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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/franchises-and-final-draft).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 236 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today, on the program, somebody buys Final Draft. But it’s not an aspiring screenwriter, rather a giant accounting software company. We’ll talk about what that means for Craig’s favorite application and the state of screenwriting software in general.

Also, today we’ll talk about franchises. We’ll do a ton of follow-up questions about previous discussions, including some “How Would This Be a Movie?” that are actually going to be movies. And we’ll answer listener questions, too, about reading your boss’ script and moving on from a draft.

**Craig:** That sounds like a lot.

**John:** It sounds like a lot. It wasn’t very much until we just added the last little thing.

**Craig:** I know —

**John:** Right before we started recording.

**Craig:** It’s way too ambitious. But you know what, I feel like we could do it.

**John:** I feel like we could do it because we’re an ambitious podcast that gets a lot of news attention. This last week we got written up in Vanity Fair because of our live show, our Hollywood Heart show with Jason Bateman and The Game of Thrones guys. There’s a whole article in Vanity Fair about that now.

**Craig:** I don’t know how Vanity Fair makes their money. I’m guessing ads on the internet.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We should get some of it. I mean, we did the work.

**John:** We did the work. There is reporting on something that we did.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean —

**John:** Yeah. So Joanna Robinson just did a little write-up about The Game of Thrones guys talking about how the first pilot was terrible and how you said it was terrible and the things they did to fix it. And she noted that it’s not just booze and death threats that keep these two together, which really could be said for you and me as well. [laughs]

**Craig:** I’ve definitely been having a strange week in the news.

**John:** You have. Craig, you passed me in Twitter followers which is just — which is fine. Also just kind of bonkers because like I’ve been hovering above 50,000 for a long time. And if you look at the chart, you’ve rocketed it up in the last month.

**Craig:** I want people to notice. Play it, rewind if you can, and listen to John’s “Which is fine.” [laughs]

**John:** Which is fine.

So Craig, here’s a fascinating thing you’re going to find is — I don’t know if on Twitter you ever got ads before. Did you get ads in your timeline?

**Craig:** I don’t think so. You mean like a sponsored tweet or something?

**John:** Like a sponsored tweet or like you’d scroll past and there’d be an ad in there.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. So I don’t get them either. But apparently a lot of people do get them. And it’s because you and I crossed a certain threshold or because we have little verified checkmarks, we don’t get any of that stuff. So we live in a slightly different Twitter universe than other people do.

**Craig:** You mean it’s better?

**John:** It’s better. We sort of — we are in the express lane of Twitter, which is odd. But you are now in the center of Twitter firestorms because you keep poking the bear and the bow — the bear being your former college roommate.

**Craig:** He’s no bear.

**John:** No, he’s not a bear.

**Craig:** No. Bears are cool. [laughs] Yeah, I know I’m not going to stop.

**John:** You’re not going to stop?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And people will not stop emailing the ask account to say if I could get you to go on a national media appearance, and the answer is no. So you can stop writing in.

**Craig:** And I’m so sorry that that’s happening. For whatever it’s worth, I get bombarded constantly, every day, six or seven calls.

What’s kind of remarkable to me is news organizations will just have different people call and you start to realize that every organization is terrible in the world. So —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like, you know, so CNN will have somebody call. And then two days later somebody else from CNN will call. And then three days later somebody else from CNN will call. And then NBC calls, but then MSNBC calls. Nobody talks, and anyway, I’m not doing any of it, ever. So stop calling.

**John:** Which is good.

**Craig:** That ain’t going to work, but fine. [laughs]

**John:** So last night I had my own little media spotlight because I got to host Beyond Words 2016. So this is who I had up on stage with me. So I had Matt Charman who wrote Bridge of Spies. Drew Goddard from The Martian. I had Jon Herman and Andrea Berloff from Straight Outta Compton. John McNamara from Trumbo, Phyllis Nagy from Carol. We had Charles Randolph and Adam McKay from The Big Short, Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy from Spotlight, and Aaron Sorkin from Steve Jobs.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** That was a lot of people on stage. And if it sounds like that was too many people to have on stage, you are correct. That is more writers than you should ever have on stage for a Q&A.

But it ended up being really fun. And so we got a review. We got a write-up. Which I didn’t know they would ever write a review for a Q&A, but they did. So David Robb from Deadline wrote, “It was a high-spirited evening with lots of laughs and no controversy.”

**Craig:** That’s the way we like it.

**John:** That’s the way we roll.

So it was actually a really fun time. And everybody was great. No one had nearly enough time to speak. But I tried to structure it in a way that everybody got to speak pretty often so that it didn’t just go for like a half an hour without hearing from anybody. So it was a fun night.

If you were not able to attend but would like to hear it, you’re in luck because it’s going to be on the premium feed. So we’ll have that up maybe at the same time this episode goes up. So if you want to go over to scriptnotes.net, it’s $1.99 a month to get all the back episodes and premium episodes, and that will be one of them.

**Craig:** Spectacular. That must have been quite the task to wrangle — I mean, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11.

**John:** Yup. So me, plus 11 people.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** You could barely fit all those chairs on the stage because we had the sort of couchey kind of things. We’ve done a lot of events at this theater. And so we went with the couch mold and — but it was a lot of people there.

And so I tried to structure questions that there would be some speed rounds where everybody would answer one thing and it would be really short. And then we try to go in-depth and talk about relationship with characters, relationship with setting up the worlds.

It was interesting. But what was so weird about that group of movies and that group of writers is like they were almost entirely movies about real people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so we could really focus on that.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** And so except for Drew Goddard who ruined everything by writing The Martian.

**Craig:** Right. Drew ruined it.

**John:** But even Carol, as I went — as we sort of got into it, Carol is, you know, based on some real experiences. And Phyllis’ relationship with Patricia Highsmith and sort of the weird way that they met and first became friendly was a huge part of that. And the sense of responsibility writers have to their subjects, be it the author or be it the real-life people you’re portraying, that was a great thing to get into. And I don’t think — people weren’t answering the same questions they answered throughout the rest of the award circuit, which is fun.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the idea. I mean, when I did the session with Charles and Adam for The Big Short, I tried my best to come up with questions that I didn’t think they are constantly — I mean, because you can — it’s amazing. I don’t want to use the word lazy or anything, but man, these people, a lot of them don’t even try. They just ask the same question. They’re not embarrassed to ask the same questions over and over. I would be so embarrassed.

**John:** Yeah. You got to talk about new things.

**Craig:** Yeah, give it a shot.

**John:** So one of the things we did talk about was what was one of your favorite scenes that is not in the movie. Or something you wrote that didn’t make it through to the end. And except for Aaron Sorkin everyone was delighted to sort of tell us those things. And I think those are often really revealing because those things that don’t make it up there were probably very important to you in the writing of the movie, but they weren’t necessarily important to the final version of the movie because, obviously, these movies all turned out great without those scenes being in them. So that was a good look at sort of the process and the emotional journey you go through as you’re writing.

**Craig:** I’m always struck by how you can take writers who are at the top of their game and take them at a point in their career when they’re in the middle of all this glory. And they’re all writing different kinds of things completely, and they all come from different places, and the problems are all the same.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re — it just — that’s actually very comforting, I think.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a shared experience of being the person trying to make this impossible movie happen. And all these movies were incredibly unlikely movies to exist. And so the fact that they all turned out and came out this year is a great testament.

I found it weird that three of these movies take place in the ’50s. And so I kept waiting for someone to cut together these movies into like one cohesive whole.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Where like Carol is in Bridge of Spies and Trumbo is suddenly walking through. Because certain people could kind of be in both places. And of course you have Jeff Daniels who is both in Steve Jobs but he’s also in The Martian, and so he could, you know, be yelling at people for different reasons.

**Craig:** Bridge of Carol Trumbo.

**John:** Yeah. That’s maybe not the strongest.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But we can workshop it.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs] Let’s get a roundtable together.

**John:** Yeah, we can go out to one of the vendors and they can come back to us with some title treatments and some, you know, one-sheets. And we can really figure out what that’s like.

I will say, if you are an aspiring editor who likes to cut together mash-up of things, I would say, go for those three movies and cut them together and make something new out of it. Because they very much feel like they could exist in the same color-space-universe. So go for it.

**Craig:** I feel like I’m on the verge of a new character, by the way.

**John:** Uh-oh. Let’s work through this right now because I want to hear it.

**Craig:** Well, you know, we have Sexy Craig.

**John:** Yeah. And everyone knows how I feel about Sexy Craig.

**Craig:** This is — the new character is Cool Craig.

**John:** Oh, all right.

**Craig:** He’s like — Cool Craig is like this. He’s like, “Yeah, you know, it’s like, ah. Everybody’s just like all part of the same world, you know?”

**John:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, like, I don’t know. I can’t even get worked up.

**John:** Yeah. [laughs] Absolutely. It’s that sense of being like really connected but detached at the same time.

**Craig:** You know what, it’s not Cool Craig. It’s blasé Craig. [laughs] It’s actually — it’s the opposite of cool. But I’m going to work on blasé Craig.

**John:** I wonder if it’s maybe like a Whole Foods Craig. It’s really — yeah.

**Craig:** Ooh, I like that, Whole Foods Craig. That’s — it’s like a mixture of blasé and cool. Done.

**John:** Yeah. Done.

**Craig:** Okay. Whole Foods Craig.

**John:** This last week my daughter has been watching a fair amount of TV including Grease: Live, which I thought was fantastic. I don’t know if you saw Grease: Live.

**Craig:** Amazing. And I’m actually — the script I’m writing now is for the gentleman that produced that. And they were just — I mean, talk about going into a thing all muscle tight and, on my god, it’s going to rain, and what happens, and then poor, you know —

**John:** Vanessa Hudgens who lost her husband — who lost her dad.

**Craig:** Yeah. Her father died like six hours before. I mean, it’s just like, that’s ugh. But it was — I thought it was the best of all the versions of live productions they’ve done on network TV.

**John:** I thought it was spectacular. And look, I have some issues with the underlying material of Grease, but I thought they actually did a really smart job of just making that a huge, entertaining moment of television live in front of my eyes.

And it did definitely feel like they were like sprinting on tightropes. Like I just couldn’t believe that they were able to do this thing live in front of me.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you know — look, I know — I saw the tweets, you know — the point of Grease is change everything about you to get a man. You know, yeah. And also, it was made in the ’70s and so it’s like, whatever.

**John:** Yeah. It’s the ’70s version of the ’50s. And if we wanted to get our best lessons about how to live life out of stage musicals, I think we are really in trouble.

**Craig:** Well, also, it’s like, no one is coming to Grease for that. No one. You know why you’re going to Grease? For the romance and the songs. And it’s funny and they all get together at the end. They go together like ramramlam and dingidy dingidy bam.

You know what, man, it’s like, ugh. I just feel like, can’t you just like enjoy the music and not like overthink it? I don’t know, man. You know what? It’s like, whatever.

**John:** I think a Whole Foods Craig is going to work.

So before we got on to the Grease topic, my daughter has been watching a lot of things that involves sort of young adults flirting. And so she was just like, “Can you show me like how you flirt?” And so I was — we’ve been trying to demonstrate like really inept flirting, and it’s just delightful because she’s like, “No, no. You’re doing it wrong.” I’m like, “Ah, thank you, thank you. Somehow you were conceived. So I don’t know, I did something right.” [laughs]

**Craig:** I just think that I would pay anything to watch that. [laughs] To watch you teach flirting classes to your daughter. I just like —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you turn towards the flirt recipient and you engage the flirting protocol, adjusting for input variables. [laughs]

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And she said, “No, Daddy.”

**John:** She said it was the worst, that I was doing a terrible job. But what’s fascinating is that she was comparing against a template that has been enforced by like Disney Channel shows.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so her idea of like what cool is, is really sort of like this weird manufactured adult version of what kids should think is cool.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so it’s just — it’s all so completely synthetic.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t match up to Zack and Cody at all.

**John:** Not a bit. Now they’re the best.

**Craig:** They’re just better than you.

**John:** They are better than me.

Let’s get to some follow-up. So hey, do you remember way back in Austin? We were sitting there in that church and we were taking through How Would This Be a Movie. We had Steve Zissis up on stage. Who else did we have up on stage?

**Craig:** I believe we had Nicole Perlman.

**John:** Oh, Nicole Perlman was there, yes.

And so we were talking about Zola. And so Zola was the young woman who was a waitress, and then she was also a stripper. And she did a little of sex work connecting. She wasn’t a sex worker, but she was helping facilitate sex work for a friend, an acquaintance.

**Craig:** The word you are looking for is pimping.

**John:** I think she was pimping and —

**Craig:** She was a big pimping.

**John:** She was pimping. And she had a very wild, very dangerous weekend, which she tweeted about. It was a long stream of tweets that became sort of this sensation. It was like, well, what is real here, what is not real here.

That became an article for Rolling Stone written by David Kushner. And it is now becoming a movie. So this last week it was announced that James Franco will direct from a script by Andrew Neel and Mike Roberts.

**Craig:** Nailed it.

**John:** Nailed it.

**Craig:** Now I’m really curious to see what angle they take on this, because we kind of went through all these permutations of how you could approach it. And so actually a very interesting example of how a story can open itself up to four or five different — totally different kinds of movies based on the same thing.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** I’m fascinated to see which one they choose.

**John:** I am, too. It seems a little bit strange that Franco is involved because like there’s an overlap between this and Spring Breakers, which seems — well, it could be good or it could be bad. I don’t know that he’s going to be playing a role in it. So it’s just — I’m curious to see what this will end up becoming.

**Craig:** I am, too. I am, too. I think that they will be smart to come at it from some angle that will be relevant beyond our general interest in the story, because it already seems like it’s 1,000 years old.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And by the time the movie comes out it’ll seem like 20,000 years old. So there’s got to be more to it than just “Here’s what happened.”

**John:** Yup. We’ll see.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Another bit of How Would This Be a Movie, this was from a later episode, we talked about sleep paralysis. And Matt, a listener writes in, “Jeffrey Reddick who is the creator and writer of Final Destination wrote and produced a feature called Dead Awake this past fall. It’s in post-production. The log line is a young woman must save herself and her friends from an ancient evil that stalks its victims through the real life phenomenon of sleep paralysis.”

**Craig:** Nailed it.

**John:** Nailed it. It totally is exactly the movie I think we pitched would happen. And it apparently did happen and it is now in post. I was looking for a trailer. There’s no trailer up yet as we’re recording this, but it sounds like a movie that you will see in a theater, or on iTunes.

**Craig:** I think so. I think all these people should be paying us even though that guy did it before we ever said it.

**John:** Absolutely. We’re giving him some advanced promotion. So just like Vanity Fair should be paying us.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think Jeffrey Reddick, if would want us, slip us a few dollars, we’re not going to say no.

**Craig:** Or hey, if you don’t, it’s all right man, whatever.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely. Either way it’s great. I’m liking this Craig.

**Craig:** You just like it because it’s not Sexy Craig. [laughs]

**John:** I like — here’s the thing about this Craig. This Craig has no umbrage whatsoever.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** This Craig, all umbrage has been completely pulled out of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, we’re going to get to Final Draft soon enough. [laughs]

**John:** It’s like there was a Transporter accident. [laughs] And all the umbrage went to one Craig. And this is just the one that has nothing left in him. He’s just a sheep.

**Craig:** You know what, nobody would want the good Craig. They would just kill him. They would set phazers to kill.

**John:** You can’t do anything.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, you’re useless.

**John:** I have a bit of correction. In our discussion of dead scripts, one of us mentioned Armageddon and Deep Impact and a listener wrote in to point out that Deep Impact actually came out first. I always forget that but it is actually true.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** All right. I believe it.

**Craig:** Sure. Yup.

**John:** We talked about Matt and Matt was looking for a place to write. So David wrote in. Craig, tell us what David wrote.

**Craig:** He said, “For $19.99 a month, that’s $19.99 a month, I have a business lounge access to any Regus in the United States.” I think I’m pronouncing Regus correctly. “I’m in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida and I use them all over Jacksonville. It works great for me. I’ve moved on but still keep it. I love it and wrote my first draft there of my most recent effort. Regus rents offices mostly to sole proprietors and small businesses. Those individual offices are extremely expensive but the business lounge accounts are a steal.”

**John:** That’s absolutely great and true. And I can imagine something that sort of like an airport lounge would be great and perfect for exactly those kinds of things. It’s like it’s a clean, well-lit place that maybe has some coffee and you just go there and you do your work. That makes a lot of sense.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So our mutual friend, Dana Fox, she does a lot of writing at the Soho House in Hollywood. So that is a fancy club at the top of a building on Sunset. And that’s another great place to sort of go for meetings and coffee. But I also know writers who just sit at a table and bang out a draft there. So it’s another good choice.

**Craig:** Yeah. A lot of writers go there. Every now and then Todd Phillips and I would write there. But the problem with the Soho House, I mean — and this is frankly, that’s the Soho House is for rich people. And I think even then they make a decision about whether or not you’re Soho House people.

**John:** I have applied and have not gotten in, so if SoHo House wants to accept me, they could.

**Craig:** Well, they have a no-cyborg policy. It’s pretty strict. But —

**John:** I’m sorry.

**Craig:** Yeah. But the problem with Soho House is that inevitably people that you know are going to walk by because it is that kind of Hollywood incestuous place. And then you’re not working, you’re talking now, you know.

I love — you know, it’s so funny like, the only person near me, truly near me is John Lee Hancock because his office is just two floors below mine in the same building. But the two of us are so similar. We never ever bother each other, ever, unless he wants to use my scanner.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, he’s doing pretty well. I bet he could afford his own scanner.

**Craig:** You know, that’s the thing. But look —

**John:** And the other thing is I honestly don’t even use my scanner that much. I just use the app on my phone. And it’s just, it’s so much easier.

**Craig:** I use the scanner if I have to like — at tax time, it’s pretty good.

**John:** Yeah, if you have a bunch of pages, it’s —

**Craig:** Yeah, a bunch of pages. But I should just start charging him, right?

**John:** You should, absolutely. Or if he got a lounge access account to —

**Craig:** To my scanner.

**John:** To Regus, I bet they have a scanner.

**Craig:** Probably.

**John:** They probably have a copier and a scanner. It’s probably one of those combo units, but it would be be fine.

**Craig:** Hey man, whether it’s a combo or not, you know, it’s like you pay and then what happens, happens.

**John:** 100%. Craig, you’re so right.

**Craig:** Here’s another question. This one is from Mario. And he asks, regarding our dead scripts discussion, “What if there were something, anything, in one of those dead scripts that you felt could work well in a different one, maybe even one you’re working on now?”

**John:** Yes. So that’s a great question. So has there been anything in one of those dead scripts that you’ve sort of taken and repurposed for something new?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I say basically no. There was one idea that I tried twice. And essentially, there’s a split screen action sequence, which I wrote in the first Charlie’s Angles and we ended up not shooting it. And so I ended up doing a similar kind of thing in another script that has never been shot.

So it’s a similar idea where at a certain point the wide screen goes split screen and you’re following two separate threads through both sides. So it’s really the same idea, but it’s so vastly different execution because the story is different. That it’s just the same. It’s only the very general same idea. There’s no beats that are the same.

I’ve never been able to like take a scene from one thing and move it to another. It just — that just never works. Everything is sort of bespoke and custom to that one movie you’re making.

**Craig:** Yeah. And occasionally I will hear writers say, “Well, you know, I wrote this scene in this other movie and I’m trying to put it into this one.” And I just think, “Why? Just, you know, write a new scene.”

When people do that, I feel like they’re clinging not to some kind of incredibly utilitarian piece of work that could fit into one movie or another. They’re clinging to some sort of feeling they had when they wrote that scene. Like, “I nailed it.” You know, “I got it.” Or that scene represented some kind of breakthrough for them and now they’re just basically clinging to it like, you know, some sort of shining example of their goodness and trying to put it into other things. It will never ever work, ever.

**John:** So if you’re a standup comic, you’re going to have your jokes. And you’re going to have your jokes that you go back to and the things that you know work because they’ve been tested. But it doesn’t really work the same for screenwriting because everything is very much, you know, the scene in front of you. So it’s very hard to move a joke from, you know, page 19 to page 64, much less from one movie to another movie. So it’s very hard to sort of take material from one script and move into a completely different movie.

**Craig:** I also feel like if you can, something is wrong with your current script. Because even jokes, unless it’s the broadest of movies, different characters say different kinds of jokes. They don’t — it just doesn’t work.

Not only have I never done it, I’ve never actually even considered doing it. It’s just those scripts are done and that’s that, and let’s just move ahead.

**John:** At some point, we’ll have Chris Morgan on, who writes The Fast and the Furious movies. And that’s a situation where I can imagine that there were stunt sequences which were considered and designed for one movie that for whatever reason they didn’t shoot, but that were actually really good ideas as sequences, which could be repurposed for another movie. I mean, obviously you would write everything in them, like the story stuff would change. But if the idea of, “What if we did these kind of trucks doing this kind of thing?” might be valid in a different The Fast and the Furious movie. That’s the kind of thing I could imagine being moved from one movie to another movie. But in most cases, it’s just not going to work.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, if you’re talking about shifting a sequence from one movie to its own sequel, then I think it’s fair game because, you know, they’re the same characters. It’s the same tone. So, sure, I think that’s fine.

I don’t think we actually did that when we were working on the Hangover movies. But we — I remember at some point we talked about like, “Oh you know, we wanted to do that thing in 2. Maybe we should do it in 3.” And I don’t think we ended up doing it, but I get that.

But that’s not I think what Mario is getting at, which is, you know, because if the script is dead, you’re not working on the sequel. [laughs]

**John:** So if you’re copying a sequence from one script to another script, you might be using some screenwriting software, perhaps even Final Draft.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** And that was in the news this week. So it was one of the things most tweeted at me this week, was this bit of news that production management specialist Cast & Crew Entertainment Services has bought screenwriting software leader Final Draft Inc. for an undisclosed price.

Cast & Crew said the deal, announced Tuesday, continues to accelerate its investment in technology supported by its majority shareholder, Silver Lake Partners. Cast & Crew which provides payroll and residuals processing and accounting systems and software, and production incentive consulting was acquired by Silver Lake Partners in mid-2015.

Marc Madnick, CEO and Chairman of Final Draft, said the deal will lead to better software and customer experience for screenwriters and filmmakers.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Together, “we will accelerate our development process and further solidify our industry leadership for many years to come.”

So in the show notes, you’ll see links to the Variety article but we’ll also put in the original press release which has sort of more details, kind of, about the deal.

**Craig:** This is awesome. [laughs]

So even the strange coincidence, I’m working on this project for HBO. It’s the first — it’s a miniseries, first television thing I’ve ever done. And it had taken me forever to finish this thing that I was doing and I finally turned it in. And then they paid me.

And I had forgotten actually that I was supposed to get paid because they didn’t pay for so long but I had taken so long. And these checks came and HBO — so all these companies go through payroll services. Usually, when I get paid, like for instance, I think Universal uses Entertainment Partners.

**John:** That’s where I get most of my stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. So that’s a company that handles payroll for the studios. I think they handle their own in-house payroll, so their own employees are paid through their own company. But outside vendors get paid through this service because when they pay writers, actors, and directors, it’s complicated. It’s not just paying you what they owe you. They also have to then keep track of how much they paid you, when you hit the certain cap, how much fringes they have to then send to the unions for pension and for health. And then there’s the whole residuals thing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But this was the first time I got one from Cast & Crew. I didn’t even know what it was when it showed up. So Cast & Crew — so at least I know they handle the payments for HBO.

**John:** And I want to make clear that the check came through properly and Cast & Crew did a good job, at least, in terms of getting you paid.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. No, Cast & Crew did a brilliant job getting me paid.

**John:** Good.

**Craig:** And they seemed like — this seems actually like a perfect match between a company that is the ultimate in bean counting and Cast & Crew. [laughs] So what in God’s name would these two companies have in common? It’s actually kind of a brilliant sale.

What is valuable about Final Draft? Well, let’s talk about what’s not valuable about it. The software stinks, in my humble opinion. It doesn’t work as well as a number of its competitors. It offers fewer features than a number of its competitors. It is refreshed far less often. It is way more expensive than any other option.

So why? Where’s the value in it?

The value, in a weird way, is in its format. Just because they were first, and because they were the leader for so, so long, their format, their file format is the industry standard file format. A little bit like the way VHS became the standard format for home recording even though, as many people will angrily say, Sony Betamax was a far superior format.

So FDX is the VHS format of screenwriting files. And you may say, “Well, you know, isn’t PDF — hasn’t that eliminated the value of FDX?” Almost entirely, but then there’s this little piece.

And the little piece is when you are in production and you are porting the script into breakdown software, breakdown software to schedule your movie, budget your movie, break it down for departments. All that stuff, which is very technical business, nuts and bolts, bean counting kind of stuff, the FDX file format pipes in, and that’s what is — their format kind of owns that space.

So this is actually a very smart marriage because I can easily see how a company that handles payroll can say, “Well, we can actually just take over this other nuts and bolts kind of thing. We’re really good in nuts and bolts. Let’s just buy the format that the nuts and bolts come in and we will do it.”

Now, what does this mean for the rest of us?

**John:** Well, before we get into what it means for the rest of us, I think you’re wrong sort of largely. And so I want to talk —

**Craig:** Hey man, whatever.

**John:** Yeah, hey, man. So we can have differences of opinion.

So let’s talk through what they said about it and I think they believe maybe what you believe. Here’s the quote from Cast & Crew.

So, “With a clear strategic vision and the active input of our clients, we are leveraging technology to create compelling end-to-end solutions,” said Eric Belcher, President and Chief Executive Officer of Cast & Crew.

“We are delighted to partner with the best screenwriting software company in the business. We see powerful links between its exceptional product of family and the digital payroll and production solutions we are providing. It all starts with a script.”

Wow, so many buzz words crammed into such a small space.

All right. So I do think that they perceive that there’s going to be some way that Final Draft will be able to tie better into — I don’t even know that they really do production budgeting but I think they probably want to do production budgeting and go into all their other systems.

The thing is, Final Draft is client software. It’s a thing that you use on your computer. And that’s not the people who are really using their normal accounting software. It’s a really different customer. So I think that is a real problem.

And the FDX file format, Final Draft created it but they don’t really own it. It’s just XML. So Highland, my app, writes and reads to the FDX format just fine. And so do all of the other screenwriting software.

So even though Final Draft created that format, they don’t own that format. They have no special keys or mastery to that format. So if they really tried to sort of lock it down some, but they can’t because they picked an open format that anyone can read and pick through. So there’s no magic benefit you get from it.

What I do think you get from Final Draft, though, is I think you get the name Final Draft, which is honestly, for all of our frustration, is synonymous with screenwriting software. I think if you talk to somebody who doesn’t know anything about screenwriting but if you asked like, “What program do you use to write scripts?” They’ll say, “Oh, it’s probably Final Draft,” because that’s the one they’ve heard of.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s true. And actually, I don’t think we disagree, because you’re right. I mean, every good screenwriting solution offers an export to FDX because it’s academic to do. FDX isn’t a proprietary format, anybody could write through it. So you’re absolutely right about that.

I think that what they’re trying to do is go into companies where they are already providing the one part of the business service, paying people and saying, “We’d like to actually — we’ll give you a rate.” Like right now you’re paying this company to do this part of the bean counting. And you’re paying us to do this part. How about you pay us to do both parts and it will end up costing you a little bit less?

I suspect that’s what they’re going for. But here’s what I know for sure. When Marc Madnick, our friend, says the deal will lead to better software and customer experience for screenwriters and filmmakers, he is lying through his teeth. There is absolutely no way that that’s true. None.

**John:** No. I don’t think that’s — I don’t think that’s accurate at all because to lie you have to be intentionally trying to deceive. I think he may genuinely believe that.

I don’t think that’s going to be the outcome. So I agree with you that the outcome will not be better for most people. But I — he sat across from us — I do take him at his word that I think he thinks it will be better for people.

**Craig:** I don’t think he thinks that at all.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Because he knows how he spends money.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And Final Draft basically is an advertising company. They have a product that they barely change and update. They have four people working on that part of it. Everybody else is in sales and promotion. And —

**John:** We should acknowledge that sales and promotion ended up becoming one of the sponsors of our live show from last week, much to our surprise.

**Craig:** Much to our surprise. Yeah, no, that’s what they’re good at. So that’s where the money will continue to go. And in fact, I think this partnership is about something that has nothing to do with the end user — the typical end user of Final Draft. This partnership has everything to do about cornering a certain part of the post-production marketplace or the — I’m sorry, the production marketplace here in Hollywood.

How in God’s name would the fact that they are now owned by a payroll company help a kid who’s 19 years old in New Jersey looking to write his first screenplay? It has nothing to do with him. And so therefore, that kid’s not going to be serviced any better. That’s ridiculous. It’s —

**John:** So I agree with you, Craig. I was just saying I don’t think — I don’t think we can necessarily say that Madnick is lying when he says it’s going to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’re right. I’m — okay. Let me amend it. I can’t say for certain that he’s lying. I can say for certain that what he’s saying will not turn out to be true. Is that fair?

**John:** I think that’s absolutely fair to say.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So my question when this happened is sort of why or why now. And I have no great insight into the finances of Final Draft to know whether they are doing great and like this was a chance to sort of buy them at the peak or if they were in trouble. And I say that honestly because while I make another screening app, my app is nowhere near the Final Draft of the world.

So I don’t know whether this was, “Uh-oh, everything is going south. We better sell the company. Maybe someone will buy the company.” And that’s — whether this was saving Final Draft or whether this was an investment firm coming in to scoop up this brand name that was available. So I don’t know what the real reasons were for why this happened.

**Craig:** Generally speaking, you don’t sell your company when it’s on the upswing.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Because there is really no point unless it’s going to open up some new marketplace to you that you didn’t have access to, which is not the case here. So —

**John:** If you’re Marvel and you sell to Disney and you can do amazing new things.

**Craig:** Correct, because Disney opens up a marketplace. They just have this infrastructure that’s so much larger than yours and they have theme parks that you simply don’t have and don’t have the capital to construct, and an empire of hotels and floating hotels, right? So that’s not applicable here.

So in my mind, I’m thinking — I don’t if they were in trouble, but I would imagine that our repeated theory that, you know, they had kind of reached the end of the golden era of being the only person out there was becoming true.

**John:** Yeah. So the people who bought them is Cast & Crew, but Cast & Crew was itself bought just in the middle of 2015. So it’s this big company called Silver Lake Partners, basically an investment fund, so they own a stake in a lot of different things including William Morris, WME.

What’s odd is I looked on the Silver Lake Partners thing, and they don’t even announce that they bought it, so — that they bought Final Draft. So you know, whatever Cast & Crew paid for it, it wasn’t enough that it made it to the front page of Silver Lake Partners. It wasn’t a big enough deal to have mattered to that.

**Craig:** Well, it’s actually kind of fascinating to me when they said they bought Final Draft. What did they really buy? I mean, what they bought was the code. They bought intellectual property. They’re not buying — I mean, what are the assets there beyond that?

**John:** Well, they’re buying Marc Madnick. They’re buying the team. It’s however much you want to value that team. [laughs]

**Craig:** Uh-huh.

**John:** Because as we talked about, obviously there’s programmers and there’s a marketing team and there’s a support team. How much of those do you want to keep or need to keep? I don’t know.

**Craig:** I’m going to just predict that within five years Marc Madnick has moved on to another enterprise.

**John:** Maybe so. And maybe this is a good way for him to transition out of doing it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I don’t know whether he’s going to want to come on the show to talk to us about it, but he came on before.

So let’s talk about what this means for actual users. If you are a person who is using Final Draft right now, I guess I would preface this by saying, if you are using Final Draft and happy, well, good for you. I mean, I guess, if you like it, that’s fantastic. A lot of people don’t like it, but that’s — and then there’s many good other choices out there. And I think there are choices that weren’t available even three or four years ago. So it is better for this to be happening now than it would have been a couple of years ago.

**Craig:** Yeah, certainly. Ultimately, this won’t change anything for the typical end user. I can’t imagine that Silver Lake Partners and their subsidiary, Cast & Crew, is going to spend unnecessary cash on a product that seems to sell regardless of quality.

**John:** Yeah. I could think — my concern would be that oftentimes, especially on the Macintosh, and really — I’m going to fully reveal our Macintosh bias here because — Craig, do you know anybody who writes on a PC?

**Craig:** You know — yeah. I mean, I’ve never seen them do it but I’ve heard them say it.

**John:** Yeah. So most of the screenwriters I know are writing on Macs. And most of the TV writers I know and TV showrooms I know or writer’s rooms are writing on Macs. So that’s really my experience.

And my experience has been that when the Mac System Software gets updated, Final Draft breaks. Not always, but very often Final Draft breaks. My concern would be that if the people who now own Final Draft choose not to spend a lot of time and money on it, Final Draft could break and become irrevocably broken for even longer than it has been in the past.

