of the people who work for him and who are doing some of that real work in terms of putting those keys together, because you’re right, these people are sometimes working on four projects at once. They’re like those artists who become factories, that just do all the stuff. He might be coming up with the main theme, but everyone else is building out that stuff.

Where it’s become a crisis though, is that classically, the work that was done for a movie or for a premium cable show, there could be a reporting of that. There could be royalties. The other people who are credited there could get a percentage of that stuff. In the streaming age, those royalties are becoming harder and harder to access. People are really struggling. Folks who are getting some portion of that money down the road are not finding that same money in a Spotify universe.

**Craig:** This is not something that you or I tend to have any experience with. When you’re a writer, you are writing. If you’re running a room full of writers, then they’re all writing as well. On a television show, most of them almost certainly will get some kind of credit on a script, an episode. There will be residuals. There will be an acknowledgement. For this area there does seem like there’s a gray zone. One would hope that composers, particularly the most successful and well-known, would be compensating their partners fairly, treating them fairly, and if they are working significantly and adding a lot creatively, that they should be rewarded for that on an ongoing basis, not just as a buyout, which I suspect may be the case.

**John:** We as screenwriters and television writers, we are represented by a union. Composers and lyricists are not represented by a union, so they don’t have the same kind of workplace protections and workplace standards and minimums that you and I benefit from. I think we’ve talked about, with Rachel Bloom, I think on the show before, is that there’s also this weird thing where she could be hired on to write a song for an episode or for a movie, and she’s creating literary material, she’s creating story for that. She’s creating a moment. She’s creating that scene in which that thing happens. She doesn’t have the Writers Guild protection over that work. She’s not considered a credited writer for having written something that could be a really significant portion of what’s happening there in that dramatic work.

**Craig:** I think it’s a great thing for us to draw attention to, not only to acknowledge that other people are doing this work and to help people understand the way things are. There’s no shame in this. This isn’t a secret or anything. Nobody’s pretending that those people aren’t there. Hopefully they are being taken care of. I haven’t noticed any major lawsuits or things, so one would hope that everyone is being taken care of and treated appropriately. That said, wish in one hand, poop in another, and see which one fills up first.

**John:** You and I both know of a screenwriter who is notorious for having had a room of writers who were apparently doing the work for him.

**Craig:** Who knows?

**John:** I think the fact that you and I are both thinking about the same person probably means that it is really exceptional.

**Craig:** It’s rare. It’s really rare.

**John:** It just doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** It’s a very rare thing. It’s not endemic to what we do.

**John:** Agreed. Craig, thanks.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* Follow alone with our Three Page Challenge selections [The Man Who Could be Macbeth](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F03%2FThe-Man-Who-Could-Be-Macbeth-first-3-pages.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=966ed6db27560a1e5248d4684aa3146ac99d688911bdcb6a6772792247a6aebc) by Daniel Brace, [Pizza Boy](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F03%2FPizza-Boy.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=b44cfadd9bbd1cd9a3eaebec7895a2df7236effe3476b09341bfcb26bbba234d) by Mick Jones, [Evergreen](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F03%2FEVERGREEN-by-Heather-Kennedy-3-pages.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=04d28a15776ebee0415aa8362aad6fa04df7782a7f0ecbd58bc5f67ded5341c7) by Heather Kennedy, [Scavenger](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F03%2FScavenger_1st3pages.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=f4b2401ba8d366f6414ee2f8aa5276338fc77d22672536f60f2b1e2229ed77fd) by Phil Saunders.
* [WGA East Settles Five-Day Strike Against G/O Media](https://deadline.com/2022/03/wga-east-settles-five-day-strike-against-gizmodo-media-group-1234972332/)
* [RSVP for the Animation Guild Rally](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf1nAG5CQeIl-UT2VoZB4kMXaoC7XH3EGppg4tIU9J-YVtFHg/viewform) Sunday 3/20 at 2pm in Burbank, CA
* [‘Copshop’ Screenwriter Sues Zero Gravity Management For Breach of Contract](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/copshop-screenwriter-sues-zero-gravity-management-for-breach-of-contract-1235107246/)
* [ScreenSkills To Fund Accessibility Co-Ordinators For British TV](https://deadline.com/2022/03/screenskills-to-fund-accessibility-co-ordinators-for-british-tv-1234975989/)
* [Behind the Tweets: “Rewrite Map”](https://www.wga.org/news-events/news/connect/3-11-22/behind-the-tweets-rewrite-map) by Jeffrey Lieber on WGAW Connect
* [Scriptnotes Episode 530: The One with Jack Thorne](https://johnaugust.com/2021/the-one-with-jack-thorne)
* [David Iserson’s Tweet on Great Scripts](https://twitter.com/davidiserson/status/1498832466575912961?s=21)
* [Touring the MOST EXPENSIVE HOUSE in the United States!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8Cd_McCdow) on Youtube and [The Queen of Versailles](https://www.magpictures.com/thequeenofversailles/)
* [The Astrologer on Elden Ring](https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Astrologer)
* [“The Minions Do the Actual Writing”: The Ugly Truth of How Movie Scores Are Made](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/the-ugly-truth-of-how-movie-scores-are-made) by Mark Rozzo for Vanity Fair
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [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 Joe Palen ([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/541standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/betrayed).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 542 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, Craig, I thought I trusted you, I believed in you, and now for you to do this.

**Craig:** You got what you deserved, my friend.

**John:** Today we’re discussing betrayals, back stabs, and double crosses as they occur in film and TV, and real life to some degree.

We also have lots of follow-up and listener questions. Plus, Craig, what should I do about my keyboard? We’re going to talk a little bit about keyboards, which is a fundamental piece of hardware technology we don’t discuss nearly enough on the show.

In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we didn’t come here to make friends, we came here to win. I want to discuss which reality competition shows you and me and Megana would enter and what our strategies would be, because I would say you’re probably not a big Survivor-y kind of fan, but I could see you on a cooking show, for example, and you would kill it.

**Craig:** The question is, what kind of cooking show? There are so many.

**John:** We’ll get into all of them, but only for our Premium Members. First, there’s some stuff that happened in the news. Obviously, Disney’s handling of the Florida Don’t Say Gay bill was a big topic in discussion this last week.

I was at a premiere for Better Nate Than Ever, which was a Disney Plus movie, directed by Tim Federle, a former guest, which was delightful. Tim was asked on the red carpet, “How are you feeling about Disney’s response to Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill?” He said that “good representation does not cancel out bad legislation,” which I just loved. I liked that he found a way to rhyme that and actually make the point that you can do everything you can do, like in Tim’s movie, which has incredibly important gay representing, but it doesn’t actually change the facts on the ground of people living under bad laws.

**Craig:** This is one of those spaces where the corporation is so far away from the content they make. It’s now run by a new guy. It was Bob Iger, and now it’s Mr. Chapek. What’s his first name, Bob?

**John:** I think it’s Bob Chapek.

**Craig:** Another Bob. There you go, just by not knowing my first name, I’ve put myself on some sort of blacklist. You have people that make these things and they care about these things and put all of their love into these things. I know that one of the producers of that was Adam Siegel, who’s a wonderful guy and a lovely friend of mine and just a good human being. They are putting all their love in this, and it means something to them. They mean what they say when they say that good representation isn’t going to cancel out bad legislation. That’s absolutely a great point. The boardroom is 4 million miles away. The boardroom might as well be on another planet. The question is, what will the boardroom actually do about this.

It is a very tricky thing for Disney, because I think they all know that this law is terrible. If this law were somewhere else, I think they would have a strong corporate response, especially Disney, which has always been, I think, the gayest of studios, just in terms of who’s been running it and who’s been there and who works on their movies. It’s just been a very gay-friendly studio, at least for employment. Disneyland has always had Gay Day, and yet their biggest investment in park is in Florida. What do they do? How many people do you think they employ in Florida? God.

**John:** I saw it was a huge number.

**Craig:** It’s insane.

**John:** I want to say it’s 30,000. They’re one of the biggest employers in Florida.

**Craig:** It’s like a city of employees. On the one hand, they do have to make sure that they take care of those employees and keep them working and all the rest of it, but on the other hand, what do they do? This is actually quite fascinating, because they have an oversized influence on Florida, but it seems like Florida’s leadership right now, under Governor Dipshit, doesn’t care. They just like being mean. I don’t know what’s going to happen here. Do you have any prediction?

**John:** I don’t have a great prediction. I think it’s [unclear 00:03:55] the folks who spend so much on Disney, which great to put pressure there, but also we need to remind everybody that Disney didn’t do this, it was Florida that did this. It was those terrible people. There are other companies that are working there who could also be pressured to do things. I’m thinking back to at the NBA making choices about when to pull games out of places because of things. This is just a bad law that will hurt people. It’s just a performative law, so not a thing that’s designed to actually have any measurable impact on people’s lives. It’s just going to do terrible things for kids who are in danger.

**Craig:** That’s a great point.

**John:** That’s the frustration is that it’s not even a thing where–

**Craig:** It’s not even a real law. They’re just posing, for their stupid core.

**John:** Sometimes what’s even more dangerous than a draconian law is a vaguely written law anybody could choose to sue over. It’s a horrible mess.

**Craig:** It’s so stupid. It’s so stupid. You got to know at least a bunch of the people that were sponsoring that are very secretly and quietly gay, because that always happens.

**John:** Yeah, or they’re going to have gay and trans family members, because that’s life.

**Craig:** I hope they all hear from all of them. You make an interesting point, which is we sometimes focus all of our fire on the friends who aren’t doing enough, and not on the enemy. I think it’s important to hold our companies to task and to make them be responsible. I think it’s important to remind them of their responsibility. First things first, let’s get rid of that governor, change the way the government works in Florida, because it’s just horrendous.

**John:** We also need to find some way to change the incentives to just make the most performatively stupid things possible, so basically that everyone has to keep running further and further to the right in order to avoid the challenges.

**Craig:** That’s easy. Just get rid of Facebook. Just get rid of Meta, and that’ll take away Insta. Then get rid of Twitter, and you’re on your way to a society that is mildly functioning.

**John:** On our way. Also, this past week, MGM officially was acquired by Amazon Prime Studios. There was a question of whether that would go through or it would face regulatory hurdles. It did not. It was approved for sale. MGM of course is the legendary lion-led studio behind the 007 movies and a huge back-history. As we’ve said before on the podcast, their catalog is really complicated because it’s been sold off in bits and pieces to various places, but it is a big acquisition. I will say that even over the past couple weeks, I’ve been out with a pitch, and I pitched Amazon and I pitched MGM, and they were two completely separate companies. They were at pains to describe themselves as two different companies. MGM could not buy this project for streaming, because they did not have any relationship with a streamer.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Now, of course, they do. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the theatrical side of MGM, the degree to which Amazon uses MGM as a theatrical distribution mechanism for the things that they make that should have a theatrical release. We’ll see what happens.

**Craig:** It made me sad, and not because I hate Amazon or anything. It just made me sad that… Then I thought, oh my god, this upstart internet company has purchased this 100-year-old studio. I’m like, actually, Amazon’s been around for a long time.

**John:** It has.

**Craig:** Actually now, they’re kind of an old company. My daughter has never existed in a world without Amazon.

**John:** If TikTok were to have bought MGM, I think we’d be a little more concerned.

**Craig:** I would’ve jumped. You’re absolutely right. The MGM catalog is bizarre and fragmented. You could argue that what they really bought was James Bond. That maybe is what they really bought, because that is all that MGM has been doing for a while. It’s pretty much a guaranteed hit, assuming that you pour the resources in that are generally required. Obviously, it’s a big turning point, because James Bond is about to get a new James Bond. What it means ultimately is one less buyer, not that MGM was really a buyer. They were. They were pretty minor. What’s going to happen to those two sets of people, some of those people are getting fired. I think that’s probably what’s going to happen. It’s the same thing when Disney bought Fox. It just happens.

**John:** It does, which is a bummer. I will already remind people that I don’t think that deal should’ve gone through. In a different administration, that deal would not have gone through, because I think it was just too big of a merger.

**Craig:** I don’t disagree.

**John:** Megana, we have some follow-up. Do you want to get us started?

**Megana:** Yes. Malgosia writes, with genuine love, “In Episode 540, Baggage asked for packing advice, and to my shock and horror, Craig said something to the tune of, ‘Don’t worry about bringing a hat and such. The lovely folks at the costume department will hook you up.’ No. Please don’t. We are not your mom. We all wear clothes every day, and therefore we at the costume department are often taken for granted as an extension of your closet. We’re absolutely not though, just the same as set deck is not there to help you decorate your hotel room, and hair and makeup are not there to brush your teeth. Baggage and Craig, please bring your own hat. If something happens and a nervous PA spills coffee on your shirt, we sure as hell will help. Just don’t treat us like your extra suitcase that you decided not to bring. Bring that extra suitcase. Production will cover it.”

**Craig:** Jeez, Malgosia, you’re tough. Maybe because I’m the showrunner.

**John:** I was going to say, Craig. I think there’s a little privilege there that may be coming in.

**Craig:** Yeah, which I’ve earned. They’re always so nice. They’re like, “Do you need a hat?” I would say that’s probably fair. That’s true. They’re not your mom. I can’t imagine that the occasional polite request would be met with quite this much horror and shock, or shock and horror. Shock and horror seems strong, Malgosia. It just really does.

**John:** It sounds like an invasion technique.

**Craig:** I know you’ve got a room with 100 hats. “Can I borrow one?” doesn’t seem like it would… Of course, no one’s relying on the costume department. I’m just saying if you forgot something, if you were like, “Oh my god, I don’t have a raincoat and it’s pouring,” it’s okay. Unless you’re working on a show where Malgosia’s got her arms crossed in front of that wardrobe truck, generally speaking, people are actually quite nice. I recognize that I’m the boss, so it’s probably why they’re nicer.

**John:** This is reminding me of a conversation I had way back when shooting Go, my very first movie. On that film, video taps were relatively new on cameras, because it was a film camera, but it had a video tap so you could see what was happening on screen.

More importantly, we also had a wireless video tap, which weren’t even I think technically even allowed at that point. It was just broadcasting on a UHF channel. We all had little TVs that we had, little handheld TVs, basically Game Boy size, so we could watch the shot if we weren’t right at set. It was incredibly handy, but those things just ate batteries. Inevitably, we’d run through our batteries, and we’d go to the sound department and say, “Hey, can I get some AA batteries?” At some point the sound department said, “Yes, but also, you’ve blown through our entire battery budget for the show.” We were counting on the sound department to always have batteries. Really we should’ve made some other arrangement for where are we going to get this or just acknowledge to the sound department, “Yeah, I know we’re eating all your batteries. Let’s talk to the line producer or somebody else, so it’s clear that this is what’s happening here.”

**Craig:** You only need one hat. If I came every day and was like, “Where’s my new hat?”

**John:** “Where’s my new hat?”

**Craig:** “Where’s my new hat?”

**John:** I burned this hat.

**Craig:** “Where’s my new hat?” Point taken. Assess your position and your need and act accordingly.

**John:** Sounds good. More follow-up, Megana?

**Megana:** Meedo wrote in, “On Craig’s question about meet cutely, yes, though not grammatically correct, cute could function adverbially in the same way hard does in die hard. On the subject of bad grammar, what are some instances of titles or catchphrases where such a distortion of the language has worked to great effect, and when does it not work? Instances of the former that come to mind are Gone Girl, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Never Say Never Again.”

