Search Results for: Save the cat

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/101-qa-from-the-live-show).

**John August:** Now, if you have a question for me, or for Craig, or for Aline, or Rawson, there is a microphone on this corner of the stage. And you can line up and we will hear your questions as you ask them and we will be so excited.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** John, I’m writing a script with an assistant character in it and I’ve named him Stuart and call dibs on that.

**John:** Done.

**Aline:** Done. I got it.

**Craig Mazin:** I’ll take Ryan.

**Aline:** I claimed it.

**John:** Hello and welcome! What’s your name?

**Eric:** Hi, my name is Eric.

**John:** Hi Eric.

**Eric:** First off, thanks for being awesome. I had a quick question for you guys. Before you’re about to send a script out, do you have particular checklists that you go through that it has to pass muster? And what are those particular things?

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Yeah, that’s a very good question. What are the last looks? Rawson, do you have a last look list on a script before you — ?

**Rawson Thurber:** Yeah, well, I do something a little different, obviously, than just… — I don’t really send them out anymore, so if I’m hired to write a script or rewrite a script, typically if it’s the first draft, and I sort of, I don’t know if I stole this from you or if I adapted it from you.

But I’ll finish the first draft, and obviously plenty of spell check and typos and I have my lovely fiancé go through it, and she finds a lot more than I do.

But if it’s a first draft, I actually hand deliver it. I go into the production office or the studio. I bring however many copies I need, usually two or three. I have the PDF on my iPhone, so I just call them up I say, “Look, I’m going to need ten minutes of your time. I’m just going to pop in, maybe right before lunch, between meetings, whatever.” Pop in, hand them the script. It gives me a chance to do two things. One is it gives me a chance to prep their read or frame their read, or I can talk about things that I really am excited about in the script, things that went really well.

I also get a chance to sort of maybe head off some negative notes at the pass where I say, “I think the villain in the second — it gets a little muddy, I’m still working on it. Don’t freak out.” So, it helps frame the read.

And then the second part of it, which I think really helps, is that it also puts it at the top of their stack. If you’re going to walk in and hand it to them, it really imprints with them. So, it’s not just another one on their stack, which doesn’t exist anymore.

When I leave I email it to them so they have a PDF and they can read it on their iPad.

The only thing I would say is just do that once. Like don’t go for every rewrite, just the first time, so they know you’re taking it seriously. And then after that it can all be email. That’s what I do.

**John:** I never heard of that. That’s very cool.

**Aline:** I’ve never heard that either I thought —

**Craig:** It’s pretty old school. Old school.

**Aline:** If you do that, bring a vibrating pen for everybody.

**Rawson:** I think you’re also apologetic. And I know it’s quaint and it won’t take much time. And you don’t really call it a meeting.

**Aline:** I think Craig and I share this. I kind of obsess a little bit over page breaks.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s my big — that’s my flight check.

**Aline:** That’s what I will fiddle with. Because I don’t like the “CONT’D” and I like things to fall on —

**Craig:** Sometimes there’s a line that’s like that’s the conclusion of the thought and if it’s on the next page, even though — look, the truth is they all read it on their iPad. There are no page breaks anymore.

**Aline:** So I have this belief now that if it starts to fall right on the page it means the script is good.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh boy, that’s mentally ill.

**Rawson:** Ooh, that’s nice.

**Craig:** I’m with you, but, I mean, I have the same problem.

**John:** Thank you very much. Next up.

**Hani:** Hi, I’m Hani Vadi and thank you; this is really amazing. My question is to Craig but anybody can chip in. Regarding writing parody films and how much is too much, copyright laws, and how much you can push and not push.

**Craig:** Well, the basic thing that governs parody is fair use. The fair use doctrine accepts certain things for use by all of us that are copyright material, for instance if you were doing a review of the book you can publish a few quotes from the book without infringing on the author’s right to reproduce that book.

And parody is one of those things. It’s very well protected. Occasionally it gets challenged in court. The very famous case that’s part of the subject of The People vs. Larry Flynt where Hustler Magazine published a cartoon in which Jerry Falwell’s mother was something, something Hustler-y. And it was considered parody and it was protected.

When we were making parody movies the big rule of thumb was “never ask permission.” If you ask, people will say no, and then they’re on record as saying no, and you’re on record as asking, which is sort of like implying that you think it’s infringement.

In general, bigger minds than yours will be concerned with this. Law professors are hired to work this stuff out. Your job is to just be funny. So you be funny, and then whoever is going to produce the movie, they’ll figure it out.

**Hani:** Just make the cat drunk.

**Craig:** Pardon me?

**Hani:** Just make the cat drunk. Save the Cat!

**Rawson:** We haven’t read it.

**Craig:** Yes sir.

**John:** Hello!

**PiPS97:** How you doing. Person in plaid shirt number 97. I was just wondering, John, what podcasts were you listening to before you approached Craig here?

**John:** I was listening to John Gruber’s podcast which was The Talk Show with Dan Benjamin. I was listening to some of the Slate podcasts. Like One Cool Thing is sort of a rip-off of the Slate Political Gabfest has Cocktail Chatter as their last little thing. My husband, Mike, was the one who talked me into listening to Slate Political Gabfest, and it was great.

So those were the two. And then I think the fact that our show is about an hour, the fact that we do three topics is really modeled on those.

**PiPS97:** And have you been on any other podcasts other than Jay Mohr’s?

**John:** I have. I’ve been on John Gruber’s new podcast, I’ve gone on Brett Terpstra’s podcast and at least one or two more, Moisés Chiullan’s podcast. So, they’re fun. And I really enjoy guesting on other people’s podcasts because I can just be the Craig who shows up unprepared.

**Craig:** It’s the best.

**John:** Yeah. Thanks.

**PiPS97:** Thank you.

**Craig:** It’s the best.

**John:** Hello!

**Kevin:** Hello there. My name is Kevin and I just want to say I hope you guys are not hungry; you’ll never shop in Ralphs again. No, I’m just kidding. I was going to ask you, do you think — It seems to me like the structure of films now, because they write in three acts, I think it was better in the earlier days of Hollywood because they wrote in reels and sequences. And what you were saying about Slate and blaming Blake Snyder, a lot of people did that with Syd Field because they felt like he gave you a couple plot points and nobody knew what was happening in between.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, we still talk about reels. I mean, movies are shot digitally and they’re edited digitally and they’re projected digitally. And in the editing room we divide them up into reels. And we even spend time balancing the reels sort of pointlessly because we just don’t want too much in one reel or the other.

We still think in terms of sequences. Certainly in animation, they’re constantly talking about sequences. The truth is I really don’t think much about acts. I don’t think much about sequences. I think about my main character and theme, and their relationship with the theme, and their progression from one kind of philosophy of life to another.

We all have different ways of approaching it, but once you get into production, I actually feel like things probably haven’t changed much in terms of the way we conceive of it.

**Kevin:** Thank you. I don’t use a G2, but I prefer writing in reels. Thank you very much.

**John:** Thank you very much.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Hello.

**Jeremy** Hi, my name is Jeremy. This is for writing comedy films. Do you hammer — what is your process for getting funny onto the screen? Do you start out by hammering out the plot and characters, look to see where to insert the funny, or do you have funny concepts and ideas and go from there?

**John:** I’ll say the comedy stuff I’ve done is making sure that you have a character who is funny and interesting in the world, and you’re creating situations in which that character can show, can be funny, and let the world be funny around them.

Go is a situation of like the world itself is not particularly hilarious, but you create predicaments in which these characters and their specific wants become funny. And hopefully you are able to write funny stuff for them to say and do. And that’s the trick. You can structure a perfect comedy, but if you’re not funny it’s not funny. Aline?

**Craig:** Or Rawson was about to say something.

**Aline:** Rawson has to answer this because Rawson wrote one of my favorite comedies ever.

**Rawson:** Thank you. That’s very kind. So, I think there are two things, because one is writing funny for a script and then the second thing is how you end up with funny in the movie. And they’re different, because a lot of times what you write in the script gets changed either from the performance or from the editing as you put the movie up.

I know in the last movie I made, We’re the Millers —

**John:** August 7th.

**Rawson:** August 7th, yes, August 7th.

You know, I guess one thing I really learned on that was nobody, not only does nobody know anything, but nobody really knows what’s funny. The people who really know funny will confess that they’re not 100%. They’re like, “I think this is going to be funny, but you don’t know.” And you don’t really know until you put it up in front of real people and they either laugh or they don’t. And then the process of editing kind of brings — takes the stuff out that isn’t working and brings in things that are closer. But that’s a process of making a film.

In terms of, when I was writing Dodgeball and when I was rewriting We’re the Millers, it’s a lot of what John said is figuring out situations that are funny or awkward, or hard, or weird, and then hoping you have characters in there that will say funny stuff.

**Aline:** The other thing I would say is characters can’t be funny if the scene is broken.

**Rawson:** That’s true.

**Aline:** And I have found that often, like if there’s something wrong and no one is saying funny things in a script, in a scene, something is wrong with the scene.

**Rawson:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And, lastly, there are scenes that are funny because the characters are odd. And the way they’re interacting with something that is mundane is specific and particular. So, you can go through — like a very famous example is if you look at Rain Man. It’s not a funny movie. I mean, there are a couple of jokes in it, but it’s a drama.

It’s the same movie as Midnight Run. It’s a guy and a weirdo on the road and the weirdo refuses to fly and they’ve got to get from here to here together. And along the way they kind of have this… — And that’s on purpose, because the men who made Midnight Run wanted to do Rain Man. [laughs] So, they’re like, “Well, I guess we can’t do Rain Man, so let’s just do this one.”

So, sometimes that’s all it is, is just a weird character and their weird take in a mundane situation, like a restaurant.

**Jeremy:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Thanks.

**Natural comedian:** This is kind of a strange problem. A couple years ago I had a lot of success with like a dark thriller sort of movie that got me repped and everything. The problem is I’m a comedy writer and of the first five scripts that I’ve ever written, four were comedies, and the other one was successful.

So, I go into these meetings and like I have to try not to tell jokes and I have to try to be like eye liner guy who is like, “This movie is about pain,” and it’s not really me because I’m always trying to make people laugh. So, how would you know what your genre is, and should you just shut up and try and take the money if you’re out of genre?

**John:** Awesome to get paid. But, you should write the movie that you want to see exist in the world. And if those movies are comedies then you should write the comedies.

**Natural comedian:** What if no one else seems to want to see them in the world?

**John:** Well, I think, you need to make them in some way. Because you have these things on the page and if for some reason people aren’t finding it —

**Craig:** Well, hold on. We don’t know how unfunny he is.

**John:** Well, maybe —

**Natural comedian:** I’m pretty funny to me.

**John:** Yeah. So I think you need to find some way to make that, either as, make something that’s either a short or something that can show people like, oh, this is actually funny, because they’re not getting it, or they just only have one preconceived notion of who you are.

Before I wrote Go I was only the guy who wrote kids movies. And so I was only getting sent things about gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas. And it was driving me crazy. And so then with Go, I wrote Go as sort of like, “You know, I can write other things.” And it was so useful because if people wanted to see it as a comedy, it’s a comedy. You want to see it as thriller, it’s a thriller. It’s an action movie. It got me other things.

So, either make something that’s specifically a comedy that can be that comedy sample for you, or write something that’s broader that people can see like, “Oh, he can do these different things.”

**Natural comedian:** So, would you write a sample — I’m sorry, I know I’m taking more time than I deserve. Would you write a sample that, you know, just to be a sample, or does it have to be something that can sell? Because I have those ideas but they’re things that aren’t going to be made. And if they’re just going to be awesome, you know.

**Craig:** If you’re so sure that they’re not going to get made —

**Natural comedian:** I’m pretty sure.

**Craig:** Then why are you? I mean, they must stink.

**Natural comedian:** No, because they’re awesome.

**Rawson:** Can I just —

**Craig:** You don’t understand how this works, see.

**John:** Rawson has the answer.

**Craig:** Awesome things get made. Right?

**Rawson:** I couldn’t agree more. I’ve never heard anybody say, “I’m working really hard on my writing sample.” Like that doesn’t make any sense to me. Either write something you love or don’t. But don’t write something that you think no one will buy, or write something that you think someone will buy. Write what you love. Don’t work on a writing sample, work on a script, work on a movie.

**Craig:** You are prime candidate for Brian Koppelman’s best advice. Brian Koppelman who writes with Koppelman/Levien. They did Rounders and stuff like that. Very smart guy. Two word advice: calculate less. Just calculate less.

**Aline:** Biederman also says, “Write with no attachment to the outcome.”

**Craig:** Boom.

**Natural comedian:** Write better.

**Craig:** You got it.

**John:** Hello and welcome.

**Alex:** Hello. I’m the first woman in the line.

**John:** Have at it. There will be another woman in the line.

**Alex:** We’re outnumbered.

**John:** Hooray! What is your name?

**Alex:** I’m Alex Angelis.

**John:** Are you here from Los Angeles?

**Alex:** Yes, I live here.

**John:** We have some people who are from Canada.

**Aline:** She looked so scared from that question. Her eyes went wide. Did you see that?

**Craig:** You leave her alone!

**John:** Who here is from Canada? See!

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**Rawson:** That’s awesome.

**Alex:** Okay, I was just hoping to get some advice about a problem which I think is probably common, where you have a lot of scripts in your mind at one time. And when I sit down to try to write one I’m supposed to focus on, I just have all these other ideas for the other ones. And is there anything, like hypnosis. Like what do you do?