**Craig:** Well, I would imagine that they — see, I actually think that maybe that’s the one thing that might get fixed because they are corporate and because they aren’t — when you — when something is just one part of your company then the costs involved aren’t so, you know, egregious. And you might think like — well, Marc Madnick, he was, “not in the business of going out of business,” which I think he translated into not in the business of doing his job.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, and putting out software that was robust and worked and was up-to-date. This company might actually go, “Okay. Look, we’re a real company here. We just got a memo from Apple saying that the following software has been deprecated for 18 years. Can we hire somebody to fix this now please?” I could see that possibly happening.

**John:** But here’s the thing, if Final Draft breaks on a Macintosh, they have to scramble to get it to work again. If this giant company — if this one little thing that’s not a huge priority for them breaks, then it’s not going to be a priority. And so that outside contractor they are bringing in to do this work, it’s unlikely to be awesome. It’s unlikely to sort of be — I mean, the good thing about Final Draft having exactly one product that sold is like all their eggs are in that basket and they’re going to protect that basket very carefully.

**Craig:** And they still had a bad basket.

**John:** They still had a bad basket.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But that’s where they’re at.

So let’s talk about the state of screenwriting software just in general because it has been a little while since we’ve done that. And I’m going to break this into sort of two categories.

So there’s the screenwriting software you need if you’re doing production work, where you need to do locked pages, revision marks, AB pages. You need this if you’re going into production and there’s an AD and there’s a line producer, and you are submitting things for budgets and you are with Craig with his little cart and you are generating new pages because they’re shooting a scene in two minutes.

I think, honestly, the two choices you have at this point are Final Draft and Fade In for that level of stuff. Would you agree with me there?

**Craig:** Yes. Although I will add that WriterDuet is coming up strong.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Generally speaking, I think the problem for WriterDuet is that most of the time when you are somebody writing in production, the notion of writing on something that is cloud-based is — makes you a little nervous. But yes, I think largely speaking, correct. If you are doing big boy, big girl screenwriting, you’re going to want Final Draft or Fade In and, you know, for my money, Fade In is vastly superior.

**John:** So the other one that still exists which some people use, god bless them, is Movie Magic Screenwriter, which has not been updated for a while. But I know some actual TV shows that use that in the room and they still use that for production. So that’s sort of legacy software that still apparently works.

So those are your kind of choices. And you’re going to probably end up using one of those three things if you’re doing those lock-down pages. What I would encourage most of our listeners, though, to look for is you’re not going to be using that stuff very often. And so if you’re looking for an app to write in, you may choose to use a different app for writing.

So the app I make it’s called Highland. It is very simple and very straightforward. Slugline works very much the same way. And you know, the web-based things, WriterDuet, some of the other ones we talked about, that Amazon thing, Celtx, which I guess some people like, those are other choices.

But I write in Highland. Everything I’ve been writing has been in Highland. Justin Marks writes in Highland. There’s good choices that aren’t appropriate for final production work but are really good for the script you’re turning into the studio. So that’s my pitch for that.

**Craig:** Yeah, absolutely true. And more to the point, if you’re listening and you haven’t made a purchase yet, you need to understand that Final Draft, again, is so much more expensive than the rest of these solutions. It’s not even funny. They’re grotesquely more expensive.

I think the most expensive of the alternatives we just mentioned is Fade In which is $49, I think. Whereas you’re looking at nearly $200, I think, for Final Draft, for a new —

**John:** Yeah. Final Draft always seems to be on sale a lot. So I think Final Draft’s price has effectively dropped and is often at around like $99 when you want it to be at $99.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** I think the reason I would say beyond just the expense is not just the dollars you’re spending but the amount of time you’re spending to learn an application that isn’t working the way you need it to work.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I guess the best analogy for me would be like, “Hey, I want to go camping. I want to try camping.” And so you have a couple choices. You could go out and buy like the $2,000 tent and the sleeping bag that is rated down to 20 degrees below Fahrenheit, and the whisper-light stove and all this thing. And you could spend a lot of money and get a really complicated thing.

That would be great if you were scaling up Everest. But it’s not really the right choice for like, “Hey, we’re going to like to the lake and like go fishing.” And so I think there’s this temptation to buy the fanciest thing with the most bells and whistles and the most features —

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Which is not necessarily going to serve you the best.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** And that, to me, is really the experience with not just Final Draft but also Fade In, is that like you open up Fade In or Scrivener — I didn’t even mention Scrivener — there’s so much that you’re faced with that is, you know, it’s not about putting words on the page. It’s about sort of figuring how the app works.

**Craig:** Yeah. Those are professional tools and not everybody needs the professional tool.

**John:** I think there’s probably a fair number of screenwriters who are not screenwriters because they thought, “Well I need to use Final Draft or one of these big apps in order to write a screenplay.” And they’re like — they were trying to learn how to write screenplays and at the same time they were trying to figure out how to use this application. And these two things got conflated and that’s not necessarily the healthiest way to approach learning how to write.

**Craig:** I think WriterDuet has two modes. One is a monthly or something like that. But then one is free. And the free one actually is pretty fully-featured and a great way to kind of at least get your feet wet without spending a dime.

**John:** Yeah. And if you’re going to, you know, just get started with things, that’s a great place to go. My hesitation with the web-based stuff has always been that I’m worried that the service is going to go under. And as we talked about on the script episode, suddenly things are just gone because things magically disappear in the cloud.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s actually done a pretty good job the way he’s designed it where — from what I can tell, it’s doing both. It’s saving locally and it’s a little bit like a Dropbox kind of sync solution. So even if you don’t have access to the internet, you still have the file locally and you can still work on it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So that’s, you know, not —

**John:** Progress, at least.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, it’s not bad. It’s just not quite — yeah.

**John:** So let’s talk about Final Draft and make our wild prognostications about what happens one year from now and five years from now. Do you think we will have Final Draft a year from now?

**Craig:** Oh, for sure.

**John:** Five years from now?

**Craig:** Yes, but I don’t think — it will be different management. I don’t think Mark Madnick will be around in five years.

**John:** I would guess the same way. I think there will be something like Final Draft and there will be some changes that will come out, and I bet the website will improve. I bet there will be some things that happen.

Weirdly I did look though at the Cast & Crew website, and like there’s this really abstract like woman and a bird as the photo on the lead, like, ha, that doesn’t feel like accounting software at all. Five years from now, I think someone else will be running Final Draft or there won’t be Final Draft. That’s my prediction.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s going to — it’s all about the intransigence of the — what do they call it? The work flow, the — you know, the departments that are processing these files into schedules and budgets and all this, they are just so entrenched in like, “I use this software, beep-a-boop-a-bop.”

**John:** Yeah. But so here’s the thing is that there are maybe 100 people in all of Hollywood who needs to use that software versus thousands of screenwriters. So there’s no reason why thousands of screenwriters need to use that software —

**Craig:** I’m with you.

**John:** To send in that script to a budget because any application can create that.

**Craig:** You and I are — have been saying this forever and I’m still just puzzled. I’m just puzzled by why — you know a lot of times people say, “Well I’m working on a show and the showrunner uses Final Draft. So I guess we’re all using Final Draft, blah, blah, blah.” You know, it’s so annoying.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So annoying.

**John:** It is annoying.

All right, let’s change topics. Let’s talk about franchises. This comes from Mark Rasmussen who asks, “I was at the WGA Beyond Words panel last night and made the observation that every single one of the nominated screenplays are either an adaptation, a based-on, or a biopic. And when you throw in all the sequels, prequels and remakes.”

And this actually is — ties very well into a blog post I did this last week which is called “It’s Franchises All The Way Down.” And this was a discussion we had over lunch where I was wondering aloud how many of the top 100 grossing movies were either sequels or the first film in a franchise. So they were either, you know, Star Wars 7 or they were Star Wars. They were like an original film that created a franchise. And so around the lunch table we were speculating like, out of the top 100 movies, maybe 30 of them are part of a franchise, maybe 50.” The answer is, Craig?

**Craig:** It appears to be 86.

**John:** Yes. So 86 of the top 100 movies are either the start of a franchise or they are in fact a franchise, which seems crazy. There’s only 14 movies in the top 100 that are just single movies, that that there’s no other — they’re not based on a previous movie, they’re not — they didn’t spawn a sequel, which seems crazy.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, and no. I mean —

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Look, if a movie does so well that it is on this kind of list or at least getting close to this kind of list of the 100 all-time top grossing movies, of course the studio is going to demand another one even if the original people say, “No, we don’t want to do it,” they’ll find somebody to do it. There’s just, you know, nobody wants to be the people that leave that money on the table. It’s actually kind of when you look at the ones that are single, you realize why.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s take a look at the ones that are single. So we’ll start with Titanic. You can’t sink the same boat twice. And so obviously there have been many parody videos of Titanic 2 like the boat comes back.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But no.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** 2012, Interstellar and Gravity are sort of the same boat. Like they’re not literally boats but the same idea like it’s the thing that happens exactly once. You’ve destroyed everything once and you sort of can’t go back and destroy it again.

**Craig:** Correct. So you have movies like The Lion King which because they were animated at a particular time where we weren’t doing computer animation but hand animation, they decided to make the sequels to those things for home video.

**John:** Yeah. And so for this exercise, we’re only counting the things that were theatrical sequels. So obviously the Lion King had a direct-to-video sequel but if the Lion King were to come out right now and be the same hit that it was, obviously you do the real sequels.

**Craig:** Oh, no question there would be a Lion King 2, no question.

**John:** So in the same boat with Lion King, we have Ratatouille, Up, Inside Out, and Big Hero 6. And there is discussion that Big Hero 6 is going to have a sequel. There’s nothing preventing them from doing Ratatouille, Up, or Inside Out as a sequel. Up would be kind of the hardest of them, but they’re all Pixar movies and Pixar is making other movies. So, to make the sequel to that they have to not make something else that could be a great franchise.

**Craig:** Correct. And we know the Pixar doesn’t shy away from sequels. They’ve gone through three Toy Stories, they’ve gone through three Cars movies I believe, and they are currently doing or I think their next movie is the Finding Nemo sequel.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So they don’t have a problem with sequels but you’re absolutely right, if their choice is to do an original or do a sequel, they’re going to do an original or a sequel, but they can’t do all of the sequels so…

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And yeah, like how do you make a sequel to Up, I mean, how old is Ed Asner? It would be crazy. Now, the one that’s fascinating is ET.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because ET, if it were made today would almost, I mean there’s a 100% chance of multiple sequels. But at the time, you had the biggest director in the world who had just made a bunch of the biggest movies in the world, make another biggest movie in the world and I think after that, he was like, “I don’t need to do a sequel, I’m going to make another biggest movie in the world.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so it just didn’t happen. In fact, I don’t know if you remember but ET, it wasn’t long, maybe it was 10 years, they did a theatrical re-release and it made a ton of money again.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a great movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s one of the situations where, you know, yes, if we were to make that movie now, we would do the sequel and you still could make the sequel if you wanted to, I mean, those people are still alive and around. So I’m not going to say we’re never going to have a sequel to ET, we may not have it with Steven Spielberg, but I wouldn’t say that it’s impossible to make a sequel to ET even now.

**Craig:** They will not make a sequel to ET without Steven Spielberg.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** It would just be dead on arrival I think.

**John:** We’ll see. They made a sequel to Star Wars without George Lucas.

**Craig:** Well, after George Lucas proved that it would be a great idea to make sequels without George Lucas. I mean that’s the thing. And, you know, you could say like Jurassic World is without Steven — but that was his — he produced it, it was with his blessing. It was many years later and Steven had also made two sequels.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So this, no.

**John:** Yeah. So in the show notes, I’ll have links to the original post because there was talk of a sequel to ET, and Spielberg was going to do one at one point and then decided not to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Forrest Gump, there was a sequel written. They just decided not shoot it. Inception and The Sixth Sense, both of those movies are kind of twist movies and it would be very hard to sort of go back and do them again. Inception I think is the easier one. Inception is like, well, we’ll have another adventure sort of like another heist film.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The Sixth Sense, you still have some of those people are around and alive. There’s still Haley Joel Osment. You could do a sequel to it even without Bruce Willis. There’s —

**Craig:** Sounds like a super bad idea.

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** Yeah, Inception I think actually could make a great sequel.

**John:** So DiCaprio has never done a sequel so do you do it without DiCaprio?

**Craig:** Yeah, I think you could absolutely do it without him because I don’t think that the brilliance of that movie — and I love Inception, I don’t think the brilliance of that movie comes down to Leo, although he, you know, delivered a fantastic performance. It comes down to the concept and the nature of the world it proposes. So I think you can absolutely do another one with an entirely different cast.

**John:** Yeah. So the question is, how crucial is Christopher Nolan to that thing? Could you make Inception without Christopher Nolan or would that already have a negative spin going into it?

**Craig:** I wouldn’t want to make it without him writing it with Jonathan or however he wrote that one. I mean it’s — the part that is unique and attractive is the part that came from his mind and that’s through the story. I think somebody else wonderful could shoot it. Yeah. But no, I think you need him.

**John:** Yeah. And the final movie of the top 100 is Hancock which was not a hit. It was not a bomb but it wasn’t kind of crying out for a sequel. I think if it had have been a bigger hit if there would have been a sequel.

**Craig:** Is this domestic?

**John:** This is all-time worldwide.

**Craig:** Worldwide? And Hancock, how much money did Hancock make?

**John:** Hancock made a tremendous amount of money. So it’s like 97 though on the list so it’s going to get knocked off by next year.

**Craig:** Wow, that’s crazy.

**John:** That’s crazy. That’s Will Smith for you.

**Craig:** I didn’t know.

**John:** So right now, a bunch of people in their car are screaming, “What about inflation?” And so in the same blog post, I do link through the same list of 100 that are inflation-adjusted. So of course Gone with the Wind is the top thing. When you look at the inflation-adjusted list, there are a lot more single movies in there but not as many as you would think. So it’s 49 of the top 100 are neither a sequel or the start of a franchise of the adjusted ones. So we’ve always been making sequels and they’ve always been making a lot of money. It’s just the trend has accelerated.

**Craig:** Oh, without a doubt. And so, you know, we can say I think with surety that we live in an era of sequel saturation unlike any other before it. And I had this discussion with — actually with Chris Morgan who writes the Fast and Furious sequels. So Chris and I have spent a lot of time on movies with numbers on them. And, you know, then we’re writing our own things and people are saying, “Great, and we’ll get around to that but we need you to write the sequel to this other thing.” And the frustration is, you just want to say, “Don’t you all realize that you got to have the first one to have the sequel? So when can we do the first one of something?”

**John:** Yup, and that is a thing that I’ve said so often in rooms and frustrated. It also weirdly gets thrown back at you. It’s because sometimes you’ll be pitching them an original idea and they really want to know, well, what — they’ll be thinking like, “What is the franchise here? Can I make four movies out of this?” because they’re not going to want to focus on that one movie. So it makes it especially hard to make. Honestly, most of the movies that we were showing or been talking about at the panel last night, like those movies were not sequelable movies. You’re not going to make The Martian 2 because you got him back and that is one of the frustrations is sometimes the best movies by their nature kind of can’t have a sequel.

**Craig:** Right. So the world is dividing — the studio world is dividing between movies that are made to win awards and movies that can be franchises. And then there’s this gone, lost practice of making movies for mass audiences that aren’t designed to be franchises and —

**John:** So we can’t make Fatal Attraction anymore because that’s a movie that can only happen once and it can’t be franchised.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that kind of stinks, you know. It’s the only genre I think that kind of gets a pass on it is comedy because even though they try and make comedy sequels a lot and they do, I mean, you know, you just saw Ride Along 2 but, you know, they wanted to do a sequel to Identity Thief and none of us wanted to do it. We just wanted to do other things, you know, but they didn’t freak out. They weren’t like, “What? You’re costing us a franchise.” They were like, “Okay, yeah, that would have made money but, okay, we understand.” Comedies can kind of come and go because comedies don’t turn into, with rare exception, don’t turn into these juggernauts that generate hundreds and hundreds of million dollars of profit every single time plus ancillary, god knows what, you know. When you’re talking about new things and you’re trying to get them to make a movie that they haven’t made before, they are asking how many more can we make?

**John:** Yup. And so part of the reason why they want those things to be adapted from other material is oftentimes that material has already lent itself to sequel. So there’s already a reason to believe that you’re going to be able to make sequels from this thing. The nature of the project, if it’s based on a toy, well, that’s a big toy line that has a whole bunch of different ways it can go or when they’re putting together a writer’s room for Transformers or for Terminator or for some other big property, it’s like, well they want to see like, “Could we make a bunch of movies out of this?” because while they would love to have one hit movie, they would also love to have five hit movies.

**Craig:** Absolutely. So take a movie like Jack Reacher. So we all know that it’s hard to make movies now that are what we would call adult movies, not porn adult movies, but movies about adults doing real adult things and it’s not explosions. It’s just that good old fashioned kind of thrillery movie, right. Normally, the discussion would go like this, “I want to make a movie based on this novel and we can get Tom Cruise. He’s awesome. What do you think?” “You know, we’re not really making in that space.” “Okay, well, what if I told you that there was like 50 of these books?” “Oh, really? Okay, yeah.”

**John:** Yeah, it helps.

**Craig:** Because here’s the deal, if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. If it does work, we’re going to make it over and over and over and over. And that’s where the real money comes.

**John:** Yeah. So I don’t have any great lessons to pull out of this other than to say that we kind of always made franchises, we both strongly believe that you can’t make a franchise until you make the first movie. So you have to make that first movie. You don’t always know what that movie is that’s going to spawn a franchise but everyone can sort of sense the thing that probably can’t be a franchise because of the nature of the movie. So it’s why it’s harder to make Gravity for example because there’s no possibility making a sequel from it, but sometimes you make really good movies that can only be made once.

**Craig:** I think sometimes people go to the movie theatre and they see some movie come out that is the first of its kind and they think, “Why did anyone make this?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s because they were hoping that they could make 12 of them. That’s why.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Simple as that.

**John:** And sometimes — yeah, and sometimes people make the movie that can only be made once like Inception because that filmmaker has tremendous power and in order to make the next Dark Knight, he gets to make Inception and that’s awesome. So we need to sort of celebrate when that’s possible to happen.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Indeed. One last thing about my list, you’ll notice that I didn’t count Avatar or Frozen. The things that are very close to becoming sequels, I left off that list because I strongly believe that there will be Avatar sequels. I strongly believe there will be a Frozen sequel.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I’m not counting those.

**Craig:** No, no, there absolutely will be. They’re working on it.

**John:** Jerry writes, “I’m a writer’s assistance to a produced writer-director in Seattle. My boss handed me a screenplay she wrote a while back. It is a ‘comedy’ but it ain’t funny. It’s very specific to a particular subculture and it feels dated. If and when she asks my thoughts, how do I give honest criticism without making her unhappy?”

**Craig:** Well, she’s going to ask your thoughts because she gave it to you. [laughs] Right. I assume that she gave it to you because she wanted — okay, Jerry. So you’ve got some choices here. So let’s talk Machiavellian. She’s your boss. I assume you like your job so one option is lie. Just say, “I read it. It’s so good. It’s really funny. I had a couple of thoughts that if you want, I was just going to mention to you just things to think about if you were still working on it but I like this, I like this, I like this. It’s just really good and really helpful to read.” Hmm, Machiavellian, good.

The other option is to say nothing but then you risk that day when she surprises you by saying, “Hey, did you ever read my script? Because you’re my employee,” right? And then the third option is to treat her the way you would treat any rational human being who has asked for your opinion about their work and that is to be — to provide dispassionate, honest criticism that is neither over the top nor a pulled punch in that is clear and shows that you’ve really thought about the material and provide some potential solutions or ways to solutions. But you really got to think about who you’re working for here because I don’t know.

**John:** Yup. The choice is almost always choice one.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** Let’s just be honest. And so, here’s what I say is, you know, it’s basically choice one which is to say like basically you love it, but I would say it’s easy to couch notes in terms of your reaction or something that makes it sound like it is you’re failing. So I often find — so I kind of fell off the ride here. I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to be feeling here, I didn’t quite know how these points were going to connect, and I think I was questioning this. So as long as you can talk about your subjective experience of reading it and not make it sound like it’s something that they did wrong, that can be a helpful way to sort of get your note out there without making it sound like you didn’t love it.

**Craig:** That’s a great, great way of putting it, John. I really — that’s perfect. You should do that, Jerry, what John just said.

**John:** So Jerry, do that. Our last question comes from Mark Rasmussen who asked a previous question. He asks, “How do you know when it’s time to step away or shelve a script that you feel is not working?”

**Craig:** I’m the wrong person to ask that question to because I don’t do that. First of all, I don’t think I ever have the luxury to do it. I mean, the truth is just because of the way my career started, you know, I started writing and then I was working and so with the exception of one screenplay, I’ve always had some sort of gun to my head and an expectation, a professional expectation that I’m to finish something.

**John:** I think Mark though might be asking more about the dead scripts because as we talked through those, there were a couple of things which you and I both said like I did a draft and it just wasn’t anything that was worth sort of going back to. So it may not be — I don’t think he’s saying like pull the ripcord midway through.

**Craig:** I see, I see. Okay. So after you finish, okay. You give it a little bit of time and then you kind of check your own emotions and feelings. It’s hard enough to write things when you don’t have passion and there isn’t the wind at your back. It’s nearly impossible to do it when you’re dreading it and the wind is in your face. So you just ask yourself, am I looking forward to writing this or not? And if you’re not, and you’re looking forward to writing something else, perhaps you should listen to that voice. It’s not a great voice to listen to mid-script because in mid-script, we will sometimes get the 7-year itch but after the script is done, if it hasn’t landed the way you were hoping with other people, then maybe yeah, listen to your little voice.

**John:** Craig, you’re absolutely right. And to me, what it is, is if I’m excited to do another pass because I’ve just spoken with somebody who had great thoughts and suddenly I’m engaged to do that next pass, then absolutely I should do that next pass. If I’m dreading going back into it because I’ve lost the thread, I just don’t know what it is to be doing with it, that’s a sign that I should probably be writing something else and set this thing aside. Maybe I’ll come back to it, likely I won’t, and that’s just the reality is that you’re going to be writing a lot of things in your life and that thing that you spent six months on may not be a movie and that’s okay, too.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s like, man, just let it go, you know, and if it was meant to be, it would be.

**John:** Craig, it’s time for One Cool Things. So I think you’re going to do the coolest One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** I am so excited about this. I got a tweet about this and sometimes those pan out, sometimes they don’t. This time, it panned out like beyond. I cannot wait.

All right. So there is a game, I’m a little late to this, a few months late, called Pandemic Legacy. It is a board game and we’re going to provide a link in the show notes to someone’s review of it which really goes into why this game sounds so great. I haven’t played it yet, but the description of the game, I bought it. It’s on its way.

The description of the game makes me salivate. And as far as I can tell, on the one hand, it’s a very simple strategy game. It’s — the idea is there — you and — you’re playing two to four players and each player is a CDC scientist and you’re trying to stop outbreaks of viruses across the world. There’s a Risk-like map and, you know, as viruses spread, you’re taking actions and there are actions cards, you know. So it’s strategy and resource. Okay, it’s a regular game. Here’s where it gets crazy. Two things as far as I could tell. Crazy part number one, as you play the game, when you experience certain things, there are stickers, right, and you or your opponents can choose stickers that apply to your characters. And those stickers stay there permanently meaning the next time you play that game, the game is different.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So there’s — and in fact, you can even get to a place where like your game is done, right, which is amazing. So you’re permanently changing the game every time you play the game. Awesomeness number two, there are eight sealed things in the game box and on rare occasions, it will tell you open up the secret prize in box number three and you open it up and there’s something inside and the reviewer doesn’t tell you what but he gives the example of like let’s say it’s a little motor boat and you have no idea what good is this. And then later you realize, oh my god, there’s an airborne spore that’s only, you know, on land or it has infected our planes and you need a speedboat to get from place to place. So there’s these little things and those again, those are one shots that then change the game permanently.

And then the thing that really grabbed me and this kind of gives away like how bananas this thing is and why I must play it, one of the secret boxes says, “To be opened only if you have lost four games in a row,” and no one knows what’s in there. I mean you could open it and find out but I don’t want to know. So there’s like — it’s got spoilers, it’s got meta games, it’s got permanent changes. If you — certain victories give you permanent buffs, certain failures give you scars that last permanently, so we’re going to play it. You and I are definitely playing it for sure.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** We got to think of our other two players. They’ve got to be serious, they’ve got to be people — I think they’ve got to be people that can do left and right brain because a lot of this — the way he described it is it’s a bit of like a strategy board game combined with dungeons and dragons because you are playing characters and you’re making these really difficult choices about what to do and who to save and who to kill. So, I can’t wait.

**John:** I’m excited. So I have not played Pandemic Legacy but I will tell you that in the board game community, this idea of a board game that is permanently changed by playing it is sort of a thing and so some Kickstarters now will launch where they will send you two copies of the game. So basically you will have one clean copy and one to destroy.

**Craig:** In fact, Pandemic Legacy does this as well. They have a red box and a blue box. They are identical. This way you can say, “Alright, the red box is the one I’m playing with this group, the blue box is the one I’m playing with this group.” Also, they’re referring to this game as season one.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** So they will carry on to some sequel game. I can’t wait. I’m so excited.

**John:** Very excited. My One Cool Thing is The Katering Show, With a K. It’s this Australian team. These two women, Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan. They are ostensibly doing a sort of YouTube cooking show where they’re talking about cooking gluten-free or cooking with ethical ingredients but it’s really sort of about their lives and everything falling apart around them. They are incredibly funny. It is just really well done. It’s available on YouTube in the US, probably everywhere in the world. It’s just terrific and I just love Australian comedy in general but this one was just delightful. So they’re short episodes and you’ll probably burn through all of them at once.

**Craig:** They are awesome. Years ago, I saw this one — their episode 3, We Quit Sugar, and so I’m going to watch the other ones, but I recommend that you start with that one because it’s spectacular.

**John:** So Craig, I’m watching this and I’m really questioning why no one’s figured a way to use them here because you see Rebel Wilson, you see other great Australian people who’d be able to crossover. I just feel like there’s a thing you could do with these guys that could bring them to a bigger audience.

**Craig:** Well, all right. So why don’t we see how powerful we are?

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan, you don’t know us and we don’t know you, we don’t know if you listen to the show, we don’t know if anybody you know listens to the show, but if some magic should happen, give us an email, drop us a line, and then let’s — who knows? Let’s see what happens. Yeah.

**John:** We will see what happens.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s our show this week. So our outro this week comes from Sam Tahhan. If you have an outro you would like to have us play on the podcast, write in to ask@johnaugust.com and send us a link to that. That’s also the place where you would send your emails about questions or follow-up or things we got horribly wrong in this episode.

Our episode is produced by Stuart Friedel and it’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. You can find us on iTunes. You could just search for Scriptnotes. If you search for Scriptnotes, you’ll also see our Scriptnotes app that let’s you get you to all of our back episodes including the live shows we talked about, the Beyond Words, and other interviews we’ve done with cool, famous people.

If you would like to follow us on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. He’s currently ahead of me in the Twitter count followers. I am @johnaugust. And you can find the links to all the things we talked about in the show notes. That’s at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. Craig, have a great week.

**Craig:** Hey, man, whatever.

**John:** Whatever, it’s fine.

Links:

* Vanity Fair on [the original Game of Thrones pilot](http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/02/game-of-thrones-original-pilot-bad)
* [@clmazin’s followers growth over the past two months](http://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/clmazin_20160208followers.png)
* Deadline on the [2016 WGA Beyond Words panel](http://deadline.com/2016/02/wga-nominated-writers-panel-beyond-words-no-controversy-1201696981/), which you can [listen to now with a premium subscription at scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/bonus-beyond-words-2016/)
* [Grease Live](http://www.fox.com/grease-live) on Fox
* [Scriptnotes, 222: Live from Austin 2015](http://johnaugust.com/2015/live-from-austin-2015), and [Variety’s article on the upcoming Zola movie](http://variety.com/2016/film/news/james-franco-direct-zola-stripper-saga-1201697548/) based on [this Rolling Stone article](http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/zola-tells-all-the-real-story-behind-the-greatest-stripper-saga-ever-tweeted-20151117)
* [Scriptnotes, 233: Ocean’s 77](http://johnaugust.com/2016/oceans-77), and [Dead Awake](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3778010/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_2)
* [Regus](http://www.regus.com/)
* Variety on [the acquisition of Final Draft by Cast & Crew](http://variety.com/2016/artisans/news/screenwriting-software-final-draft-cast-and-crew-1201694791/), and [the official press release](http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160202005654/en/Cast-Crew-Entertainment-Acquires-Final-Draft)
* [Highland](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/), [Slugline](http://slugline.co/), [Writer Duet](https://writerduet.com/), [Movie Magic Screenwriter](http://www.write-bros.com/movie-magic-screenwriter.html), [Fade In](http://www.fadeinpro.com/), [Amazon Storywriter](https://storywriter.amazon.com/), and [a host of other apps for writing in Fountain](http://fountain.io/apps)
* John’s blog post on [franchises all the way down](http://johnaugust.com/2016/its-franchises-all-the-way-down)
* Shut Up & Sit Down’s spoiler-free review of [Pandemic Legacy](http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/blog/post/spoiler-free-review-pandemic-legacy/)
* [The Katering Show](http://thekateringshow.com/), and the Craig-recommended [third episode](http://thekateringshow.com/episodes/3-we-quit-sugar/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Sam Tahhan ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/live-from-austin-2015).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So today’s episode of Scriptnotes was recorded live at the Austin Film Festival. There are enough bad words, you probably don’t want to listen to it in the car with your kids or at work if you work at some place that doesn’t like to have occasional swearing.

Our thanks to the Austin Film Festival for having us there. It was tremendously fun. And we look forward to seeing you next year.

**Craig Mazin:** Hello and welcome. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. This is a real church crowd. Yeah. All right.

**John:** My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and —

**Audience:** Things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**John:** Really well done. So a few of you may have listened to the podcast before. Can I see a show of hands of who’s actually heard of the Scriptnotes podcast? Oh, that’s a lot of you.

**Craig:** That’s a softball to use. You’re just —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Looking for praise now.

**John:** Yeah, we are. Basically, we’re looking for t-shirts out there in the crowd. Some of you might not know what the podcast is like. So Craig, what do we do on a weekly basis?

**Craig:** John carefully prepares a bunch of topics. He talks to his staff about how to produce the show. He lets me know what time the show will happen. I am five minutes late. I don’t know what we’re doing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I talk too much.

**John:** Oh, no. You talk just the right amount, Craig. So what are we doing today? I’m going to put you on the spot.

**Craig:** Today, I know what we’re doing.

**John:** All right. Tell us what we’re going to do today.

**Craig:** Because it’s special.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Well, we have two great guests today. We have Nicole Perlman who wrote Guardians of the Galaxy. Little movie. And we also have Steve Zissis, star of HBO’s Togetherness and writer and creator thereof. And those of you who are looking in the book, the guest list has changed a bit because of flights and whatever. I think, frankly, it has improved.

**John:** Tornadoes, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Floods.

**Craig:** We’re also going to be —

**John:** Acts of God in a church.

**Craig:** Acts of — we should be safe here.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, not me.

**John:** Listeners at home — and I realize that we’re actually in a historic sanctuary at St. David’s Episcopal Church. And so we are looking over a crowd that’s like maybe, I don’t know, 2,000 people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And they’re all in pews.

**Craig:** It’s a mega church.

**John:** We have this little, you know, satellite room, too.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a mega church.

**John:** Thank you for being here in this church with us.

**Craig:** Yeah. And we’re also, today, going to be doing this little feature that we started kind of recently where we take three different stories from the news — current stories from the news and ask, and we’ll have our guests who are in, how would we make a movie out of this. So we’ll be doing that with you guys today.

**John:** Hooray.

**Craig:** Hooray.

**John:** So this will be really fun. So this is probably my seventh Austin Film Festival. You’ve been here a bunch of times, Craig.

**Craig:** I think this is my fourth or fifth.

**John:** Yeah. So we love the Austin Film Festival. And yesterday as I arrived, I had maybe not the best start. So I wanted to talk through sort of what happened going from the plane — actually, going from the escalator to the baggage claim. I managed to make a series of faux pas that I feel if I would share them it will make me seem human and relatable.

**Craig:** Let me just point out, he’s not human.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** But he will seem human and relatable.

**John:** Yeah. So I want you to sympathize with my plight here. So I get down off the escalator and there’s a guy there waiting — maybe you’re out here in the crowd right now — with a big blank sheet of paper and said, “Mr. August, would you draw us a sketch from like, from one of your movies?” I’m like, “I didn’t illustrate any of these movies.” And so like, you know, “Sketch us something from like Frankenweenie or something from Corpse Bride.”