**John:** Basically the question is, meet cute feels like bad grammar, but you can argue that it’s functioning adverbially.

**Craig:** You could try.

**John:** In titles we often do strangle some grammar there for effect. Gone Girl is the girl who’s gone, you get it. The Me and You and Everyone We Know, that feels actually pretty natural. I guess in titles we do get away with some weird grammar because we just accept it.

**Craig:** I just Googled a little bit here just to find some good ones, and there’s actually quite a few of them that are fun. You Got Served. No, you were served. You were served. Two Weeks Notice is missing a possessive apostrophe.

**John:** It is, yeah.

**Craig:** The Ladies Man, that was spelled the ladies, ladies plural, and the man. That just makes no sense. They’re titles, so you can do whatever the hell you want. Doesn’t matter. I remember I did a paper in college on Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song by Melvin Van Peebles. There are so many A’s and E’s. I had to learn, because I had to type it so many times, how many, because the spelling was obviously whatever it wanted to be. Get away with Honey I Shrunk the Kids. Honey, I’ve shrunk the kids. I think you can get away with anything, Meeto.

**John:** Honey, I shrank the kids. Honey, I shrunk the kids. Oh yeah, it’s honey, I shrank the kids.

**Craig:** Yeah, or honey, I’ve shrunk.

**John:** Also that’s one of those words that’s… Shrink. You could almost get to shrinked. It’s one of those words that’s going to be a transition going back to the more normal -ed things rather than switching vowels. [Cross-talk 00:13:35].

**Craig:** I think you can do whatever you want in a title.

**John:** You really can.

**Craig:** Titles are fine.

**John:** Later on in the show we’re going to be discussing BlacKkKlansman or mentioning BlacKkKlansman. As I’d try to type it into the Workflowy, I just could never remember how they spelled that.

**Craig:** That’s another good example.

**John:** Multiple K’s. Finally, some follow-up in Intelligence versus Charisma. Let’s start us out with that.

**Craig:** Em wrote in, “I think what’s missing in this conversation, and really missing in the Twitter fracas, is the connection between writing a great sample and figuring out what a great sample is in the context of the industry, which is something that’s largely learned via social connections with peers, which in turn is largely a function of charisma or at least social intelligence. A great sample in 2014 might not be a great sample in 2022, at least in TV, since the spectrum of what’s on the air has changed so much.

The best way to learn about that is talking to other writers and executives, usually in nonprofessional social context. It’s much harder I think to break in with low charisma, even if you’re a great writer, because you’ll have fewer friends, not because those connections are what will give you that first break, but because those connections are what might attune you to the industry so you can figure out what you should be writing.”

**John:** I think Em makes a really good point, but Craig is going to disagree.

**Craig:** Look, if you want to find out what the industry is doing, you can just watch TV. Also, if you’re in that spot where because of your high charisma you are now plugged into what’s being made, you may be in danger of agenting yourself, where you think, “Ah, I know what they want now. I will chase that.” It’s possible that that might help you a little bit, but not as much as something that’s fresh and original. I think now more than ever, actually, there is space for stuff that is different, because of television and the way television has functioned. Yeah, of course you could always do things that other people are doing. I’m not sure you’re going to need a lot of charisma for that.

**John:** Here’s my defense of what Em is saying, is that we talked on the previous episode about how there’s intelligence and charisma and wisdom, and wisdom is that knowing what to write, recognizing patterns, recognizing trends. Some of that also just comes with experience. Your wisdom stats will go up with some time. I think what Em is describing in terms of just getting a sense of the chatter and what people are actually talking about, because you can watch TV and see, oh, this is what’s on TV, but that’s what was purchased two years ahead of time and where the trend was. Getting a sense of where the puck is headed is a function of talking with people and being I that chatter. Yes, there’s a danger of overdoing that and chasing too hard the next trend, but it’s appropriate to be thinking about that in terms of not writing something that no one is going to pick up because of other things.

Right now I will tell our listeners, it’s really, really hard to set up a musical, I can tell you this from firsthand experience, because everyone’s afraid of musicals because so many musicals have failed recently. That’s just a thing I can tell you because you’re my friend and you’re listening to this on a podcast. If you didn’t have a friend who was listening to this, you might say, “Oh, I’m going to go set up a musical.” It’s going to be really hard to do it this week or this month. That’s just the reality. I think some charisma would be the way of being out there in the space, chatting with people at bars, doing that sort of stuff that happens, where you get the sense of what people are working on and what people are excited about. Some charisma there is helpful.

**Craig:** Look, I suppose also if you were just a careful reader for the 4 billion articles get fire hosed at us about everything, so if you Google Dear Evan Hansen, I think a thousand talk pieces will appear, and you’ll probably get a sense of why there is a trend right now. It’s understandable. I never want to come across as somebody who’s suggesting that social skills don’t help. I think I have pretty decent social skills, and they help. I don’t want to say wisdom doesn’t help, because I think I have some of that too. Of all your stats, really the one that is so outlandishly more important than the other is your intelligence here or–

**John:** Your writing intelligence.

**Craig:** What we call talent.

**John:** Obviously, this conversation was all about starting out a career. I will say that as my career has progressed, I reached a mid-level tier, where my writing was important, but my ability to be in a room with heavy hitters and survive was probably more important in terms of being able to keep that job and keep the project going. The words I was writing were very important. It was my ability to be present in a room and keeping up with the conversation and recognizing the psychological aspects of these difficult people in a room was more key to my success than actually the words, for some projects and some points in their production.

**Craig:** I agree with that. I think we talked about the whole concept of the screenwriter plus. Especially in features, that makes absolute sense. If you’re going to break through to the next level in feature writing, and we’re talking about you’ve got a career, you’ve had a credit or two, things are going well, you’re getting work steadily, the next level up, if you’re trying to get to the famous A-list, is you now need to have quite a bit of charisma and quite a bit of wisdom, because you are now going to be more than a screenwriter. You’re also going to be an interlocutor, you’re going to be a producer of a kind, you’re going to be a therapist, you’re going to be a conflict manager, and you’re going to be a de-escalator and a hostage negotiator. You’re going to be a lot of different things, and you need to know how to do that well. If you can’t, you will not be that person. You will still be somebody they might hire for a week or two, because you’re wonderful.

I don’t think anybody that hires Charlie Kaufman for a week or two is looking for a therapist, screenwriter plus producer. They’re looking for somebody to come in and be Charlie Kaufman for two weeks and to get that stuff. Guys like him have removed themselves from any need of being on any list. He’s just his own list. Yes, I completely agree, as you go on in your career, once the talent has been established, that other stuff makes a huge difference.

**John:** We should also acknowledge our screenwriting bias here, our feature bias, and that if you’re a person who’s working in television, you’re going to be working with groups of people a lot, so other writers in a room often, but then on a set you’re going to be doing lot of other work where you’re going to be interfacing with people and not just doing your writing skill. You’re going to be doing other persuasion skills and ability to communicate, and that does come down to charisma at some levels. It is important, especially in television.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** On this show, over the history of this show, we’ve talked some about keyboards. I’ve definitely blogged about my keyboard travails over the years. I noticed I think the last time I think we were doing DnD or something, I saw your keyboard. You are not using any traditional keyboard right now either, are you?

**Craig:** No. I have not used a traditional keyboard in forever.

**John:** Great. Let’s talk about that, because I started using a split keyboard. It’s basically the one where the keyboard is divided in half and a little bit at an angle, some sort of Microsoft keyboard, ergonomic keyboard, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, because it was helpful because I was having some issues. That keyboard alone was not enough to stop some really serious carpal tunnel problems I was having, and so I had to escalate to bigger, more serious, weirder, stranger keyboards. The one that I’ve been using for the past 15 years is a recommendation from Dana Fox. We’ll put a link to it in the show notes. Craig, you can see it also in the Workflowy. This is my SafeType keyboard. Craig, could you describe for our listeners at home what this keyboard looks like?

**Craig:** If you imagine a regular keyboard and then you keep the middle where it… The middle would be your number pad and stuff like that, which normally wouldn’t be in the middle. Then the other two sides, the left and the right side, you take and tilt up 90 degrees. If you’re a touch typer, you know you have your left-hand letters and you have your right-hand letters. All the left-hand letters and the right-hand letters are now on an upright thing. Instead of typing with your fingers pointing down, you are typing with your fingers pointing toward each other. I guess your hands are now perpendicular to the desk.

**John:** This is the keyboard I’ve been typing on for a very long time. It’s weird to learn how to do it. In the photo that we’ll include in the show notes, you can see that it has little rearview mirrors that fold out so you can see the function keys. No one ever uses the mirrors. I’ve tucked the mirrors away for all these years. It works for me. Because I’m a touch typist, I can type at a good normal clip on it. I’ve been happy with it enough that I got a backup keyboard just in case this one breaks, although this past week I was featured on this little blog post called Writes With, which is basically what different tools writers use. I linked to the SafeType keyboard. The guy who does the blog said, “Oh, that link doesn’t work anymore.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” It turned out that SafeType has not actually existed as a company for at least three years.

**Craig:** John, they’ve been dead for 100 years.

**John:** I’m typing on a dead keyboard. I’m typing on a keyboard that is–

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Who knows, maybe it’s going to last me 20 years and I don’t need to think about anything else. This keyboard may not be around forever. In fact, the keyboard I’m using, it’s not even USB. It’s an ADB thing that has a little USB connector.

**Craig:** Oh my god, ADB. Oh, jeez. Wow.

**John:** It’s sketchy.

**Craig:** Megana has never seen that. Megana has never seen that in the wild, I don’t think.

**John:** Apple Desktop Bus, or it’s whatever the PC equivalent to that, but it’s not a USB connection, which is strange. Because it’s also hard for this keyboard to do keyboard command shortcuts, like command X, command C, command A, I have those mapped out to an external gaming keyboard.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** Which I absolutely love. It’s just the Razer Tartarus Pro. Unfortunately, they stopped making drivers for it for Mac, so I need to have this Frankenstein combination of other things that don’t reliably work. I’ve been in frustration anyway. I’m now considering switching keyboards. I wanted to talk with you about this and see where you’re at but also have a discussion about why keyboards are so crucial but why they are so problematic, often for writers.

**Craig:** As long as I can double up. The new keyboard I have is my One Cool Thing. I’m going to double up. As long as I get credit for that.

**John:** You get credit for an early One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** I had, same as you, a lot of wrist issues. I’m a touch typist, as you are. The old keyboards were just horrendous. The new keyboard that, for instance the No-Frills Apple keyboard, I don’t know what they call it, Magic Keyboard, whatever they call it, it’s terrible.

**John:** Nice and straight.

**Craig:** Horrible. The reason it’s horrible is because ultimately your wrists have to pronate. Your hands are going in. It’s an unnatural position for your elbows and your wrists. Ergonomically, it messes you up. I found a little cushiony thing that I was using for a while. It helped a little bit, but not a lot.

Then eventually I did find my way to split keyboards. A standard split keyboard, unlike what John uses, which is essentially an affront to God, a normal split keyboard just takes the keyboard and separates the left and right slightly. Imagine putting a triangle between them. Instead of your hands pronating in, they can just relax in a natural place. It does take a little bit of getting used to, but not much. I can go back and forth between a split keyboard and a regular keyboard without any fuss at all. I can’t remember what the original one I was using was, but eventually it did break, and so then I switched over to Microsoft, of all people, for a long time.

**John:** They had some good ones.

**Craig:** That’s what I’ve been using for a long time. It was Microsoft. I think the first one was called the Sculpt Keyboard. It’s still called the Sculpt Keyboard. Essentially it just became their Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard, which if you look it up, you can see a picture of it, you can see exactly what I’m talking about. It’s curvy and it’s got a built-in hand rest and it’s lovely. Here’s the issue with this and a lot of them. Most keyboards now want to be wireless. These third-party ones use Bluetooth, but they require dongles. This is enraging to me, but I guess there’s no way around it. If you lose the dongle, at least for Microsoft, you have to buy a whole new keyboard. They don’t sell the dongle.

In looking for a better option, because there were certain things I just… The way the command keys and things mapped I didn’t really enjoy, even though I could remap them. I did just recently switch to a new keyboard, and that is the Logitech Ergo K860 wireless split keyboard, also with dongle, but connects much easier and quicker. It’s more comfortable. The key action is nicer, I think. It does everything I need it to do. It worked instantly with Mac, no drivers required.

**John:** The keyboard, for folks who are listening at home, like most split keyboards, it’s divided in the middle and then rotated slightly out. Also, it has a hump in the middle so that the middle part of the keyboard is higher than the outside part of the keyboard. That is so your wrists are turned slightly at an angle. They’re not completely flat, which is better for your wrists and is a very natural typing form too. People don’t react to that poorly. I think this will not be enough for me. I think I would probably still have the problems I would have on a keyboard like this, which is why I’m trying out as a backup keyboard, this thing which I will also put in the show notes, if you want to look at the Workflowy here. This thing looks insane. This is the Kinesis Advantage 2.

**Craig:** I saw this one when I was researching.

**John:** This is a much more ambitious rethinking of what a keyboard should be. You still have the keyboard split in half, but those two halves are set far apart from each other and inside little wells, and so that you are still on your home keys, but those home keys are set down into little bowls, and all the other keys are facing into them. Your muscle memory can still do its thing and still hit the letters, but it’s a very different experience. Your space bar is–

**Craig:** Where is that?

**John:** Your space bar is your right thumb. Backspace is your left thumb. Return is next to the space. It’s one reach over from where the space bar is.

**Craig:** Oh, no, no no no.

**John:** It’s a strange thing.

**Craig:** The one thing that I can’t deal with is, return should be to the right of the apostrophe, which so the right of the L. That’s where it goes.

**John:** I get that.

**Craig:** Anybody that moves it is a criminal.

**John:** That is a natural feeling. I think the logic behind this is that your pinky is by far your weakest finger, and your thumb is by far your strongest finger, and so therefore, putting those things you hit all the time on your thumb saves your hand. It saves your pinky from doing that work, which is a large part of the problem with repetitive stress.

**Craig:** I could see that. I do enjoy slamming the space bar. People have commented to me that I am a very loud typer.

**John:** I can imagine that.

**Craig:** I type fast, but I type furious. It’s just ba ta ta ta ta ta ba ba ta ta ta ta ta ba ba ba! It’s just my thing. I’m just a furious typer.

**John:** I always say I always envy the people who like, “Oh, I’ve been making a custom keyboard. I’m replacing all my letters with these things and I have these mechanical switches.” That’s wonderful for you. I’m trying to find the keyboard that will make my arms not go dead at night, where I would literally have zombie arms at night, where I would wake up and I could not move my arms, until I replaced my keyboard with this one and also replaced my mouse with a vertical mouse, which was much better.

**Craig:** Sorry, the way you said that, for a moment it sounded like you had zombie arms and you kept having zombie arms that night, until you reached over and dialed something with your nose and then got a new keyboard to come in.

