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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 163 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, on previous episodes we talked about Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Craig: Yes.

John: We went deep on Frozen.

Craig: Yes.

John: We talked about Groundhog Day.

Craig: And The Little Mermaid.

John: And The Little Mermaid. Actually, The Little Mermaid was our first one.

Craig: That’s right.

John: So, it’s another one of those, and this was your idea from last week.

Craig: It was my idea?

John: I think so. We said Ghost and you said we should do that.

Craig: Yeah, we should do that.

John: We should do that right now. So, our episode this week is talking about the 1990 film Ghost.

Craig: Ghost.

John: And talking about it in sort of the kind of depth that only we would want to talk about it in.

Craig: Only we can do what we’re about to do.

John: Yes. We will unchain our melodies and get into Ghost.

Craig: [sings] Ooh…my…

Okay.

John: But first a little bit of follow up. John Miller wrote in and said, “What is the 12 Days of Scriptnotes I see on the back of the sexy new t-shirt?” So, he’s talking about the Scriptnotes t-shirts. Craig, we sold a whole bunch of these Scriptnotes t-shirts.

Craig: I’m not surprised. It’s a great t-shirt. I think everybody should own one, whether they listen to the podcast or not.

John: Well, it’s the softest t-shirt we’ve ever made. And if you remember the first batch of t-shirts we made, they were supposed to be just the world’s softest things. And they were really incredibly good. But I challenged Stuart Friedel that, you know what — we need to make an even softer t-shirt. And Stuart’s sense of softness is just remarkable. And so he found the t-shirt. He says the paragon of softness is this American Apparel shirt from 2008 that doesn’t exist anymore.

Craig: That was the 10 on the scale. That’s the diamond —

John: Absolutely.

Craig: I see.

John: Yeah. And so like nothing can actually, like if you were to scratch something against it, it couldn’t even scratch. It can scratch nothing.

Craig: Yeah, it’s maximum soft.

John: I think the reason they don’t make that t-shirt anymore is they use it to swaddle newborns.

Craig: Because air scratches the shirt.

John: Yes. So, the closest we were able to come to it is actually not an American Apparel shirt. It’s the next level shirt. It’s a blend and it’s kind of great. And so I tested it and it’s really a wonderful shirt. So, we’re making them only in gray, only with or sort of Sons of Anarchy tour band, just sort of world tour logo kind of thing. So, they’re only available for one more week, so people need to click on them to get them. So, store.johnaugust.com and you can order them.

And they run sort of in American Apparel sizes. So, if you are between a medium and a large, you get the large, so aim up is what we’re saying.

Craig: And what is it actually — do we know what it’s made out of? Is it some kind of chemical? How else is it so soft?

John: It is a blend. And so that’s the thing, to make really soft t-shirts they can’t be 100% cotton. They have to be a blend of cotton and two other fibers. So, it’s a tri-blend.

Craig: But they won’t say, because those fibers are — they’re made in a lab, deep in a lab under micro —

John: No, I think actually, I’ve listened to another podcast that was talking about sort of how fabrics were made, because I listen to a lot of other podcasts, and so it’s actually not —

Craig: Wait, there are other podcasts? [laughs]

John: There are other podcasts in the world.

Craig: I thought this was it. I thought this was the —

John: There’s us and the Slate Culture Gabfest, then one that we’re —

Craig: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John: October 8.

Craig: So, there’s two now?

John: So there’s now two podcasts.

Craig: Great.

John: And so it must have been on the other podcast where they were talking about how fabric is soft or hard, sort of how fabric works is really about the way you’re twisting the fibers. So, it’s not about the things that it’s actually made of. It’s how you’re twisting it that makes the biggest difference.

Craig: Well, I’m educated.

John: You’re educated now. So, remember, pre-orders. If you want this t-shirt, you have to order this week or else you’re not going to get one because we’ll only print as many as people order for them.

Craig: Now, what is the answer to this question? What is the 12 Days of Scriptnotes on the back of the shirt?

John: So, we were trying to figure out what to put on the dates. The back of the t-shirt has all of the live show dates that we’ve done in the past and in the future, because we didn’t want this to sort of immediately be out of date, because a real tour shirt is talking about the future events, the future live shows.

And so we knew we had Austin, so that’s on there. We knew we would have the Slate Live Culture Gabfest. But we knew there was going to be some kind of Christmas show, and so we had to figure out what to call that Christmas show that would be funny on the t-shirt. And so we had all sorts of discussion around the office, and so one of the top contenders was The Passion of the Craig.

Craig: I can’t believe that didn’t…

John: So, my argument against The Passion of the Craig is that that’s really an Easter thing.

Craig: Well, that’s true.

John: So for the Easter show we can call it The Passion of the Craig.

Craig: Yeah. That’s true. Technically, theologically, that’s correct. Although —

John: I want to be a theologically correct podcast.

Craig: I mean, as long as I’m compared to dying Christ, then I think it’s accurate. It’s fair.

John: Craig died for our sins.

Craig: Every day.

John: Every day.

Craig: Every day.

John: Another correction. On the last podcast we were doing questions-and-answers and there was a question from John Schurmann, the Playwright, but it wasn’t John Schurmann, The Playwright. It was John Schurmann the TV Writer. So, he had deliberately in his question said, “I’m not the playwright, I’m the TV writer, and I completely reversed it. So, anyway.

Craig: Well, that’s a disaster.

John: Yeah, so I apologize to both John Schurmanns.

Craig: I assume we’re getting sued?

John: Well, actually we fixed it in the transcript so that when they Google it it will never actually show up wrong.

Craig: Oh, thank god.

John: So, I should say, the reason why we sell t-shirts in the first place, sort of to back into this whole the thing is we are a money-losing podcast. We don’t have ads or anything like that. So, we sell t-shirts, and the t-shirts really help pay for things like the transcripts, the hosting, and for Matthew who does such a great job of cutting our shows. So, it’s kind of the only way we kind of pay for what it is that we do.

So, if you’d like a t-shirt, it helps us pay for the whole show.

Craig: And just be aware, if you buy five shirts, if everybody you know buys a shirt, don’t worry, we’ll still be losing money.

John: We will still lose some money. Even if you are a premium subscriber for $1.99 a month, we will still manage to lose some money.

Craig: Yeah. That is our promise to you, the customer. We will never be profitable. [laughs] We will always lose money.

John: Yes. We will always meander for a long time before we get to our actual stated topics and we’ll always lose money.

Craig: [sings] Ooh…my love…

Okay, so Ghost.

John: The film Ghost is written by Bruce Joel Rubin and directed by Jerry Zucker, which I always forget that he directed this movie.

Craig: It’s Jerry Zucker [pronounced Zooker].

John: Oh, Z[oo]cker’d it instead of Zucker’d it.

Craig: It’s Z[oo]cker. I don’t know, okay, so I have the new iPhone, this is awesome. I have the new iPhone 6 and you know how they have this thing where like you can tell Siri to start talking to you without pressing any buttons?

John: Yeah.

Craig: Well, I said something that made it think that I wanted Siri to come on and it, oh well, that’s interesting.

John: Jerry Zucker sounds like Hey Siri.

Craig: It’s Jerry Zucker.

John: Zucker. I’ll never get —

Craig: Zucker. So, the first time I met David —

John: So, David is David Zucker.

Craig: David Zucker, his brother. I was talking to a guy who works for him and I said, well this is very exciting meeting David Zucker and he said, “It’s Z[oo]cker. Rhymes with Hooker. If you say Zucker it’s going to go poorly.”

John: Ah! Yeah. Because Zucker rhymes with another word.

Craig: It does. And they’re very finicky about it.

John: Okay.

Craig: They’re very finicky about it. So, it’s Jerry Zucker. Yes, directed by Jerry Zucker, coming off of all the spoof movies.

John: Airplane!

Craig: Airplane! And Top Secret! And I don’t know if The Naked Gun had — had The Naked Gun come out prior to this?

John: I think Naked Gun is after that, because Naked Gun happened after the TV show, didn’t it?

Craig: It did. Yes. So, this was after Police Squad and Kentucky Fried Movie. So, obviously not at all continuous with his other work with David, his brother, and Jim Abrahams.

John: So, this movie comes out in July 13, 1990. It’s a long movie. It’s 126 minutes. I looked up budget and box office for it. So, back in 1990 it was budgeted at $22 million, which inflations up to about $40 million.

Craig: Right.

John: Box office, it made $505 million, which in modern terms would be $900 million.

Craig: Wow. Unbelievable. And that is a worldwide number I assume?

John: Uh…yes. I think it’s a worldwide number.

Craig: That’s just unbelievable. Can you imagine a $40 million movie today making nearly a billion dollars? Wow.

John: So, Whoopi Goldberg went on to win the Oscar, the BAFTA, the Golden Globe for her performance, and Bruce Joel Rubin, the screenwriter, won the Oscar for Best Screenplay.

Craig: Well deserved by both.

John: So, I also wanted to look and see how was this movie perceived when it came out. And so challengingly it’s actually kind of hard to find the reviews from that time, because a lot of times there will be links to those old reviews and they’ll be completely dead. So, when you try to go through everything sort of disappears.

But I was able to find the Ebert review and Peter Travers. So, Peter Travers first. His little quote, he talks about sort of the antecedents for Ghost, which I think is actually useful framing for this. He talks about “Blithe Spirit, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, just to name three classic movies with the same theme. And there have been many sentimental botch jobs, including Kiss Me Goodbye, Chances Are and Steven Spielberg’s dreary Always.”

Ooh…

Craig: Yeah, okay. All right, Peter.

John: But I think it’s worth noting that Ghost wasn’t the first time we ever had the sort of romantic movie with the Ghost and the living woman.

Craig: No, it is not. And The Ghost and Mrs. Muir probably the closest, although they’re not — what this, this one is very different than The Ghost and Mrs. Muir because she’s sort of inherited a ghost. And she falls in love with a ghost because it’s like she has a meet-cute with a ghost and then they fall in love. Peter Travers says, and I quote, “Ghost belongs with the treacle…Zucker dutifully pushes all the buttons — romance, thrills, laughs, tears — that have been pushed before by more assured hands…There is little else to admire other than Whoopi Goldberg, except for some nifty special effects,” which in the lens of today not at all nifty. “For the rest, Ghost succeeds only at being insubstantial.” And I think with this review we can say that Peter Travers, once again, has succeeded only in being insubstantial.

That’s just a dumb review of a much better movie than what he’s talking about.

John: I think it’s a better movie than he’s seeing, but we do have the benefit of knowing that it became this incredible phenomena and sort of touchstone movie. And he had to review it in the week that it came out. And so sometimes —

Craig: But then to be fair to us, we were alive in 1990. We were young adults. I was 19 years old. And I loved this movie. I remember loving it in the theater, crying and laughing in the theater, and feeling like it was one of the best movies I had seen ever. And it wasn’t my kind of movie. And I loved it. I just loved it. And I watched it again in preparation for this, and I still love it, and it’s so — I mean, we’re going to talk, obviously because we’re a screenwriting podcast I want to talk mostly, I’m sure you do as well, about Bruce’s script. I’m going to call him Bruce even though I never met him, and how good it is, and how sad it is to read some dumb review like this.

This review, you have to dig up and find in some dusty archive, look at it and laugh at it as an absurdity. And happily the movie lives on and I haven’t shown it to my daughter yet, but I bet she will love it. This is her kind of movie. She will love it.

John: The thing that really struck me as I watched the movie again is you can take a look at the movies that came before it, but what I think this really paved the way for is movies like Twilight. It’s really one of the first breakout supernatural romances that sort of had audiences, especially women audiences, going to see it ten times in the theater.

And it just hit all of those notes exactly the right way so that people loved it and that people wanted to see it again and again. And they wanted to sort of live through all of those experiences again and again with the movie.

Craig: Yeah. Ghost, to me, is a masterpiece of tone. Bruce Joel Rubin is writing and his entire oeuvre seems to be centered around questions of death. So, he wrote Jacob’s Ladder, and I believe there was another movie called My Life I believe which was also — which are meditations on death and how we handle our own mortality.

And obviously this movie has a supernatural fairy tale approach to death, but it concentrates on the living to some regard. So, you have this very deep tone of a dead man and the woman who loved him and they cannot be apart. And it’s a tragic romance. You also have a comedy. You also have sort of a crime/caper mystery. All of those things are handled perfectly well by his script. And where I think Ghost triumphs is in its precision point tone.

John: I agree. One of the criticisms of the film as I looked through sort of people who are not fans of it, they say that it shifts gears too often, or shifts tones too often. But what I think is interesting is you talk about the different things that it needs to do. It needs to have this much plot so that it makes sense. It needs to focus on the romance in these ways. It needs to have humor so that you can sort of have the relationships between Whoopi Goldberg and Patrick Swayze, and Whoopi Goldberg and Demi Moore, and sort of what’s going to happen. And it manages to do those very deftly.

The comedy works in the ways it needs to work without going so big that it eclipses the actual threat and it makes it feel like this isn’t a serious movie where people could be facing true harm.

Craig: Well, what Rubin does so well is avoid — so he avoids a mistake that I see all the time in screenplays that I get sent. And he embraces the opposite. And that is a question of reorientation to extraordinary events. A character faces an extraordinary event and the — sometimes I read scripts and the characters simply don’t behave in ways that you or I would behave in the middle of an extraordinary event like that.

John: Yeah.

Craig: There’s no time for them to behave. This movie takes its time and has no problem saying, okay, you’ve just been killed. We’re just going to spend 10, 15 minutes with you absorbing that. We’re going to spend 10 or 15 minutes with your not-wife but your girlfriend, your surviving girlfriend, absorbing what this means.

When you discover someone who can actually hear you, and a wonderful choice to make the psychic a fraud until this moment, she’s going to spend time just absorbing the fact that this is real. He’s going to spend time absorbing that she can hear him. Everything is allowed to just breathe and people are allowed to react the way I think you would normally react. And that’s why we go along for the ride, even when it gets wild.

John: It would be fascinating if we could somehow take a development executive and remove Ghost from their experience, so basically they’ve never seen Ghost, they have no idea Ghost exists. Then give them the script, because I really do feel like their instincts are going to be to make huge cuts to the first act and really the start of the second act. And basically get plot started much faster. And they would want Patrick Swayze’s character killed as soon as possible.

Craig: Yes.

John: They would want to skip over a lot of the little sort of comedy beats and sort of get things going and really ramp up the tension and the stakes and all the things that you’re supposed to do. And it would really be to the detriment of the film.

Craig: I think also that they would force a genre on it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: They would say, look, either this is All of Me, which was, you know, All of Me was a similar kind of movie that was all about being a comedy.

John: Yes.

Craig: And all about a dead person moving inside of a live person’s body. So, either do All of Me and make it a total comedy, or so this is a sad, weepy tragedy. But what’s this whole thing about where you want to have your cake and eat it too? Well, you can, as long as you give the characters time to absorb what’s happening. [laughs] Then I think it’s okay.

John: So, let’s start in. I have the movie here in front of me. I’m going to be skipping through some things, but I really want to see how the movie unfolds as it plays because it’s not what I remembered it being, and it begins in a very different way than I expected.

So, it’s a Paramount movie. You’ve got the stars flying in. Then we’re fading into what seems like we’re in a scary movie.

Craig: Right.

John: And I did not remember this at all. And I don’t know if you remembered it when you saw it, but it’s dark, it’s shadowy, we’re not quite sure what this place is that we’re in. It’s a pretty font, so it doesn’t look like scary murder font, but it’s one of those long opening title sequences.

So, it’s dusty and what we’re ultimately going to see is that Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, and Tony Goldwyn are sledge-hammering down this wall to open up this new loft that they’re going to be moving in to.

Craig: Right. And as we’ve talked about, these opening moments, this is why even though we don’t insist that your first three pages be the pages you send in for a Three Page Challenge, it’s good often that they are because those are the pages that are teaching us how to watch the movie. So, when the title comes on, it comes on with a jarring jump scare tone. And then the credit sequence is giving you a horror movie vibe. And by doing so it’s saying, hey, take this seriously. This is not going to be what you’ve expected from Jerry Zucker before.

John: True.

Craig: It’s not the just light romance or romantic comedy. We’re actually taking this real. When we say Ghost we don’t mean like Wocka Wocka Ghost. We mean there is going to be some serious stuff going down. And when the credit sequence ends, what we are revealing is essentially three of the four people that are in this movie. And this is a movie with very few characters.

And here we are meeting three of them and learning very quickly that Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore’s characters, Sam and Molly, are together. And then there’s this friend that they have, Carl, who is played by Tony Goldwyn.

John: Yes. So you see the three of them smashing through the wall. Essentially they all have weapons. They’re not using them on each other quite yet. It’s sexy. I mean, Tony Goldwyn is in really great shape here.

Craig: I mean, both of those guys are ripped.

John: They’re ripped. I mean, Patrick Swayze you always sort of knew was the, but I mean Tony Goldwyn, this was his moment. And so it’s going to be this love triangle between the three of them is the sort of central drama of this thing. And the music sort of threw me, but I think you make a good point is that starting in this movie, if you had sort of the more romantic sort of music, or if you had the comedy kind of music, you would be expecting this to be a funny movie right from the start.

So, in a weird way the misdirect of sort of the — it’s not Aliens, but so it’s Maurice Jarre, sort of his more sort of mysterious — it’s an interesting way to start the movie. And it sort of gets you taking the movie seriously.

Craig: Right.

John: We meet our three main characters. So, Patrick Swayze’s character is named Sam Wheat. Wow. There’s a name.

Craig: It’s just a bad name. It is, especially because it’s said over and over and over. I mean, look —

John: Has anyone in the world ever been named Wheat?

Craig: I mean, I’m sure there are people named Wheat, but Sam Wheat sounds like a bad cereal. So, I mean, look, these are the things you point out when you love a movie because there’s like little things that stick out as wrong. And there’s very few of them, but I’ll point them out as they come. But Sam Wheat is just a dumb name.

John: Molly Jensen, which is sort of a perfect name for a Demi Moore character.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

John: And then Carl Bruner.

Craig: I mean, what a great villain name, right?

John: It’s sort of a great villain name. It sort of tips that he might be a villain.

Craig: Everything tips that he might be a villain.

John: And it’s Carl with a C which is especially — you don’t really see that in the movie, though.

Craig: It’s like a Nazi name, you know, Carl Bruner.

John: Yes. So, she is an artist. We don’t sort of know that she’s a potter yet, but they are living in scary New York, not sort of modern New York. And it’s going to become important that they’re living in a not yet gentrified neighborhood.

Craig: Right, so in the late ’80s, or this movie comes out in 1990, so they shot it in the late ’80s, downtown areas, downtown that we think of as super hip now like Meatpacking or even Tribeca or so, were kind of scummy. Alphabet City, totally off-limits. And it seems like they’re living down there. Yeah.

John: So, we see their new loft and sort of the plans for the new loft. They’re moving in together for the first time.

Craig: Right.

John: Next scene we’re seeing Carl and Sam in the elevator. They’re dressed up in suits and we see that they work in Wall Street banking, some sort of financial thing. It’s a first comedy bit really which is faking that Carl has a terrible disease in a crowded elevator and they make everyone really uncomfortable. So, we’re seeing that they’re buds, and they feel like kind of frat boy buddies.

Craig: That scene is the one thing I know for sure is that that was not Bruce Joel Rubin’s idea. That was something that Jerry, and Jim, and David would do themselves in elevators to entertain each other. I think that goes all the way back to their time in college. And I’ve actually been in elevators when they’ve done it now, which is even scarier because they’re older now. So, god knows what they’re hacking up. So, Jerry just has these two guys do it.

But what I love about it is that it is essentially pushing a button in the audience’s brain. And it’s saying here’s kind of a cliché scene of two guys yucking it up. And while it is cliché and has nothing to do with story, doesn’t move the plot along at all, what it’s doing is it’s tapping you in a spot that goes, oh, these two fit into this cinema box of wacky buds. And that’s going to help kind of misdirect us until the movie can’t bear any more direction in part because they seem to be missing one character. [laughs] I feel like the movie is short one red herring character.

But, regardless, that does help quite a bit.

John: It does. So, the elevator takes us into the financial offices which are the saddest financial offices I think I’ve seen in this kind of movie. It’s just such a little set. And it feels more like a bank in Wichita than a high stakes financial office. Partly, the fault of movies is movies really kind of, from the time of Wall Street, but really as long as we’ve always thought about big New York City corporate movies, they always have the glamour shot, like windows that look out over the city.

Craig: Right.

John: It’s always this high power thing, and this is not that at all. It’s like they sort of ran out of money for like trans lights or things, so that you don’t really see out the windows. It was odd to me that it was just such a boring office set.

Craig: It is a bizarre space. There’s a weird lavender carpet. It probably actually is more accurate to what those spaces look like, because real estate is a premium in New York and only enormous firms can afford these super fancy looking places.

But, I have to say that while sometimes the movie does seem a little cheap, and frankly it wasn’t made for a lot, I mean $40 million today is not a lot of money to make a movie like this, there was some already — even before we got to this point, or maybe, I’m sorry, just following there’s going to be some really nice directorial touches. You can see that Jerry is pulling some cool moves.

But in this sequence, we learn a couple of facts that are fairly nicely layered in.

John: Agreed.

Craig: We learn that Patrick Swayze’s character, Sam, seems to be a little more senior than his buddy, Carl, and that Sam is in possession of certain codes that allow the transfer of money and, in fact, he’s changed one of those codes and maybe there’s a little bit of that later, but we’re learning at least there’s a hierarchy here. They’re in charge of money. And Sam has a code.

John: Exactly. And so this ability to put stuff into accounts is something that Sam has and something that Carl needs. And we’re going to learn down the road that Carl put some money into an account and then can’t get it back out. And that is the reason for the plot of Ghost in terms of the villain plot of Ghost is just about this code got changed.

Craig: Correct.

John: So, we see their offices. We see what that is. There’s the Japanese. We are coming back to the beautiful loft apartment which Molly is fixing up.

Craig: And is this where the angel is being…?

John: Yeah, the angel.

Craig: Right. So, it’s a nice little visual thematic thing. They’re hoisting this wooden angel up. You know, and listen, foreshadowing comes in all sorts of flavors. Sometimes it’s punch you in the face foreshadowing, but I didn’t mind it so much here. There’s a nice moment where we see Sam go to help get the thing in and you almost think like, oh my god, is he going to die here? But he doesn’t die here.

There’s a very nifty little shot that Jerry does with a mirror. I don’t know if you noticed that or not. I liked that one a bit. But, again, we see they’re all together and they’re all buddies.

John: Yeah. It is actually a very clever shot. I was playing it right as I’m watching this right now. So, essentially Sam’s helped get the angel inside and there’s a shot which you think is real but is actually in a mirror that’s being carried back away from you. And that took probably half a day to choreograph, but it does help give you sense of the space really nicely.

Craig: Yes.

John: So this is our first apartment together. It’s all about sort of their love and sort of their being together. It’s the first time we have the I Love You words spoken, I believe.

Craig: Yes.

John: And the lack of that.

Craig: Yeah. So, there’s this exchange that they do here, and we’ve talked about this before. You can’t write great dialogue. You can’t. You can write dialogue that becomes great. But you can’t sit down and say now I’m going to write an iconic line. I can’t sit down and say I’m going to write, “You had me at hello.” I love you and Ditto became a thing.

It was just so perfect because it wasn’t as blatant as I love you and then, “Oh, you know, you mean so much to me, too,” and this very on the nose thing. He’s saying ditto and she’s laughing. It’s their gag. But there’s a little something missing there and transitions into this very interesting expression of pessimism from this character. And maybe that pessimism kind of gives a hint as to what his little journey is going to be all about. But essentially saying every time things are going well for me it seems like — he’s kind of discussing the sort of Damocles and the idea of the other shoe dropping and he’s worried just that the good times will end.

John: Yeah. If I had a criticism of the movie up to this point is that I haven’t had a very good perspective on what he wants. And I know he has a job. I know he has this beautiful wife — or not wife — girlfriend. This is one of the few moments where he’s talking about his inner life, but we don’t get a lot. And it would be better to see sort of what his flaws are before this moment. But, movies only have so much time.

Craig: Well, that’s true. And I would also say that I’m not sure how I would have done it differently, because in the way the movie is going to work we know that what he’s going to want is such a big want. I want to save the woman I love from a terrible end, that that would dwarf anything that comes before it. And so what he’s expressing here is an inability to just be happy with what he has.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And I think that that’s a nice thing to do for a character that’s going to lose everything and then appreciate even the smallest thing, like being able to just touch the person you love.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So I thought that was a good choice actually.

John: So, 13 minutes in is where we have our iconic pottery scene.

Craig: [laughs] Right.

John: And so what’s so funny, obviously everyone knows this scene. But watching it again, I had never realized how incredibly phallic it was. Because I always think about it being like sort of sexual touchy, but you realize she’s crafting a giant penis in front of her.

Craig: That’s right. Uh-huh.

John: And then the penis will collapse.

Craig: Yeah. What she’s doing is she’s jerking him off in this scene.

John: Yes. She is. And the young me did not recognize that.

Craig: No. I don’t think young me recognized it either, [laughs]. But in watching it now, it couldn’t be more obvious. She’s masturbating him. But, so a very — there’s just so much about this scene that’s fascinating to me.

Okay, first of all, again, does absolutely nothing to move the plot forward. And when we talk about rules and how rules are rules until they’re not rules, this is a great example. This doesn’t move the plot forward. It doesn’t even really move the information of their relationship forward because we already know he loves her. Or, he may be conflicted in not being able to express it, but he certainly likes her a lot. They’ve moved in. They’ve been hugging and kissing.

So, what is this for? And ultimately it’s for a feeling. It is a scene that evokes something that is more than just information. It makes me believe that these two people are soul mates.

John: Well, the moment is actually genuinely cinema. It’s not just story. It’s the thing that can only be captured by sight and sound and the great music playing underneath it. It’s all those things put together as a package.

And reading this on the page would not have anywhere near the impact of seeing these two attractive people rubbing their hands all over this clay and being intimate with that song playing. It is truly a cinematic moment.

Craig: It’s gorgeously done. I love what she’s wearing. It’s so sexy. You know, that kind of like overall but no shirt underneath. It’s great. And the music — when you get a song like this, and it doesn’t happen often. This is an old song, Unchained Melody, had been around forever. It was from the ’50s. And yet it was one of those “what’s old is new again” songs. I love the way that they have the old style jukebox moving the record around, which is gorgeous.

But, a song like that you get like I Will Always Love You, from The Bodyguard, My Heart Will Go On, from Titanic — it’s just one of those things that is so right for the moment that the movie becomes defined by it, you know?

John: 100 percent. And so sometimes they’re songs. Sometimes they are poses. Sometimes they’re just little snippets. I mean, Flashdance, she pours the water down on herself. That’s the iconic image from it. It’s not that it was the one sheet, but it sort of had to be the one sheet, because that is the thing sort of encapsulates what the experience of the movie is. And the pottery/clay moment is that moment here. And it’s interesting because if you look at the posters for it, a lot of times it’s like Patrick Swayze all glowy, but that’s not really what the movie is about. It’s about the two of them, and touching is what you want to see them be able to do, because of course we’re about to take away their ability to touch each other.

Craig: And, again, you could play the what would the studio executive say game, and they would probably say, “Well, yeah, but this should end in a fight. Somehow move the story, Make a change in this.”

But, no, this scene is why the movie works. I really believe that in my heart. We would not care so much if we didn’t see the two of them actually have sex without having sex. And it’s like great sex. It’s great movie sex. It’s spectacular. And it’s the buy-in for women, for men, for anybody that knows what passion is, this is the thing that gets your heart pumping for these two characters so that when they are rendered asunder it matters.

John: Yup. Immediately after this scene it is daytime and we’re going to a new plot moment. So, like we’ve had our love and now it’s plot. We are close in on a green CRT monitor and someone is trying to access an account. And stuff has been changed. And so this is where Patrick Swayze suddenly looks like, wait, something is wrong. There’s too much money in this account. He has to change the codes on things. So, he’s going to fix this thing and he’s going to tell Carl, huh, I’m going to have to stay late tonight to figure out what is wrong with these codes.

Craig: Right. And Carl is asking, oh, I could do it for you. No, no, I’ll do it. No suspicion there whatsoever. I don’t think we’ll ever understand, we’re ever made to understand why there is extra money in the account, where it came from.

John: Yeah. The sort of thrown away explanation is that Carl is laundering drug money. And so whoever the people are, they’re incredibly dangerous. But, we never see them. They never become a real threat. Apparently they’re enough of a threat to Carl that Carl is willing to do terrible things. But, we don’t know this yet.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, the fact that we never see them is probably a good thing because it would just end up being a guy. Carl’s plan to use these accounts to launder money is not a particularly good one if it could be that easily discovered, plus in order to launder the money I would think you would need to be able to actually move money around, which he doesn’t have the ability to do. So, there’s a lot of issues with that and we don’t care.

John: We don’t care.

Craig: No.

John: It’s one of those things where it has to be — it’s movie logic. Do you believe that it could kind of happen? Yeah. Is it crucial to your understanding? Nah.

Craig: I mean, yeah, it’s like one of those things where, well, it’s possible that if you work for the SEC this movie just wouldn’t work for you, but most of us don’t. And we understand essentially that there’s a crime going on here and it doesn’t flout logic, it’s simply leaving things out. Essentially the movie is saying you don’t need to know.

John: Many science fiction stories sort of do that sort of shorthand with science where it’s like, okay, we’re skipping over 15 steps and because we’re skipping over all these things it’s actually impossible, but most people say like, “Yeah, that feels good enough.” And that’s what it probably feels like to anyone who has any sort of accounting background. It’s like, wait, no, no, that’s impossible. And yet…yeah. Because it’s not important.

Because what’s going to happen next is that Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore are walking through their dangerous neighborhood. A guy comes up to them, insists on his wallet. He’s going to hand it over, but a scuffle breaks out and suddenly Patrick Swayze is collapsed to the ground.

Craig: Right.

John: He gets up. He chases after the guy. And as he returns he sees Demi Moore huddled over his body and he is not himself.

Craig: Right. So, a good misdirection here. There’s a struggle. We’re on Demi Moore when we hear a gunshot go off. And then the next thing we see is the bad guy running away, followed by Patrick Swayze chasing him. We presume in that moment perhaps the gun just didn’t hit anyone and was just a random.

But then when Patrick Swayze comes back, he experiences something on his face and then we see what he’s experiencing. That’s the way to write movies like this, I think, so that everything is through the perspective of a character and we’re watching them absorb this. And this is the first moment where I was so grateful that the movie said what would people actually do. You know? What would they actually do?

And what they would actually do is spend a lot of time doing nothing except watching and feeling what’s happened to them. And that’s exactly what this movie does. A great choice by Bruce Joel Rubin.

John: Yeah. So, a moment of glorious light comes. Patrick Swayze has the opportunity to follow that light and leave, but he does not want to leave. And so he stays with Demi Moore. And ends up in the hospital, which is where we’re getting a little bit more of the sense of the rules behind things.