I’m eager to please people. I’m a teacher pleaser. And so I was like, “You know what, I’ll try something. I’ll give it a shot. Like, I’ve never drawn anything from these movies, but sure.” Tim Burton won’t mind if I draw one of his creations.

**Craig:** And did that guy’s face just go, “Uhh?”

**John:** No, no. He was really pushing me. And so I was trying to decide whether I was being punked or like to see like how badly I could draw Sparky from Frankenweenie. So I ended up drawing the female dog from Frankenweenie. And like the ball being pushed underneath the fence, and it was like a charming little scene, but completely the wrong thing to draw.

So I’m drawing this thing and I signed it, whatever, and I signed another autograph. And then people started to think like, “Oh, that must be a famous person.” So random people started to like try take photos with me as if I was a famous person. And they have no idea who I am in their photos.

That’s by far the better part of what happened.

**Craig:** This is what he thought would make him sound human and relatable.

**John:** No. No, no, no. No, wait. Because the whole thing is about to flip.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So as I’m waiting for my bag in baggage claim, there’s a guy who I recognized who was on the flight. I was like, “Is that an actor? I can’t picture him.” But he seems familiar, and he’s wearing sunglasses. And there was a limousine driver who was meeting him there. And so I was like, “He’s somebody famous. Who is that person?”

And then I could see the driver’s little card that he would hold up. And it was flipped over and it said “Raimi.” I’m like, “That’s Sam Raimi.” And so I’m like, “Oh, I should say something to Sam Raimi because we have mutual friends. I mean, like Laura Ziskin and other folks.

And so I finally, like, sort of screw up my courage and say, like, “Hey, Sam. Sam, it’s John. It’s John August.” And he just completely stone faces me. Like does not acknowledge me whatsoever, like I’m just a crazy stalker person. So I became that stalkery person who sort of wanted to, like, get his attention.

So this other nice guy who might be in the audience here today said, “That’s not Sam Raimi.” It wasn’t Sam Raimi. It was Sam Raimi’s brother apparently. And so —

**Craig:** You met Ted Raimi?

**John:** Ted Raimi is here.

**Craig:** Ted Raimi I would have thought would have been like, “No. But let’s talk.”

**John:** No.

**Craig:** You know —

**John:** Ted Raimi shut down.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And so this is no slam on Ted Raimi. This is no slam on Sam Raimi who wasn’t even here to defend himself. It’s just this is a situation at trying to get my bag, I managed to humiliate myself kind of twice. So the tornadoes in Austin have been, like, really a highlight after that point.

**Craig:** I’m really sorry that that happened.

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

**Craig:** I care about you.

**John:** Thanks. That’s nice to hear.

We’re going to try something very new and very different that we’ve never done before. So back on our 100th episode of the show, we did this thing where underneath the people’s seats, there was a golden ticket hidden. And if you have that golden —

**Craig:** Don’t go looking.

**John:** Or, maybe go looking but you won’t find anything.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Underneath one seat, there was a golden ticket and that person won a very special prize. So today, we’re going to try doing a raffle of a very special prize. So as you guys came in, each of you should have gotten a little raffle ticket, hopefully most of you. And —

**Craig:** Did you throw your raffle ticket out? You ate it? What did you do?

**John:** You ate it? Yeah. It wasn’t edible, no. I guess it technically is edible, just not really good.

**Craig:** Not tasty.

**John:** Not tasty.

So this is Annie Hayes, everyone. Annie Hayes is our Austin Stuart. Say hi to Annie Hayes. So Annie Hayes is helping us out.

Craig Mazin, will you pick one ticket from there?

**Craig:** Yes. Oh, so many. Okay, I got it.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I have it.

**John:** So let’s read the number and see if it matches up to anybody here.

**Craig:** Six. Good. So far so good. Two. One. I think everybody started with 621. Zero. One. Zero.

**Amanda Murad:** Oh, that’s me.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Come on up.

**Craig:** Let’s see. I’m going to hold on, I’m going to figure out what your name is. It’s Amanda.

**Amanda:** Amanda.

**Craig:** Amanda Murad.

**Amanda:** Murad.

**Craig:** Murad.

**Amanda:** Close.

**Craig:** I thought it was Norad for a second.

**John:** That would be cool.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** But Murad’s great too.

**Amanda:** Okay.

**Craig:** No, no. It’s not that cool.

**John:** So are you a screenwriter?

**Amanda:** I am a screenwriter.

**John:** And do you live in the Austin area or are you just here for this conference?

**Amanda:** Just here for the conference. I live in LA.

**John:** Oh, holy cow.

**Craig:** Great.

**Amanda:** Yeah.

**John:** Is this your first time in the Austin Film Festival?

**Amanda:** It is.

**John:** And how is it so far?

**Amanda:** It is really fun.

**Craig:** It just got awesome.

**Amanda:** It just got way more awesome.

**John:** What are you writing right now?

**Amanda:** I am working on my second pilot.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** And have you only done TV stuff so far? Have you written a feature? What else have you written?

**Amanda:** I’ve written one feature. But I have two pilots and a play.

**John:** Cool. That’s awesome. In these envelopes, they’re marked A, B, and C, there are three different items. And I want you to pick which envelope you would like to open.

**Amanda:** Whose fate am I deciding in this decision?

**John:** Your own fate.

**Craig:** I like her sense of nervousness and caution though, I have to say.

**John:** Yes. She’s not just blindly rushing in.

**Craig:** Yeah. She’s not like, “Okay.” No. She’s like, “Okay.” So A, B, or C?

**Amanda:** Okay. The letter A is usually pretty good to me.

**John:** All right. Great.

**Amanda:** A.

**John:** A. So take this envelope but don’t open it yet.

**Amanda:** Okay.

**John:** And we are going to open up one other envelope. So I want a vote from the crowd. Which of these other two envelopes should I open up?

**Audience:** B.

**John:** Everybody who wants me to open up envelope C, raise your hand.

**Craig:** C.

**John:** Yeah. All right. We’re going to open up envelope C. Open up envelope C, Craig.

**Craig:** Okay. All right.

**John:** Let’s see what’s inside.

**Craig:** See, he gives me stuff to do and everything, keeps me involved. Okay. Oh, this was the good one.

**John:** Yeah, this was the good one.

**Craig:** This was the best one.

**John:** All right. Yeah, it’s a really good one.

**Craig:** Just let her have it. [laughs]

**John:** Maybe we should.

**Craig:** No, because she’s so normal. I mean we had like a chance of getting a total freak. Not that — I mean, there’s at least one of you in here who’s —

**John:** Yeah. So there’s a thing which I was going to do with all this but apparently, you chose so well or the audience chose for you. Maybe it’s the audience who chose for you.

**Craig:** You know what? The audience chose this for you.

**John:** That’s really the audience choice.

**Amanda:** Thank you, guys, so much.

**John:** So what this card says is, “John and Craig will read your script.” If you would like to.

**Amanda:** Yes.

**John:** Great.

**Amanda:** Yes.

**Craig:** And we’ll talk about it on the show. And you can come on the show.

**Amanda:** Yes. Yes.

**Craig:** Great. Or you can have a t-shirt.

**John:** Yeah.

**Amanda:** I’m going to pick C.

**John:** All right. Well done.

**Craig:** C.

**Amanda:** The letter A has failed me.

**John:** Yeah. Amanda, at whatever point you feel like you have a script that you want to send in, just send it in to Stuart at ask@johnaugust. I’ll remind him that you were the one who won this competition and the audience won it for you, really.

**Amanda:** I will be sure to thank you all in my email.

**John:** And we look forward to receiving it.

**Amanda:** All right. Thank you, guys.

**John:** Amanda, thanks so much.

**Craig:** Envelope B was money, by the way.

**John:** Yeah, exactly.

So the idea behind that was the Monty Hall problem which is essentially we were going to open up one thing and then she would decide whether she wanted to keep or switch and it involved math and statistics and probability.

**Craig:** These guys messed it up.

**John:** No. You guys did a nice thing. You did this all for her.

**Craig:** They did. Yeah, they did.

**John:** They did.

Let us get to our very first guest of the podcast.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Nicole Perlman is the writer of Guardians of the Galaxy. And she’s writing a bunch of other stuff right now and we cannot wait to talk with her. She was a guest way back when, right when that movie came out. And let’s welcome Nicole Perlman up to talk to us again.

**Craig:** Nicole Perlman.

**Nicole Perlman:** Thank you.

**John:** Nicole Perlman, you were on the show before. You had just written Guardians of the Galaxy which was a giant, giant hit. What has changed in your life since we’ve talked to you last, in writing?

**Nicole:** I’ve descended into heroin use and I’ve lost all my friends and family. [laughs]

**Craig:** God, I know how that goes.

**Nicole:** Yeah. Totally. No, it’s been good. It’s been really crazy. It’s been so crazy that I sort of fled to San Francisco. I was like, “Oh, too much stuff. Too much good. Must run north.” So no, it’s been very good. Lots of projects. I’m doing Captain Marvel —

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**Nicole:** With Meg LeFauve. So that has been cool. We’re really in the early stages but we’re having a lot of fun. And I’m doing a project for Fox, an adaptation of Hugh Howey’s Wool Trilogy, and that has been very cool.

That guy, by the way, really knows how to live. He wrote a best-selling novel and he’s like, “I’m going to go build a boat and sail around the world. See you.” And he like checked out. So that’s what he’s doing which is really cool.

**John:** I mean you’re checking out to some degree.

**Nicole:** Totally.

**John:** Like you’re keeping out of the rat race.

**Nicole:** Yeah.

**John:** And so what really prompted the decision? Was it just you had enough stuff on your plate that you actually could leave and —

**Nicole:** Yes. That was it.

**John:** That’s the response?

**Nicole:** And also, people just kept asking me to be on their podcasts and it was just —

**John:** Yeah, it was such a huge drag.

**Nicole:** It was a huge drag.

**Craig:** It’s the worst.

**John:** Yeah, I mean, Craig, I tell you, you got to back off a little bit.

**Craig:** I mean, I don’t know what those podcasts are because I don’t listen to podcasts. But I know what it’s like.

**Nicole:** No, it’s good. It’s probably just for like a year. I’m in LA every week for work but I felt like I could just do it. I spend less time commuting by flying in and out than I did when I was in LA in my car, which is kind of crazy.

**John:** That’s actually scary, yeah.

**Nicole:** It’s true though, yeah.

**John:** So talk to us about — obviously, you can’t give us any character details or really plot details about Captain Marvel.

**Nicole:** Yeah.

**John:** But what is it like writing with another writer? Is this the first time you’ve had a writing partner on something?

**Nicole:** It’s not the first time. I’m working with another writing partner on a spec, my first spec in a long time. So that is another experience. It’s been really good.

Meg and I are really, really just starting out. And she comes from a Pixar background so she’s really used to collaborating. So I think we’re still feeling it out a little bit. The being on the phone part, I’m very meek on the phone when other people are talking. I’m very respectful. I’m just, like, “No, no. You go ahead. No, no. You go ahead.” You know, and —

**Craig:** You got to lean in, girl.

**Nicole:** You got to be like, [roars], “Listen to me.” So I think that is — because that goes over really well, too.

**John:** Yeah, it does.

**Craig:** I don’t think that’s a good idea, actually. I don’t want you to do that.

**John:** But you need to get a Groot voice is really what you have to do.

**Nicole:** A Groot voice for sure. For sure.

**John:** Simple things.

**Nicole:** But Meg is wonderful and so she’s really good about character. And I think she comes from a non-genre background and so there’s a little bit of me being like, “Oh, you know, so there’s this history of this type of character, you know, we don’t want to do that because it’s been done that way.” And she’s like, “But we want to have this with character and integrity.” I’m like, “What? Integrity? What? What’s that?” So she’s great. And I think that we balance each other out in a good way. But again, it’s early days yet.

**John:** So one of the challenges would seem to be that you have to come to a consensus between the two of you about what it is you want to do and how you want this movie to work and how you want the character the work. But also then you have to be able to pitch in a unified sense to Marvel. And Craig sort of loves Kevin Feige or sort of really admires Kevin Feige.

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** And so that must be a challenge of like how you want to do your work and also fit into this greater picture. Do you have to be mindful of everything else that’s happening in the Marvel Universe to do your one story?

**Nicole:** Well, you know, without giving away anything that would get me, you know, excommunicated, basically Kevin and his group of brain trust people go and figure out where we fit in and then have let us know where we fit in. And so Meg and I gave them a list of questions, very long and epic questions and then potential answers to those questions. And they, you know, returned from their mountain top retreat which they [laughs] went to and then returned from and said they —

**Craig:** Handed you tablets.

**Nicole:** Pretty much. Pretty much. And so that’s what we’re working with now. And we’re also really in the phase of reading through massive packets of information, you know, which is always fun.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** I love that you’re writing a spec at the same time you’re doing all this other stuff.

**Nicole:** Yes.

**Craig:** In the wake of the success that you’ve had and all of the stuff that they’re now asking you to do, how do you manage to carve these spaces out and keep these things separate? Because you’re working on, you said, Captain Marvel and a spec and —

**Nicole:** The Hugh Howey Wool.

**Craig:** The Wool.

**Nicole:** Yeah. And I just sold a sequel to a movie that was my favorite movie from childhood but I can’t talk about it yet, so that’s going on. And then I’m also doing a virtual reality project with Steven Spielberg.

**Craig:** That’s five.

**Nicole:** And then I’m also doing a comic book —

**Craig:** I’m sorry, with who?

**Nicole:** Nobody. Nobody. Just a real, you know, up and coming —

**Craig:** So that’s five things.

**Nicole:** Yeah. And then a comic book series, too.

**Craig:** Six things.

**Nicole:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I’ll ask my question again. I mean, how do you keep it all — I mean, do you just push a few things off?

**Nicole:** Well, honestly, it’s just because — and I’m sure you guys have experienced this — that things go into holding patterns. And especially with Marvel, the movie doesn’t come out for three-and-a-half years, so it’s got a lot of long pauses in between submissions of stuff. So with that and with the other projects, too, there’s a long waiting period.

The people who’ve made me wait the longest are the Marvel publishing people. And that’s like a 20-page thing. You send them and like months go by and then they’re like, “Good work.” “Okay.”

**Craig:** So in a situation like yours, you’re almost kind of hoping that they’ll take time.

**Nicole:** Right, exactly. So it’s okay. I think the more projects you have to fill the empty spaces, the less fear, that existential dread of like, “What’s happened to my projects?” You know, they just take a while and so that helps.

**Craig:** Yeah, because all of your eggs aren’t in that basket. But then there is that sense of being overwhelmed.

**Nicole:** Yes.

**Craig:** Do you have that?

**Nicole:** All the time. All the time.

**Craig:** Right now?

**Nicole:** I’m just veering between sheer panic and like different kinds of panic. Like panic of like “I have nothing going on. My career is going to crash.” And “Oh my, god. I’m going to be overwhelmed and die and never get anything done.” So, yes.

**Craig:** Sounds just like me.

**Nicole:** I’m really happy all the time.

**Craig:** Right. Of course. So what do you do to deal with that?

**Nicole:** I moved to San Francisco.

**Craig:** Of course, yes. Yes, of course.

**John:** So I want to get back to the idea of writing a spec. And so what was it? It was an idea that was just burning that demanded to be written? What was the —

**Nicole:** What it was, was that I’m doing a lot of big, fantastical, world-building projects and I wanted to do something that was contained, low-budget, very character-driven, just a cast of three or four people, and possibly something that would be able to, you know, produce or direct.

My writing partner is a writer/director and so we wanted to do something that was manageable. Which of course my representatives were like, “You realize you’re not going to get paid anything for that.” And I’m like, “Yeah. But get excited about it. Like, you know, get so excited about this guys.” And they’re like, “Yeah. Mm-hmm. That’s great.” So it’s basically what we’re doing in spare time to remind me that I am a writer [laughs] and not a cog in the machine.

**John:** Yeah, it’s the Joss Whedon do a smaller thing in between the two giant projects.

**Nicole:** Exactly. Exactly, yeah.

**John:** Cool. So Scott Neustadter was supposed to be joining us here up on the panel. And Scott Neustadter couldn’t be here because the airport is completely shut down. So like one of many panels who’s not going to be here today. Luckily, Steve Zissis has agreed to fill in. This is Steve Zissis —

**Craig:** Upgrade.

**John:** Who is the co-creator of Togetherness. Steve Zissis, come up here.

**Steve Zissis:** So what’s the processional hymn?

**Craig:** I’m Jewish. And this is not Greek Orthodox at all. At all. Like the two of us — actually, three of us. And he —

**John:** I’m good. I’m good. The android faith alone —

**Craig:** Fucking white privileged man.

**John:** Yeah. It’s so good.

**Craig:** I’m good.

**John:** I’m good.

**Steve:** What are you?

**John:** I’m sort of, like, random protestant.

**Steve:** Oh, random protestant.

**Nicole:** Random protestant.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** Culturally. Steve, thank you so much for filling in.

**Steve:** Of course.

**John:** But thank you also for you great TV show, Togetherness.

**Steve:** Thank you.

**John:** Tell us how that came to be because this is an HBO show. It was an idea that you sparked with a Duplass brother and is now going into its second season.

**Steve:** It started, I guess, with Jay Duplass and I fooling around in his backhouse trying to do something creative together. And —

**John:** It sounds terrible.

**Steve:** Yeah. We just wanted to do something creative. And at first we started recreating ’80s soap opera scenes from like YouTube clips. And then Jay and I would act them out and we would record them. We didn’t really have a goal in mind.

**Craig:** How high were you guys? [laughs]

**Steve:** We just stole someone’s lithium. But then that just started snowballing into something, like, “Okay, we need to do something more structured.” And then we really borrowed upon our own lives and created a relationship show that was very autobiographical.

I was waiting tables at the time. And I would get off of work and stay on the phone with Jay because he was on the graveyard shift with his newborn child. So we would work out the story and the season arc for the first season during the graveyard shift, basically, on the phone.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**Steve:** And that’s how it started.

**John:** So by that point, you were thinking about this as probably a half-hour for cable and it’s going to revolve around these central characters, this family, this guy who’s moving in. You had all those dynamics sort of figured out early on.

**Steve:** Actually, initially, it was just going to center around the Alex character who was my character. But then when we went to HBO, they were like, “We love it. We really want to work with you. But we’re looking for relationship shows that could be a four-hander.” And we were like, “Yeah. Yeah. We could do that.”

We went back to the drawing board and — I mean, it was tough because we had built something centered around one character. So we were panicked for a little bit. But ultimately, HBO was right.

**Craig:** Well, I love moments like this because you never — we just did this show last week about William Goldman’s Nobody Knows Anything, which is not nobody knows anything but nobody knows anything. You never know.

So these people hand down these edicts sometimes and our first reaction is, “You know, goddamn. I mean, sure go ahead and turn it into whatever you want. It’s not something that we bled over the graveyard shift while he’s up with his kid and I’m slaving away waiting tables. No, no. Your whim is my command.”

But then sometimes they’re right. And I love that you guys did it. Because the truth is, what was the worst that happened? You tried and it didn’t work, right? But it does work. It’s amazing.

**Steve:** And HBO in general is really — they’re pretty hands off with notes. I mean, once they sort of, you know, tap you, they want you to do your thing. And they’ve been pretty hands off since then, actually.

**John:** So when did you actually start writing? So had you written anything before you went in to meet with HBO?

**Steve:** So we wrote the initial pilot called Alexander the Great which was centered around my character. And then they said, “Let’s go back to the drawing board.” And then it took us about four months to come up with the pilot for Togetherness. We went in and shot that. And then, you know, I was still waiting tables and rubbing rabbits’ feet. And we got the green light for this first season.

**John:** Great. So you turned in this pilot script. They said yes. They blessed you to go shoot a pilot. But then there’s that long waiting process, you know, whether it’s a show that they’re going to actually want to put on the air.

**Steve:** Yeah. And we had had the first season sort of arced out. We didn’t write the first season until after we got the green light.

**Craig:** And then the panic of success set in and you realized, “Oh my, god.” I mean, were you overwhelmed by the thought that you had to do the thing that took you four months again and again and again and again?

**Steve:** All I remember is calling my mom and crying. And I remember the last day at the restaurant, my last shift, I was so happy. There was such a weight lifted off of me. But I was trying to contain my joy because I didn’t want my fellow friends that I’ve been like slaving with in hell to look at me.

**Craig:** You’re nice.

**Steve:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’re nice.

**Steve:** You know, I didn’t want to —

**Craig:** Right.

**Steve:** So then I got home and, you know, exploded.

**Craig:** Oh. It’s such —

**Steve:** Literally.

**Craig:** And then — [laughs]

**Steve:** I exploded.

**Craig:** I exploded.

**Steve:** Like the blimp that was released from — .

**Craig:** Well, we’ll be getting to that.

**Nicole:** Yes, they will.

**Craig:** I see you’ve done your homework. You were mostly following the career path of an actor. Is that correct?

**Steve:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Prior to Togetherness? Had you done a lot of writing before that? This was kind of the first stab at it.

**Steve:** The only real writing I had been doing is the countless improvisational —

**Craig:** He’s an improvisational master, by the way.

**Steve:** Which I know isn’t really writing.

**Craig:** Master of improvisation.

**Steve:** But Jay, Mark, and I had been doing really highly improvised independent films since, like, the early 2000s, even in 1999. And then it just sort of evolved out of that style.

**Craig:** For your show, I get the sense that it’s not quite like the Curb Your Enthusiasm model where you’re scripting it but you’re almost scripting your own improv. That’s kind of the sense I get from it.

**Steve:** Well, like Curb and I think, like, the show like The League, they go in with just an outline.

**Craig:** Right.

**Steve:** But our show is completely scripted, really tight, really structured. But we just find that, like, the golden nuggets in the scenes and oftentimes the funniest jokes are the ones that are found in the moment. Even the emotional scenes, not just the comedic scenes. Like we talk about it like, sort of like setting up like lightning rods, and then just creating the perfect conditions for lighting to strike.

**Craig:** Right.

**Steve:** You don’t always get gold and there’s a lot of trial and error. But if you’re patient, you will.

**John:** Now, on a show like Togetherness, do you have — obviously you don’t have act breaks, but do you have a template in your head of like over the course of an episode these are the kinds of things that need to happen. We need to be able to take a character from this place to this place. We need to like hit certain milestones. Did you and Jay figure out sort of what the show is like, you know, structurally?

**Steve:** Yeah. We had a good sense of where the first two seasons were going to be in terms of a story arc and character arc. And then now, we’re preparing to write season three. And for the first time, we’re having to really — we sort of have an open map. We can create our own map at this point. So we’re finding new things now with season three, because the first two seasons were sort of already mapped out in our heads. So now, we’re writing a new map.

**Craig:** It’s such a great cast, too. I mean, everybody —

**Steve:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Everybody is spectacular. You know, the first time I saw the show — I tuned because you know I don’t watch anything. You guys know that. But I watched the show because I’m friends with Amanda Peet and she was in a movie I did and her husband and everything. And so I wanted to see it and there was something about it.

I was one of your first Twitter followers. Because you just — well, there was something, like, you know, I don’t know why I’m attracted to sort of schlumpy side stacks. Yes. Something about you. Something about ethnic, sad men — [laughs]

Like that face right there. It’s like, it’s all I want, like that. Like, look at me moving towards it. [laughs]

No, I mean, honestly, you’re the best. I mean it’s a great show. I’m just so glad that you — I love stories like yours but we don’t hear them a lot. Now, what we do, in a way we celebrate them, I think, sometimes more than we should because a lot of people who are waitering, they’re like, “Fuck it, man. Steve did it. I’m next.” Probably not. Probably not. It’s incredibly rare. So it’s so exciting that it happened, that the incredibly rare thing happened to you.

**Steve:** And I grew up with Mark and Jay back in New Orleans. We’re all from New Orleans. We all went to the same high school. And we all sort of came across this method of filmmaking sort of by accident. Out of necessity, really, because, you know, we were all broke. [laughs] So, you know, this whole John Cassavetes style, we could say that it was our intention from the beginning but it actually wasn’t. Like Jay and Mark’s first attempt to make a feature film was a complete disaster. It was a failure.

**Craig:** Because they were trying to make a real —

**Steve:** They were trying to make something big. They were trying to emulate the Coen Brothers. They failed miserably. They borrowed $100,000 from their father who was like a very successful lawyer in New Orleans. And they squandered — like it was a complete failure. [laughs]

**Craig:** Was he angry?

**Steve:** No, not at all. Because he’s —

**Craig:** Cool dad.

**Steve:** Yeah. He’s a great guy and so supportive.

**Craig:** I would be pissed off. My kid blows $100,000, I’m pissed.

**Steve:** But then after those failures and those failed attempts that they started to find their own voice and style just sort of out of necessity, which is cool.

**Craig:** And you were part of that from the start.

**Steve:** Yeah. I did their first experimental films. I did shorts with them. And I loved sort of the improv style of their way.

**Craig:** Right.

**Steve:** It just fits with me well.

**Craig:** Yeah, excellent.

**Steve:** Thank you.

**John:** So because we have two of you up here, we want to talk through this feature we usually do called, “How would this be a movie?” And I asked on Twitter for people for suggestions. I’m like, “What should we talk about for how to make into a movie?” And the three best suggestions we got were Zola. People who’ve done their homework, Zola is sort of amazing. So I want to talk through sort of what that is.

We’re going to talk about Zola, we’re going to talk about the rogue blimp, and we’re going to talk about George Bell, The Lonely Death of George Bell. And try to figure out how to make these into a movie or a TV series. Or if someone approaches you with this idea, how do you run with it?

So let’s get some back story on Zola. Actually, I took notes because I’m the preparer. So Zola, if you don’t know is —

**Craig:** I don’t need notes. I could do this just fine.

**John:** Just —

**Craig:** No, no.

**John:** No, it’s fine. I’ll —

**Craig:** No, no. I’m done.

**John:** Just for everybody else, Craig. They might need it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Steve:** We’ll just ‘prov it.

**John:** What was the white boyfriend’s name?

**Craig:** Jarrett.

**John:** Oh, he’s got it. All right, so for people who —

**Craig:** I don’t drop mics because it’s not good for the microphone.

**John:** Yeah. So for people who’ve missed out on the story so far, Zola is a Twitter account. And basically, she had like this epic tweet of like 174 tweets that detailed this wild experience she had in March. And you read this and it is amazing and sort of tweet by tweet sort of going through this long saga of what happened.

Her name is Zola. She meets this girl named Jess at a Hooters. They strike up a friendship. They talk about hoeing. And they exchanged phone numbers. And Zola agrees to go on this trip.

**Craig:** Just to dance.

**John:** Just to dance.

**Craig:** She’s not a hoe.

**John:** She’s not a hoe. She’s a dancer.

**Craig:** And she doesn’t know that the other girl is a hoe either.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** She knows she’s a dancer. That’s it.

**John:** Yeah, but —

**Craig:** She’s not out there trapping —

**Nicole:** She didn’t seem that surprised though. She’s like, “Oh, yeah.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** She doesn’t seem that surprised because even early on they were talking about hoeing. So like —

**Craig:** There was some hoe talk.

**John:** Yeah. Even not if profession, it’s — they’re sex worker adjacent, if nothing else.

**Craig:** I ain’t touching that one.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I’ve gotten in trouble before.

**John:** So the characters we have are Zola. We have Jess. We have the black pimp whose name is eventually revealed to be Z something.

**Craig:** Z.

**John:** Z something. We have Jarrett and Jarrett’s fiancée who shows up every once in a while and is a complete character of mystery. But you guys looked through these tweets and someone approaches you with this, you know, Nicole Perlman, what is a movie you spin out of there? What’s interesting to you as a movie out of the Zola story?

**Nicole:** Nobody would ever give me [laughs] this project to adapt. I was impressed at her excitement and her enthusiasm about this and she was like, “And then, and then, oh no but wait, oh no, but wait,” you know. And that part was great but I actually kind of lost the thread a little bit, I was just like ah — so I’m going to be lame about it. But I kind of loved the idea of them talking about hoeing like they were farmers, you know. They’re just hoeing and —

**John:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Nicole:** That was the twist like —

**Craig:** I think we’re going to pass on you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t think that that’s —

**Nicole:** All right, that wasn’t mine —

**Craig:** But thanks for coming in.

**Nicole:** That’s okay, that’s okay.

**John:** Craig, if someone approached you with that story, do you tell the story as just that? Because it felt like a Magic Mike kind of like road trip sort of, like Magic Mike XXL which is —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Just following a series of events and perspective.

**Craig:** Well, it’s so crazy that if you try and tell it, it’s just going to seem like you told it again because the story that she lays out is in bananas. The one way to think about it is, like I was thinking about how sad it was. I mean, the woman that is the actual hoe and she’s getting beaten up and snatched and a man gets shot in the face. This is terrible.

And yet, we’re all reading and everyone’s like, “Oh, my god, you got to read what Zola wrote.” Like that’s an interesting movie to me is that somebody types up something like that and it becomes viral. Meanwhile, the people that are in that have no idea and they’re out there somewhere —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And going through something real. That could be kind of interesting because the nature of these viral things, there’s something really creepy about how it separates us from the real. Someone died. That guy murdered someone.

**John:** Yes, shot them in the face.

**Craig:** And they beat that woman up.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Plus the hoeing.

**Steve:** Is the Twitter account verified?

**John:** Yeah, the Twitter account is not verified, so let’s talk about that possibility.

**Steve:** Okay. I’m not sure about the movie, you guys would be better for that. But I think at the end, there should be voice over throughout, we should see the little emoticons on the screen, the tweets, and at the end of the film, there should be a 72-year-old grandmother in Ohio —

**Craig:** [laughs] Right. Catfishing everyone.

**Steve:** That has catfished the whole thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**Nicole:** That would be amazing. That would be so great.

**Craig:** That’s pretty great. That’s pretty great. And like her grandson is there in the background playing “Grandma, almost done.”

**John:** So we’ve talked about this on the podcast before, who was the writer who pretended to be much younger than she was and was Felicity. Was that Riley Weston?

**Craig:** Riley Weston.

**John:** Riley Weston. So it would be fascinating if it were a Riley Weston situation where somebody is basically spitting a giant yarn for what all this is. It has such a feeling of truth though. I also had the question about whether all those tweets were written in advance or was she writing them one by one.

**Nicole:** I think she was writing them all in one stream of consciousness.

**Craig:** I think so too, yeah.

**John:** But it’s so hard to, I mean I have such a hard time fitting everything I want to say into one tweet. So to be able to stretch that out over —

**Craig:** She just got to that character limit, hit return and kept going, you know, I can hear the clacking of her nails on the laptop. And she’s like “Bam, ding ding ding ding.”

**John:** Yeah. And yet it had a structure to it. She just kind of knew where to start and she knew — she was very good about reminding you, this person you saw before, like I didn’t know his name, but now, I know his name was Z, and it was brilliantly done to me.

**Steve:** Yes. And just when the energy started to wane, she said, “Only four more tweets till the end.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I know like she actually knew.

**Steve:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You think that there’s — you think grandma —

**Steve:** It’s a 72-year-old grandmother. That just graduated from the Iowa writing program.

**Craig:** Nothing good comes out of that.

**John:** Nothing good possibly can.

**Craig:** All right, all right. That’s pretty solid.

**John:** Right. Let’s talk about rogue blimp. So for people who are listening to this, way after the fact, there was a giant blimp, actually particularly an aerostat that was designed for East Coast defense. Basically it wasn’t a camera, but it had a like long range radar for detecting incoming missiles that could hit the East Coast. It broke free of its mooring and all hell sort of broke loose. And so it ended up dragging a cable behind it that did not have power and did other things. This is the sort of a little more in your wheelhouse.

**Nicole:** Yeah.

**John:** And a producer comes to you and is like, Nicole —

**Craig:** [laughs] She’s written a ton of blimp movies.

**Nicole:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, indeed.

**Nicole:** A whole sub-genre.

**Craig:** Like another one. I can do more than blimps. [laughs]

**Nicole:** Dammit, I’m so pigeon-holed.

**John:** What kind of movie is the blimp movie to you?

**Nicole:** It seemed like a wacky sort of like two guys think they’re going to get in the Goodyear blimp but they choose the wrong blimp and then they cut it free. And then because of that they end up almost starting World War III because they keep — I don’t know, but I could see it with the whole cruise missiles with blimps, by the way. I was like that’s how we detect incoming cruise missiles, is with a blimp? You know, that just seems really shoddy. [laughs] I was really disappointed in the Department of Defense. I was like, guys, seriously.

And also the whole Google blimps. Somebody has to get something mixed up with the Google blimp. And I thought it would be fun if they — If they took off on the sort of the like cross country trip in this NSA blimp not realizing it wasn’t the Goodyear blimp and causing a whole bunch of problems with the DOD thinking there was some sort of terrorist attack.