**John:** At night. When I say zombie arms, literally both my arms would be dead. I would have to physically flop my body over to get out of bed. I couldn’t even use my arms to push myself out of bed.

**Craig:** It’s so funny. I wish it still happened.

**John:** It’s hilarious.

**Craig:** You’re like a Muppet basically where the–

**John:** I’m a Muppet. I’m a Muppet who’s lost the little sticks to the puppeteer. I think our conclusion here is that if you’re experiencing pain after typing, you should do something about it, because it will not just magically get better by itself. You just need to look for solutions. Some of those solutions are a new keyboard, a new mouse, but honestly, just changing your work setup could also be helpful. So often I think people try to type on a surface that’s too high or too low. Just look for those proper angles. For me, I need arm rests on a chair that can support me as I’m typing. For other people, that’s a bad solution. Do what works for you and do what’s going to not make your arms hurt, because you will not be a productive writer if you cannot write productively.

**Craig:** You’re going to spend a lot of time typing.

**John:** Got it.

**Craig:** Side note, learn how to type.

**John:** Learn how to type. People who don’t learn how to type, learn how to type.

**Craig:** Learn how to type.

**John:** Just take one of those online little classes if you need to. I learned how to type, and it was just an absolute godsend.

**Craig:** In fact, all this talk about charisma, wisdom, intelligence, sometimes there’s this weird little stat that you forget about. Typing, let’s put that under dexterity.

**John:** It is what dexterity is.

**Craig:** There’s a minimum dex. Believe it or not, typing will make you a better writer. If it happens faster between your brain and the page–

**John:** Less friction, yeah.

**Craig:** Less friction will make you better. Actually, you do need to bump that dex up to a minimum number for typing.

**John:** You know who’s a very fast typist?

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** Andrew Lippa.

**Craig:** What’s his number?

**John:** It’s well in the hundreds.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** He’s a pianist. He has incredibly strong fingers and just can brrrrt.

**Craig:** I’m about 100.

**John:** That’s great. I’m nowhere near that.

**Craig:** When you talk about people that are 150 and 160, it’s terrifying to watch them go. Even for me, it’s weird. The 100 is when I’m transcribing something. I’m looking at something and I’m typing it, and my mind turns off and my fingers are just going. At some point it even weirds me out how it works. 150, or whatever, 175, that’s steno tool stuff from the ’60s. I’m impressed.

**John:** My fastest typing is I had to do not even really a pitch, but get ready for a meeting, and so I just had an open Highland document and with just brain dumping. Brain dumping is incredibly quick for me. It’s just a great way of just getting all that out. I don’t know how many words per minute it is, but I can just very quickly plow through stuff. I find that very liberating.

**Craig:** It’s fine. It’s fine. Megana, do you type?

**John:** Weirdly, Megana doesn’t know how to type at all. You would think that between Harvard and Google, she would learn how to type, but no, it never came up.

**Megana:** I made it this far. I had to Google what touch typing was though, because–

**Craig:** Wow.

**Megana:** They just called it typing. I don’t know, I just think of it as typing.

**John:** You probably had a keyboarding class in school at some point.

**Craig:** Keyboarding.

**Megana:** They called it technology. I used to fall asleep in that class a lot, and then my output was just where my head had fallen asleep on the keyboard. I learned to type because I grew up during AOL Instant Messenger and so I was just constantly chatting with people on the internet. I became a quick typer that way.

**Craig:** Did anything bad ever happen? “I was a 10-year-old girl constantly chatting on the internet.”

**John:** With strangers. AOL.

**Craig:** Yes, the perverts’ playground. Megana, I think you need to bump the dex up. It’s just something to think about, and it actually goes faster than you think. Learning how to type properly goes faster than you think.

**Megana:** I think I did learn how to type properly, but I didn’t practice well until I started internet chatting.

**Craig:** It’s gone?

**Megana:** No, it’s there.

**Craig:** Oh, you do type.

**Megana:** I do type.

**John:** She does type. I’m kidding. I was kidding.

**Craig:** Oh, I just took John at his word–

**John:** Sorry, I’m never joking again.

**Craig:** Because I trust John. You have nothing. Your dex is fine?

**Megana:** Yeah. It’s strong.

**Craig:** It’s strong. You have strong dex.

**Megana:** Across the board I’m really everything that we’re measuring here.

**Craig:** You mean you’re a well-rounded bard.

**John:** That’s what she is. She’s really a performer.

**Craig:** You know what? That’s important. You need a jack of all trades.

**John:** We love it. Let’s get to our marquee topic, which is betrayals and back stabs and double crossing. This was prompted by, two weeks ago in Interesting we were talking about these topics and some good examples from different films or TV shows or the nature of what betrayals look like in film and television. While we’ve talked about lying on the show before and how important lying is, we’ve never really gotten to betrayals, which I think are important, because we have cases where obviously the villain betrays the hero, or someone who’s supposed to be a friend betrays our hero and that becomes a big thing. We also have situations where our main character has to make moral and ethical choices which do result in a betrayal.

A very obvious example from Jurassic Park is the notion that one of the employees was actually working behind the scenes to steal the material and sell it off to another thing. That betrayal became an important plot point, and once it was revealed, put other characters in danger. Also leading up to this discussion of The Departed and the betrayals and deceptions within The Departed and how that comes out and comes across.

There’s so many movies you can think of, movies in different genres. It’s not just the con men genre. It’s not just heist movies. In a lot of our science fiction and a lot of our other films, you have characters who seem like they’re working together, and then one will turn on the other. Let’s just talk about how that functions and how we should think about that as a writer, both so that it’s as rewarding as possible within the film, but so that a character being betrayed doesn’t feel like the audience being betrayed.

**Craig:** It’s an incredibly useful technique, because you can create plot through a simple need. In Jurassic Park they could’ve had our bad guy just need money because his grandma was sick. He’s like, “I’m desperate. I know this is wrong, but I need to do this for money.” That’s perfectly fine, because that character isn’t somebody we’re probably going to be emotionally invested in. The wonderful part about double crossing and backstabbing is that it creates an emotional response in us from a character that probably isn’t essential or is secondary. This can happen all the time. It’s exciting. It means that we haven’t figured out exactly what’s going on yet.

The movies that I think about all the time for backstabbing and double crossing are the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. It’s baked into everything. What was wonderful about those films and what Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio did was have main characters backstabbing and double crossing each other, so that whenever you got a little too sentimental about the characters, whenever you bought in a little too much to kumbaya, they reminded you that they were pirates, agents of chaos, who would absolutely betray each other. We have an ability to keep the audience on their toes. When they get fooled, they don’t get angry at you, the writer. They get angry at the character for doing it, which is great.

**John:** Other great examples, Aliens is of course one of my all-time favorite movies. Paul Reiser’s character and his betrayal in that is crucial. We’ve mentioned BlacKkKlansman before in terms of who is he really working for. Parasite. In the first Charlie’s Angels, the relationship between Sam Rockwell and Drew Barrymore is about that. It’s about a deception and really the question of he’s revealing his true identity at the moment it’s going to hurt her most, not even for the most useful moment in plot, that he actually is a bad person for what he’s doing there. The Social Network is basically a betrayal of when did you decide that this company was worth more than our friendship, when did you know you were going to screw me over. There’s lots of genres in which this can take place.

Maybe we should define our terms a little bit first, because let’s think about what a betrayal actually really means and why it has this moral valence to it. Betrayal is you’re breaking an oath. There’s a trust between two characters or an expectation of trust that has been broken in a way that causes harm to one of the people. It’s not just like you disappointed me. A disappointment is not a betrayal. There’s some lasting harm you’ve done because of this betrayal. Betrayal I think can really only be a conscious choice. You can’t accidentally betray somebody. You can betray your principles. You can betray your inner promise that you’ve made to yourself. A betrayal’s often also a revelation of something, a revelation of some secret or some nature that you didn’t want to get out there.

**Craig:** Good betrayals I think have an interesting perversion of power dynamics. A lot of times the people that are doing the betraying are not people in power. People that have the upper hand often don’t need to betray the people beneath them. When there is a slight power imbalance, it doesn’t always work like this, but when there is, the betrayals can be particularly delicious, because the powerful person didn’t see it coming. If they’re a villain, you get very excited. if they’re a good person, it just really affects us.

This goes back to the Gospel. Jesus is betrayed. The person who betrays him does not have the power that Jesus has, but he gets him in the back. In the movie 300 there’s something just brutal about the way the lowliest person is the one that betrays the Spartans and so they all die. I do remember as a kid watching the, I think it was CBS, (singing), the animated special of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Do you remember that one, John?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** When Aslan, Jesus, is captured, and because he’s betrayed by Edward, and they shave his mane, aka putting the crown of thorns on him, I felt something terrible in me. It affected me deeply, because it seemed so brutally unjust, this violation not only of trust between people, it’s a violation of what we understand about justice and how people ought to be. That’s why being stabbed in the back is the ultimate expression of betrayal, because no one can defend against it. The highborn, the lowborn, no one.

**John:** The reason why a back stab works is because a false friend is doing it. You did not defend your flank because you didn’t think you had to. You were vulnerable to that person because you let them get close to you and they can stab you in the back. I would say every back stab is a betrayal, but not every betrayal is a back stab, because there’s many ways to betray something that’s not a back stab.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** The other thing to talk to, which I didn’t know the whole history of, is a double cross.

**Craig:** Double cross.

**John:** The first apparent reference to it is 1834. It’s from the Thieves Slang. To cross is to refer to something dishonest, which is the opposite of be square or straight with something. If you have a crook that’s going back on his partners, that would be crossing the crossers, which would be a double cross. In this case you’ve agreed on a plan with somebody and then you were deliberately doing the opposite. You had a second plan that they did not know about.

**Craig:** When you watch Casino or Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese is so good at portraying these petty double crossings. As you’re watching you’re like, “Oh my god, just don’t do that.” Then you realize, that’s what criminals do. They’re criminals. If they’re the sort of person in the first place that’s willing to break all of society’s codes and morays for selfish purposes, they’ll probably also do that to you. No honor among thieves.

**John:** The crucial thing about all of these betrayals is to remember that you can’t betray somebody if you never trusted them in the first place. There has to be some relationship between the two of you in order for betrayal to actually make sense. There has to be some, doesn’t have to be friendship, but it has to be some relationship, some assumption of mutual benefit between the two of you for this betrayal to actually work in there.

As we’re looking at setting up our characters and where they’re headed and what they are expecting, it does come back to what characters want. Obviously, our approach is from what our hero wants and what their goals are and what they’re trying to do and how they’re trying to do it, but looking at those characters around them, what do they want, and at what point are the things that they want that are in contrast to our hero is enough to motivate them to actually do this thing. We’re going to want to make choices about did they come into this relationship with the intention of betraying them? Was it all a setup from the start or did the circumstances on the ground change and therefore they are making the best choice for themselves at the moment?

**Craig:** I think a small peripheral character can just be defined as betrayer. In Jurassic Park, his name is Nedry. Nedry is a scumbag. He’s a scumbag. They always make him sweaty. He’s shifty and sweaty and he’s disgruntled and he’s a scumbag. When they figure out it’s his betrayal, I don’t even think anyone’s like, “What?”

**John:** “Never saw that coming.”

**Craig:** They’re like, “That’s about right, that shifty, beady-eyed sweaty guy who was grumpy all the time did us bad.” Side characters, you can do a classic, typical betraying side character. Die Hard has a wonderful moment like that with Hart Bochner. If you want your main character to be betraying, if you want the betrayal to be something that’s carrying you through, as opposed to just being a little kickoff incident, then I think it’s important that you do show the choice. If there’s this pointless or blithe betrayal, we will not care as much about it. It won’t make us as angry. We need to see the choice.

**John:** Always remember that just seeing your characters have relationships with each other, you as the writer have a relationship with your audience and making sure that the betrayal that you’re portraying doesn’t feel like a betrayal of the audience. There are notable examples of movies that did pull a sudden switcheroo at the very end, and you’re like, “Oh, that worked great, and I was surprised, but I’m delighted, because I could see it all make sense.” The Sixth Sense is a case where that turned out really well. No Way Out is an example of that, where information is being held from the audience, that when it was revealed is like, oh, I get what was happening there, and that feels great. Those are the notable exceptions.

In general, if we get to a place in the movie where you’ve pulled the rug out from underneath us and, okay, that was just not even cool. I thought we had a deal here. You’ve broken that social contract between us. That’s going to be a problem.

**Craig:** Twist endings are dangerous things. You have to get them right. As you’re writing these characters, and one of the issues with the twist ending is, at some point, like we say, we need to understand the double cross. It can’t just be ha ha! There has to be some sort of sadness to it. There has to be a humanity to it.

Again, thinking about 300, I think his name is Ephialtes. I think it was Ephialtes. He was deformed. He was physically deformed. He was supposed to die, because the fascists in Sparta would get rid of any slightly imperfect, quote unquote, children. He’s disabled. He cannot physically be a Spartan soldier, even though he desperately wants to be. King Leonidas in a kind way just says, “You aren’t able to do the things physically we require.” He’s very angry, and he sells them out, because he wants something for himself. He wants honor for him. He wants dignity. He is denied it. He lashes out. In the end, he regrets. I understand why he does what he does. In fact, it’s Xerxes as portrayed as a weird demigod who basically plays on all that stuff, so we understand. It’s similar in The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe. There’s temptation.

If you think about all the things that can feed into betrayal, you start to realize how juicy it could be for you and how exciting it could be, particularly if as you’re writing you start to feel like everyone can see what’s coming next. Then it may be time to think about betrayal.

**John:** Let’s get to our listener questions. Megana, do you want to start us off?

**Megana:** Imposter from New Jersey wrote in asked, “I’ve been listening to the back-episodes, and from the very beginning of the podcast, you’ve been warning listeners about supposed screenwriting gurus. A bit of context, I graduated film school about seven years ago and have worked in various jobs in the industry, UPM work, AD-ing, a bit of acting. Though professional screenwriting is my aspiration, I’ve never made much money at it. I’ve written a few small shorts, and I’ve been hired to do rewrites of independent features, but my credits are meager. To pay my mortgage, I’ve started teaching. Through a local nonprofit, I teach beginner screenwriting to teens and adults. When I say beginner, I mean ground zero, what a slug line is, why you shouldn’t use Google Docs to write a script, how to format dialog. Though the classes are through a nonprofit, students still pay to enroll.

“I’ve always felt a bit ethically icky about teaching these classes. Who am I to give instructions on the right way to write a script when I have so few credits to my name? Why should anyone take my advice? Have I become the most repugnant of all specialists, a screenwriting guru, or is this just another imposter syndrome flareup? Should I step aside and wait until I have more produced credits before I try to teach others how to write scripts?”

**Craig:** Imposter from New Jersey, that’s my name.

**John:** Let’s think about this. Imposter from New Jersey is concerned ethically whether it’s reasonable for him to be teaching screenwriting since he’s not had much success as a screenwriter himself.