**John:** That never happens to any of us.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** We’re all perfect.

**Craig:** Yeah, we just focus. There’s nothing wrong with having multiple things going on in your mind.

**Alex:** No, of course.

**Craig:** I think it’s important to at least give yourself an opportunity to take one of those ideas and make a little outline of it. You know, I don’t know if you like index cards, or maybe you like to type up a little outline or something like that. Outline it. And what I find is sometimes by putting a little bit of flesh on this skeleton, now I think, “Oh, that could be a person and I’ll leave these other ones here for awhile. This one I have to commit to.”

Nothing is sexier than a new person, right? It’s the same thing with ideas, but you’ve got to marry one of them. You got to have the kid. You got to pay tuition. Wife leaves you. And then you move on.

No, my wife is lovely. She would never leave me. But you do have to commit at some point.

**John:** I would say if you’re picking between projects, my first simple bit of advice, pick the one with the best ending, which I know sounds really weird.

**Aline:** It’s great advice.

**Rawson:** Great advice.

**John:** Everything is going to have a great start because first acts are easy. But think of the one that you’re excited to write the ending for, because that’s the one you’ll actually finish.

**Aline:** That’s the answer to the question.

**Rawson:** Wow. We can all stop.

**Alex:** Nailed it.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Nailed it!

**John:** Hello sir. You have a fantastic orange shirt.

**Orange shirt:** I went with umbrage.

**Craig:** Great shirt. Umbrage orange! Also blue is umbrage.

**Orange shirt:** First of all I’m so glad to hear that some of you guys are obsessed with page breaks. That makes me feel so much better. I thought I might have been going crazy.

**Craig:** You are, but…

**Orange shirt:** My question is, Craig, you warned against not chasing trends. And I have to ask, because at least three of my most recent favorite films released failed miserably at the box office. Is there any value in not avoiding failures?

**Aline:** Name one.

**Orange shirt:** The Lone Ranger. Pacific Rim. Cloud Atlas. These things, like should I not write a giant monster movie? Should I not write a western movie if I’m writing one?

**Aline:** I thought you were going to say like a tiny movie —

**Craig:** No, I think you should write what you want to write, what you care the most about writing. The truth is you may run into something where you’re off trend. And they may say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, you’re a big huge robot monster movie. Dude, Pacific Rim, we’re not going to make this.” But if you’ve written something well and it’s impressive, they’re going to say, “But, what about this, what about this, are you interested in this? We bought this…”

And here’s another thing, just so you know about off trends, there really is no off trend, because what happens is you’ll hear that something is off trend. There are 50 producers out there desperate to get a movie made who own properties that are on trend. And trends just do this, right?

Nothing could have been more off trend than a pirate movie, until Pirates of the Caribbean. I mean, not just one, two spectacular pirate failures had happened. And then, look right? So, ignore all of that. You just do your thing.

**Orange shirt:** Will do. Thank you.

**Craig:** You got it.

**John:** Hello and welcome.

**Makers fan:** Hi, sorry, I’m short. Firstly, lady business. Makers is awesome. I cried like for three hours.

**Aline:** Amazing, right? I cried so hard at the beginning, with the lady, the runner.

**Makers fan:** Yes! Oh my god, sorry, okay. I just want to say your episode on why you should continue writing was like, whoa, I needed to hear that, so thank you.

**John:** Great. Thank you.

**Makers fan:** Also, so, you guys were going over the WGA report a couple weeks ago and you were talking about how screenwriting for film is like kind of doing this, and TV writing is doing this.

**John:** For people who are listening at home, one hand was going down and one hand was going up.

**Makers fan:** Down, up. Increasing, decreasing. So, do you think that there’s any merit in trying to bring back the miniseries or the made for TV movie?

**John:** Yes. And I think that the stuff that we’re talking about, like that off trend, that’s going to come back on trend. And so if you look at Under the Dome, that’s really kind of a miniseries. It’s like its own special thing. You look at Orange is the New Black, it’s kind of a miniseries because it’s all put together as one thing.

**Aline:** I loved those growing up, like the Shogun and what was —

**Craig:** Shogun was awesome!

**Aline:** What was the World War II one?

**John:** Winds of War?

**Aline:** Winds of War.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** Thorn Birds.

**Aline:** Yeah. I mean, those were great.

**Craig:** Richard Chamberlain, basically. Richard Chamberlain’s entire career.

**John:** So, yes, I think that’s the kind of thing that’s going to come back. Now, as an aspiring writer, is that the kind of thing you should do out of the gate? It’s sort of hard. It’s neither fish nor fowl, so it’s weird for you to do that. But for the TV execs who are listening, yeah, make some miniseries, because they’re kind of cool.

**Aline:** Yeah, but you know what? If somebody called you and said, “This woman wrote this thing. It’s weird. It’s three two-hour episodes of a story,” you’d be like, “That’s great, I want to read that, because I haven’t seen that.” I would think that would make it more interesting. If you could write a miniseries, I mean, that would be —

**Craig:** If you have something in that shape, why not?

**Aline:** Yeah, people would, yeah.

**Craig:** Look, when miniseries ruled the earth there were three networks, right? So, the world stopped and watched Roots. That was the deal, right? But now with Netflix and everything you’re starting to see there are just more avenues for television content because there are more delivery systems for it. Which means there are more delivery systems for shorter series. All a miniseries is is basically what they call a regular series in England, you know?

**Aline:** You know what would be cool would be to option a piece of material that was a miniseries and write the first part of it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** And then be like, “Boom, I have the rest of it. I own the rights to the rest of it.”

**John:** Aline, do you want to do Winds of War for ABC?

**Aline:** I love Winds of War.

**John:** We could totally do that. We could totally —

**Aline:** Who was in it? Who was the woman who was in it, the blonde who was in it? Victoria something.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Herman Wouk wrote the novel.

**Aline:** Ooh, it was so good.

**John:** So good. So, thank you for a great idea.

**Makers fan:** You’re welcome.

**John:** Cool. You’re awesome. We’ll name a character for you. It’s going to be great.

**Craig:** Good question.

**John:** Hello and welcome.

**Doppelgänger problems:** Hi guys. There are a bunch of us so I’ll try to be quick. I have a question, a very hands-on question. I’m writing a script with an alternate universe in it, so there are two versions of the main character. And there’s one scene where I want us to think that it’s the main character but it’s really the doppelgänger.

So, how do I write that? Because if I write it as the original, it’s kind of —

**John:** It’s rough. And so many people have faced exactly what you’re facing where what information should the person watching the film have versus what information should the person reading the script have, and it’s a bitch. And you’re going to have to make a choice between is the reader going to be ahead of where the viewer is at?

**Doppelgänger problems:** Right. That’s what I’m doing right now.

**John:** How are you going to pull that off? I think it’s one of those rare cases where bold is your friend. And so at a certain point when something has to be revealed, break out that bold text to really say, “Pay attention. This is a thing that happened.” Otherwise people are going to be confused. They’re going to be confused anyway.

**Craig:** By the way, that’s also a moment to step out of the script and just say, “That’s right. The person you thought was blank was really blank.” It’s okay to do that.

**Aline:** Just in case you missed it.

**Craig:** It’s okay to do that if it’s a big deal.

A**Doppelgänger problems:** Okay. And on the names and everything I use like —

**Craig:** Use the name that you want the audience to think is the person, otherwise it’s going to be super boring to be like, “Secretly blank but looks like blanks.” Right?

**Doppelgänger problems:** Right.

**Craig:** Then they’ll be like, “Okay?” Go ahead, fool the reader the reader you want to fool the audience.

**Doppelgänger problems:** Great. Thank you.

**John:** Thanks. We have people in line. The gentlemen in the red shirt is who, in my head, you, is the last question, but anyone else can grab us afterwards and we’ll answer your question. Hello sir at the microphone.

**Hunter:** Hi, Hunter, first time, long time. So, you guys were talking and I’ve seen on the blog and the podcast discussions of how to dress for meetings and what to do. But can you guys give us some tips or examples of what the most ridiculous, rubbish thing that you have ever done or heard of somebody doing in a meeting?

**Aline:** That’s good.

**Rawson:** I’ve got one.

**John:** You go first.

**Craig:** Let’s hear it.

**Rawson:** Well, this was recent. I met Jennifer Aniston for the first time. And I was a little nervous.

**John:** Did you drink her Vitamin Water?

**Rawson:** I did not. I did not. But I walk in and all I’m thinking is like, “Be cool. Be cool. Be cool.” And the door opens and she’s like, “Hi, I’m Jen,” and she’s like the nicest person, reaches out. And I go, “Hi, I’m Rawson,” and go like, bang, right into a glass coffee table and eat shit. And I’m like, “Hey! Hi! — ”

So, don’t bang into things. And if there’s a glass coffee table, just take a beat before you try to shake somebody’s hand. That would be my advice on the glass coffee table movie star thing.

**Craig:** Wow. That’s bad.

**Rawson:** It was awful. And it got better. It got better.

**Aline:** I have a good one that’s not rubbish but was funny. I made a movie with Rachel McAdams, who I just adored, and I was saying goodbye to her on the last day that I was on set. And I was wearing this pink scarf. And I was talking to her and I was saying she was so amazing and thank you so much and she’s been so great. And I become aware that she’s looking at a thing right here and she’s like, “Oh, honey, Aline, it’s so great. I had such a good time working with you.” And then she reaches down and picks out a piece of donut frosting that was wedged in the middle of my scarf.

So the entire time I was telling her about amazing, how much I love working with her, all she was thinking was like, “Really? Donut frosting?”

**Craig:** “Pig.”

**Aline:** “Pig.” On the scarf.

**John:** I can’t beat that, so next question.

**Jeff:** Hello.

**Craig:** Hello!

**John:** Hello and welcome.

**Jeff:** My name is Jeff and I always think of you, John, whenever I tell people hello now, so thank you. So, my question is actually about reading scripts and if you guys have any tips about giving feedback or like how you get through maybe a bad script or stop at a certain point.

**Craig:** There’s an art to it, isn’t there? Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, Rawson, you, as a director, you —

**Aline:** How often do people give you scripts to read and they really want an opinion?

**Rawson:** Well, what do you mean? When they want you to tell them, “This is great!” When they want that opinion?

**Aline:** Most of the time people really just want to hear, “This was awesome.”

**Rawson:** I have a screenwriting friend who will say, “Yeah, I’ll read your script.” And then all he says is, “I love it. I think it’s going to be the best movie that’s ever been made.” And that’s it. And they love that. He goes, “It’s incredible.” I don’t even know if he reads it. But no matter what his thought is, that’s his response ever time.

**Craig:** So, that’s awful, right? I will tell you that as I’ve gone on, and this is going to sound Pollyannaish, okay, I read scripts all the time and a lot of times I read them and I think, “This is not very good. Maybe this person is just not professional. They’re never going to be a professional. This is never going to be good.”

However, it’s worth it for me, an exercise for me, to talk about some things in the script from a craft perspective and say, “So, I want to talk to you about, let’s just look at this one scene and let’s talk about some of the things that I thought maybe could make it better.” And just in a craft way, it forces you to start thinking about things.

I find that looking at mistakes helps me crystallize how to avoid mistakes. There is a value to it.

**Aline:** The other thing is when you’re reading like a terrible script it takes like 11 hours and every page weighs like forty pounds.

**Rawson:** That’s the worst.

**Aline:** So, you’re like, “Ooh [feigns turning page].” I’m too dumb and lazy. Like I can’t even focus on what’s happening in the thing. I don’t know what’s… — Somebody once said at a meeting, an executive was talking about this script that needed to be rewritten. And she said, “This script is so bad that I can’t remember what happened on the page before.”

**Rawson:** Yeah, I think every time someone hands me a script to read, I mean, I think this is probably the same for all of you, is that you want it to be great because you read it so much faster.

**Aline:** So much faster.

**Craig:** And also you’re going to avoid that terrible moment.

**Rawson:** Of course. And the way I’ve tried to kind of avoid the terrible moment is like you get a bad script, sometimes it’s a friend, sometimes it’s not, and you’re going to talk to that person. A lot of times what I’ve found very helpful is two things. One is to start by asking some questions about what they want from this script that they’ve written. Like, what is your goal? Is your goal to get an agent?

**Aline:** Did you want this to be boring?

**Rawson:** But that’s exactly the point. I don’t talk about the script. I talk about the intent. So, what do you want from this? You want an agent? You want a spec script? You want to direct it? And that takes up the first ten minutes of the conversation?.

**Aline:** “You wanted to euthanize me?”

**Rawson:** And then the other part is like then I saw, “Okay, so tell me the story.” And invariably they’ll start telling the story and sometimes it’s better than the script and then you can focus on what they’re talking to you about. You can say, “That sounds great. I didn’t get that here. Maybe do that, what you’re saying, because here it didn’t come through.” And then you’re off the hook.

**Aline:** You’re so nice. Give your scripts to him.

**John:** Yeah, he’s nice.

**Rawson:** No, no.

**Aline:** First him, then him. I would say then me. And then him last.

**John:** If you’re reading a script for a friend, who is a genuine friend, and it’s not working, there’s probably something that is working — I would hope there’s something that’s working. I always start with like, “These are the moments I loved.” And talk about this and why it was working really well. And hopefully that is what they actually want the movie to be. And then you can start having a conversation about like how to make the rest of the movie that movie.