**John:** Steve, what kind of movie do you make out of the blimp?

**Steve:** Well when I saw NORAD, it made me think of the 80s movie WarGames.

**Nicole:** Yes, totally.

**Steve:** So like tonally I think WarGames would be a [laughs] good match. But I think it should be about the guy that was holding on to the blimp, you know, by the line there. And what happened to him the day before.

**John:** Yeah, so it’s sort of like Up but bigger.

**Steve:** Why did he — yeah, like Up. Exactly. Why did his grip — why did he lose his grip?

**John:** I see the campaign for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and she’s — who’s carrying in the balloons and like it’s sort of like that, but it looks — you need to never let go.

**Craig:** Never let — that’s the tagline.

**John:** Never let go. Craig Mazin, what movie would you make out of the blimp?

**Craig:** You know what, I think you could make a really good Pixar kind of movie about a blimp. Because I love the fact that it seems so anachronistic. And I like the idea that this blimp has been there for so long and he’s just blimping along protecting America and we don’t know. And he just follows orders and he just never doesn’t do his job. And then they come in they’re like, “Oh, you know, we’re replacing blimps, we’re replacing it all, you’re done.” And he’s so depressed. And he basically pulls himself away to just go. And then he kind of goes on this journey that may — helps him find his purpose again and he meets other things that float.

I mean there’s, you know, like dandelions and —

**John:** There’s a cloud.

**Craig:** A cloud, you know. But the blimp finds his, you know — it’s basically, he’s committing suicide is what he’s doing but, you know — so it’s — I think he could — I don’t know —

**Nicole:** It’s really heartwarming.

**Steve:** I think for sure, at the end credits, there should be a Led Zeppelin song.

**Nicole:** Ah.

**Craig:** Nah. No, no. Yay. [laughs]

**John:** It’s improv. Only good ideas — yes and…

**Craig:** Yes and.

**John:** The other —

**Craig:** Yes and no.

**John:** Yes and. Another possibility is a — the Michael Bay version is essentially it’s stealth because essentially like the death blimp sort of goes out there and you cannot possibly stop it. And so like if it has a sentience, if it has a thing it’s trying to do. There’s something also kind of like slow motion zombie about it because it’s not fast, it just like — it’s a path of destruction, it’s like the tornadoes this morning. It’s just that it’s going to move through in a straight line.

**Craig:** So even more blimps start coming and they just keep coming.

**John:** Yeah. Absolutely.

**Nicole:** It’s kind of like that — what is it, Rubber with the one about the tire?

**John:** Oh yeah the tire, yeah.

**Nicole:** It’s just like this rabid tire that’s running over people. It’s just like that. It’s like the cable very slowly dragging and causing devastation. It would be like, “No,” and it just keeps coming.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s a little low stakes. It just — shoot the — just takes the —

**Nicole:** You just step to the side —

**Craig:** Just shoot the blimp — yeah.

**Nicole:** One foot.

**Craig:** It’s a blimp.

**John:** Yeah. But the fact that it just keeps coming. And they had to shoot it down. That’s actually the funniest thing. It’s like —

**Craig:** They do. Use a shotgun.

**John:** They use a shotgun to shoot a blimp.

**Craig:** But by the way — I’m sorry but if that’s Pixar and they shoot him at the end and he deflates. You’re going to feel, like that will kill you.

**John:** It’s Old Yeller. It totally is.

**Craig:** It’s freaking Old Yeller, but then somebody finds him and inflates him again. You see what I’m saying? It’s like, let’s go make that, guys. Somebody just steal it. I mean, it’s gold.

**John:** All right. Another option, you have the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, one of those gets loose and you have to go after that thing and shoot that thing down and that’s pretty good. So Underdog gets loose, and you have to shoot down Underdog.

**Craig:** Underdog.

**John:** Yeah. That’s how I would do it. Or Snoopy. One of them would do it.

Let’s get to our third possibility which is, well maybe there’s a comedy but it’s The Lonely Death of George Bell. This is a New York Times story.

**Craig:** Hehe. Hahahahaha.

**John:** Hahahaha. Written by N. R. Kleinfield. And it talks through the death of this man, George Bell, who was found in his apartment, he’d been dead for about a week. He was a giant, obese, he was a hoarder, everything was sort of awful and he had no —

**Craig:** Otherwise, good.

**John:** All of it was great —

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. Otherwise, good.

**John:** He had no next of kin and so he talks through this, how does the city and the state have to deal with people who have no next of kin and sort of what that whole process was. It was a fascinating look at sort of the different layers of bureaucracy that sort of happen to settle out the estate and deal with the body.

**Craig:** And a lot of people do die alone and disconnected and they don’t even — like they were having trouble even just identifying him even though he was — everyone was like, “Oh yeah, that’s George Bell.” They had to find some — it took them forever to even match up an x-ray to know that it was really him.

**John:** Yeah. And it wasn’t a remarkable case —

**Craig:** No, just a guy.

**John:** The journalist picked this one situation, but like it’s a very common situation. So what kind of movie? You do sad well. So what kind of movie do you make out of George Bell?

**Steve:** I was — It was a great article. I was really — I immediately thought of It’s a Wonderful Life when I was reading this, for a bunch of reasons. The main character’s name was George Bell instead of Bailey. And then also, if you’re reading the article where unclaimed bodies go, is a place called Potter’s Field which is where the evil Mr. Potter, you know, his area became — but I was thinking, you know, It’s a Wonderful Life is about George Bailey learning about the lives he touched while he was alive. But in this article, you could study the lives that this man touched by his death, which I find it really interesting like the workers who were sifting through his apartment and his other relatives that were getting like — they weren’t hardly relatives, but they were getting some of his money through his death. It’d be interesting to examine how the death of someone can bring people’s lives together and unify people in a way that is unexpected.

**John:** Nicole, what kind of a movie do you make out of Bell?

**Nicole:** I mean it’s going to be a sad movie no matter what I think, but if it’s one of those movies that makes you feel better about your own life [laughs] or rather it gives you a more insightful look into what makes a life worth living. I thought that the heartbreaking thing was the lost relationship, the woman that he loved, and he left in his will, and she still cared for him and how he had withdrawn it. And I think that there’s something really interesting about how objects reflect choices that we make in our lives sometimes. And the whole investigation into who this man was, trying to piece together who he was based on objects left behind. And that was really interesting because it, you know, was definitely a memento mori, but it was also a — it was like a case study of every object represented — I almost saw it more as like a mini-series, almost like a Serial kind of thing. But, you know, each object represented a choice that he made to either connect or disconnect and leading to the final disconnection with the one person who still loved him, you know. And what else do you have to live for, you know.

**Craig:** I love that part. So in the story, he’s left money to people and they have to find these people. Some of those people are dead, one of them is this woman who we find out he was engaged to. The woman’s mother told her daughter, you have to get a prenup, and the guy said, “I’m not signing any prenup,” and he left. And they never spoke again except for occasional cards. And the woman always felt like that was the path she should have gone. And then by the time they find her, she’s also dead, and she kind of ended up in a bad way. And you know what I was thinking was, just because — my whole thing about these stories is, at some point, obviously we need to find the uplift and the redemption or else it’s kind of brutal.

And I love the characters of these people that go into your apartment and start investigating from your stuff. And I thought what if a man dies alone in an apartment in New York, and a woman dies alone in an apartment in Florida. And you have a guy in New York — or probably a woman in New York looking through the stuff and a guy in that apartment in Florida looking through the stuff. And they find things that are related to each other, and they have to call each other to help, and they fall in love.

**John:** Oh, Softie Craig.

**Craig:** Well, I mean because they’re — it’s like The Notebook except with different people, you know, and just like —

They’re both like — well, the point — I mean — because I love — there was one guy they talked to who was like, “Yeah, I’m probably going to end up like George, like his buddy.” He’s like, “Yeah, I’ll probably die alone, too.” And here are two people that are like, this could be me, you know, and almost have given up, and then through this they — and so their love happen, you know. It was like there was some George and whatever her name was, you know. I’ll give her a name, Evelyn.

**John:** As I was reading through this, I looked at it more as a world in which you could set a story, rather than looking at George Bell because it felt like the people who were the investigators, that was a fascinating job and that fascinating job could take you into lots of really interesting places. So you could have the comedy version where — or the romantic comedy where people meet this — sort of meet-cute over death. But you also have lots of good thriller options. So you discover like — it looks like it was just a guy who died, there actually is a much more complicated situation. And once you start digging around, you yourself get in danger. So that’s the thriller way to take it.

With all these three scenarios, this one has characters and has a world which is great, but doesn’t really have a story. It doesn’t have a story driver. It doesn’t have like present day story drive, so we have to find a way to make the story drive take place. The blimp one has a lot of sort of like present day stakes, but there’s no characters, whatsoever, so we have to create a whole new characters.

**Craig:** Except for the blimp.

**John:** Except for the blimp. If the blimp is anthropomorphic and can talk. If the blimp can sing, well…

**Craig:** “Well, I guess they don’t want me no more.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Nicole:** Plush toy potential.

**John:** Yeah

**Nicole:** Inflatables.

**Craig:** Actually, you know who’d be a great voice for the blimp?

**John:** Josh Gad. Oh Steve Zissis.

**Craig:** A great voice for the blimp. He would, because he can bring sadness but then he can bring joy.

**John:** I like it — I like it so much.

**Nicole:** He can lift your hearts.

**John:** How do you feel about — ?

**Craig:** Look, look, that’s blimp. That’s it. That’s the blimp face. We should totally do this.

**John:** Zemeckis. Motion Capture. Steve Zissis. Done.

**Craig:** Wait, hold on.

**Steve:** Or it could be Andy Serkis being the blimp.

**Craig:** Yes, yes. Andy Serkis. He does the voice and he does the blimp.

**John:** That’s nice. I think Andy Serkis would be delighted to have someone else do the voice because it’s going to work out really, really well.

**Steve:** Sure.

**John:** And then the first one has characters and plot and there’s so much but it feels like it’s so already made. I mean it’s Spring Breaker 2 or like my first movie, Go. It has that same aspect of like all this stuff just happening.

**Craig:** It also has that thing that a lot of real life stories have which is that they’re incredibly episodic and then and then and then and then and then and then and you know what happens at the end? This.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you’re like, okay, but that actually is a great example of a story that if you just took and tried to narrativize without re-contextualizing anything, people would go, “Why did I watch that?”

**John:** Although I would push back on that. Zola herself has a lot of agency in the story so Zola is the one who’s like taking photos of the girl and putting it on the back page.

**Craig:** I know. So who are we rooting for?

**John:** Yeah. It’s a real question.

**Craig:** There — I mean Zola literally starts — Zola starts out great like, “I’m not — I’m just a dancer and that’s fine.” And then she’s like, “Oh no, this guy is trying to hoe us. That’s no good.” And this girl is scared and says, “Please, you know, we just got to do this.” And Zola is like, “Well, okay, if we’re going to do this, we might as well do it right. I’m now going to make a whole bunch of money. I’m going to pimp you.” Who are we — ?

**John:** Yeah, it’s Risky Business though. I think what’s fascinating is that —

**Craig:** Well —

**John:** If you would — well, if you take — I think Zola is part of the reason why she’s so fascinating is because she is a woman in that situation. She is taking control and ownership of —

**Craig:** Another human being.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Not good.

**John:** [Crosstalk] another human being.

**Craig:** Like she’s sex trafficking a person.

**John:** I also love that she will just run at the first sign of danger.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Anything goes, she’s out of there.

**Craig:** That was the other thing. Yeah. So this poor woman gets snatched up. What does Zola do? Runs. Does she call the police?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No, just runs.

**John:** Yeah. So people who listened to the show before know that we’ve had a really good track record of the things we discuss on what would — would this be a movie. They always get kind of picked up. At least one of the three things gets picked up and so maybe an audience poll, of these three movies, which one do you think Matt and Ben are going to try to make into a movie first?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because it’s usually them. Sometimes it’s DiCaprio, but usually it’s Matt and Ben.

**Craig:** Usually it’s Matt and Ben.

**John:** All right. So can I get by applause, who thinks the Zola movie will happen? Okay, by applause, who thinks the blimp movie will happen? And who thinks the George Bell movie will happen?

**Craig:** People love death. They love death.

**John:** They love death and uplifts. Yeah.

**Craig:** And there’s tragedy and it’s good. It’s Greek tragedy.

**Steve:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s good Greek tragedy. This is the time in the podcast where we open it up to questions which we can’t normally do because we’re usually recording this on Skype and there’s no one else in the room. But at this point, we would love to hear your questions.

So there’s not a microphone out there, so you’re going to just raise your hand to ask your question. I will repeat back the question and then we’ll answer it. So if anyone has a question, raise your hand. You have a question right there in the first row.

**Craig:** So the question is that, so this woman knew about the George Bell story, wanted to write the George Bell story. I assume you contacted the author of the story to try and get the rights, and the author said, “No,” and then sold the rights to somebody bigger.

So John Lee Hancock is here. He’s an excellent, excellent director and filmmaker. And John Lee and I tried to get the rights to a story and we failed, we got beaten out by Brad Pitt. It’s hard. The truth is that the people who write these things, they kind of go where they want to go. It’s tough, you know.

**John:** So let’s talk about what her options are. So I would say if there are things that are so appealing about that movie for you, you might be able to find different real life details or basically a fictional version that can get you to those places because the stuff we talked about with the George Bell movie, it doesn’t necessarily need to be George Bell.

There were things that were interesting about his specific case, but there were also just things that are interesting about that world and that world is —

**Craig:** I’d even go a step further. There’s actually nothing specific to his story that — I mean, well, the thing about the woman is great, you know. But you can invent a lot using — no, you can’t? Okay.

You know, and the other thing to remember is that the rights are granted on cycles. They are not in perpetuity usually. So they give people 18 months and if nothing happens in 18 months, a lot of times there’s an option to renew and sometimes they don’t and the rights become available, so stay on top of it. You know, that’s the best you can do, but it happens to everyone. And it’s not just, “I’m a little girl and I’m nobody.” Everybody has to deal with this. It’s one of those things.

**John:** John Lee should direct that movie. Wouldn’t he do a great job?

**Craig:** He does a great job all the time with all movies. Yeah. Thank you.

**John:** Thank you, John Lee. Another question from the audience. Anything you want to ask us. Such a quiet group. Right here. So I’m going to repeat the question. Question is, is anything happening with Challenger that someone might see down the line?

**Nicole:** Yes, this is the project, this is the zombie project that will not die and I’m glad because it’s my favorite but it keeps coming back from the dead and every time I’m sure it’s dead, it keeps coming back.

So yes, it’s been re-optioned, we have financing from E 1 but again this whole, it all really depends on casting. There’s like four people who could play the part and so if we get one of those four people, hooray. If not, it will die again until somebody else wants to option it.

**John:** I don’t even know what the project is so this is a script that you wrote?

**Nicole:** This is a script I wrote a million years — I wrote this script in college actually and it was a love letter to Richard Fineman because he was my childhood crush when I was in high school which is why I had no dates until college. But I really, really loved Richard Fineman. And so I wrote a screenplay about his investigation into the Challenger shuttle disaster and it was my golden ticket kind of, you know, my Willy Wonka ticket in a sense that that was what got me meetings and I won a bunch of contests and got my first job off of that as a sample.

And so it was this project that had, one day it’s like a hair raising story of lots of crazy experiences with directors and actors and it hit financing like five times. So it’s funny every time I get a new financier, I’m like, “Great, awesome, yay. We’ll see. That would be so great if it happens.”

But yes, I love that project. I’ve rewritten it a million times. We’ll see what happens.

**John:** I remember it now because you talked about it on the podcast the very first time.

**Nicole:** Yeah.

**John:** Great. Another question from the audience. Right here.

**Craig:** It’s a big question.

**John:** I’ll try to recap it. So what is the intellectual property at the heart of a movie and related, sort of what do we really mean when we’re talking about sort of what a movie is or what the fundamental idea of a movie is?

**Craig:** Well, I guess we’ll limit it first to screenplay, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because once the movie is made, that’s the intellectual property. So intellectual property is unique expression in fixed form movie, fixed form done so that works, right?

Screenplay, that’s the intellectual property. It’s the unique expression in fixed form. Courts interpret this. That’s why judges sometimes go, yeah, no. We know that ideas aren’t intellectual property so the blimp idea is just an idea, right, plus it’s not written down. It’s not in fixed form.

If you write a screenplay, that contains dialogue but it also contains scenes that you’ve written, characters that you’ve described so everything that is evidenced by the text in your screenplay is in large part your intellectual property. It’s just the concept, the basic idea of it that isn’t.

So more is protectable than you think. In fact, that’s why so many of these cases fail because eventually somebody goes, “Well, show me what you have and let me see what you have.”

**John:** So arbitration which we talked about on the show is the WGA process for figuring out who deserves the writing credit on a script when there were multiple writers. And that’s not copyright. That’s literally looking at sort of the copyright is owned by whoever is making the movie.

The arbiter’s job is to figure out, of the things that constitute this screenplay, who did what and sort of whether that person did enough that it actually should count as being her movie or it should be shared credit. And that is a difficult thing. That’s why it’s a good thing overall that we are having screenwriters look at that stuff because it’s a hard thing to judge.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And when you see those weird copyright cases or those things where like, “Oh, this person stole my movie,” they’ll often be — those cases will often be brought in really weird venues because it won’t be sort of in Los Angeles, it will be in like some weird Texas court because they have a better track record of getting those things to happen there.

**Craig:** But they never —

**John:** But they don’t actually work. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, but you’re protected. I mean — great example. Okay, so the question is, you write an in-depth outline for a movie and then somebody else takes that outline and writes a script. Have they infringed on your copyright? Essentially is what you’re asking. The answer is absolutely, no question.

One of the things that copyright gives you is the right to make derivative works which means other people do not have the right to make derivative works unless you license and grant them that permission. So the screenplay that is taken from an outline is a derivative work of that outline.

So this is why when we sell screenplays to the studios, they buy everything. They never leave anything out. They want to own everything. The last thing they want is for you to then go, “Oh, by the way, I’m writing another screenplay that you don’t own this derivative of my treatment that somehow you didn’t buy stupid, haha,” right? Okay.

So yes, that is a treatment and outline in fixed form is protectable copyright. That is intellectual property for sure.

**John:** Great. Question right back there. Nicole Perlman is a great person to answer that question.

**Nicole:** I don’t know if I could answer it particularly because I didn’t write samples of different genres. When I was starting out, I kind of got a lot of work from my Challenger sample, got me a lot of biopic, space, aviation, technology work and then randomly an Argentinean tango movie with Sandra Bullock. [laughs] Which did not get made. I can’t imagine why.

So yeah, I would say that it can help you having a brand. I think that if maybe it’s not your strength, definitely try other things and if you might find that you — and I personally — I’m writing Marvel movies and big fantastical science fiction and fantasy kind of things and I’m also interested in space, technology, aviation as well at the same time so — which drives my representatives crazy, but I think it’s a — I think you write what you want to write and what you love and don’t really — if you have a great idea for romantic comedy, write the romantic comedy and then maybe people who are looking for romantic comedy wouldn’t have thought of you because they thought you only did, you know, thrillers so I’d say whatever is your best idea that’s most on fire at this stage in your career, write that, and don’t worry about it.

**Craig:** Have you sold a screenplay yet or — ?

**Audience Member:** No.

**Craig:** Then think of it this way, you don’t even have a brand yet because the brand thing is really just, “Well, we bought something from him so now we’re going to put him on a list for things like that.” So at this point, you’re free, free, free, and by the way, you’ll be free later too.

I mean the nice thing about writing is you can write yourself in and out of trouble. So yeah, now write that great script. There’s no need to worry about pigeon-holing.

**John:** We have time for one more question. Which question will be — right here.

**Craig:** That’s a good Zissis question because I feel like your character is a bit of a reluctant hero in Togetherness. I mean it’s not a movie, it’s — but I look at that season, that first season.

**Steve:** Yeah, in terms of the first season, Amanda Peet’s character is kind of like the catalyst. She’s the kick in the pants of my character that gets him going on a trajectory. But after that, after she does do that, I am on a mission to, you know, transform and pursue my acting goals and et cetera.

**Craig:** So there’s this tension that happens with the reluctant protagonist where we’re actually waiting for them. You know, a lot of times reluctant protagonists will take on some job begrudgingly just to go back to what they had. It’s very common. Shrek I think just wants to get his swamp back. He’s a pretty reluctant protagonist, right? But then they are transformed.

I think that’s the key for the reluctant protagonist is that we’re waiting for somebody to light that spark. They don’t really — they’re reluctant because they’re afraid, it’s probably a better word, the fearful — and I think all protagonists are afraid, on some level.

I mean your character, definitely, you can feel it. He’s just scared, you know, and then Amanda comes along and she forces you but then — and I love the dramatic irony of what it also does between the two of you which is great, you know, but that’s — that would be my short answer.

**John:** So what we’re describing with Steve’s show is a show where you have, you know, multiple characters who are functioning as each other’s protagonist and antagonist. They’re causing each other to change. Classically what we are often talking about with movies is you have one character taking a trip that they’re only going to take once.

And so I can’t think of a lot of movies where I’ve been willing to watch a character just never engage and like finally at the end engaged. That doesn’t tend to be a really successful paradigm. So you as the writer have to find a reason to get them engaged with your story so whether that’s burning down their house, so they can’t go back to their original ways, or taking that one thing that actually means something to them which is what Shrek ultimately does.

You are forcing them into because you’re creating a situation where they have to change. Go back to sort of those Pixar story rules, like every day is the same except one day and that’s usually the day that your movie is taking place.

**Steve:** I think it happens a lot with the lovable loser archetype actually now that I’m thinking about it. If you think about a lot of Bill Murray type movies, he’s usually in that role like Stripes where he is that reluctant — reluctant guy.

**Craig:** Groundhog Day, he’s just refusing to change, refusing, refusing, refusing to the point where he just, he would prefer to kill himself than change which is the sort of ultimate reluctant hero but again, there’s Andie MacDowell transforming him.

And so I love that you said that that because that’s the answer to every reluctant hero is a relationship that changes them. That’s why we go to movies. It’s for that. I think all heroes in a weird way are reluctant. I mean I don’t like heroes that wake up in the morning and go, “Time to kick ass, let’s go.” Jerry Bruckheimer loves that.

I wrote a movie for Jerry once and the first note I got back was, “He doesn’t seem like a hero on page one.” I’m like, why would — who wants to beep, that’s the movie, beep, hero, hero, hero, hero, credits.

**John:** Things blow up.

**Craig:** Yeah. Boom. That is not me.

**John:** But think about George Bell. Like George Bell is like a reluctant hero who never actually sort of kicks out of gear but there’s a version of George Bell where like he’s in that situation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And something kicks him out of that life.

**Craig:** Okay, so —

**John:** And he’s a Shrek.

**Craig:** So have you seen the movie Marty, classic Paddy Chayefsky screenplay, 1955? Ernest Borgnine won an Oscar for it, beautiful movie, and it’s one of those old movies that honestly is not old.

And it’s a very simple story of a butcher who’s not a particularly good-looking guy and he’s lonely and he lives with his mom who harangues him, and he’s resigned and then he meets this woman. And stuff happens and there’s a transformation but it’s a difficult transformation. There’s a price to pay for leaving your shell, you know. You should come to this, I’m doing this structure talk tomorrow, I don’t know if you’re available, this is all I talk about — okay, good. You’ll hear it again but like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It will be a lot —

**John:** Okay, very quickly because we’re running out of time. I forgot to do One Cool Things. So One Cool Thing is a tradition in the show. My One Cool Thing is actually a little thing I used for filming this last week. It is called a Glif. It comes right here in Austin, Texas. It was a Kickstarter, so Craig’s favorite thing in the world.

It is a little device for holding your phone, being able to mount it on tripod which is tremendously useful when you want to shoot photos or video with your phone because the iPhone is a really great camera these days and so it’s a little mount for your phone so you can attach it to a tripod. That’s my One Cool Thing, the Glif.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Nicole, what is your One Cool Thing?

**Nicole:** I was in London last week and I went to the Cosmonauts Exhibit at the London Science Museum and it was amazing and the Russians had some great stories and I highly recommend you guys all look into Cosmonauts. They are fantastic.

**John:** Great. Steve, do you have One Cool Thing?

**Steve:** I was just going to recommend an animated film called The Man Who Planted Trees. That’s old but you can get it on Netflix. It’s one of the greatest pieces of animation ever.

**Craig:** Is it American, Japanese, or?

**Steve:** It’s, it was a Canadian animator and it’s narrated by Christopher Plummer.

**Craig:** Awesome. Well, my One Cool Thing is an update on an old One Cool Thing called Thync. I don’t know if you guys listened to the show. A while ago, I found this product that you stuck on your head and it sent electrical impulses into your head in an attempt to calm you down or perk you up and I thought, “You know, this sounds cool.”

And then every now and then on Twitter, someone will be like, “Have you done it? Have you done it?” I’m like, “No.” So I did it, kind of works. It kind of works. You definitely feel it and it allows you — you have an app that sort of is Bluetooth connected to this ridiculous thing and as you move the dial up and down, you can feel it. And if you move it too high, it hurts and you feel your scalp contracting, it’s bad.

So, but there’s this calm lady on your iPhone going, “Find your sweet spot,” and you’re like, “My head, my head, my head, my head, fuck” but then you get, and it actually did. I felt spacey. I don’t know if that’s calm, but I felt spacey.

**Nicole:** It’s like electroshock therapy.

**Steve:** I’m thinking of the last scene of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest right now. Craig, we might need to smother you with a pillow.

**Craig:** Pillow me. Yes, give me the L’amour treatment, I need it. Yeah, it’s time.

**John:** Excellent. So glad we actually got to shock you, Craig and actually — and attach you —

**Craig:** Shocking myself.

**John:** It’s so good.

**Nicole:** Can we get access to that? Can we just shock you whenever we want?

**John:** I think —

**Craig:** No.

**John:** We’ll build an app for that and soon everyone will be able to zap Craig.

**Craig:** Shock Craig.

**John:** Yeah. Nicole and Steve, thank you so much for being our guests.

**Craig:** Thank you, guys.

**Steve:** Thank you.

**Nicole:** Thank you.

**John:** We need to thank the Austin Film Festival for having us. It’s a huge pleasure to do this every year. Thank you guys for being an incredibly good audience. We need to thank Annie Haze who’s our assistant this week. So thank you very much. Guys, thank you so very much.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

Links:

* [The Austin Film Festival](https://www.austinfilmfestival.com/aff/live/)
* [The Monty Hall problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem) on Wikipedia
* Nicole Perlman on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2270979/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/Uncannygirl), and on [Scriptnotes, 164](http://johnaugust.com/2014/guardians-of-the-galaxys-nicole-perlman)
* Steve Zissis on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1587813/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/stevezissis)
* Togetherness on [HBO](http://www.hbo.com/togetherness) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Togetherness_(TV_series))
* Papermag on [The Harrowing Twitter Odyssey of @_zolarmoon](http://www.papermag.com/2015/10/the_harrowing_twitter_odyssey.php)
* The Baltimore Sun on the [rogue JLENS blimp](http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/harford/aberdeen-havre-de-grace/bs-md-jlens-blimp-loose-20151028-story.html)
* [The Lonely Death of George Bell](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/nyregion/dying-alone-in-new-york-city.html), from The New York Times
* Variety on [Nicole Perlman and Challenger](http://variety.com/2006/film/features/nicole-perlman-1200337283/)
* [Marty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marty_(teleplay)) on Wikipedia
* [Glif](http://www.studioneat.com/products/glif) tripod phone mount
* [Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age](http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/Plan_your_visit/exhibitions/cosmonauts.aspx) at the London Science Museum
* The Man Who Planted Trees, on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Planted_Trees_(film)) and [Netflix DVD](http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/The-Man-Who-Planted-Trees/70048862?strkid=1887480798_0_0&strackid=743041023553ef8f_0_srl&trkid=222336)
* [Thync](http://www.thync.com/)
* [Intro/Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-one-with-alec-berg).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 205 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now like most weeks, I’m here in Los Angeles, but Craig is way off in the other side of the country. He has kidnapped a famous writer/director who we both like, Alec Berg, and he’s holding him hostage in a house. So this can be sort of a special episode because Craig is going to interrogate him and get all the information he can out of Alec Berg.

**Craig:** Yeah. The Bergs and the Mazins are on a little mini vacation together right now. All of the children are out of our hair, spectacular. And what we like to do when we go on vacation is record podcasts.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** So I’ve got him. And I’m going to be asking him all the questions that people want to know. You know, a lot of questions about Alec Berg that have gone unanswered over the years and they’re all going to be asked, and I will get answers. Oh, I will.

**John:** And I’m looking forward to it. So before you do that, let’s do just a tiny bit of follow up.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In the last episode, we described the new 200 episodes Scriptnotes USB drive that people can purchase. A bunch of people purchased them so we are not quite in danger of selling out of them but they will sell out relatively soon. So if you would like to get the entire back catalogue of Scriptnotes on a USB drive, you should go to store.johnaugust.com and probably not wait too long for those because they will go. But thank you for everyone who bought one of those.

And Craig, do you remember what the promo code was that you picked for these USB drives?

**Craig:** Yes, the promo code was SINGULARITY.

**John:** That is the promo code that will save you 20% which would almost cover the shipping cost of those in the U.S. So if you want one of those —

**Craig:** Huge savings.

**John:** Huge savings. Second, our final bit of follow up — I’m kind of sad about this, on Tess Gerritsen and her Gravity lawsuit. Craig, talk us through it.

**Craig:** Well, you know, we’ve been following Tess Gerritsen. She alleged that she was owed a whole bunch of money because the Warner Bros. film Gravity, at least in her point of view, was based on her book Gravity that she had sold the rights to New Line, and she’d been suing. And all along the way, we had been following this and saying, “We don’t think she has a case.” Well, neither did the judge, repeatedly. And now she’s saying, alas, she’s giving up.

But she’s saying she’s giving up in the weirdest way. And it’s kind of consistent with everything she’s done so far. I mean, her whole thing is — she would go on her blog and say, “This is why I have this amazing case and this is why it’s terrible and this is why Warner Bros. can’t get away with this.” This is an incredibly one sided thing that even then both you and I felt was flimsy and not substantive.

And her final goodbye here is similar. Rather than saying — so the title of the piece is Gravity Lawsuit: Why I’m Giving Up. The proper answer is because I have no case. That’s not the answer she gives. The answer she gives instead is because the court is nuts and didn’t allow us to prove our justice and so forth. But I disagree. I disagree.

She even cites — I don’t know if you noticed this John, she cites for the first time something, right? What she never gave us was anything from her book and then something from the movie for us all to look at and say, “Oh yeah, that’s very, very similar.” What she does instead now is she cites something from her contract and she believes that this is determinative, and it says, “Owner agrees that the company may assign this agreement blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” May, she just doesn’t see the word may there. Interesting, very interesting.

**John:** Yeah. So this is the end of our Gravity saga and I guess I’ll kind of miss it. The good news/bad news is that people have been tweeting in with all sorts of other lawsuits that are similar, some of which are making it through the court system as we speak. So in a future episode, we will talk through some of these other ones that have percolated up.

My hunch is that we are seeing more of these but they’ve always been there. You and I have both been around long enough that we’ve seen a lot of these things happen, what’s interesting to me is I think more of these are actually going to trial rather being settled before they ever become publicly known. So we’ll talk through some of those. I expect our opinions on them will probably be similar to the Gravity lawsuit but we’ll look at them as they come up.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, a general rule of thumb is if it goes to trial, the studio is going to win. They don’t go to trial with losers in general, they just settle them. They never came close to settling on this one as far as I could tell. I think, you know, when I see something like this, I just keep thinking that at some point, somebody must have reached out from the plaintiff side to say, “Well, do you guys just want to make this go away or what?” And when the studio says, “No. Actually, we would love to go all the way with this.” That’s when you know, they just — that’s just not the way corporate lawyers behave when they don’t have something locked down.

**John:** Yeah. I doubt it’s a philosophical change where the corporate lawyer decided to just become much more aggressive and like, “Oh yeah, we’d love to go to trial.” I think there’s something that has shifted in terms of how they respond into these kind of complaints or just that they felt there were no grounds for the complaint.

**Craig:** I agree. I’ll tell you that I don’t blame Tess Gerritsen for anything she did. I am concerned with her lawyers who I think kind of sold her a bill of goods here, but that’s my opinion, my non-lawyerly opinion that her legal team may have led her down the primrose path.

**John:** Great. So for the rest of this podcast, you are going to be talking to Alec Berg and I will not be there in the room to defend Alec Berg as you beat him up. He’s tied to a chair. You’re going to slap the answers out of him, correct?

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. I’m going to slap a lot out of him.