Craig: A little bit, yeah. So, what we see is that another person dies and he goes into the light. So we understand that that’s an option. And Patrick Swayze encounters another ghost, so we know he’s not the only one. Which, again, you’d think like, well, okay, there’s this other ghost that shows up. He’s like an old Jewish man. It’s played for comedy, which I love by the way that it’s played for comedy.

But it’s a very smart choice. It’s not just a random thing. Because these are the little questions that sometimes we forget to ask when we’re writing a movie. We know the movie is about a ghost and da-da-da. Well, here’s a question: is he the only one?

John: Yup. Can ghosts talk to each other? Can anyone see ghosts? Can ghosts walk through things? Yes. But it’s not easy and it’s not necessarily easy to walk through things. They can’t magically appear places. They actually have to travel and walk places.

Craig: Right. And all of those things are answered in the scene without really being expository. It’s a very different kind of scene than what we saw, for instance, in Beetlejuice, where they go into a place and someone delivers a whole bunch of exposition to them. They literally sit at a desk and are told things.

This is much more impressionistic. Somebody just sits down and just starts talking to them, an old man starts talking to Sam as if he’s known him his whole life. Says a bunch of things that are cryptic and yet informative. And then he’s gone.

John: Yeah. So we see another patient die. The patient goes up into the glorious light. The old man says, “Oh, it’s better than the other way.”

Craig: Right.

John: So the sense of like, oh okay, so there is a heaven and a hell concept in this universe. A guy with a gurney walks right through Sam and it’s horrifying, because he sees sort of all inside the body. And then we’re not rushing the plot ahead. We’re not — Sam’s not looking for his killer. He’s just sort of hanging out with his wife.

Craig: He’s doing exactly what somebody would do. The whole point is I’m not ready to move on, and by the way, I don’t believe in any of this baloney, but it’s fun for the movie. He’s not ready to move on, so what would you do? You would stay there and just stare at your girlfriend while she cries. And that’s exactly what he does.

And by doing that, our heart already starts to go — because we’ve put ourselves in our shoes. And every person in the audience was imagining this with their partner. Guaranteed.

John: So, we are — this is classically the end of the first act, start of the second act. And this is sort of where you would expect this to be time wise in the movie. We’re about 30 minutes in. And so Patrick Swayze is dead. He is in this new land of being a dead person and sort of having to learn new rules which is what it’s like to be a ghost among these living people and what other ghosts are like.

He is looking at his life from the outside, so he sees his beautiful girlfriend going through his stuff. He sees his best friend there to help her out. He is sad. He’s lonely. He’s despondent. Demi Moore is sad, and lonely, and despondent. And neither is able to help the other one.

Craig: Exactly right. And we feel it and we buy it, we believe it. We have absorbed with ease the supernatural incursion. And we’re perfectly happy.

John: One bit of rule logic we’ve encountered is that their cat is able to sense him. And so the cat knows that Sam is around and does not like it one bit. So the cat will hiss and snarl at him. This becomes important because Demi Moore and Carl, or Molly and Carl go off, leave the house. They leave Sam in the apartment. And the guy who killed Sam shows up at the apartment. He’s going through things.

So, suddenly we are back in a thriller. This is actually a point of danger. Who is this person? Who is this person who is in our house. Molly comes back. She is now in danger. He is powerless to keep her from being in danger.

Craig: Right.

John: And that sense of really emasculation is incredibly frustrating. So, he’s able to use the cat to scare off the intruder, but it’s the first sense that the A plot has not ended because he’s dead.

Craig: Right. So, obviously some big information is learned here. The person that mugged him and killed him was not just a mugger. Something else is going on. He was- – this was intentional. And if you haven’t at this point already figured out that Tony Goldwyn is involved, your brain isn’t functional well because, again, he’s the only other character in the movie. Who else could it be.

But the emasculation you describe, that’s dead on. And a lot of what’s going to happen now is watching someone be frustrated their inability to save the person they love. And this is a very lovely escalation because when you die that’s enormous, right? That’s a huge problem. How do you top that?

Well, I’ll tell you how you top it. You’re going to have to sit there and watch the person you love mourn you. Oh my god. Well, how do you top that? Ah-ha, you’re going to have to watch passively as somebody tries to hurt them.

John: Yes.

Craig: And that’s a great escalation. I mean, talk about how do you escalate something that’s already fairly well escalated? And, of course, the wonderful concept of stakes comes into play. When you have a movie where your hero is dead and cannot die what are the stakes? Somebody that he loves dying.

John: Yup. Just thinking aloud here, I mean, if you look at this first half of the movie as basically being the emasculation of Patrick Swayze’s character. It’s all about sort of like he’s bringing this big statue into his apartment, building this clay phallus that collapses. He’s being killed. He is powerless to stop this person from hurting his girlfriend. And he’s giving chase to this guy who he can’t even sort of stop.

So, it’s a frustrating thing. And I think you’re exactly right. You would think like, well, there can’t be anything worse than dying. It’s like, oh yeah, there actually can be something worse than dying. It’s dying and being powerless to fix the things around you.

Craig: Mm-hmm. And this is also where I think when you talk about a movie that makes what the equivalent of today’s billion dollars, you don’t make a billion dollars off of one gender or the other. This is where I think men are watching this movie and completely involved.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Because there’s this protective instinct that has been — either it is innate or it is a gender role and a construct. I don’t care. All I know is that it’s there. And this is tweaking that in men. This protective instinct and the inability to protect is enough, I think, to make every man in the theater lean forward in their seat and be involved.

John: Yes. So, in giving chase to this guy who invaded his apartment, he goes into the subway. And so one of the weird rules of this movie is like he can take the subway to get around places. And it’s on the subway that he meets another ghost, a really crazy sort of aggressive ghost, Vincent Schiavelli.

Craig: Vincent Schiavelli.

John: We’re not sure [how to pronounce].

Craig: Well, Schiavelli would be the proper Italian pronunciation.

John: But we’ll see how he pronounces it.

Craig: Yes.

John: If he’s still alive. I have no idea.

Craig: He is not alive, sadly.

John: Sadly.

Craig: No, he died actually fairly young. Vincent Schiavelli’s character emerges here. And this is maybe my favorite scene in the movie and it’s very, very short. And it’s followed by another Vincent Schiavelli scene later, which is terrific, but I love this scene. I love the way that Rubin did it.

So, up until this point it’s been fairly procedural. Our ghost is wandering around, following people, and we understand that in some ways he has this omniscience. He can be anywhere and hear anything. But on the other hand he has this powerlessness. He can’t actually touch things or move things or impact the physical world around him. So, it’s an interesting collision of ability and disability.

He’s following this guy, but for what? What could he possibly be able to do? Well, he’s following him because he wants to know the truth, I suppose. And he’s on this train and we are completely in that moment and then suddenly out of nowhere this other ghost starts screaming at him in the most frightening way, “Get off my train,” and it’s frightening.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And he pushes our guy, not only pushes him off the train, but as he pushes him off the train breaks physical glass, which is making us think, wait a second, perhaps there’s more that ghosts can do. Tonally speaking, it was a reminder for me in this movie that we’re dealing with serious stuff and potentially very scary stuff. And Vincent Schiavelli is so — his face is frightening. The way he yells at him is frightening. The whole thing is creepy and it’s very Bruce Joel Rubin. It’s the closest scene in this movie to the sort of creepy stuff we see a lot of in Jacob’s Ladder.

John: Yes. So, following the subway moments, we get to the mugger’s apartment where the mugger is on his phone, his sort of powder blue classic rotary phone, which is so great. It’s one of those things like your daughter would see it, it’s like, “But what is he talking on?” Oh, that’s a phone. Phones used to look like that before the iPhone 6.

And so he’s saying, he’s calling someone and saying, “I wasn’t able to get it,” and basically letting us know that he wasn’t a random — obviously we knew it wasn’t a random thing because it’s the same guy from before, but he’s in cahoots with somebody. And who that person he’s in cahoots with, that’s the question.

Craig: It’s probably the other character in the movie.

John: [laughs] Exactly. There’s almost no one left. And so —

Craig: There’s no one left.

John: And so if you were to add in, because I was thinking like sort of how do you put in a red herring there. I wonder if there is some way to take the character who is the banker, who is going to show up later in the story that Whoopi Goldberg has to deal with. If you could somehow bring him into the story earlier on, like somebody who is fulfilling that function so you think like, oh, there’s another person who it could be.

Craig: I’m with you 100 percent. That’s the way to do it. You take that guy and you put him in the beginning of the movie as a jerk. As a bad guy. And he should be a bad guy. He’s just not a criminal but he’s a jerk. And he’s sleazy. And there’s something off about him. And we just assume it’s him and it’s not him at all.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You need, I mean, this movie really could have used that red herring because when the big reveal comes it’s such a, well yeah.

John: Well, yeah. There’s no, “Oh my god.” Even in the moment I’m sure it didn’t have that kind of impact.

Craig: No, we’re literally out of people that have names [laughs] by the time we get to that.

John: Another sort of small criticism, there are a lot of like single use characters in this. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but like Stephen Root shows up as a police detective and, well, he gets one scene.

Craig: Yeah, he shows up in one scene. And curiously in that scene he is accompanied by a female cop who has I think one line, which I don’t know, maybe they were doing somebody a SAG favor and then that was it. It just didn’t need to happen.

Although, because I know David and Jerry, I know that for instance the woman at the bank who — we’ll get to Oda Mae — does her signature card with, that’s their mother. And she’s always in —

John: That’s awesome.

Craig: She actually does a very fine acting job I have to say.

John: No, she’s great. I have zero complaints. And so that’s not a blanket dismissal of using characters and then never seeing them again. That’s completely good and valid. I just felt like there was an opportunity to take one of these characters from later in the story, pull them back earlier, and let them be useful in your story.

Craig: I agree. It would have helped.

John: So, one of the things I found fascinating, which I hadn’t remembered until rewatching the movie, is that Patrick Swayze encounters Oda Mae, this is Whoopi Goldberg’s character — well, first off, he encounters her quite late in the story. We are about 40 minutes into the story before Whoopi Goldberg’s character shows up. And it’s just location coincidence. It’s right across the street from the mugger.

And you say like, well, that’s just really convenient, but it ends up becoming very, very useful because later on in the story she’s in danger because she’s right across the street from the mugger.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So, it’s one of those things where it feels convenient in the time that you first introduce it, but then it ends up having a plot consequence that’s actually genuinely helpful.

Craig: So, Oda Mae Brown is this fascinating character. And, again, the confluence of good choices. Physics in movies, I mean, look, they could have just gone the easy way and he gets in touch with a psychic and so forth, but she’s a fraud.

She’s not only a fraud. She’s a fraud with a backstory. She’s a fraud, but her mother, and her mother, and her mother who we presume before her, the whole line was supposedly had the shining as they say. And she doesn’t. She’s never had it. She’s a complete fraud until suddenly she can hear Sam. And they play it for comedy. And we believe it because, again, they let Oda Mae, they let Whoopi Goldberg react as somebody actually would. And they let her play it.

Everybody in this movie is constantly denying the call to action as cowards would and then finally getting pushed into it reluctant. Everyone feels like a reluctant hero to some regard.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And that was a great choice because we believed it. We also then understood that she had absolutely no idea how to navigate this.

John: Yeah. So, I think Whoopi Goldberg is fantastic in the movie. I think it’s a really good character. Looking back at the reviews at the time, and sort of the reviews since that time, there’s criticism that her character sort of falls into the magical negro problem. And very quickly summarized, it’s when you have an African American character in a story whose function is to sort of help the white people do their things and sometimes teach them a wise, valuable lesson. But they’re supposed to put their entire life on hold to help the white people.

And you can level that to Oda Mae Brown, but I think she actually transcends it in ways that are really interesting. She seems — she wants her own things. We don’t know her whole life, but she didn’t just show up at the start of the movie to help the white person. She would have had a whole story if Patrick Swayze had never entered into that room.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t think she fits. I think that she fits only nominally in that she is African American and she is magical, which you would think would be enough to fit the checkboxes of the magical negro stereotype. But, she isn’t magical. The point is that she’s not magical until this moment. And so that surprises her as much as it surprises him.

She clearly has her own volition. She does not exist to serve this guy, and in fact, doesn’t want to. And is continually convinced to continue to help him because she’s in danger. She makes choices based on what is good for her. Granted, she’s presented as a kind of sexless woman living a spinster life with her sisters, which is — that is magical negro territory. But she’s not particularly wise. She’s not coddling this character. She doesn’t particularly like him for most of the movie.

What I was struck by, actually, was how different her performance was here than what we would come to see from Whoopi Goldberg as her career went on. And interestingly, I found at times that when she was doing some of the comic runs that at times she seemed like she was copying Eddie Murphy a little bit. Certain Eddie Murphy intonations and moves that she was doing, because he was like at the height of his powers.

And it felt like she was kind of doing some Eddie Murphy stuff here and there, particularly just the way she would say certain words, or kind of pull a couple of things. But so much of it then is her own deal and it is that — she is a unique character. And watching her relationship with him develop is one of the pleasures of the movie.

And one last thing. Another argument against magical negro-hood for this character of Oda Mae Brown is that she gets something from him. And that is a realization that she actually is more than she thought she was.

John: And that in helping people, ultimately she’s going to help not only him but sort of other ghosts who need to contact the living, she has a purpose to her life, which is a good thing as well.

Craig: Yes.

John: One of the other things that’s remarkable about her performance, which you sort of can easily forget because she does it so well, is that the rules of the movie is she doesn’t see him. She can only hear him. And so whenever they’re having a conversation, she has no eye contact with him. And so we have to believe that she’s hearing him and yet not seeing him and being fully engaged with the people around her instead.

And she does that incredibly well and that’s not a simple thing.

Craig: No it’s not. It’s completely believable. And you have to give Jerry credit for keeping everybody on point there with that and moving Patrick Swayze around so that Whoopi’s eye line doesn’t change, but Patrick’s position changes quite a bit. It’s done very, very well.

You know, occasionally the shtick between them gets a little recycled.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: She has a tendency too often to go to the well of the joke of I’m talking to you in front of somebody else who doesn’t know that you’re there, so I sound crazy.

But by and large it feels natural.

John: Yes.

Craig: And so it doesn’t grate.

John: If I were to have a — this is a terrible thing to say about an actor who is no longer here with us, Patrick Swayze’s character I feel is better than Patrick Swayze’s performance. And watching this again, there were moments where I could imagine, wow, a different actor, that could land better than it did right there. He felt sometimes just a little light for the movie.

Craig: I agree. And it is — listen, never speak ill of the dead. This, at times, he was not able to convey what I would call the most convincing agony. He struggled with the agony part. The confidence part, the romantic part, nailed it. The agony at times felt a little forced.

Now, interestingly with Demi Moore, let’s talk about her performance for a second. It’s not screenplay stuff but… — So, I mean, a couple of moments here and there where, okay, particularly when he died she seemed a little too dead for the moment. But, throughout the movie she actually does what I think is a terrific job of quietly expressing this grief. And she cries better in this movie than just about any actor I’ve ever seen in any movie.

John: Yeah.

Craig: There’s about seven times where she very naturally produces like two or three tracks of parallel tears from her eyes, moving at like a perfect uneven — it’s gorgeous.

John: Her tears have this amazing viscosity of sort of how they fall. It really is remarkable.

Craig: It’s amazing. And she’s so beautiful. And I love her hair in the movie. And I talk with Lindsay Doran all the time about hair. Because Lindsay, you know, her whole thing is, you know, all the stuff that we do, if it’s bad hair the movie is dead. She’s got great hair in the movie. Much better than his hair. And her crying is just like, it’s so good. It’s hard to do that.

John: Have you met Demi Moore at all?

Craig: No, never met her.

John: So, my only experience with her was for the second Charlie’s Angels. And so while we were writing the first Charlie’s Angels I said if we ever make a sequel, the villain is, her name is Madison Lee and it has to be Demi Moore playing an angel from the ’80s. And everyone was like absolutely that’s what’s going to happen.

And so then we got Demi Moore and it was great. And so I had a meeting with her over at the Peninsula Hotel with McG and it was on my birthday I just remember because it was my birthday. And we were just sitting around the Peninsula Hotel and she managed to drink like three large Starbucks coffees. She’s just a person who drinks a lot of coffee.

But she’s really — she’s really cool and fascinating. She was ultimately I think, because it was at the time of the Bruce Willis — she had split from Bruce Willis. She was there with Ashton Kutcher. She ended up overshadowing the movie in ways that wasn’t helpful. But she’s still kind of great. And in the right things she’s an amazing actress.

Craig: Someone once said, I don’t know who said this. Ted Elliott told me this, but I can’t remember who he was quoting, that we don’t cry when we see actors crying. We cry when we see actors trying to not cry.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: And when she’s crying, she’s trying to not cry. You can tell. So, it’s so real and so all that’s sort of — all you’re getting are the two tears that slop over the resistance, which is just beautiful. I mean, she just does such a good job. All right.

John: All right. So, we’re 47 minutes into the movie and Patrick Swayze has convinced Whoopi Goldberg to go to my apartment, tell my girlfriend what it is and I will tell you things that only I will know. And so this is a moment that happens. Whoopi Goldberg is yelling up to the apartment. Demi Moore finally comes down. Says Sam’s here. I’ve got this information.

And Demi believes him. I mean, Molly’s character does seem to believe that this is real in this moment.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And so if everything had gone exactly this way, the movie would be over. Well, actually, Patrick Swayze doesn’t actually have information. Doesn’t know how her life is in danger. Just saying her life is in danger.

Craig: Yeah. There’s still this plot that’s going on. But what we’re playing now is this reconnection between these two. And this is where I think Roger Ebert lost his mind in his review where he was complaining that, “Well, this is what people do when they’re dead? They come back and start telling people about what shirt they were wearing to prove that they’re really there?” Yeah. I think so. That’s probably what they would do, because they care about the people they love and they want them to know that they’re still there and they’re trying to warn them that they’re in danger. Yeah. It’s totally okay. I love this stuff. I think it’s great.

I mean, and by the way, absolutely necessary. I won’t like her if I think she’s just a nut that naturally believes in ghosts. I only like her if she’s convinced. Similarly, she becomes unconvinced when Tony Goldwyn’s character kind of does a number on her, and then also Stephen Root shows her that Oda Mae is basically a criminal. She’s a fraud with a record. And so, yeah, of course this is emotionally you’re going to be caught between wanting to — am I fool for believing this? Or am I fool for not believing this? It’s a very normal, Demi Moore plays it perfectly. I believed it the whole way. And so enough with these critics who don’t understand how the human mind works, frankly, or the heart.

Because, again, I’ll just point to a billion dollars of people loving this movie. I mean, it’s just.

John: Yeah, people who love it. Another example of how this movie feels like it’s missing a character is like Demi Moore has no friends. It does feel a little bit strange that like there’s no one else she can turn to for help other than the guy who is ultimately going to be the villain of the story, Carl, who comes by, very deliberately spills off his coffee, and takes off his shirt.

Craig: He does. So, here he’s going to do the seduction. But you’re making a very interesting point. This is under-populated movie in a large sense. As we’ve said, the movie opens on three characters. We’re going to add a fourth character in Oda Mae. And that’s it. There’s the bad guy, Willie Lopez, who is just, you know, he’s just a bad guy. He’s not a real character.

And there’s no one else in the movie.

John: Yeah. And this may be partly why it’s so successful.

Craig: I was going to say that. Exactly. Because really the movie is boiling down a certain kind of tragedy to its barest essence. It’s just mainlining it into your veins. There’s no reason for funerals. You know what I mean? There’s no funeral, no burial. Oh, there is, I’m sorry.

John: Oh, there’s a burial, yeah.

Craig: You’re right. They did a quick funeral and burial. And actually a very beautiful moment where this one ghost sort of smiles at him and walks off, which I loved. But there’s no like we don’t — all the people at that burial, we never meet them again. Although one of them is Jerry’s sister I know. [laughs] So, the Zuckers show up. The entire family always shows up.

But it’s under-populated for a reason and I kind of think it works that way. It’s very atavistic. This is the romantic man. This is the romantic woman. This is the snake. And this is the sage, I guess, you know. This is the wise — even though I’m now going against my whole thing about how she wasn’t that wise, but regardless.

So, now, in order to crank this thing up yet even more, not only is Tony Goldwyn a murderer who is placing her in danger, he’s now also seducing her sexually which is just like — and poor Patrick Swayze has to watch.

John: Yes.

Craig: And now he realizes —

John: This is the hell he’s in.

Craig: And now because the stakes have been ratcheted up even more, and because the frustration is ratcheted up even more, he now pays off my favorite scene in the movie. He goes and he finds Vincent Schiavelli.

John: Well, importantly, before he goes to find Vincent Schiavelli, he’s so angry that he dives across and ends up knocking a photo off.

Craig: Yes.

John: And so it’s the first time where he’s actually been able to affect the physical world. And there’s a light bulb moment like, wait, this is something I can do.

Craig: It’s something I can do, but I can’t reliably do it.

John: Yeah. How do I do it?

Craig: I don’t know how I just did that. How do I — wait a second, where have I seen that before? That’s right, that lunatic ghost on a train who scared the hell out of all of us and this is Bruce Joel Rubin. This whole thing with Vincent Schiavelli is so Bruce Joel Rubin to me.

John: So this would the training montage. In other movies this would be sort of like the wax on/wax off, this is how you do your thing. There’s that moment that I think Patrick Swayze does a really good job with, because it suits his physicality really well. And so he’s learning how to move things, how to make things as a ghost affect the world around him.

So, kicking the can, hitting the signs. He’s gradually learning how to touch things.

Craig: Right. And I like that the movie makes a choice to reduce him down to this very, very tiny thing. You’re going to be able to just now move things around in small ways, but we’re going to force you to go through that. We’re going to start with a bottle cap and work our way up to bigger things. But, of all the scenes, I think this is the one that may be the most useful to consider for those of you who are screenwriting and getting into screenwriting and trying to make your scripts better.

Here’s a ghost, an angry ghost, who tells you, okay, if you want to learn, you stubborn son-of-a-bitch, I’ll teach you how. You have to focus all of your anger and emotion and then you push the thing. And Patrick Swayze pushes a thing and it’s a success. Good job. That could be pretty much the end of the scene. I think a lot of people would have ended it there and Vincent Schiavelli would have said, “All right, kid, go get ’em.”

That’s not how it ends at all. How it ends is that Patrick Swayze asks him have you been here, how long have you been here. And suddenly Vincent Schiavelli makes this angry speech about he was pushed and he was pushed onto a track in front of a train. And Patrick Swayze says, “You were pushed?” And Vincent Schiavelli says, “What? You don’t believe me? You think I jumped? You think I jumped!”

And you realize, oh man, this is what happens to you if you never resolve your life.

John: Yeah.

Craig: He obviously did jump. He can’t handle the fact that he killed himself, and now he’s stuck here forever. And that is scary stuff.

John: So, the lesson, I think, the take home for this is obviously the purpose of the scene is to teach Patrick Swayze how to do these things. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the scene needs to only be about that, or has to end there. It should have some other secondary story purpose as well.

So, not just functional, but really fill in the sort of tonal details, the themes of your piece. And ending it that way is exactly the right choice there.

Craig: Yeah. You can feel everything coming together and working hand in hand here. It’s not enough to give your character a tool. When we watch movies and somebody goes somewhere and someone says, “Here is the blade of blah, blah, blah that will slay the dragon,” and you walk out of the cave with it you think, oh, well, good. I’m glad I got the blade of blah, blah, blah. Was there anything else there except that you needed him to go get the blade of blah, blah, blah?

Well, this is that scene. He’s going to basically be taught how to move stuff around, but then you get this thing that impacts his understanding of his own circumstances and does so in a tragic way. And the tragedy of failure here as relayed through Vincent Schiavelli’s character is palpable. And it’s disturbing. And it’s exactly right. It’s so smart the way that Rubin wrote that and Vincent Schiavelli — it’s the performance everybody remembers. He was a character actor that was in so many things, including One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I think a lot of people remembered him from that. But this one, this is the one I think people remember and always will.

John: The other nice thing about sending off his character that way is we don’t ever expect to see him again in the movie. So, it’s a nice way to like that was his moment, he’s gone, he’s done, let’s keep going with our guy.

Craig: That’s right. And thank god the imaginary studio executive that we keep proposing didn’t exist, because that person would have said, “And then at the end of the movie can we see him come back and he’s happy now and he goes into the light?” No.

John: No.

Craig: [laughs] No we can’t.

John: So, Patrick Swayze now with the ability to move things goes to find Oda Mae Brown and Oda Mae Brown has a very crowded room because a bunch of other ghosts have shown up now because with her ability to really see ghosts and talk with ghosts now, a bunch of ghosts want her help to contact their loved ones.

Craig: Yeah. Exactly. And she’s frustrated with this whole thing. And this is a scene where we learn some information. One of those ghosts occupies her body and it’s funny. We do bits, you know, again, this is an Oda Mae bit.

But when he falls out of her body, he’s on the floor, he can’t get up.

John: Exhausted.

Craig: He’s exhausted. And another character says, “Don’t you know that occupying bodies wears you out, and that’s not good.” That was a not good moment where somebody just announced a rule that we just saw. And announced it in a way where we thought, right, so Patrick Swayze will be doing that later and it’s going to be a problem.

John: It’s hanging a little lantern on that.

Craig: And I’ve got to say, also, not necessary.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I think if we had never seen that happen and if she had just said, “Why don’t you come into my body and let’s try this,” and he had done it, and then been exhausted from it we would have just assumed it’s part of it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: It just didn’t need it.

John: I agree. We can’t sneak in there and cut it out of the movie.

Craig: Well, no, we could.

John: We could. Totally can.

Craig: I spent time with Jerry and David and Jim talking about how they were re-cutting Top Secret!

John: Good.

Craig: Yeah, maybe we can re-cut this, too. [laughs] Just get rid of that line.

John: So, meanwhile Carl Bruner is back in the really boring office and he’s freaking out. He’s sweating. He’s on the phone and he’s got to get that money. He’s got to get that money transferred. He has a plan for transferring that money which involves putting it in this other account and he’s going to open an account with this other name. So, that plot is still happening. But things are ticking.

Craig: Yeah. So, here’s where, I mean, at this point in the movie you would imagine the plot sort of starts to take over. And it does. And it’s all fine. It works out well. Basically, he goes to the apartment, gets the code that he was looking for. You know, a little convenient that he just walks in, opens a box gets it. But fine. He then follows instructions to put the money an account under the name Rita Miller. And that he’s going to transfer it at this certain time. And, of course, Patrick Swayze is there to hear it, so when he goes to Oda Mae he’s able to say, look, I have a plan.

And their plan is simple. And, again, it involves comedy. Pose as Rita Miller and following the instructions I’m going to be whispering into your ear, go ahead and essentially withdraw all that money so that Carl won’t have it and then he’s going to face a terrible end. And that’s exactly what happens.

John: And what is fascinating about this moment is that it’s played as comedy. There’s suspense in the sense of like will she get found out, but race underlies all this as well. So, not only is she really flamboyantly dressed, but she’s this black woman impersonating a presumably white person, or fictitious person, in this all white establishment bank.

This is a case where like the bank really looks like a bank. You know, that stock office didn’t look like a good stock office, but this totally feels like a bank, and a big old, fussy bank. And she is the bull in the china shop in the ways you sort of want her to be in this comedy/suspense moment.

Craig: Yeah. And this is the scene where I felt most like she was kind of doing a version of Eddie Murphy because it felt very Beverly Hills Cop. A black guy in the middle of wealthy white territory kind of flimflamming them and with sort of a fast talking attitude and getting away with it, but it works.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You know, it works. It’s the funniest stuff in the world, but there’s so much charm to her, you know. It’s remarkable how charm can get you by. And she’s so goodhearted. You can just tell, like the character and Whoopi Goldberg herself is just so goodhearted about it. There’s a wonderful moment where she smiles this beautiful smile and it just makes the whole scene work.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I think it’s to Jerry Zucker’s mom, I think. She just smiles this great smile.

John: So, they’re able to get the money. They get a cashier’s check for the money that was in the account and Whoopi Goldberg thinks she’s rich and Sam convinces her, no, no, you have to give it to the nuns because it’s not your money.

Now, I don’t think you would necessarily give it to the Catholic Church.

Craig: [laughs] And that actually did feel very Jerry Zucker to me. The idea of nuns. Those guys have always found nuns funny. And just the idea of nuns on the street somehow representing the best use of a $4 million charitable donation. But, you know, it’s a little dated. The moment is dated. And there’s a button on it that is, you know, you can see coming a billion miles away. But, again, it’s charm. You know, there’s just a charm to it.

John: Yes. Well, with the money withdrawn, Tony Goldwyn’s character is not happy. He’s looking at this monitor and all the money is gone. And he’s going to smash his monitor. Now, that monitor probably cost $3,000 in those days.

Craig: And incredibly expensive 10-inch green CRT monitor. But in this scene now, finally it appears that Sam Wheat has full possession of his Vincent Schiavelli learned powers. And he can knock things around. He can make his presence known and he uses the computer keyboard to let Carl know that he’s there. He says murderer and then his own name — Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam. So, now he’s all confident.

He feels like he’s done it. He’s won. And that carries through when Carl returns to Molly because now he’s freaked out and he wants to know if this is real, is Sam real, what did that lady tell you. And Patrick Swayze is kind of acting out here. He’s pushing him around. He’s proving to Carl that he’s real. And Carl makes this threat basically because now Carl knows that Oda Mae was at the bank and she took the money. And he says to nobody but assuming that Sam is there — I’m going to come back at 11 and if the money isn’t her I’m going to kill her.

So, now, once again, we have that final escalation. And we can feel that the movie is essentially presenting us with our climax. That at 11 o’clock everything will be figured out, for better or for worse, but before 11 o’clock comes Sam knows that the first thing Carl and his henchmen, Willie, are going to try and do is kill Oda Mae and get the money from her.

John: Yup. So this is a very classic sort of screenwriting thing you do is you state a destination or a time. And so you publicly say what needs to happen before this or we are going to this place. And it gives the audience a sense of, okay, I know where we’re headed. I know what to expect. And I can sort of forecast the time ahead of me and therefore the stakes feel increased because there’s a clock ticking.

Craig: Right. So, it’s not particularly great screenwriting to have a character say, “I’m going to come back here in four hours to finish this when I could just probably do it now, or maybe in an hour,” I don’t know why 11 is so important. But one thing that it really provides the audience with is comfort that this is ending. Just so that everybody knows like, okay, if you’ve gotten a little squirmy in your seat, don’t go pee now, this thing is pulling into the station. It’s going to happen. Everybody settle in for the big final showdown.