**Aline:** Okay, I have a good story about this.

**John:** All right, tell me.

**Aline:** I read Gatins’s script for Flight, you know, John Gatins who is a very good friend of mine. And I read that script a bunch. And I was like, “Dude, you need to take out the scene with the cancer patient in the stairwell. This just does not contribute to the forward momentum of the script at all. This has nothing to do with anything. This character does not…”

**Craig:** Violates Save the Cat!

**Aline:** The famous Save the Cat! clause. “There’s this character who does not reappear. He’s like a combination of exposition-man and the theme-god. Like this needs to go.” And it’s one of the reasons that Robert Zemeckis directed the movie, and it’s everyone’s favorite scene. And it’s a tour de force. And it’s brilliant. And it’s one of the things that makes that script so special.

So it’s…

**Craig:** Don’t listen to Aline.

**John:** Don’t’ let Aline read your script.

**Craig:** She’s an idiot.

**Jeff:** Thanks guys.

**John:** Great. Thanks. Hello, our final question tonight.

**Craig:** Hello!

**Final question:** Hello. So, quick question, probably rough answer. So, you finish your draft and you’re unhappy with how one of your characters turned out. How do you approach that on the redraft?

**Craig:** You mean how they turned out like, “Oh my god, this guy is a dick at the end?” Or just you don’t like the way they’re reading in general?

**Final question:** So, yeah, those.

**Craig:** Both.

**Rawson:** Is it a main character or are you talking about — ?

**Final question:** Main character.

**Rawson:** Main character. Yikes.

**Craig:** Oh boy. Now, normally, you want to know how they’re going to turn out before you start writing. So, did you do that thing where you’re like, “I’ll just start writing and we’ll see what happens?”

**Final question:** Well, it wound up more passive. So the character isn’t as active as you would hope.

**John:** My quick suggestion would be think of a new character, who has a new name, and run that character through your story and see if it works better. And see how do you make things as interesting and as terrible for that character as possible. Because a passive character is only passive because you’re allowing him to be passive.

**Aline:** Are you asking can you do a whole character pass without messing up without your script? Like can you change a lead character without changing your script? Is that what you’re asking?

**Final question:** Well, I’m just wondering if you’ve encountered that problem and your approach.

**Aline:** I had — not a lead, but I had, I’ve told this story before, but on Devil Wears Prada the character that Stanley Tucci played was very difficult and I really struggled with it, because he was very nice, he was sort of like that character that Héctor Elizondo always plays. He was like that very nice kind of helpful character. And it was not working for the story at all.

But draft after draft he was still there. And then there came a point where we needed to cast it. So, we started thinking of specific actors and I was like, “This guy just doesn’t have a point of view. He has nothing to say.” And then I talked to somebody in the fashion business who said, “The problem with this character is he’s too nice, and no one in the fashion business is nice to each other.”

And I said, “No one ever?” And he said, “No, there’s no reason to be. And no one is.”

And so I went back and I wrote that character like an insult comic. And I’m a huge Rickles fan. And I just went in and wrote him as sort of un-mentor-ish as I could. And that was a situation where like his story didn’t change, but I just went in, and there are situations where somehow, sometimes, your character just doesn’t move the levers in the way that you want to.

It’s easier with a supporting character. It’s going to be harder with a lead character because they’re already — it would be very hard to do.

**Craig:** It’s impossible.

**Aline:** But sometimes with supporting characters you can kind of lift that out and plunk somebody back in there.

**John:** Melissa McCarthy in Identity Thief.

**Craig:** Yes, so the original Identity Thief, the spec script was two guys. But, that required a complete rewrite. You know, what you’re describing is a function of an error that happened very early on in the beginning, in your conception. Because your story allowed for a passive character.

Maybe ask yourself in going back to the beginning, what is this movie about? What am I trying to impart upon people? What is the argument that I’m making at the end? Take a character, make him believe the opposite of that. And then get him there.

**Aline:** Have you ever talked about this thing that Ted Elliott talks about which is like, I think he calls is “Phase Space” or something like that, which is this thing — isn’t it something like that?

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** At length.

**Aline:** Where there are these decisions, it’s like there’s a whole pie of a reality when you start a script. And you make a decision. And all of a sudden it goes from being a circle to this shape. And then this. And then this. And you’re narrowing your narrative possibilities with every choice you make. It’s like, “Oh, it’s going to take place in Detroit and the lead character is going to be a cop and his partner is going to be a woman.”

And you start narrowing, and narrowing, and narrowing, and every time I’ve ever worked on or experienced a script that had problems, it was because someone you ended up in this tiny sliver and the solutions were over there. And you had made some choices that were so big in the beginning that it was like even if you saw the pill across the room that would make the problem go away, you can’t get there. And that’s why those first … — You know, I’m working with a friend and we’ve been outlining and now she has to write. She’s very intimidated by the writing process.

And I said, “You’ve outlined this movie. You have a 15-page outline. You’ve done most of the writing.” Those decisions are — those big, first decisions, are critical, and the lead has to embody your theme, and your momentum, and your narrative. So, if it’s not doing that there’s probably some other things that are not working.

**Craig:** But don’t get sad. No, I’m serious, don’t get sad. That’s our lives. What’s happening now, that’s it. It’s the constant redoing and redoing. And sometimes you do fall into a terrible trap.

Go ahead, you can cry one night if you want. Have a couple of drinks, wake up the next day, begin again. You’ll be fine.

**John:** Thank you!

LINKS:

* [Scriptnotes, the 100th episode](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-100th-episode)
* [Aline Brosh McKenna](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0112459/) on IMDb, and her [first](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-black-list-and-a-stack-of-scenes) and [second](http://johnaugust.com/2013/how-screenwriters-find-their-voice) appearances on Scriptnotes
* [Rawson Thurber](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1098493/) on IMDb
* Go see [We’re the Millers](http://werethemillers.warnerbros.com/) on August 7th!
* [Fair use](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use) on Wikipedia
* The Slate [Political Gabfest](http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/gabfest.html)
* John on [Mohr Stories](http://mohrstories.libsyn.com/mohr-stories-53-john-august), [The Talk Show](http://www.muleradio.net/thetalkshow/7/) with John Gruber, Brett Terpstra’s [Systematic](http://5by5.tv/systematic/30), and Moisés Chiullan’s [Screen Time](http://5by5.tv/screentime/13)
* [The Winds of War](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winds_of_War_(miniseries)) on Wikipedia
* Outro by Scriptnotes listener [Seth Podowitz](http://www.musictomedia.com/)

The original post for this episode can be found here.

Announcer: Live from Hollywood, California, it’s the 100th Episode of Scriptnotes.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Scriptnotes, it’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are inTEResting to screenwriters.

Thank you so much for being here. We’re live here in Hollywood at the Academy Lab Space Theatre. Thank you to the Academy for having us here. It’s kind of amazing.

Craig: Thank you. I’d like to thank the Academy. I will never say that again. Never have a chance, ever to ever say, I’d like to… — God, I’d like to thank the Academy. Let’s just do it a bunch of times. I — I — I’d like to thank the Academy.

John: I feel like we need to have Dennis Palumbo here to help talk you through the emotions you’re feeling right now.

Craig: It would be good.

John: Yeah. Specifically, I need to thank Greg Beal and Bettina Fisher for putting this together and their tremendous stuff.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Thank you so much — because Craig and I talked in a very general sense like, “Oh, you know we’re going to hit 100 episodes at some point.” And so then we actually looked at the calendar, it’s like, “Oh, it’s going to be some time in the end of July. We’ll both be in town and we could theoretically do a live event.” We sort of put it out in the universe in sort of a The Secret kind of way like maybe somebody will want us to do a live event. And it was the Academy. So this is amazing and thank you very much for having us here tonight.

Craig: It’s pretty awesome and that Nicholls Fellowship and Nicholls, you know that wonderful screenwriting, the one screenwriting contest that matters frankly.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Is sponsoring all the food and the wine and the beer. So…

John: Yeah. I think in some ways like we’re a fundraiser for them but they’re kind of fundraising for us and it’s kind of amazing. It’s an educational outreach. So thank you very much for this existing.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Craig, this is our hundredth episode.

Craig: One Hundred.

John: And it’s kind of remarkable. Do you have a favorite episode of the episodes we’ve recorded?

Craig: Well, I’m kind of partial to the one where I opened my heart up and bled all over the keyboard there…

John: The dark night of your soul.

Craig: The dark midnight of my soul.

John: After the terrible reviews.

Craig: Yeah. After the terrible…

John: Which of the two movies?

Craig: All of them.

John: Yeah. Right.

Craig: All of them. That was good. That felt good, actually.

John: It felt good. Yeah.

Craig: I actually got something out of the podcast for once which was nice.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And I really liked, even though it was the one that we just did so it feels a little bit like a cheap, and I don’t know if you guys have heard podcast 99, but that’s the one we did with Dr. Dennis Palumbo and that was great.

John: That was great. And so that was our sort of psychotherapy for screenwriters and that was a… — It’s recent to you but we actually recorded it like three weeks ago and we knew, it was like, “God, that’s really good.” It was one of those situations where we’re actually live in a room like, “Wow, that’s going to be a good episode.”

Craig: Yeah.

John: So I’m happy that turned out really well.

Craig: But…

John: Yes.

Craig: Favorite podcast out of the one hundred?

John: Yeah.

Craig: Raiders.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Raiders.

John: The Raiders episode was probably my favorite too because it was the first time we were doing something just completely brand new. We were just focusing on one episode. And what I liked so much about Raiders is we could talk about the movie that we were watching but we could also look back at the transcript and see like, “This is the process they went through to make that movie that we loved so much.” And I thought tonight we could actually go back and do the transcripts of how this podcast came to be.

Craig: Because it’s as important as Raiders.

John: Yes. Maybe as seminal an event in film history. And so this afternoon I went through email archives and found the four emails between me and Craig Mazin about this podcast. So this is the entirety of the planning for the original Scriptnotes. So this is actually what happened.

So this is June 27, 2011, 1:17 pm, I wrote to Craig, “Subject: Podcasts. Do you listen to any? I had dismissed them as a fad but now I find myself listening to several, wondering if you would have any interest in doing a joint podcast on screenwriting?”

Craig: “I don’t. But then again, I didn’t read any blogs either and then I wrote one for five years. A podcast would solve my ‘I want to talk about screenwriting but I’m tired of writing about screenwriting’ problem, so, yes, count me in. What sort of thing were you thinking?”

John: This is at 3:04 pm, “I was thinking a weekly thing in which we would talk about the Issues of the Day for screenwriters and the film industry, loose, not edited. The first couple would probably be a cluster-fuck but we’d get better at it. Then we would go in with a mutually agreed list of things we want to discuss. Most of these podcasts seem to be done remotely on Google Talk or some such. I’ll have my guy Ryan,” — Ryan Nelson! — “look into them to see what would be involved. My guess is that at most you’d need headphones with attached mic to plug into your computer. Some of the best podcasts are the ones Dan Benjamin does on 5by5 [url]. This is the one he does with the John Gruber of Daring Fireball [url].”

Craig: I should mention I did not listen to any of them but 16 minutes later I wrote back, “Perfect. Sounds like it is easy and fun! And easy! And fun! At this age, that’s all I care about. I’ll check out the podcasts you cite below for inspiration.”

John: Yeah. It’s a lie. The first of many lies in our relationship over the course of making the show.

Craig: And you can see a theme emerging here at the beginning. He had the idea and then had all the details and I said, “Sure!”

John: Yeah. “Just tell me when to sign on.”

Craig: Yeah.

John: So that was the initial sort of a spark of the show and now we’re a hundred episodes later.

Craig: Amazing.

John: And tonight we get to talk about the same stuff that we’ve been talking about for hundred episodes which is screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig: To screenwriters.

John: Tonight we’re going to talk about…

Craig: Wait, wait, hold on.

John: What?

Craig: I have to say it’s really cool that you guys showed up. I really do. I mean, I have to say…

John: Yeah.

Craig: It’s just cool. I’m a little verklempt because people really do enjoy the podcast and it’s great and I often tell people, “It’s just John and I. I always look at it as like we’re having a phone conversation for an hour each week.” But it’s great to see a little love reflected back and I really appreciate all the people, you guys bought tickets. I mean, granted, it was five dollars and so I’m not going to give you that much praise for it but still, you know, you parked, right?

John: Yeah. You drove to Hollywood.

Craig: You drove to Hollywood and you parked. Nice.

John: Ah! Nice.

Craig: And that’s the kind of ethic that we support.

John: [laughs]

Craig: So thank you guys. That’s great.

John: Craig, this is an honest conversation here. Did you ever consider bailing on the podcast?

Craig: Not once. No.

John: I did.

Craig: Oh.

John: Right around in the 50s.

Craig: Was it because of me? [laughs]

John: No. I just had sort of, getting tired of it.

Craig: I mean, here’s the truth. You know I’ll never bail on it because you make it so, so easy for us. So it it’s like I just show up and there is food in front of me and I eat it. I mean, you and Stuart. — Stuart is real. The guy here tonight who is playing Stuart, we have a different guy.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Where’s our Stuart?

John: No, it is a real Stuart?

Craig: Where’s the Stuart tonight that we have?

John: Stuart who’s here tonight. Can you raise your hand. There is he, here’s tonight’s Stuart.

Craig: Oh, that’s tonight’s Stuart.

John: Yeah.

Craig: It’s not, I mean, basically we’re like, okay, we just go, they have books of like we need a curly-haired ginger and then we get one.

Stuart does so much.

John: We hired Stuart from the Disney Channel. He’s actually one of the… — He was a kid actor who aged out and then that’s who we got.

Craig: He aged out. Exactly and so we caught him before he went full Amanda Bynes and… [Audience: “Ohhhhh.”] — Oh, okay, well she’s crazy. It’s not my fault. Anyway, no, I’ve never thought about it, but please don’t leave me.

John: All right. I won’t. I won’t.

Craig: I can’t quit you.