**Craig:** I get that. I think the best news here is that he’s thinking that way, because the people that I despise never think that way. They think the opposite way. They think they have something special to offer the world and they’re going to charge them quite a bit. Here are all the positives here, Imposter. You are working for a nonprofit. Let’s just start right there. It’s a nonprofit. The gurus that I love teeing off on are very much for-profit people. They are charging people hundreds of dollars to get notes on their screenplay or master class sessions when they are themselves nowhere near master or even apprentice.

You’re working at a nonprofit. As you point out, you’re teaching beginner screenwriting, ground zero, fundamentals. They pay to enroll. They are not paying you directly. They are paying a nonprofit. I presume the nonprofit pays you. I suspect because it’s a nonprofit they’re not paying a whole lot. The fact that you have always felt a bit ethically icky means you’re okay. You’re right up against the guardrail of what you think you ought to be doing. If you went further, I think your own decent self would say, I cannot justify presenting myself as somebody that should do the following.

Where you are right now, I suspect you’re doing a fine job, teaching them what a slug line is, why you shouldn’t use Google Docs, and how to format dialog. I think that’s okay. Under no circumstances would it seem to me that anybody showing up in your class at a local nonprofit would describe you as a screenwriting guru. I don’t think you’re presenting yourself as one. I think you have a very healthy conscience. As far as I can tell, you’re doing just fine.

**John:** A couple scenarios here to talk through. I remember in junior high or high school, I went to this creative writing program that was done through our school district that was once a week. The guy who taught it was nice, well-meaning, had maybe had some short stories published, but had never actually done a full book. Would they learn as much as they possibly could? Was he an expert in the subject of creative writing? No, but it got me a structured situation in which I could be writing for this class, turning in stuff, getting feedback, working with other writers. It was incredibly valuable to me. If that is what Imposter is doing is providing a situation where he is teaching some very fundamental basics to these students who can also be in a group and learn from each other and learn some stuff about screenwriting and have conversations about screenwriting, I see that as only a win. If Imposter were teaching a Spanish class but did not actually speak Spanish, that would be a problem.

**Craig:** That would be a problem.

**John:** Where he actually has no business doing that thing, that would be not just ethically icky, that would be actually bad. That would be not acceptable to do. In this case, he is teaching what he knows, which is these fundamental things. He’s not teaching, “This is how Hollywood works,” because Imposter doesn’t know that. He is doing some fundamental Lord’s work in terms of getting those basics about how screenwriting works out there to these students. Go for it.

**Craig:** I agree. I think you’re fine. I think you’re a good guy. That’s what I think.

**John:** Cool. Next question, Megana.

**Megana:** Bruce asks, “I’m not a professional screenwriter, but I am a professional scientist, certified with a PhD, a bunch of papers, patents, etc. Over a number of podcasts, you fielded questions on people’s skill level and feelings. Sometimes your advice requires the person to take an honest look at themselves and ask, do I actually have it? This self-assessment is a critical aspect of life. It’s a reality, that unfortunately gets pushed aside for a general ‘you can do anything you put your mind to’ approach. In corporate America, the HR policies tend to coddle people. For example, in a managerial training on giving constructive criticism, I asked, ‘This is great and all, but what do you do when someone just doesn’t get it? Can I say we have a problem and the problem is you?’ ‘No,’ HR responded, ‘Please stick to the talking points and hope they get it.'”

**Craig:** That’s so great.

**Megana:** “Do you have the same issue in film and television production? What is the role of constructive criticism? Can you be honest when someone just isn’t cut out for what they’re trying to do?”

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Wow. Great question, Bruce. I love this. These are two great questions. Couldn’t agree with you more, by the way, Bruce, that “you can do anything you put your mind to” is utter horseshit.

**John:** It’s a trap.

**Craig:** You cannot. In fact, you can do almost nothing you put your mind to. That’s the God’s honest truth. There’s only so many things we can do. It just doesn’t work that way. Follow your dreams? I don’t even know what dreams. You’re putting your finger on something important, that is to say that some people, their talent stat is just not high enough to do the job they’re doing. They’re are underpowered in an over-leveled area of Elden Ring. What do we do with folks like this? Do we say, “We have a problem, and the problem is you.” You could. It’s unnecessary, I think.

If I were your HR advisor, I’d say, look, I understand exactly what that is like. It doesn’t help much to say it like that, because it makes you potentially seem like somebody who also doesn’t get it, because what if they have a problem and their problem is you? What happens in Hollywood and film and television production is expectations are placed. If at some point it just seems like that person just doesn’t get it, then the production parts ways with them. They just say, “You know what? It’s just not a good fit. Hopefully you can do a two-week transition while we bring somebody else on, and then that’ll be your time with us.”

**John:** What I like about this question is it’s not specifically talking about screenwriting, because we’ve talked so much about screenwriting and how it’s hard to get a clear metric on whether a person has talent or doesn’t have talent. It’s challenging. If you think about it, film and TV production, or if you think about a set or post in an editorial situation, yes, you could say, this assistant editor, we’re going to let them try to cut a scene, try to cut another scene. At a certain point editors can say, “Oh, this person just doesn’t get it. Editorial choices are not their strong suit.” It becomes tough to say, “Oh, I think you should not be doing this. I think you should try to find some other career in the business.” That’s just really hard to do.

I think one of the weird luxuries we have in film and television is because it’s all gig work and you’re just going from job to job to job, the next time the person is up for a job and they call the previous boss and say, “Hey, is this person good?” you can say, “Honestly, no, they’re not very good.” I do worry that we’re never on the hook to give the honest feedback about someone’s not up to snuff in this thing, that they’re spinning their wheels and should try something else. Again, one of the luxuries of film and TV production is because it’s gig to gig to gig, you can just not deal with some of those problems, but it’s certainly not helping those people who are never getting the honest feedback they should be getting.

**Craig:** I completely agree. Great question. We should talk about this stuff more. We should. I think it’s important. By the way, we never talk about HR.

**John:** HR exists in certain capacities within our business, but it’s invisible in other parts.

**Craig:** Now that I’m–

**John:** You’re a boss.

**Craig:** Yeah, A, and B, there’s just more HR than has ever been before. Just the presence of HR and what HR does and how much they have to deal with has gone up dramatically. Maybe we’ll have an HR person on to talk about this.

**John:** We should have an HR person on the show. Your experience doing a longer project like an HBO series is going to be different than a person on an independent film who won’t have an HR department at all, and yet some of the same things will still come up, these same issues, harassment at work hours and other problems will come up, and so much of what we’ve been dealing with from Pay Up Hollywood to Me Too are HR functions, just incredibly strained because of the weird way we work.

**Craig:** HR, boy, it’s a hard job to do, because they get a lot of stuff that comes in. I think my guess is that quite a bit of it feels eyerolly a little bit. The case gets opened, the case gets closed rather quickly. Then there are these real things that come through where HR makes an enormous difference in someone’s life, probably in a number of people’s lives in terms of the people who are perpetrating bad deeds, but also, more importantly, the people upon whom bad deeds are visited. HR matters. It’s a huge part of what goes on now in the world, more than it… When we started out, HR, they were just the people that were like, “Here’s what you get paid. Here’s the sick days. Here’s your parking spot. This is what the medical is.” No one ever said, “I’m going to HR.” You’d be like, “Why? You mean the people that tell us what the raises are?”

**John:** All that being said, one needs to remember that HR is fundamentally there to defend the company and to defend the company from horrible things such as employee lawsuits. That’s reasons why with certain kind of complaints, you need to be going into HR with somebody else and not be going in there by yourself. That’s why we have gills and other people there who can intercede, because there are occasions where HR is just there to protect the company.

**Craig:** HR, they work for the company. There is an interesting synergy where part of protecting the company is making sure that somebody doesn’t sue them because they’ve done that person bad. That’s where it aligns. I think that good HR people really do have humans in mind, even though human resources is the most Orwellian term possible. They do have resources that are I think independent. I believe that HR departments, the big ones do have independent therapists and people that are not responsible to the company and keep patient-client privilege and all that, I think, but I could be wrong about that.

**John:** When it comes to legal challenges, there’s reasons why, and there’s all sorts of issues about what things can actually go to court and what things cannot and have to go to private arbitration. It’s a challenging thing, which I agree, we should get back into, but if we have an HR person on, I think we should also have someone who’s critical of our HR system to also be a counterpoint there.

**Craig:** Who’s that?

**John:** We’ll find somebody. There are some good examples of people out there who have some–

**Craig:** Dear Twitter, who does not like HR?

**John:** Who doesn’t like HR? Come on our show. That’ll be a fun one. Let’s do some One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a show I’ve enjoyed on Netflix, it’s just six episodes, called Murderville. It stars Will Arnett, developed by Krister Johnson. It’s based on this British showed called Murder in Successville. The central premise of Murderville is Will Arnett plays this homicide detective in some unnamed city, and he has a dead partner and all these tropey things about this. It’s a scripted show. Things are happening. They’re going to solve a case. There’s going to be a murder every week, and a murder’s going to be solved. Every week he gets a new celebrity partner, who is just some random actor who’s being brought in. That person is not given the script and has no idea what’s actually happening. Therefore, they have to improv, again, what’s going on. It works, I think, surprisingly well. My two favorite episodes of the six are Kumail Nanjiani’s episode and Annie Murphy’s episode. They’re all good. There is some serialization that happens between episodes, so you probably shouldn’t watch them out of order.

I just really dug it. It’s a good, fun, light watch if you’re in the mood for something goofy. It reminded me a bit of Children’s Hospital, the David Wain show, and David Wain actually shows up in an episode.

**Craig:** I think Krister worked on that. I’m pretty sure. He’s a great guy. This has been on my list of stuff. When we stop shooting in 15 years, I’m going to sit down and just start watching stuff. It’s going to be a joy.

**John:** So many good things to watch.

**Craig:** I’m going to go find a hotel somewhere, hole up, and just watch.

**John:** You’re going to be away from your wife and your family in Los Angeles even longer, just so you can watch the TV, catch up on the really important things.

**Craig:** Oh no, I’m bringing the wife. Not the kids. My One Cool Thing is, as ibid, Logitech Ergo K860 wireless split keyboard. It is not super cheap. Here’s the thing about these keyboards. It’s $150 is what their retail list is. Keyboards, especially the ones these days, should last forever. Keyboards seem to be made out of the same material that PlayStation controllers are made out of. They should build anything important out of that material. PlayStation controllers I think have been tested within god knows what tolerances, because they presume that gamers are going to be smashing them on the ground in frustration, particularly while playing Elden Ring, and they never break. This very sturdy material should last for a long time.

Excellent key feel, connects instantly with a Mac, and unfortunately does require the dongle, which comes with it. Boy, if they sold the dongle itself… I don’t know, that’s a great question. If they sold the dongle itself, it’s a no-brainer.

**John:** Love it. We’ll put links in the show notes to also the keyboards we talked about, the other ones, for choices. I really do recommend a vertical mouse if you’re having any problems, because the one I am using is great and helpful for that.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We also have hoodies that are delightful. We have a non-zip-up hoodie available in all our different patterns. Is it the 10th anniversary one, green one, which I quite liked a lot. I wore it for St. Patrick’s Day. Check that out and get your hoodies.

Show notes for this episode and all episodes are at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, 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 reality television and competition shows. Stick around for that. Craig, Megana, thank you for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Megana, this was your suggestion, so set us up.

**Megana:** I had a question. If you guys could be on any reality competition television show, which one would you pick and what would be your strategy?

**John:** Let’s define reality competition shows, because Megana and I were discussing it in the office, it would be tremendously fun if Craig’s wife were cast on Real Housewives of Hancock Park, and that Craig would be that husband who’s interviewed every once in a while, like the Kelsey Grammer who shows up. That’s not really what we’re talking about. We’re talking about some show in which there’s a winner and a loser and each week someone gets sent home. That’s what we’re thinking about. Anything from a Survivor to Big Brother, but also Project Runway, Great British Baking Show. Craig, what are you thinking in terms of your reality competition show?

**Craig:** It would almost certainly be the Great British Baking Show, because it doesn’t seem like winning is important to anyone. Everyone is trying to just do something that is not going to embarrass them, which is basically how I approach everything, what can I do to not shame myself and my name. Then if it works out, they’re just stunned and delighted. If you’re picked, you’re like, “Oh. Oh, my. I was just hoping to not be eliminated.” On all the American racing and surviving shows, it’s like, “I’m going to win this thing and I’m going to destroy you.” I don’t want to destroy anybody. I love baking. It’s fun. If I mess up, you know what? I think everyone’s going to be like, “Oh. Oh, didn’t quite come together, did it?” I’ll say, “No. No, it didn’t.” They’ll be like, “Quite a shame really.” I’ll be like, “I know. I’m so sorry.”

**John:** Craig, how did your crème brûlées come together? As we were playing DnD this last week, you were working on your crème brûlées in your oven that was not heated properly.

**Craig:** I really struggled. I dumped that batch and made a second batch in Jaq Lesko’s oven, because she’s in the building next to me and her oven’s just better than mine. I’m suspicious of this batch as well, to be honest with you. I’m a bit terrified, because there’s a dinner party this evening. I’m going to be giving people the crème brûlée. If it’s not quite right, I’m just going to be embarrassed and ashamed. You know what? I think what I’m going to say is, “Look, this is a bit British Baking Show. If it doesn’t work, I think you should all just say, honestly, ‘Didn’t quite come together, did it?’ and then I’ll say, ‘No, afraid no. Oh, pity really. Did try. Not sure what went wrong.’” Then I’ll go home. I think that’s the way I would do best.

**John:** I like the Great British Baking Show a lot. I agree with the criticism of it, that the middle segment where they’re given this blind instructions for things can sometimes be a little absurd. You’re trying to make this thing. I have never heard of this thing. The instructions are so absurd. Yet that also feels like a puzzle situation that Craig might enjoy.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s scary. If you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re baking, it’s terrifying. To be honest with you, I’m a recipe baker. My daughter, she can actually just take things from the pantry and make something, and it’s good. Just wizardry. I’m a directions follower. I like the science of cooking. What about you, John? I assume you’d be on some sort of brutal… You’re going to want to be on Survivor, right? You’re going to want to [unclear 01:05:32]?

**John:** A younger me would want to be on Survivor. Mike White, another screenwriter–

**Craig:** He was on The Amazing Race.

**John:** He was on The Amazing Race and on Survivor. He’s been on both of those shows.

**Craig:** Jesus.

**John:** There’s been a precedent for pale gay screenwriter on these shows already. I can certainly survive it.

**Craig:** Do you think they would notice the difference? “Oh, Mike White’s back.”

**John:** “Mike White’s back.” I don’t have the blond eyelashes.

**Craig:** That is true. He’s very, very pale.

**John:** Very, very blond. That much sun freaks me out. That’s the thing that would scare me most about being on a Survivor kind of show. I think we’ve established on the show, I’m actually remarkably good at making fire. I can make fire [cross-talk 01:06:15].

**Craig:** You were an Eagle Scout.

**John:** I was an Eagle Scout, yeah, so I’m good at that. I can make it with a magnifying glass. I know how to do that stuff.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** That doesn’t scare me. I just don’t want to be out there in the sand for 30 days. I think instead I would probably, if I had to choose one, it would either be Big Brother, because you’re indoors a lot. I like being indoors. I can get along with people well. I would definitely the hide the fact that I was a screenwriter and that I had some success. I’d just make up some other career, I was a teacher in something. You just make a consistent story about that. Or Amazing Race, which is a fun show that takes you around the world. My husband and I, we do travel a lot. We could theoretically be good on that show. I just refuse to fight with him on national television. I’ve made a rule that we’re not going to fight on national television, because that’s what we would do, and it would not be fun.