John: Yes. And this big final showdown is going to happen because Sam is going to have to go get Oda Mae. Oda Mae’s life is in danger. Of course, she lives right across the street from the mugger. The mugger is going to come after her. This is a moment where Sam Wheat gets to use his powers to harass and sort of throw the mugger around. Honestly some very clever sequences where opening doors, closing doors, riding on things, making this guy think that he’s crazy. Ultimately our mugger is going to get hit by a car, smashed, and he will himself die, be a ghost. And then we see what happens to a bad person.

Craig: Right.

John: They get dragged by the shadows into the abyss.

Craig: The Rotoscope shadows. And I have to say as cheese ball as the Rotoscope shadows are, it made me kind of yearn for those days because the more realistic you make those things oddly the less threatening they seem to be. I just find that like perfectly rendered CGI shadow demons are just not as scary somehow. I don’t — isn’t that odd?

But we can’t go back. We can’t show like lame-o Rotoscope shadow demons anymore, so we’re kind of in this weird middle ground. It is interesting that the movie very carefully follows a certain PG-13 ethic of only really bad people murdering. So, for instance, when Carl shows up and meets up with Willie Lopez for the first time in the least climatic reveal of the bad guy ever, he announces that all he intended for Willie to do was just to mug Sam and steal his wallet so that he could get the code. He never meant for him to be killed.

Similarly here, this is a classic movie trope. Good guy chasing bad guy. We want the bad guy to die, but we don’t want the good guy to kill him, so let’s have the bad guy run in front of a car. Which they always do. And he gets killed. But again, they let it play and I like the way they let it play. And they let Willie have his moment.

John: Yes. So, the witching hour has come. Sam and Oda Mae show up at Molly’s house, Molly’s apartment with the news “You in danger, girl.” And this is sort of the iconic moment of, oh, that’s right, she can be possessed. And this is the one moment in which Sam will be able to touch the love of his life.

Craig: Yeah. So, we bring back this little bit of nice foreshadowing. The very beginning of the movie when they break through the wall they find this old jar with an Indian head penny in it. And then sort of in the middle when Molly has had her experience with Oda Mae and then I think she’s already been to the police and they’ve told her that Oda Mae is a fraud and she’s starting to question whether or not any of this is real, she rolls that jar down some stairs where it smashes.

So it’s this idea of like the lucky penny and all the rest of it has kind of been going on through the movie. And here, in order to finally prove to Molly that he’s really there, he has Oda Mae push a penny under the door and he lifts it. And it’s beautiful. It’s just so small. Sometimes when you can focus all of this tragic loss and yearning into something as simple as this penny, and then as the penny is floating across to her, because we see him carrying it. And then the reverse is just the penny floating, because of course he’s invisible in her perspective. And she starts to do that perfect two-tear thing. That’s when I think everybody starts balling for the first time. It won’t be the last time in this climax.

John: Yeah. The original tag line for Ghost was Believe. And this is belief. I mean, it’s a way of visualizing that sense of even though I can’t physically see this thing in front of me, I believe it’s there. And it’s a way of just cinematically showing something that you cannot otherwise see.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So, it’s love. It’s faith. But belief is sort of the combination of the two of them here. And so it’s a single shot in which the penny floats in towards her face. And, again, I’m watching this right now. She’s got the perfectly —

Craig: Perfect.

John: Viscous tears that are clinging in her eyes.

Craig: And they’re real, by the way. Those aren’t like glycerin. Those are real. You can just tell.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Even if they’re not real, then whoever came up with them is a genius. But they just seem so real to me. I mean, god, it’s so good. So good.

John: So, here’s the trick. You tilt your head up, the tear falls down, and right as it touches the edge of your mouth you sort of taste it a little bit. That’s a great cinematic tear.

Craig: So good. She just is the best crier. And we do believe it here. This is, by the way, one of those moments as a screenwriter that can be very frustrating for us because we see this so clearly. We understand that he will be there, we’ll see him lift the penny, we’ll see him carry the penny, and then we’re going to do a reverse shot — so she’s not in that frame. And then we’re going to come around and then he’s not in the frame that’s on her on her single. And the penny will float to her. And he’s invisible. And I cannot tell you guys how many times we will write scenes like this and people will go, “Wait a second. Why can we see him sometimes? Why can’t we see him other times?”

It’s like oh my god. This is where it gets so frustrating because you know, you’ve seen the movie, you know it works. Of course it works that way.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You know, I’m so curious to hear if they ran into those kinds of frustrating discussion when they were writing this. Because it’s exactly the way it should be done. It’s gorgeous.

John: Yes. Because what it is, as you’re looking at the moment from Demi Moore’s point of view, that’s why he is not in the frame and the penny is floating by itself. And it’s so obvious.

Craig: So obvious.

John: And yet before you shot the scene, if you were to try to describe it that way, you would encounter resistance.

Craig: You would encounter resistance, confusion. It’s amazing how — look, there’s a skill to screenwriting and directing. And I would imagine that this is where it’s like, okay, if Bruce and Jerry together were like, “No, no, no, we’ve got this. Trust us on this,” everybody would be quiet. But when it’s only a screenwriter, sometimes people are like, “Wait, I don’t get it…”

It’s the worst.

John: Oh, the classic thing I stole from somebody and I say a lot is that you have to remember that as a screenwriter you’re the only person who’s already seen the movie. And so your job is to reflect on the page that movie that you see, but oftentimes you will have to go back many, many times and talk through people so you can make sure you are seeing the same movie that they are seeing.

In this case, clearly Bruce Joel Rubin and Jerry Zucker —

Craig: Well done.

John: Did see the same movie, especially at this one moment which is crucial.

Craig: Yes. So, following this there is this — we’ve been told that they’ve called the police. The police never show up, by the way, because again New York in the late ’80s —

John: [laughs] They’re in a bad neighborhood here, so —

Craig: There’s a bad neighborhood and there’s crack and, you know, they’re busy.

John: So the police never show up, the drug dealers never show up.

Craig: The drug dealers never show up. None of the people that are supposed to show up show up. But, in this pause, he occupies Whoopi Goldberg’s body. She lets him, which is a big deal because she’s starting — now that she knows that these two are together and they believe, you can see her just softening and giving herself up to it.

And in that moment it’s done perfectly. And, again, Roger Ebert completely wrong, felt that this should have been done with — the entire thing should have been done with Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg dancing together and caressing each other’s faces, which is ridiculous.

John: Yeah.

Craig: They did it exactly the right way, which is start with Whoopi’s hand and Demi’s hand intertwining to understand what was happening there. And then to go to a single of Demi, and then bring in actual Patrick Swayze, which we know is — her eyes are closed, which that’s key. That’s what direction is, by the way. That’s great direction. Bad directors would have had her eyes open and then it wouldn’t have made sense. And, by the way, I’m sure that Bruce called that out in the script as well.

And then , so this is her imagination, Roger Ebert. It’s her imagination! That’s why it works.

John: Yeah. It’s her point of view on what the moment is. And that’s crucial.

Craig: Right. Why would we give a damn watching her dancing around with Whoopi Goldberg? That would have been bizarre.

John: Yeah.

Craig: It just would have been so dumb. So, of course, now we’re just crying because finally at last they’re holding each other and they’re together. And, of course, what do they do? He starts playing — and it’s an interesting choice — he starts playing Unchained Melody. That is Jerry starts playing Unchained Melody. And now, what’s the word? Is it like…what’s that…Stochastic? Diacaustic? Diastolic? What’s the word for — ?

John: Oh yeah, when something plays in the scene.

Craig: Right. So the first time we heard the song it was playing on a record in the movie. Now it’s score. It’s imposed from above by god, which is an interesting choice. Regardless, it works. We all just start balling because it’s paying off that moment from before. And we believe it and it’s gorgeous. And then as we knew it happened because of the bad line, [laughs] —

John: I’ll be back at exactly this hour.

Craig: Exactly. He comes back at this hour and the other bad line that says when I fall out of a body I’m weak, he falls out of the body, he’s weak and helpless at the worst time because here comes the bad guy with the gun to chase Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg.

John: Yes. So, the chase goes outside the window up to another level. And I honestly got really confused at the geography because I started feeling like, wait, is this still their apartment? Is this the apartment above them that’s half done up? It felt like the set that I saw originally when they were first moving in. I got a little bit confused about where they actually were in this final sequence.

Craig: I had the same confusion. And I think what’s intended here is that it’s just this building is a lot of those rooms. Like old boarded up rooms. Again, different time in New York when there were just empty lofts available for anybody. But, I think that it was meant to say like, oh no, it’s on a floor above.

So there’s this chase and Tony Goldwyn grabs Whoopi Goldberg and he’s got a gun to her. And I want my money. We already know she doesn’t have it. He doesn’t believe her and he’s going to kill her. And then like Han Solo, here comes Patrick Swayze who has, I guess, gathered up enough of his energy. And he starts slapping Tony Goldwyn around, knocks the gun out of his hand, pushes him backwards. Tony Goldwyn tries to escape, or gets thrown into a window. And, again, I’m going to chase you and then you’re going to get yourself hit by a car —

John: Exactly.

Craig: I’m going to chase Tony Goldwyn and you’re going to get yourself gutted by a falling piece of plat glass which, folks, you really shouldn’t have.

John: You should not have plate glass. There’s a thing we’ve learned in movies. You should not have plate glass.

Craig: Plate glass, super dangerous. You got a put a film on that or replace it with tempered glass. [laughs] But anyway, he dies. He comes out of his body. He sees his friend. Patrick Swayze gives him an “Oh Carl,” like, “Oh, boy, this isn’t go well for you.” And the shadow —

John: The shadow comes and Tony is dragged back by a dolly and then handed over with shadows.

Craig: Dragged back by a dolly, painted over with shadows, and now we get our final moment where Patrick Swayze is okay with going into the light now because he’s done his job. And this is just about the best way to end the movie.

John: Now, it takes a while here. And so I will say that watching this movie again, looking at this ending, so Demi and Whoopi are sort of huddled together. And so Sam comes over. First he talks to Demi. Then he talks to Whoopi. Then he talks to Demi. Then the light comes. And then he goes. And it feels like a stutter step and yet I understand why ultimately they did it. Because you need to wrap up both of those relationships and it feels weird to sort of start with Whoopi.

Craig: Exactly.

John: So you kind of had to do it.

Craig: That was the only way to do it. And, you know what? It was a stutter step but it worked. I mean, there’s a small uncomfortable moment when he turns to Oda Mae and sort of says kind of “I’ll miss you most of all, Scarecrow,” kind of moment. And you think, but your wife. Your almost wife, she’s still there. Why are you talking to Oda Mae, you just met her?

But then he comes back to her and delivers one of the great, I mean, first of all they kiss.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And it’s so gorgeous because you know that they’re not really touching, but they are. And he’s now — now he’s a ghost. He’s not like fake ghost, but he’s like an actual glowy ghost, and she can see him, which is awesome. And they kiss. It’s so romantic and it’s just so right. And they’re committed to being super sentimental about this, which is what it should be.

And then he says this great, great final line, which I just love. “It’s amazing, Molly, the love inside you. You get to take it with you.” Which is a really nice refutation of you can’t take it with you, the idea of the things you can’t take with you, but that you get to take love with you.

And with at line, what he’s saying, and this is why it’s such a great line. Not only is it nice in and of itself, but he’s giving Molly permission and the audience permission to not be sad.

John: Yeah.

Craig: To be happy that he’s going, because he’s taking all this love with him and it’s over. Naturally I feel terrible for whoever the next guy is that has to date the character of Molly Jensen, because how do you beat that?

John: That’s tough.

Craig: It’s tough! But it is the perfect end because he’s giving everybody permission to feel good about the fact that he’s leaving.

John: And he’s walking away into Close Encounters of Third Kind.

Craig: He walks away into Close Encounters of Third Kind, which is appropriate, because the movie is giving that moment dignity. It’s saying this should be awesome because the truth is after all the kooky stuff that’s gone on, we are suggesting that there is some great, beautiful thing waiting for us all. And the movie takes it seriously so that we can take it seriously.

John: Yeah. I agree. And we get the final Demi Moore tears, which are crucial.

Craig: Perfect.

John: Those are perfect. So, this is Ghost. And, you know, it’s so fascinating because I think we’ve — obviously when a movie is this incredibly successful it has an impact that resonates, you know, sort of kind of forever. And we are making movies differently because of this movie.

So, some things you can see in this movie is like, well, that’s obvious, but they weren’t necessarily obvious when Ghost was made.

Craig: Yeah. They’re obvious because Ghost was made. They’re obvious now because Ghost did it. But like I hope that people get a sense from the way we’ve talked about this that there were a hundred ways they could have gone wrong. So, we see what’s right, we don’t see all the ways that it could have been wrong, whether characters weren’t reacting appropriately or at length enough to the moments. Or whether the rules had been discarded. Or whether some scenes had just been sort of on the nose like, here, let me teach you how to move things and not layered in with tragedy and that character being a real character.

All those choices made this thing great. And if there’s a lesson for today, I think it’s this: original movies can make a ton of money.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: And this movie was not a book. And it was not a remake. And it was just original to itself and it connected in such a huge way. Romance has been taken over at the box office by YA. And this is an adult romance.

John: Yeah, it is.

Craig: And I would love to see some adult romance come back. I think it’s gorgeous.

John: I would argue that it’s an adult romance, but it’s not — I mean, their love is real and they’re kind of grownups, but they’re also kind of — they’re a little simplified versions of grownups. The same way that the movie feels like there’s not enough people in it. They’re somewhat perfected grownups. I think it’s part of the reason why it is so successful. This feels like a great YA novel before there were great YA novels.

Craig: Yeah, but they’re not teenagers.

John: They’re not teenagers. That’s exactly 100 percent.

Craig: They’re 30 years old in the movie I expect, something like that. They feel like they’re 30 years old. They have jobs and lives. You’re right. They don’t have children. They don’t have friends. They don’t seem to have like — they don’t go to doctor’s appointments or, you know, and they are idealized.

And, you know, it’s funny. As you go back, even 1990 which to you and I, I expect we feel similarly about this, that doesn’t seem like that long ago at all. It is long ago. It’s nearly 25 years ago. And just as movies 25 years before 1990 felt old fashioned and kind of fake, this feels fake in that regard, too. Like they’re not as real as we ask our characters to be now. But unfortunately this overdose of reality has kind of killed romance a little bit in movies.

So, it would be nice to see something like this again, I would think.

John: I agree with you. So, Craig, thank you so much for talking through Ghost with me. This was really fun. It was a good sort of spontaneous suggestion last week. And it’s still a good movie.

Craig: It is. It was fun to watch again. I thought that Jerry and Bruce did great work. The cast did great work. And, by the way, great to see a screenwriter win an Oscar for a movie that at least was partly a comedy.

John: And a movie that was hugely successful. Because so often the screenwriting award kind of goes to this was a really, really good movie that we’re not going to give other awards to, so therefore we’re going to give it to this. So rarely does the most commercially successful movie reward with Best Screenplay.

Craig: Yeah. We used to give Oscars to big Hollywood movies. And now we find that distasteful somehow. We have to give an Oscar to the small Hollywood movie, or the small not-Hollywood movie.

John: Exactly. And we give it to really great movies, but it’s also nice to celebrate great movies that are also huge successes.

Craig: Yeah. Fun. Fun. Good stuff.

John: So that’s our show this week. You can find us on iTunes. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there subscribe and also leave us a comment. We love those. If you would like to listen to all of the back episodes, including the Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The Little Mermaid, and Groundhog Day, you can find those at scriptnotes.net. There’s a subscription for $1.99, the premium subscription, that lets you listen to all of those back episodes and bonus episodes. You can also listen to it on the apps for Android and for iPhone.

I think there’s a new iPhone app coming, which would be great because the current iPhone app is not fantastic, but it’s out there.

If you would like to say something to Craig or I, Craig or me —

Craig: Say something. To Craig or me. To Craig or me.

John: I said that aloud. You can write to Craig. He’s at @clmazin on Twitter. I am @johnaugust. Longer questions are at ask@johnaugust.com.

You can find show notes for the things we talked about at johnaugust.com as well.

store.johnaugust.com is where you need to go if you’re going to get a t-shirt. Because you should get a t-shirt, because why not get a t-shirt.

Craig: Yeah.

John: While you’re there, we still have a few more of the USB drives which now have the first 150 episodes of Scriptnotes on them.

Craig: Damn.

John: You can buy those all at once if you’d like to. Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. And we have outros every week, so if you want to give us a new outro, just send that to ask@johnaugust.com.

Craig: Oh, yeah, baby.

John: Hooray.

Craig: Woo-hoo. By the way, this movie was edited by Walter Murch.

John: I know! Isn’t that sort of amazing?

Craig: Amazing.

John: Famous for many other things.

Craig: Many, many other things. Great book, In the Blink of an Eye. I believe it’s called In the Blink of an Eye. A great book on editing by Walter Murch.

John: Yes. He’s also one of the first proponents of Final Cut Pro. And so he was one of the first people to cut features, big features, on Final Cut Pro. Craig, thank you so much. We’ll talk to you next week.

Craig: Thank you, John. Bye.

John: Bye.

Links:

• Our episodes on Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Little Mermaid, Frozen and Groundhog Day
• New shirts are available for pre-order now through September 30th in the John August Store
• Get tickets now for October 8th’s live Slate Culture Gabfest with guests John and Craig
• Planet Money’s T-Shirt Project and the Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt web app
• Get premium Scriptnotes access at scriptnotes.net and hear our 1,000th subscriber special
• Ghost on Wikipedia, IMDb, Netflix, Amazon and iTunes
• Ghost on Box Office Mojo
• Reviews by Peter Travers and Roger Ebert
• In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch
• Outro by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 161 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, this is our third anniversary.

Craig: Whoa!

John: Three years we’ve been doing this.

Aline Brosh McKenna: Oh my god.

Craig: Wait, wait, who’s that? [laughs]

John: Well, we couldn’t do a three-year anniversary without the third voice in Scriptnotes, Aline Brosh McKenna. Hi Aline.

Aline: Hi, here I am.

Craig: What did I always call her?

John: The Joan Rivers of our podcast.

Aline: The Joan Rivers. Ooh, let’s take a moment.

Craig: I know. Poor Joan.

Aline: I’m sad. I saw her in January here live.

John: Oh, how great.

Aline: I saw her. She was so funny.

Craig: She was the best. You know, I always feel like my One Cool Thing, I’m the guy that dedicates my One Cool Thing to people that die, so I’m not going to do it this time. But she is like the coolest thing ever. And Joan Rivers, what a legend. What a pro. What a pro! Like they don’t make them like that anymore.

Aline: But I like what you said which is that she was too busy being a working comedian to be a legend.

Craig: It’s true. Like she never did the victory lap. She didn’t have time for people to celebrate her and talk about how great she used to be. She was like, “No, no. I’ve got to go do my E! show. And then I got to do a web thing.” She never stopped. Amazing. And funny.

Aline: And she really, truly had the respect of her peers.

Craig: For sure. Well, for a bunch of reasons, but you know, the truth is for all of the, you know, people will say, well, she opened doors for women in comedy and that’s all true, but the fact is I think more than anything she was funny. She was funny. She was funny in her 80s. And that is not — honestly that’s not common.

John: It is not common. She came to Big Fish while we were in previews and she came backstage and she was so nice to the cast and crew. She was phenomenal. And she was like, “The guys to the left of me are crying, the man to the right of me is crying. You guys are going to run for ten years.”

Craig: Wow.

Aline: So not prescient.

John: No, she was not correct, but she was lovely.

Aline: Didn’t she tweet?

John: She tweeted that she loved it.

Aline: Yeah, I think I remember I emailed you and said now you’re done.

John: Now we’re done.

Aline: You got the Joan Rivers’ thumbs up.

Craig: Joan loved you. I mean, my wife watched the Fashion Police. She watched every episode of Fashion Police. I don’t think she’s ever missed an episode of Fashion Police. And I would wander by and then inevitably I would get sucked in because [laughs] Joan Rivers was so foul and screwed up, like her jokes were so insane, but they were great though. I mean, she just didn’t give a damn.

Aline: Yeah, I was just going to say the great thing about her, I agree with what you’re saying; the thing I think she really innovated was she just didn’t give a rat’s A.

Craig: She didn’t. She was from that —

Aline: She just said whatever and if you didn’t like it then you could…you know what you could do with it.

Craig: Yeah, she didn’t care. There is like a school of comedy that I guess you would call brave comedy where you just march into the lion’s den, say whatever you feel like, and if people don’t like it, their problem. And she just, boy, fearless. Loved it.

John: Well, today we are going to be saying the things we want to say and not caring about it because it’s our third anniversary. We can do whatever we want. And we have Aline here. Plus, we’re recording this at night. I have glass and a half of wine in me.

Aline: John’s drunk. John’s drunk.

John: I’m just a little bit drunk, so it’s going to be fantastic.

Aline: He’s lit up.

Craig: You think we got Austin John August?

John: Not quite Austin John August, but we’re getting close.

Craig: Okay, okay, we’re getting close.

John: Tonight we are going to talk about Brooks Barnes and the summer season.

Craig: Oh yeah.

John: We’re going to talk about flipping the script, which is Aline’s topic suggestion. We’re going to talk about scene geography and why that matters. We’re going to talk about emotional IQ and why screenwriters need it. And we’re going to offer other special little incentives at the end.

But first there’s follow up. Last week on the podcast we talked about t-shirts and we asked whether we should make more t-shirts. The response was, yes, we should make more t-shirts.

Craig: Oh, great.

John: So, we will. So, details next week about how you can order them and how you can get them, but they’re going to be cool. So, there will be more Scriptnotes t-shirts coming.

Craig: Awesome.

John: We also on the last episode talked about throwing vegetables. That sort of randomly came up, throwing vegetables. And Craig wondered how did that tradition start. Fortunately a smart reader who listens to the podcast sent us a link and it’s actually been a very old tradition, obviously, and political figures were the first people to be pelted with vegetables.

But the first reference to throwing these rotten vegetables at bad stage acts came in 1883 New York Times article, “After John Ritchie was hit with a barrage of tomatoes and rotten eggs by an unpleasant audience in New York. ‘A large tomato thrown from the gallery struck him square between the eyes and he fell to the stage floor just as several bad eggs dropped upon his head.'”

Craig: Dropped upon? So there were even people up where the lights are directly above him. [laughs]

John: Yes. Perhaps those side balcony things.

Craig: I see, side balcony. But I love that they were like — I have to feel that John Ritchie, whoever he was, was so bad that after opening night everybody left and said, “We got to come back. We got to come back — ”

Aline: With something gross.

Craig: Yeah. “Let’s bring some stuff to pelt this guy with. He’s the worst.” Because people don’t walk around waiting for that moment. They have to plan it.

John: So there will be a link in the show notes to this article, but the article points out that the tomato is actually the perfect thing to throw because it’s baseball size. You can get some distance on it. It’s got good squish factor. So, you can understand why rotting vegetables, but particularly the tomato.

Craig: The tomato.

John: Technically a fruit, but yes.

Craig: It’s a fruit. And it’s not going to — probably won’t harm someone.

John: Probably.

Craig: Probably. Thank you.

John: Final bit of follow up tonight is about my One Cool Thing from last week which is The Knowledge, which is this book about if civilization falls apart and you have to sort of restart everything from scratch, how do you do basic things like make steel and deal with diseases.

So, Lewis Dartnell who is the author of the book wrote me to say like, thank you for mentioning the book, but there’s also a whole website with videos about how to do all this stuff. And it’s actually really good. So, one of the videos I watched today talks about the simple sort of chimney thing you make over a small fire that makes it burn much, much hotter. It’s like a primitive stove. And it’s exactly the kind of thing that you think in Mad Max times they should be using because it is just much more efficient.

So, there will be a link in the show notes to this thing, but it’s basically just the-knowledge.org. And you can see all of these videos, which is quite cool.

Craig: I’ve got to be honest. If it really comes down to this where we’re going to need to build our own stoves and stove, I’ve got two options personally: option one, blow my brains out; option two, sell my body. I’m just going to sell my body. I feel like that’s where I would be most successful.

Aline: I will already be in space.

Craig: What, you will have ejected yourself?

Aline: I will already have been relocated with the special elite people that are going to be relocated to space.

John: That’s right. Because the magic space planes that they’ve developed just for the exodus.

Aline: Yeah. You have to apply, but I did great. I had a great interview. So, I’ll be in space.

John: Well, but you had another interview today, because today, the reason why we’re recording this at night is because you went and had your Global Entry visa.

Craig: Yes! One of my One Cool Things.

Aline: I had my Global Entry thing and the guy was so nice.

John: Talk us through this process. You go down to LAX to do this interview?

Aline: Well, yeah. I Uber’d down to LAX so I wouldn’t have to park. And then you go right in, it’s right in there in the Tom Bradley International Terminal.

Craig: That’s right.

Aline: They took me right on time.

Craig: They keep to their schedule.

Aline: Keep to their schedule. The guy could not have been any nicer. He asked me a couple questions and they take your fingerprints and my hands were not moist enough.

Craig: Ew.

Aline: And so he gave me —

Craig: Did he lick your hands?

Aline: [laughs] He gave me this little, you know what, I really should have boiled my hands. He gave me this little pot of cream to stick my hands in to moisturize them. And he said, “No, no, no, it’s good that your hands are not moist. It means you’re clean.” But not after I stuck my hand in that jar of moisturizer. Just so that it would conduct.

And so he gave me a tip which is when you get off the plane put a little moisturizer on your fingers so you don’t get — otherwise the fingerprint thing won’t read you. Isn’t that weird?

John: But it’s cool. I’ve actually had sensors doing that, the whole Global Entry, where like one sensor just wouldn’t read my hand. So I’d go down to the next one in line.

Aline: It’s moisturizer. But the other thing I didn’t know is that you don’t have to fill out that customs form.

Craig: You don’t have to fill out the customs form.

Aline: Well, so all the bother, the money, the website, the traveling to the airport at rush hour — all worth it just so that when they come around with the forms you’re like, “No, no, I don’t need to deal with that.”

Craig: You’re like, “Piss off.” It’s the best. If you’re traveling overseas it’s like amazing. That part is pretty great, but the best part is when you get off the plane there’s a 4,000-foot line and you skip it.

Aline: Yeah.

Craig: But also even for regular domestic flights you’re always going to get the TSA pre-check. You want a pro tip Aline?

Aline: Yes.

Craig: Pro tip. Okay. To get the pre-check stuff through your Global Entry you’ve got to look at how your name is. Usually on your Global Entry the way you’ve registered for it, it will be your first, middle, and last name. You’ve got to go now to your frequent flier sites and make sure that your name appears that way. So, you need to have your first, middle, and last. If you’re missing your middle name a lot of times the system will go, nah, we’re not quite sure it’s the same person. No pre-check for you.

Aline: Oh interesting. Because my whole thing is all messed up because I’m a three-namer. I’m not a hyphenate. But you know what? I did not have a middle name.

Craig: Okay. So, if you don’t have a middle name on your thing —

Aline: So now I do. Now my middle name is Brosh.

Craig: Okay, well, so, just make sure it all adds up. And then also on your frequent flier stuff, there’s a spot where you can put a known traveler ID. That’s where you put your Global Entry ID. Boom.

Aline: Boom.

Craig: Boom.

John: We’re set. So, our first topic is the summer movie season. And there have been many articles about how this season, this summer, was a disappointment. We are down from last year’s numbers. It’s the end of the film industry. The sturm und drang.

There are many articles about this. In my opinion, the worst of these articles was written by Brooks Barnes for the New York Times.

Craig: Again. [laughs]

John: So, Craig, Brooks has been sort of a familiar ghost over the last three years on this podcast because I think we’ve discussed his journalism several times.

Aline: Is he a bugaboo?

Craig: Several times. He might be a little bit of a bugaboo. Well, Brooks actually, our history with Brooks — you and I both blogged about Brooks years ago when he attempted somewhat pathetically right about residuals. I think he called them royalties and screwed it up completely.

I don’t know what’s going on over there at the New York Times. I’m sure Brooks Barnes is a great guy, but I don’t know how this guy got the job to cover one of America’s most enduring and dominant industries for the national paper of record as they say and he just simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I’m just blown away by this guy every time. Let’s walk through the article.

So, his thesis is: “American moviegoers sent a clear message to Hollywood over the summer: We are tired of more of the same.”

Well, that just sort of flies in the face of everything we actually know about the way American moviegoers go to movies. They seem to reward sequels, reboots, and so forth. But, fine. And then he says, “But don’t entirely blame the sequels and superheroes,” so at this point his thesis is American moviegoers have sent a clear message that isn’t at all clear. So, far Brooks you’re batting a thousand.

So he says, “The film industry had its worst summer in North America…since at least 1997, after adjusting for inflation,” and that we’re 15% down from the same stretch last year. John, tell me why that stat isn’t particularly interesting.

John: Because last year was a record year.

Craig: Right.

John: Last year was the highest ever box office gross.

Craig: Right. So, yes, naturally we have fallen off a bit from the highest ever. And, of course, when you say movies have had the worst summer since 1997, you’re implicitly stating that this is the tail end of a long, sad trajectory when in fact, no, just last year they set records.

But here’s where he gets really weird. So, he says, “Tom Cruise’s futuristic Edge of Tomorrow, for instance, looked like a hit — and that was exactly its problem.” Huh?

John: What?

Craig: “The title was too similar to The Day After Tomorrow, released in summer 2004.” I’m sorry.

Aline: And see I thought it was too similar to The Edge of Night which was a soap opera I used to watch.

John: I thought it was a terrible title.

Craig: It’s a terrible title for the movie. It’s a good movie. It had a bad title.

Aline: It is a good movie.

Craig: But surely the problem was that the title was too similar to a movie that was released ten years ago. I mean, nobody said, “Oh, this looks too much like that movie that might be out also at the same time if it’s ten years ago.” It just doesn’t make any sense.

Anyway, he says, “Despite stellar reviews, Edge of Tomorrow took in $99.9 million.” So he’s citing Edge of Tomorrow as an example of the problem, although I’d like to, again, refer you to the very first sentence, “American moviegoers sent a clear message to Hollywood over the summer: we’re tired of seeing more of the same.” In fact, Edge of Tomorrow was an original movie and it wasn’t more of the same.

John: No. Later in the article he says that Edge of Tomorrow had a title that seemed familiar, it had robot-y kind of things that seemed kind of familiar, but he’s reaching there.

Craig: He’s reaching, because the robot things, he cites Pacific Rim and Real Steel. Well, Real Steel came before Pacific Rim. It didn’t do that well. Pacific Rim came between Real Steel and Edge of Tomorrow and actually did pretty well.

John: So, the only thing I will give him credit for is Oblivion which is similar enough that I can see people sort of saying like, “Oh, I saw Tom Cruise in a futuristic movie that appears to have a twist in it.”

Craig: Sure.

John: That’s great. It’s a ridiculous article for so many things that it leaves out. And that’s — we can say like last year’s record summer is one of the things it leaves out. But the two big headlines of what it’s sort of not shining a spotlight on is that we knew it was going to be a bad summer, or a down summer, anyway because two of the giant movies of the year got pushed out of the summer. So, Fast and the Furious 7 was supposed to be out this summer; it couldn’t come out this summer because Paul Walker died.