John: We’re good. Actually, as I was putting together the music for tonight I put together a lot of sort of like the break up songs just to try to set up that idea that maybe this was going to be the end.

Craig: Oh.

John: It was actually the last episode of Scriptnotes, but it’s not now. So we’re good. Fine.

Tonight, we’re actually going to talk about some things that are interesting to screenwriters including something that Craig calls Screenwriter-Plus.

Craig: Yeah.

John: We’ll get into that.

Craig: Yep.

John: We’ll talk about that Slate article that literally everyone in the audience tweeted me saying like, “Hey, you should talk about this” Yeah. We know. We will talk about this.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So it’s Slate article about how…

Craig: It’s fun. There is like you get that tweet of, “I’m sure everyone’s mentioned this to you,” and that is the one you get 15,000 times.

John: Yeah.

Craig: “I’m sure everyone has mentioned.” Well then, if you’re sure…

John: Yeah. Well, so we will talk about that thing because that would be useful to talk about. Before we get into that though there is a little bit of housekeeping, because there’s always housekeeping on our show.

Craig: Always housekeeping.

John: There is always a little housekeeping.

We switched our server that the podcast is on. So if for some reason episode 99 did not show up properly in your feed or your device or your app or wherever you expect it to be, that’s probably because your system logged in at just exactly the wrong moment when Ryan was switching stuff over and so if that happens delete the thing that you have there and re-add it in iTunes or however you add it into your thing. It’ll be there; it will be magic.

The reason why we switched stuff up over is because there is some cool new stuff that’s coming next week that you’ll see that we had to go to a newer server to support. So, enjoy that.

Secondly, Craig, I have here something that you’re going to be so excited to see. This is the Golden Ticket. So, when we sent out the t-shirts we said, “Oh, you know what? There should be a Golden Ticket that’s provided with one t-shirt.” This was your idea, Craig.

Craig: I had one.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I had an idea.

John: It didn’t work out so well.

Craig: Here’s why…

John: All right.

Craig: So the idea was somebody would open up their t-shirt package and there would be this Thank You card that everybody got and then they would turn it over and it would have the special message just for them, there was one of them.

John: Yeah. It was handwritten.

Craig: Yeah. And Stuart and Ryan — it’s fair to say Stuart and Ryan, or not that guy, but the real Stuart and Ryan — they never sent it out.

John: Yeah. Okay. But let’s talk about why it never got sent out. So, Craig, there is this big box of the postcards that went in with t-shirts and so Craig is like, “Well, let’s do this” and so, “Okay. That’s a good idea.” It seemed like a good idea. This is when we were recording the Dennis Palumbo episode. And so we’d sign all these cards, it’s a lot of cards to sign. And so we did this one special card and Craig put it back in the box, so like, ah, I have no idea where it is in the box.

Craig: Right. That’s the point.

John: It should be the point. It’s magical and like you don’t know where it’s going to be.

Craig: Right.

John: But then finally like no one was writing in. So like I said, “Guys, look through the rest of the box,” and there it was.

Craig: Well…

John: Yeah. It’s kind of a bummer. What was the idea behind the golden ticket?

Craig: Well, the idea was you would get the golden ticket and on the back, well, here, I’ll read it.

John: Yeah. Well, it didn’t really quite say, but…

Craig: Oh, you’re right. Oh, yeah. “This is the golden ticket, email ‘Prairie’…”

John: Prairie was the magic word.

Craig: “…’Prairie’ to ask@johnaugust.com to tell us that you got it.” And then what we would tell you is, “John and I will read your script and we’ll talk to you about your script.” And we’ll, I mean, we’re not going to help you really. But we’ll give you feedback and stuff. You know.

John: Yeah. That would be nice.

Craig: Yeah. But it’s too bad. There is no…

John: I mean, would that have been a good thing? I mean, who would have been excited to get that? Yeah? Craig, I wish there was a way we could do that. I mean, we got to find another way to do that. I mean, whenever life sets challenges for me I usually think, “What would Oprah do?”

Craig: Oprah!

John: And it’s got me through so much.

Craig: What would Oprah do?

John: Well, you know what she would do? She would tell people to look underneath their chair; there might be something under one person’s chair.

Craig: Okay.

John: In the audience tonight.

Craig: So maybe they should look under their chairs.

John: Maybe everyone should look underneath their chairs.

Craig: Take a look under your chair.

John: Take a look under your chair. Take a feel under your chair.

Craig: Because one of you might have it. Look under your chairs.

John: Someone in this audience might have something that’s different than everyone else’s.

Craig: Someone has it. Anyone? Anyone? No?

Ya!

John: Oh my god! Come on up here and the audience can meet you.

Craig: Awesome!

John: What’s your name?

Matt Smith: My name is Matt Smith.

John: Matt Smith, I’m John August.

Matt: Hi, I met you in Chicago.

John: Oh, yeah! So, great.

Craig: What happened in Chicago?

John: We made a musical called Big Fish. You don’t really keep up with this…

Craig: Hey, hopefully you don’t have a script or anything like that. Do you?

John: Are you a writer?

Matt: Several.

Craig: Oh geez.

John: All right. So, do you have a script that you think would be appropriate for us to read?

Matt: Sure.

John: All right.

Matt: It’s like a pilot.

John: Oh pilots are great. We love.

Craig: It’s shorter than a screenplay!

John: [laughs] There’s a reason!

Matt: I could give you a short film if you want a short one.

Craig: What’s the shortest thing you got?

John: Yeah.

Matt: 130 pages.

John: So it’s a pilot?

Matt: Yeah.

John: I love a pilot.

Craig: Great! Awesome! Can we read it?

Matt: Sure.

Craig: Awesome.

John: So the guy who is playing Stuart is going to track you down later on. He’s going to give you a magic email address that you’ll email to and…

Matt: Awesome.

John: We’ll talk about it.

Matt: Thanks guys.

Craig: You just got Oprahed! Awesome.

John: All right. Thank you so much.

Craig: I’m glad that worked out.

John: I was terrified that was not going to work out. Yeah.

Craig: Some guy is going to be like, “Nah! It’s never me. I’m not looking. I won’t look under my seat.”

John: No. No. No.

— I’m really not just checking Twitter. This is where all my notes are here.

It’s time to get onto the real meat of our show. And our first guest, and when I say first guest she really is our first guest. She was our first guest at our live show —

Craig: She was.

John: — in Austin, Texas. This is the writer of Devil Wears Prada, 27 Dresses, the upcoming Cinderella. She is a friend of the show, a fan of the show. She’s kind of…

Craig: She’s our Joan Rivers.

John: She’s our Joan Rivers. This is Aline Brosh McKenna. Come on up.

Craig: Come on, Aline. Steps. You get yellow microphone.

John: Ooh!

Aline Brosh McKenna: You don’t have your wine.

Craig: Oh god.

Aline: Yeah.

John: We talked about this before we started, because the ideal amount of wine to have before recording a podcast is…

Craig: Between one and two glasses.

Aline: Craig said between one and two glasses. So this is the half.

Craig: Oh, that’s your, you’re onto your half

Aline: That’s my half. I’m on my half. I did it.

Craig: I did a full. I did one. That’s technically.

Aline: You did? Okay.

John: I did a little less than one. It’s a lot, so…

Aline: So I’m going to be way more entertaining.

John: Yeah.

Aline: Than both of you.

John: Let’s get to our first topic which is…

Aline: Yeah.

John: Craig suggested this topic which is what is called Screenwriter-Plus. So what is a Screenwriter-Plus? What are you talking about here?

Craig: Well, I’ve been thinking about this lately because as we talk to people about the way our business is changing it occurred to me that there’s been this kind of huge change and I’m not sure anyone is really specifically talking about it in nature and that is what I call screenwriter, the job of Screenwriter-Plus.

When I started in the business, and we all pretty much started at the same time, it was fairly common for feature film writers to write a screenplay and then turn it into the studio and the studio and the producer would talk to you about your screenplay and then one day they’d say, “Okay, we’re interested in making this. We’re going to go find a director and a movie star.” And then they found those people and those people would talk to you maybe briefly or not. Maybe they would have somebody else come in and do a little thing or not. And then they go make the movie.

And you would show up at the premiere. That was kind of a routine sort of thing, not always, but often. It is so different now and there is this new position, there is just like a new way of thinking about a screenwriter and that is a screenwriter who — and forget titles — don’t worry about producer, producer-director, screenwriter. Just screenwriter. A screenwriter who writes a screenplay works with the studio and the producer, works with the director, works with the actors, is there during prep, is there during shooting, is there during editing, is in meetings talking about marketing, essentially as involved as the director is and maybe even more so because they pre-date the director often.

And so I wanted to talk a little bit about what you guys think about, is that real? Is that something that’s definitely happening and if it is, is it something that you need to be doing as a screenwriter and if so how do you get into that sort of thing, particularly if you’re trying to break into the business?

Aline: Well, I think partly the reason that’s happened is because of television and because there is such an ascendancy of television, so people are used to writer-producers. So they’re used to writers performing those functions. And I also think it’s because there are just fewer jobs, they’re less likely to bring in multiple writers on movies now. They kind of want to get their money’s worth and towards the end your steps towards the end you’re getting paid less money and they’re like, “Oh, we have this guy and he’s around. We’ve already paid for him and he’ll do this and maybe he’ll come look at this and look at some footage and …”

So, I’ve definitely notice that. And also as we were talking about earlier, there are a lot more writers who have become producers, who really have become officially producers and produce their own stuff and produce other people’s stuff. So I’ve definitely noticed that, but I think it’s any time you’re in a position to really protect your own work and to have input, it’s a great thing whether you get the title or not.

John: When you said showrunners I immediately was thinking about the guys who are doing these jobs right now and Damon Lindelof comes in on a movie, he was a showrunner, he comes in like Kurtzman/Orci, they come from that TV background where the writer is responsible for the script but also for this is the whole package, this is the everything, this is the marketing, this is the running of the show. Simon Kinberg, who you worked with, is the same kind of guy who does just features but very much is that guy. You think of him as much as being the guy who sort of delivers the movie as much as the guy who is putting the words on the page.

Craig: Yeah. And there are guys like Chris McQuarrie who have really done almost only features but they do this kind of thing. There has also been an interesting change in the way writers and directors work with each other because there was a kind of a weird antipathy between the two camps when I first started in movies. It was, I mean, sometimes you had directors that were really imperious, sometimes you had directors that were really cool but they almost felt like it was part of their job to exclude the writer. It was like their peer group essentially pressured them to sort of say, “Well, if you have a writer on the set you’re a loser, you’re not a real director” That seems to have changed almost to the point of being obliterated and gone the other way where they want you there, which is great I think.

John: A writer can be the director’s best ally, because the writer is there remembering what the intention was behind things and can be someone to back you up. So if you have a great relationship with the director that’s an incredibly useful thing.

I was thinking back through sort of my own movies and there have been movies which I’ve been in that function, sort of that writer plus. My very first movie Go, I was there before we hired Doug, I was there for every frame shot in second unit, I was in the editing room the whole time through; that was very much that function.

And Charlie’s Angels was that, too. I was there before McG was there and I sort of came back in. And even though a zillion other writers worked on that movie I was the guy who sort of captured the vision of things around because I had a relationship with Drew to sort of steer through.

But the Tim Burton movies, not at all. The Tim Burton movies I’ve been the writer and I show up to give them the script and help in pre-production but I’m not there…

Craig: Well, that’s interesting because that’s almost a generational thing because that Tim Burton does sort of — he became powerful in the 90s when that was still going on but, you know, like so I worked with Todd Phillips. He’s not like that at all. Seth Gordon is not like that at all. Marc Forster is not like that at all. So it just…

Aline: I mean, it’s always been confusing to me because I don’t understand why everyone isn’t clamoring for a writer on the set. I always feel like don’t you want the guy who’s just going to sit in his trailer and then things happen, you’re on location or something is not working out with an actor, you have a costume change, whatever, don’t you want to be able to run to that guy and have them fix it and change it? Because there are situations where the director who has so much to do is trying to figure out how to figure out a new piece of dialogue to cover something. And I think it’s strange that it’s not the other way — that they’re not begging us to be on set.

Craig: Well, I feel like they are now in a weird way. I never understood it. A lot of screenwriters would sit around and talk about this. I remember Phil Robinson said once. He said something to me and I was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s a great point.” Like, okay, we can grouch about how we’re not there but I guess the director, they have their thing, whatever. He’s like, “There is a standby painter, there’s a guy who literally just stands there and if something has to be painted…”

Aline: In case there needs some painting. Yeah.

Craig: In case something needs to be painted. But there is not somebody to be there in case a line needs to be written? It’s kind of crazy. And it never made sense and I kept waiting around for somebody to make sense of it for me and it seemed like instead the business went, “Oh, yeah, oh, no, it doesn’t actually make sense.”

John: But we talked about sort of who the directors are and some of the generational shift that they may be more inclusive of the writer and I think to J.J. Abrams who is having those guys around all the time because he came up in the television world.

Aline: Well, he came up in both. I mean, I would say that the guys who do that come out of two things. One is TV and the other one is production rewrites. So the production rewrite guys, which is Simon, and J.J. was that guy too, and McQuarrie, you know, the kind of high end guys, they’re accustomed to being on a set, solving problems, really being there in the same way as a TV writer-producer. So those guys are really accustomed to solving problems in a production situation.

Not all writers know how to do that, really, and it’s something that I know you’ve talked about and worked on, you have to kind of be there and get that experience and if you’ve been in television or you’ve done production rewrites you’ve been on production, some of the other — if you — before you’ve done that — we’ve had this conversation before where writers don’t always know how to comport themselves.