**Craig:** I’m so not interested in winning. All these people want to win. I think that’s fun for them. Mike White, he also wanted to win. I don’t. That’s why I need to go on a show that’s not about winning.

**John:** Lowest stakes possible.

**Craig:** Yeah, just the most gentle, calm… Even the person who wins doesn’t really win. Then there’s a winner at the end, but it’s fine.

**John:** You get a glass plate.

**Craig:** It’s all really about just spending a nice time under a lovely tent in an area that’s reminiscent of the shire in Lord of the Rings.

**John:** That’s lovely. I would say, if I could invent a reality show for me to compete upon, it would be a gift wrapping show, because I’m really good at wrapping gifts. I would greatly enjoy the craft of wrapping gifts.

**Craig:** Literally just talking about this yesterday, because Bo’s birthday is coming up.

**John:** I know. It’s a national holiday.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** It’s here on the calendar.

**Craig:** It’s huge. It’s Bo day. I bought her a present. If she listens to this, she’ll know that I bought her a present. I was talking about this with Jaq last night in fact, because I was like, “Normally, I would have Bo wrap this, but I can’t have her wrap her own gift.” I’m just going to give it to–

**John:** Craig, can’t you take it to wardrobe and have them wrap it for you, because they help you out of all other binds.

**Craig:** That’s actually not a bad idea. They probably would know how to wrap it. “Can you guys just put this in a shirt?”

**John:** Megana, what would be your competition show? What would you compete on?

**Megana:** I don’t know if this counts. I think I would do the Bachelor.

**John:** The Bachelor totally counts. There’s a winner.

**Megana:** There is a winner.

**Craig:** Is there?

**John:** We’re all losers on the Bachelor. Tell us about your strategy on the Bachelor. What do you want to do? How much are you interacting with the other women who are competing, or are you the Bachelorette? It’s your show, so tell us how it’s going to work.

**Megana:** In order to become the Bachelorette, I would have to compete on the Bachelor. I think you brought up an interesting question, which is you can take one of two strategies, and one is to become a personality within the franchise, and the second one is to win. The prize of winning is being with a super milk toast man who’s never interacted with a woman.

**Craig:** Wait. Really? That’s who they put on the Bachelor?

**Megana:** Yeah, they always cast these guys who have the same talking points where they’re like, “Thank you so much for sharing that,” or like, “I appreciate you opening up to me,” but they don’t have an interesting point of view, or I don’t know, they’re just bad at dealing with conflict.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** Your strategy is I’m the iconic personality that they’re going to want to bring back, right?

**Megana:** Exactly. I think it’s an interesting social situation, because nobody has phones. I am always here to make friends, but I would really try to adopt the “I’m not here to make friends” strategy and pull some shenanigans, and I would be totally unchecked, because nobody has the internet.

**Craig:** Interesting, so you want to be the villain.

**Megana:** Absolutely.

**John:** Wow. This is surprising, but exciting. I think your mom is disappointed.

**Megana:** Do you think she would be disappointed? I think my mom would thrive on this.

**John:** I have played board games with your mom, and your mom, you said, cheats. Your mom is a known cheater at board games.

**Megana:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Also, does your mom have any investment in you getting married?

**John:** A little bit.

**Craig:** I think that she would be totally into this. She’s like, “I don’t really care what you do. Get married.”

**Megana:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** “I want a wedding.” Oh my god.

**John:** They’ve tried, there’s been various efforts to do a gay version of the Bachelor, and it doesn’t work, because everyone could just like, “Oh we don’t need this guy. We can just hook up with whatever.” It doesn’t actually pay off to the same degree. I would not be opposed to have been in my single life to be on one of those dating shows, because I feel like, why not? It could be fun.

**Craig:** Wait. I don’t understand. Why? I would actually prefer to watch gay Bachelor, because I would learn something new.

**John:** You would learn something new, but why are all those guys competing for the one guy, when all those guys who are also hot could just be hooking up with each other?

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** That’s the problem.

**Craig:** I see. I see.

**Megana:** That’s still great television though.

**John:** Still great television.

**Craig:** Yeah, but I get it. It’s like if you’re the Bachelor, you’re like, “Wait, where is everyone?”

**John:** Now, Megana, you’ve watched enough Bachelor. There’s been situations where women have hooked up on The Bachelor too, right?

**Megana:** Not that I can recall. I don’t think so. Not in the American Bachelor franchise.

**John:** I may be thinking of Too Hot To Handle or one of the other–

**Craig:** Love Island?

**John:** Love Island. I think it’s Love Island is maybe what I’m thinking of.

**Craig:** Love Island, just the name alone implies that everyone is hooking up with everybody. Everyone is pansexual, like Youngbloods.

**John:** Like Youngbloods. It all comes back to Youngblood, in the pre-show conversation. At some point we’ll start recording the pre-show stuff and we’ll get the real dirt on all this stuff.

**Craig:** So much better than the show.

**John:** Thank you, Craig. Thank you, Megana.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Megana:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [‘Better Nate Than Ever’ Filmmaker on Disney’s Handling of “Don’t Say Gay” Bill: “Good Representation Does Not Cancel Out Bad Legislation”](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/disney-dont-say-gay-bill-tim-federle-better-nate-than-ever-1235112555/)
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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 524 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

We don’t have Craig today but we do have a very full show because today’s episode we’re going to be talking about endings. We’re going to start with a segment from Episode 44, Endings for Beginners, where Craig and I look at how you plan for a successful conclusion. Then we’ll have Aline join us for Episode 152, The Rocky Shoals, where we look at the particular challenges writers face around page 70 every script, when you start shifting gears into the end game. Then in a segment from 392 we will focus on the final moment, the punchline and the payoff. So it’s a whole episode about endings. It’s not really a script from A to Z. It’s more from R to Z, or maybe S to Z. But it should be a very useful thing as you’re thinking about your script.

As always, if you want to hear these full episodes you can find them in our archives available to premium members at Scriptnotes.net. And if you are a premium member stick around at the end where Megana and I will chat about nighttime rituals for creative folk. Enjoy.

[Episode 44]

John: I thought today we’d start by talking about endings, and let this be more of a craft episode, because a lot times as we start we start looking at writing screenplays, start writing TV pilots, it’s all about those first ten pages, about getting people hooked and getting people to know your world, getting people to love your characters. That’s not ultimately what they’re going to walk away from your movie with. They’re going to walk away from your movie with an ending.

And so I thought we would spend some time today talking about endings, and the characteristics of good endings, and the things you need to look for as a writer as you’re figuring out what your story is both way in advance and as you’re leading up to those last few pages.

Craig: Yeah. Ending are… — Like I think we had talked in a prior podcast about the bare minimums required to start beyond idea, main character. And for me, one of them is ending. I need to know how the movie ends, because essentially the process of the story is one that takes you from your key crucial first five pages to those key crucial last ten. Everything in between is informed by your beginning and your ending. Everything.

I’ve never understood people who write and have no idea how the movie’s going to end. That’s insane to me.

John: So, I would argue that a screenplay is essentially a contract between a writer and a reader, and same with a book, but we are talking about screenplays. And you are saying to the reader, “If you will give me your time and your attention, I will show you a world, I will tell you story, and it will get to a place that you will find satisfying. And it will surprise you, it will fulfill you. You will have enjoyed spending your time reading this script and seeing the potential in this movie.”

The ending is where you want to be lost. It’s the punch line, it’s the resolution, it’s the triumph. And so often it’s the last thing we actually really focus on.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So many writers, I think, spend all of their time working on those first ten pages, their first 30 pages, then sort of powering through the script. And those last five, ten pages are written in a panicked frenzy because they owe the script to somebody, or they just have to finish. And so those last ten pages are just banged out and they’re not executed with nearly the precision and nearly the detail of how the movie started.
Which is a shame because if you think about any movie that you see in the theater, hopefully you’re enjoying how it starts, hopefully you’re enjoying how the ride goes along, but your real impression of the movie was how it ended.

My impression of Silence of the Lambs, great movie all the way through, but I’m thinking about Jodie Foster in the basement and sort of what happens there.

Craig: Right.

John: As I look at more recent movies like Prometheus, I’m looking at the things I enjoyed along the way, but I’m also asking, “Did I enjoy where that movie took me to at the end?”

Craig: Yeah. I like what you say about contract, that’s exactly right. Because it’s understood that everything that you see is raveling or unraveling depending on your perspective towards this conclusion. The conclusion must be intentional. We always took about intention and specificity. The conclusion must, when you get to it, be satisfying in a way that makes you realize everything had to go like this. Not that it had to go like this, but to be satisfying it had to go like this.

That ultimately the choices that were made by the character and the people around the character led to this moment, this key moment. And I think we should talk about what makes an ending an ending, because it’s not just that it’s the thing that happens before credits roll. You know, I’ve always thought the ending of a movie is defined by your main character performing some act of faith. And there’s a decision and there’s a faith in that decision to do something. And that is connected — it always seems to me — it is connected through, all the way back to the beginning, in a very different way from what is there in the beginning.

That’s the point is there is an expression of faith in something that has changed. But there is a decision. There is a moment where that character does something that transcends and brings them out of what was so that hopefully by the end of the movie they are not the same person they were in the beginning.
John: Either they have literally gotten to the place that you have promised the audience that they’re going to get to. Like if you have set up a location that they’re going to get to. Is Dorothy going to get back to Kansas? Well, you could have ended the movie when she got to Oz, or when she got to the Emerald City because she was trying to get to the Emerald City, but her real goal was to get back to Oz, or to get back to Kansas. I’m confusing all my locations.

Dorothy wants to get back to Kansas. If the movie doesn’t get us back to Kansas, we’re going to be frustrated. If she gets back to Kansas and we’re there for 10 more minutes, we’re going to be frustrated. The movie has promised us that she will get back to Kansas, or I guess she could die trying. That’s a valid choice too.

Craig: I’d like to see that movie.

John: That’s her literal stated goal. That’s her want. And there’s also her need. And her need is to, I guess, come to appreciate the people that’s she’s with, to find some independence…

Craig: Well, but that’s what I’m talking about when I say that the character must have some faith and a choice, and a decision that’s different. In the beginning of the movie she leaves home. She runs away.

John: That’s right.

Craig: And at the end of the movie she has to have faith that by actually loving home, which she finally does now, she can return. And essentially you can look at the entire movie in a very simple way as somebody saying to a runaway on the street, “Trust me kid, if you want to go back home you can get back home. You just got to want to go back home. I know you ran away, you made a stand, you thought you were a grown up. The world is scary. It’s okay. You can go back home. They’ll take you back.”

That’s what the Wizard of Oz is. And the whole thing is a runaway story. And yet the ending… — It’s funny; a lot of people have always said, “Well, you know, the ending, it’s they’re mocking us. She just hands her the shoes. She could have given her the shoes and told her to click the heels in the beginning, we’d be done with this thing.”

But the point is then, okay, fine, maybe that’s a little clumsy, but really more to the point the ending is defined by faith and decision. And I think almost every movie, the wildest arrangement of movies, and look at Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the end he has faith. “Close your eyes, Marion.” That’s faith he didn’t he didn’t have in the beginning in something. It’s not always religious, you know.

The Ghostbusters decide, “We’re going to cross the streams.” [laughs] “We’re gonna have faith that we’re gonna do the thing we knew we weren’t going to do. Forget fear. Let’s just go for it. It’s the only way we can save the world. We might die in the process but we’re heroes now. We have faith in that.” I see it all the time. And I feel like when you’re crafting your ending and you’re trying to focus it through the lens of character as opposed to circumstance, finding that decision is such a big deal.

John: Yeah. The ending of your movie is very rarely going to be defeating the villain or finding the bomb. It’s going to be the character having achieved something that was difficult throughout the whole course of the movie. So, sometimes that’s expressed as what the character wanted. More often it’s expressed by what the character needed but didn’t realize he or she needed. And by the end of the movie they’re able to do something they were not able to do at the start of the movie, either literally, or because they’ve made emotional progress over the course of the movie that they can do something.

Craig: Right. That’s exactly right. And it’s a great way of thinking about, you know, sometimes we get lost in the plot jungle. And we look around and we think, “Well, this character could go anywhere and do anything.” Well, stop thinking about that and start thinking about what you want to say about life through your movie, because frankly there’s not much more reason to watch movies. [laughs] You know?

John: And we are talking about movies, not TV shows. And a movie is really a two-hour, 100-minute lens on one section of a character’s life, or one section of a cinematic world. And so you’re making very deliberate choices about how you’re starting. One of the first things we see, or how we meet those characters. You have to make just as deliberate choices about where you’re going to end. What’s the last thing that we’re going to take out of this world? And why are we cutting out this slice of everything that could happen to show us in this time?

Craig: Right.

John: And you will change your ending, just as you change your beginning. But you have to go in with a plan for where you think this is going to go to.

Craig: No question. I think a huge mistake to start writing… — And frankly if you’re writing and you don’t know how the movie ends, you’re writing the wrong beginning. Because to me, the whole point of the beginning is to be somehow poetically opposite the end. That’s the point. If you don’t know what you’re opposing here, I’m not really sure how you know what you’re supposed to be writing at all.

John: In one of our first screenwriting classes they forced us to write the first 30 pages and the last 10 pages, which seemed like a really brutal exercise, but was actually very illuminating because if you’ve written the first 30 and the last 10 you can write your whole movie because you know — you have to know everything that’s going to happen in there to get you to that last moment.

Craig: I love it.

John: And it makes you think very deliberately about what those last things are. And so I still try to write those last 10 pages pretty early on in the process while I still have enthusiasm about my movie, while I still love it, while I’m still excited about it. And so I’m not writing those last pages in a panic, with sort of coffee momentum. I’m writing them with craft, and with detail, and with precision.

And then I can write some of the middle stuff with some of that panic and looseness if I don’t have… — If I’ve lost some of my enthusiasm, I can muscle through some of the middle parts, but I don’t want to muscle through my ending. I want the ending to be something that’s precise and exactly what this movie wants to be.

Craig: You know, I have the kind of OCD need to write chronologically. I can’t skip around at all. But I won’t start writing until I know the ending. And what I mean by ending, I mean, I know what the character, what he thought in the beginning of the movie, what he thinks differently in the end. Why that difference is interesting. What decision he’s going to make, and then what action is he going to take that epitomizes his new state of mind.

When we start thinking about what should the ending be, I think sometimes writers think about how big should the explosion be, or which city should the aliens attack. And if you start thinking about what would be the best, most excruciating, difficult test of faith for my hero and his new outlook on life, or at least his new theoretical outlook on life.
And, you know, Pixar does this better than anybody, and they do so much better than everybody. And it’s funny, because I really start thinking about endings this way because of Pixar films. And I went, I remember I was watching Up. And they got to that point where he had — Carl had finally decided that kid was worth going back to save. You know, he brought the house right to where he said he would bring it, and no, he’s going to leave that and go back. And I like that but I thought, that’s not quite that difficult of a test. And then, of course, see Pixar knows that it wasn’t enough, that the real test to say “I have moved on” is to let that house go.