**John:** But what I’d love to know is how he helped create such an amazing show called Silicon Valley and how he actually topped the work in the first season with the second season. And how he prepares for the crushing disappointment of the third season which cannot possibly live up to expectation.

**Craig:** You know, it’s funny, I was not aware that he was involved in a show called — what is it? Silicon what?

**John:** Silicon Valley.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And so apparently it’s about the silicon mining industry, and also intercut with the plastic surgery industry. So it’s really a great, gripping drama that enfolds over, you know, this sort of nonlinear storytelling mode. So maybe while you’re on vacation with him, you could, you know, rent the DVDs and watch them.

**Craig:** Just to be clear, I’m here with a guy name Alex Berg, I don’t know — do you?

**John:** Oh man, the wrong person, sorry.

**Craig:** Yeah. But this is Alex Berg. He’s not — I mean he’s a writer of a kind-ish. [laughs]

**John:** Well, Craig, I’ll leave it to you to figure out who this man is and why he should be on our podcast.

**Craig:** All right, here we go. So at last, I’m here with Alec Berg.

**Alec Berg:** Indeed you are, sir.

**Craig:** Got rid of Alex Berg, turns out he was useless.

**Alec:** Alex Berg, a real guy, actor.

**Craig:** Oh?

**Alec:** Yes

**Craig:** Not useless.

**Alec:** No. There is an Alex Berg who is an actor, and there’s an Alec Berg who’s a musician, I believe, in Portland. And there’s an Alec Berg who is a tech writer, oddly enough. I think he’s in upstate New York and he tweets constantly. So if you go to Twitter, he’s Alec Berg and I had to be pretentiously real Alec Berg like he’s not real because I’m the real Alec Berg, but —

**Craig:** By the way, you’re not real —

**Alec:** No.

**Craig:** And he is probably real.

**Alec:** He’s much more real than I am.

**Craig:** He seems real than you are.

**Alec:** He certainly tweeted several hundred thousand times more than I have.

**Craig:** Oh, he’s doing — oh, and that means, therefore, real.

**Alec:** Yes.

**Craig:** As we all know, volume equals substance.

**Alec:** Well, sure.

**Craig:** Well, [laughs] so here I am with the real, real Alec Berg —

**Alec:** @realalecberg.

**Craig:** And we are on vacation together.

**Alec:** We are.

**Craig:** With our wives.

**Alec:** Not the way —

**Craig:** I don’t want to start any weird rumors or nothing, although we do have a free path to happiness across the country.

**Alec:** Craig, please, this is going out to the public.

**Craig:** That is true, that is true.

**Alec:** We will end at that part.

**Craig:** Yes, yes.

**Alec:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Let’s keep it in. So Alec, I’ve known you for many years but I’ve never interviewed you. So I’m going to start a little bit where most of the interviews start and then we’re going to wander off. Because what we like to do on our show is talk about things from the writing perspective as writers. It’s not the same old questions. Nonetheless, I’m going to start with the same old question. You began your Swedish life as a writer at Harvard, I believe. Were you writing even prior to college?

**Alec:** Yeah. I mean, I did a lot of like, you know, the usual creative writing classes and things like that. And those were always the classes that I was, you know, enjoying the most in junior high and high school. I went to high school with Ted Griffin who I don’t know if you’ve had on this podcast or not, but —

**Craig:** No. Ted is simply not important enough.

**Alec:** Yes.

**Craig:** No. We’ll get him on for sure.

**Alec:** Screenwriter of much repute —

**Craig:** Ocean’s Eleven

**Alec:** Ocean’s Eleven and Matchstick Men.

**Craig:** And Matchstick Men.

**Alec:** And he created a show on —

**Craig:** Terriers.

**Alec:** FX called Terriers which was amazing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alec:** Anyway, Ted and I went to junior high and high school together and he was, you know, probably from birth, like just obsessed with the film business. It’s in his family. His grandfather was a director. So he was aggressively making short films. We were actually editing short films together where we would have to plug two VCRs into each other and you would have to play from one into the other.

**Craig:** Basically like the first EditDroid from Lucas.

**Alec:** Yes. Yeah, right, right.

**Craig:** But only with two instead of like twenty.

**Alec:** Yeah, right. But like I remember sitting in his apartment when I think I was in like ninth grade and he was in seventh grade and we were, you know, editing. And I grew up in Pasadena so it was close enough to the film business that I knew it was there. Like I wasn’t like a child of the film business but I definitely was very aware of it.

**Craig:** Did you look at the film business as kind of a trap for feckless dreamers?

**Alec:** I had no sense, really, of what it was. And I certainly had no pretension of like — I always assumed like even from that age like, “Oh, I’d like to do something peripherally pertaining to entertainment.” I was really obsessed with stand-ups. Like when I was eight years old, I could do two-and-half hours of Bill Cosby kind of word perfect.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** And then Steve Martin became like the game changer for me, like those few first few albums.

**Craig:** It’s interesting. I went through the same thing. I remember Delirious, Eddie Murphy’s Delirious. It’s like you memorized it almost word for word.

**Alec:** Well, somebody just wrote an amazing piece. Somebody interviewed like a hundred comedians and said, “What was the thing that made you want to be a comedian?” And of those hundred comedians, I think like 80 of them referenced Eddie Murphy’s Delirious. Like that really was like the — that’s the Star Wars of stand-ups.

**Craig:** It kind of is. And I remember, yeah, you would sit with your friends and sort of compete to see who had the most word for word.

**Alec:** Yes. And it’s still amazing. If you watch it now, it’s like it’s not one of those things where you go, “Oh yeah. Well sure, 30 years ago.”

**Craig:** It’s still really funny stuff, yes.

**Alec:** It’s unbelievably edgy. It’s great stuff still. So I was kind of a comedy nerd and we did — Ted and I did — but I mean Ted, far more than I, like driven by show business, show business. So I came to be enamored with the entertainment business, but I always thought I’d be an executive or, you know, an attorney or something like that. Like I don’t really ever think — until I got to college and I started writing — I worked at the Harvard Lampoon and that was where all of a sudden I became aware of like, “Oh, there are people who graduated a few years ago who write for Letterman, who write for The Simpsons,” had just started. The Simpsons started when I think I was a sophomore in college.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** And that was one of those things where it’s like, “Oh, this is a thing.” Like people actually, like they don’t get jobs, they don’t go to law school. But I don’t think I was really like, it’s become a very weird thing now where like, there are like sophomores at the Lampoon who are like writing spec scripts and, “Oh yeah, this is my sketch package.”

**Craig:** Weaponize their ambition, yeah. .

**Alec:** It’s like what? Like I didn’t even know what that was or like that’s how you got a job. But I did a bunch of filmmaking in college and then the part of it that I thought I was sort of best at and I was most interested in was writing.

**Craig:** Right. So you were in that — it’s interesting, I was — because we’re going to leap ahead to a question I was going to ask you later, but I want to ask you now because you kind of segued into it perfectly. When you and I — we both got into the business roughly around the same time, in the early mid-90s —

**Alec:** Yes, the good old days.

**Craig:** The good old days. And we came out of what does seem like a fairly naive place. I mean, I remember, when I first came to L.A. that I got this book, Ken Auletta I think was his name, he wrote a book called Three Blind Mice and it was the story of the networks. And I got it because I just didn’t understand what the difference was between a network and those stations that weren’t networks and who made shows. Wait, wait, networks don’t make shows and I had no idea how any of it worked.

**Alec:** Well, the nice thing is that nobody knows how that works still to the this day —

**Craig:** Still to this day, exactly.

**Alec:** And now more than ever.

**Craig:** But, you know, you were at the Lampoon going, “Oh wow, there’s people who write on those shows, maybe I could do that too.” And you’re right. Now it seems very formalized. Everybody seems to be aware of everything very early on. Do you think that — and I promise we’ll get back to you in a second, but do you think that whatever you call it, the farm system, the incubation of new writers, is that damaged beyond repair or is it just too self-aware right now?

**Alec:** You know, it’s funny, I have no sense — people always ask me like, people always like people ask me questions like all the time.

**Craig:** Like just this morning this guy asked you.

**Alec:** Yeah. I can’t go anywhere without people asking me. When I do get asked about like how do you break into the business, the answer I sort of come around to is I kind of look at it like breaking into a bank. Or it’s like, I can tell you how I robbed the bank.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** I can tell you what I did to short the alarm system and to fool people into thinking I was the security guard —

**Craig:** They’ve closed that loop a lot, yeah.

**Alec:** That’s my thing. It’s like people are like, “How do I break into the business?” And my honest answer is, “I have no idea.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** Like I know what people were expecting of me back then, like you’d write a couple of spec scripts of existing shows. The rule then was, don’t write a spec pilot because people don’t want to read spec pilots, they want to read existing shows, they want to read —

**Craig:** Just the opposite of what it is now.

**Alec:** Right, right. And now it’s like when I read writer submissions, it’s like — nobody’s writing Modern Family. Like all I’m getting are pilots because that’s the thing people do now.

**Craig:** Do you think that the cohort — I mean, I’m asking to throw an entire generation under the bus, but you don’t have to. But do you think that the cohort of writers that you came up with is stronger at least in inception than say this one now?

**Alec:** I think it’s a generational thing. It’s always going to be, you always think that like because you prize your skills in a certain, you know, order, I think you value certain things that people of your era valued, right?

**Craig:** Right. Like quality.

**Alec:** Well, it’s like, you know, the whole point of like rock music was to piss of your parents. And if your parents like the music, it’s not working correctly. It feels like it’s the same thing where it’s like each generation — like personally, I feel like — especially in sketch, you feel the influence of UCB and that kind zany improv like, “Oh, the twist in the middle of the sketch is this thing goes completely sideways and it turns out we’re on an alien planet watching this on TV.” And to me, as a sort of traditionalist, that offends me, because when I think of sketches I think come up with a really solid premise.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** And serve the premise. And this idea of like in the middle of the sketch you go zany sideways, and it’s — you turn the whole thing upside down. That feels like a quit to me. But people who grew up prizing those zany left-turns as like, “Oh, that’s the comedy gold,” I think that —

**Craig:** Oh, but you know —

**Alec:** That feels right to them. So I guess what I’m saying is, without even realizing it, I’ve become hacky and —

**Craig:** [laughs] At last I’ve led you to the truth.

**Alec:** It’s over. It’s over for me.

**Craig:** Halfway through this, you’re going to quit the business.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And at the end you’re going to shoot yourself.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is going to be great, yeah.

**Alec:** People would just say, we always used to joke about this, like the hardest thing about show business really is like you never get pink slipped, right?

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Alec:** It not like somebody just calls you and goes, “Yeah, we appreciate your contributions. Here’s your severance package. Don’t come in tomorrow.”

**Craig:** Your last day looks just like all your other days.

**Alec:** Right. You keep going in and then all of a sudden you realize that you haven’t been on the payroll for weeks.

**Craig:** That’s right. And you don’t know any of these people.

**Alec:** No. But also, everyone else knows you’re not working there anymore but they haven’t said anything.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Alec:** And that’s the most brutal part. It’s just like it’s a very slow, quiet, there’s no definitive end moment.

**Craig:** That’s actually great news for us, I think. Because I plan on just drifting out of the business.

**Alec:** But the terrifying thing is that, we may be done.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** Without even knowing it.

**Craig:** You said it’s terrifying and my heart is singing right now. I’m still happy. It means we can extend this vacation. Let’s just keep driving, man, like Thelma and Louise.

**Alec:** Wouldn’t that be amazing? You suddenly realize there’s just no compelling reason to go back.

**Craig:** Well, you know, a lot of people — no one really knows this except for you and for me, but we’ll share it with them that you and I have this fantasy —

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’ve been talking about it for years — quitting writing.

**Alec:** Dare to dream.

**Craig:** Dare to dream, quit writing, and the two of us just open some kind of — we’d become lawyers. And I honestly feel like we could get our law degrees — I’m not kidding — in months. I feel like if you and I tried really hard —

**Alec:** I think you can get a law degree. I don’t know if it would be reputable at all but it does seem like —

**Craig:** It would be a degree.

**Alec:** It would be a physical piece of paper that says we have —

**Craig:** Right. If you and I said, “Look, the bar is one year from now, let’s start studying now,” and we’ll take the bar a year from now, I think we could do it.

**Alec:** If our sole reason for studying was to pass the bar, as opposed to amassing actual useable legal knowledge —

**Craig:** Not interested in that.

**Alec:** [laughs] That’s applicable in some real world.

**Craig:** I already feel like I’m more of a lawyer than you are because of the way I’m approaching it —

**Alec:** Yeah. No, you’ve already — you adjudicated this entire thing.

**Craig:** Your scruples [laughs] —

**Alec:** Masterfully. Yeah. No. See, again, this is the problem, I’m out of that business also before I even got in.

**Craig:** I need a new partner. You and I become lawyers and then — and sort of, like, lawyers-managers-agents. We become like some sort of weird new thing. We take on all of our friends, we stop writing, and we just advise them on how to go through their careers. We probably would end up making more money. Now, we’re taking 10% of 20 or 30 A-list writers.

**Alec:** Yeah. And I don’t know that I would end up being more happy doing that, but I’ll bet you I would be less sad.

**Craig:** Well, and then there’s that. Let’s talk about that. Why —

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So Alec, this is what I think a lot of people will never understand. So you and your occasional partners, and for many years you were really tied at the hip with Jeff Schaffer and David Mandel.

**Alec:** Yes.

**Craig:** So Berg, Schaffer, Mandel. Even when I started working, I remember people were like, well, there’s Berg, Schaffer, Mandel. That’s like a thing. They’re like a big comedy corporation. And you guys did everything — Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, a ton of movies. You wrote and directed EuroTrip and then there was a lot of movies that you worked on that you didn’t get credit for —

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But a ton of work there. Everything seems to be going great and yet, sad. And I talk about this all the time. And I think in a weird way, people, when they hear me say that I’m sad a lot, they I go, “Yeah, you should be.” [laughs] But I think people would be surprised to hear that you get glum about things. What is going on?

**Alec:** I’ve made peace of it. It’s the creative process. That’s just what it is. I think in any creative endeavor, I feel like if you’re not unhappy with where your product is, whatever it is, you’re not going to strive to do better. Like as soon as — I think complacency is just absolutely anathema to doing good work. Especially in comedy which — I mean, you know, this is a sidebar, but like comedy really is binary, right? Like it’s either funny or it’s not. It’s not like, “We’re going to get it to a certain level and then we’ll just make it a little funnier and a little funnier.” Like certain things are like, “That’s funny,” or, “That’s not funny.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** Right? So if it’s not working, it’s just white hot death. I think as soon as you start to feel smug or complacent or satisfied, you know, unfortunately, you stop trying desperately to make everything better. And I feel like everything I do creatively, I always approach from the standpoint of, “This is terrible. This is going to get out into the world, and people are going to laugh at me in a bad way.” Not like a “Ha-ha, this is hilarious” way, like in a “This is what passes for professional work? This is a joke. That guy stinks. He’s terrible. We’ve discovered his dirty secret. He’s talentless.”

**Craig:** Right. There’s a lot of that going around.

**Alec:** And that is the way I approach everything. And it’s like — it makes it difficult because even, you know, when I get an occasional Emmy nomination, for about 10 seconds, that’s awesome, and then it becomes, “Oh, my God. The fall is going to be even more precipitous and more ugly, and people are going to watch —

**Craig:** What do I do now?

**Alec:** The crap that I turned out next and go, ‘Somebody got nominated for an Emmy for this?'”

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** But ultimately, as awful as all that sounds, I’ve sort of made peace with it because it’s good for the work. It just is. It’s a professional hazard but it makes the work better because I don’t stop.

**Craig:** But do you think it’s possible to be happy and still also be committed to — for instance, Jerry Seinfeld, you worked with him for many years.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He strikes me as the guy that isn’t torturing himself. Am I wildly off-base there?

**Alec:** I think he is very hard on himself, but no. He definitely has figured out a way, I think, to feel positive and good about the good work that he’s doing and —

**Craig:** In a healthy way.

**Alec:** The pleasure he derives from his work seems not to have led him to a place of complacency and mediocrity.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** But there’s a reason that you’re citing him as an example because he stands out.

**Craig:** Exception to the rule.

**Alec:** Right? Like, “Oh, there is somebody who can do that and he’s that guy.” Like the vast majority of people are, you know, when Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld worked together on Seinfeld, Jerry was always the positive one who’s like, “If we set our minds to this, we will do it and we will crush it and we will be great.”

**Craig:** And Larry —

**Alec:** And Larry’s whole thing is, “No, we can’t do this. This will never work.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**Alec:** “Let’s not even try, because what’s the point?”

**Craig:** And that was a pretty great combination.

**Alec:** And the yin and yang of that was really exceptional.

**Craig:** And that’s an interesting thing for you to bring up because for many years you did have this very — it was a unique partnership. You don’t see a three-man team or a three-person team almost ever.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In writing, at least. It’s every now and then, but you guys really are the only one of note that I can think of.

**Alec:** Well, Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, those three guys were — there’s a slightly different division of labor there.

**Alec:** Yeah you’ve worked with those —

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean —

**Alec:** So you tell me.

**Craig:** Because in a weird way, there was almost four of them because Pat Proft was usually in the mix as well. One of them, often David, was directing more, you know. But you guys were like a traditional, like the three of you would write a script.

**Alec:** Yeah. And the three of us would direct when we directed. I mean, it really was — yeah, that is a —

**Craig:** Correct. It was extremely —

**Alec:** That is the interesting thing about that partnership because I do see a lot of partnerships where like one guy is the this guy and the other one is the that guy. All three of us did everything.

**Craig:** Right. All three of you did everything in a kind of an equal way. But now, you have sort of said, “Okay, just as Schaffer is off doing The League and Mandel is currently now running Veep.”

**Alec:** He just started running Veep, yes.

**Craig:** Right. And you are running Silicon Valley, and have been running it as the writer from the start.

**Alec:** Yes. I came on after the pilot.

**Craig:** Oh, came on after the pilot.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, after everybody else had done the hardest part of it.

**Alec:** That’s right.

**Craig:** And cleared away all the possible mines that you certainly would have stepped on.

**Alec:** Yeah. No. I showed up for dessert.

**Craig:** You showed up after they loosened it and then just went wee, wee, wee, and out came gold.

**Alec:** That seems fair.

**Craig:** Right. So congrats.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Good.

**Alec:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Nice job. But that’s an interesting thing that you have wandered away from what I would imagine would be this comforting nest where you knew, okay, maybe, and each of you might have had this thought at some point. Maybe on our own, we’re only a third of a great person but together we’re one great person?

**Alec:** I think part of us thought that way. I don’t think we ever had one discussion about, like, how do we work and what is our — like, we just did the work. There wasn’t a lot of, like, you know, talk about process and who does what and who’s better at what and why and how can we, you know, make this process more efficient or hone it in any way. Like there was no —

**Craig:** The other two guys just agreed that you were the best of them.

**Alec:** Well, I always used to joke that Jeff and Dave argued and disagreed about almost everything. So functionally, I got to make every decision because that’s the way — it was majority rules.

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**Alec:** And that part of it —

**Craig:** You would just wait

**Alec:** Yes. So in a funny way, it was really like it was — they were helping me make decisions but really —

**Craig:** They should have just even stopped trying to make decisions.

**Alec:** Yeah. Which is not entirely true. I mean —

**Craig:** It’s entirely true.

**Alec:** All right.

**Craig:** It’s entirely true.

**Alec:** No. I mean, we just didn’t spend a lot of time analyzing how it worked. We just did it. And actually, I would say it’s funny. Like there are a lot of writing teams, particularly in comedy, of two people. And you’re right, not that many three-person teams. What’s weird is a three-person team actually makes it much easier. Because with two people you get into these deadlocks —

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** Where it’s like, “I think it should be black,” “I think it should be white.” And you fight about it. You fight about it, and all sorts of teams have all sorts of different ways of breaking the ties. Some alternate, some flip a coin.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** With three people —

**Craig:** There is no question.

**Alec:** If two people really have an argument, they argue it out and the third person is almost literally watching it like a tennis match. Just listening to the argument meaning that in the end, well, a lot of times, me, but —

**Craig:** I could totally see it.

**Alec:** But really — but here’s — this was also the —

**Craig:** Here’s what’s going on. You have one Swedish guy, you, watching two Jews beating each other up, just waiting.

**Alec:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Just waiting for them to tire each other out with words.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you come in and in your flat affect way, just say, “We will do the following.”

**Alec:** Yeah. But what was interesting is, you know, I got outvoted a lot. And what was interesting about that is there just was a level of trust. Like, those guys are both really talented, skilled guys.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** And you just get to a point where you go, “I think they are absolutely wrong. I don’t see what they’re agreeing about here. They’re just flat wrong.” But if both of those guys see something in going this other route —

**Craig:** There might be something —

**Alec:** There must be something.

**Craig:** There must be something.

**Alec:** There must be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alec:** Like we just got to that level of trust where it’s like, “I think you’re wrong — ”

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** “But I also believe that because of past experience, if both of you see it, you’re right.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I always felt — when I was writing with Todd Philips and he would say, “No, no, no. This should be this way,” and I would think, “I don’t like that. I don’t think that’s true. But I know that if you see it, then you will at least know how to make it good.”

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And when I say good, I mean, I may never love that one thing but I’ll know that it will work.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because in your mind, if you say to me, “I know how to make this work,” I trust you, you know how to make it work. I would imagine that it was probably that way with those two guys.

**Alec:** Absolutely. No, 100%. That even the things that I was most like adamantly opposed to, in the end I would always come around to and I’d go, “Oh, okay. Now, I get it.”

**Craig:** All right. So the brief journey here, you graduated from Harvard, which is a second tier school, you end up in Los Angeles.

**Alec:** Yeah. It’s the Princeton of Cambridge.

**Craig:** [laughs] It is the Princeton. It’s the Princeton of — I don’t even think — I think it’s actually the Cornell of Cambridge, but fine.

**Alec:** [laughs]

**Craig:** So you end up out here back home, essentially.

**Alec:** Yes, yeah.

**Craig:** Where you’re from.

**Alec:** Well, my folks moved to Boston after I graduated from high school. So I finally —

**Craig:** To be near you?

**Alec:** No, my dad is a college professor, my mom is college professor. They got work on the East Coast.

**Craig:** Idiots.

**Alec:** Yeah, they went that way.

**Craig:** Got it.

**Alec:** So I finally, after graduating college, moved really away from them for the first time.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was going to say. Like you thought you were getting away from them?

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then when was that? Like freshman year? Surprise.

**Alec:** Yeah. Well, no. What was really funny is — no, they moved the summer before my freshman year.

**Craig:** Oh, my. You never even had a day?

**Alec:** So we sort of went to college together.

**Craig:** Oh.

**Alec:** But what was funny is, my brother went — my brother’s in college in Connecticut, he ended up seeing and talking to my parents much more than I did even though they were ten blocks away. Because psychologically I’m like, “I don’t have to call them, they’re right there.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** “I don’t have to go see them, they’re right there.” And so I would go months —

**Craig:** The distance —

**Alec:** Without talking to them or seeing them.

**Craig:** I’m really rethinking my strategy of moving halfway across the country, entirely across the country with my parents. I should be next door.

**Alec:** Yeah. No, I was — I didn’t have to call them, they’re right there.

**Craig:** Brilliant.

**Alec:** Why? What do I need to call them for?

**Craig:** Brilliant.

**Alec:** I could shout to them.

**Craig:** And so I won’t.

**Alec:** Yeah, so —

**Craig:** So, you came out here —

**Alec:** Yeah, I graduated. I spent about six months living at home, writing specs because I had a friend who was a couple years older who had moved out to L.A. and had worked in an agency.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Alec:** Chris Moore.

**Craig:** Oh, yes, Chris.

**Alec:** Who ended up producing the American Pie movies. And he worked at a little agency called InterTalent. And he basically said, “Look, I just got promoted. I have my own desk. I’m an agent now and I don’t really have a lot of clients. I can sort of represent you, but you’ve got to move to L.A.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** And he said, “When you get here, you need writing samples.” So I spent six months writing.

Jeff Schaffer graduated the same year I did. He basically lived in Cambridge for six months. And we didn’t work together-together, but everything I wrote, he read. Everything he wrote, I read. We would trade things back and forth. Yeah. We were, you know, we helped each other.

**Craig:** And somewhere out there was Mandel.

**Alec:** Mandel was a year younger.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Alec:** So we had worked with him on a bunch of Lampoon stuff but he was still in college when we were out. So Jeff and I moved — packed up his Toyota Camry and we moved to L.A. And our intention initially was to work.

**Craig:** He had a Camry?

**Alec:** He did.

**Craig:** Rich kid.

**Alec:** Yeah. Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** Rich kid. I had a Corolla.

**Alec:** It was something.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alec:** With the leather and the —

**Craig:** Leather?

**Alec:** Yeah. Oh, it had a CD player in it.

**Craig:** Chic.

Alex: Ooh, yeah, no, it was fancy.

**Craig:** God. CD player?

**Alec:** Yeah. I actually ended up crashing his car at one point.

**Craig:** Nice.

**Alec:** So I took him down a peg.

**Craig:** Nice.

**Alec:** So we moved to L.A. and we sat down with Chris Moore. And Chris Moore at that point was trying to get more into features. He represented a young Zak Penn and Adam Leff actually who had just sold the Last Action Hero.

**Craig:** I always put Leff first just to piss Zak off.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Leff and Penn. That team was —

**Alec:** And Zak is —

**Craig:** It was Adam Leff, and Adam Leff’s partner.

**Alec:** Yeah, that’s right. And a slight annex of Adam Leff.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Alec:** So we moved out. Chris was going to represent us. He became a feature agent, so he put us in a room with two kind of fledgling TV agents, one of whom we ended up working with. The other of whom was a young kid named Ari Emanuel.

**Craig:** That kid’s name was Ari Emanuel.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And was it Ari Emanuel or just a different Israeli?

**Alec:** Who can tell, really? I’m Swedish, I can’t tell the difference.

**Craig:** Alec Berg, anti-Semite. I got my news story.

**Alec:** Edit this out.

**Craig:** No, editing it in.

**Alec:** The thing that happened immediately was these agents all said, “Look, you guys have the same background, you like the same shows, you want to work in the same places, you have very similar samples, you’ve worked together for several years in the Lampoon — ”

**Craig:** Right. Formalize it.

**Alec:** “Be a team.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alec:** “We’re going to send you out against each other or we can send you out with each other,” and people feel like rightfully so they’re getting more for their money when they hire a team because you really are getting two — especially in a comedy room they’re —

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re getting more.

**Alec:** You’ve got two brains instead of one.

**Craig:** Let’s take a side trip and talk for a second to the — because, you know, we have a lot of people who listen to the show that are aspiring writers, many of whom have partners. How do you get screwed when you’re a — I mean, you guys got particularly screwed as a three-man team but what are the ways that writing teams get screwed?

**Alec:** Well, I mean, you know, there’s a big thing going on with the Writers Guild about paper teams, right? Where like TV shows will basically say, “I want to hire you and I want to hire you. You don’t work together, but if you become a team, I can hire both of you for one salary and you guys can both work at the show.” And people who aren’t actually teams —

**Craig:** Yes, they’re getting their salaries halved — they’re getting their residuals halved.

**Alec:** Team up and basically each take half.

**Craig:** Right. There’s also — for you guys, there’s — you know, we get money — when we get paid there’s a percentage on top of that that the studios kick in for our healthcare and our pension. And they don’t really double it exactly or like they don’t double the cap for teams. And tripling God only knows what it is.

**Alec:** You know far more about —

**Craig:** What I’m trying to tell you that you’ve been really damaged over the years.

**Alec:** Yeah, no, just —

**Craig:** Deeply damaged by this.

**Alec:** I was aware of that, I just don’t know the extent to which I’ve been damaged.

**Craig:** Let me take out a spreadsheet and then just take a look at these numbers.

**Alec:** I feel like knowing the extent to which I’ve been damaged is going to damage me that much further.

**Craig:** Yes. So as I said, at the end of the show, you’ll kill yourself. [laughs] I’m working towards the gunshot.

**Alec:** Yeah. You’re just going to show me a printout of my career stats and I’ll off myself.

**Craig:** Here’s your pension information. Here are some texts that I’ve had with your wife. Here’s — okay.

**Alec:** [laughs].

**Craig:** But now —

**Alec:** File all of these under “mistakes made.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Exactly. This is the conception of this thing that eventually turns into this amazing career in television. And I want to talk about this — what I think of as — because I’m catching up to Silicon Valley in a way. I’m going to, like, I’m speeding through Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, getting to Silicon Valley in part because I feel like there’s something that unites them. And I always think of a certain kind of story as very Bergian. You prefer Bergian? Bergess?

**Alec:** I prefer neither.

**Craig:** Bergish? Yes.

**Alec:** Speaking [crosstalk].

**Craig:** So Bergian, we all know what Bergian means. Crap.

**Alec:** [laughs]

**Craig:** But also —

**Alec:** That’s what I’m thinking in my head. That’s Hollywood translation.

**Craig:** Yes, but also, “God, that’s Bergian.”

**Alec:** On the fly.

**Craig:** But also there is a certain kind of recursive self-referential plotting, a kind of a Rube Goldberg plotting that goes on, I see it Silicon Valley the way I would see it in Curb and Seinfeld, too, to maybe a lesser extent, but it’s there. And it’s this thing where these really funny jokes happen. And when you’re writing a comedy and there’re jokes that are connected to plot, they’re on plot, they’re on the specific character relationship that story is about. Then there are these little side jokes, they’re there for funsies. Those become important to the plot. You just don’t realize it’s happening.

**Alec:** Absolutely. No, there’s nothing better than something that plays purely as a joke that all of a sudden you realize it’s like a magic trick.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Alec:** And it’s just like —

**Craig:** This is what I think of as Bergian.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I guess my craft question is how intentional is that? I mean, do you stop and go, “I know I need something that doesn’t seem like plot and seems like pure icing to turn into cake later.”

**Alec:** That’s a great question. The answer honestly is we cheat, which is that I would say way more often than not, that little joke early that becomes plot was written after the plot was written.

**Craig:** Got it. So you’re retrofitting.

**Alec:** That’s the big difference is that you watch a show in a linear fashion.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** The show is never written in a linear fashion. And in fact, one of the great joys of Silicon Valley is because we only do 10 episodes, we can do the same trick from show to show where we’ll come up with something in show six as we’re writing it and we’ll go, “Wait a second, there was a moment in show two where we talked about a similar thing. Let’s go back — ”

**Craig:** Let’s go back and retrofit.

**Alec:** “Let’s put something in the show two script — ”

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** “That sets this up.” And there are things that we do all the time in the show where, you know, there’s a conversation in the first episode of the season where somebody says, “Watch out or this will happen, you got to be careful.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** And then in show nine or 10, that happens.

**Craig:** What’s the board, the — ?

**Alec:** We have a big grid on the wall in the office.

**Craig:** No. I mean, on the show itself, what’s —

**Alec:** Oh, the SWOT board?

**Craig:** The SWOT board, yeah. Like that was something that you could see like, “Okay, that was just funny. That was just a sad joke.”

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then it became like a runner. I mean, even like the condor, you know, the joke was —

**Alec:** That’s a great example.

**Craig:** It was like, “Okay, we’re making a joke about Schrodinger’s bird, Schrodinger’s egg.”

**Alec:** Yes.

**Craig:** And then that becomes — I always think of that as a very Bergian thing, the ferrets.

**Alec:** But that’s the rewriting process, right, is that you go, “Oh, we can reference that here, we can set that up here.” And you’re basically, yeah, you’ve got a chunk of something and you’re pulling little tendrils out of it and plugging them in in other places so that eventually everything is woven in, right? I mean, that I learned from — that’s Larry David. You know, Larry and Jerry kind of invented —

**Craig:** He invented that in a way.

**Alec:** I think so. I mean, I don’t know, there’s probably somebody who did something 10 years earlier who’s listening to this going, “Damn you. It was me.” But —

**Craig:** Well, sorry, sucker.

**Alec:** Yeah. I just made a joke about somebody listening to this.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Alec:** No, but the honest answer, that’s where I learned it is the whole method of telling stories in Seinfeld is, first of all, there were no freestanding jokes in that show. And it’s what makes that show endure, I think, is when you tell somebody the plot of a Seinfeld episode, that’s the comedy, right?

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** It’s not like a traditional sitcom where it’s like, “Oh, he told somebody that he was he was going to do them a favor and then he didn’t want to do it and here of the funny jokes that happened during that.” The story of Seinfeld episodes, when you just say what happened, that’s the comedy of it.

**Craig:** Right. How far can we go without running out of gas?

**Alec:** Right, exactly. But those are the laughs, right?

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** Is the comedy and the story are the same and that is something that I kind of learned to do from Larry. And we did that in Curb also, that like, what’s the story? The story is the comedy, right? Like what’s a funny idea? Oh, that’s a comedy idea? That’s what happens.