Craig: Right.

Aline: And then there is this other kind of fascinating thing that I always think about which is there is this tremendous blind date that happens in the middle of your movie getting made which is you write a script and then it goes out to directors and it’s always like, “Well, I hope this goes okay.” Like you bring in a guy, you have a meeting, they say something. It’s like, “It sounds good. I don’t know. It seems okay.”

John: But it’s not even really a blind date though; it’s really an arranged marriage. Like, “This is good, this is going to work out. Right? This is going to work.”

Aline: Right. That’s true. A blind date implies choice.

John: Yeah.

Aline: Yeah.

Craig: You’re not going to throw acid on my face, right?

John: [laughs]

Craig: Something stupid like that.

Aline: Yeah. But it is this incredible thing where like it’s not just creatively what they want but it’s also how they like to work and do they want writers around? Is that something that they want? Every guy is different, guy or gal.

Craig: Well, that’s true. And I think also that if you’re writing comedy you will likely end up in a situation where you get some of that experience because there is a certain immediacy with comedy and a lot of comedy writers end up on set trying to make things work if things are going a little sideways.

But I guess that brings up the question for all these guys. Okay, you’re starting out and the old narrative is, write a screenplay and then someone gets attached and someone gets attached and then it goes into the black box and a movie comes out. But that’s probably not going to really — that’s not necessarily what you want to aspire to anymore. What you want to aspire to is be part of the filmmaking process. To that end, it doesn’t make sense to say to budding screenwriters and aspiring screenwriters, “Don’t be — don’t settle just for I’m writing a great script. Learn how movies are made because if you don’t you’ll never know the other half of the job.” It’s like you’re a plumber that works on stuff until they turn the water on, but…

Aline: Well, we’ve seen that a lot of times. We know people who just — they just don’t know what to do when they get on the set. They don’t know how to behave, they don’t know where to get the food, they don’t know where to sit, they don’t know how to act… And the other thing is, younger —

Craig: Food is…

Aline: — Yeah. It’s important to know where it is and not to put your hand in the cereal box.

John: No. Dump out.

Aline: Yeah. So…

Craig: That happens?

Aline: Oh, I’ve seen that.

John: Yeah.

Aline: But the other thing is younger people have access to production in a way that we did not.

Craig: Exactly.

Aline: I mean, those guys are all making movies. Everybody has made a movie; everybody is making a movie, everybody’s shooting a video. I mean, I’m working with a young woman now who shoots and produces and directs and does her own shorts; and so they have a lot more experience with production then I think we did when we were coming up and that’s great. You really have to understand how it’s made and also how to contribute, how to really make a contribution in a positive way to being part of the crew.

John: The general advice I would say for the aspiring writers who wonder sort of, “How do I become the Screenwriter Plus?” First you have to be a screenwriter, you have to be able to write generally to start, but you also have to really think of yourself as a filmmaker and so your function of filmmaking is to create that initial screenplay but to also be able to change and roll with it as things happen and so a lot of times the problem-solving you’re doing on the set isn’t because of a difficult actor, although a lot of times it’s the difficult actor. It’s because you lost a location or like suddenly we can’t make this thing work. So if we have this location versus this location, how do we make this scene work in this space?

Aline: I think it’s helpful to say, “It’s perfect. Just do it.”

John: Yeah. Don’t change the line.

Aline: I’m kidding.

Craig: Sometimes that actually works.

John: Sometimes you do. Sometimes that is the right answer but sometimes you need to be able to explain back and so I think I often credit you with saying this but I think you may not have been the first person that…

Craig: He is wrongly crediting you for a thing.

Aline: What did I say was brilliant?

John: The screenwriter is the only person who’s already seen the movie.

Aline: I don’t think I said that but I’ll pretend I did.

John: Okay, the useful thing to remember as a screenwriter is that you as a screenwriter have already seen the movie and the director and everybody else has not seen the movie because they didn’t write it, and they didn’t have that in their head and so sometimes they’ll make a choice that is not the right choice because they’re just still not quite getting the movie that’s in your head. And so if you could be there to help explain that in a very tactful way about what the intention was…

Aline: And also just you have custody of the story. It’s like Craig said, you know, there is all these like department heads and they have custody of certain parts of it and you have custody of the story.

I once had a director call me and he said, “I’m standing here on the set and there is a character in the scene. I don’t think he’s supposed to be here…”

John: [laughs]

Aline: “I think he’s supposed to have already gone home but I’m really tired.”

John: [laughs]

Aline: “And I can’t remember if this guy is supposed to be here or not.”

And I was like, “No. He’s drunk. He was walked home before that scene.”

He was like, “Thank you.” Just to have somebody around who actually knows, that’s all you have thought of.

John: It’s a call sheet mistake. Like his little number got put on the call sheet.

Aline: Right. But that’s why when I feel like a confident filmmaker is happy to have a writer there in charge of the story department to ask questions, but part of that is I think we need to acclimate directors and producers that we are going to behave in a helpful productive manner.

Craig: That’s right. And then ultimately the director is responsible for what’s going on to the film or the flash drive and because they’re responsible they have to have authority. You can’t have responsibility without authority. If you can figure out how to have a respectful relationship with that person and acknowledge that they have authority and accountability for what they’re doing you’ll be the greatest help to them.

One exercise that I would suggest is if you have some material, little something short that you want to shoot yourself, even if it’s just with your phone and you have somebody that you know who is also trying this, swap and see what it’s like to interpret somebody else’s work, and watch how many choices you make and watch how off you can be from what they thought it was supposed to be. Not necessarily bad, right, but start to understand what it’s like to be in those shoes.

And the more you can understand the nature of production, the psychological nature of production and also the procedural nature of production the more useful you will be to it and the more useful you’re to it the better chance you have to actually protect what matters.

Aline: Yeah. I also want to say those guys like J.J. and Alex, Bob and Simon, those guys are really as they produce stuff, even producing stuff that they didn’t write, they’re just invaluable on set because they’ve done the other job, too. So they understand how to communicate with writers. I mean, that’s why I’ve really enjoyed working with those guys who are producers but were writers first because I feel like they speak writer and I have such a good shorthand with them and they understand how to solve problems in a way that I understand. So I really love that. I think those guys are uniquely equipped to deal with the writing part of it is as producers.

John: Well, let’s get to next topic which is talking about the writing itself. And to join us on this topic I want to invite a gentleman who was one of my first assistants. He is a frequent suggester of material for our podcasts. He is the one who suggested 15 is the new 30 and which was a whole topic that we talked about. He’s also made some movies. He wrote and directed this movie called Dodgeball, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. He has this movie called We’re the Millers which comes out really soon. So, maybe you should go see that movie.

Craig: Couple of weeks.

John: Couple of weeks. August 7th I believe. So maybe we can hype that. This is Rawson Marshall Thurber. Rawson get up here.

Craig: Rawson! There he is. And Rawson for those of you who don’t know is the best-looking male screenwriter.

Aline: Yeah. There is a competition ongoing. There’s a calendar…

Craig: Well, we had a little chit-chat about it. There is a calendar. One question about the calendar, that we didn’t know, and you guys just mull this over, in sexy calendars is it supposed to get sexier as you go through the year? Is December better?

Aline: Well, there is this thing where there are lot of screenwriters who were…

[Audience member: Yes!]

Craig: Yes. She says yes.

Aline: Are there? Is it really…?

Craig: She says December is the hot one.

Aline: Is December hotter, is better than January? I don’t think so. But a lot of the good-looking screenwriters were actors.

Craig: Right, but he’s not.

Aline: And that disqualifies them. So that rockets Rawson right up there.

Craig: Right.

Rawson Marshall Thurber: Thank you. That’s so kind.

Craig: We don’t count, like, so he’s made a movie with Jennifer Aniston, she’s married to Justin Theroux. He’s a screenwriter…

Aline: Does not count.

John: Does not count.

Craig: But he’s an actor. Doesn’t count. That’s it. It’s not fair to us to include actors.

John: We have to be judged against your own cohort.

Craig: Right. And against his own cohort…

John: Also pretty good. What’s weird is that I think of Rawson as like this young child who came in to interview for an assistant job and you were working at the William Morris mailroom. You came in dressed in like a suit that did not fit you very well.

Rawson: No.

John: This is at Dick Wolf’s company and like you were on like a lunch break from William Morris and you kept being so insistent about like, “What my salary is going to be…?”

Rawson: Yeah. Yeah.

John: I think your dad had sort of drilled that into you, too, didn’t he?

Rawson: And gave me the suit. It was both of those things.

Craig: “Son, two bits of advice: wear my lucky suit and demand a salary over and over.”

Rawson: Yeah. I think I was just being paid so little at William Morris that I was like, “Look, if I’m going to leave I just, I want be able to it eat…”

John: Like that was it.

Rawson: It was really hunger. The hunger and shame. I think both of those things. The beats of a screenwriter.

John: There is no hunger but there is certainly some shame in the article that we’re going to be talking about from Slate. This is an article by Peter Suderman in which he argues that — I’m kind of reading of my phone here because that’s how I can read things — he argues that the reason movies feel formulaic these days is because there is a formula, a template, described by Blake Snyder in his 2005 book, Save the Cat.

This is a quote of what he said, “When Snyder published his book in 2005, it was as if an explosion ripped through Hollywood. The book offered something previous screenplay guru tomes didn’t. Instead of a broad overview of how a screen story fits together, his book broke down the three-act structure into a detailed beat sheet: 15 key story ‘beats’ — pivotal events that have to happen – and gave each of those beats a name and a screenplay page number. Given that each page of a screenplay is expected to equal a minute of film, this makes Snyder’s guide essentially a minute-to-minute movie formula.”

So before we start our discussion I want a show of hands of this audience, how many people have read Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat? It was a lot, I mean, this is common for aspiring screenwriters. Did any of you read it?

Craig: No!

Rawson: Never read it.

Aline: The explosion that ripped through Hollywood, I missed it when I was online shopping and eating pizza. I missed it.

Craig: Yeah. “Oh, did you hear there was an explosion that ripped through Hollywood the other day? Yeah, apparently now it’s a minute by minute break down.”

Aline: I totally missed it. I totally missed it.

John: Yeah. And so this article was on Slate. And a general rule I do follow is I never read the comments on articles but I figured like well, people are going to be responding. I’m curious how they’re going to be responding to this. And so the very first comment on this was from a guy name Shagbark and this is what Shagbark says. He says, “Also, other screenwriters including John August and Thomas Lennon, now quote Snyder’s numbers re. which page of the script each thing should happen on, without mentioning Snyder, as if they were universal truths instead of made-up numbers.”

Okay, first of all, fuck you Shagbark. To throw me in with this article saying like, “Oh John August got that thing from Blake Snyder…”

Aline: Anybody who’s a careful listener of this podcast knows that John August, who is the nicest person in the world, is secretly very angry.

John: Yeah.

Craig: It’s not really a secret. I’m famous for letting it out.

John: Yeah.

Aline: There is so much niceness over it that when it comes out, it’s a delight.

Craig: By the way, I’m Shagbark. You know that.

John: Oh yeah. You totally are Shagbark. Craig has been trolling me for the whole hundred episodes. So to say like, “Oh, John August said and took it from Blake Snyder.” I did not take it from Blake Snyder, I took it from like the fact that certain things tend to kind of happen at certain places.

Craig: Wait, wait are you saying maybe Blake Snyder took from something? Like the history of movies?

John: Maybe. Perhaps. Perhaps.

Craig: Or the history of storytelling, that either started 3000 years ago or in 2005?

John: I want to let our guests speak. [laughs]

Rawson: Thanks!

John: This is Rawson Thurber. So you’ve not read Blake Snyder’s book?

Rawson: I’ve not. No.

John: Are familiar with the book? Have you heard of this book?

Rawson: Only by title, until you sent me the article and I read the article, of course, and all the supplementary material, but I have not read the book.

John: Okay. And so what is your impression? Do you think there is a formula? Question: Are movies more formulaic than they have been or than they should be, is question A and if so, is there a formula?

Rawson: Well, I guess, I mean, I would say, are movies formulaic? I mean, yes and no. There are certain moves that need to happen in a three-act structure but, I mean, I feel like the article that — is it Peter, is that right? — that he wrote, I thought it was largely horse shit, frankly.

I think that it’s easy to kind of put all those touchstones and those beats retroactively back in and say like, “Look at Olympus Has Fallen, look at The Lone Ranger, look at all these things.” It’s really easy to do that and whether that’s right or wrong is one part of the article. The other piece that I thought was absolutely not true in my experience is that that is something that professionals in Hollywood are actively doing, which is fallacy and, I mean, I guess it makes a good article but it makes no sense. I’ve never ever in a meeting had anybody talk to me about any of these terms in any way like that.

Craig: Ever.

Rawson: Ever. Not even close.

Craig: Ever. Where do they make this? Is there some building where these people get together and say, “Let’s all agree that we don’t know shit and now let’s start assigning each other topics?”

John: Yes. It’s the new journalism. So really it’s a question of like whether it’s — if it’s journalism then you would actually interview a screenwriter to see if there was any basis of reality but it’s essentially an opinion piece based on sort of like one idea which is like a blog post…

Aline: Here is the thing. Here is the thing. There are tropes. There are tropes and there are things that reappear and there are people, you know, there are modes of storytelling that become fashionable and people adopt it but the idea that, I mean, when I looked at that I thought, I went to the 15 beats and I thought, “Oh maybe this will be helpful.”

Rawson: Yeah. I did the same thing.