And they design their climax, they design the action of the climax in such a way to force Carl, the circumstances force Carl to let the house go to save the kid.

John: Yup.

Craig: And that’s the perfect example to me of how to think about writing a satisfying ending. That’s why that ending is satisfying. It’s not about the details. The details are as absurd as “man on airship with boy scout, flying, talking dogs, and a house tied to him.” No problem; you can make it work.
John: And example I can speak to very specifically is the movie Big Fish, which really follows two story lines, and the implied contract with the audience is you know the father is going to die. It would be a betrayal of the movie if the father suddenly pulled out of it and the father wasn’t going to die. We know from the start of the movie that the father is going to die.
The question of the movie is, “Will the father and son come to terms, will they reconcile before his death, and will this rift be amended?” And so quite early on I had to figure out like, well what is it that the son — the son is really the protagonist in the present day — what is it that the son can do at the end of the story that he couldn’t do at the start of the story? Well, the son has to tell the story of the father’s death. And so knowing, like, that’s going to be incredibly difficult, an emotionally trying thing to do, but I could see all that, I could feel that.

Knowing that that was the moment I was leading up to, well what is it that lets the son get to that point? And you’re really working backwards to what are the steps that are going to get me to that point. And so it’s hearing someone else tell one of the father’s stories, it’s Jenny Hill, that fills in this missing chapter and sort of why that chapter is missing. That backtracks into, “Well, how big is the fight that set up this disagreement?” “What are the conversations along the way?” Knowing I needed to lead up to that moment, knowing what that ending was was what let me track the present day storyline back to the beginning.

Craig: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. There was to be a connection between the beginning and the end. I am excited for the day that Identify Thief comes out, because I can sort of talk specifically about how that — that ending, the whole reason I wrote that movie, aside from liking it, was I thought I had a very interesting dilemma for the character at the end, and it was an interesting climax of decision. And the decision meant something. And it was interesting. And I like that. That to me — it’s all about the ending like that. So, looking forward to that one coming out. Hopefully people will like it.

John: This talk of endings reminds me of… — I met John Williams. He was at USC; the scoring stage is named the John Williams Scoring Stage. And when they were rededicating it John Williams was there, along with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and they were talking about the movies they worked on together.

And John Williams made this really great point, was that the music of a movie is the thing you take home with you, it’s like the goodie bag. It’s the one thing you as an audience member get to sort of recycle and play in your head is that last theme. So as I’m thinking about endings, that’s the same idea. What is that little melody? What is that moment that people are going to walk out of the theater with? And that’s — that’s your ending.

And we’ve both made movies where we’ve gone through testing, and you’ll see that the smallest change in the ending makes this huge difference in how people react to your movie.

Craig: Oh, for sure.

John: It’s that last little thing that they take with them.

Craig: Yeah. In fact, when people are testing movies that have sort of absurdly happy endings, you know, what you’d call an uplifting film, you almost to kind of discount the numbers. You’ll get a 98 and you’ll think, “Well, it’s not really a 98. At this point it doesn’t matter, it’s just that the ending was such a big thumbs up.”

But, you know, if you ask these people tomorrow or the next day would they pay to go see it, you might get a different answer. And similarly when you end on a bummer, or on a flat note, just like the air goes out of the theater, and people will struggle to explain why they did not like the movie when in fact they just didn’t like the ending.

John: But I want to make sure for people who are listening, we are not arguing for happy endings.

Craig: No.

John: We’re not arguing that every movie needs to have a happy ending. It needs to have a satisfying ending that matches the movie that you’ve given them up to that point.

Craig: Yes.

John: Is it one that tracks with the characters along the way? So it doesn’t mean the character has to win. The character can die at the end, that’s absolutely fine, as long as the death is meaningful in the context of the movie that you’ve shown us.

Craig: Yeah. And maybe just a little bit of hope.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You know, I mean, I always thought it was such a great choice by Clint Eastwood, the ending shot of Unforgiven, which really ends on a downer. I mean, this man struggled his whole life, most of his adult life, to be a good person when inside in fact he was awful. And in a moment of explosion at the end truly reveals the devil inside, kills everybody. We kind of sickly root for it. And then he goes back home. And it basically says he never, you know, he just died alone.

And yet there’s something nice about the image because while that’s rolling, and we just dealt with all of that, the final images of him alone on his farm, putting some flowers down — I think by the grave of his dead wife, who we understand from the scroll is somebody that he always, he truly loved and was good to, so that there is a bit of hope there. You know?

[Episode 152]

John: So, we’ve set a very high bar. But let’s get started. Let’s get started with those rocky shoals. So, talk to us about what you mean by this topic.

Aline: Well, this is something that I’ve always found to be true and in talking to other writers I have found it also true for them. Which is the first act tends to be the funnest and easiest to write. You often overwrite the first act. You often write the 38 pages when it needs to be 29, but it’s usually because it’s the thing that you spent the most time on which is the setup and the idea and you have the most information about it.

And what I’ve found is that after the first part of act two, where you’re sort of setting up the pins to knock them down — analogy — in the second part what you’re really doing is sort of building that on ramp to the third act. And I know Craig has talked many times about how you need to know that third act to write the movie, and it’s best if you know the third act, and I agree with that. And I find third acts not, I would say, on a par with first acts in terms of difficulty to write.
But if I’m going to have an existential crisis, if there is going to be a moment where I drive home from work and say to my husband, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how I’ve ever written one of these before, I don’t understand how these work,” it will always be around 71 where I start to feel like, you know, it should start to spit out material, and it’s probably the stuff you have the least of in the outline. But it should start to spit out steps to this thing that you know you’re going to.

So, often I know exactly what the third act is and I can see it. And it’s just over the crest, but I need those steps, and 70 to 90 are those steps. And if something is wrong, if you’ve conceived a character incorrectly, if the action in the third act is in fact wrong, if your thematic are wrong, that’s where it’s all going to fall down. It almost never falls apart in act one. For me it almost never falls apart in act three. It’s always 70 to 90 is the moment where I think, oh boy.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

John: In act one you’re setting things up. And that’s the part of the movie where you had the best idea of what it really was. That was probably what got you to start writing the movie. You had this idea, and that was probably act one.

Act three, you’re closing stuff down. You’re cutting off those threads, you’re tying stuff up. Final confrontations. But there is not a defined thing that’s sort of supposed to happen in that stretch that you’re talking about. There’s probably been some big thing that happened in the middle of your second act, but now you’re kind of waiting for this third act thing to happen. You’re waiting for either the worst of the worst, or this big twist, this big reveal, and you don’t want to do anything before its time. But, yeah, it’s a tough moment.

Craig: Well, it is. Although I kind of feel like that’s the point. You know, your character is going through this process and that’s the part of the movie where they’re lost, right? Your plot is building in a certain way and that’s the part of the movie where the plot and the simplicity of what’s supposed to happen doesn’t work anymore. It’s natural for us to get to that place and start to feel overwhelmed. Oddly, we give ourselves a break from page 30 — well, the ending is far away, I’m relaxed.

When you get to page 70 you think, well the ending is supposed to be coming up soon but it also still feels far away. It feels further away now that I’m at 71 then it did when I was at 30. But I feel like that’s the purpose of that section. In a weird way pages 71 and 90 in every movie is a horror movie, in every genre. That’s where the horror is. It’s where everything is supposed to basically fall apart, otherwise your ending is kind of a “who cares?”

So, if you start to embrace the fact that you’re supposed to feel that way, particularly if you’re connected to your main character and the movie is supposed to fall apart. You have to break it to fix it. Then maybe, you’ll still be scared, but at least you’ll understand why.

Aline: You know how Ted Elliott talks about that stuff where you make those first couple decisions about a movie and then you’re sort of — you have the consequences of those you can’t ever get back. I feel like to use one of my tortured analogies that to get — you’re going to have a lot of stuff and you’re winnowing. The process of a movie really is winnowing down thematically and plot wise.

And I always feel like it’s like you’re at the edge of a river. You’re Tarzan. You’re trying to get to this place across and there’s ten vines. And you can only pick a couple to swing across on. And I just have had a couple times where I’ve gotten there and thought which one is taking me, is the right path to act three. And I think that’s probably the section that I rewrite the most because often I have an act three I really like, but it might not land if the onramp is not — if I have not picked the right thing to swing across on.

John: One of the things I think you’re describing may be part of the problem. If you’re describing it as an onramp then you’re not describing what the actual — what’s the joy of that part of the movie? If it’s only doing work, then there’s not a joy to that part of the movie.

Aline: Right.

John: One of the scripts that I was working with at Sundance this last year, as I was talking with the writer we were trying to figure out how to move some scenes around, or sort of what could go where. And I had him really rethink the whole thing in terms of sequences. And so basically like imagine this is the sequence that goes from here to here, the sequence that goes from here to here. And within that sequence, those are the edges of your sequence — what is the movie? Like imagine that little sequence as its own movie.

And maybe that’s the key to what the 70 to 90 is, is think about, well, given where we’re at what is the movie of 70 to 90 and how can we make the most interesting movie in that place?
Craig: That movie also is… — One thing, it’s funny, I actually have a weirdly opposite point of view that it is true, as we make choices, the breadth of choices that are available to us begin to narrow. But that section to me is actually the one place where you get to not worry about that because, for instance, that’s the point in movies a lot of times when somebody gets really drunk, or gets high, or has a vision, or a dream. That part of the movie you’re allowed to almost become non-linear. And then arrive at something kind of —

Aline: But you need propulsion. It’s too late in the movie to not be propulsive. And I often find I’m in that section cutting stuff because it feels early act two-y.

Craig: Maybe so. I mean, to me if you’ve gotten your character to a place where they are disconnected from the life they had, but they are no longer at the life they need to live, then you’re allowed to get arty horror, I guess. I don’t know how else to put it. You’re allowed to break the rules of your movie and actually plunge them into a moment where out of it they can have an epiphany or something.

I was just telling John before the show began that I’m plotting out the story of the script that I’m about to write and I got to this point. And I understood that my character needed to have an epiphany, but well how do you have — it’s hard to create an epiphany. If you can create it that simply then it’s probably not that satisfying.

So, part of what I did was just relax. I don’t know how else to put it. Like you can start to beat yourself up when you get to that section because you feel like, oh my god, ugh. And then it has to make this half propulse and make the ending happen and all the rest. I just weirdly just relaxed.

Aline: But I do think it’s the point where the audience starts to get shifty. It’s just the part in the movie after the first hour and it’s the thing that I always refer to in meetings as you really don’t want people to be sitting there going, “Did I park on P2 or P3? Honey, was it P2 or P3?” And they’re thinking that. And that’s where if it’s going to go south it’s going to be there.

I mean, you have such tremendous goodwill in act one. You really do. And I always find, I have a friend who watches movies going, “I’m at an A. I’m at an A+. I’m at a B. I’m at a B-. I’m at a C.” Like that’s how he experiences a movie. And so often you watch a movie and you’re like, I’m at an A. I don’t know why people didn’t like this. I’m at an A. I’m at an A. But getting back to you’re like at a B. And then it’s always an hour in where you’re like, oh, we just wandered into D- here. Like we’ve lost our way.
That’s always the — that really is. That’s why I say, “Rocky shoals, men from the boys, you know?”

Craig: Yeah. Because you can get into a treading water syndrome where you kind of think, oh, I’m not allowed to have my ending yet. I need to do some work. You actually don’t. Like for instance one solution to your 71 to 90 problem is that it’s really 71 to 80.

John: Yeah, you’re cutting it short.

Aline: And you know what I will say? I worked with Alex Kurtzman and he said something to me that I really think about all the time. He’s like, “You always need less stuff than you think you need.”

Craig: It’s so true.

Aline: It is so true. You pack up for your screenplay and you’ve got like giant suitcases and a duffle and a carryon slung across you. And you always get through and go, “Why did I bring all this stuff? I didn’t need all this stuff.”

Craig: But you don’t know what you need until you get to the resort.

Aline: You don’t know what you need until you get there!

Craig: Yeah, but you should just be willing to not wear everything at once. Right.

John: Well, let’s talk about like that heading into that last section. If we talk about a movie as being a character’s transformation and hopefully you’re going to have this arc of transformation. They start at one place and they end up in a different place. And that transition to act three is really the lowest of the lowest, that moment of great transformation. Everything seems lost. All hope is gone.
There may be an opportunity in that 70 to 90 phase for the character to try a new thing, to try a new persona, to try a new approach that may not end up succeeding, but you can see it’s a step on their way to this next thing. So, they wouldn’t get to the character they’re going to be at the end if they hadn’t tried this new thing. And that could lead you into the new thing.

It may also be a moment for — I’m a big believer in burning down the house. Like literally I will burn down the house as much as I possibly can. And sometimes you’re burning down the house at the start and that’s instigating the whole story. But sometimes you’re burning down the house at the act two moment, that’s like that was the worst of the worst and their house got burned down. But it can be a fascinating time to literally burn down their house or destroy everything they have at that moment before the real end of act two. And so this is a section where they’re forced to sort of be on their own. They’re force to sort not be able to go back.

Aline: I’ll give you a somewhat, it’s not super specific, but in the script I’m writing midway through this character has had a relationship with — a woman has had a relationship with a man. And halfway through she realizes he’s not who she thought she was. And the third act is her realizing, oh, he’s a good guy. I’m going to go help him and save him.

But in between, oh, he’s not the person I thought he was, in that 70 to 90, she’s trying to decide or figure out is he the good guy or bad guy of this story. That’s really what’s she’s doing is she’s going back and forth between trying to figure out was I right to be drawn to this person or not. And at the end she’s, yes, and she goes — so, she is in a treading water kind of a thing where she’s investigating and it is a little bit like a horror movie because she’s sort of going down halls and trying doors.

And my challenge has been to pick the things that allow her to be in a little bit of a suspended state, which you often are in that section, right?

Craig: Without feeling like —

Aline: Without feel like —

Craig: The movie is just flat-lining across. I know what you mean.

Aline: Yes. Exactly.

Craig: Well, sometimes also the way to approach those sections is to think of them as false endings. So, okay, in her mind this movie needs to end on page 90. So, perhaps then she just decides I’m going to make a decision. I don’t know if it’s the right decision or not, but I’m making a decision and I’m going to confront this person and I’m going to blow this thing up. And that’s going to be the end of this movie. And she does it. But then it’s not, you know?

Aline: Right. Right.

Craig: Or sometimes if it is a heist movie, this is where we’re going to do the thing, oh my god, it just —

Aline: Well that’s exactly, really smart, because that’s the part in the heist movie where everybody is moving in and getting the thing and the acrobat is in the box and all that stuff is happening. And I think one of the reasons really truly that I find it challenging is not often because I don’t know what to do, but because the execution of that, if it’s elegant and wonderful like it is in Ocean’s, if it’s an elegant, wonderful, surprising thing, it elevates the movie and if it’s the kind of thing where the audience goes, yeah, yeah, okay, so that’s the part where blah, blah — I think the onus on the level of execution in that particular thing is quite high. I just think they’re not in a — an audience is not in as forgiving a mood.

