Search Results for: beat sheet

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/talking-to-actors).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 107 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, I think you’ll be excited by this, but I went to my first Rosh Hashanah service this last week.

**Craig:** Ooh! And how boring was that?

**John:** It was actually not boring at all…

**Craig:** What?!

**John:** …because it was conducted at the Neil Simon Theater…

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** …by Andrew Lippa who is now an ordained interfaith minister.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So, it was kind of awesome, but also really strange, because I realized as I’ve been around Jewish culture a lot since moving to Los Angeles but I’d never actually seen even on film a portrayal of what the Rosh Hashanah service was like. And it’s a little bit odd.

**Craig:** It’s a lot a bit odd. Did they blow the Shofar?

**John:** They did. The Shofar being the sort of curved horn thing, which you tweet, actually tweet is the wrong word for it. Really, it’s like you —

**Craig:** Oh John. “A curved horn thing that you tweet.” You are so Christian.

**John:** Oh, yes, [laughs]. So, what is the Shofar meant to represent? It’s not a horn. What would you call it?

**Craig:** It is. In fact it is a ram’s horn.

**John:** So therefore I’m correct and it is curved.

**Craig:** It’s just the way you said it. “It’s a curved horn.” It was just very goyisha.

**John:** All right. That’s fine. So, anyway, it’s a thing that you are meant to…

**Craig:** Blow.

**John:** …blow. But tweet is actually sort of the right word. It implies it’s a high sound. It’s not a high sound at all. It’s sort of a horn blowing sound, kind of.

**Craig:** Fancy that. [laughs]

**John:** But it is a very specific rhythm for this part of the thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And then that part of the thing.

**Craig:** Tekiah. Teruah. Yeah. There are I think three different ones. There’s [imitates horn sounds].

**John:** And it’s supposed to be nine, but you really can’t count.

**Craig:** And then there’s one that goes [horn sound again]. Basically goes until the old men run out of breath. And it’s like a competition to see who can last the longest.

**John:** Yeah. I found the whole thing just absolutely fascinating.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s silly.

**John:** But wonderful. And, of course, it was an abbreviated thing because we were literally doing this in the upstairs lobby at the Neil Simon Theater, just like an hour before they had to completely clear everything out so we could have our opening night. So, it was a really busy, jam-packed day. But it was a great way to start a jam-packed day.

**Craig:** Now, do you have people that are going to be observing Yom Kippur which is sort of the important part of the holiday?

**John:** Yes, we do. So, it’s going to be a… — We’re smack dab in the middle of the Jewish holidays for Big Fish, which is traditionally like not the time you would want to do this, but it actually worked out very well for us because we’re the only show trying to open now.

**Craig:** Oh, good. All right, competition.

**John:** Let’s talk about the show that we’re actually recording right now, which is Scriptnotes, which is mostly a conversation about screenwriting.

**Craig:** And things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**John:** And so maybe that’s a Broadway show. But, and you, Craig Mazin, you stepped up today because two of our three topics are Craig Mazin topics.

**Craig:** I can do it. I just need — I just need someone to believe in me. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] And we all believe in you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** So, the topic that I would like to propose today is the difference between intention and motivation. And words that are often sort of combined but are actually probably more useful if we can keep them apart and really think of them as two separate things.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And the topics that you brought to us today are?

**Craig:** Today I want to talk about sort of a screenwriter’s guide to working with actors, because no matter what level you are working at you need to work with actors. And then just a sort of a techie thing, I thought it might be fun to talk about your “onset rig.” What you need as a screenwriter on set in terms of just stuff to be able to do your job effectively.

**John:** Those are good topics. I feel like we’re going to have a good, strong podcast today.

So, I wanted to do just a little bit of housekeeping first. You are coming to New York City yourself for the live Scriptnotes show.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And we’re very excited to have you there. I kind of thought it was sold out, but they actually released the very back rows of the theater, so now we actually have — as we’re recording this podcast — possibly 40 seats. So, if you are still interested in coming to the October, sorry, September 23 recording of Scriptnotes Live in New York City, you should try to come. And you should try to get a ticket.

**Craig:** I just think it’s amazing that you can sell this — you, I mean we, I suppose — sell these things out. How many people are in this — how many seats are available?

**John:** This will be significantly bigger than the LA version. So, this is 300?

**Craig:** Oh, boy! Well we better have something to talk about.

**John:** We will. So, we’ll have you and me and Craig Mazin, uh, you’re Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** That’s me. That’s also me.

**John:** It’s very late. It’s late recording. There will be you, and me, and Andrew Lippa.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And a piano.

And so we will be talking about writing with somebody and sort of that writing partner process, specifically writing musicals and that whole shared process, the nine-year journey of Big Fish. But there will also be some singing of songs. Andrew Lippa is actually — that’s what he does for a living. But I will do this because I made a bet that I would do this. And you will do this because you have a song you want to sing.

**Craig:** Is he going to be able to play my song?

**John:** Yeah, he can play anything, Craig.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** That’s not going to be an issue.

**Craig:** Is he good at the piano? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. The guy who wrote the Broadway show, is he good at the piano?