Aline: Yeah. I was like, “Oh, maybe there is something good in here.” And you go and it’s like, it’s the same crap that everybody always says. And my feeling about those things is buy one book, buy Adventures in Screenwriting, buy Syd Field, buy this, buy one, take one class. There are sort of some basic principles and — look at Craig, he looks so horrified. There are some basic principles of storytelling that are good to sort of have run past you but the idea that anyone has — if it worked, people would do it.

Rawson: Of course.

Aline: If you could slavishly follow those things and they would work, they don’t. But I don’t think his contention that people are following it more and then it works, particularly he said it works better for male characters and then he said J.J’s whole canon is that and I really take exception to that because J.J. did Felicity and Alias and it has really nothing to do with that. No one consciously retrofits it. There are certain tropes of storytelling in the culture that will filter in; no one has ever consciously…

Craig: Yeah, there always have been. Narrative has, I mean, read Poetics. Aristotle talks about this stuff in Poetics. We might as well say that Poetics exploded through Hollywood in minus-2005, right.

Aline: “Oh, this protagonist.”

Craig: Right and apparently there needs to be a catharsis. Yes.

Aline: Whatever.

Craig: Yes. Storytelling — oh, we have a spider hanging out!

Sorry, I was distracted for a second.

Storytelling has a purpose and anything that has a purpose therefore will have a form to fit its function. This isn’t new and movies will vacillate in and around various different kinds of form to match their function, but I just want to be really clear for both the writer of this nonsense and anybody else that might have been susceptible to it. Nobody professionally in Hollywood, to echo what Rawson said, nobody talks about this book. I’ve never, no one has ever mentioned it to me and I mean anywhere, on any level, at any place. That’s how thorough that is. And anything inside of it that may be of some use to you is only of use to you in that regard. That it’s of use to you however it may do, but don’t think…

Aline: Good God, don’t mention it in a meeting.

Craig: Yeah. Oh, please because by the way that is literally like you might as well just stamp “rookie” on your head like, “Well, I read in Save the Cat…”

Rawson: I had one experience with Save the Cat, actually. There was an actor on a movie that I was directing who kept coming up to me, like about a week in he would come up and have these very strange ideas and questions about what we’re doing and where it was going. And I didn’t, you know, I would answer them and walk away sort of scratching my head. I didn’t quite understand like where this is all coming from. And he had an assistant named Jim, no Jimmy, and he would come up to me, the actor would come up to me and say, “You know, Jim was talking to me about” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and it all sounded super suspicious to me and I’m like, “Okay, okay.”

And then one day at wrap, they were leaving and I said goodbye to the actor and Jim was driving home and I saw in the backseat of Jim’s Prius was Save the Cat. And I went — Oh, you’re fucking kidding me! Of course! So that’s my only experience with Save the Cat which…

Craig: It’s deeply frustrating.

John: And how was Nick Nolte other than that?

Rawson: [laughs] No. It wasn’t Nick.

Craig: I just want to say also, just one thing that makes me nuts about this.

Aline: Umbrage, umbrage, umbrage.

Craig: It’s happening.

John: You know we actually seeded the article in Slate this week specifically so that it would …

Craig: The sad thing is like I know that and it’s still working. The purpose of these articles really if you think about it is to go, “These screenwriters, these filmmakers are just, they’re just machinists. They’re building IKEA furniture, you guys. There’s nothing special about what they do.” It’s all like, “Let’s demystify their nonsense.”

You know, I’m not going to say that we’re all amazing Mozarts, we’re not. But go ahead, Peter whatever, pick up that book and you go just as a goof, as a goof, follow it and write a screenplay. I’d love to read it and see just how amazing this explosive affair is.

Aline: Well, when you do pick them up, like when you do pick up those books or when you look at that I always find it so inscrutable and difficult. It’s like, “Here the hero either transcends or does not transcend the gate which he does or does not pass at which point he does triumph or does not triumph with a sidekick or without one.” And I’m always like…

Craig: There. Done. Problem solved.

Rawson: Writes itself.

Craig: It writes itself.

Aline: I wish it gave me something to use. I always find it like, “Has he crossed the threshold of the mighty river?” I don’t know. She’s got a job at a magazine. I don’t know. Is that the mighty river? It might be. I’m not sure.

John: My frustration with it is really the false causation, it’s the sense that, “Here I’ve noticed a pattern and therefore because I’ve noticed a pattern everything — I’m magical.” So it’s like saying like, “Many pop songs have a structure of one, six, four, five and like therefore every pop song after that point is following my structure that I identified.” No, it’s not. That’s just how songs work.

Aline: That’s analysis.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yeah. It’s the difference between reading and writing.

John: And so the reason why I’m willing to say three-acts for a movie is because like movies have beginnings, middles and ends. They just do. The projector turns on at a certain point, it turns off at a certain point. Like there are phases of a movie and it’s useful to be able to talk about those phases with terminology, but everything else is just inventions.

There was one thing I — because my function in the podcast is to play devil’s advocate — there is one thing I will say devil’s advocate. He calls out the, which is kind of just thrown in, but he calls out the villain who gets himself caught deliberately.

Guys, we need to stop doing that. We just need to stop doing that. It’s become the air duct.

Aline: And he’s in a glass room.

John: Yes. Right. Exactly. So, like, you know, we’ve caught the bad guy but no, no he meant to be caught. No, uh-uh. Stop. I want a ten-year moratorium on that.

Craig: It was cool when Heath Ledger did it.

John: Yeah. It was, it was great, remember when he did that?

Craig: I do remember that. That was awesome.

Aline: But that’s what I was talking about like there are these tropes that kind of filter through where there was a whole thing for a while when there were cop movies where it was like they were partners but they were shadow images, mirror images of the same person and their lives are really similar but wasn’t. That was a huge thing and culminated in Face/Off. There are kind of vogues in storytelling.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, that’s normal. That book won’t even help you chase. And you know my whole thing is: never chase. You write what you write, I’ve said this a hundred times. The only thing interesting about you is what’s specific to you. That’s it. If you’re writing something, if you’re just chasing the market, there are 50 people ahead of you in line who just better writers because they’ve been it longer. So don’t that, that’s crazy. But this book won’t even help you do that. It’s useless.

John: Useless

Craig: Useless!

Rawson: I think what Aline is saying is right is that there are tropes at work and you’re saying there is always a beginning, middle and end and one of the ones in the list that made a lot of sense to me is the sort of Dark Night of the Soul at the end of the second act, right, where everything looks like it’s lost.

John: The worst of the worst.

Rawson: That’s right. So when John and I, we both went to USC and we had, I think, the same instructor and she talked a lot about the three-act structure and how it works typically and the big moves in it. And that’s been incredibly helpful to me in my career. And so I don’t think you shouldn’t pay attention to these things but it doesn’t mean that they’re gospel and they have to be followed lockstep. But I do think there is some value there but if you pin your hopes to it you’ll be working at Ralphs.

John: I was watching a movie on the plane…

Rawson: — Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

John: Good to be working at Ralphs.

Craig: Would have been great if like four people just stood up, “Fuck you. It’s a decent living.”

John: I will say there was a movie I watched on the plane as I was flying back from Europe this week and it was really well executed, like the performances were really great but like the movie just didn’t quite hold up right. And I did look at it and say like, “You know what, the problem here is that it’s kind of not doing the things that it needs to do. Like your hero, your protagonist, she’s just not actually changing that much; you’re not making things difficult enough for her. It’s never reaching a real crisis.”

And so those are the kind of things that this book would point out. And so if reading this book makes you think about story in that way that’s useful. But also a smart person reading your scripts who knows about movies would also say the same thing.

Craig: Yes. Agreed.

John: Let us go to One Cool Thing which has been a staple of the show I think since the beginning. I think we started…

Craig: For you it’s been a staple. For me it’s just a nightmare.

John: Yeah. Every once in a while Craig will remember and sometimes they’re good. But, Aline would you kick us off with a One Cool Thing?

Aline: I will. I found a thing that had been I believe on PBS and then I found it on iTunes and I read about it. I didn’t watch it when it was on PBS and I just watched it recently. It’s three one-hour episodes, it’s a documentary, and I gobbled it up and each episode seemed like five minutes to me and I was in tears through most of it. And it has a very bad title. It’s called Making: The Women who Made America, or Who Make America.

It’s not a good title but it’s called Making and it’s the documentary about the women’s movement and it is so well done. And the interviews are so good and it’s so well balanced. And they talked to Phyllis Schlafly and they talked to Gloria Steinem and it’s incredibly well done and if you have interest in that subject matter it just whizzes by and I loved it.

John: Cool. Rawson Thurber.

Rawson: Yeah. This is, you might not like this one, but my One Cool Thing is actually this podcast which I love dearly.

Aline: Oh my god. Oh, he’s not your boss anymore! You don’t have to suck up anymore.

Rawson: I know. I know. But sincerely, it’s the truth. Like what you guys do every week for the screenwriting community is amazing. I listen to it all the time; I know a lot of friends do. And it’s really, really cool.

Craig: Thank you.

Aline: Also you guys are really good-looking.

John: We’re built for audio podcasts.

Craig: Yeah. Faces for radio.

John: My One Cool Thing: So my go-to pen — I’m not actually like a person who like tries to have, like obsess about sort of things like, you know, light coming through a window at certain thing, but I hate a terrible pen. And so I like a good, cheap pen that I don’t care if I lose. So my go-to, cheap pen has been the Pilot G2.

[The crowd cheers]

Aline: Wow!

John: It’s a good pen.

Craig: Are you serious?

John: Yeah.

Rawson: Holy shit.

Craig: Oh my god.

Rawson: That was amazing.

Craig: I also…

John: Spontaneous love for the Pilot G2. It’s a really solid good pen and I love that pen. So wherever Stuart will like hand me a pen that’s not that I’m like, “Stuart, no.”

Rawson: Is it .05 or .07?

John: I like the .05 or the .07. Really the .05 is fine…

Rawson: That’s how I roll, too. The .05. I think I might have gotten that from you, the G2 .05.

John: It’s good. Well, this week…

Craig: They came out with the G3?

John: No. But Pilot has a new pen and it’s actually kind of an amazing pen. So it’s the Pilot Frixion.

Aline: It’s not a vibrator?

John: It’s not. Doesn’t it sound like it could be?

Craig: Aline has lost interest.

John: Although it has, Aline, it has a rubber component. So, here is the thing about the Pilot Frixion.

Aline: The Pilot Frottage.

John: Up until now you can only get them in Japan. You can now get them in the US on Amazon.

Craig: Or vibrating.

John: Yeah. You can get it on Amazon. They’re fairly cheap. If you lose one you’re not going to feel sad about it. They are erasable and like you would think like well an erasable pen would suck. All erasable pens have always sucked, right?

Craig: Yeah, like the kind in fourth grade.

John: Yeah.

Rawson: They were terrible.

Craig: Paper Mate or whatever.

Rawson: They were terrible.

John: They were terrible. So the way this pen works is it writes just like a normal gel pen and it’s not quite as awesome as the G2 but it’s really solid and good. It’s a good solid pen and it can erase. And so when you erase it, it’s actually, the little rubber tip — I know this sounds really pornographic — the rubber tip creates heat and the heat actually makes it go invisible.

Aline: This is like a John August bit. This is like somebody wrote a John August bit.

Craig: I could not write that perfect. That was really — that was good.

Aline: It heats up, it gets a little bigger.

John: It gets a little bigger. And so my daughter has become obsessed with it, too, now because…

Rawson: Oh Jesus. Good night folks. Good night.

John: Here is the thing, because it can erase and if you’re a kid you make mistakes and you erase. Although, if you stick it in the freezer the hidden text comes back!

Craig: I mean, you’re just, you’re doing this on purpose now. “Although, if you put it up your ass…”

John: Yeah.

Aline: “And on the surface of the moon it’s amazing.”

John: Yeah. It’s kind of great!

Craig: Frixion.

John: You got something better than that, Craig Mazin?

Craig: I have something so different than that.

Aline: I hope you have a vibrator.

Craig: I have Two Cool Things.

John: Oh, yeah, he’s breaking the rules again.

Craig: Breaking the rules again, as always. So I don’t if you guys, on one of the podcasts we talked about our origin stories, like how we got started in the business because people often ask that question.

So tonight there are two people here, my first job, they gave me my first job in Los Angeles. It was 1992. I had just turned 21. Well, technically, my first job was temping at William Morris, typing their employee manual. And because some secretary had typed it, literally on a typewriter in the ’50s, and so I put it into Word Perfect.

But the next job I got was at this little ad agency and these two took a chance on this kid and, you know, I say all the time like luck — people overemphasize luck, chance favors the prepared and all that. And that’s true. But this was legitimately lucky that these were the people I met instead of total assholes because you there’s a lot of those, too.

And you can’t really replace what it means to be supported and valued by good human beings. So Nancy Fletcher and Julia Wayne could you please stand up?

Aline: Wow!

Craig: 21 years later. And also they would buy me lunch a lot which was really nice because I had no money. It’s great. So, you are my two. Oh, and also Julia and I, I’m not going to say what it was but she did something in front of me that is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen, ever. Nothing will ever be funnier. Sometimes when I’m sad I think about it and I still laugh again. So thank you for that.

John: Aw. I have a couple of special thank yous, too. Stuart Friedel, or the man playing Stuart Friedel, please stand up. This is the man who edits our podcasts and makes us sound coherent when we’re drunk. I also need to thank Ryan Nelson who I think is in the very back of the room.

Craig: Ryan!

John: Ryan Nelson. Oh Ryan is up here now. He is the actual Ryan Nelson who designs all our apps. Along with Nima Yousefi who is also up here.