Craig: Right.

John: So it will come out next summer, it will be a giant hit.

Craig: Yes.

John: So hurrah. Secondly, there’s a Pixar movie that was supposed to be here that’s not done. So, that got pushed out of the season.

Craig: Exactly.

John: If both of those movies had opened as they were supposed to do, is there any article, is there any trend to find?

Aline: What happens if next summer it goes way up again? What’s the trend?

Craig: Well, it will go way up again and Brooks Barnes won’t write an article. And that’s what kind of drives me crazy about Brooks Barnes and The New York Times is that you can feel them working to sneer. You can just feel it.

Like, “Well, Disney’s Maleficent became a runaway hit. Not bad for a film that one Wells Fargo analyst earmarked in the spring as a ‘too weird to succeed bomb.'” And then he says, “Well, the characters are familiar but it offered a revisionist storyline.” He’s just saying like, look, I have this idea now that only different movies do well, so even a movie that’s just a retelling of Snow White or Sleeping Beauty rather I’ll say is new. He’s just making stuff up.

I just feel like this is an example of this fake journalism where somebody goes, “Well, we need a story. The numbers are down. I have no idea why the numbers are down. I really don’t. My guess is if I cared enough I would figure out that they’re just sort of naturally down as part of like, you know, the way that trend lines have little saw teeth in them and this is a little down saw tooth. But I have to write a story, so let me just make up a bunch of stuff and use examples that don’t make any sense.”

John: A couple weeks ago we talked about the difference between journalism and sort of academic writing, and how academic writing got to be just these weird things where you’re searching for things that aren’t really there. And this is an example of like journalism that has become academic writing where you’re looking for a trend where there actually really is no trend beyond the facts.

And so these are the four facts I think you can draw from this summer’s box office. First off, it’s down from last year’s record summer. Second, this downturn was expected ahead of time because two big tent poles had moved. Number three, no movies cleared $400 million domestic. And only Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy cleared $300. And last year we had two movies that did that.

There were no out-and-out disasters. There was no Lone Ranger this season, but there were disappointments. The Edge of Tomorrow, a disappointment. Transformers, kind of a disappointment. Spiderman 2 — they all underperformed.

Craig: Well, Transformers made $244 million. I mean —

John: But it made a lot less than the previous Transformers.

Craig: Well, sure, but it made $244 million. It’s going to make money. And obviously that’s just here in North America. It doesn’t include overseas. But again, my whole issue is, look, everything you’re saying is clearly true and I think Brooks must be smart enough to know it. He works at The New York Times, for god’s sakes. But how does he get away with stuff like this: “What separated the few winners from the many losers? For the most part, the winners convinced ticket buyers that they were not just more of the same.”

Example, “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was distinctive by using a bold advertising image of a machine-gun-wielding chimp on horseback.” What?!

John: That was not the main image of the movie. That drives me crazy.

Craig: A. B, how can you use Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, a sequel to a movie that is a reboot of a series. I’m sorry, that was a reboot of a reboot of an exemplar of not just more of the same. It makes no sense. I have umbrage for this.

I would like to say, by the way, next summer is going to be, I think, huge. Because next summer you’re going to have Fast and Furious 7 and The Avengers and Mad Max and Jurassic World and the new Fantastic Four. And Ted 2. And Minions. I think next summer is going to be crazy.

John: The last point I want to make on this is that we talk about the summer as if the summer is really this clearly defined thing. So, we pick these arbitrary dates for when summer starts and when summer ends. And I guess you have to do that if you want to declare a season. But you look at a movie like Captain America 2, that was a giant hit and it feels like a summer movie, but they opened it in April.

So, if you look at the whole year we’re not down that much.

Craig: I totally agree.

Aline: Also tell you the other trend that’s not publicized, I mean, that wasn’t discussed in the article is that these big movies have gotten to be really good. I mean, all those movies you mentioned, Apes is really good. X-Men is amazing. Guardians of the Galaxy is a hoot. A hoot. I don’t think I’ve ever said that word before.

Craig: All right. Thanks, Grandma.

Aline: And Captain America 2, I mean, these big tent pole movies have gotten really quite good. I mean, good writing, and good acting, and I kind of think you could point to this year as the year that there were a lot of really well executed genre movies. Another trend piece you could write.

Craig: John is correct though, also. This is an important thing. When we talk about the summer, the summer is not the calendar summer or the solstice summer. The summer in fact does now begin in April. That’s a fact. The movie studios look at it that way. The summer is now April, May, June, July. August is no longer summer.

So, to me those are the four months of summer that we have to look at when we think about how movie studios release movies. Because if you’re going to compare… — By the way, who cares? What do I care if the summer, “Oh yeah, the summer is down.” Well, what about the fall? How did the spring do? What was winter like?

These people. I just can’t take it anymore, John. I can’t. I can’t do it. [laughs] I can’t do it. I can’t have it.

John: Craig, they need to be able to report about something before Toronto. And Toronto is happening this week, so they needed to have an article for last week and it has to be about the summer box office.

Craig: Well, I just have to say, Brooks — Brooks, you have to be better than this. I know you are. I believe you are. He should come on the show. I feel like I could just say, Brooks, there’s no way you think this is good journalism, this artitorial or whatever the hell it is. There’s just no way. It’s just terrible. Terrible.

John: All right. Terrible.

Craig: Terrible.

John: Aline, please pull us out of this morass. Let’s talk about your topic which you’re calling Flipping the Script. Set us up.

Aline: Okay. Well, the topics I love the most on this show are the crafty topics that give me things to think about in my daily practice. And one thing that happened to me recently that I thought might be helpful to people, and then I have a suggestion.

I was working on a passage of this script and it was about a 15-page passage that was just — it was functioning, but I felt like it wasn’t advancing the story narratively or emotionally and that the characters had kind of frozen. So, just for fun I took this sequence and I took the motivation of one of the two characters and I just made it exactly the opposite of what I had written.

So, instead of resisting the other character in these scenes, he is pursuing her. And instead of being angry with her, he’s solicitous of her. I just changed the dynamic of every scene just to see what happened. And all of a sudden, you know, we complain so much about writing and it’s such a misery and it’s so true. And the moments of true flow are really not that frequent, but I had this moment where I was sitting at a table, sun was shining, breeze was blowing, and I had two and a half hours of reversing the dynamics in the script.

And all of a sudden it changed everything that was going on in those scenes and then it really informed the movie from then on. And it was sort of a breakthrough moment in writing this script and finishing this script. And I kept stopping and looking around and saying like, “I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe that this actually feels as organic and enjoyable and fun.” And it was because I had reversed this thing that had been so set in my mind.

And I think one of the reasons that it really freed… — If you had asked me before if this was a good idea I would have said absolutely not. He can’t do this because of XY and Z. And then once I did it I found a way into it and into this character that really transformed all the writing for me. And it was a great moment.

John: I’ve been in situations like that where I’ll get just jammed up on like I don’t know how to make these things fit together and I can muscle my way through the sequence, but I can feel myself forcing this thing to happen in ways that just doesn’t really want to happen.

And a lot of times it’s great that you have this sort of inner motivation to have this epiphany, but often I’ve been in meetings with an executive and they’re just like, no, you can’t do this. And basically they’re forcing me not to do something. And I’ll fight them. And suddenly I’ll say, “Well, if I had to do it that way then all these things would change.” But then they’re like, “Oh, but all these other things would change, too.”

It’s almost like a wrinkle in the carpet, and as you start to sort of push it one way you’re like, oh but it’s not, oh, I could just push it all the way out of the whole script. Well, that’s just lovely.

And so sometimes those things are so terrifying, you sort of run towards them and hooray, you actually sort of get to a new place.

Craig: It’s such a common thing to feel yourself laboring through something. And because we are taught, I think, in part by the world, and also in part by our own failures and successes that persistence is so important, it’s natural that we want to persist, that we don’t want to quit. We don’t want to give up. Just go, “Well this part seems hard all of a sudden, I shouldn’t just give up on it. I should muscle my way through it.”

Aline: “I should grind through it.”

Craig: Yeah, but you shouldn’t. It turns out that actually that’s the script telling you stop. It’s a little bit like when they say in the gym if it hurts, stop, you know, like the bad hurt. And that’s the bad hurt. We always get afraid when we are lost and we don’t know where to go. That’s a terrible feeling. So, when we’ve been like, well, the only way out of this hedge maze is to push through these hedges, at some point you realize that’s not right. I shouldn’t push through these hedges, but I actually now don’t know where to go.

And what you’re talking about that’s so useful I think, Aline, is the idea of examining your givens and questioning if they’re really given.

Aline: Right.

Craig: Because when you give them up, while that may seem radical, it is often easier to make a radical change that puts the wind at your back than to maintain all that is given and write with the wind in your face.

Aline: Yeah, and it’s true. It’s funny, I think a lot of screenwriters were people who were good students and you know handed their papers in on time and a lot of writers are. And I’ve really noticed that one of the things I had to train myself to do when I became a writer is to feel and not think. And when you’re writing just to feel how does this feel to be in this movie. And it just didn’t feel good. It didn’t feel revelatory. It didn’t feel interesting. It felt sloggy.

And there’s an interesting thing that happens as you become more proficient is that you can write sloggy stuff so that it reads okay. But you know in your heart that like I’m just greasing it here, you know. I’m just pouring sugar and butter on this thing. There’s no nutrition here. I’m just — the steak is kind of — this is a very cheap cut of steak that I’m now soaking in butter so it’ll have some flavor.

And I really had to stop and say like where is the joy in this, where is the discovery in this, and that’s the thing that takes you beyond just craft, you know, that takes it from just being a table that will hold weight into being something that has dimension and interest in it. And even if it hadn’t worked, I think it would have been helpful to me just to see how the characters would talk in these scenes. And I think John is a proponent of these sort of word game type approaches. And I think if you can have the characters adopt each other’s emotional strategies, or change geographically where they are or what they’re trying to do.

Anything, just take the characters for a walk and do something different with them, you have a shot at uncovering a moment like this.

John: The script I’m writing right now, there are two characters who are sort of, they’re not handcuffed together literally, but they sort of have to work together to do something. And one of them is able to achieve her goal at a certain point and that all felt really good and that scene was really good. And as I started writing past it I realized like, wow, she has nothing she wants. And I know that there’s going to be a thing that she’s ultimately going to be on his side a few scenes later, but there’s just going to be this gap of time where like her movie is over.

Aline: She’s completed. That’s the worst.

John: She’s completed her quest. And so the kind of thing I wouldn’t necessarily have noticed on the outline. It would have felt like, well we’re going for that, and then we’re getting into his stuff. But then I realized as I was actually writing the scenes there’s moments there were like she’s just kind of dangling. And so why is she still around.

And so it made me sort of go back and think like well how can I take away that thing that she thinks she just won. And so how do I let her have that little victory and then be able to take it away. So it ended up making the scene much better because it was a reversal within that course of the scene where the thing she thought she had gotten is a way again and sort of together they have to go to the next stage and they both still have a goal and they’re still at cross purposes which is certainly a very useful thing for where I’m at in the story.

Craig: Yeah.

Aline: I have one more suggestion for flipping the script. I think, particularly in genre movies, if you look at the call sheet there’s such a preponderance of male characters. And I think if you get stuck writing a character that you feel stuck or feels familiar, sometimes just changing the gender of the character can really unlock really interesting things.

So, you know, the crooked cop is a woman. Or the baby nurse is a man. And you don’t need to call a tremendous amount of attention. It’s not about the fact that they have a different gender, but it will inform the storytelling with some, because we’ll fill in the blanks. And when I was watching Planet of the Apes I kept thinking what if that character that was played by the Zero Dark Thirty Jason guy, if that had been —

John: Jason Clarke.

Aline: Jason Clarke. If that had been a woman who had been a civil engineer and had lost her spouse, and had a child and was trying to — just, you know, sometimes when you find that there’s blocks of unigender characters, sometimes just changing the gender or the background or the — something that you, you know, when it falls out of your brain in a very stock form, sometimes just changing one thing that could be a detail but actually makes the whole thing more interesting is another thing I could suggest to people to make stuff feel fresher to them.

Craig: That’s exactly why I think that works when you said it falls out of your brain in stock form. When you make yourself, force yourself to go in a direction that is not familiar, it’s like your mind doesn’t have that soporific thing with all the filled in blanks. Suddenly none of the blanks are filled in. And it’s fun to fill them in. Now you’re building a person. It’s exciting. If you say to me, okay, the villain is an army sergeant who is following orders because he believes that the enemy must be crushed at any cost, there’s so — I’ve got like five million movies behind me now. Oh, well, I guess he’s got gray hair and he barks orders. He might have a mustache. He’s very grim.

[laughs] You know, it’s like it’s already — I can’t get away from it.

John: Well, you picked that character, but also I think a good way to segue to the next topic is you picture where he is in those moments. You picture sort of what it is to feel like those moments and what is around him. If you stick a character in those moments you’re maybe going to stick him to some different places, stick her in some different places, and then you’re really writing brand new scenes where you have to figure out everything else that’s around them and that seems really crucial.

Aline: Scene geography is actually where people are in scenes. Where they physically are?

Craig: Yeah. Where they physically are. Where things and people are in a scene.

Aline: So you’re talking about how you do that?

Craig: Well, I’m talking about why it’s important and how you do it.

Aline: Okay. Do it. Hit it.

Craig: Well, it’s something that I think we elide generally. No one is asking us to provide them a plot map where everyone is going to stand. On the day we’ll be in a location and a place that will be designed. The director, and the cameraman, and the actors will work out where they’re standing and how they’re moving, but we can do a lot of helping along the way.

There is a, of all the things that can happen in a scene that tell the story, typically screenwriters think of dialogue. That’s the first and most obvious tool. Then there’s actions. What do the people do? Are they punching, shooting, running, kissing? But there’s also space. How close are they? How close are they to each other? How close are they to the thing they want?

If they’re moving towards it or away from it, how hard or far do they have to go? If they’re hiding from somebody, how are they hiding? Are they hiding really close them? Can they hear the other person? All these physical dimensions help us tell the story of the scene in interesting ways.

One thing that I’ve discovered along the way is that a lot of times we’ll do this work in our mind so that we know it makes sense, but we either don’t include the detail sufficiently in the scene work, or we do it in a way that is not clear enough. And I am repeatedly surprised how frequently people will read a script and get hung up on geographical issues. They don’t understand how somebody could have said something and not be heard by somebody else. They don’t understand how somebody could have said something and be heard by someone else.

And they will stop and we don’t want that.

Aline: Well, one thing I would say is that, you know, a mark of a not very proficiently written script will be like “He stands here, he’s holding a cup, he looks in this direction, 20 feet away is this.” Doing it in language which is too detailed where you feel like you’re reading a continuity and not a script. So, I think it’s always best to think of those things, translate them into emotional language. So it’s like, “He sees the dog around the corner. He leans towards it. It’s so close. It’s only three arm lengths away. It’s only five steps away.”

If you can describe it through the lens of the character, how they’re experiencing it, as opposed to trying to objectively describe it from the outside. It enhances the reading experience.

John: Yeah. You’re using your words that can hopefully have both emotional meaning and sort of logical meaning. So, like “Just out of reach. There in the distance he can barely make out.” Give a sense of sort of where people are in space.

This thing I’m working on right now, there’s one house that’s incredibly important to it. And without sort of giving you a floor plan, I want to at least walk you through some parts of it so you understand how close certain things are and how far certain things are.

Craig: Right.

John: There’s a staircase that’s very important. The dining room is sort of close to there. Sometimes it’s as simple as I will use a scene header, a slug line, that is both Stairwell/Dining Room, so you know that from the Dining Room you can actually see the stairwell. That’s an important thing, so you don’t make them feel like they’re physically separate spaces. You can walk continuously from one to the other.

If you hear somebody screaming at the other side of the house, well, we see them reacting to hear the scream and we see them running up the stairs and through that hallway so we have a sense of how these places connect together.

Aline: It’s also really important when you’re describing where people are in space to vary your sizes. So, things go from being a speck on the horizon to close on the fist opening. Because you want to vary your sense of scale most often because it will get monotonous if everything feels like it’s the same size in every frame.

Craig: Well, we’ve talked about that when we’ve done transitions. I mean, that was a big simple transitional device, big to small, small to big. But I think that there is something worth considering when we’re creating scenes to ask, just as we ask how can we allow an actor to convey an emotion without saying a word, how can we create suspense when no one is talking?

Suspense is a great example of how to properly use geography to your advantage as a storyteller. When you think about the scene in Jurassic Park where the raptor is moving through the kitchen. And the girl is hiding behind the counter. These are the ways that you should ask what other tools do I have. Well, I know I have action. I know I have dialogue. I know I have music. And I know I have the camera, but what about space? What about where people are? There is something great about saying, okay, in an intentional way I want Dustin Hoffman banging on this big window that’s far away. Right?

So that here is this girl getting married and he wants to be with her and he’s far away, but he’s banging on this thing so we hear this distant thumping. And there he is tiny in that space, so that people can get that picture and they understand it. Because the thing is if you don’t spell that out clearly, 99 times out of 100 they’ll go, oh, he’s like right there. There’s like a window that’s right there. That’s creepy.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And it’s not at all what you meant.

John: So, I think I’ve talked about this on the podcast before. In general, you’re trying to evoke the experience of seeing a movie just with your words on the page. And sometimes you can just use little things like right and left. And they’re telling you what I see in my head is that like the phone is on the right, the phone is on the left. But sometimes you’re just creating a very general space.

And there’s a scene in Big Fish, in the movie Big Fish, where he goes to make a phone call to tell his mom that his dad has died. And I saw the scene and was like, wait, that’s wrong. In my head I have always seen the scene in my head with the phone being on the other side of the bed. And it’s such a weird thing that like it doesn’t matter at all, but it completely matters to me.

And so the take home from this is that the scene still worked because I created a space with which there was logic in there. There was geographic logic in there. It didn’t matter that it was ultimately on the left or on the right, but it mattered that it was close enough to this space, so the emotional connection was still there. The scene ultimately made sense, it just didn’t fit the way I had it in my head.

Aline: It’s interesting because screenplays are a form of concision, you know, they’re a form that’s organized around concision and brevity. You don’t have a lot of space. And I’ve always thought, pretentiously, that screenplays were more like poems than like novels. And I think a lot of people approach their scripts with too much of a novelistic point of view. Almost too much of a complete vision in a way. And you want to have the complete vision, but you want to pluck out just those details that are the most evocative. And the most evocative detail of that Dustin Hoffman scene that you cite is that we’re very far away from him and we can’t hear him as he bangs on the window.

And so I think training yourself to find the most important detail that really gets across what the scene is trying to do, and being concise about it, I really have notice that the more I do this in a funny way the less I — just the less.

John: The less overall, too. I’m a much more concise writer now than I used to be.

Craig: Yeah. I try and be very concise with my action description. And the simple rule is do they need to know this? Do they need to know it? And if they need to know it, then put it in, and put it in in an interesting way. And if they don’t, don’t. But, part of I guess what I’m getting at is sometimes they don’t need to know certain geographical things that they do.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve shown up on a set and thought, oh man, I should have mentioned this. In my head it was obvious. But now this — why is this nightclub cavernous?

Aline: Oh yeah. Right.

Craig: They’re so far away from where I want them to go. It’s just not intimate anymore. It’s not what I wanted. [laughs]

Aline: Well that’s why you have to be, you know, it’s so true sometimes things that are obvious to you, they’re just not self-evident. And that’s why it’s a collaborative medium and you’re trying to share your vision or how you see it with everyone else in. So, if it’s really important to you, you have to find a way to make sure it’s on the page.

John: That’s why ideally you’d love to be the screenwriter who is involved through the process, so as the director is picking locations and finding stuff, you can be there to say, “Okay, just so we know, the scene that I wrote is meant in a much smaller, more intimate nightclub. And I worry that we’re going to lose some of the comedy or the drama or some of the whatever in this by having it be so incredibly — ”

Aline: It’s so crazy to me that like, you know, sometimes they’re making moves and the person who wrote it is long gone. They don’t even have their phone number.

Craig: Sometimes? Of course.

Aline: You’re so 17 — you’ve made so many, it’s like when we were kids and they would run it through the ditto machine. You just run so many dittos on that thing that it just doesn’t make any sense anymore.

Craig: Did you call them dittos or did you call them mimeos?

Aline: We called them dittos.

John: We called them dittos. You called them mimeo?

Craig: I think we had mimeos, because I think that was a New York term.

Aline: And sometimes you’d get a test and it had been dittoed so much that there was like no blue ink on it at all.

Craig: Yeah, that’s right, because when I moved to Jersey it was ditto, but in New York it was mimeo for mimeograph. And did you guys have the purple ones?

Aline: Yup.

John: Oh yeah. It smelled so good when it came fresh off the ink.

Craig: Snort it.

Aline: And it would be wet.

Craig: You’d snort that wet mimeo.

John: If I remember correctly, the one that was in our elementary school office was a hand crank. It wasn’t —

Aline: Yeah, it was a hand crank.

Craig: Oh absolutely.

Aline: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we got to go ditto it.

Craig: Yeah, because it was like that purple roll, and somebody would just [cranking sound]. Oh my god.

Aline: Bringing the dittoes.

John: I kind of want one now. Because you feel like if civilization collapses —

Aline: On eBay there is ditto machines for sure.

John: For sure there are. Because you think about it, if civilization collapses, the printing press is a challenging thing to get made again, but I bet ditto, you could do that more quickly.

Craig: I’m looking up mimeograph on eBay right now. I think we should all get one.

John: By the way, Craig, Aline brought us presents for our third anniversary. And so I have mine here. Do you want me to spoil you what our present is, or do you just want to see it yourself?

Aline: No.

Craig: No, what? No which one?

Aline: No, he’s going to send it to you and you’re going to open it up and you’re going to have the thrill of opening it.

Craig: Great. Thank you, Aline.

John: We are pro mimeograph.

Aline: Yes.

John: We are pro scene geography. But we’re also pro concision. And so the balance here, I was thinking about this anecdote which could completely be apocryphal. I heard it in relation to a class they teach at Apple University. They talk about Picasso and how Picasso would start by drawing a bull. And his first drawing would be really, really detailed. And like look like a bull. And then like he would just go through a series of drawings and get less and less and less —

Aline: What’s the essence of it?

John: Yeah, what is the essence of a bull? And so it was a single line. It was like, oh, well that’s a bull. And it really is —

Aline: And then later in production they’ll be like, “Does it have a tail? Does it have hooves? What kind of bull? Does it have a — ”

John: Exactly.

Craig: I know.

John: And so you may have created this beautiful line of poetry that sort of describes what this thing feels like, but maybe it won’t have the detail that actually gets the right location picked or makes people cross the right ways. It is a real challenge.

Aline: Yup.

Craig: Man, these mimeographs are pricey. [laughs]

Aline: Are they really? What does a mimeograph machine go for?

Craig: Well, like I’m looking at one that is an antique vintage, but of course I think that means from the ’60s, which is probably the ones that we were looking at. An antique vintage AB Dick, that’s the actual name, AB Dick Fluid Duplicator. It’s a Dick Fluid Duplicator.

Aline: [laughs]

John: [laughs] Love it.

Craig: So an antique vintage AB Dick Fluid Duplicator.

John: It is viscous?

Craig: [laughs] I don’t know. But it’s $277.

John: That feels like a lot.

Craig: That’s a lot. I guess these things are — like people must collect these things.

John: Probably most of them were thrown away.

Aline: But you had to interact with your teacher’s handwriting.

Craig: That’s right. That’s right.

Aline: So you knew which teachers had good handwriting and which ones, it was like scrawled and badly dittoed, and then you were like I’m stuck with this.

John: I have no idea what this is.

Craig: I can’t read this dick fluid. [laughs]

Aline: [laughs]

John: [laughs] Speaking of like auctions of things that were otherwise lost or destroyed, I’m going to put a link in the show notes of this guy has tried to get all the VHS copies of Jerry Maguire. I may be remembering this completely wrong.

Aline: Oh yeah.

John: Yeah, and so basically he’s trying to buy all of them.

Craig: Why?

Aline: Why is that?

John: Just as an art thing.

Craig: Ooh…

Aline: Yeah, I read about that.

John: And so they were on display, I want to say they were at Cinefamily, but it’s —

Aline: That’s such a Cameron Crowe thing to do. It really is.

John: It’s just the perfect choice.

Craig: What an odd thing.

John: So I really applaud that crazy kind of thing.

Craig: Why not?

John: Oh, Craig, I just realized that this episode is going to come out on Tuesday morning. Do you know what else is going to come out on Tuesday morning?

Craig: What?

John: The iPhone 6.

Craig: Uh..Ooh…jizz.

Aline: Dick fluid! Dick fluid! Dick fluid.

Craig: I just started singing Jizz in my Pants.

John: Viscous mimeograph fluid in your pants.

Craig: I just AB Dick fluid’d in my pants.

Aline: [laughs]

Craig: I’m so excited. Well, first of all it’s not just the iPhone 6.

John: It’s everything.

Craig: It’s everything. So, there’s probably going to be a watch, or a wearable as the nerds call it. And obviously the iPhone 6, and a whole bunch of other god knows what. And one more thing! I’m very excited. Do you now, I assume you do this, I do it. I actually sit there and watch the live thing.

John: Yeah. Actually the whole staff is coming in. We’re going to watch it live.

Craig: [laughs] You guys make popcorn. You’re so cute.

John: It’s actually our business to make this thing.

Craig: That’s true.

John: So I will, god, I will hate myself for making this prediction, but we rebuilt Weekend Read kind of behind the scenes, and so the version that’s on your phone right now should theoretically scale up and everything should look perfect on the new iPhones. Lord knows if we’re actually correct.

The Scriptnotes app, by the way, which we don’t actually make will probably be a disaster on the new iPhones because we don’t make it. So, I hope it works. God, I hope it works. But we won’t know until we know.

Craig: [sings] God, I hope I get it!

John: Yeah, I hope I get it to. Speaking of hope and emotions, talk to us about emotional IQ.

Aline: Wow, that was a good one.

John: I try.

Aline: That was good. No, it’s good.

John: I think over the course of the three years —

Aline: Yeah, you’ve gotten really good at it.

John: Aline went back and listened to the very first episode of Scriptnotes. Tell u about the first episode, because I have not listened to it —

Craig: You mean like today?

Aline: No, I bought the premium subscription.

Craig: Oh, thank you, Aline.

Aline: Which was impossible to figure — I had a little trouble. But I got it. And I went back and listened to the first episode. And the most notable thing about it is you guys are not funny at all. You’re not relaxed. You’re very earnest and you’re talking very seriously about things that are interesting to screenwriters. And it’s cute.

And I listened to the first half of the second one, and by then you’re starting to get a little bit of the banter going. But I’m a completist. So, I think I started listening like 60 episodes in or something. So, I’m looking forward to listening to the first —

Craig: Well I think the first of things are fascinating to me. Like if you ever watch the first —

Aline: Oh the pilot of Seinfeld is fascinating.

Craig: That, or the first six episodes of The Simpsons where you’re like what is this crudely drawn unfunny thing? [laughs] This thing is weird.

Aline: Yeah.

John: But The Simpsons actually has two starts. So it has the Tracey Ullman things, which are just bizarre.

Craig: Bizarre.

Aline: Yeah.

John: And then it has the real episodes which are, you know, also bizarre.

Aline: Which are very different.

Craig: Even then they were bizarre.

Aline: Yeah, they really were.

Craig: The early one where Penny Marshall plays their murderous babysitter. It’s just dark and not that funny.

Aline: Yeah, it took them awhile. All right, I wanted to talk about EQ because I’ve really found over the eons that I’ve been doing this that there are many talented people, we know many talented people who are great at writing, but screenwriting as you point out many times is a social endeavor. And it kind of amazes me how many times I find that people are their own worst enemy, myself included.

And one of the things that I’ve learned over time, if I’ve learned screenwriting skills, one of the things I’ve learned is to sort of manage my own feelings and the feelings of people around me and to understand what’s happening emotionally, to read the room, as they say, and to understand how you’re coming across to other people, what’s actually being communicated to you, and I found that it seems to go with writing there’s a lot of blaminess, victimness, almost a nihilism. People get to a point where they feel like, you know, you often hear people complaining a lot about other people’s success. There’s a lot of schadenfreude.

And I really have noticed that the most successful people that I know are positive and intuitive and productive and the way I’ve come to see it that everybody has a narrative for their own life. We’re all telling a story about ourselves, to ourselves, every day. And if the story you’re telling yourself is executives and producers are stupid and I’m a victim, it’s just really hard to get anywhere. And I just find that so many times when people will come and say, well this guy was dumb, and that guy was an idiot, and this guy said something stupid, and I always think like, “Is that what happened? Or was the script not very good? Or were you being obstructionist?”

And I think being successful in this business is as much about learning those things. And I know it’s sort of crude to say that, because we want to think it’s just based on pure what you can get on the page, but you’re a vendor and you’re somebody that has to do something on a regular basis in social interactions with people. And I’m not telling people to be charming, because that’s not what it is. I think that’s sort of a little bit of a misconception that you need to be a networker. I never understand when people talk about networking. I don’t know what that is.

But it’s about understanding that these other people also want your thing to be good. Their careers depend on it, too. And you need to be a participant and a team player and understand that things will be said to you that are maybe not framed in the right way or you’ll say things that are controlled by your emotions, but you need to learn how to control. And I mean I’m sure every business is like this, it’s just that what we do is so personal and emotional, but I find that a lot of screenwriter’s narratives that they construct for themselves schmuckify themselves unnecessarily.

Craig: Schmuckify. I like that word.

Aline: Yeah, it’s a thing I call “schmuckifying.” And I find that there are people, you know, I have been friends with people who they can schmuckify themselves anywhere. They can schmuckify themselves at Denny’s. You know, they can be insulted and feel put upon and criticized anywhere. And if you’re someone who your personal narrative is dumb people are picking on me, that’s going to be fed back to you. That comes back in a loop.

Craig: It’s also not going to help you advance the cause of your artwork.

Aline: Right.

Craig: I mean, what’s hard for us is that we are — we should, I think, have all of the emotional squishiness and angst of an artist, because that’s what we are, but then we have to stop and say, okay, but down past that I do have a goal. And my goal is that I want the closest thing to my expression to be seen by as many people as possible. At least that’s — for many of us in screenwriting that’s what we want. We want as many people as possible to see our movie.

And how do I get there? And how will it — and how do I get there without compromising what I want? And that’s a dangerous path to walk that we must walk. But there are times when I stop and say I am allowed to feel put upon. I am allowed to feel insulted by this. I’m allowed to be angry, and frustrated, and hurt, and sad. But, if I use that to direct what I now say and do immediately next, I’m going to actually get in the way of my own goal, which is to get my movie made.