**Craig:** Does he know how to work a piano?

**John:** Yeah. He’s competent at that.

**Craig:** He’s no Seth Rudetsky. That’s all I can tell you.

**John:** Oh, no. No one is Seth Rudetsky.

**Craig:** No one!

**John:** Second bit of housekeeping, there will be another opportunity to see me and Craig doing Scriptnotes Live at the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** The Austin Film Festival is at the end of October. We don’t know the exact dates of when our different events are going to be, but there’s two — at least two Scriptnotes things happening there. We are doing a live episode of the podcast. It will be you, and me, and Rian Johnson, which will be kind of great.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And they’ve promised us a big space this year, not a small space.

**Craig:** And not at nine in the morning. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. Last time was at nine in the morning. That’s too early for our listeners. So, it should be a great fun prime time. So, if you’re coming to Austin and you’re coming to the film festival, come see us there.

We’re also talking about doing a second panel workshop thing that would be focused on the Three Page Challenges. If you have a Three Page Challenge that you would like us to look at and you are going to be attending the Austin Film Festival it would be great for you to put that in the email to Stuart saying, “Here’s my Three Page Challenge and I will be at the Austin Film Festival,” because we would love to be able to bring those people up on stage with us and talk with them about the three pages they have submitted.

**Craig:** Yes. That sounds like a lot of stuff in our immediate future.

**John:** Yes. A lot of live speaking. So, the topic I want to talk about today is the difference between intention and motivation. And I sometimes hear them used as the same term, which is fine. I’m not going to be prescriptive. You don’t have to use exactly the words I like to use. But I think they’re actually somewhat different concepts and I want to talk about how you as a writer might use these words to best effect.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** When you talk about a character’s motivation I tend to think of that as the big general who is this person in their world, in their life, and how is who they are in their world and their life and what their aims are reflected in your movie, or in your story.

So, a motivation might be attempting to make peace with his father. A motivation might be greed. It could be something like simple thematic kind of motivation, but it’s an overarching this is what they’re aiming for.

A lot of times in screenwriting we talk about what is the character’s want versus the character’s need. Motivation, you can think of it being the general umbrella category of what is the character going for. What is the character’s overall aim? Generally it is a character, but specifically in a story.

Do you use that term the same way?

**Craig:** I don’t at all.

**John:** Great. [Crosstalk]

**Craig:** I think of it as being a clear line. The way I like to think of that is motivation is why a character is doing something. Intention is what they want to achieve by doing something.

**John:** Oh, so we’re using these terms differently. I think it’s great that we’re having this conversation.

**Craig:** I think of characters, like for instance, I’m motivated by jealousy. My intention is to make you feel bad. Do you see what I mean? That’s sort of how I do it.

**John:** So, I use intention in a different way. And I use intention as a very granular what is a character attempting to achieve in this specific moment. So, intention to me is a thing that can happen in a scene or a sequence, but intention is a very specific “in this moment.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And so what is this character’s intention as the scene is opening and how has the intention changed based on what has happened in the scene?

At any moment I think in a scene you should be able to freeze/pause, and look at each character in the scene and figure out what their intention is. And, if you can’t do that then maybe you need to rethink how the scene is working, because if a character is just there because they’re just there something is not ideal.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like to think about this weird line between why I’m doing something and what I want to achieve, because it’s a way to make characters interesting if you can — if the audience understands why they’re doing something and also can see how when it translates into “and therefore I want to achieve this,” something has gone wrong.

It’s interesting to watch characters be motivated by things and then have these strange intentions because of it.

**John:** Well, I would say another distinction I would try to make is motivations tend to be a little bit less concrete. They are bigger picture things and they’re not necessarily actionable. And intention should be more actionable.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And intention should be something you can see that they’re literally trying to achieve. And you can actually see did they achieve their intention or not achieve their intention.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** There’s a test to it. Like are they doing what they’re trying to do? Even if their intention is like “I’m trying to relax and read my book on the couch,” that’s an intention. And if they’re being prevented in that intention they have reason to be upset.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, even if it seems like a passive intention it’s a thing that they’re trying to do as the scene unfolds.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Do you use a different term for what I’m talking about for like what they’re doing in a scene?

**Craig:** No, because I tend to think that these things can be looked at in a macro way and in a micro way, so within a scene there’s a motivation and there’s an intention. And within a movie there’s a motivation and an intention.

If you look at a character in a very big global sense, you can see plenty of movies where the intention doesn’t change at all, or changes multiple times throughout the movie — what it is the character is trying to achieve changes.

But, it is a rare movie where the motivation never changes and it is a rare movie where the motivation changes more than once or twice, because what motivates somebody is fundamental. And because it’s fundamental, we like to see what’s motivating somebody change. That’s part of what’s built into the arc, the so-called arc of the character is the why they’re doing things changes. “I used to do this for money, but now I’m doing it for love,” in a very big, broad way, right?

But, because it’s such a big deal to fundamentally change your point of view, to change it two, or three, or four times starts to water the character down to mush.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I like to think of characters as their big internal motivations changing at least once but not more than once, so once, right? I think that’s what I mean. Changing once.