Craig: Nima!

John: Where’s Nima? Nima, the magical elf, who is just this week a full-time employee at Quote-Unquote Films. So hooray!

I need to thank everyone here for coming to this thing. We really, really wondered whether anyone would show up.

Aline: Awesome. So awesome.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And you did and that was so cool and it really means a lot. I’ll get sort of verklempt and weepy. But since that won’t happen, because I won’t let myself get verklempt…

Craig: I’m not going to cry. I’m not going to cry.

John: I’m not going to cry. I’m not going to cry. I’m just going to thank you and we’re going to applaud and then we’re going to do some questions. So hooray!

Craig: Woo!

LINKS:

• The Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting
• Aline Brosh McKenna on IMDb, and her first and second appearances on Scriptnotes
• Rawson Thurber on IMDb
• Go see We’re the Millers on August 7th!
• Slate’s article on Save the Cat! (and Stuart’s review of the series)
• Makers: Women Who Make America on PBS
• Scriptnotes: A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters
• The classic Pilot G2 and the brand new erasable Pilot Frixion on Amazon
• Stuart, Ryan and Nima
• Outro by Scriptnotes listener Mike Timmerman

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/screenwriting-gurus-and-so-called-experts).

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

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

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

Craig, a weird thing happened this last week. I thought I would share this anecdote, this story about a thing that happened this past week. It’s dinner time and we’re sitting down to eat some good dinner and we hear a helicopter overhead, which is not that unusual in Los Angeles. We have a lot of helicopters in Los Angeles because we have a lot of news copters, we have police helicopters. It’s pretty common to hear some helicopters.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But then I noticed this helicopter is persisting. It’s like, “Oh, well that’s kind of unusual.” While this is my most favorite time of year because of all the great stuff that happens this time of year, I don’t like that it gets dark so early, so it’s quite dark out. I notice that the helicopter’s light is going on. So they’re looking for something or someone in this area, so it’s a police helicopter, not a news helicopter.

We go out front and there’s two police cars out in front of our house. Well that’s not great news. If you’re a single person, you have the option of freaking out because you can just freak out that there’s a police helicopters overhead and there’s police cars out front. But when you have a young child, you’ve given up the right to freak out about things.

**Craig:** Yeah, because they’re going to mirror your anxiety.

**John:** Yeah. You have to just completely play it off like, “Oh, hey, how neat. There’s those policemen. Aren’t policemen great? Let’s talk about how wonderful policemen are while we’re locking the windows and locking the doors. Oh, you know what, I think I’m going to turn on the alarm now instead of late at night. Hey, that’s great. By the way, did we shut the gate? Yeah, everything seems to be pretty good.”

We’re trying to watch the police officers out front to see what’s going on and then I notice the helicopter overhead is circling around. The light just keeps going over the back of our house. They’re looking for something right here. This isn’t one of those things where they’re following somebody down the street. Literally something is happening right next to our house. It’s probably the house that’s under construction next door because houses that are under construction tend to invite problems because no one’s actually living there.

All this time I’m trying to keep really calm and not freak out the kid. Then I saw something that was actually kind of amazing. Police helicopters, the light is incredibly bright. It’s sort of like a second sun in the sky. Because it’s pretty low overhead, it’s casting these really cool shadows across the driveway. The silhouette of the trees is really cool. You see every little branch projected onto the driveway.

But what’s even cooler is helicopters, they have to circle a little bit and so the shadows of the tree branches keep sweeping across the driveway in this really, really cool way. It’s like one of those stop motion Vimeo things where they do those long exposure landscape things where you see all the stars going in circles across the sky.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s like that but it’s happening right in front of you.

**Craig:** It’s Koyaanisqatsi in your front yard.

**John:** It’s basically that word I can’t say in my front yard.

**Craig:** [laughing] Right.

**John:** I bring my daughter over to see it. “Hey, this is really cool.” I can genuinely say this is a very cool moment that is happening despite the fact that there could be murders next door. By the way, I’m completely holding onto this idea. If you see the next movie I direct has helicopters that are projecting branches onto the ground, you’ll know where it came from. This was my Alan Ball plastic-bag-blowing-in-the-wind moment because it was just really, really beautiful.

**Craig:** [laughs] This is the moment you’ll bore thousands and thousands of people with.

**John:** Oh, completely.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** People will be talking about it, reverentially at first and then they’ll just hate the moment.

**Craig:** Then they’ll realize, wait a second, [laughing] it was a plastic bag. That’s great.

Alright, so the helicopter is circling. What happened, murder?

**John:** That’s the thing about all police activity that happens in a city like Los Angeles is you never really know what happens. The next day we find out that it probably was a break-in, somebody trying to steal power tools next door. No one was hurt, nothing bad happened. It’s just one of those things where someone saw that there was a construction site, waited until it was shut down and then broke in to try to steal all the power tools.

**Craig:** You know, I used to live not too far from where you live so we would get the helicopters all the time. In fact, I was probably a mile or two away from where most of the bad things happened, which meant that the helicopter often was right over my house because they’re shining the light at the center point of their circle. I’m on the edge, I’m on the circumference of their circle.

I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, but sometimes they start talking to the people once they find them. Have you heard the helicopter guys talking?

**John:** I have yet to hear the helicopter people talking. That sounds great.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, they’ve got this massive loudspeaker on those helicopters. You just hear them giving very specific instructions. It’s so odd to just be sitting in your house and then you just hear this chopper noise and then, “The people on the roof, move to the ladder. No, the other way,” [laughing] this very casual conversation with the people on the roof.

I live in La Canada now, which is up against the mountains northwest of Pasadena. Our interesting thing was last night there was this amazing windstorm that brutalized Los Angeles. For whatever reason or function of geography, Pasadena and La Canada always get the worst of it. Last night was no exception. We had winds up to 95 miles an hour. My little thing for a movie is, I always like it when mundane things are slightly out of place because it’s more shocking, I think, than, I don’t know, just the sweeping shots of CGI devastation.

I’m driving back from my office — because we lost our power, I had to go to my office to work. I’m driving back on the highway and there’s a large oak tree in the highway just sitting there. Yeah, you don’t see that every day.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was kind of cool.

**John:** When I was in Boy Scouts, there was one time we had a winter campout. It was really windy while we were up in the mountains but we drove back into Boulder and the traffic lights were down. The traffic lights had been knocked down or bent around themselves by this huge windstorm that happened while we were gone. It was very much like coming back into a post-apocalyptic scene.

We got home and there was no power at home. I’d come from a weekend of cooking over a campfire to building a campfire in the fireplace so we could actually have heat.

**Craig:** It doesn’t take much to remind how fragile our little grasp on civilization is.

**John:** It is. One thing I should say in reference to my earlier story about the police helicopter is there’s a danger that in telling that story I’m contributing to the fallacy of misleading vividness, which is that by telling you this story of this police action that happened next door, a listener in Topeka might thing, “Oh my god, I could never move to Los Angeles because it’s so dangerous because I just heard this story of this police thing that happened right next door to this guy whose podcast you’re listening to.”

That would be a mistake because if you actually stop and think about that story, it’s that the police you could say overreacted a bit to sending two police cars and a helicopter to potentially someone stealing power tools next door. It was really a very minor thing that I just had a very big reaction to and it felt very cinematic but it was really not that big of a deal.

**Craig:** That’s right, you don’t know. Maybe it was a murderer next door or maybe it’s just that the Los Angeles Police Department has this enormous arsenal of tools, so they bring the sledgehammer out for everything.

**John:** Yeah. While we were talking I actually looked up — Wolfram|Alpha is a really good place to go if you want to look up crime rates for places. The crime rate for Los Angeles I know had fallen a lot. The crime rate for Los Angeles is actually lower than the national average. It is lower than the California average. It is lower than Pasadena.

**Craig:** I believe that. You’d have to figure out which parts of Pasadena you’re talking about because there are parts of Pasadena that are pretty rough. But in general, one of the strange things about our culture is that — there was an interesting study I read a couple years ago: The violent crime rate in the United States has been dropping precipitously, I think, since the early ’90s and we are now back to levels that we haven’t seen since, I think, the ’50s or early ’60s.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yet at the same time the reportage of violent crime has skyrocketed. While we live in this relatively un-violent period of time, we tend to think we’re living in the most violent period of time.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** But in fact, we don’t.

**John:** No, we don’t.

**Craig:** No, it’s pretty good out there.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Stop complaining.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I thought we might start today by doing some follow-up on previous episodes.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Our last episode was on residuals and there was one question which came up in the comments section which I thought was pretty good. Residuals: do they count towards maintaining your health insurance?

**Craig:** They do not, not for the Writers Guild. They do for the Directors Guild, and I think we mentioned this last time. The Directors Guild automatically lops off, I think, half of the residuals. It may be a little more complicated than that but let’s just say for the sake of argument roughly half. And they steer those residuals into the health fund. Thus, as a result of that, your residuals count as earned income towards qualification for health care.

The Writers Guild does not lop any of your residuals off for health care. The exchange that we make, however, is that our earned residuals do not qualify us towards health care, only writing income.

**John:** Yeah. If you write a movie which is produced and you are earning residuals for it but you don’t continue to write other movies, your health plan will run out.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** You will stop being qualified for health insurance.

**Craig:** Yes, whereas in the Directors Guild — actually I directed a movie and all of my income was within one calendar year, so obviously I qualified for health insurance for the following year, but then I qualified again because the residuals the following year were enough to get me another year.

**John:** A weird loophole that happened for me was I’m not a member of the Directors Guild, but for a year I had Directors Guild health insurance which happened because maybe you remember a couple of years ago, Heroes was a TV show on NBC that was a huge success originally. After the first season of Heroes they decided they were going to do obviously a second season but they were also going to do these origin episodes.

They went to a couple filmmakers to say, “Hey, would you direct these one-off episodes of Heroes Origins that are creating new characters that could be folded into the universe?” A couple of us said yes, and so Kevin Smith was supposed to do an episode. I was supposed to do an episode. And they made a deal for us to do this.

Then the air went out of the Heroes balloon and they decided not to do it, but the money they paid me, for whatever reason, counted towards DGA. I ended up having Directors Guild health insurance for a year.

**Craig:** When you do, what no one tells you is that obviously you qualify for Writers Guild health insurance. Then this other health insurance becomes your secondary insurance.

What they don’t tell you, and you have to kind of figure out yourself is, that secondary insurance works, but every time you get something back from the Writers Guild, you have to then send that form to the Directors’ Guild so that they can process it. It’s the worst. It’s a full-time job. I was actually happy to not have secondary insurance. It was killing me.

**John:** Yeah, it was kind of a mess.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a mess.

**John:** Yeah, we should talk about health insurance sometime. That’d be a good thing to talk about.

**Craig:** The Writers Guild health insurance, like every health insurance system, is absurdly complicated and it’s not their fault. Frankly, the more complicated it is, it’s usually because the better it is.

We have an excellent health care system, but there are a lot of weird little ins and outs and things that people don’t know. You’re right, it would be — I mean, listen: god knows we risk boring everyone to death every time we delve really deeply into this stuff. But, why not?

**John:** I’ve actually had mostly good experiences with the WGA health insurance people. But I had one very bad experience where we were adding my daughter to our health insurance. The woman on the other end of the phone said, “No, I need the adoption papers.”

“Well, you don’t understand, I didn’t adopt my daughter.”

It was like, “No, you have to adopt your daughter.”

**Craig:** Huh?

**John:** It was this bizarre thing where she just couldn’t quite process what our family situation was. I was like, “I really need to talk to your supervisor right now.” It got all resolved.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, the question for you is, does the Writers Guild handle your specific situation relatively better or worse than, say, if you were with Aetna or an even more faceless massive bureaucracy. Because you obviously have a twist.

The other thing is that the same-sex couple rules are changing constantly, it seems to me, at least. They seem to be in flux, whereas, the traditional man/woman/kid situation is in stasis.

**John:** Yeah, I would say, overall, the WGA seems to be handling it as well as any place handles that stuff, so, I’m not particularly worried about it.

Another note follow up question here. We were talking about video games and getting union representation, WGA representation for video game writing. One of the readers wrote in and said, “Nobody in game development gives a rat’s ass about the writer. If anything, we’re viewed as an inconvenience to most game developers, a necessary evil, if you will. I predict you have something to say about that.”

**Craig:** I don’t really care if people in video game companies look down on writers. They can look down on anyone they want. The question is: Are those writers serving a role that makes it such that it’s hard to replace them if they all walk? If the answer is yes, then it doesn’t matter.

Unions aren’t about making people like you. They’re about protecting your job, setting some basic parameters for what you ought to be paid, and how you should be acknowledged for the work you do.

**John:** Yeah. Where would you start with the video game people? Would you try to go after everyone who works at the video game company, or just people who are doing, who are putting words on paper, or on a screen?

**Craig:** Well, this is one area where I tend to veer a little bit off from a lot of the more hard-line organizing folks at the Writers Guild. There is a tendency to want to overreach with these things and suggest that we should represent everybody that is, quote unquote, “contributing to story.”

The problem with that is, producers contribute to story, actors contribute to story, directors certainly contribute to story. Story isn’t the functional aspect when we’re talking about employment contracts.

The functional aspect is literary material. Who is putting their fingers on the keyboard, typing in words and printing them out? That is writing that we can represent, as far as I’m concerned. It’s provable, it creates literary material. Literary material is something you can take a look at and credit and assign authorship to.

I would say, if, let’s say, we were talking about organizing Bethesda, who are the people that are writing stuff down? Those are the writers.