Aline: Right. No one is going to make your movie because you deserve it, and you’ve been really nice and you’ve tried really hard and you’ve worked really hard. It’s about being excellent. And part of being excellent is listening to other people and being productive and being positive. And I think sometimes there’s this — people just lose sight of how to be smart emotionally. And that that’s — you’re trying to get somewhere. You need to learn how to collaborate with people and tell a story which attracts people to you.

John: Well, it sounds like you’re talking about the same kind of emotional intelligence that you have as a writer. Your ability to have insight into your characters. You need to have that same kind of insight into yourself and what your motivations are.

Aline: Right. It’s true.

John: And what the people around you, their motivations are. And be able to sort of construct this narrative outside of the script you’ve written about how you get this movie made and how this career progresses.

Aline: And just by its very nature, your work and you, you have to attract people to you. You have to attract directors. You have to attract buyers. You have to attract actors. You know, you have to be someone who attracts other people and being sensitive to other people’s emotions is a huge part of it.

I was lucky enough, I had an amazing, the woman who was my agent for 17 years was a great guide to me in sort of how to comport myself, and I was quite young. I was 26 when I started with her. And I remember I was working on a project where the script wasn’t very good, but people were also behaving in a way that I thought was making me unhappy. And I just got on the phone with her and I was complaining, and complaining, and complaining. And she said, “Okay, so here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to hang up the phone and you’re going to get over yourself. And then you’re going to call me tomorrow and we’re going to come up with a strategy for how to deal with this.”

Craig: Right.

Aline: And I was so stung in the moment, and then I thought, god, she’s right. I am not currently in a state to make any decisions or any game plan because I am just up my own ditto. I really need to… — And you know what? A lot of times you’ll be in situations where as Craig say, you know, you bring your little squishy little thing that you made and you’re so proud of. And you take it to people and they say things which are shocking and hurtful to you because you thought it was great, or you thought you were communicating something, or it meant a lot to you.

And you’re going to get notes which are going to feel like you’ve been slammed over the head with a sledgehammer. And part of your job as a professional is to take a deep breath and not transmit that to other people and really take in their viewpoints. And really, that’s part of what being a good collaborator is and understanding that nobody means to drown your puppy. They’re just trying to give you their opinion.

And it’s really one of the hardest things. And now that I’ve been doing this for awhile, I kind of see that the people who make it are not just the best writers. They’re the people who are the most emotionally resilient and confident. And I think you can learn that. I really do. I think that’s something that you can learn. And it’s important to have people in your life who tell you, hey, you know what, I think it’s time for you to get over yourself.

Craig: Well some people, I agree, respond to what we would call tough love, like your agent delivered some tough love. But this may surprise you, I’m going to stand up a little bit for the squishy folks out there. The emotional pain that we experience is quite real. And it can be profound at times, and very confusing, and I don’t want anyone to think that this is yet another part of their life that deserves shame. And that this is more evidence of their weakness, because it’s not. I just think it’s —

Aline: But I’m not really even talking about that. I’m talking about things where, you know, you’re a struggling writer and you get a meeting with someone and they reschedule it seven times. And instead of being like, blech, talking to the assistant and being like, “Um, really? So, you know, because I am busy and I do — ”

It’s just being like going with the flow and being okay with it, even if you then have to hang up and kick the dog.

John: Yeah. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Craig: Ha! Well, I think that that’s fair. And I do —

Aline: And also like things we’ve talked about, like when you’re approaching someone that you’d like to work with, don’t be creepy. Don’t be, you know, all of that stuff.

Craig: Some of the things, like when you say don’t be creepy, or don’t care so much about that, some people are creepy and some people I think are just wired to be injustice collectors and that’s their vibe. And then if, okay, look, if that’s your vibe, if you know you’re just not necessarily the most socially appealing person, or that you do get hung up on these things, at least be aware of it. And then just say, okay, I’m going to put that in the box of stuff that is naturally me. It’s not evil. It’s not bad, but it’s also not going to help.

Just as there are other parts of my life that don’t necessarily help me with my writing, that’s not going to help me with my writing. So at least be aware of it, because there are some people out there who are — I mean, I’ve met some writers who are odd. I mean, really odd. And they’re brilliant and they do really good work. And they’re super successful. So it’s possible.

Aline: I’m not even talking, that’s what I’m saying. Like I don’t mean be charming. I don’t mean have great meeting patter. Some odd people really have great EQ. They understand, okay, that’s how I need to behave. I need to show up early. I need to be prepared. I need to be pleasant. I need to remember the names of everyone here. I need to turn this in on time. I need — just anything that you would do to be a good business person.

And I just feel like we sometimes lose sight of that because we want to be artistes. And a lot of times when someone is complaining to me about their career, what I’m hearing is they’re putting things into the universe that are allowing people to schmuckify them.

John: Let’s speak some truth here. I think that the writers who are successful, who are just socially not great, the ones who succeed tend to have partners. And that may be a solution for a lot of these people is that like if you’re a really great writer, but you just can’t sort of figure out how to get along with other people, find one person you can get along with and partner up. Because that may be a way that you can have a career and get movies made that work really well.

Aline: In partnerships there’s almost always a sunny one and a not so sunny one.

John: But I too, like Craig, I want to stick up for sort of the weirdos, oddballs, and the ones who just sort of don’t get it, because sometimes they make the most brilliant amazing things. And sometimes if that makes it harder for them to make it in the Hollywood system, I hope they get to make cool movies outside of the Hollywood system and sort of do things on their own, because I want those movies to exist.

I want them to find somebody who can champion them and recognize their weirdness and their difficulty and help make those movies. Some great producers can do that. And that’s a good thing.

Aline: But I’m really less talking about being weird than I am about the sort of we’re going to sit around and complain and blame and talk about how dumb the executives are. I don’t know, I just think it’s so boring.

Craig: Sometimes that is about blowing off steam. I think that there are — I have met writers and, frankly, they, to fit your thesis, they don’t really make it, or they don’t last, or they really struggle. Writers who seem far more interested in blaming the world for the difficulties that they’re having, but I always feel like they’re actually not really blaming the world, they’re just essentially trumping this up because it’s easier to do than to admit the truth, which is that they’re either scared, or they don’t know how to do it, or it’s just too hard for them to do, or they don’t even want to do it anymore.

But somehow or another a lot of times I think what we’re hearing is the symptom of some other real problem when people just lose themselves in anger and resentment toward a system that frankly we all know is not fair. Nobody could possibly wander into Hollywood and go, “This is going to be a wonderful meritocracy and everyone is going to be quite lovely and rational.” No.

Aline: Right. Who told you it was not going to be like this? And that’s the thing, it’s not like you read a lot of books about how we’re all sort of carried around on silk pillows and treated awesomely.

Craig: Yeah, everybody knows. Everybody knows. So, when I find somebody who is acting like this is somehow new, I think you already knew this. This isn’t about that. But, you know, then again, I do tend to want to dole out a hug.

Aline: I was talking to a friend of mine and he had cribbed a phrase from a friend of his. I said so how are things going right now and he goes, “Well, you know, I’m working on stuff. I’ve got a lot of irons in the freezer.”

John: [laughs]

Craig: That’s funny.

Aline: And I have been handing that out like Halloween candy. I just love — that just really sums up Hollywood. Got a lot of irons in the freezer.

Craig: Wow. Terrible business.

John: Ooh, what a fun third anniversary episode.

Craig: Third anniversary. We’ve been together for three — what is the third anniversary, John? What is it, paper? Wax?

John: Isn’t paper the first one?

Craig: Or, it’s dick fluid. [laughs]

John: [laughs]

Aline: I remember very clearly seeing Craig and him being like, “John called me. He wants me to do this thing. I have no idea what it is. I have to get on the phone with him and talk about stuff. I don’t know. I’m just going to go and see what it is.” Like he was mystified.

Craig: [laughs] I don’t know, I still don’t apparently know what a podcast is.

John: You’ve been on several podcasts and you still have no idea what they are.

Craig: I’m not really sure. Are we live on the air right now? What’s happening? John, where is the antenna?

John: So, we, against all odds, our podcast is going really well. About 25,000 people listen to us every week, which is nuts.

Craig: Wow. Crazy.

John: And of those 25,000, about 800 are premium subscribers who are subscribing to the app. Premium subscribers like Aline Brosh McKenna.

Aline: Me among them.

John: You’re paying us $1.99 a month to listen to all the back episodes and occasional bonus episodes.

Aline: I’d give you $2.99 a month.

John: Do you?

Aline: I would.

John: Oh, thank you.

Aline: I would give you $5.99 a month.

John: Holy cow!

Aline: Yeah, I would give you a flat $75 for the year.

John: You can’t see it because it’s an audio podcast, but she’s raising her paddle. It’s like the auction is going on.

Aline: But it’s got to give me that thing where I can listen through, what is it called?

John: Yeah, so apparently the Scriptnotes app right now, it won’t play in the background, so you actually have to have the app open for it to play. So you can’t like check your email when it’s playing.

Craig: Well that’s no good.

John: It totally should be possible.

Aline: My whole airplane thing is listening to old Scriptnotes and playing Scrabble at the same time. So, it’s a problem. Look into it. Look into it!

John: We’ll fix it. We’ll try to fix it for Aline. If we can fix it for Aline we will.

Aline: For anyone.

John: But I just emailed Craig about this, because we have 800 premium subscribers. I’m curious whether we can get to a thousand by Christmas. And it seems like we probably could. But if we get to a thousand subscribers, I think you and I, Craig, should do a special bonus episode that is just for subscribers that’s absolutely filthy.

Craig: Yes! I agree.

John: Because we attempt to make the normal show fairly clean, so you can listen to it in your car with your kids.

Aline: I want in. Come on, guys. I’ve got to get in there.

John: We’ll have special guests like Aline Brosh McKenna just being filthy.

Aline: Well, I think Kelly and I could do a segment where we really —

Craig: Oh, that’s just far too much. [laughs] I mean, we said dirty, we didn’t say horrifying. I mean, come one. The last time John, and I, and Kelly got together —

John: People’s eye balls will melt.

Craig: I mean, we reduced John to a vegetable. I mean, it was just tragic. It was just tragic. That was easily the filthiest one we’ve ever done was the one that you and I did with Kelly.

Aline: Was that the one where you played games?

Craig: Yeah, we played Fiasco.

Aline: I don’t know. I’m a completist, but that one, I was —

John: Yeah, a lot of people —

Aline: Head scratching on that one. Also, the audio was weird.

John: It was a little bit weird, yeah.

Aline: John was so much more upset, by the way, Craig, that I just said the audio was weird than I said the show was weird. He would have been much happier if I said, no, the show —

John: The audio was brilliant.

Aline: Perfect. Yeah.

John: But the content was terrible.

Aline: That’s what he wanted to hear.

Craig: I could have told you that that would have been the reaction.

Aline: Are we on to One Cool Things?

Craig: No, we’re not done yet, Aline. You’re not in charge of this podcast. You’re not the boss of us!

Aline: Neither are you?

Craig: No, I am. Well, I’m second in command. [laughs] I’m the Gilligan of this boat.

John: You’re the Riker of this enterprise.

Craig: That’s right.

John: So, if we get to a thousand subscribers, Craig and I promise we will do a bonus episode that’s only for subscribers. So, if you’d like to subscribe go to scriptnotes.net, or you can subscribe kind of through the app, but it’s kind of frustrating through the app.

Anyway, you should subscribe because you get all the back episodes and some bonus stuff, too. And I’m going to be doing a special Q&A thing at the Writers Guild with Simon Kinberg.

Craig: Ooh…

John: All of our friends, Simon Kinberg.

Aline: What?

Craig: Yeah.

John: And we’ll have the audio for that, too. So, you should come for that.

Aline: Nice.

Craig: Excellent. Great. Love that guy.

Aline: He’s the best.

Craig: He is.

John: One Cool Thing, Aline Brosh McKenna.

Aline: I have one. So, Breaking Bad is not on the air anymore —

Craig: What?!

Aline: And True Detective is not on the air anymore.

Craig: What?!

Aline: But you know what has been on the air this year which is quite good is The Honourable Woman which is a TV series that’s on the Sundance Channel. Maggie Gyllenhaal is in it. Stephen Rea is in it. It was written and directed by a gentleman named Hugh Blick. I’m making that up.

John: Sure.

Aline: Something like that. Something British like that. Hugo. Hugo — look it up. John is looking it up. It’s so good. It’s really a very good thriller. The title is not great. The title makes it sound like it’s a 19th Century.

John: It sounds like an “eat your spinach” show.

Aline: Yes, it sounds like a 19th Century thing where people wear corsets. But it’s actually —

Craig: Well, I like that sort of thing.

Aline: A very well done thriller, contemporary thriller, about — she’s in parliament played Maggie Gyllenhaal and she’s Jewish and she owns a company that has investments in the territories. And it’s about Israeli/Palestinian relations. And it’s obviously very relevant right now. It’s very well done. It’s very well written.

I think there are eight episodes. We’re about six into it. It’s just really good. It’s the kind of movie that I feel like Hollywood used to — it’s the kind of story that Hollywood used to do kind of on a regular basis and does less frequently. And if you like intelligent thrillers… — The one thing I will say is the first 20 minutes of the first episode, we had no idea what was going on. And we kept all, I watched it with my son, and we kept saying who is that, what’s going on.

But I really love that about it actually because it gave us so much credit. What’s the name of the guy?

John: Hugo Blick.

Aline: Hugo Blick. He’s really so talented. It’s got such scope. Such scale. It’s smart. And it gives you credit. And I highly recommend it.

Craig: [British accent] Who is that? Who is that? What’s going on? Who’s that one now?

Aline: You’ve just described me watching Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones for me, the entire second season was me leaning over to my husband and going, “Who is that? Which one is that?’

Craig: Was that the one from before?

Aline: And he would say, “He’s the one who wants to take over the kingdom,” which was really not helpful.

John: [laughs] That’s not helpful at all.

Aline: There’s about 11 of those.

John: I love Game of Thrones. But Game of Thrones, I really don’t know the names of most of the characters. I can sort of identify them by general type and sort of like I think it’s a Lannister. There you go.

Craig: Well, the Lannisters are easy because they’re blonde.

Aline: Yeah, but there were a lot of blondish men of about 43 years old in that second season that were all trying to take over the kingdom.

Craig: Was that the one from before who had, with the lady? I can’t keep — I don’t know who these people are.

Aline: The Honourable Woman, Sundance Channel, Maggie Gyllenhaal.

John: And it’s Honourable Woman with a U in it. I just looked it up.

Craig: Of course it is.

Aline: It’s all Brit like.

John: It’s all Brit like.

Craig: Honourable. Yes. Honourable.

John: My One Cool Thing is a follow up on an earlier One Cool Thing. So, early on in the show I had One Cool Thing Untitled Screenplays, which is a Tumblr of like little snippets of screenplays that are like ridiculous.

Aline: Oh yeah, it’s funny.

John: Sort of deliberately ridiculous. And so the person who created that Tumblr, C.W. Neill, has a book, like a published book you can buy called This Movie Will Require Dinosaurs.

Craig: [laughs] That’s a great title.

John: And so it’s available in the world right now. It’s a physical book. I actually bought the iBook store version of it, which is good and fun, too. So I would highly recommend people check it out.

And there’s actually a live reading happening as well. I don’t have the dates in front of me, but there will be a link to that in the show notes as well.

Craig: Who’s that one?

John: Who’s that one?

Craig: Oh, he’s with the sword.

Aline: She’s the one with the dragons.

Craig: Oh, oh, from last time?

Aline: Mm-hmm. With the boobs and the dragons.

Craig: My grandmother used to do that stuff. I loved it. I can’t keep — my grandmother talked like this. “I can’t keep up.” Such a sweet lady.

Aline: She wasn’t Jewish though?

Craig: Oh my god. She was, every amount of Jewish that you could have. Her DNA was a thousand percent Jewish. She was the mother of all Jews.

So, have I — John, have I done N3TWORK, the app N3TWORK? Have I done this one yet?

John: I don’t think you’ve ever done N3TWORK.

Craig: Okay. So, my One Cool Thing, an app called N3TWORK. It’s free. If you want to get it, it’s certainly available for iOS. Probably for — I can’t imagine it’s not for Android. N3TWORK. Not Twerk as in Miley Cyrus but Twork, N3TWORK. And it’s a very smart little app.

So, the theory behind it is there’s a ton of really good content publicly available on YouTube and similar sites, but there’s no way to curate it. I mean, you can go to YouTube’s home page, but it’s sort of useless, and a lot of it is ad-supported and promoted. And there’s just a ton of crap out there. And the one thing that networks always did for us was curate. They just would say, okay, well we at least think this is good, why don’t you check it out.

So, this app basically sucks up all this video and you just start saying I am interested in videos about this topic, and this topic, and this topic, and they just start piping them to you. And as you watch it, you can go, no, don’t like this one, just swipe it away and it’s gone. Oh, I do like this one, I’ll watch it a little longer. And, of course, like all big brother apps it’s learning and so it starts to be able to send you things that you might like. And you can sort of download them for offline viewing. It’s a really cool little app.

I haven’t used it too much just because I hate watching things, as you know. But for those of you that enjoy watching things, and think that you might be missing out on some really cool things out there on the YouTubes and so forth, check out N3TWORK.

Aline: Does your music on your iPod get smarter? Like when you use shuffle, does it know like I listen to this song a lot. I tend to listen all the way through this song. This is a song I like. Because, my god, it keeps trying to give me like the most obscure thing in my — it just is insisting on giving it to me on shuffle.

Craig: I think it’s pure random on shuffle.

John: I think shuffle is purely random. I think Genius, if Genius is still part of your thing, is attempting to sort of navigate towards things. But that’s why Beats is supposed to be — that’s one of the ideas behind the Beats app is that —

Aline: Knows what you like?

John: It knows what you like, or you’re telling them what mood you’re in and therefore it’s going to sort of put stuff together that is going to fit that mood.

Craig: Angry.

John: Angry. Always angry.

Craig: Angry.

Aline: Schmucked.

John: And that’s our episode this week. I want to thank Aline Brosh McKenna, our wonderful co-host for this.

Aline: I’ll still be Joan Rivers. Listen, I’ll still be Joan Rivers forever.

Craig: Ooh.

John: Thank you very much. Joan Rivers forever. If you have a question for Craig Mazin, you should tweet at him. he is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Aline is at nothing, because she’s not on Twitter.

Craig: No.

John: If you have a longer question for any of us, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. johnaugust.com is also where you can find the notes for today’s episode and for all of our episodes. Transcripts are also there.

If you are on iTunes, you should subscribe to the show. Look for Scriptnotes and subscribe there. You can also leave us a comment. We love those comments.

If you would like to listen to all those back episodes and perhaps be that 1,000th subscriber to the premium channel that gets us to our very filthy show, you can do so at scriptnotes.net. There’s also an app in the iTunes app store and in the Android app store for listening to it on your phone. So, that is our show this week. We will be back next week. But, thank you all.

Aline: Thanks for having me.

Craig: Thanks guys.

John: Thanks Aline.

Aline: Bye Craigy.

Craig: Bye.

John: Thanks Craig. Bye.

Links:

• Aline Brosh McKenna on episodes 60, 76, 100, 101, 119, 123, 124 and 152
• Joan Rivers’s obituary in The New York Times
• Get tickets now for October 8th’s live Slate Culture Gabfest with guests John and Craig
• Why do people throw tomatoes? from How Stuff Works
• the-knowledge.org teaches you how to rebuild the world from scratch
• About Global Entry
• Movies Have Worst Summer Since 1997 by Brooks Barnes
• Mimeographs on Wikipedia and eBay
• Maguire Watch on Everything is Terrible!
• Get premium Scriptnotes access at scriptnotes.net and hear our 1,000th subscriber special
• The Honourable Woman on Sundance.tv
• This Movie Will Require Dinosaurs by C. W. Neill, and details on the September 15th live read
• N3TWORK is the first personal TV network
• Outro by Scriptnotes listener Robert Hutchison (send us yours!)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/from-debussy-to-vod).

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

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

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

Craig, how are you today?

**Craig:** Really good. Really good. Super good, John. You’re going to have to constrain my exuberance.

**John:** I won’t even ask why. Or should I ask why?

**Craig:** Because, it’s kind of a bounce back day. You ever have a week where you felt a little low, felt a little blue, wasn’t really sure why? And then you have your bounce back day where everything is like, oh yeah, that’s right — I’m not going to be sort of glum for the rest of my life.

**John:** Oh, that’s a good thing.

**Craig:** Isn’t that nice.

**John:** So, welcome to the podcast where Craig Mazin is rapidly cycling bipolar.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Yeah! It’s going to be great.

**Craig:** Woo-hoo!

**John:** Well, today you’ll hear bipolar Craig talk about remakes versus reboots, classical music and how it relates to screenwriting. We’re going to talk about the future of the Three Page Challenge, and we’ll also be talking with Scott Tobias of The Dissolve about an article he wrote on Video On Demand and the sort of mysterious finances behind it.

So, it’s a busy show. Like most of our shows, it’s a pretty full show.

**Craig:** It’s a pretty full show. Before we get started with the pretty full show, a couple things, one, could we just talk about bipolar for a second? Everybody misuses this term.

**John:** Okay. Tell me about it.

**Craig:** Everybody thinks that bipolar is like, oh, I’m really moody and one day I’m this and one day I’m that, and I’m up and I’m down. Actual bipolar disease is fairly rare and it’s very, very serious. I was talking about this with a psychologist the other day, in fact. And real bipolar individuals have very often very severe clinical depression that lasts for a long time, not like a day, or two days, or a week, but a long time.

Then they shift into a different area, a different section where they become manic. And manic isn’t like really up and, hey, hey, hey, and kind of like cokey. Mania is closer to schizophrenia. They start to believe that they could bike across the ocean and that they could build a skyscraper with their hands. It’s a very serious mental disease. And I think sometimes people use bipolar when they really mean moody. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, so I do apologize for being a little dismissive of your feelings there and overextending the bipolar diagnosis to what is probably normal moodiness.

**Craig:** No, no, you don’t have to apologize to me. I just like talking about mental illness because it fascinates me. And I think, you know, because I do meet people who are like, “Oh, well he’s a little bipolar.” And I’m like let me stop you there. No one is a little bipolar. That’s like saying, well, he’s a little psychotic. Is he or is he not hallucinating? [laughs] You know, it’s one or the other.

Okay, so that was one thing. Bigger follow up was that I totally blew it last week. We were talking about Edgar Wright and his budgets and I mentioned that I thought that the budget for Hot Fuzz was something like $40 million. I wasn’t even close on that one. It was actually more like $16 million U.S. And so I do apologize; that was totally wrong.

Frankly, I’m even more impressed with that movie now that I know that he was able to do it with that budget. It’s pretty remarkable.

**John:** All right. I have some follow up as well. Last week we talked about — we gave some advice to Jason about whether he should spec a new screenplay over the summer or if he should chase some assignments. And weirdly we did a thing which I try not to do which is we offer those as like the two alternatives when really of course there are many other alternatives.

And one of the alternatives that people wrote in suggesting was, you know, the third choice is he could make something. And he could find a way, like, write something that he could shoot or do something else that is — so he’s not just having another script sitting there, but has something else as a sample to show — something he could shoot. And I think that’s actually a really good suggestion.

And so we don’t know about this guy who wrote in, whether he has aspirations about being a director, but if he does the summer is a good time to shoot something and always be looking for what is the next step you want to take to get you to your overall goals which maybe are being a screenwriter, but maybe they’re being a writer-director. So, do more stuff is a good suggestion.

**Craig:** Yeah. If he has something lying around that he loves, that he’s written, he can go shoot that. If he doesn’t, better to take a little time to write first. Get it in good shape, then go shoot. I’m not a big fan of just sort of ad hoc shooting.

**John:** Yeah. But in general I try to always catch myself when I’m trying to decide between two choices because whenever it looks like there are two choices, the first thing you should ask yourself is like are there other choices I’m not considering.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And in this case we were looking at just those two things and that wasn’t the full picture.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like drinking, for instance. Just —

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Just drink.

**John:** A good solution for most of life’s problems.

**Craig:** Right. Just drink it away.

**John:** Jake wrote in to say, “I was listening to your podcast today and thinking about watermarking and how difficult it is to keep a script secure. I wanted to share with you what we did on my first screenplay which sold a couple months ago.”

Well, congratulations that it sold. “To keep the script ultra secure we created 20 different versions of the script, each with tiny subtle differences in the script.”

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** “Mainly these were words, all in uppercase or underlined. Our writing style uses these anyway, so it didn’t look out of place. Then we created a spreadsheet with these changes marked. Example, like this word is in uppercase on page three and then gently let the recipient know that there were changes but not what the changes were.

“Who knows if this ever stopped the script from getting leaked, but it made it very difficult to get past a watermark.”

This is a totally valid thing and it’s not the first time I’ve heard of this. Have you ever done that, Craig?

**Craig:** No, I mean, what’s better about that than watermarking, other than that watermarking is ugly?

**John:** Yeah. So, it gets rid of like the visible watermark and if someone does disseminate you can tell which draft leaked. Basically you could tell who leaked it very easily based on like that word was different.

And it’s something I’ve seen other people do. And so it’s certainly a valid technique. It’s a giant pain in the ass to do it, but it might be a valid way to do it. So, in his situation this was a script that they were sending out to — a spec that they were sending out to specific buyers and I think they wanted to make sure that only those buyers were seeing it and that it wasn’t getting passed around too quickly too soon.

And for that reason it might have been a good choice to do it.

**Craig:** I guess. I mean, I still think a watermark does that same exact thing. I don’t mind watermarking.

**John:** I don’t really mind watermarking either. I make a program called Bronson Watermarker, so I really don’t mind it that much.

When we talked, in the new Bronson Watermarker we have this thing called Finger Printing. And when we were first developing the feature, what he described, what Jake described was really kind of what we were thinking about doing is basically we would make small changes to certain words. Like we’d substitute out the number one character for a lowercase L on a certain page. And we’d give you a little sheet that showed you what we did. The challenge is when you’re talking about a real PDF, we would have to break open the PDF in order to like insert that one little character. And it would just very likely ruin the script by doing that. You would ruin something, you’d knock of pages or things like that. So, we didn’t end up doing it.

So, our finger printing feature inserts invisible watermarks that stick with a file but don’t actually change any of the words on the page.

**Craig:** Oh. There’s a simplicity, and ease, and general industry acceptance for watermarking. This is a version of watermarking that’s less visually intrusive, but really cumbersome to manage on the other end. I don’t know.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** I don’t love it. I mean, it works. I just don’t love it.

**John:** All right. Let’s see if you’re going to love this. So, Ben wrote in, it’s our first new topic. He wrote in saying, “Okay, here’s a matter of some sort of Aspergery semantics. Reboot versus remake? To me, you remake a singular film and you reboot a franchise. Stargate can be rebooted because the TV series has continuity. You reboot or reset the continuity like a computer. There’s no real continuity to Cliffhanger, though. It was a one-shot story. So, it’s a remake of Cliffhanger, not a reboot. I believe the industry lingo does not make this distinction, but I want to. It’s been driving me nuts for years.”

Craig, where do you stand on reboot versus remake? Because I will tell you that I had never really thought about it but I do use them slightly differently. So, talk to me.

**Craig:** I actually never really understood my own distinction until now. I think… — Who wrote this question in?

**John:** This was Ben.

**Craig:** Ben, I think, is absolutely right. I think it’s actually kind of brilliant. He’s exactly right because a remake is a remake of — that’s how I think of a remake — they had a film and then they remade it. But when a movie has spooled itself into sequels, then when you’re starting the thing all over again with a fresh tone, a thing that can generate its own sequels within its own carved out universe, that does feel like a reboot. That’s what I think reboot is. Yeah, I think he’s totally right.

**John:** I think he’s totally right. If you think about Batman Begins, Batman Begins is clearly a reboot. You can’t think of that as being a remake of Tim Burton’s Batman.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s madness to think about that. It’s a reboot. And so some of the other things I would add into the idea of a reboot is that you are approaching an existing property with a really kind of brand new idea. It’s a new take on something, so it’s not just you’re updating necessarily, but it’s a real kind of re-thinking of what it is.

That’s why the new Star Trek franchise really is genuinely a reboot because it acknowledges the continuity of the old series and moves forward in a way that is completely different. And so the same kinds of characters are there, but they serve different functions. It really is, you know, it’s its own new thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are a couple of times where it’s a little thinky because, for instance, let’s take a look at the new Karate Kid. So, there were multiple Karate Kids.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then they decided to start it again with Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan. And is that a reboot? Well, I saw that movie and it kind of felt more like a remake to me.

**John:** It feels like a remake also to me.

**Craig:** Because it really closely hued to the first story. Obviously they reset it in a place, but they really followed that story and the main beats from that. They didn’t actually reboot. I mean, he’s write to say it’s sort of like when you restart a franchise because what is a reboot? There’s something that’s been running in a sequence and then you’re restarting. And all of the sequencing should be gone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because you’re starting fresh again with a new thing. So, I thought like, okay, if — and I believe, have they made a second Karate Kid in this new version?

**John:** They haven’t.

**Craig:** Oh, they haven’t. Okay. Then I think of that as a remake, even though it is in fact a remake of a movie that is part of a franchise. But, generally speaking, yes, I think he’s right — rebooting comes from restarting something that is a franchise.

**John:** Yeah. I think you’re right.

**Craig:** I think he’s right.

**John:** I think we’re all right. I think, Ben, that is an important distinction and it’s not just Aspergers. I think we should be more careful in our choice of words.

**Craig:** Well, that may in fact be Aspergers. Listen, Aspergers obviously comes with enormous benefits.

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** And this is one of them. I mean, a really particular way of drilling into what language is. He’s right. I would — look, do you not have Aspergers just a little?

**John:** Oh, everyone needs a little whiff of Aspergers, I think, just to get through the day.

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** But here’s the thing though, again, we should back up to our bipolar thing. I think we end up being too flippant with a diagnosis just because it’s fun and convenient. So, to say like he’s a little bit Aspergers is like, no, he’s just actually like methodical and cares about things.

**Craig:** Maybe. I mean, the whole thing about Aspergers is that it is — it’s like sort of definitionally mild.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I guess there is something to be said of, oh, he’s got severe Aspergers, but wouldn’t that just be autism? I don’t know. That’s where I don’t know.

**John:** Let’s just go way off into the deep here. The same thing though can be said about like a whiff of many kinds of mental — I don’t want to say mental illness — but conditions that are negative when they’re too strong can be positive when they are mild.

**Craig:** That’s true.

**John:** And so even what we’re talking about with mania or depression to some degree, those can be useful things to certain people and certain circumstances. And so the people who often get a tremendous amount done, if you were to really step back and say like, okay, they were a little bit manic but like they weren’t trying to bicycle across the ocean. Instead they were trying to build a remarkable business and they succeeded in building that remarkable business.