Craig: Yeah, no, you have to write it well.

Aline: Yes.

John: [laughs]

Aline: The solution to all your writing problems is write things well.

Craig: Yeah, you have to do that part good.

Aline: But I do find, I always think of it as like going down a
rapids thing and then you get there and you’re like, oh, you know, here it is. Rocky shoals.

John: Part of the challenge may be with your project, but all projects in that 70 to 90 phase is that you want to sort of keep your hero active. So, right now in your case like she’s opening doors and she’s investigating, but that character doesn’t necessarily know where the end is. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for.

Aline: Exactly. That’s right.

John: And I think part of the reason why movies often feel aimless in this part is you’re not communicating to the reader and to the audience what the character is trying to do and where the character thinks they’re headed. And so sometimes you just literally need to put a place or you need to put — explicitly state a goal, like I need proof that he is this person. I need proof that he really did this thing, so we know what they’re really trying to do.

Aline: I’ve noticed this a lot in action movies where they wrap their movie up on page 85 and they start a new movie.

Craig: Right.

John: Yup. Absolutely.

Aline: Every action, I mean, I actually really admired in X-Men it did not feel that way, the latest X-Men. I felt like it was a true continuation. But a bunch of the super hero movies I’ve seen and the action movies I’ve seen recently, it seems like you all just stop at the end of act two and then there’s new creatures, and new stakes. And then they go to a… — And that’s a note. In the third act you often go to a new setting, a new environment.

Craig: I actually don’t love that syndrome. And I think that’s part of the new creature of movie as theme ride theme room.

Aline: That’s exactly how it feels. It’s like that thing where you’re in that strap in a ride and you get around the corner and you see that last thing.

Craig: Right, you’re like, oh, I thought I was done, but there’s one more thing. You know, and that’s fine. But for an integrated story that you’re telling, I think, John’s got the exact right advice. There’s a — even if the character doesn’t have clarity, that’s good. But the audience needs clarity.

Aline: That’s right.

Craig: And you need clarity to know what the hell you need to do.

Aline: She doesn’t need to know what’s going on, but you don’t want the audience to be like, “What is she doing?”

Craig: Right. Even if she sets an artificial thing up, okay, I’m giving myself 48 hours. I’m like a jury now. I’m going to collect evidence over 48 hours and then I’m going to render a verdict. Verdict: you’re not good; I’m dumping you.

Aline: Right.

John: Another possibility would be to shift POV. So, if your
story has really locked POV to one character —

Aline: That’s when you can switch.

John: That might be the right moment to switch and actually see things from the other point of view.

Aline: Listen, you guys are very expensive, so if we do a lot more of this on the air I’m going to be owing you guys a lot of dough.

Craig: Uh, you already do.

John: Yeah.

Aline: That’s a great idea because you know what’s funny —

Craig: As John Gatins says, “The meter is running.”

Aline: It’s funny when you have a single perspective movie, it does get exhausting. And that’s a great kind of technical tip just to try, even if you don’t end up keeping it, which is go to the other lead, go to the other main relationship and write what they’re doing for awhile and see if that is — because that creates a nice intriguing mystery for the audience, which is you want to get back to your lead. That’s an excellent tip.

John: One of the other exercises I do with people when I’m sitting down and talking about their scripts is I’ll ask them like, okay, you have written a thriller here, but let’s imagine this as a crazy comedy. Let’s imagine this as a western. This imagine this in a completely different genre.

Aline: Yes

John: And sometimes you’ll figure out what the beats would be in that other kind of genre and that you won’t necessarily be able to apply those directly, but it will get you thinking in different ways.

So, in your case, if your movie is predominately not a thriller, but these are thriller moments, like let’s talk about the real thriller of this, and then you can sometimes bend those elements back into your —

Aline: Well, I don’t think it’s funny because this is sort of what Lindsay Doran’s thing is, but every movie I’ve written in any genre, you always start going — someone always says, or you say to yourself, “This is really a love story about these two people.”

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: All movies are.

Aline: Always. All movies are.

Craig: If they’re done right.

Aline: They’re always a love story between two people.

John: 21 Jump Street is a love story.

Aline: Sometimes you have the wrong people. I mean, name any movie we love, ET, even movies that are — every Hitchcock movie. I mean, they’re love stories.

John: Cast Away.

Craig: All movies have a central relationship. All of them. And knowing your central relationship and playing that through. And she has this great thing. She talks about how some movies it’s do a thing, and then you get the relationship. And some movies the relationship is the thing.

Aline: That’s right.

Craig: Which I love. I love both kinds.

Aline: That’s great.

Craig: But I think it’s not — the Rocky Shoals aren’t so rocky. You know, we know this because we get through them. Once you’re done with it, and you’ve fixed it, and you know what you’re doing and you’ve solved that problem, when you look back you go, “There’s no rocks. There’s no shoals.”

Aline: Yeah, well, of course. Any writing problem once you fix it it’s like why was that a problem, yeah.

Craig: So, I guess my point is that over time, we’ve been doing this long enough to know, when you get to that place, see if you can’t subtract the fear of it from the equation. The answer may come, I don’t know if it will be a better answer, but it will probably come quicker. I do believe that. I believe that relaxing and not tensing up will probably make it go faster. I love speed.

John: Yeah, speed is good.

Craig: Speed.

[Episode 392]

John: Cool. Our big marquee topic I want to get into today is the final moment in movies, or I guess episodes of TV, but I’m really thinking more in movies. And this came to mind this morning because there was an article talking about the end of Captain Marvel. This is not even a spoiler, but at the end of the original version of Captain Marvel she flew off into space and they changed it so she flew off into space with some other characters. And it was an important change and sort of giving you a sense of where the character was headed next.
And it got me thinking that in pretty much every movie I’ve written that last moment, that last beat, has changed from the pitch to the screenplay to the movie. And I sort of want to focus on why that moment is so important and also why it tends to change so much.

Craig: Interesting. And it’s funny because for me because I’m obsessed with that moment it actually rarely doesn’t change – it doesn’t change much for me.

John: OK.

Craig: But that’s in a sense because I think I weirdly start with it. I don’t know.

John: I start with it, too. And so as I was thinking back to Aladdin, my pitch for it had a very specific runner that had a very definite end beat. And so when I pitched it to Disney and also I just pitched it casually to Dana Fox, it made Dana Fox cry that last line, the last image of that last moment. It’s not in the movie at all. It totally changed in ways that things change.

But I would say even the movies like Big Fish and other things which have been very much, you know, we shot the script, those last moments and sometimes the last image really does change because it’s based on the experience of sitting through the whole movie and sort of where it’s deliberated to.
So let’s talk about that last moment as a way of organizing your thoughts when you’re first thinking about the story and then what it looks like at all the different stages.

Craig: Well, to start with, we have to ask what the purpose is. You know, I think sometimes people think of the last shot in cinematic terms. Somebody rides off into the sunset. So the last shot really is about sunsets. But of course it’s not.
For me the final moment, the final shot, that last image contains the purpose of the entire thing. Everything comes down to that. If your movie was about the love between two people, then that is that final moment. We’ve talked about Lindsay Doran’s Ted Talk where she talks about how movies are really about relationships. And she would cite how sometimes she would ask people well what was the last image of some movie, The Karate Kid, and a lot of people don’t remember it is Mr. Miyagi’s face. Proud. It’s Daniel and then Mr. Miyagi looking at each other and there’s pride.

So, figuring out the purpose of that last shot is kind of your step one of determining what it’s supposed to be. And you can’t get there unless you kind of know what the hell your whole movie is about in the first place.

John: Yeah. I mean, movies are generally about a character taking a journey. A character leaving home and getting to some place. But it’s also about the movie itself starting at a place and getting to a place. And that destination is generally that last beat, that last moment, that last image. And so of course you’re going to be thinking about that early on in the process of where do you want to end up. And way back in Episode 100 there was a listener question and someone asked us I have a couple different ideas for movies and I’m not sure which one I should start writing. And my answer was you should pick the one with the best ending because that’s the one you’ll actually finish.

Craig: Right.

John: And if you start writing without having a clear sense of where you’re going to you’re very likely to either stop writing it or get really off track and having to sort of strip away a lot of what you’ve done. So, having a clear sense of this is where I think the movie lands is crucial. It’s like the plane is going to land on this runway tells you, OK, I can do a bunch of different stuff but ultimately I have to make sure that I’m headed to that place. You may not be signaling that even to the reader, to the audience, so that they’re not ahead of you, but you yourself have to know where this is going.

Craig: John, when you were in grade school and you had some sort of arts and crafts assignment and the teacher said you need to draw a circle, and you just have to draw a circle. You don’t have a thing to trace. Were you a good circle drawer?
John: I was a fair circle drawer. I know it’s a very classic artistic lesson is how to trust your hand to do the movements and how to think about what a circle is. Were you a good circle drawer?

Craig: No. Absolutely horrendous. If you ask me to draw a circle you would end up with some sort of unclosed cucumber. And the reason I bring this up is because to me the classic narrative is a circle. We begin in a place and we end in that same place. There is a full return. Of course we are changed, but the ending reflects the beginning. The beginning reflects the ending. There is a circle.

If you don’t know your ending and you don’t know how the circle finishes it’s quite probable that you won’t know how to start the circle either. That you will end up with an unclosed cucumber, like nine-year-old Craig Mazin attempting to draw someone’s head. This is how things go off. This is where, I think, people can easily get lost as they’re writing their script because they realize that the story has developed in such a way that it wants to end somewhere but it has really not a strong click connection to the beginning.
One of my favorite albums is Pink Floyd’s The Wall, I think it’s Pink Floyd The Wall. And Pink Floyd The Wall, they play little games, the Pink Floyd folks did, and one of the games they play in Pink Floyd The Wall is very low volume at the very beginning. You hear this tiny little song and then someone says, “We came in.” And then at the very end, the very end, they’re playing the song and it finishes and then you hear someone say, “Isn’t this where?” And that’s exactly the kind of thing that blows a 15-year-old boy’s life, but it also was satisfying. You felt things were connected and they chose to make the very last moment some sort of indication that the beginning is relevant.

It’s the way frankly Watchmen ends. It’s the same thing. There’s this beautiful come around with that last final look.

John: Now, because we’re talking about narrative circles I need to acknowledge that Dan Harmon has this whole structure thing that’s based on a circle where there’s a circle and there’s these little lines across it that characters go on this journey. That’s absolutely a valid approach if you want to think about story that way.
That’s not quite what we’re talking about.

Craig: No.

John: We’re talking about how in general a character leaves from a place and gets to a place, but in both cases they’re either finding a new home or returning to a previous home changed. And so just a character walking around in a circle isn’t a story. A character being profoundly changed and coming to this environment with a new understanding that is a change. And sometimes it won’t be that one character. Sometimes it’s the narrative question you’ve asked at the beginning of the story has gone through all these permutations and landed you back at a place that lets you look at that question from a new way.

So it’s either answering the question or reframing the question in a way that is more meaningful. So that’s what we’re talking about, the narrative comes full circle. There’s a place that you were headed and that place that you were headed reflects where you began.

Craig: No question. And it’s really clear to us how someone has changed when we put them back where they were when we met them. It’s just one of those things where you can say, oh, here’s the variable. Where we begin is the control. Our character is the variable. Start at the beginning, get me to the end, and let me see the difference. And sometimes it’s very profound.
You know, we start and end in the same place in Finding Nemo, but we can see how different it is in the same place because the variable has changed and that’s your character.

John: So, I’m finishing the third Arlo Finch book right now which is the end of the trilogy, and so each of the books has had that sense of like, OK, reflecting where the book began and where the book ended and there is a completion there. But it’s been fun to actually see the whole trilogy. And it’s like, OK, this is the journey that we went on over the course of this year of Arlo Finch’s life. And yes he’s physically in the same space but he’s a completely different character in that same space and has a different appreciation for what’s happened.
And so being able to go back to previous locations where things have happened you see that his relationship to them is completely different because he’s a different character having been changed by what’s gone on. That’s what we’re really talking about with that last beat and how the last beat has to reflect where the character started and what has happened to the character over the course of the journey.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, you would not – reading Arlo Finch you would never expect that he would end up a savage murderer, but he does.

John: [laughs] It’s really shocking for middle grade fiction.

Craig: Well it is. But then when you look back you go, oh yeah, you know what, he was laying the groundwork for that all along. It actually makes sense. He’s a nightmare. Then there’s the
Dark Finch trilogy that comes next. Oh, you know what? Dark Finch trilogy is not a bad idea.

John: Dark Finch sounds pretty good.

Craig: You should do it.

John: I think it’s going to be a crossover with Derek Haas’s books about his assassin.

Craig: Oh yeah. Silver Bear.

John: Silver Bear.

Craig: Silver Bear. Dark Finch. That sounds like a Sondheim lyric. I love it.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: I love it. So, you know, when I’m thinking about these last images, everybody has a different way of thinking about this. But what I try and do really is actually think about it in terms of a last emotion. What is it that I want to feel? Do I want to feel comfort? Do I want to feel pride? Do I want to feel love? Do I want to feel hope? The movie that I worked on with Lindsay Doran, which is I think my favorite feature script, and so of course it hasn’t been made. They make the other ones, not those. The last shot to me was always an expression of the kind of bittersweet salute to the people who are gone. You know, it’s a coming of age story and the last shot when I just thought about the emotion at the end, the emotion at the end was the kind of sad thankfulness for having known someone who is no longer with you.
And I go, OK, I can wrap myself in that. That feels like a good emotion. And I know how that is reflected by the beginning. How you then express it that can change.

John: For sure.

Craig: And often changes frequently. But this is an area where I think movies sometimes fail because the system of movies is designed to separate the writer and her intention from the actual outcome, so a writer will have an intention like I want my movie to end with the bittersweet thankfulness for those who are no longer with us. That is my emotional intention. And here is how I would execute it.

Nobody else sees the intention underneath, or they don’t understand it, and they just go, “Well you know what? We don’t like necessarily the way they’re executing that. Let’s make a new execution. Let’s do this. Let’s do that. Let’s make it noisy. Let’s make it loud. Let’s make it funny.” And the intention is gone. And then you get to the movie and you show it and people go, “Well, the ending.” And you’re like, yeah, the ending, and that writer never really nailed the ending.

John: Ha.

Craig: You see how it goes? It’s just freaking brutal.

John: Yeah. That’s never happened to me once in my career. Let’s talk about what that ending looks like in the different stages. So, in the pitch version of it, you know, obviously we talked about in pitches that I would describe it as you’re trying to convince your best friend to see this movie that you’ve seen that they’ve not seen. So you’re really talking a lot about the characters and how it starts. And you may simplify and summarize some things, especially in the second and third act about stuff. But you will tend to describe out that last moment, that last beat, because you’re really talking about what is the takeaway experience going to be for a person who has watched this movie that you’re hopefully going to be writing.

So, in a pitch you’re going to have a description of what that last moment is because that’s really important. It’s the reason why someone should say yes to reading your script, to buying your script, to hiring you to write that script. So that last moment is almost always going to be there in the pitch, even if it’s not fully fleshed out, to give you a sense of what you want the audience and the readers to take away from reading the script.