**Craig:** Right. Jerry Zucker, I think — I don’t know, David will probably say that he said it first because that’s the way they are. But he said early on they said, “Make plot points jokes, and make jokes plot points,” which is very similar. But what’s different about what you do and I’m using you as the common thread even though obviously all you ever did was just rip off Larry David.

**Alec:** I hope this analysis doesn’t screw me up because I’ve never thought about what I do or how I do it, I just do it.

**Craig:** Let me reiterate again. At the end of the show, you will kill yourself. [laughs]

What you do specifically is you make non-plot jokes plot points. There are certain kinds of jokes that never feel like they’re meant to be plot. They just seem like minor, they seem like minor things that are just there because they’re amusing. And you take those out and really — and no one ever sees that coming because we’re trained, I think, now as just consumers of so much culture and a lot of comedy, we’re trained to see setups and payoffs. We know they’re coming.

**Alec:** Yeah, well it’s like the insert shot of something, right? Like if somebody puts their phone down, there’s a tight shot of the phone. It’s like, “Oh, okay. Here it comes.”

**Craig:** That means something. Right. We are trained for setups and payoffs. You know, we know when somebody says, “There is absolutely no way I’m going in there…” Right? And you’re really good at paying off setups that we didn’t think could ever be setups for anything anyway, like why would the ferret thing ever be relevant?

**Alec:** Right.

**Craig:** You know.

**Alec:** Well, the condor is an example of like where we wanted Jared’s idea of live streaming the condor egg to be just a dumb Jared suggestion.

**Craig:** Correct. But that’s exactly right. Like, I thought the joke was Jared is just being a sweet dork the way he is and these guys are torturing him by making him think that he’s going to kill the bird by calling, which is classic those guys, right? And so that felt great to me. And it turns out, yeah, and then in an Alec Berg way — so sorry for the suicide that’s coming — you say, “That’s what we should be paying off. Not, for instance, making a huge payoff about the guy and that the other company and their competing software,” which is what I think everybody else would do.

**Alec:** Yeah. But again, the way that’s actually constructed is a lot of times in reverse, right? Where we know that we’re doing this thing at the end where there’s this guy on a cliff and that’s the live stream and that catches on. And then we sort of back into all that other stuff.

**Craig:** Great.

**Alec:** And sometimes it’s the reverse. Sometimes you have a funny joke and then later in the show you’re like, “What are we going to do here?” And then somebody goes, “Well, what if that thing becomes this?” “Oh, great.” Boom.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** But a lot of times, you back into it. You know, you go back and you go, “Oh, this should be the funny thing that we do there.”

**Craig:** Really, to me, I think what makes you special and different than a lot of writers is —

**Alec:** Aww.

**Craig:** It’s not good [laughs]. It’s just how incompetent you are —

**Alec:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Craig:** And yet you still get paid at such a high level.

**Alec:** Oh, shocking.

**Craig:** It’s that it’s what you choose. It’s when you go backwards, where do you go backwards to? And I find that that’s where you make interesting choices all the time. Because, I mean, you know, everybody, I think, plays the setup/payoff game. But where you go looking for those setups in the kind of retroactive fit ways is very clever and it’s always really funny.

**Alec:** Oh, thank you.

**Craig:** Now, so Silicon Valley, I suspect that you felt great going into the second season. You thought, “We’ve had a great first season, what could possibly go wrong in the second season?”

**Alec:** No, no. Precisely the opposite. I mean, actually in a weird way, the first season was very freeing because it was — “We’re doing this show.” “What is it?” “I don’t know. It could be this.” “What if this is the show?” “How about they — ” “Yeah, that could be the show,” “This could be the show,” “That could be the show.” And you’re just — you’re vamping. You’re just kind of like, you know, you’re really like kind of freeform —

**Craig:** Free.

**Alec:** And it’s like, “This could be the show.” And if it’s not the show, no one will see us fail because no one’s watching the show.

**Craig:** No one will see it. Exactly.

**Alec:** Right?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alec:** So it’s very freeing in a way because it’s really like you’re just backstage doing it for yourself. And then when it got out and it sort of worked, Season 2 was like the, “Okay, now prove this wasn’t a fluke.”

**Craig:** Well, first of all, you guys suffered a ridiculous tragedy in between those seasons. I mean —

**Alec:** Well, it was in the middle of Season 1 —

**Craig:** You were in the middle of Season 1, right.

**Alec:** Chris Evan Welch who played Peter Gregory, brilliant, brilliant actor, unbelievably great guy.

**Craig:** And potentially the reason — I mean, this is the thing, that when I heard the news about that, what killed me was that — and I think we all knew by the time the show started airing, correct?

**Alec:** He died when we were shooting shows five and six of the eight initial shows.

**Craig:** But he didn’t die after the first episode aired on HBO, did he?

**Alec:** No, no. He died while we were filming.

**Craig:** While you were filming.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So we all knew.

**Alec:** There were scenes that we had written for him in the last two episodes of the first season that — and toughest thing I’ve ever had to do as a writer is soon after learning of his death, it was like we got — this train is on the tracks and moving —

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** You know, the show must go on. I had to sit and delete him from these scripts —

**Craig:** Oh, my god.

**Alec:** I mean we loved him, we loved the character, we loved the scenes.

**Craig:** Right. You are part Swedish and, I don’t know, maybe you have a thousandth of the average human’s emotion.

**Alec:** Do I? I can’t find it. I defy you.

**Craig:** If I ever were on a show where the main character died in the middle and I had to do these tragic things like delete their name while I was in mourning and replace them, I would call you.

**Alec:** It was awful, it was really —

**Craig:** Yeah. Even you thought it was awful.

**Alec:** It was grim. No. I was like, I realized in that moment, I’m like, “Oh, this is what it’s like to feel.”

**Craig:** [laughs] At last.

**Alec:** Yeah. No. No wonder —

**Craig:** And then you said, “Ow.”

**Alec:** Yeah. No wonder my wife gets so down. Like if this is what it’s like, god.

**Craig:** She’s like this every day.

**Alec:** Yeah, man.

**Craig:** But he was potentially the reason to watch that show.

**Alec:** He was amazing. Amazing. He was the guy who every time you shot with him —

**Craig:** Something happened, right?

**Alec:** For the next day or two, everybody like, you know, at craft service was like mimicking his delivery and his lines and it was like —

**Craig:** It was a kind of an impossible creation because it doesn’t seem like you can do anything truly new in that space, in a performance space like that. All you can do is versions of things. I had never seen anything like that in my life.

**Alec:** He was brilliant. And what was amazing about it is it was completely farcical and insanely broad but at the same time 100% real.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alec:** Like you believed everything he did was a real human, a very strange —

**Craig:** Very strange but internally —

**Alec:** But very particular human being.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alec:** But everything was real. And that was his brilliance. Like there was not a phony beat to anything he did.

**Craig:** No. It was all consistent to his character. You know, when he called the hamburger buns breadings, I believed it 100%. And these breadings have sesame seeds, these breadings do not.

**Alec:** Yeah. And, you know, have you been to Burger King.

**Craig:** Yeah. Burger King.

**Alec:** Do people like it? Is it enjoyed?

**Craig:** [laughs] Is it enjoyed? And then there’s that thing he did that you made me notice. I mean, I think I would have noticed it anyway, when he has that chance encounter with —

**Alec:** Yeah. Belson, yeah.

**Craig:** With Gavin Belson and the rest —

**Alec:** I think my favorite scene to date that we’ve done on the show.

**Craig:** And instead of saying goodbye, he does like a weird hand —

**Alec:** His wave.

**Craig:** His wave.

**Alec:** It’s very strange, where he has his hand at his side and he kind of brings it up sort of across his chest and lowers it like he knows he’s supposed to wave because someone has told him that moving your hand in a certain way is a human way of communicating farewell. And he knows that he’s supposed to —

**Craig:** Incredible.

**Alec:** But it’s just a fascinating thing.

**Craig:** And the reason I also love —

**Alec:** And that was all him, by the way, like there was no like, “Hey, do a weird wave.” He just did it.

**Craig:** And we’re going to get into that question, too, in a second. But that character, what I also loved about him was I believed all of his behavior, all of his behavioral problems, but I also believed because of the way you guys portrayed him that he actually deserved every cent of his billions of dollars.

**Alec:** This is one of the things that we worked I think probably hardest on in Silicon Valley is that there’s a huge amount of protecting the characters. And we talk about that all the time. We can kick the crap out of Richard a lot —

**Craig:** But he has to be at least —

**Alec:** But you have to believe that he’s good at this because ultimately you want to root for him to succeed. And like when we first started, a lot of people, especially like tech journalists and people in the tech business were like, “Wait, is this just like — are you just like kicking the tar out of us? Like is this just a poison pen letter?”

And the answer was, no, of course not. Like, we’re going to take shots and we’re going to call out, you know, things that we see as ridiculous. But we’re not indicting the tech business because our characters are striving to succeed in that business. And if we’re saying that what they’re striving to do is nonsense, then we’re telling the audience not to root for them to succeed.

**Craig:** Not to root for them, not to care about our show.

**Alec:** Right. So ultimately, what we’re saying is there’s a right way and a wrong way to succeed in the business, you know. But we’re not saying that success in that business means that you’re a bad person or is a bad thing because then the audience is going to go, “Well, why am I rooting for somebody to get to something that I know is bad?”

**Craig:** It’s odd to me that the tech community missed the subtle cues of what you were presenting there. But nonetheless, I think you guys do a great job of that. And, you know, particularly good job with him because he did seem like if you pushed him even three or four more millimeters one way or the other that I would just stop believing that he had actually earned all that money. Whereas a guy like Gavin Belson, I think of as somebody who actually probably can’t do much but was a very aggressive businessman.

**Alec:** Of course. No, I mean look, we play with that a lot, too. Like, we can’t render Gavin as a complete buffoon because he needs to be formidable.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** Right? We need a real enemy. We need a real heavy that Richard has to actually battle and those battles have to be real and hard. And if Gavin is just a buffoon —

**Craig:** Well, you look at him as this incredibly — he is like a Steve Ballmer kind of guy, like I don’t think of Steve Ballmer as a big tech head, but I think of him as a corporate bully.

**Alec:** Yeah, but oddly, most CEOs are not engineers.

**Craig:** That’s right, exactly. Gates was — Jobs really wasn’t —

**Alec:** Well, we did a joke in the pilot about that, right, where Richard sort of, you know, raises his nose at Jobs, right, because Jobs didn’t even write code, right?

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Alec:** And it is a funny like engineers versus management thing.

**Craig:** 100%.

**Alec:** It was like Jobs versus Woz. You know there is a yin and yang. Where engineers traditionally don’t make great CEOs because they’re so in their heads.

**Craig:** Exactly, and so that’s what’s interesting that that’s the story that you’ve set up now for Season 3.

**Alec:** Yes. But we have to have that conversation about protecting all of the characters. Like Gilfoyle and Dinesh giving Jared crap is something where it’s fun to watch, but we have to be very careful about making Gilfoyle and Dinesh too mean because it’s just like once they’re just slapping a baby, it’s like you hate them for that. And so it’s like you like them beating him up, but we have to be very careful about how far we go.

And it’s funny, we always talk about — Mike and I have kind of come up with this thing that we call the Price is Right school of comedy where it’s better to be significantly under the line than to be even one penny over the line.

**Craig:** One dollar over, exactly.

**Alec:** Right? Like you’d rather be $10 under than $0.01 over.

**Craig:** Well, because nobody really gives you credit for being slightly over the line. Either you are or you’re not.

**Alec:** It is damaging, and sometimes it just destroys everything. And so you’d rather miss under, under, under, under, under than ever miss over.

**Craig:** When you were evaluating this, I mean, because here’s what I think people probably — for people that are writing, they put so much pressure on themselves to get it right. When you’re writing especially this kind of comedy which is truly about generating laughs, you just acknowledge upfront you’re going to blow some things. You have to. There’s no way, you can’t hit home runs if you’re not occasionally whiffing. So there’s I assume this very painful and painstaking process in editing where it’s like, “No, that went too far.”

**Alec:** 100%. No, we do it in the writing process, we do it on the stage when we’re shooting, we pull people back, we, “Okay, go for it. Try it. And if it doesn’t work, you know, we’ll pull it back later.” And yeah, we do a tremendous amount of writing in the edit on the show where there’s a huge amount of lines on people’s backs that we do in ADR, and reconfiguring things.

And, you know, a lot of times if you’re on somebody’s close up and you want to build a pause into that, that pause is not they were pausing when they performed it, there was somebody else off-camera talking. And we take that line out so you build a pause in, like you play with rhythms and —

**Craig:** You know, when it comes to comedy, I wish that there could be some kind of program or something for up and coming comedy writers to watch comedy people edit comedy because that is where you see so much happening. The rescue missions that happen when you’re editing comedy and the tricks, the bag of tricks that are enormous, I mean, especially when you’re doing joke-based comedy and you and I both spend time doing a lot of jokes-based comedy. It’s all about the rhythm and finding, oh, my god, if I need him to just stare and then look briefly to the right, where is that? Find that.

**Alec:** Oh, the number of times like you’ll use a piece of like after you’ve cut —

**Craig:** After you’ve cut.

**Alec:** And somebody says like, “Hey can we do one more?” And the actor will kind of look up to hear who’s off-camera talking to them.

**Craig:** Gold.

**Alec:** You use that piece because it’s like we need something where he turns to his right so that we can cut to that guy and he looks like he’s looking.

**Craig:** Have you ever done one where you played it backwards?

**Alec:** We have. We did it. There was a scene in an episode in the first season where they hired a guy named The Carver and then we shot two scenes and we realized in the edit that those two scenes really should be one scene. And we glued them together. We had a shot of Kumail in the second scene standing up and leaving. And we used that shot played in reverse so that at the end of the first scene, we cut to a shot of Kumail sitting into his chair which was actually a shot of him standing up from the second scene.

**Craig:** This is the epitome —

**Alec:** And you put some footsteps in, so you hear him enter.

**Craig:** These are the tricks.

**Alec:** Right. So when you’re watching the show, you go, “Somebody’s walking into the room.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** And then you caught to Kumail sitting. You go, “Oh, that was Kumail who walked in.” And then the second scene starts.

**Craig:** Kumail does act ambidextrously. I mean, the reputation that he has is like —

**Alec:** You can’t tell.

**Craig:** You can’t tell. Even when he’s walking forward, if you play him backwards, it seems natural.

**Alec:** It’s his gift. He walks forward backwards.

**Craig:** He walks forward backwards. He’s incredible.

**Alec:** He’s a talent.

**Craig:** By the way, I mean like I’ve told you many, many times, if all the show were Gilfoyle and Dinesh talking, I would watch it. I would. I know I would.

**Alec:** But see, here’s all I will say. And those guys are brilliant, super, super funny. I respect the hell out of them. But —

**Craig:** Throw them under the bus.

**Alec:** But the fact is, this is an ensemble show. And the reason that you want to watch those guys all day every day —

**Craig:** Of course. You’re right.

**Alec:** Is that they’re part of a bigger machine that works.

**Craig:** You can’t eat dessert all day. I get it.

**Alec:** Right.

**Craig:** I get it. And it’s true. And —

**Alec:** But it’s great that people think that. Like people want the Erlich show, people want the Jared show, people want the Dinesh and Gilfoyle show.

**Craig:** That means you’re doing it right.

**Alec:** Right.

**Craig:** It’s interesting. I saw an interview with those guys and they said something that made me so happy because whenever actors are being interviewed for junkets and things, somebody inevitably, in comedy always, will say, “How much of this is improv?” And the actors will always give one answer and the writers will always give another. It’s just hysterical.

**Alec:** [laughs]

**Craig:** “Yes, you know, they let us kind of do, you know, obviously there’s the script and, you know, then they kind of — we find stuff in the moment.” And the writer answers always like, “Less than you think. Less than you think.”

**Alec:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] “Ever here and there.” And what I find fascinating about you guys is that you guys switched. In this interview, the actors are all like, “No, the scripts are really tightly put together, so we stick to them.” But when I talk to you, you’re like, you know, you’ll say like Zach Woods is an incredible improv artist and that Kumail and —

**Alec:** They’re all super nimble and yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, and that they go on these incredible runs and that there is improv in the show. So is it just that you guys are all incredibly humble or is the answer sort of somewhere in the middle?

**Alec:** I think that we’ve just found a balance. And I’ve worked on shows where the writers are very sort of hostile about the cast and the cast are very hostile about the writers and there is a lot of like, “Oh, you want me to go out there and say this? I’m going to look like an idiot.” And that there’s this animosity and there really is this cliquishness where like the writers are mad that the actors are tanking their jokes. And the actors are mad that the writers are giving this garbage. It’s exactly the opposite on this show. I just think that it is a special show in that regard that I think the actors have tremendous respect for the writing and we all have tremendous respect for them as performers. And it’s just a good —

**Craig:** It’s a good mix.

**Alec:** It’s a good ecosystem. And I credit Mike Judge for that as well, like he’s just a super laid back guy. He was a musician and you can tell from the way he writes and the way he directs that it’s all done by ear. It’s not “I have rules and I’m going to, no, this is the way I shoot.”

**Craig:** He feels it.

**Alec:** “I have a style.” He just listens. And if it sounds right, it works. And if it doesn’t sound right, he wants to adjust.

**Craig:** And so, heading into Season 3, I assume now at last, right? So, okay, first season’s whatever.

**Alec:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** Second season, very scary. I mean, what are we going to do?

**Alec:** Sure.

**Craig:** We lost a key cast member and I was so worried. But then we put together a really good season. So now you’re comfortable and happy and perfectly ready for Season 3 knowing that nothing can go wrong.

**Alec:** Of course.

**Craig:** And by the way, here’s the gun, here’s how it works.

**Alec:** Yes, right.

**Craig:** Now, answer the question. Yeah. [laughs]

**Alec:** I see what you’re doing. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, what do you think?

**Alec:** You’re [crosstalk].

**Craig:** [laughs] Are you excited?

**Alec:** Look, I feel like, like I said, there was a freedom to Season 1 that, you know, I think in the moment, I was terrified because, “What is this? We have to make a show out of this. How do we do that?” Look, this applies to everything. I feel like I wish that I could figure out a way to enjoy anything that I’m doing in the moment.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** I enjoy an enormous amount of what I do retroactively.

**Craig:** Like this for instance.

**Alec:** Right. Yes.

**Craig:** You will later look back at this.

**Alec:** Like, right now, this is awful. And at a certain point, I might look back after I realized that this led to the freedom of not having to work again where I’ll go, “Oh, that was good.”

**Craig:** This was the moment.

**Alec:** Yeah. That was pink slip moment. But, virtually, nothing that I do, like during any of it, during the writing process, during the directing, during the editing, if you said to me, “Are you having fun right now?” The answer, 100% of the time, is no.

**Craig:** Is no. So, you’re looking forward to more of that?

**Alec:** “But did you enjoy doing that?” I did. Tremendously. “Did you enjoy that thing?” I enjoyed having done things.

**Craig:** In the past. Right.

**Alec:** Yes, of course.

**Craig:** So, you appreciate the past.

**Alec:** Right.

**Craig:** The present is misery.

**Alec:** I wish I were better because there have been an enormous amount of things that I’ve done that I look back at and I go, “That was awesome that I got to do that. That was an amazing thing that I was allowed to do.”

**Craig:** “But while I was doing it, I hated it.”

**Alec:** “I wish, in the moment, I had been able to relax and have more fun doing it.”

**Craig:** I mean, let’s —

**Alec:** I can’t. I can’t.

**Craig:** Let’s end with this.

**Alec:** Pow!

**Craig:** [laughs] That was Alec Berg in his last interview.

**Alec:** Beep.

**Craig:** [laughs] Reporting live from the Sonoma County Coroner’s Office. Do you think it’s possible, when you say you can’t, if you at least intellectually acknowledge that you’ve worried in all of the moments, some of the results have been good and some have been bad.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Therefore, we can take that variable out. The worrying isn’t what makes the work good. Can you at least then say, “Well, why don’t I just stop worrying since it’s having no effect?”

**Alec:** But, see, I feel like you’ve made a spurious leap of logic there.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Alec:** Which is I believe, unfortunately, that the worrying is what makes the work good. That being so terrified of caulking it up —

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** Is what makes me reexamine and reexamine and shred and tear apart and rebuild and —

**Craig:** Okay. But let me —

**Alec:** And if I’m ever enjoying this machine that I’m building in the moment and going, “This works great,” then I’m not scrutinizing it to the point where I’m going to make it work as well as it can.

**Craig:** But I think you’re confounding joy with satisfaction. In other words, you can enjoy the process while saying, “Well, it’s not good enough but it will get better.”

**Alec:** Except that I believe that my motivation to really push and work hard —

**Craig:** Is dread.

**Alec:** I’m not a person who runs to something. I’m not running to quality. I’m running from failure.

**Craig:** Okay, running away. Well, it’s Woody Allen’s thing, you know, that his big goal when they asked him, “What are you always trying to achieve when you make a movie?” And he said, “To not embarrass myself.”

**Alec:** Yeah. And that’s it. That is the sole drive. And I know you would think having done this the way I’ve done it and having worked on the things I’ve worked on, that worked the way a lot of them worked, that at a certain point I would go, “At this point, having done this 20 plus years, I kind of know what I’m doing.” I don’t feel like that at all. I feel like I know less now about how to do it than I did when I started. What I know is I think I have a better idea of what doesn’t work.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** So, I can look at something that 20 years ago I might have looked at something and I might have said, “Yeah, I think that’s pretty good.” Now, I’ll look at it and go, “This doesn’t work, and here are 50 reasons why. That’s no good. This is no good. That guy shouldn’t be this way, that guy shouldn’t be this way, she shouldn’t be talking like that.”

**Craig:** Suddenly, the channel for success becomes incredibly narrow.

**Alec:** Yes. But I don’t know any better now how to make things work.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** I just am much better at identifying flaws.

**Craig:** You just see all the mines in the field.

**Alec:** Right.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** So, it gets harder and harder as I do it. Not easier and easier.

**Craig:** Well, there is one way out, Alec.

**Alec:** Yeah. No, I think we’ve come to that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Here, let me show you how this works. [laughs] And take that. No, no, don’t touch that yet.

**Alec:** What’s this X here?

**Craig:** That, you want to push that down.

**Alec:** Orange dot. What do I do with that?

**Craig:** The orange dot you want to be looking at directly or taste it.

**Alec:** Oh, that’s right.

**Craig:** Well, Alec, a tremendously insightful conversation. I, like you, am soaking in misery all the time. I share this with our listeners constantly.

**Alec:** Yes. But that’s the job.

**Craig:** It’s kind of the gig. It’s part of what we do. I try as best I can now to find little bits of joy.

**Alec:** Yes. It’s funny, we always used to have this running joke that there’s not a funny comedian on earth with washboard abs. And the reason is, once you take the time to focus on yourself and take yourself seriously enough to sculpt your body like that —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alec:** You’re taking yourself seriously.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Alec:** And you’re not kicking the tar out of yourself and you’re not going to be as funny as you can be. And I sort of have just embraced that.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Alec:** At a certain point, I’m sorry for all the misery that I caused my wife and every time I come home and I say, “This show is not good. You don’t understand,” I know I said it wasn’t good before, this time —

**Craig:** That you’ve been saying this to me, I mean, like, you were really worried about this season.

**Alec:** Yes.

**Craig:** Really worried.

**Alec:** Desperately worried. I was convinced that it was a colossal — like we had just driven it right into a cliff.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** I swear to you, it’s not a —

**Craig:** It’s not false —

**Alec:** I need approbation, somebody telling me how good I am. It’s really not. I was genuinely 100% convinced that Season 2 was a disaster.

**Craig:** When you said that to me, it wasn’t like I thought to myself, “Oh, no, no. There’s something I can tell him that will make him feel good.” I thought, “He’s giving me something as he sees it as a fact.”

**Alec:** Yes.

**Craig:** I’m not going to tell him that his, you know, dead cat is really alive by shaking it in the air.

**Alec:** Yes.

**Craig:** And I understood, by the way, exactly where you were coming from. Exactly. Because it’s a very hard thing to do. I mean, it’s essentially a sequel. Every season is a sequel. And you’re always on the horns of, “I want to be different but I don’t want to be so different that it’s — ”

**Alec:** Both.

**Craig:** We have to kind of the same, we have —

**Alec:** It’s like releasing albums. I think like every band, you know, like, there are AC/DCs who just make the same album over and over and over again. And they’re great.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** Right?

**Craig:** And that’s what their fans want.

**Alec:** Right. There’s Madonnas who, like, “Oh, now, she’s this woman. And now, she’s the Marilyn Monroe lookalike, and now she’s Vogueing,” and there are people who can reinvent themselves and each version is good.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alec:** Right? And then there are bands that, you know, they do an album or two and then they put something out and you go, well, I don’t want this. It’s over.”

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s over. You’re done. Here’s your gun, go ahead.

**Alec:** Yeah. Yeah, they are the one-hit wonders.

**Craig:** No, I got actually why you were so upset or concerned, really.

**Alec:** Yeah. Terrified.

**Craig:** But what I know about your show is that the characters are so strong. And I think that no matter what you do plot-wise — because here’s the truth, if you were to say to me, “Figure out the Season 3 plot line,” I think I could sit and come up with a plot line, sure. Would I care about it? I wouldn’t care about the plot line as much as I would care about the characters as they moved through it. To me, that’s the heart of television. The true heart of television is the characters.

**Alec:** Everything is so interdependent that I’d think you care about the characters because the characters care about executing certain things. And that’s the plot.

**Craig:** Yes. But I will tell you as just — this is my experience of the show. I was not worried that they were going to lose their company. And here’s why. Either they were going to lose their company and then I was excited to see what those characters would do, or they were going to get their company and I was excited to see what those characters would do. The dilemma and the building the case — by the way, the lawyer, I mean, just an amazing performance. It was a great, great performance.

**Alec:** Oh, Matt McCoy?

**Craig:** Matt McCoy.

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just crushed it.

**Alec:** Unbelievable.

**Craig:** That’s another great lesson, by the way, is those little characters have to be like your best characters you know. Just your best characters in their own quiet way.

**Alec:** Yeah. And he was so freakishly good. So great.

**Craig:** So good, so good. Anyway, I wasn’t worried. I’m not worried for Season 3 either, although you probably will fail this time.

**Alec:** Oh, we just started writing a couple of weeks ago and I’m already — I just go, “That’s it. It’s over.”

**Craig:** Actually, this time I believe you.

**Alec:** We had a good run.

**Craig:** Yeah — not even — two seasons is not a good run. [laughs]

**Alec:** Eighteen episodes, that’s a lot.

**Craig:** In Britain. [laughs] I mean, come on, man.

**Alec:** We had a good run.

**Craig:** No, this is going to be one of those like, “What happened?”

**Alec:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Did you ever watch Silicon Valley?” “No. Should I?” “Well, only the first two seasons. Only the first two seasons. Don’t go after that.”

**Alec:** By the way, you’re channeling — this is my internal monologue.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wonder how I know what that sounds like.

**Alec:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Ladies and gentlemen, Alec Berg. Thank you very much for joining us.

**Alec:** Thank you for having me. This was fun.

**Craig:** And we’ll do it again. We’ll get you on live with John.

**Alec:** Would love to, yeah.

**Craig:** So you can face his withering questions.

**Alec:** Bring it on.

**Craig:** All right, that was Alec Berg and now back to the regular show.

**John:** So, Craig, that was your interview with Alec Berg which I did not hear a bit of, but I assume that you got all the answers out of him, that he’s not bleeding too hard, that there are not any marks that cannot be healed with time or with plastic surgery.

**Craig:** Not only that, but I fully expect a Pulitzer for — I mean, truly one of the great coops of journalism right there.

**John:** It was basically Frost/Nixon but in a podcast form.

**Craig:** It was. It was Frost/Nixon except important.

**John:** Yes. [laughs] Let’s talk about our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing this week is a video that was sent around because the subway, the purple line of the Los Angeles subway is being constructed very, very close to my house. I will be near one of the new subway stops. And so they sent through all this information about the street closures and everything else they have to do to make this subway happen. It’ll be open in like in 2020, so it’s quite a ways off.

The coolest thing they sent was this video that describes and shows how the subway boring machine works, how they actually create the tunnels. And it is so different than you would think. I had a hard time believing that such a robot existed. It felt like something of Robert Zemeckis’ Contact, that we’re actually able to build this thing that can bore and also take all the ore and transport it back.

It was so amazing that I immediately want to set a movie inside a subway digging construction. So it’s a 15-minute video I’m going to send you from a German subway boring tunnel machine. And I think you will find it fascinating.

**Craig:** That is such a boring machine. You know who drives the boring machine? Arkham Knight. Are you playing Arkham Knight?

**John:** I’m not playing Arkham Knight. Is Arkham Knight great?

**Craig:** It’s the greatest and the Arkham Knight who is not Batman. That’s the whole question is, who is the Arkham Knight? I know. He drives a boring machine at one point.

**John:** I think that’s great. You know, the villain at the very end of the Incredibles is the Underminer. Perhaps he is the boring knight.

**Craig:** He is the boring knight.

**John:** Arkham Knight, is it a open sandbox or is it a strict sort of campaign storyline?

**Craig:** Yeah, if you’ve played the other Arkham games, it’s essentially the same thing. You’re in a general sandbox area but your missions are on rails. It’s Arkham. It’s very, very good. It’s very, very good. But that’s not my One Cool Thing this week.

My One Cool Thing this week is “Rex Parker Does the New York Times Crossword Puzzle”. And when I say One Cool Thing, I mean one kind of cool thing because the truth is, Rex is not cool at all. [laughs] He’s not cool. Rex Parker is a man named Michael Sharp. He is a professor I think at — I want to say SUNY Binghamton. I’m guessing on that one, I think.

But what’s interesting about Rex is that he runs a blog, “Rex Parker Does the New York Times Crossword Puzzle”. He does the New York Times Crossword Puzzle every single day. And then he puts the solution on his blog and then analyzes and critiques the puzzle.

And what’s fascinating is, because I do the puzzle every day, and it’s like, if there were no film critics in the world, if nobody reviewed movies at all, that wasn’t even a thing, except for one guy, one guy did it, that’s kind of what this is like. He’s the only crossword critic I think that exists.

And amazingly, even though he’s the only one, he is incredibly typical for critics. He’s just cranky as hell. He hates most of the puzzles that he does, so of course you’re left thinking, “Why do you do them every day?”

He hates about 90% of them. That’s just my unscientific tally from reading his reviews each day. He particularly hates bad fill. Fill is what they call in crosswords — you have your longer theme answers and then Fill are the shorter answers. So, you know, a lot of bad crossword words that people learn, he’s not a big fan of those.

But I do check him out every day after I do the puzzle and it makes me understand how people use movie reviews I think because the way I use his stuff is, I complete the puzzle and then I go over to Rex to see if I’m either angry at him because he’s wrong, or happy with him because he’s right. Either way, I get validation. I get the validation of anger at him because he’s stupid or pleasure with him because he’s smart. It has nothing to do with him. It has everything to do with me. And as it turns out, I agree with him about 50% of the time.

But if you are interested in getting started on the New York Times Crossword Puzzle, you could do worst. At least at his site, you can get the answers pretty quickly and you can see how he constructs his solutions. And to be fair to Michael Sharp who is cranky, cranky, cranky, he’s a very good solver. His solve times are fairly extraordinary. Well, as he says on his website, he is the 9th greatest crossword solver in the universe based on the 2015 Indie 500 Crossword Tournament.

**John:** He sounds like an amazing character, so even though I could not care less about crossword puzzles, I will check out his site just because that persona you’re describing sounds amazing.

**Craig:** It’s kind of great.

**John:** What do you think is his day job?

**Craig:** I know in the day he’s a professor, so I think that his deal is he is — I want to say a professor of English, possibly? Yeah, at SUNY Binghamton, I believe. So he’s an academic.

**John:** Cool. Very nice. I have one last plug. So every Friday this summer, we are going to be putting up some brand new scripts in Weekend Read. Weekend Read is the app that I make for iOS, for iPad and for iPhone.

And so the scripts are only up for the weekend. It’s truly only a weekend read. So if you’re listening to this on Tuesday, there are no scripts up there for you to read because they were only available from Friday until Sunday night. So you just missed out on Josh Freedman’s original script pilot for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, you missed out on Lorene Scafaria’s Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, and a highly recommend Black List script.

So, every Friday, check out Weekend Read because there will be brand new stuff up there all summer long.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel who’s also on vacation on the West Coast. Matthew Chilelli edited our show and did the amazing outro of this week. Our thanks to Alec Berg, our wonderful guest. I hope his wounds heal. Craig, have a great week.