**Craig:** Yeah…

**John:** Yeah. The people who just won’t stop at anything. There’s a relentlessness that’s crucial.

**Craig:** The psycho-pathological mania is less about super energetic and more about being delusional. But the point — the point is that I’m not flippant about Aspergers because I feel like most of my friends are — we didn’t have it. When you and I were kids we didn’t have that, right?

**John:** No, we didn’t have that.

**Craig:** Most of my friends would have been it. I would have been it, I think. [laughs] I think, to some extent. You know, I’ve never met somebody who had Aspergers who I thought, oh god, I’ve got to get away from this person — they have Aspergers. You know?

I think it actually can be… — Well, have you ever heard this theory that autism is an expression of what they call extreme male brain. Male Brain Syndrome.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** There’s a whole study of the gender differences in the brain itself and what testosterone does to the brain. And there are clear differences between male and female brains. But when you take the general male syndrome in extremists you can end up with autism. Of course, this doesn’t explain why some girls have autism. It’s a very confusing area of research.

Anyway, we’re not a podcast about any of that.

**John:** We’re not a podcast about that. The only last point I will say though is you’re saying, you know, with mania comes — you have this image of delusion or delusions of grandeur. But there’s a really fine line between delusions of grandeur and vision. And sometimes you have to have a little bit of delusion in order to do impossible things.

And many of the best directors I’ve worked with have just a little bit of that delusion and they have a little bit of that sort of — that unstoppability that is what lets them sort of keep pushing through on hour 17 and not sort of worry about the world around them. So, I’m just saying in the business that we’re in, you’re likely to encounter people who have conditions which could almost fit into the DSM and yet are tremendously successful in part because of that.

**Craig:** No, I’ve never actually met anybody that does what we do for a living that is — that doesn’t have something. [laughs] Honestly, I do. We are —

**John:** [laughs] No, it’s absolutely true.

**Craig:** We are not normal people. And you feel it most notably when you travel away and go home because it’s a funeral or something and you’re suddenly — there’s nobody there that works in the arts and you realize that you’re the freak.

**John:** Yeah. When you’re around the normals you’re like, oh no.

**Craig:** Civilians.

**John:** Yeah, like, man.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’re the weird one. That’s why, you know, like my son is really into drama at school, and musicals and stuff. And it makes me so happy because he’s with the freaks, like daddy. Just like daddy.

**John:** My daughter has taken her summer vacation and she’s writing a play she’s decided. And so her play is called True Blood. It’s like, really?

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** But she doesn’t know there’s another thing called True Blood. She’s like, “That’s a great title.” It’s like, okay…

**Craig:** Well, yes it is. It is actually —

**John:** It’s a really good title.

**Craig:** Good instincts.

**John:** Yeah. And I suspect that whatever she ends up writing will make more sense than the very late seasons of True Blood.

**Craig:** You know, I stopped watching True Blood because I just, I mean, my wife and I used to watch it early on, but somewhere in there — I hate saying “jumped the shark.” I don’t know what happened, but it just got crazy.

**John:** It got really super crazy. And, you know, their last season is coming up and I will watch the last season because I’m a completist. I was the person who watched every episode of many shows that never sort of made it through. And so I will watch it because I’m a completist and I think it’s a tremendously talented cast and it’s so difficult to make that show, so I have nothing but full love and respect for everybody on board with that show.

But, it did just get like crazy town.

**Craig:** Yeah, at some point I’m like, wait a second. What?!

**John:** What?!

**Craig:** I just did a lot of that, “What?!” My wife would say, “Shut up!”

**John:** So, our next topic is one you proposed and honestly I think it fits in very well because classical music, many of the people who have made the iconic classical music would have a little bit of a whiff of something not quite right about them.

**Craig:** Or a lot of a whiff. So, I was thinking about this because I don’t know if there is a particularly strong overlap between people who write and people who appreciate classical music, and the truth is I’m not — I’m not what you’d call a classical music buff. In fact, I’m going to give a couple of examples today that reveal that fully.

But, there are certain kinds of classical music that I think are really helpful for us as we think about what it means to create narrative in a let’s say — in a way that is separate from text. As writers, we are soaking in text and we are tasked with creating a lot of things that aren’t meant to exist in words with words. We have a weird gig. We’re attempting to capture emotions and feelings. We are attempting to inspire suspense and fear and joy and relief. And our ultimate goal is to do so with light and with sound. And we can’t use any of it. All we can use are words.

But music I find is analogous in that regard because they have sound, but for certain kinds of classical music you can start to see a narrative in your head, only with sound, and no words at all.

So, a couple examples I want to give. And, look, the early classical music, baroque, or the true classical period I don’t think is as useful for us in this regard. It’s beautiful music, but it’s very structured.

**John:** Yeah. You need to get into the romantic era and —

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. Where it really kicks in I think for our purposes for fun stuff is the romantic era, which by the way is what I think influences almost all of the classical scoring that you see in movies today, whether we’re talking about Tchaikovsky or Wagner, that kind of feeling.

So, I wanted to talk about a couple pieces that are so common it would almost be hackneyed, but if you just sit down and listen to them now as an exercise I think it might be useful to you. One is the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky. And the other is Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin. And, they are both self-contained pieces somewhere around, what, 18 to 22 minutes, somewhere in that zone? And what I love about them is that they are telling stories just with music and you can start to detect it.

And you can see all of these tools in there that I think we should be thinking about when we’re writing. First of all, they have nice, long first acts. And they are clearly broken into acts. And in those nice, long first acts they are relaxed and they’re introducing themes. And those themes are for me analogous to characters. And as they do that they then begin to build. And as we — you know, one thing that we’re constantly dealing with when we’re writing is we’re building to things. And then we’re coming back down. And we’re building, and we’re coming back down, right?

We think of a movie as three acts and a climax, but really it’s a build and a climax, a build and a climax. It’s movies within movies within movies. It’s very fractal. And I think it’s the same way with these pieces. There are builds, crescendos, and then diminuendos, and in the builds there is tension and you can start to feel how tension works on a right brain level when you listen to this stuff.

Similarly, you can feel how the release of tension works, the importance of silence, and the saying of nothing. The competing themes, you can see how they bandy with each other and one gets the upper hand and then the other gets the upper hand. And then, of course, you start to see that one of them is winning. You start to feel like there is a hero in this. 1812 Overture is a great example because it’s about a war.

**John:** Yeah. And it feels like it’s about a war. And it feels like it’s about the dark scary moments of it, and also victory at the end of it.

**Craig:** Right. For instance, at the end of the 1812 Overture there is this moment that’s, I mean, textbook romantic orchestration. Tchaikovsky has this long descending chromatic action from the stings. [hums] And that goes on, and on, and on, and on.

Now, what do you think that is?

**John:** I think it’s the flag falling, isn’t it?

**Craig:** Well, essentially it’s the retreat of the French. They’re running away. And it’s so great because it’s done over and over and it’s beautiful. In and of itself you actually start to feel bad for them, you know, even though they’ve lost. But it’s emotional. We know that, again, this is the episode about neurology. For a typical right-handed person, because we don’t discuss those left-handed freaks on this show — no, actually left handers have an amazing advantage over us, we right handers. But for the typical crippled right hander, the left side of the brain controls speech, writing, language, vocabulary, grammar, all the stuff that we use. The right side is the music side. And I think that music is a great way to integrate the two.

**John:** So, when you talked about themes, like [hums], like you described that as being a character which I think is absolutely valid and true. You see a character reoccur. But it’s also an idea. And a theme can be, as we’re talking about screenplays, that theme can be expressed, or that idea can be expressed by multiple characters. And you can also think about that theme being expressed by multiple instruments in a piece.

And so you might here that theme being played by the woodwinds in the middle of the range, but then you hear it suddenly up on the flutes. And then you hear it very low on the bassoons. And that is something that also happens in our screenplays where different characters are expressing the same idea and you sort of see that idea being spread among multiple characters.

And so when your screenplay is really cooking, every person feels like they have a distinct voice, they have a distinct tone. You can hear sort of what a flute sounds like, but then you hear that flute expressing an idea that is key to the overall piece.

And so basically it is spread virally from one instrument to another instrument, from one character to another character. When things are working really well, that happens, and that is fantastic. And it feels like it sort of had to happen. Like everything was leading up to this next thing, was leading up to that next thing. And two themes combined become a new theme. That’s how lovers connect in your story. Those two things you wouldn’t think would necessarily fit together somehow magically, beautifully fit together.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you can see that perfectly at the end of Rhapsody in Blue where the two major themes come together and mesh perfectly. Rhapsody in Blue is far less of a literal, character-based discussion and is more about a setting. It’s about a city. It’s about the vibrance of a city and the clanging madness and beauty that are contained within the hustle and bustle of New York.

And that also is really valuable for us as we write our characters and we create our scenes. So often I think we are tempted to exclude the world save for the people in it, but the world is what we’re going to see. And I think movies that capture an entire scenario are the most successful.

And you look at Lawrence of Arabia, a story about Lawrence of Arabia. What you see — the beauty, the sweeping beauty of it is just astonishing, and so much of why that movie is a joy to watch and experience in its highs and lows. And, again, not surprisingly, if somebody said to me you could bring back one composer from the dead to score movies I would say Tchaikovsky.

**John:** Yeah. He’s a genius.

**Craig:** He’s amazing.

**John:** Another piece that I would recommend people listen to for that sense of like progression and arc is Ravel’s Boléro. The classically [hums] — that’s basically it. And then there’s one counter theme, [hums].

**Craig:** [hums] And then people rioted.

**John:** Yes. And it just keeps rising and rising and rising. And you’re thinking like, well, this can’t just keep going, but it’s going to keep going. And it actually keeps sort of reinventing itself until it becomes just triumphant at the end.

So, it’s that thing that could start incredibly slowly and build into sort of a giant fire. And great writing can do that same thing where it seems so simple and it becomes this sort of sweeping romantic statement based on its escalation.

**Craig:** Yeah. Absolutely. In the Hall of the Mountain King is another famous version of that kind of sustained melody that just builds, and builds, and builds until you go nuts.

**John:** Great. So, this was fun. It’s fun to talk about classical music on a podcast about screenwriting.

**Craig:** Yeah. Why not?

**John:** We should. We totally should.

**Craig:** Come on, people.

**John:** So, a thing I want to talk about next is Three Page Challenge. So, occasionally on the podcast we will do a Three Page Challenge. We will invite people to send in their three pages of their screenplay. We will take a look at them. We will talk though the things we thought worked fantastic and the things we thought could be better. And we’ve enjoyed doing it. It’s been sort of a thing about our podcast for quite a long time.

We did a Three Page Challenge at the live show and for that one we opened it up so people could vote on it and people could see what all the things were. We’ve reopened that submission process, so if you go to johnaugust.com/threepage, you can submit your script. You can click a link and attach your file and send it through.

And for now that’s what we’re doing. But, someone brought up and I thought it was a really good point, that it’s sort of weird that we talk about the Three Page Challenge and then we also talk about how we need to move past the idea of pages as being the defining unit of a screenplay.

**Craig:** It is weird.

**John:** It is weird. So, I asked Stuart to go through this last cohort of scripts and in the next Highland, in the Highland that comes out next week we added a word count feature. So, I had him take all of the Three Page Challenges and just do a word count on all of them.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And figure out, so how many words do you think is average for three pages? Do you have any sense?

**Craig:** Oh my…I would say 300.

**John:** It’s actually 600. It’s more than you would think. So, 616 about. And so I want to propose to you and to see, just talk it through on the air, what if it was like a 600-Word Challenge rather than a Three Page Challenge? How would that change things?

**Craig:** Ah, it would just replace one arbitrary measurement with another.

**John:** Yeah, it would.

**Craig:** I mean, I wonder if we — it’s kind of an interesting experiment. What if we said to people it’s a One Sequence Challenge?

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And so instead of feeling like you can’t finish your sequence, send us a sequence. A sequence could be one page long, it could be two pages. It could be four pages. We will limit the sequence in some length just so that we don’t have to read too much. You could use words if you like because, again, we hate pages.

What if we said it’s a One Sequence Challenge?

**John:** Perhaps. That might be the way to do it. And we might provide very clear metrics so we can maybe read or not read certain things if they seem like they’re excessively long or, you know.

**Craig:** The other thing we could do is if somebody sends a One Sequence Challenge in, we could stop reading where the sequence ends. [laughs] In other words, if somebody thought that their sequence was longer than it was we go, no, here is where we stopped because that’s the end of your sequence.

**John:** Maybe so. So, we’ll think about the right way to do this. One theory I had, one idea I had which, again, is like really easy to think about and actually a pain in the ass to build — you probably aren’t familiar with it, but there’s a site called Code Pen. And what you can do there is you put up snippets of code and CSS and sort of show cool little things, animations you’ve made, and stuff like that.

Something like that might actually be the right way to do it where people are essentially just pasting in their script, it shows it nicely formatted, and everyone can see it. And then we can decide out of there which ones to do.

Because right now it’s essentially an email process. You’re clicking submit and it’s going to this black box that Stuart looks at.

**Craig:** Oh, Stuart’s brilliant filing system.

**John:** Yes. So, Stuart’s filing system has improved.

**Craig:** Oh really? Did you yell at Stuart?

**John:** I don’t yell at Stuart.

**Craig:** Did you give him like bad disappointed John talk?

**John:** [laughs] I asked ways that we could do better.

**Craig:** Ah! [laughs] Poor Stuart!

**John:** I inquired in a very positive way how we could do better.

**Craig:** “Stuart, let us have a discussion.”

**John:** So, maybe there’s a public way that we could have them all up there and some sort of authentication so you know sort of who it is that you’re actually talking with.

**Craig:** I’m game for anything. I don’t know if people have concerns about putting their stuff out there in public for everybody to see.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t know either.

**Craig:** But, you know —

**John:** But, actually everyone who submitted to the Three Page Challenge for the live show, they seemed delighted to have their stuff out there. So.

**Craig:** And, again, it’s one sequence.

**John:** It’s one sequence. That’s the thing. Maybe people shouldn’t be so worried.

**Craig:** I don’t think people should ever be worried, personally. But, that’s me. I’m carefree because I’m on a bounce back week.

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** Catch me next week, I’m going to just be grim.

**John:** So, now, I think it’s time we should talk to our guest on the show today. It’s Mr. Scott Tobias.

**Craig:** Great. So, Scott Tobias is the editor of The Dissolve, a film website. Before that he was a film reviewer and writer for the AV Club. Scott Tobias, welcome.

**Scott Tobias:** Oh, thanks for having me.

**John:** And you are recording from Chicago, so thank you, all the way from the Windy City joining us on the show.

**Scott:** That’s not a problem.

**John:** So, the reason why I wanted to talk to you is you had a post this last week titled The Hidden World of Video On Demand Profits. And we love to talk about great articles, but it’s so hard to recap an article on the podcast, so it would be so great if you could talk us through why you wrote this post and sort of what you found or what motivated you to write it.

**Scott:** Sure. Well, one of the things about running a website, I mean, the site is a little under one year old. And we want to try to cover the waterfront and we want to cover everything that comes out. And we want to figure out how people are — what people are watching and how people are watching it, which means that you have to kind of grapple with video on demand. And it’s been a real challenge for us, you know, sometimes just to even find the movies that we want to review, but also, you know, it’s kind of a dark world.

You have a lot of viewers who are migrating to video on demand, who are watching new movies this way, particularly independent movies, or specifically independent movies. And you sense that the ground beneath your feet is shifting really dramatically. There’s no actual — it can’t be quantified. You can only speak in generalities about it because there are no actual figures that are given for movies that are released on video on demand like there are for movies that are released theatrically.

**John:** So, it’s certainly a growing trend. I had a movie in 2007 called The Nines and we debuted at Sundance. We came out, had our sort of hand stamped theatrically, and then many, many months later we showed up on video. And that was sort of the last year that happened. The next year you had the Magnolias and those companies coming in.

And when they would buy one of these independent movies they would put it in theaters and on video on demand simultaneous, or increasingly it’s on video on demand first and then it’s showing up in theaters even sometimes a month later.

**Scott:** Yes.

**John:** So, how do you make the choice of which movies to cover and which movies to not cover? What is you process at The Dissolve?

**Scott:** Well, we try to cover everything that we can. If something is released theatrically, commercially in New York or other cities for an extended run of a week or more we cover it. VOD can be a little bit — if it’s VOD-only that can be a little bit shaky here. One thing we do, we have been doing that other publications haven’t done as much is that if a movie that say Magnolia releases on VOD first and then in theaters, we review it at the first window on VOD and then later in theaters. So, that’s kind of our approach to it.

But, you know, it changes. Again, we’re really trying to figure out how to best serve our readers and really what we end up doing with VOD before theatrical is review it for VOD first. And then when it cycles back around to theaters then we’ll run the review. Like this new Ti West movie, The Sacrament, was on VOD a month ago and it opened in theaters on Friday. So, we reran the review yesterday.

**John:** Now, are these movies making money, because that’s actually one of the tricky things to figure out is classically you sort of had a sense of how well a movie did based on how much money it made at the box office. As you point out in the article, it’s very hard to know how much a movie like Blue Ruin is actually making. In the article you say that it grossed $32,000 on seven screens in its opening weekend, which isn’t amazing. It’s maybe fine, but it’s not amazing, yet it had already been out on VOD, so you really have no good sense of whether that was a great showing for that or a bad showing for that.

**Scott:** Yeah, I mean, that one was day and days, which means it was released simultaneously in theaters and on VOD. And that was kind of, as I put in the article, it was sort of the canary and the coal mine for me because I’ve been sort of eyeing how independent genre films specifically have done in theaters.

And, you know, if you actually just look at the numbers you think these types of movies are not viable in theaters. These movies aren’t making any money at all. I mean, Blue Ruin is a film that had every possible advantage. It was a real sensation at Cannes where it was picked up by The Weinstein Company which released it through Radius-TWC which is their VOD/theatrical . It played at virtually every festival. The reviews were excellent. I mean, it was a film that was pretty much the chief buzz magnet when I was at Toronto last year and there was a lot of anticipation for it.

But then, you know, when it’s released theatrically these numbers are pretty weak. I think it maybe made $4,000 or so per screen, something like that, which is not that great. And I’m sure looking at what it’s made so far theatrically which I think is somewhere in the range of about $225,000 or something, that’s probably well less than what was paid for it.

But my suspicion is that it did very well on VOD, but it’s just a suspicion. I can’t know for sure. And that’s really kind of at the heart of the piece is that we really guess that these films are successful but we can’t know because we’re just not getting a clear picture.

**Craig:** Well, I want to talk a little bit about who the “we” is, because obviously the distributors know. They’re the ones who are collecting the money. On some level the creative guilds will know because we have residuals based on internet sales and internet rentals. And while we, at least conditionally rely on the studios to send us our fair share, the three guilds do something called a tri-guild audit fairly regularly where they go through the books to make sure that in fact we’re getting our fair share.

So, I guess one question I have for you is if the writers and the directors and the actors know, and the studios know, who else needs to know? In other words, why is it important that you guys know?

**Scott:** Actually, let me fire one question back to you, just as a point of clarification. Does this include films that are released not by a major studio but by Magnolia or by Film Buff or by really smaller distributors than that? I mean, do they know?

**Craig:** It depends. Like I said, the guilds will have a mechanism in place. So, if a movie is done non-union, which is different than independent because there are a lot of independent films that are done union, at least for the writers and the directors, sometimes not for the actors. But one component will at least be guild. And then somebody on some other side other than the company will know.

But if your point is that there are small companies that are operating outside of the auspices of the guild who can be shady about their reporting of box office or of — I would imagine those companies could also be just as shady about their reporting of video. In other words, I mean, my question is — I guess here’s my real question: is it something that you are most interested in because you think that how a movie does financially is of public interest value, or are you concerned about protecting the artists and making sure that they get taken care of? Or both?

**Scott:** I think it’s just about knowledge, you know, about getting a sense of what the landscape is like. I’m not personally much of a box office tracker. It’s not my — whatever interest I have in that has to do with, well, maybe if a movie is successful more movies like it will get made. But, I think we’re at such a critical juncture right now, for all of film really, just that transition to the digital age is so dramatic. It’s very dark, this understanding of this particular realm because nothing is disclosed.

So, I don’t know if that helps answer your question or not, but —

**John:** I would actually step in and say that I’m always curious about how a movie did largely because whether a movie is a success or a failure, you have some sense of is it perceived as a success or a failure. And in the case of Blue Ruin it’s very hard to know how we’re supposed to feel about it. So, if you as a journalist writing about, do you write about this that, you know, is it considered a success or not a success? And it’s very hard to know when you don’t have any of that information. And it’s all sort of hidden away.

I’m not saying that you’re necessarily going to get that information, but it’s harder to know how to feel about it. I think it’s also harder for other filmmakers to have a sense of what is normal and have a sense of what the expectations are.

I remember there was a time back in like the early ’90s probably, late ’80s/early ’90s where you had — if you made a gay film that was below a certain budget you could bank on making about $2 million theatrically. And there was just sort of a template for that. And it feels like without any of these numbers it’s really hard to know what the template is.

Now, certainly sales agents probably know what the template is. Distributors probably know what the template is. But that indie filmmaker really may have no sense of what the template is and what’s a good deal or what is the right amount of money to spend on something.

**Scott:** That’s a really good point. And actually it’s a point that was made by this producer named Travis Stevens who has done a lot of indie genre films, including his film Cheap Thrills that came out earlier this year. And he posted my article on Facebook and there was kind of a discussion between himself and a bunch of other indie filmmakers. And his point was that about when he deals with filmmakers a lot of his job is about managing expectations because they don’t — it’s very hard to make money and it’s hard to know. And my sense also, anecdotally, is that a lot of filmmakers really don’t know how well their films are doing when they’re released on VOD.

I think there are actually some pretty good motives for not only hiding failures on VOD but hiding successes. I mean, how much does it serve unless they absolutely have to tell a filmmaker how well a film is doing on VOD. Does it really serve them to say anything?

**John:** I can tell you from personal experience that I have zero idea how The Nines is really doing on VOD. So, we get these residual statements, but to try to go through and actually audit that and figure out what the dollars I’m making off of VOD is really, really tough. And, it is true.

Now, Craig, you were saying that residuals will show us some sense of how the VOD is doing, but what happens when you are doing day and date? Is that video considered first release, or is that video considered real true video?

**Craig:** It’s not considered part of the primary theatrical exposition. And, you know, this is an area where I suspect we’re going to be fighting some fights one day.

Right now the profit, or let’s put profit aside, the gross receipts that are not included for residuals and so are not considered ancillary are primary theatrical — exhibition I should be saying — exposition is an entirely different thing — exhibition and also curiously planes. For whatever reason when they run movies on planes they consider that part of the primary exhibition.

But, all video on demand of all sorts is not considered primary. We do get a percentage of that. So, if it’s sold on iTunes or if it’s run on HBO or pay per view on cable then we do get a percentage of that. There’s the wild west of exhibition and then there’s kind of the big city. And in the big city it’s still a problem, by the way. And you’re absolutely right that the companies have every reason to want to keep every number quiet. They don’t want anyone to know that they’ve made a lot of money. They don’t want anyone to know they’ve lost a lot of money because it will probably save them money in the long run to keep those cards close to their vest.

What this has unfortunately done is created a cottage industry of rubbernecking where people are very curious and there’s an enormous amount of speculation about movies that appear to have lost a ton of money. Similarly, there is a weird kind of fetishization of movies that appear to have made a lot of money, when in fact a lot of the reportage doesn’t include things that impact what the actual money really is.

We tend to over-dramatize money that’s earned here in the United States. We tend to underplay the variable cost of marketing which can be enormous.

And, beyond all that, my personal opinion is I just wish the entire discussion would go away because I don’t think it has anything to do with our appreciation of movies. I don’t care how much a movie has made. As a person who likes watching movies, I don’t care whether it’s lost money or made money. I just like it or I don’t. I just want to be able to enjoy the movie without feeling like… — It’s funny, a lot of the people who love movies and wish that they would not be commodities talk about movies constantly as commodities.

That said, there is a real problem for people who are in the wild west who don’t have access to a collective bargaining agency that is going to audit things for them. They are simply at the mercy of companies that collectively have a less than stellar reputation when it comes to full disclosure and honesty.

**John:** Yeah. I would just push back a little bit on what you just said Craig. I want to make sure that this industry is actually viable. And I want to know the general question of like is it viable to be launching day and date and video on demand as a filmmaker, as a writer. Is this is a thing that is good and profitable for people? I think that macro question is really important.

So, while I agree with like, you know, individual film by film judging success or failure isn’t as important. I do want to know whether overall this is a good thing that’s going to continue because I have friends who are making these movies that are coming out day and date on video on demand and I want to know that it’s going to work for them.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** And I don’t yet.

**Craig:** I agree. And I guess my point is by the time the news ends up on a blog, it’s probably too late because the people who know — the canaries in the coal mine will be the people who are spending the money. The first sign that this will be a profitable method will be the emergence of people with money asking to fund movies following this method. And the converse is also true: if that dries up, then we’ll know that in fact the money isn’t there. The money is the answer.

People simply — the kinds of people who invest in these things talk to the kinds of people who invest in these things and we will know very quickly what the real margins are.

But, you know, look, I’m all for some kind of transparency for the artists because we are making money off of this. I’ve never been particularly interested in the — there is a slight… — I don’t know. Look, maybe you disagree as a journalist, but I feel like there’s a slightly prurient aspect to the interest in how much money a movie makes or loses.

**Scott:** Oh, I completely agree with that actually. I’m not someone who writes about box office terribly much. And I agree about the whole rubbernecking aspect of it. But at the same time, viability is important and kind of getting a sense overall sort of the macro landscape is important.

One of the big concerns that I had was about specifically is indie genre filmmaking, but the other concern has to do with independent cinema period, because it seems to me like they’re the ones that are really suffering as a result of this migration because we may not be able to see the numbers for VOD, but we can see vastly diminished numbers for theatrical, for indie theatrical.

So, all of these indie theaters that have spent tens of thousands of dollars to convert from 35mm to digital are now in a position to where they’re on sort of the losing end of the whole thing, right?

I mean, and really the only reason I think that this was able back in the first place is because Magnolia Pictures bought Landmark. Right? So, the chief obstacle running movies day and date which would have been theater owners, when you buy the biggest indie theater company there is you just blow that obstacle right — you run it right over. And I am concerned with places like Music Box here in Chicago or Brattle in Boston or all of these other indie theaters that are really taking it on the chin because VOD, day before date, day and date VOD is just siphoning away all their viewers.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that that’s absolutely correct. The theater experience is already under pretty savage attack and you can see how the theaters are attempting to pivot in the newly popular word from Silicon Valley — pivot, pivot, pivot — they’re pivoting. They’re trying a lot of different things. Independent film cinema is, I think, doomed. I just don’t see it lasting because the distribution of independent film is almost certainly going to go exclusively to a direct distribution model.

It’s very expensive to rent a movie theater. It’s just really expensive. And the most people you could fit into most of those theaters is much smaller than the amount of people you need to start to make sense out of that unless you think your movie is going to actually play there like Rocky Horror Picture Show over and over and over. But those days are gone.

And I think that that’s unfortunately a doomed business and it’s regrettable because I believe that there is something fundamental to the communal aspect of watching a film. And I’m concerned that it’s just going to go away, particularly if distributors are allowed to start purchasing these movie theaters because they’re just going to do different kinds of things with them. I mean, it was against the law for a long time to do that sort of thing.

**John:** Yeah. Well, Scott, you watch a lot more movies than we do, so I’m curious whether there’s any one or two or three movies you would recommend to our listeners that they should definitely try to check out this summer that they may not have heard of.

**Scott:** Well, you know, sure. Well, I mean, for one you couldn’t continue, you know, Blue Ruin is right there. It’s available to you and I would completely recommend checking that out if you’re a fan of sort of indie genre films as I am. It’s very much — it has kind of an early Coen Brothers vibe to it. Very Blood Simple-ish.

Another film that I really have been championing that’s still in theaters, not on VOD, is The Immigrant, which is written and directed by James Gray who did films like Two Lovers and Little Odessa and We Own the Night and this sort of thing. It’s got Marion Cotillard and Joaquin Phoenix. It’s an immigration story set I the early ’20s and it’s very classically filmed in a way that very few films are. And it’s really gorgeous and it’s been terribly mistreated by The Weinstein Company who just have completely dumped it despite —

**Craig:** That’s weird.

**Scott:** A lot of critics like — I know, it’s so out of character for them.

**Craig:** I know. I just don’t — that’s so surprising.

**Scott:** I know. And they’re doing the same thing with this film I’m really excited about by Bong Joon-ho, this great Korean director, called Snowpiercer.

**Craig:** Well, that story is even crazier what they did.

**Scott:** Yeah, they’ve been fighting with him forever and his cut incredibly is going to be the one that people see. So, I don’t know if they’re going to have trouble seeing it, which tends to be their response when they lose a fight is to just completely dump it like they did with Dead Man back in the day. But I’m really excited about that one. I haven’t seen it, but I think he’s one of the best filmmakers around.

**John:** Great. Scott, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

**Scott:** Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thanks guys.

**Craig:** Thank you, Scott.

**John:** All right. Bye.

And, Craig, it’s that time. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** I do have a One Cool Thing this week. In keeping with our musical theme, it’s a song that I love. It is I think maybe the best opening song of any Broadway musical. And I know that this is going to invite criticism because there are some great, great show openers out there. There’s Tradition from Fiddler on the Roof and there’s Ragtime from Ragtime. There’s just some great opening songs.

But my favorite opening song is one of the oddest I think songs out there in a mainstream Broadway musical and that’s maybe why I love it so much. It’s called Life Is and it is the first song from Zorba, the musical. And in the original Broadway Cast — and I strongly recommend that that would be the version that you listen — it’s sung by Chorus and Leader. Leader is the woman who’s singing, mainly singing the song. The woman who played the part in the original cast I believe is Lorraine Serabian. A gorgeous voice.

But what I love about it so much is the lyrics. The idea is that you open on a scene and some folks are arguing about what life is. And they have all these silly theories, analogies about what life is, and then she shuts them all up. It’s very funny. She shuts them up. And she says, “I’ll tell you. Life is what you do while you’re waiting to do. This is how the time goes by.”

And it’s this remarkable song about embracing the absurdity and pointlessness of life. And it’s beautiful. I mean, really beautiful. And it builds. It has a great crescendo that goes to a total dead stop and then a rebuild at the end. The melody is perfect. The singing is insane and outrageous. I love this song. I’ve always loved this song. And I strongly recommend you take a listen.

**John:** I will take a listen. I’ve never heard it. I don’t know anything about Zorba the Greek. So, I will enjoy it.

How would you say it functions in the show in terms of setting up what the actual show is going to be? Or is it just a great song by itself?

**Craig:** Well, it is a great song by itself. But it introduces the audience to the idea that there is kind of a chorus. This is a little bit of a Greek drama where there’s a chorus and also provides people with a sense that this is not going to be a standard story. Zorba the Greek is very much a philosophical musing of people living during a time of crisis, and war, and misery. And about finding joy within that. And it’s very Greek. It’s very Greek. The kind of love of melancholy and catastrophe which are two wonderful Greek words, I think it’s just instructing the audience to buckle in. There’s going to be a little philosophy tonight. Not a ton, but a little bit. And that this is not going to be a feel good musical where Curly gets the girl at the end, you know ?