Craig: What I’m thinking about in a room where I’m relaying something to somebody is ultimately how do I want them to – I want to give them a fuzzy at the end. I want to give them some sort of fuzzy feeling. I don’t want to give them plot. If I finish off with plot, so for instance, let’s say I’m in a room and I’m pitching Star Wars.

What I don’t want to do is get to the end and say, “And in our last shot our hero receives a medal which he deserved.” What I want to talk about is how a kid – I would bring it back to the beginning and say this farm boy who didn’t know about this world beyond him, didn’t know about the Force, who didn’t know about the fate of his father or the way he can maybe save the world, he is the one who saved the galaxy. And at last he knows who he is.

See, some sort of sense of connected feeling to the beginning. If you’re selling plot at the end then what you’re really selling is what Lindsay Doran calls the end that people think is the end but not the actual end.

John: Well, let’s take your example of Star Wars because you might pitch it that way, but then when it comes to writing the script you actually have to write this scene that gets you to that moment. And so as you’re writing that scene at the last moment you’re looking at what is the medal ceremony like, who is there, what is said, but most importantly what is the emotional connection between those characters who are up there. Actually painting out the world so we can see like, OK, this is why it’s going to feel this way. This is clearly the intention behind this scene but also I’m giving you the actual things you need to give us that feeling at the end.

And so in the script stage what was sort of a nebulous description of like this is what it’s going to feel like has to actually deliver on that promise.

Craig: Yeah. I always wondered – I hate being the guy who’s like would it be better if a movie that everybody loved ended like this – but the last shot of Star Wars is the medal ceremony, right. And then you have them looking at each other, and so the emotion is the relationships between them. But I always wondered what would happen if the last-last shot of Star Wars was Luke Skywalker returning back to Tatooine a different man and kind of starting a new beginning, a new hope. You know, that vibe of returning. I always wondered if I would feel more at the end if I saw him return.
John: I think it’s worth exploring. I think if you were to try to do that though it would just feel like one more beat. It would feel like the movie was over when he got the medal and you had this swell. Whether the journey was this is a kid who is all on his own who forms a new family, so like going back to where his dead family was wouldn’t feel like the kind of victory.

Craig: Dead family.

John: Dead family. So I think you want to see his joy and excitement rather than sort of the – I would just imagine the music would be very different if he had gone back to Tatooine at the end. It wouldn’t feel like a triumph.

Craig: Yeah, no, you’re right. And I guess then the payload for that final bit is really the looks between Leia and Luke and Han and Luke. That it’s we’re a family, we’re friends, we did it. We went through something nobody else understands.

John: So let’s say you’ve written the script, you’ve gone into production, and 100 days of production there’s finally a cut and you see that last moment in the film and it’s different, or it doesn’t work, or the way you had it written on the page doesn’t work. In my experience it’s generally because the movie sort of got – the actual movie that you watched isn’t quite the movie that’s on the page just naturally. And as people are embodying those characters things just feel different. Obviously some scenes get cut, things get moved around. And where you kind of thought you were headed is not really where you’ve ended up. And so you have to make some sort of change there.

In some cases it’s reshoots. In some cases you’re really shooting a new last scene. You realize this was not the moment that we thought we wanted to get to at the end. But in some cases it is just a matter of this shot versus that shot. Whose close-up are we ending on? You talk about Mr. Miyagi. I bet they tried it a bunch of different ways and it would make more sense to end on Daniel rather than Mr. Miyagi, but ultimately Mr. Miyagi was the right choice.

They’re thinking about what does the music feel at this moment. How are we emotionally landing, the payload here. And the music is going to be a big factor. So, there’s going to be a lot of things conspiring to get that last image, that last moment of the movie. And you may not have been able to anticipate that on the page.

Craig: No question. And this is why it’s really important for you to understand your intention because it may work out that your intention didn’t carry through in the plan. But if we know the intention and we have married the beginning to the end then the beginning has set up this inexorable domino effect. You have landed at the end. You require a feeling. Let’s see if we can make that feeling editorially a different way. And if we can’t, OK, let’s go back and reconsider what it’s supposed to be.

In rare circumstances you do get to a place where you realize, oh my god, having gone through this movie it’s really about this. It turns out we care more about this than this. This relationship matters more than this relationship. OK. So, now we have to think of the beginning, let’s recontextualize what our beginning means and then let’s go ahead and fix an ending.
But the ending can never be just – do you know what? “It just needs to be more exciting.” That’s nonsense.

John: The danger is a lot of times in test screenings they’ll see like, OK, the numbers are a little bit low here and people dipped at the end, so let’s add some more razzmatazz to this last little beat, or like an extra thing. And generally people don’t want more. They don’t want bigger or more, they just want to actually exit the movie at the right time with the right emotion. And that’s the challenge.

Craig: Right. How do you leave them feeling is the biggest.
John: So sometimes though the opposite holds true. Just this last week I was watching a rough cut of a friend’s film. And he has this really remarkable last shot and these two characters and their relationship has changed profoundly. But as I watched it I was like oh that’s a really great last shot/last moment for kind of a different movie than I saw. But when I looked at the movie I had seen before that I was like, oh yeah, you could actually do some reconfiguring to get you to that moment and actually have it make sense. So it was really talking about this is where we get to at the end. I think you’re not starting at the right place. And so therefore you may want to take a look at those first scenes and really change our expectations and change what we’re following over the course of the movie because doing that you could land at that place and it would feel really meaningful.

Craig: Again, the beginning is the end is the beginning. Right? If something is not working in that where your circle is supposed to connect up and you ended up with an open cucumber, then either the ending is wrong, or the beginning is wrong, or they’re both wrong.

John: Ha.

Craig: But it’s usually one or the other. And it is I think tempting at times to say, “Well, since the ending is the last thing, everything else is the pyramid and this this thing sits atop the pyramid, this is the easiest thing to fix.” And, John, you’re absolutely right. Sometimes the easiest thing to fix is the beginning.

John: Yeah. Change the expectations of the audience as they go into it and you can get them there.

Craig: Match them to where they’re going to arrive.

John: All right. That is our discussion of that final moment.

[Bonus segment]

John: All right. I’m here with Megana Rao our producer. Megana, why did you pick these segments for today’s episode?

Megana Rao: I guess because I’m approaching the rocky shoals in my own project and rewriting it. And so I obviously turn to Scriptnotes for advice.

John: All right. So you don’t get enough of me and Craig just talking normally.

Megana: Exactly.

John: You listen to old back episodes. Now we’re talking about endings so much in this, and I feel like we’re always talking about beginnings in this podcast, like sort of how you get started, how you break the seal and get started writing, but we don’t talk enough about finishing stuff up in terms of your work and your craft. With you and a script how do you – if you’re finished with the day’s work what does it look like and are you just walking away from your laptop? Like when you’re done what do you do?

Megana: I feel like if it’s a good day’s work I’m usually pretty hungry. I’m usually pretty hungry or you know sometimes you have that feeling where my mind is still buzzing but there’s nothing in there. I still have a lot of energy in my body so I’ll go for a walk or I’ll workout then.

John: Yeah.

Megana: But basically just not writing and not looking at my computer.

John: Yeah. I think it is important to sort of make a clean break from your writing time to your non-writing time, because you will still have stuff swirling there and you should take some notes. I tend to if I’m sort of writing more or less in sequence or I know what the next thing is I would be writing I’ll take some really quick little notes about what happens next just so I can plan for it, so that my next – I’m trying to do a favor to my future self.

Megana: Aw.

John: And put some stuff down there so that Tomorrow John will be able to get some stuff actually written there. In Highland that’s where I would use the synopsis format where there’s little equal signs there. It’s not meant to be real material, but it’s just bullet points for what happens next.

Megana: And then the next day are you going back and rereading your work?

John: I’m not rereading from the start, but I’ll try to at least reread what I just wrote the day before so I can get a sense of what the flow was. And I will make some small changes in that to get back up to speed and obviously you recognize some things that you didn’t notice the first time. And so you can polish that a little bit. But I will try not to go back too far because otherwise you’re just constantly revising stuff you’ve already worked on and you’re not actually moving the cursor forward.

Megana: Totally. And when you finish a writing session do you go back and read those pages?

John: Not immediately. Sometimes I will print, like I’ll print them for you so that they’re down there. It’s sort of that closure on that idea. But I will save the file and sort of walk away from the laptop. I’m trying not to focus on it too much.

Now, how about at the end of the day? Are you doing anything at the end of your work day or the end of getting ready for bed that is creative?

Megana: I don’t think so. I feel like I’m a night owl and so my best writing time is either 9pm to midnight or 7am to 10am. But we live in a morning-biased world. So most of my nighttime is trying to get my body to sleep when it’s so tough because as soon as the sun goes down I’m just awake.

John: Yeah. Classically I was oriented the same way where I was very much a night owl. And I loved to write from like 8pm until 2 in the morning. And sort of once you have kids that stops becoming an option. And also just like you’re trying to have a life and do other things and see friends. It does get in the way of a lot of things. And so I’ve had to much more shift to like, you know, my work life is 9 to 6 as much as possible as I can do.

But, the creative brain is still functioning really well at night and sometimes that stuff is coming up, so I do have as you’ve seen a stack of note cards beside the bed and I will just write down the stuff that’s in my head so I can get it out of my head. And capture it. And that helps me sleep, too, because I’m not trying to keep a loop going in my head of I have to remember this beat or this moment or this line of dialogue. I write it down, get it out of my head, and I have a constant system where I put it on the door, on the floor, by the door so I will see it as I’m headed downstairs in the morning. So I know that I’ve captured it and I won’t forget it and then I don’t have to worry about it.

Megana: Yeah, sometimes I’ll journal and write goals or things that I want to write in the morning before I go to bed and that helps me turn that part off.

John: Now is that journaling at all like The Artists’ Way, that classic technique of getting stuff out of your brain?

Megana: Yeah. I think that that’s where it started, the sort of morning pages of doing the – I’m not doing a full three pages, but as you know I’m such a deep sleeper and my dreams are really intense, so I need to write in the morning to remind myself that I am awake and starting my day. That journaling in the morning helps me make that transition.

John: Let’s circle back to where you are at in the script you’re at right now because you said you were in the rocky shoals situation. And is that because you feel like you’re having to shift gears from the first engine of your story to the end game of your story? Or do you feel that you haven’t adequately planned for the section? What kind of stuff are you feeling about the section of the script you’re in right now?

Megana: The supporting characters, I feel like I have gotten to know them too much. That my original ending doesn’t feel satisfying anymore.

John: That makes a lot of sense. You’re going to discover a lot about your characters over the course of writing, and especially if you’re writing in sequence you spend 70 pages with them and you might have had one plan for them but they’ve told you who they are in ways that’s different as you’ve gotten to this point. Listening back to the segments that you picked for this show, are there any insights from that that you think you can actually use?

Megana: In your discussion of the final moment where you talk about getting to this final moment and then having to rewrite your beginning because of that, like I have come to the realization that that is what I’m going to end up having to do.

John: It’s giving yourself permission to do that. Because you might have had absolute, fantastic, perfect opening image, opening moment for the story you did not end up writing.

Megana: Exactly. Exactly. It is, yeah, it’s a weird feeling and I’m like, ugh, it feels like I have gotten to know these people and now I can’t shut them up.

John: Yeah. You’re also suffering from a bit of the curse of knowledge. Because you know who those characters are at page 70 in ways that the audience wouldn’t. So, again, you have all the blessings of wisdom of living with these characters and really knowing who they are, but you have to remind yourself that a person picking up the script for the first time won’t know these things, so you have to introduce them as strangers too.

Megana: Yeah.

John: And that’s honestly one of the really tricky things about getting through this pass and sort of – it’s not even really your second pass. It’s that draft 1.5 is remembering, oh that’s right, you have information that the normal reader would not have.

Megana: Oh. I have to walk away. If this wasn’t on a mic stand I would have dropped it for you. Wait, but did you want to talk about your nighttime rituals?

John: So my nighttime ritual is obviously using the cards is really helpful to get stuff out of my head. And if there’s a thing that’s the main thing I’m writing and I don’t have it all figured out I will as I close my eyes to get to sleep I will try to think about that space and be in that space. And I won’t necessarily dream about it but it just reminds me that it’s the most important thing to be working on.

I’ll also write myself some cards like focus on this first tomorrow. As I get started on the day’s work I’ll know like, oh, those are the things I actually really wanted to write. And so the scenes you just read today those came out of cards last night saying like write this scene between these characters, do the new version of this, and that sort of sets the priority, the agenda for what my writing is going to be like the next day. Because as you know it’s just so easy to be distracted from actually getting started doing the work and so to close up a day’s work with notes about what you want to tackle next feels important.

Megana: So you’re not writing at night at all?

John: I’m almost never writing at night. Unless there’s something urgent I’m almost never writing at night. There have been times where I’ll have to excuse myself, I really do have a great new idea that I want to tackle. But as a parent and husband you can’t do that too often.

Megana: Yeah. That makes sense.

John: Now, we’ve talked about the end of your writing day, the end of the day, sort of getting ready for bed. But what about finishing up a script? Because at this point you’ve now finished a couple of scripts. And do you have – what is working for you in terms of feeling closure, completion with the stuff you’re writing?

Megana: I will usually send it to a friend and then I will like treat myself to something nice, like maybe a nice blouse.

John: The equivalent of me treating myself to Panda Express.

Megana: Exactly. Like I’ll buy a piece of clothing that I like, or I will go treat myself to a nice dinner.

John: Which is I think a smart way to reward yourself. We’re in the middle of NaNoWriMo right now so, or I guess we’ve just started NaNoWriMo, and when I was doing the Arlo Finch book which started as a NaNoWriMo project I loved the daily routing of like OK I have to hit my 1,500 words or 1,600 words in order to hit this goal. But it did feel weirdly artificial because I didn’t necessarily feel like I was achieving any sort of story purpose. It was a very artificial sort of boundary behind stuff.

One thing I do very much like about screenwriting is that a scene begins or it ends. It’s just done and you can have some closure. And there can be short scenes. And there can be short moments that feel intact and full. But getting to the end of an Arlo Finch book was just so amazing because I could just look at all the words that I had done. There wasn’t even time to reread the whole book because it just takes too long to read a whole book. So those feelings of completion, like I actually had some postpartum joy and depression for a week or two after finishing one of those giant books.

Megana: There’s such a fleeting moment between feeling so proud of yourself and then being like, wait, was that shit? Now I have to reread it and edit it and face my own writing judgment.

John: Yeah. So as we end this segment on endings any thoughts about the next topic that will be good to do as one of these clip shows? Because we hadn’t done clip shows before you became a producer. So, any other things you want to think about? Do you want listener suggestions?

Megana: I would love listener suggestions. And to hear what other people are struggling with.

John: Yeah. Megana, thank you so much.

Megana: Thanks John.

Links:

• Scriptnotes Episode 44: Endings for Beginners
• Scriptnotes Episode 152: The Rocky Shoals
• Scriptnotes Episode 392: The Final Moment
• Lindsay Doran’s Ted Talk
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Henry Adler (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.