**Craig:** You too, John.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes 200 Episode USB drives are available now!](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Tess Gerritsen on why she is giving up the Gravity lawsuit](http://www.tessgerritsen.com/gravity-lawsuit-why-i-am-giving-up/)
* Alec Berg on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alec_Berg), [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0073688/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/realalecberg)
* [The Harvard Lampoon](http://harvardlampoon.com/), and [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Harvard_Lampoon)
* [Jeff Schaffer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Schaffer) and [David Mandel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Mandel) on Wikipedia
* Silicon Valley on [HBO.com](http://www.hbo.com/silicon-valley) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series))
* [Christopher Evan Welch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Evan_Welch)
* [Crenshaw/LAX Tunnel Boring Machine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLbkiTnRw5qna2lET4HkTFbIQ8EXEAoZhT&v=iN_bnsFrGBA)
* [Batman: Arkham Knight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman:_Arkham_Knight)
* [Rex Parker Does The NY Times Crossword Puzzle](http://rexwordpuzzle.blogspot.com/)
* [Check out Featured Fridays](http://johnaugust.com/2015/weekend-read-featured-fridays) on [Weekend Read](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/weekend-read/id502725173?mt=8)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/everyman-vs-superman).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So today’s episode has Three Page Challenges in it that use some F-words, so if you’re listening to this in the car, there’s a very good chance we will end up using some of those F-words in the podcast. So, just standard issue warning for explicit language. Thanks.

Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 202 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, I’m in Vancouver Canada. You’re in La Cañada. So, in some ways we are straddling the border, but also in the same semantic space.

**Craig:** Yeah. La Cañada is the sister city to all of Canada. I love Vancouver.

**John:** One tiny little village in California. One giant country that is very close to the US border.

**Craig:** It’s massive. What are you doing up there?

**John:** Just vacation. Just a week’s vacation.

**Craig:** Ooh, I like it.

**John:** We picked one of the weeks of the year in which Vancouver is absolutely stunningly beautiful and sunny and it’s been terrific. So, I tweeted and you probably saw this tweet. I jumped off a bridge, which was quite fun.

**Craig:** Yeah. I saw it and I think you’re out of your mind.

**John:** Yes. I am insane, but it was actually tremendously fun. And it was because my whole family, or actually four people in my family decided, hey, let’s do it. And so I said, you know what, that’s a really good idea. We should do it. So even my nine-year-old daughter did it, which was again, questionable parenting if anything had gone wrong. But because everything went really right, it was empowering for her as a young woman who could take charge of her destiny and jump off bridges.

**Craig:** You know, it’s not. It’s not empowering. It’s sick. I don’t understand why you would do it. I don’t understand why she did it. I don’t understand why anyone does that. This bungee jumping thing — anything jumping, bungee jumping, jumping out of a plane, jumping — base —

**John:** Jumping on a trampoline.

**Craig:** Base jumping. Jumping off of a couch. [laughs] But you know, here’s the thing, I do believe that there’s some kind of genetic thing where some people appreciate that feeling of falling and other people hate it. And I’m definitely in the hate it camp.

My daughter is — she loves it. She loves rollercoasters and all that stuff. I can’t. And my son is like me. We can’t. You know, that feeling I’m talking about right?

**John:** Absolutely. It’s that feeling of being completely out of control, but at the same time knowing intellectually that nothing bad can actually happen to me.

**Craig:** I’m not talking about the psychological. I’m talking about the physiological feeling. Do you not get that sensation?

**John:** Oh, I absolutely get that sensation. But also I know that the endorphin rush that happens after is also tremendously great. So, I’m looking past that terrible moment to the great moment.

**Craig:** A couple years ago I was in Florida with my in-laws. We were having dinner and my wife’s grandmother, who is still alive, god bless her. Even though I think she’s 97 now. So she was about 95. We’re all sitting there eating dinner and this topic comes up, the topic of falling and that feeling.

And my mother-in-law said where do you feel that feeling. And I said it’s in the pit of my stomach. And we were all talking about where it was. And then my wife said, Gamma, because that’s what she calls her grandma. “Gamma, where do you feel that feeling?” And she looked up from her baked fish and she said, “In my clitoris.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** It was the greatest moment of my life.

**John:** And I have a suspicion that because of that she enjoyed the feeling of falling. I hope she enjoyed the feeling of falling.

**Craig:** No. [laughs] She wasn’t actually a big fan of it. No, because not all clitoris feelings are good feelings. There’s good clitoris and bad clitoris, I guess. But when a 95-year-old woman refers to her clitoris in any context, it’s spectacular.

**John:** Craig, we’ve just found a title for this week’s episode. There’s good clitoris and bad clitoris. It won’t be controversial at all.

**Craig:** No, no. Twitter won’t erupt.

**John:** Not a bit. So while the title of today’s episode might be about the clitoris, the actual topics we’ll be discussing today really have nothing to do with female genital health. We’ll be looking at three Three Page Challenges. We’ll be looking at a system for writing your screenplay that must work because the guy gave a Ted Talk. We’ll look at everyday heroes. We’ll look at what happens when a union threatens to sue a filmmaker.

But first, we have follow up. Craig?

**Craig:** Just a touch of follow up. I heard from a couple of writers on Telltale Software’s Game of Thrones app, because that was my One Cool Thing last week. And I did leave one name off, Zach Schiff Abrams who actually ran the writing room early on when they were breaking the story. They were very happy to be called out on the podcast. So, I just wanted to make sure that we acknowledged Zach because he was obviously a big part of the development of that product.

**John:** Craig, I played the first two episodes of it on this trip. I played one on the plane. I played one last night. They really are just phenomenally well done. So, a great recommendation from you, but really just a great experience for anybody who is jonesing for a little bit extra Game of Thrones in their lives.

I really want to make some House Forrester like t-shirts. I want like a House Forrester team shirt because I’m really rooting for the Forresters. And I just feel like more bad things are going to happen to them.

**Craig:** I mean, even Jesus is like, come on. Come on, you’re being a little hard on those people.

**John:** Now, Craig, have you gone back and made different choices along the way? Because for people who didn’t follow the last episode, these Game of Thrones games done by Telltale games, they’re sort of like Choose Your Own Adventure where you get to make choices along the way. They’re more sophisticated than the simple book kind of choices, but you can kind of make some choices that are going to affect the plot, but you also get the chance to rewind and make some different choices if you want to.

Have you just stuck with the original choices, or did you go back and change anything along the way?

**Craig:** I’ve stuck with my original choices. I suspect now that I’ve played through four of these things that it’s really the allusion of choice.

**John:** I think you’re right.

**Craig:** They carry over some things. They’ll say things like, well, you did do blanket-blank. But those things really still are contained within the rails of the story. The big things that happen, you cannot avoid happening.

**John:** I was curious whether the song the girl sings — this is not a spoiler at all — the song the girl sings incorporates some of these specific events that you did or didn’t — it was generic enough, so we’ll see.

**Craig:** No, I think that song actually is a good example of how your choices do impact things, because it’s those areas where they go, okay, we’ll reward you and make you feel like your choices matter. But your choices don’t matter. [laughs] Not really. You’re really just watching TV. You’re just watching a side series of Game of Thrones. That’s the way I feel about it. I think they’ve just done a great job.

**John:** So, while that game may be slightly on rails, this guy has a system that can break you out of your rails. This is a system for writing a screenplay quickly and, Craig, this is your entry to the Workflowy, so tell us about this guy and why we should maybe stop the podcast right now.

**Craig:** Well, someone on Twitter who just likes winding up — I mean, that’s what’s happened now. I get it. People go, “Oh, this will make him crazy.” And they’re right. I’m not complicated. They sent me a link to a website called FAST Screenplay. Fastscreenplay.com. And the gentleman who runs Fastscreenplay.com, Jeff Bollow, gave a Ted Talk, well, it’s a TEDx Talk —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In Dockland, which I think is —

**John:** It’s Australia.

**Craig:** Australia.

**John:** And so he’s not Australian though. That’s a fascinating thing. I kept waiting for an Australian accent and it never came.

**Craig:** Right. I don’t understand the deal with TEDx. The deal with TEDx is pretty much anybody who can write the word Ted on a banner and stick it behind them gets to give a TEDx talk? I don’t understand any of it. Anyway, I went over to this website and I just got infuriated.

And here’s the thing. So, look, he’s selling a system. It’s the same old come on that we’ve read in a million different ways, in a million different places. He’s got a system to help you write a screenplay. It’s a system to help you write a screenplay that reads fast and eventually if you master his system you can write fast. Obviously, the system is not good enough to get him to sell screenplays for millions of dollars apiece. He would prefer to just take your money. Always interesting.

And you get this lifetime membership. Lifetime membership for a limited time only, $600. What?! And that regular price is $1,300. But, you know, it’s a special right now because it’s celebrating the release of his Ted Talk. But here’s the thing, all right, so whatever, it’s baloney, of course. I mean, he says things like, “FAST Screenplay is a yearlong step-by-step professional screenplay development system worth over $30,000.” Uh, yeah, if you also get like a Kia with it or —

[laughs] I mean, I don’t — how do you come up with that number? And then he says it’s designed to replace a three-year university program and ten years’ worth of real world, hands-on skills and insights, which as you know are incredibly quantifiable.

It includes over 1 million words of content. Oh boy. That must mean it’s good.

But here’s the thing that really snagged me in my little umbrage gland and started squeezing it. He says, “Please note FAST Screenplay is entirely not-for-profit. Every dollar that comes in is poured right back into the system, which is why we keep our price so low.” What the hell does that mean?

**John:** It’s fascinating.

**Craig:** So, of course, I immediately went, wait a second. Not-for-profit, that’s not just a phrase. That is a status. That’s a tax status here in the United States. It is an IRS tax status. So, I started looking to see, well, what is this company? Well, according to their website, FAST Screenplay is trademarked and copyright by Embryo Films in Sydney, Australia. Embryo Films seems to be just a — seems to be a for-profit film production company that is turn owed by another media company of some sort.

I see no information indicating that they have any kind of tax exempt status as a non-profit or not-for-profit corporation. But also if it’s not-for-profit, why are you charging anyone anything? Why don’t you just put it out there?

**John:** There’s a subtle distinction between not-for-profit and unprofitable. And there are many businesses that are unprofitable, but not actually not-for-profit. It’s an important distinction that seems to be really swept under the rug here.

I found the site and his whole video kind of fascinating. And I had to sort of keep skimming through the video because it was just so empty and vacuous and it’s just like a bunch of buzz words strung together in a way that had the qualities of human speech without actually having any content.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And the site is very much the same thing, too. But, honestly, you could switch out the word screenplay for almost anything else on any page and it could be about like investing in real estate, or how to do almost anything. So, it felt like there was a template kind of behind the whole thing.

That said, I thought it was all really well executed template stuff. And so I found myself sort of fascinated and repulsed by him as an individual and what he was trying to do. And as a character I found him kind of fascinating. As a person who is trying to take money from screenwriters, I found him, of course, just to be horrible.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this is a new twist on the generic horribleness of these sorts of people and these sorts of ventures. And it’s the, oh, we’re not-for-profit. Does that mean — do they pay themselves salaries? Like what do they do with all of this money if they’re not for profit? Is it to run this website? That can’t cost that much. I mean, each person is giving them hundreds of dollars, even if you just go month-to-month, which is an option.

A three-month subscription is $300. That’s their minimum, as far as I can tell on their website. So, everyone is giving them somewhere between $300 to $1,300. What are they doing with all that money?

Are they paying themselves salaries and so that’s why it’s not-for-profit? None of this makes any sense. I don’t know what this sentence means. “Every dollar that comes in is poured right back into the system.” What?

**John:** Well he says very clearly, “Our goal is not to make money off writers. It’s to generate screenplays which we can turn into films and lift the overall quality of screenwriting to empower individual voices and visions around the world.” Parenthetical, it’s the “variety of imagination that expands our thinking.”

**Craig:** What the hell does that mean?

**John:** I don’t know what it means. But I found it all kind of just amazing, as if some sort of bizarre AB tested kind of system developed the perfect like I’m going to get money off of screenwriters system.

**Craig:** I think you’re actually onto something. This really does feel like a brilliant application of a standard get rich quick template. That you could plug in real estate or investment or work from home or penis enlargement, or any of these things, and lay it out like this and it would work.

I’m just baffled.

**John:** So, here is why — I’m trying to always play my devil’s advocate. Like, well, what if he really is sincere, and what if he truly believes what he’s saying. And on some level he might truly believe what he’s saying. But if his overall goal is to improve the lot of writers and to do the things he’s saying in these dreamy kind of speeches, there are many other ways to do that. And there are many sources he should be looking for those screenplays rather than trying to create a new class of brilliant screenwriters from scratch.

That’s the part that feels so incredibly disingenuous. He’s saying like, oh, I searched throughout Australia and could not find any good screenplays, so I must now make more screenwriters. That I just don’t believe on any level.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. If he doesn’t care about profit and he wants to help screenwriters and he has this brilliant system that will transform you into a genius, just publish it on the web for free.

**John:** That would be great. You could either do that, or you could fund the very needy Australian screenwriters who have things they want to make, and they cannot make them in Australia because it’s challenging to make films in Australia. That would be another great way to do that.

**Craig:** I just — I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m tired.

**John:** Let’s switch to a happier topic. This is another great suggestion from Craig Mazin. It’s an article by Jordan Crucchiola called Bring Back Everyday Heroes. It ran in Wired Magazine. And it’s talking about the nature of heroes in our movies and how they have literally gotten bigger. And as the movies have gotten bigger, literally the men in these movies have gotten so much bigger in a way that is strange and perhaps dangerous. Craig, take it.

**Craig:** Well, every now and then you come across an article that says something that you think is immediately obvious and yet no one has pointed it out yet in this kind of way. And this was one of those articles. So, Jordan Crucchiola, I’m going to go with the standard Italian pronunciation, I don’t know if that’s right. So, what he says basically is that we used to have a certain kind of American action hero, a male American action hero who at least physically was roughly like the average guy.

He uses the example of Kurt Russell in Big Trouble in Little China. Kurt Russell, he’s in decent shape. You know, he’s not overweight, but maybe he had gone to the gym a bit. There’s not a ton of muscles there. And that’s kind of the point. But now he says take a look at the evolution of Hugh Jackman from the first X-Men movie, where he played Wolverine, to now. And it’s astonishing.

I mean, truly astonishing. It’s like looking at the before and after pictures of Barry Bonds when he was playing as a rookie for the Pirates and he looked like he was basically 170 pounds soaking wet. And then eventually after all the ‘roids and the HGH, he was like the Incredible Hulk. It’s a very similar thing when you look at Hugh Jackman’s body. And I don’t know if there’s any kind of chemical shenanigans. I just think it’s insane amount of working out.

And what he says, at least the point he’s making, is this isn’t just a superficial issue. It’s actually affecting stories, and that’s what really fascinated me because the truth is when an actor has a certain physicality it limits or it certainly influences the choices you make about that character.

**John:** Exactly. So, a lot of times you’ll be writing a character who is supposed to be like the ordinary guy next door. So, an ordinary man forced into extraordinary circumstances. But the Rock isn’t an ordinary person. He is sort of by definition special from the very beginning. And the characters who we are seeing in these kinds of movies these days are these just larger than life and sort of impossible people. So, you don’t have the Kurt Russells as your action heroes. You don’t even have the Keanu Reeves as action heroes. You have these super human gods.

He does single out like some movies really call for gods. So you look at Captain America, well I mean he’s Chris Evans because he’s supposed to be this sort of larger than life character. He’s like this ordinary man who got transformed. That’s great. Or you have Thor. And Thor is supposed to be a god. Great. Chris Hemsworth is perfect for that.

But you have these other people that are supposed to be just kind of normal folks. You end up casting the Rock in it, suddenly you have to change the backstory to make some reason why that person is in this movie right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, here’s what I think silently goes on when I see a character who is just an amazing physical specimen. A certain amount of drama is immediately diminished. Here are some things that I think can’t be true about that character. They can’t be lazy. They can’t be unmotivated. They can’t be undisciplined. They can’t be depressed. They can’t be resigned to life. They can’t even be uncool, because it’s essentially impossible to become that freaking awesome if you’re held back in all of these other ways. And so you start to lose dimensions of that character. You also start to lose a certain amount of risk.

So, when you look at The Terminator, obviously Arnold Schwarzenegger is supposed to be massive because he’s this possible robot. But playing against him you had Michael Biehn who basically was like a 165 pound guy.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that made it better, you know. I mean, you don’t want — and eventually you could see how those movies then turned into bigger against bigger. You know, we had what you’d call great everyday heroes. Harrison Ford, who kind of elevated fear as the epitome of heroism. All of his characters were always afraid. And that made them more believable. Charles Bronson was skinny but super angry, which I thought was really cool. Steve McQueen sort of embodied whatever the non-physical dimensions of a classic masculinity are. And then you had Sean Connery who was all about charm and confidence instead of brawn.

You see the difference between Sean Connery’s body and Daniel Craig’s body. It’s not even close.

**John:** Absolutely. You look at Harrison in Indiana Jones. Now we would make Indiana Jones with Chris Pratt who has also transformed from schlubby guy into super-hot guy and sort of action star big muscle guy. And that changes the nature of that character.

Now, it would be a question of when Chris Pratt plays that character, is he going to keep this new Chris Pratt body, or is he going to go back to an ordinary size? I don’t know. But it does change our approach to that character if he’s already the biggest guy in the room.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. I mean, is this the worst thing in the world? No. There’s still actors that portray a kind of an everyman sense. But there is a dark side to this. For every article about the latest fashion for women or the latest fad diet for women, there are three articles saying this is not good for women and for girls.

But these things that are happening now in movies I think are probably also not good for boys and for men. And there’s some interesting — I started looking around, some interesting statistics. Over the last three decades, the percentage of men that said they had body image concerns has gone from 15% to 43%, which is a rate comparable to those currently found in women.

And when you look at what they call the muscularity of ideal male body representations, from 1979 to the 1990s it went way high. And is currently still way, way up there. I think it’s not great for boys to look up to the heroes and see these absolutely impossible to achieve bodies. I mean, they’re not impossible to achieve. Well, from where I’m sitting they are.

**John:** So, here we’re taking a look at how male heroes have become sort of giant and larger than life. In many ways I’d say that women in movies have always been sort of these impossible to achieve ideals. They’re always like they’re a great cook and yet they’re hot in the sack and they’re stunningly beautiful and they can do all these things. Women are always supposed to be perfect.

And in some ways we’re maybe falling into the same trap with our male characters where what you said before, if that guy is that ripped he can’t be lazy. By his nature he couldn’t be sort of the slack off. I just worry that we’re going to end up with these characters who are so perfect from the beginning that they’re not going to have any journey to go on.

You know, you look at Linda Hamilton in The Terminator. We talked about Michael Biehn, but Linda Hamilton in the first Terminator, she’s just an ordinary woman. She’s not — there’s nothing special about her. She’s a waitress. And then because she’s ordinary, she’s really fragile. And then in the second movie she can become hardened and tough because of the events of the first movie. And she can be ripped in that movie and that was a great transformation. That was a change.

Now, I just worry that she’s going to have to be sort of jacked from the very start and that’s not the same kind of movie. That’s not the same kind of experience.

**Craig:** I agree. It’s a little bit of the superhero-ization of human characters. I think for a lot of these actors, they realize that in Hollywood today the apex of our business and the apex of how you are employed as an actor is to be a very popular superhero. And so you have to have a certain kind of body.

And the problem is that you have that body while you’re making that movie and other movies. And you can’t stop, because there’s going to be four action man movies and you have to be jacked up for all four. So, looks like when you’re doing the other movies in between, you’re going to also have to be jacked up. And that’s becoming an issue.

**John:** It’s limiting the kinds of movies you can make. I was trying to think of some movies that wouldn’t be possible to make because we don’t have the right people anymore. Like kind of any movie that Burt Reynolds was in. You know, you don’t make Smokey and the Bandit kind of because I don’t know who we stick in Smokey and the Bandit who is that sort of — maybe you just go with like the guy who stayed schlubby. Maybe go with like a Josh Gad kind of character because there’s just no other choice to make that.

Or the counter example, you look at Melissa McCarthy in Spy this last weekend, a huge hit. And maybe that was in some ways a reaction to everything we’ve been forced by like what a hero is supposed to look like. And that’s maybe the reason why Melissa has become this force in popular culture is because she’s not representing all those other ideals.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I mean, she is one of the few women onscreen that represents that what a good third or more of American women actually look like and are ignored. And whereas no men are ignored. I mean, there’s an actor I can look at for every male body type onscreen, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep an eye on — it’s like well what we did to women and what we’ve always done to women onscreen is wrong, and now we’re starting to do it to guys.

So, how about we don’t do it to either men or women. [laughs] That would be nice, right? There is one interesting thing I noted was the casting of Paul Rudd as Ant Man which reminded me very much of when they cast Michael Keaton as Batman. And I thought, oh, you know, yeah. Like, that’s a regular person. Like the whole point of a superhero movie is that you are wearing a suit that makes you awesome, or that you have some sort of particular kind of training or attitude that makes you awesome. You don’t necessarily need to be massively jacked up. You can be a little bit more representative of a wish fulfillment.

**John:** I would say if you look at the Iron Man movies as they tracked across, I think they’ve focused much less and less on Robert Downey, Jr.’s physical health over the course of them. You know, you don’t shirtless shots of Robert Downey Jr. anymore. And maybe that’s great. Maybe that’s okay.

But, again, that’s a character who has a suit of armor, so therefore doesn’t have to be, I don’t know, doesn’t have to be ripped and doesn’t have to rely on his own physicality. And it would be great to see more movies with heroes who are relying on their physicality and its ordinary person physicality rather than sort of super seven days at the gym physicality.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m with you on that one.

**John:** So, how do we fix this, Craig? We can’t just point out the problem without correcting the problem.

**Craig:** I think that these problems are always fixed the same way. A hit movie comes out that shoes a different possibility. So, every movie Melissa McCarthy makes is that movie right now. I mean, she has failed to fail. From Bridesmaids through to Spy, every movie she’s starred in has been a hit. Every single one. And she has this extraordinary fan base that is very broad and very deep and that’s a testament to her. And I think that’s opening a lot of eyes. That’s the way Hollywood works. They just respect money. They don’t actually have any real belief system. I think people think they do.

They don’t. Their only belief system is what will put money in my pocket. So, I’m hoping — I’m actually rooting for Ant Man. I was really rooting for it when I knew that Edgar Wright was doing it, but I’m still going to give this one its fair shot because it does seem like an everyman kind of deal. That’s the only thing that’s going to help.

**John:** I agree. And I think as we find heroes who aren’t the classic — the sort of new ideal of this sort of Superman thing, we just need to sort of point that out and make sure that people are aware that this is a good thing that we’re doing this.

The upcoming Fantastic Four, Miles Teller is in that. And Miles Teller isn’t a giant, ripped guy. Maybe that will work, and maybe that will be another sort of indication that there’s not just one type of person we stick in these kinds of movies. We’ll see.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think the better test are the guys like the Wolverines. Because, you know, Mr. Fantastic is supposed to be like a slender, stretchy kind of guy. It’s the brawlers, you know. The Kurt Russell used to kick butt and he didn’t need to be massive.

**John:** Where is our Roadhouse going to come from?

**Craig:** Exactly. Although he was really cut in that movie.

**John:** It’s tough. So, while we’re figuring out who should star in the next Roadhouse, Screen Actors Guild and AFTRA are working to make sure that we don’t see another aspect of the film industry portrayed. This is a lawsuit. Craig, talk us through this.

**Craig:** Oh boy. What a mess this is. So, a woman named Amy Berg has directed a documentary about the sexual abuse of child actors in Hollywood. The film is called An Open Secret. And it is currently platforming right now. I suspect like most documentaries it will not have a big theatrical life. It will mostly exist on video on demand.

And I have not seen the documentary, although it is about a topic that is sorely needed to be aired out. There is a legitimate issue that’s been going on for years and years about the sexual abuse of child actors. And one of the people that she interviewed was a gentleman named Michael Harrah who is a, or was a, manager of child actors and a former child actor himself who had been a longtime member of the SAG Young Performers Committee which he co-founded in 1975 and chaired from 2001 to 2003.

And when she sat down to interview him at SAG I believe she confronted him with the fact that this guy Joey Coleman, who was a former client of Michael Harrah’s, is accusing him essentially of making advances toward him. Having him sleep in Mr. Harrah’s bed. Mr. Harrah touching him in a way that he did not want. And when — since Michael Harrah apparently acknowledged that he might have done something unwanted. He said in the interview, “That was something unwanted I shouldn’t have done. And there’s no way you can undo that, but it is certainly something I shouldn’t have done.” Yikes.

Okay. Well, that’s not good. But here’s a really ridiculous outcome of this. SAG, feeling somehow like they’re being tarred with this brush because this guy is being presented as somebody who sat on a SAG committee and created a SAG committee, which he did, SAG has now threatened to sue Ms. Berg and is attempting to block her film because they do not want any references to SAG, SAG/AFTRA, or any SAG/AFTRA committees to be included in any portions of the documentary.

Then, they claim they didn’t do that. But they did. This is just terrible behavior by the union in my opinion.

**John:** So, we don’t have any more information about the actual nature of the allegations of the actual abuse way back there. So, this is just us talking about sort of what is the function of a union in sort of threatening a filmmaker for essentially defaming the union or saying anything untoward about the union or making sort of allegations about the union.

You can understand an organization trying to protect itself, but this felt like really tone deaf in terms of what they were trying to do. If you are a union representing actors, you want to embrace the idea of filmmakers tackling difficult subjects and try to sort of come to clarity. You want to sort of publicly state it is our goal to protect all actors. Like that’s the first thing you should probably be doing, rather than sort of coming after saying don’t dare use our logo in your film.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, here’s the deal. From what I understand from this article, Miss Berg’s film does not accuse SAG/AFTRA institutionally of any crime. What she’s saying is that somebody who was a co-founder and member of their committee, the Young Performers Committee, seems to be admitting, at least on tape, to very questionable behavior at best. And at worst, child molestation.

And SAG’s reaction just seems really, really out of whack. And I think sometimes unions do stuff like this because there is a certain amount of paranoia and monomania as a cultural default. They are so used to the fight that they fight with the companies that they go into this defensive stance where anything that is “not good for us” will therefore weaken us at the bargaining table and be bad for actors. Anything. So there is this closing of ranks when bad news arrives and I just think it was a huge mistake, huge mistake. And I would ask anyone over there that’s involved in this decision to think twice, thrice, and quadrice, because this is not what you want to be doing as a union, threatening to sue a director for a film that frankly is getting to the heart of something that’s hurting your members.

**John:** It very much feels like the memo went to the wrong department. And if the memo had gone to the public relations department, they would have had a response to it which would have been maybe the correct response. But instead it goes to the legal department and the legal department does what legal departments do. They respond in legalistic kind of ways. And they don’t necessarily have a good sense of how something will play out in the broader world. And that really feels like what happened here is that if your first instinct is, well, we have to threaten a lawsuit because that’s what we do, that’s not going to necessarily be the right outcome here.

So, again, that speaks to leadership and sort of who you put in charge to sort of make these decisions about how you handle situations that come up.

If I were SAG, if I were running SAG, and lord knows I would never want to run SAG/AFTRA, but if I were running that I would look at this as a really good test case for when bad stuff happens, how are we going to make the decision about who should handle it and the ways we should handle it. And this was just really bungled.

**Craig:** It’s bungled. And I think you’ll see a little bit of what they call the Streisand effect. Where very famously years ago somebody found out where Barbra Streisand lived and put her address and a link to — a Google Earth photo of her home on the Internet on some small unattended corner of the Internet. She found out, went crazy, sued, and suddenly everybody knew where she lived. [laughs] And everybody saw her house. And I think that SAG/AFTRA is just making this so much worse because now when I hear about Miss Berg’s movie I immediately think, oh yeah, that’s the one that SAG/AFTRA is suing her over. That’s crazy.

What a bad decision. Bad decision. Bad. Bad, bad, bad. So, no good SAG/AFTRA. Big mistake.

**John:** All right. Now we get to go to some good things. We get to look at three Three Page Challenges. So, it’s been a while since we’ve done this. God, maybe ten episodes. But if you’re new to the show, every once and awhile we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their screenplay or their pilot of a TV show and we look through them on the air.

So, if you would like to look through these pages with us, you can find links to the PDFs at johnaugust.com. Just search for this episode and Stuart will put the links in there. You will also find them on Weekend Read if you are on the iPhone and want to download them on there.

So, we have three of these. Thank you to everybody who submitted them. If you would like to submit your own scripts to be looked at for the Three Page Challenge, just those first three pages can be sent to johnaugust.com/threepage, and that is where you will find instructions for sending us your three pages so that we can look through them on the air.

We get about 100 a week or something, and Stuart has to go through all of them. So, if we don’t get to yours that’s because of just sheer numbers. It’s not because we don’t individually like you or love your writing. Stuart tries to pick a representative sample of what we get in and sometimes the best of what we get in, but sometimes just things that have interesting things to talk about. And I felt like all three of these Three Page Challenges had really interesting things that people can learn from.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, which of these should we hit first?

**Craig:** Well I’m holding Get One Free in my hand by Zach Kaplan.

**John:** Let’s do it. Do you want to — ?

**Craig:** Summarize this?

**John:** Yeah, recap that for us.

**Craig:** All right. I’ll give you a little recap. So, Get One Free, written by Zach Kaplan. It opens on black and a voiceover, a man that we’ll know as Sadler is talking about how even in suicide brand loyalty matters. And then we fade in on a convenience store where Mr. Sadler is buying a pack of cigarettes from a low key paranoid Indian man in his 50s, Barry. And he identifies that his brand is Camel Crush. And then while Barry goes to get his cigarettes, Sadler looks around and imagines different kinds of people and the different kinds of cigarettes that they buy and smoke. And in voiceover comments about how blue collar types smoke Marlboro Reds and sorority girls smoke lights. And housewives smoke Parliaments. And depressed 65-year-old men smoke L&Ms.

And then at last he gets his cigarettes. He goes out into the parking lot, sees four teenager skateboarders, teenage skateboarders around his car. And they ask him if he could buy them some cigarettes. And that’s essentially our three pages.

**John:** Absolutely. So, this reminded me a bit of, because this had the nature of a character who is in the scene and we also had his voiceover through a lot of it, it reminded me a bit of Fight Club in that sense of where you have sort of the narration of the moment in addition to the things happening within the scenes.

If I had a frustration, it’s that while the voiceover felt like it was happening in its own space and was sort of its own movie, the actual action happening onscreen wasn’t that compelling in our first three pages. It was a lot of just standing there, waiting around, looking at things. So, I felt a little under-excited about Sadler, our hero, based on what he was doing. Basically the only information I had was this ongoing voiceover from him and it wasn’t giving me a great sense of who he really was, or why should we be looking for what he does on page four.

That was sort of my first instincts here. The actual writing of the voiceover about sort of the different kinds of cigarettes, sure, I totally get that. But in some ways it felt like it would be a more interesting Tumblr post than a voiceover setup for what we’re seeing right here on the screen.

Craig, what was your instinct?

**Craig:** Similar. I thought that it was — first of all, I’m not one of these people that has a voiceover problem. You know, we hear this all the time, “Don’t start your script with voiceover, blah, blah, blah.”

No, go ahead. It’s good. I like it. I thought it was a mistake to start the voiceover where he did. So, Zach has the voiceover begin over black. That little speech that he does there is disconnected from any visuals so unless it’s something a little epic and poetic and specifically expository like say the beginning of Lord of the Rings, it’s just going to feel a bit of a mistake to hear just that much talking over darkness. Also, it’s not necessarily.

Because we’re going to go back and we’re going to have voiceover in a bit, I’d rather just open with a guy buying a pack of cigarettes. And the man says what kind and he goes, “Oh, I’m sorry Camel Crush.” And then he begins to think about what he just said and about brands. That would be more interesting to me. I would actually just recommend cutting that first chuck of VO.

A little bit of a problem for me, I actually got a lot I thought about who this guy was from his VO. He seems nihilistic. He seems too cool for school. He seems bored with life. He’s got that tone of a person who observes without feeling like he’s part of humanity.

A little bit of a problem is I don’t actually believe what he’s saying here. I don’t believe what he’s saying about these brands. There’s a little bit of a facts not in evidence. He’s telling me that plastic surgery infused housewives in their 40s are all about the Parliaments. Are they?

And if they are, who cares? I mean, there’s a little bit of a who cares factor to that. When he goes outside and these kids ask him to buy them cigarettes, it ends really well. I like this. There’s a certain wit here. The kids ask to buy cigarettes and then they hand him a $5 bill and the kid says, “Here’s five bucks. Wait, haven’t I seen you on TV,” which is interesting. He must have been on TV.