It’s a little different. And I did read when I was looking around to find — because I didn’t know the name of the woman who originated the part, and I believe it’s Lorraine Serabian, gorgeous voice. I guess when they did a revival — not a reboot but a remake —

**John:** Ah-ha!

**Craig:** One Broadway of Zorba that they changed that opening lyric to “Life is what you do…” They changed it and they watered it down so it isn’t “Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die.” They made it softer and not quite as harsh as that.

But it’s not harsh. It’s true. It’s true. [laughs] Yeah, because that’s the [sings] “only choice you’ve come..” Oh, it’s great, great song. Love it. Anyway, check it out.

**John:** I will check it out. My One Cool Thing is, I bet you could predict this, so this last week was the World Wide Developers Conference for Apple.

**Craig:** “Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers!”

**John:** And what’s weird about your “Developers. Developers. Developers,” I had a vague memory of it, but Ryan Nelson in the office pulled up the video and showed us like, oh my god, Craig was spot on.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Steve Ballmer, wow.

**Craig:** He went absolutely insane. “Developers. Developers. Developers.” You saw that his heart stopped a few times when he did that, right?

**John:** It’s amazing.

**Craig:** John, I so thought of you when I was watching that video because, aside from the fact that you got a shout-out, which is awesome, then the reaction of the crowd when Craig Federighi announced what I’m sure you’re One Cool Thing is, it was awesome.

**John:** Yeah. So, the One Cool Thing for me is Swift which is the new programming language that’s underlying all of Apple’s technologies now. And previously on the podcast I swear I had One Cool Things about Coffee Script which is like the JavaScript variant that I love so much. And I had sort of dreamed that, oh, at one point Apple will embrace something like Coffee Script to actually do the coding of the language because it’s just so much more elegant and it fits my brain so much better than Objective C does.

And suddenly they just did. And it’s so odd that like I’m living in a universe where this is suddenly a thing you can do now. So, if you are a developer or have interest in becoming a developer, if you download the developer’s kit and play around with Swift, there’s a little playground feature where you sort of type on the left hand side and it shows you the results on the right hand side. It’s just remarkably elegant. And if you’re a person who has done any programming in JavaScript, or Python, or Ruby, or any of the modern scripting languages, you will immediately see how it works. It’s just incredibly straight forward. And the fact that you can now use that to program sort of fundamental apps is great.

The fact that it’s actually faster than the current languages is great. So, it’s a wonderful time for us. As a place that makes apps it forces some decisions about like, well, do we rewrite Highland entirely in Swift. And, perhaps we do so that we don’t end up with sort of the Final Draft 9 situation where we have a technical debt to payoff. And yet it’s a big choice to do all that.

**Craig:** You know, speaking of Final Draft —

**John:** Yes?

**Craig:** It’s not like the fact that they have some legacy issues, some coding debt in there, that couldn’t possibly be impacting their bottom line. For instance, there’s still probably, if you were to compare say, I don’t know, Final Draft for iOS compared to like, I don’t know, Highland, I would imagine that Final Draft crushes Highland.

**John:** Final Draft sells for a lot more than Highland does. So, Final Draft sells for $199 and Highland this last week was $15. It’s normally $30. And so in grosses, yes, traditionally Final Draft does beat Highland.

**Craig:** But. But —

**John:** But this last week we actually beat them.

**Craig:** Ooh!

**John:** Which was remarkable. Yeah.

**Craig:** Wow! Holler!

**John:** For a brief moment we actually overtook them which was remarkable. So, again, it’s probably not the usual situation. We were on sale. So, I don’t want abundant enthusiasm to sort of cloud the reality of this.

**Craig:** I am over-exuberant now.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I am Alan Greenspan over-exuberant. I’m irrationally exuberant. [laughs]

**John:** So, it’s been nice that people have taken the opportunity to try out Highland and that’s fantastic. And that there are alternatives out there. So, it’s been great to sort of see that happen this last week.

We had the launch of Bronson and we had Highland and we had Weekend Read and they were all on sale for this last week. And I lot of people checked them out. The interesting thing is when you sell more apps you have more technical support issues, and that’s just sort of natural. Because if you’re going to get — if 10 percent of your users are going to have some problem, when you have a tremendous number more people installing your apps you’re going to have more people with problems. And so the one thing we had to do this last week was really change our tech support thing because basically we’d been using email before.

So, someone would write in and Nima would write back and that was all fine because Nima could do that. But it got to be so much more that we actually had to dig in and actually set up a whole tech support system so that we can track tickets and do all that stuff. And it feels like we’re a legitimate company.

**Craig:** You guys are like a real company now. I mean, are you — are you making a ton of money off of this?

**John:** We’re not making a ton of money. So, honestly, our goal is to make it so that it’s profitable for Nima and Ryan to be employed. [laughs] That’s not actually a very high bar and we’re just clearing that.

**Craig:** Okay. That’s good.

**John:** So, we’re not a company of 40 people. We’re a company of four people. And I don’t really count me or Stuart because we’re here anyway.

**Craig:** Right. And Stuart’s not exactly a person. He’s —

**John:** Well, Stuart is really an idea.

**Craig:** Stuart is an idea.

**John:** Stuart, he’s a philosophy.

**Craig:** [sings] “Stuart is what you do while you’re waiting to die.” She has this great accent. “This is how the time goes by..” Ooh, it’s such… — Anyway, congratulations for being mentioned on the WWDC. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers.

My favorite moment of the whole thing was when Craig Federighi said, “What if we could have all of the power or all the things of Objective C without the baggage of C?” And in the audience there was like a [gasps], “Ooh! Ooh!”

**John:** [gasps] “It’s happening! It’s happening! It’s happening!”

**Craig:** Right. And I was sitting there like, “What does that even mean?” I had no idea what they were talking about. But it was exciting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. “Without the baggage of…” That guy is cool by the way. You get the feeling that guy is going to run the whole show, don’t you?

**John:** Yeah. It was weird because I felt like in the first segment I was like — all I could think of was, wow, he seems like — he’s got the hair and he sort of seems like the soccer dad, sort of like the slick soccer dad kind of thing. But then he’s out there for so much that I ended up kind of loving him by the end of the presentation.

**Craig:** Well, he was sort of the breakout star of the last version of these things. And you could tell, like, Apple is so smart. They’re just like put out the guy that’s cool. But he also like obviously knows his stuff because he’s the head of engineering. Is that right?

**John:** He’s the head of software.

**Craig:** Software, okay. So, he really knows his stuff. But most importantly he’s a Craig.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And we’re all pretty good.

**John:** So, Craig, I think we’re committing to this idea that for Halloween you’re going to go as Ballmer and I’m going to have to learn how to — I’m going to get the gray wig, the silver wig and I’ll be Tim Cook and it’s going to be amazing.

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh my god. I’ve got to practice getting my voice real high. His voice is up here!

**John:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** Oh my god. “How much for the phone — a phone is not a very good email device, so enterprises just won’t want to use it. It’s the most expensive phone in the world after subsidies. Okay, I mean…” God, that guy. Every time he talks. You’ve seen the video of him saying that iPhone, “No, nobody is going to like iPhone. ”

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Every time it’s amazing.

**John:** I’ve been trying to practice my Tim Cook and it’s actually rally hard because it’s an Alabama accent, but it’s like, it’s a slow Alabama accent and it’s really hard to hit the vowels the way he hits them.

**Craig:** I don’t even know where I would begin, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Fortunately we’ve got months ahead of us. And if worse comes to worse we still have the dialogue coach from Big Fish and she can just come in and give me a shake.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then you and I can show up at Hollywood Halloween parties. Doing that and no one will know who the hell we are.

**John:** [laughs] No, I think we should just go down Hollywood Boulevard and just be, that would just be our thing. We could be like those panhandlers on Hollywood Boulevard except we’re Steve Ballmer and Tim Cook.

**Craig:** [laughs] I’m okay with that. I still think in that crowd no one will know who the hell we are.

**John:** Oh, they won’t, and I think that’s more the fun of it. They won’t know —

**Craig:** That’s like amazing. It’s like the biggest celebration of the gay community in West Hollywood and you are there dressed as the most powerful gay man in the world and nobody will know who you are.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Classic.

**John:** It’s good stuff.

**Craig:** It’s good stuff.

**John:** Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you for a fun show, John.

**John:** Our usual boilerplate here at the end. If you like the show and are listening to the show on a device that listens to podcasts you might want to go to iTunes and look up Scriptnotes and actually subscribe because that would be a great place to subscribe to our show.

While you’re there you can leave a comment. That’s always fantastic. While you’re there you can also download the Scriptnotes app. The Scriptnotes app is there available for Android and for iOS devices. With the Scriptnotes app you can also download — you can subscribe to the premium features which gets you all the back episodes. So, this is episode 148. So, there are 147 previous episodes you’ve missed. So, that’s great and that’s fun.

If you would like to send a note to me or to Craig, on Twitter is best. I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. If you have a longer email-y kind of thing, email it to ask@johnaugust.com.

Our outro this week is by Robin Karlsson. Robin, thank you for writing this.

Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel. Or, the idea of Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** [laughs] The show is produced by the idea of Stuart Friedel. Oh, it’s so great.

**John:** And so edited by Matthew Chilelli. Thank you, Matthew. And thank you again to Scott Tobias for being on the show.

**Craig:** Yes. Thank you, Scott.

**John:** It’s very nice to have a guest. And we’ll see you again next week.

**Craig:** See you next week. Bye.

**John:** All right. Bye.

Links:

* [Bronson Watermarker PDF](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/bronson) is available now
* [Romantic-era classical music](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_music) on Wikipedia
* Tchaikovsky’s [1812 Overture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbxgYlcNxE8), and [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1812_Overture)
* Gershwin’s [Rhapsody in Blue](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFHdRkeEnpM), and [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_in_Blue)
* Ravel’s [Boléro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4wb11w0ZHQ), and [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bol%C3%A9ro)
* Grieg’s [In the Hall of the Mountain King](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLp_Hh6DKWc), and [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Hall_of_the_Mountain_King)
* The [new Three Page Challenge submissions page](http://johnaugust.com/threepage) is now taking submissions
* The Dissolve’s [Scott Tobias](http://thedissolve.com/authors/scottt/)
* Scott’s article, [The hidden world of Video On Demand profits](http://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/594-the-hidden-world-of-video-on-demand-profits/) from The Dissolve
* WGA’s [Residuals Survival Guide](http://www.wga.org/subpage_writersresources.aspx?id=133)
* [Blue Ruin](http://blueruinmovie.com/), a film by Jeremy Saulnier
* James Gray’s [The Immigrant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immigrant_(2013_film)) on Wikipedia
* Bong Joon-ho’s [Snowpiercer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer) on Wikipedia
* [Life Is](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMRb9Elttns) from Zorba
* Introducing [Swift](https://developer.apple.com/swift/)
* John’s [mention at WWDC](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/473597039016546305)
* [Highland](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/)
* Apple’s [Craig Federighi](https://www.apple.com/pr/bios/craig-federighi.html)
* Steve Ballmer [on the impending release of the iPhone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Robin Karlsson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/to-chase-or-to-spec).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 147 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, this is the last episode of Scriptnotes we’re recording…

…before the Worldwide Developers Conference. Apple will release all the brand new stuff on Monday but this is before Monday, so we don’t know what that stuff will be.

**Craig:** When you say they’re going to release all the brand new stuff, is this when they’re going to announce the next iPhone and such?

**John:** Well, they’re going to announce the new operating system, so for Macintosh and for iOS. And so it’s where all, you see, it’s sort of the future. And so our listeners who are listening to this on Tuesday or sometime after Tuesday, they are living in a future in which all these things are known. But we are living in a place of uncertainty. It’s like — it’s a quantum flux — flux is really the word but there’s — the decisions have not yet been made about what the future’s going to hold but they are made in the future that they’re living in.

**Craig:** You know what happened is the power of movies just happened there, because you saw Back to the Future.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And in your mind, flux capacitor is permanently lodged. It’s neurologically lodged right next to time travel.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, I mean quantum and quantum flux, I think they sort of feel like they belong together but I’m not sure they really do in a scientific way. But I do know that I envy the people in the future who know what the future’s going to be and, yet, I don’t want my time to move any faster.

**Craig:** It’s getting a little sad.

**John:** No, no, it’s getting exciting because exciting things are brewing. So, you know, it’s exciting for me as a developer because we are always so excited to see what the next things are going to be and what the next shiny bits of goodness are going to be. And so the very first Mac app we ever created was called Bronson Watermarker. I don’t know if you remember Bronson Watermarker.

**Craig:** I do, I do.

**John:** So Bronson’s really useful for watermarking scripts or any PDF that you need to send out. And it does a good job with that. But it looked just so awful and it actually sort of caused me pain every time I looked at it, so we decided a couple of weeks ago like you know what, we’re just going to dust it off and make a new version. The challenge is you would have to figure out like, well, do you make it look like the apps look right now or how you think the apps are going to look like after they announce all the shiny new goodness.

So we just kind of took a guess about where we thought the apps were going to look like. And so we just released it today, the new version today. And we think we got it right, but the people who are listening to this podcast will know whether we got it right or didn’t get it right because we made choices that could be completely wrong.

**Craig:** Let me get this straight. You guys a couple of weeks ago decided to significantly update your software.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And even though you only have 40 people working for you, [laughs], you managed to do it in two weeks?

**John:** We did manage to do it in a very, very —

**Craig:** That is right. You have 40 people working for you, right?

**John:** No, we actually — that’s not quite correct. If you count me, and you count Stuart who you can sort of only kind of half count because he’s really, you know —

**Craig:** Stuart.

**John:** He’s Stuart. Stuart’s wonderful but he’s not a programmer.

**Craig:** No, he’s not a full human being, right.

**John:** Stuart’s a wonderful human being with many other qualities, but coding and design are not his forte.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So it’s really a team of like two and a half, counting me as a half person that could do it in two weeks.

**Craig:** Two and a half — but that’s — what?

**John:** No, I know it does seem impossible. Granted, it is a simpler app then, you know, a mega-giant screenwriting app. But it does a lot of stuff and so it does sort of the watermarking stuff it always did, and does it better. But we also added in password protection, so we now create encrypted PDFs with passwords that are going to be individually generated and it’s stronger. A couple of weeks — not couple weeks — probably months ago we talked about the Tarantino script that leaked.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And there are all these people who were saying like, “Oh, if they just like watermarked it, it would have been safe and protected.” It’s like, yeah, stuff can always get out.

**Craig:** Ish. Yeah.

**John:** Ish. It would have been a little bit more protected. I think a watermark is useful for saying like, “Hey, you know what? Don’t copy this.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s like a socially engineered protection. You don’t want to be blamed.

**John:** So for this new build we did a couple of things that are sort of also social engineering and a little bit more hidden engineering. So password protection is really obvious. So like if you’re sending someone a password protected PDF and separately sending them like this is the password to unlock it, you’re really sending a message like, hey, you know what, we really don’t want this going any place.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We also had this thing called finger printing which is it creates a bunch of invisible watermarks on the file itself, so you don’t necessarily know that it’s invisibly watermarked but if that file gets out some place, other people can see that, ah, this was who the file actually came from.

**Craig:** That’s cool. You know, when you say developers, you know what I think of because I mean —

**John:** Who do you think of?

**Craig:** I’m not in the business, but whenever I hear the word developers, I think of —

**John:** Silicon Valley?

**Craig:** No. No, I mean, I love Silicon Valley. No, I think of Steve Ballmer.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Developers. Developers

**John:** Steve Ballmer is so excited.

**Craig:** Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers! And you could hear — you could hear his heart, whatever is inside of his heart, congealing, and his cardiac arteries are struggling and he’s just — it seems like he’s killing himself by talking that much.

**John:** You know what? I think for Halloween you could go as Steve Ballmer and I could go as Tim Cook and we would be like the CEOs.

**Craig:** Developers, developers, developers, developers! And the other thing that’s so great about Steve Ballmer is he’s got this really high voice. So, you know, because, I don’t know, when I think of the man that runs Microsoft, they go, “Developers, develop…”

You know, and he looks like a — he’s like a linebacker, you know. But he has this really high… — It’s funny, both he and Bill Gates have very I guess you’d call them tenory voices, you know.

**John:** Maybe that’s the quality of being a great Microsoft CEO is that you have to have that voice. The new guy, Satya, I’ve never actually heard him speak. I’ve seen photos of him. I have no idea what his speaking voice is.

**Craig:** I do. You ready for it?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.

**John:** It’s going to be a great voice.

So last bit on Bronson, so we put that out in the world today, so it’s out and through next Sunday… — So if you are listening to this on Tuesday, through Sunday it’s half off, so it’s $15 rather than $30. And we cut the price on all of our apps just to celebrate that, so Highland is half off. Even Weekend Read, if you want to unlock the full library, Weekend Read is only $4.99 through Sunday, so enjoy that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We have a show today to talk about. We’re going to talk about whether to chase projects or whether you should spec scripts. And this was a listener question that we thought was great and applicable to many of our listeners and sort of at many stages of your career.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’re going to talk about Edgar Wright’s style of comedy and a video that says that more directors should take lessons from Edgar Wright.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And we will talk about Shawshank Redemption which is 20 years old and was not a success in its time and it has done really, really well for itself in the 20 years that have passed since then.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So let’s do it.

**Craig:** All right. If you would —

**John:** First, we have a bit of follow up because several episodes ago we did The Angeles Crest Fiasco where you and me and Kelly Marcel played Fiasco. And we played a specific scenario in Fiasco called Hollywood Wives and I know that we mentioned the guy’s name who created it but somehow it got dropped out of the edit. So Hollywood Wives was created by a guy named Jobe Bittman and he did a great job, so.

**Craig:** Thank you, Jobe. Yeah, we did for sure because I remember when we were there we had a very brief sidebar about how to pronounce Jobe because it could be Hobe or Hobé or Jobé, but we ended up on Jobe which I hope is correct.

**John:** Yeah, we hope it’s all correct.

**Craig:** Yeah. So thank you, Jobe, and we do apologize for the initial omission.

**John:** Our question today comes from Jason. And we actually know Jason because I talked to him at the live Scriptnotes we did. So I remember who he was and in the email he singled out like, “I’m the guy you talked to.” It’s like, I remember that guy.

Here’s what he writes. “I’m a writer with an agent trying to get my first assignment. I’ve been on almost 50 general meetings. And the advice from productions and execs seems to be the same: spend time to write more specs because they usually find buyers and chasing assignments never works out. But my agents and managers think the chase is good and puts me in rooms with people who remember me. But so far, I’ve lost a bunch and aside from the feeling of defeat, I’m actually more upset about the amount of time I spend coming up with fixes or building worlds for projects that don’t choose me.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “The last one was over a month back and forth to the pitch and the same idea three times. And in between I was tweaking my pitch and world base stuff, each person’s notes to have it ready for the next meeting. Now I’m faced with a conundrum of the summer. I’m house-sitting for the next three months with no rent to pay and a small stipend, so I quit my job just to write fulltime. I can get my job back if I need it back.

“I have the whole summer before me and I want to write a spec but several assignments have been put in front of me and my team wants me to go and try to snag them. I don’t want to waste this golden opportunity for writing, but come September I would like to not have to go back to my day job. If you were starting out in a similar situation would you go all in on yourself or chase some ideas that aren’t bad but you’d have to beat out seven to 10 writers possibly to get the gig?”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What I love so much about this question is like it so encapsulates the experience of being a starting writer presently in Hollywood. And honestly, kind of at every stage in your career you kind of face the same questions, whether you should try to land that job or you should just write your own thing.

**Craig:** Right. And of course, things have changed somewhat over time. There was a time when chasing down jobs as a strategy, putting aside whether it was creatively fulfilling for you as a human being but just as an economic strategy of somebody trying to pay bills, it wasn’t a bad strategy. They were making a lot of movies and they would have to hire a lot of people. They were making a lot of movies and their ratio of movies developed to movies made was greater. So overall, it just seemed like there was a — there were many, many more jobs in features.

Today, no longer the case. They really, as an industry you can see them moving towards this theoretical one-to-one development ratio where they only pay for scripts for projects that they want to make and they make many, many fewer movies.

So it’s absolutely true that when you’re chasing those movies, you are in fact competing with many, many other writers. Many of those other writers are more experienced. Many of those other writers will be more comforting as hires to the people who are spending all the money. And most disturbingly, because of that pressure, because there’s so much more leverage on the employer side now, they will make you jump through endless hoops. It becomes Kafkaesque really quickly.

And it does require a lot of work. I mean, listen, they, on their side, think that screenwriting is, you know, when you start typing Fade In and putting things in a format. And we, on our side, know that so much of the work, perhaps the most important work is what happens before that. But that’s the stuff that they’re sort of expecting from you speculatively just to see if maybe they’ll hire you, maybe.

**John:** Yeah. The other thing we should stress is that a change from when you and I first started to what we see happening now is it’s not just that like we’re going to develop, you know, these movies — the ones we’re going to produce. It’s like a lot of them won’t, they’ll never hire anybody, o they’ll never actually proceed. And so I think so many more movies like never actually pick any of the writers. Like seven people will go in on a pitch, they’ll pick the best of the pitches to go up to the highest level and then they’ll say, “Nah.”

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** “We don’t really want to do that.” And so then all seven of those writers have wasted a month trying to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. People lose jobs to no one.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That we, the writer we prefer is no writer. And, you know, what’s going on also is that just as we have pressure on us now because of the way that the world has changed in terms of film production, so too is there great pressure on the executives. They now are almost acting entrepreneurially because they need to justify their jobs. So what’s happening is back in the day when you and I started, some executive picks up the phone and says, “I have this thing and we love it internally and we want to make it and we want to hear from a writer.” You would at least know it was real. Not anymore.

Now they call sometimes and like, “There’s something and I love it and I know that, you know, whoever the boss on high is is really into it and I want to bring this pitch.” They’re actually trying to make something happen which may not happen with anyone.

**John:** It may not happen with anyone. So Jason is talking about the very first wrung, when you’re trying to land that first job. But from my personal experience, I can talk about two projects in the last six months that a similar kind of thing has happened. So both of them I think I obliquely referred to in an earlier podcast where we talked about like well what should I do next.

And one of them was an adaptation of a book. And it was a YA book that was a hot sale, a studio bought it, they were looking for a take and so I went in and I met with them and I pitched a take to the producer. And I met him and pitched the take to the studio boss and that went really well. And so as we started to make a deal things just slowed down and things slowed down. And sometimes it’s like, well, maybe I’m just too expensive for this property and this book and this whole world and that can happen.

But really what had overall happened is like the book came out and it wasn’t a huge bestseller. It wasn’t The Hunger Games. It was more just like a mid tier. And so suddenly they were looking at the book and it’s just like this book, this plot, this story. And while there was something promising there, it wasn’t — it had no extra juice to it. And basically, I think they hired nobody. And that’s a thing that happens.

**Craig:** They just kill it. Practically speaking, it does seem to me where we’re both going with this is that this — Jason should in fact spend his summer writing something original.

**John:** I think he should.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And probably in retrospect, should I have spent that time writing something original? It’s very easy to say that hindsight. The other example I wanted to give was I think I’d also kind of obliquely referred to this in the podcast was there was a property that was based on a piece of IP that was very linked to a studio. So no one else could do it.

And the real question was like, is there a movie here? And that’s a really dangerous thing because when you go in on a property that is exclusively at one place either because they own the book or because it’s already part of the studio general package, you’re really competing against nothing. You’re competing against the alternate choice of just like let’s just do nothing.

And so this is the process over like many, many months of like this meeting and that meeting and this meeting and that meeting, going up through the ranks to see whether everyone sort of agreed like this is a way to approach the movie. And so when I pitched it they all said like, “That’s a really good pitch. I totally get what that movie is, it’s not what we see ourselves doing with this property.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That was a lot of time wasted.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know.

**John:** And that’s going to happen. So from a beginning writer’s perspective, Jason’s representatives are saying, you know what, it’s good for you to be in those rooms, it’s good for you to have exposure to those executives, to know who they are, know who you like, know, you know, sort of all that stuff. To some degree, that’s true. But after, you know, 50 projects, you’re wasting a lot of time.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s come at this from a couple of angles. The first angle is from the agency side. Why are his representatives advising him this way? Because it’s what makes sense for them. As an agent, the amount of work that is required to put your client in a room with somebody and who’s willing to meet with a certain tier of writer is de minimis. And you are also aware that those jobs are jobs. I mean, listen, maybe it turns out that they’re not really jobs, whatever. But the point is they’re there. Someone’s going to get hired. That’s at least your theory, maybe it’ll be my guy.

And while he goes through, even if he’s not hired on this particular one, they’ll know him, they’ll like him, he’ll impress them and they will think of him. And in this way, it’s a very simple way for them to have their client do the work for them. All they have to do is pick up a phone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** On the flip side, specs are a lot of work for agents. You write a spec, you give it to your agents and you say, “I want to sell this.” The first thing that has to happen is they need to agree, right? And they don’t — not all of them, but many of them frankly don’t really have very strong or reliable opinions anyway. So if they’re going to go out with a spec, they feel like, well, first I have to find other people that like this. Can I find an actor that goes along with it? Can I find a director that goes along with it? So that’s work. And it also requires them to go out on a limb which they hate.

**John:** They do. It’s requiring them to take a risk saying that I like this thing, I believe in this thing and then if they aren’t people to sell it you’re going to blame them to some degree for not selling it versus you not getting the job, yeah, you didn’t get the job.

**Craig:** Everybody will blame them even if they never — even if it’s stillborn. You hand them a script and they say, okay, and you — and well, we should go to the studio and give them a movie here. Let’s give them a director, an actor, and a script. Fine, well, this is the actor I want for sure. And they work up the courage to go to that agent down the hallway and he says, “Why would you give me this crap? I hate you. You’ve lost credibility with me.”

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s all — that’s how they see the world. It’s just a lot of risk. Doing nothing, no risk; doing something, lots of risks. Specs require them to do a lot of somethings. And so this is not — I don’t mean to imply that they are being aggressively manipulative and self-serving. I think they’re just simply being human.

**John:** They’re being rational to some degree. They’re taking the path that is least likely to end up in tears for them.

**Craig:** They’re being rational.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes. Well, yeah, what they are doing is they’re following a risk minimization strategy. The problem is that risk minimization strategies aren’t very useful for new writers. In fact, the opposite is useful. Risk maximization strategies seem to be what works for a new writer because they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. They’ve got to make big rolls of the dice. Because if you really want to get to the kind of land of milk and honey where somebody calls you up and says, “Hey, would you be interested in getting paid a lot of money to work on this thing,” and all you’ll have to do is basically say, yes, I would be interested in that because here’s what I would do with it. And after that 20 minutes, they go, “Great, here’s $2 million.”

You’re never getting there unless you can establish a beachhead as a writer with an original voice who can take a script from start to finish, guide the readers through it well and write something that could be a movie.

**John:** Write something that actually was a movie. I think that’s a crucial thing too is that you could have written the most brilliant screenplays that mankind has ever known, but if they’ve not been produced as movies and turned out as really, really good movies, you’re not going to get to that mythical land of milk and honey that Craig just described where they pick up the phone and just sort of offer you the job.

**Craig:** I don’t like milk or honey, by the way.

**John:** Really? Both of those things?

**Craig:** I don’t like — well, I’m Jewish —

**John:** You don’t like any substance that like comes out of a creature.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, that’s excreted from insects or mammals. I mean I don’t — I’m Jewish and Jewish people are notoriously poor at processing milk. I’m definitely in that subset of Jewish people. I’m not — I don’t do well with milk. And honey, I don’t know, it’s like — it’s too much. It’s just too much.

**John:** It can be overwhelming at times, yeah.

**Craig:** You know, like if somebody said, “Congratulations, you made it to the land of milk and honey,” I’d be like, “Oh…”

**John:** Oh, but come on, you get a good buttery buttermilk biscuit and a little honey on top of it, that’s a delicious thing.

**Craig:** You are so Goyishe it’s unbelievable.

**John:** Or if you ended up at Casa Bonita in Denver and you had the sopapillas and you poured the honey in there, come on, it’d be great. You raise your little flag again and again for more sopapillas.

**Craig:** Yucky.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I don’t like it.

**John:** You don’t like it.

**Craig:** No. I just want — can I just have dry toast? I just want dry.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Anyway, that’s — I think that Jason should spend his summer writing something original. You’re not going to lose out on some wonderful opportunity by taking a break for two months from the water tour of Los Angeles. Go ahead. Take the two months. Write something wonderful because I’ll tell you, when you do resume your water bottle tour of Los Angeles, you’re going to have something to talk about because they love to hear, “Oh, you have a script? Oh, well now there’s an action item. We can do something. We can read a thing.”

**John:** You can read a thing. Here’s the other reasons I wanted to talk through Jason’s decision process. So the reason why you take those general meetings is to meet people but I think it’s also very good practice of figuring out like how would I write all these different kinds of movies. And so that sort of quick scramble of like, you know, figuring out like how to do this movie or that movie or this movie or that movie, I did a lot of that.

And that was incredibly helpful for me thinking about story overall. So someone would said like, “Hey, would you want to do a Highlander movie?” And so I’m like, well, how would I do a Highlander movie? And so it’s a project I never got but it was really valuable learning experience.

Here’s why you only do so many of them. It’s because you could spend six months doing that and never have actually written something new. And suddenly then you’re not actually a writer, you’re a person who pitches things. And that’s not what you came out to Hollywood to do. Writing something give you something new, it gives you leverage with your agent to some degree. They’re going to try to sell this.

But also if you’re not really all that happy with your agent, that new script is a great way to transition to another agent or to another manager. That’s what I did as I left my first off agent and came over to my current agent was I had written a new script. I really doubted that the first guy could sell it and so I wanted to pick a new agent who I thought was going to be the right person to sell the script and this was a great entrée to introduce myself as, you know, a writer who can write this kind of script. That was Go, so.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, listen, there’s no question that the screenplays are the commodity, not the people. And you need to have some work that they can review. And if it’s not a prior job, it needs to be a screenplay. Fresh material keeps you fresh. I think you’re making a great point that the practice that you get from very quickly breaking down something and coming up with a story is excellent experience for the new writer.

Like you, I did that deal. You know, I can remember my former writing partner and I spending a couple of weeks coming up with a whole scene-by-scene story to rewrite a project that was a modern day Noah’s Ark.

It was like a comedy where — you know, and god, there was probably a thousand of those, you know. And it just doesn’t work, you know, it just doesn’t happen. But you do learn from those. There is a point, however, where you have to stop batting practice and actually go out onto the field and face live pitching. And that’s the deal. Write your spec . I mean, I started with an original, with something that was original and you started with something that was original. Most people start with something that’s original. I don’t know of anybody that didn’t. I mean, I don’t know how that would happen in any other way.