**John:** I want to get on to our main topic today. Now, Craig, a question I get a lot, and sometimes at panels or forums or other things is: What books should I read if I want to become a good screenwriter? Are there any really good manuals or how-to guides for screenwriters?

I never have a good answer, because the short answer is that I don’t have one that I should say you should absolutely read. The longer answer sort of make me sounds like a jerk, because I end up sort of espousing too much opinion about other people who write books about screenwriting.

What do you say when people ask you that?

**Craig:** Well, I mean, look: Obviously, a big difference between you and me is I don’t care about sounding like a jerk. I just do it. I immediately go to answer number two.

I mean, okay, short answer number one. What book should I read? You can read any book you want. None of them will be as useful as reading screenplays and watching movies and thinking about story and then writing the script. That is the only basic instruction set that you need. And that works. The books are useless, I do believe.

**John:** Useless, though? I mean, I would — okay…

**Craig:** Useless. Because, look, we live in a time now where we have the Internet. Okay? If I need to know how long a script should be, if I need to know how it should be formatted, if I need to know what it’s supposed to look like, if I need to know how much description I should use and all. That stuff is out there, it’s on your website, it’s all over the place. There’s no need to buy anything.

**John:** But some stuff that you learn in books is not about…it’s not the simple answers to a question; it’s more — it gets you thinking a certain way about how to do stuff. If a book provides… I’m genuinely playing devil’s advocate here, because I do share a lot of opinions with you on this.

But I feel like there could be useful information in these books, and useful ways of thinking in these books for people who have never thought about story in a way before. It gets them really thinking about story, or thinking about how puzzle pieces might go together.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, it’s possible. I still don’t know if that is as instructive as reading the screenplay to a movie you thought you knew well and seeing, in a kind of reverse engineering way, how it came from a script. Because that’s all we’re really doing, is kind of pre-engineering a movie when we write a script.

Look: There are some basic instructional guides that aren’t harmful to you. Syd Field isn’t harmful, I don’t think, unless you somehow view it as a religious choice. I don’t think that Chris Vogler’s book is harmful.

**John:** You think it’s not harmful.

**Craig:** I don’t think it’s harmful. I just think it’s only harmful if people actually think that that’s the book that’s going to teach them how to be a screenwriter. It’s not. There is no such thing.

**John:** Okay. In research for this podcast, I looked up, and there are 2,123 books about screenwriting on Amazon. —

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** — It’s really a small subset of them are the ones that I think we often hear or talk about here. Certainly Syd Field is the one we have to talk about first. Syd Field, his famous book is called Screenplay. I didn’t, I had to look it up, because we don’t, we just call it the Syd Field.

Syd Field is — if you’re going to read one book, you should probably read Syd Field, just because everyone else in this town has read Syd Field. People will talk in, sort of, Syd Field terms whether they’ve read the book or not. When people talk about Act I, Act II, Act III, mid-act, climax, worst of the worst, those are all kind of Syd Field’y terms.

Everyone’s going to talk those ways, whether you actually believe in them or not, development people will talk in those ways. By reading Syd Field, you’ll understand that everyone thinks that there’s a first act that ends at about page 30, that there’s a reversal that happens at about page 60, that there’s a second act break that happens at page 90, which is the worst of the worst, and then the movie resolves itself in the third act, which is the last 30 pages or so.

Everyone sort of uses that as a template for thinking about stuff, even though that’s not the way most movies actually happen. The danger is people use that as a template to try to shoehorn any given movie in to fit those beats and fit those page breaks and that idea that this is exactly how a movie has to work, as if there’s one magic formula, or that the architecture of screenwriting is quite literally architecture or engineering — that if you don’t do these things exactly perfect, the entire movie will fall down and collapse on itself.

**Craig:** Yeah, I remember when I was a kid in math class, that there were kids who wanted to understand basically why multiplication worked a certain way and grasp the concept behind it, and then there were kids that just wanted the 12-step algorithm, and just push it in one side and it comes out the other. It’s like a dumb box in between.

You can’t approach screenwriting that way. People who use these books to sort of try and reduce the process to something easy and controllable are failing. The only value, really, is what you’re saying, maybe plug into some common vocabulary and get a basic sense of the fundamental, most common shape of a screenplay.

Frankly, I would much prefer to see people go online and read a free public domain copy of Aristotle’s Poetics, which I think has more actual philosophical meat behind it about what the point and purpose of drama is, both good and bad.

**John:** I have to think about why there are so many people who aspire to be screenwriters and why there’s a market, apparently, for books about screenwriting. I think it’s because the form looks so different from everything else. The format scares people. Yet, it seems approachable in the way that everyone has seen a bunch of movies. Therefore — like, I get so frustrated when I hear people say, like, “Oh, I could never write a novel, but I think I could write a screenplay.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** As if it’s like, “Oh well, it’s just people talking.”

**Craig:** That’s exactly why they do this, because everybody thinks, “I can write a screenplay, I have a great idea for a screenplay. I just need a book to tell me how to do it, and then I’ll do it. But I’ve already done it in my head. I’ve already done this hard part, which is to come up with this great idea for a movie. Now, I just need to shove it through this process and the Screenwriting for Dummies will tell me about that. That’s just window dressing.”

No, that is the screenwriting. Your idea is useless. Useless. The screenwriting is everything. The process is the job.

That’s why I find these books to be, essentially… They are sold in bad faith by people who, quite frankly, were they better at screenwriting, would be screenwriting.

**John:** That is a source of frustration for me as I look through the people who are selling these books, is that most of them have no significant, or, really, any screenwriting credits whatsoever. They are aspiring screenwriters who probably have written some screenplays but have never actually made movies from their screenplays.

An exception: Blake Snyder, who has the Save the Cat books, which I’ve not read, but people seem to like a lot, has done. He unfortunately passed away. But he has two genuine credits to his name — just really makes him an exception to the rule.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** Everyone else has zero.

**Craig:** That’s right. We used to just have the plague of wannabes and pompous professors who insisted that they would give us the key to all this stuff. Now, we have this new scourge, which are underemployed readers.

For those who don’t know, because there’s so many scripts in contention at studios and production companies, the executives and gatekeepers hire people to read them, evaluate them, and score them. There’s a whole shadow industry of people that read and rate scripts.

Many of those people, I think, quite a few of whom don’t even want to be screenwriters, they want to be executives. Many of those people, faced with underemployment or lack of employment, begin to sell that service to others as a screenwriting consultant. Now they’re leveraging thousands of dollars out of people by reading their scripts and giving them so-called expert coverage. It’s atrocious.

**John:** And frustrating. I guess I come back to a question of, you know, I went to a university, I went to a film school. I went there to learn how to make movies. I had screenwriting classes. They were genuinely helpful. I’ve been a guest lecturer at screenwriting classes. I’m trying to in my head differentiate what that is versus what my frustration is with the guys and experts.

**Craig:** John, I have it. It’s — look, I just did, yesterday or two days ago, I guest spoke at Howard Rodman’s class at USC. I came there in good faith. You go to these things in good faith. And I think that for well-credentialed, respected academic programs, they’re offered in good faith.

So much of this is not. So much of this is simply a scam. You can smell it from a mile away. The truth of the matter is, there’s not much value in me reading some random person’s script, then giving them advice, because, almost always, they just don’t have it.

I want to be clear, and so, by the way, that would be in bad faith, especially if I took money, obviously. It’s about me.

I want to be clear, because a lot of times, people who are aspiring to be screenwriters feel that people like you or me are saying this stuff because we’re trying to keep them out, or hide the truth from them. Quite the opposite. I want more and better screenwriters. I want many, many screenwriters, better than I am, to come and make better movies than I make. Books aren’t going to make that happen. Talent is going to make that happen.

I really, more than anything, I’m actually trying to be very prosocial about this and say, “Please, save your money.” Screenwriting is free. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that by spending $3,000 you’re going to exercise a control that you so desperately want to have. I want that control, too. I don’t have it either. None of us do. Sorry.

**John:** One thing that occurs to me as we’re talking: While I didn’t honestly read a lot of the screenwriting books growing up, I have read a ton of programming books, because I love making apps, I enjoyed programming since I was a kid. I’m not especially great at it. I can do it, if push comes to shove. But I have real blind spots towards it. It’s not something that comes very naturally to me.

I’ll teach myself a language. I’ll teach myself Perl or Ruby or try to teach myself Objective-C, which just doesn’t fit my head very well. I can buy as many books as I want to buy, but I am searching for that book that says, like, “Oh, this is the magic formula for how you make any app.” And it’s like I said, I guess I’m guilty of that, too, is that I want there to be an easy way that just makes it all simple and possible. And it’s not.

You look at actual real programmers, Nima Yousefi, who does the programming for our stuff now, it’s just — it’s good and it’s natural for him. It’s just the work. He didn’t get to be good at it by reading a bunch of books about it. He got good at it by doing a bunch of it.

**Craig:** Yeah, the fabled 10,000 hours of doing something, it really does. I empathize with anybody who, faced with writing their 1st screenplay, or their 3rd or their 12th, who is seeking to be recognized for their work. I empathize with the pain and the fear that they have. Certainly, I empathize with their psychological craving for some kind of secret trick, control, leverage point, anything. It is a terrible drowning feeling when you don’t know if you’re doing it right. You desperately want to do it right.

It is discouraging to say to people, “There is no lifeguard on duty. The only way you will survive this drowning is by swimming through it.” But, unfortunately, there is no lifeguard on duty. These books will not help you. These people who charge you money will bleed you dry.

Think about this for a second. You are, let’s say, somebody who has a modicum of talent. But you’re raw. You are craving some assistance, some help. You spend money on a professional script consultant. They read your script.

They have a choice, they can say to you, “This is very far off the mark, you need to go write two or three more scripts and really figure out what this is about. Then, spend your money with me.” Or, they may say, “You have no talent, stop.”

Or they may say, “Wow, there’s great potential here. Here’s a bunch of notes,” that by the way, anybody could have given you. “They’ll make your script better. You go work on that, then come back, I’ll read it again, or I’ll read your other script, or I’ll read your third script. You’re the one. If only you, three or four more of my amazing sessions at $1,000 a pop and you’ll make it.”

They’re always going to do that, because it’s a scam. It’s a scam. Don’t do it.

**John:** We should probably differentiate between a couple things we’re talking about, here. I would come down on the side of, if somebody wants to read a book, it’s a small cost to reading a book. It’s going to cost you, now, $10, $15, and it’s going to cost several hours of your time. There’s the danger that it’s going to lead you in a very bad direction. But everything is a danger that’s going to lead you in a bad direction. It’s not a bigger gamble than anything else.

I would come down on the side of, “Hey, if the book seems interesting, go ahead and read it.” That’s basically what I’ve done with Stuart now, is that, Stuart is, you know, a young aspiring writer. As people ask questions, like, “Hey, is this a good screenwriting book?”

I would say, “Hey, Stuart, read this book and write a review for the site.” That’s what we’re doing with that.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** Seminars, I am opposed to seminars. I am opposed to seminars where the masterful instructor comes in and teaches you how to write a screenplay.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm, me, too, yeah.

**John:** Linda Seger’s known for them, Robert McKee is known for them.

**Craig:** Linda Seger. Linda Seger. Derek Haas was at some event and Linda Seeger was there speaking. She was peppering her speech with authoritative comments about how she assisted somebody who once wrote a Cagney and Lacey.

Good Lord. People are spending money? Why? Why? It’s crazy to me.

Listen, I completely agree with you on this. If all you lose is 80 bucks on six books, whoop-de-do. Go for it.

By the way, when it comes to… Look, there are books that I actually, I like recommending to people, because I don’t want to be a total jerk about it. I think, actually, rather than reading the Chris Vogler books, which are sort of a screenwriting view of Joseph Campbell’s work, just read Joseph Campbell.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** They’re wonderful books to read anyway, just to understand the commonalities of human narrative. But I would certainly say, before you start spending even money on books, you should read John’s site, you should check out, god, there’s just a whole bunch of sites out there.

**John:** You should also read screenplays.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the thing you keep coming back to, is that, you need to read as many screenplays as you possibly can read. You need to read the great screenplays. You need to read the screenplays to the movies that you love to see how those movies were made.

But you also really need to read bad screenplays. People don’t take my word for this, but I was a reader for TriStar for a year, and for other places for six months before that. I read, and had to write coverage on 150 terrible screenplays. You learn so much about what never works by reading bad writing.

**Craig:** So true. Not just what doesn’t work, but also where it could have worked, but the writer wrote himself out of something good, because they overwrote or they underwrote. You know, good advice, read bad scripts.

I have a few, if people want to read them. [laughter]

**John:** I’m saying, fine on books if you find that helpful. Just make sure that you’re also reading scripts. No on seminars. No on paid script consultants.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I just — if people can write in with comments if they’ve actually had a good experience where it has completely changed their…

**Craig:** They will. By the way, John, they will. They get so defensive. I’ve had lengthy arguments with people who are so defensive, but in the end.

**John:** I want to see one produced writer —

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** — who can show me where they paid a script consultant and that’s what got them where they are.

**Craig:** Thank you, thank you. It’s very dispiriting to have to argue with somebody about why they’re wasting their money. It’s a little bit like, arguing with people who spend money on psychics. At some point, you just throw up your hands and say, “Okay, you know what, go ahead. Go ahead, spend your money. I don’t care. it’s not my problem.”

**John:** That’s good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, I think that’s it. I mean, is there anymore to say about gurus or experts?

**Craig:** Ptheh.

**John:** Ptheh. Ptheh basically summarizes Craig Mazin’s position on that.

Well, thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** We’ll talk soon.

**Craig:** Very good.