Sadler says, “No. And you can take those five bucks and buy a time machine, because it’s not 19-fucking-95.” And that’s really smart.

So, I think that Zach has a really good sense of how people talk. He’s got an interesting rhythm. I think he’s trying to be cinematic here which is cool. The content may be, I don’t know, I’m interested. I’m curious to see where it goes. This may be the wrong topic for a good writer. Because it feels a little forced, but it may also work out pretty smartly.

**John:** So, I agree with you about the voiceover and that by starting the voiceover over black, it makes it feel like that is the framing for the entire movie. But the voiceover speech is just about the cigarette thing. And I can’t believe that the whole movie is going to be about brands and cigarettes. So, by starting it within the scene I think you’re going to make a stronger case for here’s a guy and now we’re going to hear his voiceover while he’s waiting for his cigarettes. That’s going to probably get us better started on this specific thread of who he is.

Because there is so much voiceover and it feels like this is a thing he’s going to do throughout the script, that it’s not just going to be the situation where there’s some voiceover at the very start and then it goes away for a lot of it, and there’s also going to be situations in which Sadler is going to both be talking within a scene and when he’s going to be voiceover-ing, I would consider putting all of Sadler’s voiceover in italics just to make it really simple and clear to the reader which things are being said to a character and which things are being said just to the audience.

An example is on page three. “The kids turn to him, nervous. ‘Hey man, um…can you buy us a pack?’ ‘Welcome to the team.'” That’s a voiceover and I think it’s great that that’s in voiceover, but it would be very easy to skip over that voiceover little tag because you just become blind to it. So, sticking in italics might help us realize that the moment didn’t stop. We just had a line of voiceover there.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a really good idea. Plus, there is a little bit of a formatting — I’m going to call it a mistake.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** It’s not a killer, but he’s putting VO in a parenthetical where the so-called Riley’s go, like thoughtfully. He’s putting it under the character name. Typically what we do is put a (VO) in parenthesis next to the character name. So, it would say, SADLER (VO) on one line, and then his VO.

**John:** Most people would call that a character extension. So, if it’s a parenthetical, something that’s in parenthesis right after the character’s name, that would usually be voiceover, OS, or OC for off-camera. Sometimes I’ll do that for On-Radio, just to be clear it’s a different kind of speech but it’s not talking about the delivery of the line, or not clarifying sort of the action that’s happening there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Especially in a script where, you’re right, I think your suspicion that there’s going to be a lot voiceover is correct. You’re actually going to save a lot of space.

**John:** Yeah. Helpful.

**Craig:** It’s a ton of lines, yeah, that you’re just wasting there.

**John:** I had a bit of an issue with the shopkeeper. “A low-key paranoid Indian man in his 50s, BARRY, tends to him. Sadler stares at the cigarettes.” So, you call this guy Barry, but is Barry going to keep coming back? Because it felt weird to me that we’re giving this guy such a specific name, a name that doesn’t really fit a 50-year-old Indian man description. And so I have to keep track of these two names. And Barry and Sandler for some reason feel kind of similar.

So, by the time I saw Barry again, I was like, wait, who’s Barry? I had to go back to figure out that it was the shopkeeper. If it’s not an important character, I would maybe just keep him shopkeeper if we’re not going to be circling back to see him again. How did you feel about that?

**Craig:** I agree. There are a couple issues here on Barry. One is that, yeah, you’re right, if he’s not a recurring character, call him Clerk I think would be fine.

I wasn’t quite sure why he was so hostile. It seemed like a pointless hostility unless they have a preexisting relationship which doesn’t appear to be the case, because Barry doesn’t know what his brand is.

Also, if you look at this paragraph, this is something that I see a lot and I would make a suggestion here, Zach. “SADLER, 35, slightly hipster-ish, dirty blonde hair, stands dead-eyed in front of the counter.” And then I would do the line of dialogue. “Sadler: Can I get a pack of smokes?” Then say, “A low-key paranoid Indian man in his 50s, BARRY, tends to him.” “What kind?”

Because when you do it all at once is happening is I am imagining, when I read action I’m imagining it happening. What I’m imagining happening the way you’ve written it, Zach, is a guy standing there and another guy is tending to him. I don’t know how that means. I just feel like two people are staring at each other and then finally someone says, “Can I get a pack of smokes,” which I don’t think is what you —

**John:** I agree with you there. Splitting that up is going to make that read a lot more clearly. So, page three is where I had the most issues with action lines and figuring out the best way to arrange our sentences to get the effect across. So, “EXT. PARKING LOT – SOON AFTER Sadler’s walking to his car, but he sees a group of four adolescent, skateboarding degenerates around his car.” In this sentence we’re using the word car twice, which isn’t awful, but isn’t maybe the best we could do.

We also need to capitalize FOUR ADOLESCENT SKATEBOARDING DEGENERATES or some part of that to indicate that these are actually people.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’d capitalize DEGENERATES.

**John:** I would agree. That’s the best choice. And I’d write around one of the cars, just because it’s more important that as Sadler is walking out he sees a group of four adolescent skateboarding degenerates around his car. Just get rid of the second car. Repeating a word within a sentence without effect is not your best choice.

Next paragraph down, two paragraphs down, “Sadler takes a few steps back, unsure, then keeps walking toward his car.” It’s mean to be a character moment, but by keeping it all as one sentence you sort of lost the flow. So, if you broke that into two sentences, “Sadler stops, unsure. Stills himself. Continues walking towards his car.” Breaking that was two separate things makes those actions you can actually play. As one sentence it’s like I don’t know where it began or where it ended.

**Craig:** I think that beat is clashing with what’s going on anyway. I mean, what I took from that was that he was nervous that these kids were there to beat him up, or rip him off, or something. But in fact the kids themselves are nervous because they want cigarettes. They’re waiting for this guy to come out so they can ask him for cigarettes. If you see a bunch of nervous kids around your car, you’re not nervous. I think he probably should just say, “Can I help you guys with something?” and we could skip this beat.

Remember, in a movie we’re going to have to watch this guy stop, see them, take a step back, then walk towards them. Then “Can I help you guys with something?” It just feels like it’s going to get cut. It’s not informing what’s going on.

**John:** I agree with you. So, Craig, what’s your verdict after three pages here?

**Craig:** My verdict is that Zach has some skill and I like the way he writes. I like his dialogue. I thought that he’s — and there’s an interesting. I will say I’m particularly pleased with the fact that he’s clearly writing about something, even if the voiceover at the top is perhaps out of place. The notion of brand and what brand means for yourself as you are self-harming is interesting.

I don’t know where it goes. I don’t know what the point is yet. I just like that there’s going to be a point, hopefully. So, it’s ambitious. I don’t know if any of it works out well. But, no, I was pleased.

**John:** I would agree with you. I’m curious enough to see what this movie becomes, because after the end of page three I really have no good sense of where it’s going to go. You have a sort of nihilistic hero and we don’t know sort of what the next step is for this movie. So, I think I would get to page ten and if it was — I’d hope by page ten to know what kind of movie I was in.

The last thing I would say is most people who send in Three Page Challenges put some sort of contact information on the front page. Just a generally good idea to put an email address or some way that people could get ahold of you if they love your pages. Zach didn’t have one. But if you are sending this in, it’s useful, because you want people to like this and reach out to you to tell you that you’re a great writer. So, put some sort of contact information on your title page.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Great. Our next script is called Not Dark Yet, by RM Weatherly. And RM is a woman. Stuart confirmed this for us. It is a script written in Courier Prime, so therefore it’s already about three steps ahead.

**Craig:** Oh lord.

**John:** Oh lord. Let me give a summary of this. So, we start in a well-ordered street of cookie-cutter McMansions. Just outside this neighborhood we see Damon Carol in his 30s who is standing over a dead body. He’s in his pajamas. He has his dog. And he’s come across a body. And he’s really not freaked out by it. He sort of kicks it with his foot. It reacts a little bit.

He tells the dog, “No, no. We won’t call the police yet. The police are sleeping. We’ll wait till they wake up.” And he convinces his dog to leave.

Next we’re in a diner in the morning. And we see our guy, who is evidently a detective, talking with a potential client. Her name is Eva. And they’re talking about her hiring him to do some recon on her husband who might be having an affair with somebody. She’s not convinced that he is having an affair. It’s sort of more idle curiosity. And they talk about sort of that there aren’t many detectives left in his line of work in this area.

So, that is where we’re at at the end of three pages. Craig, talk us through it.

**Craig:** There’s a lot of confusion in this for me. And so I was working hard to try and figure things out. And failed in spots. I think I succeeded in some spots. But let’s talk content first. The contrast of the cookie-cutter McMansion neighborhood, wealthy suburb, to a forest — now it says just outside the town. I have no idea how we’re supposed to know that it’s a forest just outside the town, unless we see the forest from the suburb and then cut to the forest.

And then we see Damon Carol who is there with his dog. He’s wearing matching monogram pajamas under an overcoat. He’s staring at this corpse. He’s at ease.

Okay, interesting. Fine. He touches the body with his foot, then cringes as the corpse has a phantom reaction. I don’t think that’s how corpses work. There is some sort of stuff like that shortly after death. But not like when you’re in the forest and somebody touches you with your foot, you’re not going to sit up. And even if you did, Damon should freak out because — and then realize that it’s phantom reaction.

He then says to his dog, “I thought I smelled something.” Now, I don’t know if that’s “I thought I smelled something,” or “I thought I smelled something.” I don’t know what he’s talking about.

**John:** It feels like it’s in the wrong place. I got really tripped up by that line, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. I was so confused by it and I even thought like, wait, is this one of those things where the corpse has evacuating its bowels? I literally had no idea what the hell was going on that point.

Then, some headlights approach and he covers the body up. It says, “Suddenly, at the sight of HEADLIGHTS approaching in the distance, Damon picks up debris to create a leafy sheet over the body.” Well, he’s certainly speedy, isn’t he? This is a car driving by, and he’s going to cover a body with leaves before the car gets past him? I don’t think so. That didn’t work.

Then, he says, “We’re going to come back.” And he says to his dog, “The po-lice don’t get in till 7.” At this point I’m like, okay, wait, so that’s sort of like an African American dialectic affectation. Is he black? And the name Damon is a pretty common name for black men. So is he black? I don’t know, because no one is telling me. But am I supposed to know from that? Or is that just an errant hyphen?

**John:** Is it affectation? Is that some weird way that he’s talking for an affect?

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** We have no idea. We don’t have enough information about him to know what the hell is going on.

**Craig:** Right. So, at this point, now I understand the point of a scene like that is to create mystery, but there’s a fine line between mystery and confusion. I need to know that I’m not supposed to know things. I can’t think I’m supposed to know things but I don’t. That’s confusion.

So, okay, we get to this diner. Now, this is an interesting conversation. This woman, and all we know about her is that she’s robust and big-boned. I don’t know what that means exactly. Does that mean fat? Does that mean tall? Does that mean fat and tall? Big-boned is a euphemism, that’s sort of a meaningless euphemism. Regardless, there’s an interesting dynamic here. This is where I started to perk up.

Essentially this woman is saying, I got from this conversation that he was a detective. And I got from what her comments were is that the detective business is sort of done. He’s the only detective around because there isn’t really any crime around here. And then she suggests that she will hire him to tail her husband because he might be up to something. And you know what? She’ll even pay him double. And at that point Damon realizes she doesn’t suspect her husband at all. She’s taking pity on him. She’s essentially trumping up a job to pay him.

Now, that’s interesting. But it came out all wonky. It’s a good dynamic. It’s a good subtext to arrive at. The problem is I only determine that from the action lines. I don’t think I get it from the dialogue.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so it’s wonky. It’s off.

**John:** I agree it’s wonky and it’s off. And I actually had a challenge with that whole diner scene because the line that leads into right now is, “Are you alone?” And then we cut to a diner. And so my natural story brain goes like, oh, whoever is asking that question must be the person who is like seating him at a table, or something like that.

So, I read Eva as a waitress the first time through. And it wasn’t until I got to the end of page three that Damon motions for the waitress for another cup of coffee and I realized like, oh wait, they’re sitting at the same table. And I didn’t catch that here. Because there’s nothing that indicates that they’re sitting at the same table. All we hear is “The voice belongs to a robust, big-boned EVA KEYS, in her late 40s. Damon takes a sip of coffee, considering his answer before speaking, but Eva has a mill of questions. She continues:”

So, I didn’t get that they were sitting alone at a booth. I didn’t know anything about the space. And so I just made the wrong assumption based on the prelap getting me into here.

I got confused a lot, too. And let’s talk about the nature of the setting. The suburb and then the forest. Right now, RM, she has Wealth Suburb — Night and then Ext. Forest — Continuous. Continuous isn’t really the right choice here. Continuous is if it literally is a continuation of the same action. And that’s not where we are. So, just give Night here. So, we’re traveling to a new place, put the city lights in the distance if you want to. Do something to let us know where we are in relation to that previous place you set up.

I’m not convinced that cookie-cutter McMansions is going to make sense for this character ultimately with the conversation we have later on, but regardless, if the forest needs to be near, show us where the city is and tell us that it’s important.

**Craig:** Here’s the thing. You’ve touched on something important. What Eva and Damon are discussing essentially is that he’s the only private eye that’s left. And he says, “That’s right. Damon Carol, the only one in the book.” And I don’t like lines like that where somebody clearly announces their name so the audience knows. There’s better ways to do that.

But, why would there be any private eyes in a McMansion suburb? That’s not where private eyes are. Why would anybody be surprised that there’s only one left? Frankly, they should be surprised that there’s one at all.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It just doesn’t make sense.

**John:** If it were like a dying town, if it were a Cincinnati or like something that used to have private eyes and they all left because everybody left, that would be great. Or if it was some sort of like it was a boom town that people moved on from, that would be great.

I like the idea of the last detective left in a town. That’s a great idea for a character. And I sense that this Damon guy could be really fascinating. And I’m projecting forward, but I’m guessing the reason he hides this body is so that he can actually discover it later when the police are there and get credit for it. He has a whole game plan. But I’m not getting it through the scenes that I’m actually seeing on the page.

So, even this thing about the phantom reaction. I have a sense that RM has an idea in her head of what that reaction is. Describe it. Be specific rather than just say a phantom reaction, because I don’t know what that is. Does it shit itself? Does it pass gas? Does something pop? Is there spontaneous spasm? Anything would be great. But phantom reaction, I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m going to make a suggestion, RM, too. I’ve been thinking about this diner scene. The idea that someone is hiring a private eye out of pity is really interesting. I think the scene would probably work better, and I don’t know if this ruins the story or not, if he’s sitting in a booth with this woman and he’s saying, “Are you ready?”

And she says, “Yes, I’m ready.”

And he opens up a folder and he shows pictures of her husband. And he says, “I’ve tracked him here, I’ve tracked him there. I’ve checked his texts and all the rest of it, and this is where he’s been going.” And he shows her. And it’s — he’s going to the library.

And she’s like, “Oh, so he’s not cheating on me?”

And that’s when Damon leans back and says, “No, he’s not cheating you. And that’s when I decided to follow you.” And then he shows pictures of her and how she, or texts that she called him and said, “Look, just do this, the guy needs the work.”

In other words, let him be a real detective to the point where he detects using his detective skills that this was a pity hire. Which is — because I want to know that he had to find out, that he didn’t immediately know it, but that there was that moment of sickening realization that somebody is giving you a handout. Like you thought you had a real job and it turns out to just be pity. That’s awful. So, find a way to demonstrate that a little more dramatically and with a little more surprise for the audience.

**John:** Agreed. You’re also describing a scene that has changes over the course of it. Where we approach the scene with one bit of information, we approach it with everything we know about detectives, and so therefore the next thing is that the detective is going to show us that the man is having an affair. Oh, but the surprise is that he’s not having an affair. The second surprise is that you actually hired me out of pity and the scene can build and change.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. So, that’s what you’re going for. And I think particularly in an early moment when you’re establishing a character, showing that they’re competent is important information. I suspect that you’re going to want Damon to be competent. Demonstrating that they are in dire straits through their competence would be interesting, too.

So, anyway, I think there’s a lot of work that needs to happen there. And really do take this to heart, RM, that mystery is good, confusion is bad.

**John:** Agreed. We were talking about sort of the dialogue scene, but let’s also back up to the discovery of the body scene, which I think should play as a completely silent scene. I don’t think there’s any reason for a guy to talk to his dog. It feels forced to talk to your dog.

But, that moment of suspense where he’s like is he going to be able to cover up this body in time, give us some real — give us some time there. Give us some sentences to describe the sort of growing — the headlights getting closer. He’s trying to cover it up. He’s trying to find the right kind of leaves to go over it. The dog keeps knocking the leaves off it, like you know, there’s moments of suspense, or comedy, or something else there that’s going to be fascinating and we’re going to watch it because it’s such an odd choice to like find a body and then try to cover it up.

That could be great. And we could be with him in suspense and knowing will that car see him. Will that car stop? Will there by anything strange happening? Is he going to wave to the driver as it goes past? There could be something really great there.

**Craig:** Yeah. And maybe just so that you have the time to play that moment, don’t make it a car. Make it a couple on a date going through the woods.

**John:** Someone on a bike, nice and slow.

**Craig:** Yeah. Something. You got to think about real time. This is where screenwriters — it’s normal, we do it all the time. We compress time and space in our minds with such ease, but we forget that somebody at some point is going to be out in a freaking woods at two in the morning going, wait, ugh, the car has to be going like one mile an hour. We won’t even be able to see it until it’s there.

We need all this time for him to do all this stuff. It’s just never going to work. You got to think ahead to those moments. Those are the worst moments where you just think, oh, who cares. The audience. They care.

All right. Well, why don’t we move on to our third Three Page Challenge? This one is called Youth on Fire by Olufemi S. Sowemimo. And I’m going to summarize this as best I can, [laughs], because this is —

**John:** This is where you’re earning your big bucks today, Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m going to get a good paycheck out of this. We begin, again, with voiceover over darkness. Someone named Castor saying, “It takes three things to start a fire.” We then are in a college lecture classroom at night. We see two people in the center of the rooms, Sarafina Wyngaard, 19 and beautiful, drenched in some sort of viscous yellow goop. And holding on to her a beaten man, Castor Pollack, 22, and geek-nouveau.

Around them in the room there appears there’s been some kind of huge fight in here. And all of this yellow goop is everywhere. It’s on the walls. It’s coming down into puddles on the floor.

Outside the window, there’s smoke and fire, a college campus set ablaze. Sarafina is holding a Bic lighter in her hand, twirling it around. And so Castor in voiceover says, “It takes three things to start a fire. Oxygen.” Then we cut to a burn ward. He says, a different voice, male voice, Ken, says, “Heat.” And we see a burned figure on a bed with oxygen tanks. And then we go to a grassy field and we hear Sarafina in voiceover saying, “Fuel,” and we see two silhouettes making love, a burning gazebo directly behind them, casting their intertwined shadows.

Then we cut to a city street and an angry mob of teens and twentysomethings fighting with police, overwhelming them. And in voiceover, “All it takes to set it off is a spark.” Sarafina, back in the classroom, places her thumb on the lighter. And before it sparks we cut to black. And then we fade in on Arizona Institute of Technology, AIT Campus Day. It’s apparently finals day and Congrats Graduates.

There is a large bear. This is the school mascot. He’s on his hind legs and a placard says the AIT Great Bear. And a distressed student comes out of the building and he looks at his final exam, it’s terrible, he’s gotten a terrible grade. And he freaks out and starts attacking the bear, yelling at the bear about how upset he is and how much he hates school. And while he’s doing that, Castor in voiceover talks about how school basically screws everybody.

And that’s —

**John:** That’s our three pages.

**Craig:** That’s a lot in three pages.

**John:** It’s a lot in three pages. So, I love movies that start with provocative imagery and gives us a sense of sort of the flash forward of where is this all going to get to. And so that’s very much what he’s doing here is setting sort of some moment from probably quite late in the story where this couple is together, something terrible has happened, the school is on fire. There’s yellow goop for some reason. These provocative images invite us to ask questions and therefore we are intrigued to get the answers to those questions, and therefore we’ll keep watching the movie.

The challenge I face is that I got just really lost and I lost some faith in this movie’s ability to make me want to follow all the way to those answers. Especially when we got into this student who comes out and has all his interactions with the bear. That’s where I was like I don’t — I didn’t feel confident that I was in good storytelling hands based on the things that we’re happening, and especially in that last page.

Craig, where were you at with this?

**Craig:** Well, that’s right. I mean, so, look, lots of good things to talk about here. Olufemi has a terrific sense of how to create a mental image with text. And that, boy, that’s a big part of our job. And so I saw everything on the first page and a half. There was a hundred things going on. I saw it all. And that’s great. And I was really interested. And I understood that there was a mystery there. I wasn’t confused.

I was fascinated. And it was so interesting. I think that voiceover wise, you’re going to run into trouble moving voiceover like this between three voices because in particular I don’t think anyone is going to know that Castor and Ken are different people. Male voices, even when they’re different men, will often sound the same if there’s a continuity of voiceover like that. Particularly when we’re not seeing a different voice. And we don’t. There’s a burned figure on a bed. So, that’s a little bit tricky.

I thought the order, oxygen, heat, and fuel, was wrong, because we start with a lighter, then we go to oxygen, then we go to fuel. So I thought it should have been heat, oxygen, fuel.

But I was so like, oh my god, this is crazy. What — how — and I understood that I was definitely going for another Stuart special, [laughs], where we open at the end of a movie and then go to the beginning. And that’s because Stuart loves that. Don’t keep doing it just to make Stuart pick your scripts. But then, oh man, did it fall off the rails. And the reason it fell off the rails was tone. Tone, tone, tone.

So, the first page and a half is dark, and moody, and poetic. I mean, the character’s name on page one, and I don’t love things like this.

**John:** Sarafina and Castor.

**Craig:** Well, and also Castor — his name is — where is page one. Castor Pollack. Which is sort of a hammy reference to Castor and Pollux, the Roman twins. You know, all right, fine. He went to school, I get it. But the tone is mood and poetic and visual.

Then when we get to this scene, where the student, the first thing he does is yell at this bear and says, “Fuck you, rape bear. Screwed me right up the ass, you stupid bear. You like that? Did you like it, huh?” This — I’m like, wait, wait, it’s like I started watching Fight Club and then I cut to black and then the next scene I’m watching Neighbors.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What’s going on? I was so confused. And then Castor’s voiceover seems completely irrelevant because all we’re really watching is a student freak out and Castor’s voiceover saying, “Students freak out.” This did not work.

**John:** It didn’t work at all. And I lost a sense of where this voiceover could be connected to. So, if you’re giving me these provocative images and you have a voiceover that’s sort of establishing like, you know, to make a fire you need heat, fuel, and oxygen. Like, I get what that is. That’s like a movie telling itself. But then to have that voiceover and have multiple voiceover empowered people feeding me more stuff just made me frustrated and sort of confused about what was going on.

But I really want to talk about the stressed student, because what he’s doing is so crazy cartoonish, but even the setup feels really strange and sort of not specific to our shared understanding of how college campuses work.

**Craig:** Wait, you didn’t buy that his final exam was graded instantly? [laughs]

**John:** So, his final exam, and “red marks cover the page like battle wounds. Nonsense. Absurd. You can go do better, etc. Up top a score of 13 out of 50.” We have the macro lens out for that, because we’re reading a lot apparently. If we see this guy freak out, we’re going to get why he’s freaking out. And this felt like the kind of scene that should have taken place entirely without him talking or without anyone else talking. And so if you want to do some cartoonish things, don’t also have him say cartoonish things. You can have him take cartoonish actions or like, you know, get fucked by the bear, or sort of do that stuff that he wants to do, just let’s not talk about. Let’s just sort of show it.

And if you want to comment on it, maybe have real characters in the scene commenting on it, because the voiceover was just not working for us.

I also want to talk about the specificity of campus. Like what is campus? Colleges are big and I don’t have a sense of where we are on this campus. I needed a little bit more scene setting, because apparently this is where most of the story is going to take place, is my guess, since we’re ending there and we’re starting here. Give us more. Tell us, are we in the main quad? Give us a sense of what kind of school this is. Because you say Arizona Institute of Technology. It’s like, am I supposed to think ASU, am I supposed to think MIT? Those are very different vibes and very different kind of feelings of what those students are like.

In general, like since we’re going to end on sort of a war scene, is this supposed to be normal days? Is the calm before the war? Show us some calm before this guy storms out.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, when you have a character doing something like this guy is doing where he’s mimicking being raped by the bear, no one does that on their own. It’s just simply not — at that point you’re mentally ill. That’s crazy. You would do it in front of a friend to make them understand how you felt possibly. I mean, I don’t love it at all, but you would not do it alone.

And it’s being commented on, again, by Castor, Ken, and Sarafina in voiceover. We have these three disembodied voices like a Greek chorus suddenly now talking, like having a conversation in VO. Look VO can be terrific. A conversation in VO, when we have no idea who is doing it yet, very difficult. And when the tone of the conversation is in polar opposition to the tone of what we’re looking at, you end up with a disaster.

So, this is so interesting to me because I feel like page one through 1.5 is fantastic. And page 1.5 to three is horrendous. And so I guess I would say that’s good news, because if you can make 1.5 fantastic pages, you can make 110 fantastic pages. But, something went rapidly awry.

**John:** I also want to think about what is the audience’s expectation after this kind of opening. So, when we do the flash forward opening and then we’re coming back to sort of the real start of the movie, my instinct is the first person I see, or the first person I should be focused on should be one of the important people. And so when you tell me in the script “distressed student,” and then I get a page and a half of just distressed student doing stuff, I’m thinking well is this our hero? Is this the guy I’m supposed to be focusing on? Because as a moviegoer, I would assume like, oh, this must be our main hero person. But the reason I know it’s not is because you didn’t give him a name. He’s just called Distressed Student.

So, I’m really conflicted about sort of should I be paying any attention to this guy? Is one of these other people going to step in, oh wait, they’re being voiceover, so who knows. And that’s a real frustration. Stories don’t always have to start with your hero. Obviously many great movies start with characters who are not your hero, who are sort of disposable and you never see again, but movies that start with this sort of flash forward structure and then come back to reality, I would bet 90% of them, one of the very first people you’re going to see if your hero to establish, ground you in the reality of this is the character’s journey.

**Craig:** Absolutely true. In fact, I’ll go a step further. When you start with voiceover over a tableau like this, sort of a — I imagine this is all very tableau like, these first 1.5 pages. When you come out of it, you’re close on someone. You want to be physically close on a face. I could easily see the first thing we see being Castor’s face not beaten, and we hear over his face some cry. And then we reveal that he’s looking out his window at a girl who is sitting under a banner that says Congratulations on your Finals, or Good Luck on Finals, and she’s just sobbing.

And we go, oh boy. You know, I would get that. But you’re so right. You have to come back to a face almost to understand even time wise what the hell is going on. If you’re going to play the time game, help me.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** Great. So, as always, I want to thank everyone who has submitted for the Three Page Challenges, especially these three people who were brave enough to have us talk about their three pages on the air. If you have your own three pages you want us to take a look at, it’s johnaugust.com/threepage, and you can submit your own. If you want to read through the ones we’ve talked about, they’re on the show notes, so just johnaugust.com.

It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a video that everybody on the Internet said I should watch, but I avoided watching it because it’s 15 minutes long. Now I watched it and it’s really, really good. It’s called The Fallen of World War II by Neil Halloran. And what he did is a great data visualization of —

**Craig:** It’s so cool.

**John:** It’s so good. It’s all the deaths of WWII. And sort of showing in sort of a great chart form of like how many people died from each country, both military casualties and civilian casualties. And it sort of shows you how big WWII really was and how it sort of out-scaled everything that had come before it, and really everything that’s come after it.

And so it was harrowing but it was also — ends on a surprisingly hopeful note in the sense that you recognize that since the horror of WWII we’ve not had anything approaching that in terms of death on a global scale. So, really just spectacularly well done. Just a great example of what’s possible to do with great data visualization. It also reminded me way back in episode 30 I talked about The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronical of Atrocities by Matthew White, which if you liked this visualization, I would urge you to read that book. Because what it does is it talks through sort of all of history’s great atrocities, some of which are in Halloran’s video.

But it gives you a sense of like what is the context for these great deaths that have happened in history and the kinds of things that lead to these big catastrophic events.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s great. Anytime somebody says how bad things are now, and the world is getting worse, I perversely want to punch them and make the world worse because we’re not even in the same galaxy of badness that existed in the middle of the 20th century.

When you look at Russia alone, it’s astonishing. When you think about what it means for millions of people to die, and then you think about tens of millions of people. It’s unfathomable. And there are all sorts of theories as to why it hasn’t happened since, one of which is kind of obvious, because it can’t. Everybody has nuclear weapons. You simply can’t do it anymore. You can’t have a war like that anymore. But I think also the war itself was proof that we shouldn’t have a war like that anymore.

It’s unreal. It’s just hard to fathom living on a planet and yet, you know, my parents were alive when that was happening. It’s just remarkable. Just remarkable. So, yeah, an amazing video.

My One Cool Thing is like on the other end of the spectrum. It’s on the loose end. So, I’m not a big wine guy, but any time I get a bottle or something I just want to say like, oh, is this crap or is it okay? And I think I mentioned this to you. There’s a website called CellarTracker where people can write their opinions of wine and it’s actually kind of useful because people that know about wine — and I am not one of them — will say things like, you know, this is a good wine, but don’t drink it now, drink it three years from now. Or leave this out for an hour, or just go ahead and drink it.

And they have an app now, it’s free, and one of the coolest things about it is you can take a picture of a wine label and it will search some database somewhere in the sky and show you that bottle of wine exactly from that year with all the reviews and thoughts on it. It’s so cool.

It will even give you a sense of what it should cost. So, if you’re in a store and they’re like, “This is the best and it only costs $120,” well, maybe it really only costs $50. So, very cool, and it’s free. They ask for a voluntary payment, which I have yet to do. Actually I just noticed that it said that. [laughs] I feel super ashamed. I will send my voluntary payment in. CellarTracker for iPhone and possibly for those other phones that others talk about.

**John:** Yes. The engine underlying it is the same thing that does Vimeo, which is an app I’ve used for a while. And I think it’s actually so smart because it’s a great use of like you have a limited data set. Although there’s thousands of wines in the world, there’s only thousands of wines in the world. So you can actually just digitize all of the labels out there and then figure out like these are the wines. And you can match those up to reviews of them and actually provide a useful service from that data set.

So, I thought it was just a really smart use of cellphone camera technologies, scanning, the power of the computers that are in our little pockets all the time to do it.

**Craig:** What a world!

**John:** We live in a great world. Better than WWII. So, this is all —

**Craig:** Yeah, and in WWII people were dying in the millions and now in 2015 my phone gets me drunk.

**John:** Ha-ha. And that’s our show this week. If you have something to say to Craig Mazin, you should write him on Twitter. He is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Longer questions, write to ask@johnaugust.com.

If you would like to leave us a review on iTunes, that would be fantastic. Just search for us there at Scriptnotes. That’s also where you can download the Scriptnotes app for your iOS device. We’re also available for Android devices on the appropriate app stores.

Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel who picked these Three Page Challenges. Thank you, Stuart.

Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli, and man, did I make his life difficult this week. We had Skype dropouts and my brain did not work very well. So, thank you, Matthew. If you have an outro for our show, we love to have great musical compositions as outros, things that incorporate the [hums], but in clever new ways. Matthew writes a lot of them, but we also have great people who have written other ones for us. So, if you have one of those outros, just send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com and we will get that into the queue.

For Craig Mazin, I’m John August. Guys, thank you so much. See you next week, Craig.

**Craig:** Bye John.

Links:

* [John jumped off a bridge](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/608473352420925440)
* [FAST Screenplay’s Jeff Bollow at TEDxDocklands](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH6AyjGgcns)
* [Action Movies, Stop Taking Away Our Everyday Heroes](http://www.wired.com/2015/06/action-stars-impossible-man/) on Wired
* NEDA’s [Statistics on Males and Eating Disorders](https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/statistics-males-and-eating-disorders)
* [SAG-AFTRA Threatened To Sue Director Amy Berg Over ‘An Open Secret’](http://deadline.com/2015/06/sag-aftra-threatening-sue-an-open-secret-director-amy-berg-1201438339/) on Deadline
* [Submit your Three Pages here](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* Three Pages by [Zach Kaplan](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/ZachKaplan.pdf)
* Three Pages by [RM Weatherly](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/RMWeatherly.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Olufemi S. Sowemimo](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/OlufemiSSowemimo.pdf)
* [The Fallen of World War II](https://vimeo.com/128373915) by Neil Halloran, and [fallen.io](http://www.fallen.io/ww2/)
* The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities by Matthew White
* [CellarTracker](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cellartracker/id893759800?mt=8) for iOS
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Adrian Tanner ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))