So in a weird way, if you haven’t sold anything original yet, that’s what you got to do first. The Black List is not a substitute for selling a screenplay.

**John:** So to clarify, I did actually get hired to write something before I had sold something. So I wrote a script that got me an agent and I was able to actually land a paid job without ever having —

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Sold something before that. But I would say that’s unusual and it was one of the things where I think I just ultimately got lucky. I was the right person to hire for that job and it was also in a day when it was like a five-step deal and they paid me through all five steps which is just crazy now, but that’s how it used to be back in the day.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, and also to be fair, I didn’t actually — the first thing that my writing partner and I sold was original but it was a pitch. So we hadn’t actually sold a script ourselves either. But my point being we sold something, you know.

**John:** You sold something, yeah.

**Craig:** One way or another, it seems to me that Jason could certainly do much worse than spending a couple of months this summer writing some fresh interesting material so that when his current agent or his new agent calls and says, “Listen, we’ve got a Black List writer, he’s got his new thing, you got to jump on this.” It’s a selling tool. And sometimes we as writers have to, in a weird way, excite our agents. It doesn’t seem like we should have to do that, but sometimes we do.

**John:** Sometimes you do. Great.

Let’s move on to our next thing which was this video that Tony Zhou did about Edgar Wright and Edgar Wright’s directing choices for comedy and Zhou’s call to action for comedy directors to take lessons from Edgar Wright and use some of his filmmaking techniques in their own movies. Basically, really it was, you know, it was a celebration of Edgar Wright but in some ways at the same time kind of a condemnation of what he perceives as kind of laziness or lack of filmmaking finesse among comedy directors. And I have a feeling this provoked a little umbrage out of Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** It provoked quite a bit of umbrage. And it bummed me out more than anything but I think the umbrage was certainly there but the stronger note in the bouquet of my reaction was sadness because this — it was so unnecessary to have been done this way. I think that Edgar Wright is extraordinarily good at what he does. And I loved how much passion this fan had for the work and how carefully he had studied it and how careful he had placed it in the context of other movies that he really liked. And particularly zeroing in on something that Edgar Wright is known for which is, I guess I would call it a visual bravura in the storytelling that he does.

And his movies are comedies. They aren’t traditional comedies. Frankly, even all parts of Edgar Wright’s movies are distinct. They are not genre films. He’s one of those guys that’s sort of his own genre which you will find here and there across many different kinds of movies. And so I love that and I thought how wonderful. And then it all succumbed to that thing, that disease of needing to justify and define that which we love by placing it in the context of that which we do not love.

And in doing so, I think, frankly, the creator of the video was just wrong. He was just wrong on so many levels.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about Edgar Wright’s style and sort of what makes it so successful for an Edgar Wright film. And is that some of the eight things that Tony Zhou highlights are things entering frames in funny ways, people leaving the frame in funny ways. There and back again where a character walks over something and then walks back to where he was after having encountered something. Matching scene transitions. The perfectly timed sound effect. Action synchronized to music. Super dramatic lighting cues. And then sort of two gimmes of like falling fences and fake guns, or really like repetitions of visual gags.

What I noticed in all of the things he’s clarifying is that they’re all very planned, very meticulously chosen beats that aren’t just sort of discovered. They were very much like you can sort of feel the storyboards in them.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And all of Edgar Wright’s movies really exist in a kind constructed universe.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Sort of like how I feel about Wes Anderson movies. And Wes Anderson movies kind of used to drive me crazy and then just — I crossed over into a place of just loving them. But they’re not natural, normal worlds. And I was frustrated that he was — Tony Zhou was comparing the Edgar Wright movies to movies that aren’t supposed to take place in a special artificial, unnatural world. They’re supposed to take place in a really real world. And real worlds don’t necessarily have this kind of visual flair for really good reasons.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think Tony understands how the music works. I mean, listen, there’s nothing particularly visually arresting or again, I’ll use that word bravura in Groundhog Day, which we went into at length on the podcast a few weeks ago. But Groundhog Day is brilliant. Most of the filming in Groundhog Day is consistent with Harold Ramis’s oeuvre and that is shot extraordinarily traditionally with extraordinarily traditional coverage and a naturalistic camera that isn’t structuring reality-bending moments because tonally that’s not the kind of story he’s telling.

Why would we beat that up? Similarly, he makes strange straw dummy comparisons. At one point, he goes after Todd Phillips. And, you know, granted, I’ve worked with Todd Phillips, I’ve made movies with him, so naturally I’m a little biased here. But I thought that was really off base because Todd actually is and has been visually arresting at times when he chooses to in his movies, when he feels it’s tonally appropriate. In The Hangover there’s that great car crash moment where that’s been aped by many other directors since, by the way I’ve seen, where they’re talking in a car and we see headlights in the distance and they keep coming and all it’s one take and the car crashes, it t-bones them, all in one shot.

And it’s really creative and not at all the way you normally would shoot something like that. There are many other examples I could cite, but it seems like he just ignored those and instead just cherry-picked a moment where people were just talking, which by the way, works great. He picks a moment in Old School that sets up a joke that works really well. And then he also does something else that I don’t understand. He compares some things that Edgar Wright does to other visual jokes that he does like and appreciate but they’re very different kinds of moments.

For instance, one of my favorite visual jokes he cites in this compilation which is the soldier running in Holy Grail

**John:** The Holy Grail. Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is great. And it’s a wonderful visual trick and it worked and it’s hysterical. But then he shows this bit with the pouring of the beers and the pouring of the water which he’s citing as visual comedy. And frankly, I just don’t think that that’s funny.

**John:** I don’t think that’s funny either.

**Craig:** I think it’s really interesting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s visually engaging and fascinating, but I don’t think it’s funny. Similarly, the transition of a policeman going from one town to another, which I have to say, kind of was cribbed from Guy Ritchie who did it I think in Snatch with Dennis Farina. But regardless, that’s a really cool moment. That’s not funny. It’s not meant to be laugh-out-loud funny. I just don’t think this guy gets the — how the music of this all works.

**John:** It’s also your relationship with your audience. And if you’re in an Edgar Wright film, and again, none of this is like criticisms of Edgar Wright’s films. They’re very specifically and very planned.

**Craig:** They’re awesome. They’re great.

**John:** They’re great. And they’re very well planned for being in that universe. And they establish an expectation that you’re going to have these kind of quick cuts at times. You’re going to have this again visual bravura that’s not part of your universe.

If you try to apply that same kind of speed and time and tempo to something like The Heat, you’re not going to have a good outcome.

**Craig:** It will break it. It will just break it.

**John:** It will break it because you have to believe that those two women are existing in a moment together and that this is the fatigue. And the most alarming thing in the frame has to be Melissa McCarthy’s actions, not how you’re cutting.

**Craig:** Well look, I engage with the characters in Edgar Wright’s movies. I believe that they’re real. But I also understand that the entire thing is pushed in an interesting way.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s part of his style. It’s part of his deal. That’s why I don’t need every movie to be a Tarantino film. I don’t need every comedy to be an Edgar Wright movie. I’m happy that Edgar Wright makes Edgar Wright movies. I just found that there was this bizarre chauvinism that other movies were lesser because they weren’t doing this.

And I have to say, maybe I’m totally off base, but if Edgar Wright were with us right now I have to presume he would agree, because I’ve always found that the people who make comedies and who have been bloodied in the war of making comedies are so much more charitable and understanding of their fellow filmmakers then is often the case with some of the more — some of the more attentive viewers out there.

**John:** Yeah. So a few things I do want to give him credit for which is I think it’s reasonable to have a call to action, really, a call to awareness for all filmmakers, comedy and otherwise, to certainly think about making some of these choices, and think about like, can you service a joke better by moving the camera in certain ways.

Can you service a joke better by holding in a shot and not trying to, you know —

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Revert to standard coverage. These are all really laudable things. And I think if this video had been framed around the idea of like, look at some of the great things that Edgar Wright does, let’s point some of these things out —

**Craig:** I would be so much happier, yeah.

**John:** Other filmmakers can learn from this thing rather than sort of, you know, crapping on other people who don’t —

**Craig:** Calling people out… — Yeah, like, I love Bridesmaids. I understand that Bridesmaids isn’t visually arresting. I understand that it absolutely broke zero ground visually or cinematically if you want to use the term. But I also loved it. It made me laugh and I cared about the people in it. And I have to think that some of these things would have broken that movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Now where I think Edgar Wright has terrific lessons for all comedy filmmakers is in his complete rejection of the very overdone visual tropes to move people around. There is, no question, there is a certain malaise in a lot of comedy filmmaking where everybody goes, “Nobody is here for that stuff. Let’s just get to the parts that are funny.” And he’s right about that.

One thing that’s interesting is that in studio comedy making, and I’ve often come up against this distressingly: the budgeting process is such that it becomes very hard actually to do the kind of things that Edgar Wright does. His movies are not inexpensive.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When we were making Identity Thief, at one point there is a car chase and, you know, we were down to like how can we make a car chase when they’ll only give us two cars?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Suddenly, you run into these budget issues where believe me, you have all these interesting ideas for how to make these transitions and then they say, “Nope, it’s the second unit and they’re going to be doing the thing with the car goes from left to right and we’ll just play music.” And you get jammed.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Part of the situation in studio comedies is that they will budget the movie. They’ll just say, look, here’s what we’re going to give you for this comedy. Most of the money will go to comic stars who deservedly get a bunch of money. So then what you have left is enough money to make a kind of a dingy looking movie. [laughs]

I see this happening all the time where, you know, Hot Fuzz, that’s not an inexpensive movie. I think it was into the $40 million in terms of budget. And because of the way he works with his collaborators, I suspect that they — it wasn’t a case where they have to pay, you know, each actor $5 or $6 million, but rather everyone is kind of working together and sharing in the pool, but I’m just guessing.

Similarly, Scott Pilgrim was $70 or $80, possibly $100 million.

**John:** It was a pricy movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, Bridesmaids I’m guessing was about $25 million.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So when you look at the shots that he is doing, for instance, the montage of Simon Pegg moving from one city to another, that’s many, many multiple shots and it’s set-ups, and it’s time, and it’s money.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** I would love comedies to get that money.

**John:** But they’re not getting that money right now. The last thing I’ll say is that he does highlight a little bit like, you know, oh, Pixar will still do these things. And yes, animated films will do sometimes much more visually sophisticated things because they have that time and it’s honestly generally no more expensive to build that as a really fascinating shot because you’re building everything from scratch anyway.

So those visual gags are very natural there because you’re not trying to — again, it’s completely constructed reality. So within that constructed reality, the choices you’re making for angles and shots and how you’re telling your joke, you can do whatever you want and you have so much time to think of what those shots are.

So if you don’t like what that one was, throw it out and put a new thing in there and you’ve got that time.

**Craig:** And I’ll just say in conclusion, I could go through a bunch of movies that this guy is implying are visually inept or mediocre and find moments that comedically are entirely about how the shot was composed and how the editing was composed.

I learned a lot, you know, David Zucker made wonderful comedies and none of them were visually stunning, on purpose by the way. And yet, there was an enormous attention to detail when he made those movies.

One thing, one wonderful lesson that he taught me early on was, in physical comedy, if you can see the result of an action within the same continuous cut as the cause of it, it will be funnier. There was a lot of attention to these things. And camera placement and how to shoot things was a constant discussion.

But it was not visually shocking or bravura or in your face or innovative. It was rather just quietly constructed. And I think that’s okay. I guess what I want to say to the guy making this is you should love Edgar Wright movies. They’re wonderful. Please don’t beat up other movies because they’re not doing that. That’s just unnecessary. And frankly, it’s just misguided.

**John:** I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about these concepts in relation to actually writing the words on the page, because a lot of what he’s describing here you would never see manifest on the page. It becomes very annoying to read about sort of like, you know, a spoon enters frame from off-screen.

Sometimes you can do that and sometimes it works. But it’s very hard to picture what that’s going to be. So like trying to sell a visual joke on the page can be really, really tough.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Sometimes you can do it, though. And techniques for like the there and back again. It can be very hard to describe like in a continuous shot the guy goes, you know, says something, goes to the window, look out the window, comes back. But sometimes the way to do that is to sort stay in the dialogue block and like put all that action in parenthetical, which is sort of cheating. But sometimes it’s worth cheating so people can actually follow what it is that’s funny that you’re doing there.

**Craig:** Well there’s — I don’t know how those guys go through their process. But if I had to guess, there’s a certain kind of casual, visual experience that I suspect is either figured out in the storyboarding process or on the day when they’re staging the scene in the morning and figuring how they’re going to do it. And they find these moments like, you know what, let’s follow with him and then let’s follow back.

But then there are other things that must be scripted. Simon Pegg’s traveling montage has to be scripted because it has to be shot. The pouring of the beers in the water must be scripted. There’s no way that they just decided on the day to do that. Or if they got it into storyboards, it probably then had to be written into the script so that you understood, okay, we’re going to need some macro shots and we have to shoot through the bottom of the glass. There’s a whole — there’s 10 meetings about that shot, so that it comes off, you know.

**John:** In the script I wouldn’t be surprised if it says, you know, in uppercase “SERIES OF SHOTS,” And either bullets them out or like in that action block talks about what happens in there and that they did have to have three production meetings to talk through what was going to be in that, what the steins looked like. And is going to be shot as a primary unit or is that something that is secondary unit? Are you going to pre-shoot that, is it all, is it happening weeks after you’ve wrapped your thing to get those extra shots? That is how it’s going to go.

So you don’t know what that’s going to look like. To the idea of storyboarding stuff, The Coen Brothers are very — who often have very visually sophisticated movies. Apparently, when you show up on the day of shooting, they’ve present your sides and they show like the storyboards, like they’ve storyboarded everything so you know like this is where — this is what the shots are going to be for the day.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So everyone can actually really have a plan for this is how it is. So you look at a movie like Raising Arizona that they do, the visual guides in there were really planned. They knew they were going to be using those wide lenses and how stuff was going to be going through the frame. But you wouldn’t necessarily see that in the script.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. In fact, if they’re presenting the storyboards to the actors on the day, it means that they haven’t seen those things because they do have the script.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And those things are — I mean you can’t — basically, you shouldn’t put anything in a script that as you’re doing it makes you think, oh, I’m just ruining it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No one’s going to think that this is any good if I spell it all out in the script. I have to again give Edgar Wright a lot of credit for having the patience and the faith to carry through on these plans because, you know, what happens is you do end up in your seventh meeting about how to shoot the glasses and the close-ups and everyone’s asking these questions. And inevitably people start to think, why am I doing this? This is an enormous —

**John:** Do you really need this? It’s not that special.

**Craig:** I’ll give you an example from something I did with Todd Phillips which I thought was very visually interesting. In the second Hangover movie, Alan, Zach Galifianakis’s character, has a flashback where he remembers some of the incidents of the night before but in a kind of a dreamy state. But in Alan’s point of view he remembers himself and his friends as 12-year-old boys because that’s how he sees the world.

**John:** Which I love that moment in the movie. And I remember commenting, I think even on the podcast, like that must have been so hard to shoot —

**Craig:** It was so hard.

**John:** And convince people to shoot that.

**Craig:** It was so hard because on paper, it takes up a half a page and all you say is, “Alan and Stu and Phil as 12-year-olds.” But then you realize, oh my god, we’ve got to cast 12 year olds to be like them. We’ve got to put them in these clothes, and then we have to shoot a second movie, because all the stuff where these guys have been, we’ve got to then redo, so we have a riot scene where Ed Helms is freaking out and there’s this enormous riot and police and mall to have cocktails, then we have to shoot it again with children.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And we have to do it over and over and over. But, you know, it kind of came together but many, many times Todd and I looked and each other and thought why would we have ever done this. Just like, you know, very famously Parker and Stone decided early on that they were going to make Team America with marionettes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And about, you know, a month in of misery they just thought, we have killed ourselves on this, killed ourselves. But, you know —

**John:** They already committed.

**Craig:** They already committed. And frankly, in the end it’s not the audience’s problem. If you can provide them with something that is visually fascinating, it doesn’t matter how long it took, it doesn’t matter how meetings you went through. It’s really cool.

So I think — look, I think he’s great and I think that what he does is spectacular. I would be shocked if Edgar Wright were ever to stop and think, boy, I wish all comedies look like my comedies. I just think he would say, oh my god, no.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Why would I want that? I like my comedies looking like my comedies.

**John:** You want to be distinctive. That’s absolutely true. And same with Tarantino and same with Wes Anderson. I mean, the fact that you can parody a Tarantino film or you can parody a Wes Anderson film means that they’re doing something very special. They have a unique voice and unique eye and celebrate that rather than sort of, you know, crapping on everybody else.

**Craig:** Yeah and at least acknowledge that while there are lazy tropey moves in comedies that I would love to see eliminated, budgetary concerns aside, there are also incredible classic, great, great comedies that invent not one new bit of cinematic language.

**John:** Yeah, it is true…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Our last topic today is The Shawshank Redemption which is rated on IMDb as the best movie ever made. But a lot of people could agree with that. There’s an article that Russell Adams wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week celebrating the 20th anniversary of The Shawshank Redemption and I had to remember sort of like what it was up against, but it came out the same year Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump.

So in its time, Shawshank Redemption wasn’t a big success. It only made $16 million in the box office. It got seven Oscar nominations, but no Oscars.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And now it’s kind of a classic. So this article is specifically talking about how, you know, the residual value of a well regarded movie and literally the residuals that happen. So, you know, minor actors in there are still getting residuals and they’re still getting like a tremendous amount of residuals because that thing airs all the time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That movie aired 151 hours of air time for Shawshank Redemption just in 2013.

**Craig:** Did I ever tell you the story of sitting in a car with Bob Weinstein and he was talking about the movie business and he said to me, “Hey, Mazin, you want to know how to make money in the movie business?”

**John:** And you said, no sir. I don’t want to know. I want to make art.

**Craig:** I said, let me out of this car. I said, yeah, sure, how do you make money in the movie business? He said, “It’s really simple, man. Have a library of movies and don’t make movies.” And he’s right, I mean —

**John:** He is right.

**Craig:** That’s, the library costs nothing to maintain and generates profit forever whereas making movies – oh, here they come, here come the alarms.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s Bob Weinstein.

**John:** It was your terrible impersonation.

**Craig:** Oh man, it’s actually dead on.

So yeah, a library sits there and unlike most warehouse products, it costs nothing to keep and yet it generates money forever. And a movie like Shawshank Redemption which crosses into that I’m going to say a land of potato chips and ice cream, a movie like that doesn’t just generate a lot of money, it generates a massive amount of money forever and increases the value of other movies, because if you want to show Shawshank Redemption, you can’t get it unless you also agree to take a bunch of other movies that maybe aren’t, you know, quite as exciting to the audience.

**John:** And that’s something I don’t think people appreciate is that when you see a movie on television, you think like, oh, okay, so ABC bought the rights to that movie so they could show it. And yes, they bought the rights to that, but they had to buy a package.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And so what the studio did is they package together this one movie that everybody really wanted along with a bunch of movies that you really didn’t want. And they would only sell them as the package. And the frustration as a filmmaker is the studio wants to divide that money equally between those films just because and pretend that it’s not like the one movie is actually the one that’s worth doing, so they’ll spread it on all the different movies that they’re selling. And that is incredibly frustrating.

And sometimes it’s the subject of lawsuits. And I don’t know that it ever actually went to trial, but the first Charlie’s Angels was a big success. And we ended up selling it to I think ABC, selling rights to ABC, but it was packaged with these other movies.

And I remember producers being not especially happy about the way that it was packaged and the way the money sort of being divided it up because obviously we were the movie that was the goldmine there.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, what they do is they divide it up. They’re not looking to screw over any individual writer, director or actor. What they’re trying to do is avoid any movie showing a profit. [laughs]

**John:** Yes, that’s exactly what it is.

**Craig:** Yeah, so they’re just sliding this stuff around so that, you know, the waterline never hits a certain thing. But when we talk about this thing, and this is all under the heading of distribution.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is the answer to the question, why are there the same five big movie studios that were around for decades and decades and decades? Why if we live in a world now where Tesla can show up and actually be a viable new car company, why can’t there be a viable new movie studio? And the answer is distribution. Distribution impacts everything.

That is why these studios have a strangle hold on films and television, because to get a movie into a theater, all those screens is an art of negotiation where you are trading on a very desirable title. And thus, getting in maybe ones that are more speculative because theater owners lose money when nobody’s in the theater to see the movie.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** They don’t want bad movies. They want the good movies. Well, you’re not getting the next say, you know, they’re making new Harry Potter movies. Warner Brothers is making —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, you’re not getting one of those unless you take a bunch of these things, too. And it works that way for television and pay cable and all the rest. I have a question for you.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Of all your movies, can you tell from your residuals which one has had the most after theatrical success?

**John:** Yes, that was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by like a landslide. And just because it sold a tremendous amount of DVDs right at that moment where like they were still selling a bunch of DVDs.

**Craig:** They were still big.

**John:** Yeah. And Go does fine and Big Fish certainly generates a fair amount. But Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was definitely the winner.

How about you? I mean you’ve got The Hangover movies. Those have to be the number ones.

**Craig:** They’re not. They’ve both done very well in video but by far, Identity Thief.

**John:** That’s not because it’s the sole credit — ?

**Craig:** No, no, no. I kind of did the math. I kind of did the math. Identity Thief has just been after market-wise, after theatrical I think the most popular movie I’ve ever done.

**John:** Well, that’s great.

**Craig:** I think so.

**John:** That’s wonderful. And again, this is a good lesson in why residuals matter so much. So the short version of what residuals are for people who are sort of new to this discussion is writers as part of this sort of grand charade we do legally about the work we do and copyright all this stuff, we don’t have royalties on movies, we have what’s called residuals.

And as movies are displayed on things after theatrical, so after they’ve left the movie theaters and after they’ve left airplanes, but as they sell on iTunes, as they go through Netflix streaming, as they show up on broadcast TV, we get a certain percentage of what that money is that comes back to the distributor or the studio to the film. We get that percentage. And that percentage can add up and be a very meaningful part of a writer’s career.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Yup, it’s good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so is Shawshank Redemption which I don’t think I’ve actually seen since it came out, so it’s one of those things where it’s always on. If you flip the channels, it’s always on somewhere. Yet, it’s a great movie and it was Frank Darabont’s sort of first big success. He bought the rights to it for $5,000.

**Craig:** Isn’t that great? And I love that Stephen King didn’t cash the check.

**John:** Ooh, Stephen King.

**Craig:** Shawshank Redemption is a fantastic movie. It’s one of those movies, I’ve never met anybody that didn’t like it.

**John:** No, how could you not like it?

**Craig:** I don’t know. It’s just a terrific movie. It’s also a movie that while very cinematic in moments, plays wonderfully on TV. It’s like The Godfather. I very happily have seen The Godfather a number of times in the theater, which is obviously it’s not something that happens frequently because, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But when I see The Godfather on TV, I’m like, yeah, this works on TV, too. It actually works everywhere. I can watch this in my shower.

**John:** Yeah, I think maybe the reason why it does, both of those films would work well on TV is because they’re sagas and they definitely kind of feel like there’s act breaks in them. You feel like, there’s moments like, okay, this is a moment where we can go away and we go to commercial and come back and regain the energy. And like it’s not going to be shattered.

**Craig:** The only thing that bugs me about Godfather is that sometimes when people are going from one place to another, Coppola will just show a car driving by.

**John:** That’s so incredibly lazy. I wish they wouldn’t do that.

**Craig:** Like when Michael Corleone goes to Vegas, there’s a plane landing and we hear a waa, waa, waa, waa. That’s not cool.

**John:** That’s not cool at all. But, you know, what is cool? One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s time for that. So my One Cool Thing is also on the topic of filmmaking. It’s this thing called A Guerilla Filmmakers Guide to After Effects. And it’s this course — I think it’s like $99, with a whole bunch of videos that you get access to, about how to use After Effects to develop visual effects for Indie projects.

It’s really well done. The sample video they have up there is Gareth Edwards who did Godzilla and Monsters and is now doing the new Gary Whitta Star Wars movie.

**Craig:** Gary Whitta.

**John:** Gary Whitta.

**Craig:** Gary Whitta.

**John:** It’s Gareth Edwards talking through doing the visual effects for this Attila the Hun movie he made and he did all the visual effects himself. And you’re literally seen his screen, you’re seeing After Effects and he’s narrating as he’s, you know, like a 40-minute lesson on sort of how he’s dealing with the timeline, the spreadsheet he’s built for himself for the work, how he’s composing these things.

And it’s just the little lesson I watched, it was basically he had to put I guess Constantinople on a hill, and so he had two shots that where handheld shots, a wide shot and the closer shot and like Constantinople had to be over there.

And so he’s doing motion tracking and figuring out like to get this city to land right in the distance. And it was just really, really cool. And so I think if you are a person who is looking to make films or honestly just kind would want to learn more of about how that stuff works, I thought it was just fascinating and really well done. So there will be a link to that in the show notes.

**Craig:** Excellent. Well, my One Cool Thing this week is a updated app for the New York Times crossword puzzle. I am a —

**John:** Now, you hate crossword puzzles.

**Craig:** [laughs] How dare you. I am an avid crossword puzzler. I’ve gotten my times down to a place where I promised my friend and New York Times crossword creator, David Kwong, that I will compete this fall in the crossword tournament here in Los Angeles.

**John:** Holy cow.

**Craig:** I’m not going to even come close to winning. I mean the scary thing is like the guys who have really, really good times, I just — I don’t even know how they fill the grid in that quickly. But they’re actually — I think they could beat me if I were just writing answers in that I had, you know.

**John:** You had the keys beside and you’re like filling it in.

**Craig:** Yeah, but I’m getting pretty good. Like I can now routinely do a Saturday, you know, around 20 minutes which —

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Which is respectable. I mean, in the crossword puzzle world, maybe not so much. But I’m obsessed with the New York Times crossword puzzle. And they have a new app that actually is very nice. It’s very clean. The apps powering crossword puzzles have always been a little clunky and oldish. And the New York Times stepped it up. I mean, for instance, you couldn’t sync your puzzle across devices until today. And now you can.

**John:** Yeah, so it’s an app for iPad and for iPhone?

**Craig:** It is, yes. It is in iOS app that syncs between your iOS devices and also syncs with the desktop New York Times crossword site so that you can pick it up and do it wherever and it’ll keep track of your time and your answers. It is a subscription. I want to say it’s $30 for the year.

**John:** If you like crossword puzzles, it’s worth it.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Of course it’s worth it. I mean, my god. Even, let me just say, even if you don’t like crossword puzzles, it’s worth it because you should start liking crossword puzzles, because if you’re a writer, it keeps your mind sharp. It’s words. It’s good for you. It’s just good brain stuff. I’ve got Missy Mazin working on crossword puzzles now. I’m very excited about that. You know that my wife used to be Missy.

**John:** I had no idea. But it makes sense, her name is Melissa, so yeah.

**Craig:** Right, so she was Missy and then after we started dating, like maybe a year before we got married, she’s like, you know what, I don’t want to be Missy anymore. I want to be Melissa now. It’s too juvenile. I want to be Melissa. And I was like, oh my god, I’ve got to actually change what I call my girlfriend. And I did. But lately I’ve been thinking that it’s time to bring Missy back.

**John:** Missy Mazin.

**Craig:** It’s just adorable.

**John:** Missy Mazin has pigtails though. She’s the not the woman I perceive.

**Craig:** She’s never had pigtails.

**John:** I just perceive her as being a Melissa. That happens.

**Craig:** All right. Well, let’s see what, maybe — let’s see if I can get this to catch on.

**John:** That is our show this week. So if you would like to learn more about the things we talked about on the show, there are show notes for every episode. They’re at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. We are on iTunes. You may be listening to us through iTunes. If you are listening to us on the website, we would really love it if you’d actually subscribe in iTunes because that’s how more people find us and then we move up the charts. And, honestly, we’re a little competitive that way.

If you’re on iTunes anyway and want to listen —

**Craig:** You’re a little competitive.[laughs] I don’t. Let me just be clear to everybody out there. I actually don’t, I never look at the charts. Where are we on the charts?

**John:** We’re pretty good.

**Craig:** Oh really?

**John:** Yeah, we are good in that film and TV category. But we can be better. We’ve been better at other times.

**Craig:** Oh really.

**John:** That’s sort of why I’m bringing it up. And so it’s not that we have fewer listeners. We actually have a lot more listeners. Those stats are really, really good. It’s that when people don’t interact with us on iTunes, we drop. And so it’s people adding us on iTunes is what moves you up the charts.

**Craig:** All right, well then everybody you’ve got to add us on iTunes.

**John:** Just add us on iTunes. It’ll take three clicks.

**Craig:** I suddenly got competitive.

**John:** Yeah, yeah. You were the person who wants like to be below 20 minutes on a Saturday crossword puzzle. This matters.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I get it.

**John:** It matters so much. [laughs]

**Craig:** I get it. I get it now.

**John:** And if you’re there and you want to leave us a comment, we love comments, that’s all really nice and good. We also have a Scriptnotes app for your iPhone and for your Android device. With that app you can access all our back episodes back to episode one is you want to. Subscriptions for the back episode are $1.99 a month. Pennies, for you. Less than — a year of that would less than a year of the New York Times crossword puzzle.

**Craig:** But not necessarily more valuable. Not to run us down. But boy, those crosswords are good.

**John:** Those crosswords are good. We have transcripts for every episode. So about got five days after an episode airs, we have transcripts for it. So if you need to go back and refer to something we said, you can always look for that, so just look for the original episode and there’s always a link to the transcript for that. It’s also how I Google to see what the hell we said. It’s been incredibly useful part of that.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel and is edited by Mathew Chilelli who this week also did the outro and it’s lovely. It uses a brand new woodwind sample library which is great.

**Craig:** Ooh, woodwinds.

**John:** And last reminder, if you would like Bronson Watermarker or Highland or Weekend Read, they’re all half off this week. So go for it. This is your week of bargains.

**Craig:** Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers!

**John:** Nicely done, Craig. Have a great week, Craig.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [WWDC14](https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/)
* [Bronson Watermarker PDF](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/bronson/) is available now! (And is half-off thru June 8th)
* [Highland](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/) and [Weekend Read Unlimited](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/) are also half off thru June 8th
* [Steve Ballmer on developers (developers, developers…)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE)
* [Tony Zhou on Edgar Wright’s visual style](https://vimeo.com/96558506)
* [Russell Adams on The Shawshank Redemption](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304536104579560021265554240?mod=trending_now_1) from The Wall Street Journal
* IMDb’s [Top 250](http://www.imdb.com/chart/top)
* [A Guerilla Filmmaker’s Guide to After Effects](http://www.fxphd.com/store/fast-forward-a-guerrilla-filmmakers-guide-to-after-effects/)
* [The New York Times Crossword](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-new-york-times-crossword/id307569751?mt=8) for iOS
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))