But intentions can change a lot or not at all. And sometimes it’s interesting to watch a character whose intention remains exactly the same throughout the movie but the motivation changes for it. That’s interesting.

**John:** Yes. I would also say that a lot of times you think about this with like sort of very classic hero’s journey kind of stories, but Erin Brockovich is a movie that somehow leapt to my mind as we were talking through this is that Erin Brockovich, you know, if you watch her general motivation in that film, as my recollection of it, is she wanted to achieve — so she wanted to achieve something. She wanted to sort of rebuild and restructure her life. She had these things — she wanted to be a different kind of person than she was and be perceived as a different kind of person than she really was.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But her intentions moment by moment are often very much about the case.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And about like getting these people on this porch to trust her and to let her into their lives. And so it was a good example of writing that you can see the overall arc of what she was trying to do, and the actual detailed plot of what’s happening moment, by moment, by moment doesn’t feel like it’s actually hitting that thing, but it always is sort of hitting that thing. What she’s trying to do, literally getting into that door, or getting this next person to take her seriously is reflected in the bigger goal of hers, to be a different person.

**Craig:** Yeah. I totally agree with that. And that’s where I think you want intentions to constantly be changing in relation to the sort of micro intention should constantly be changing. Watching characters shift tactics is a change in intention. Okay, my intention is to intimidate you. Okay, now my intention is to appeal to your better nature. Okay, now my intention is to make a deal with you. So, these exchanges make human interactions interesting.

But my motivation in that scene probably doesn’t change at all. My motivation is because I need this.

**John:** Yes. Your motivation will change as a result of many scenes or many encounters that have nudged you in that way.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, and again, it’s so tempting to think about, oh, intention is something that the hero has, or the main character has, but I really would stress that it’s something that you should be able to pause and look at everybody in that scene and understand what their intention is. Even like to some degree that guy who’s in the background past, sort of the extra who is going from this way to that way, well why is he doing that?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And sometimes you’re just really trying to — really you’re just trying to make the frame not be so empty, but when you can possibly have a reason for why that background pass is happening, the world feels more real.

**Craig:** Agreed. Everything should be motivated. And you can tell sometimes in movies things aren’t motivated for what we call organic reasons that are reasons that are true to the story and the world around it. They’re motivated by external reasons like wouldn’t it be cool if…

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** …car went kaboom. And sometimes it is cool. But, better to see if you can’t make it cool and also motivated.

**John:** Yes. I’ll also say intention is one of those terms you’ll hear actors say a lot, because if you look at what an actor needs to do it’s trying to create the reality, moment by moment, of what the character is trying to achieve in this specific moment.

It’s like an actor in a scene can’t be responsible for the overall arc of the character and all that other stuff. That’s the responsibility of the script. What the actor can be responsible for is, “Is the way I’m interacting with people around me believable for this character? And believable for what this character is trying to have happen right at this moment?”

**Craig:** Well, that’s a good segue I suppose into discussing actors because you do hear that famous, “What’s my motivation?” or “What’s my intention?” all the time. And I think that writers are either scared of talking to actors, particularly when they’re famous and well-established, or they’re just clueless about how to talk to actors. And they don’t understand what actors do.

And, so they blow it all the time. I’ve witnessed it over and over. So, I figured we could talk today about how you and I go about talking to actors and helping them do their jobs better and maybe also, hopefully, they’re helping us do our jobs better.

**John:** I think it’s a terrific conversation. So, do you want to frame this in the context of you are the writer but not the director on the project?

**Craig:** Yeah. I think so. And it’s not that directors don’t have to deal with this all the time, too. They do. But there’s something interesting — there’s an interesting thing between writers and actors just as there is between writers and directors. There is an awkwardness that is around the fact that the writer has seen the movie, has created the movie, has done a thing that has brought everybody together to make the movie, and everybody is a little concerned about it, because there’s a lot of power in that act. And everybody understands that they now have to go and perform it and capture it.

And in doing so, things are going to happen. Even if everybody really wants to stick very, very closely to the script, things are still going to happen. And everyone, I think, initially is wary of a writer who is going to stifle or attempt to quash what could be some happy accidents. And so much about performance in particular is about being in the moment and natural which requires the opposite of a screenplay. It’s a very difficult thing to do — take something that is static and fixed and present it as dynamic and of a moment and extemporaneous. Very hard to do.

So, the first bit of advice that I have for writers when they’re talking to actors is something to think about before they talk to actors, before they walk up to an actor or before they even consider it. And that is to appreciate what these people have. You may not like the way they talk about your script. You may think that they don’t understand the script at all. You might be right. That happens sometimes.

But you also have to acknowledge that if it were you, the movie would be awful, and not because you’re not a big star that people didn’t know, but because you’re not a good actor, and because your face doesn’t belong on film. There are faces that belong in movies and there are faces that don’t. It’s not even a question of beauty. There are some remarkably odd looking faces that have had amazing characters. But there is a magic that is both internal and external to being a movie star.

So, stop for a moment and say, “Let me give this person the respect they deserve for having something unique that I do not have. And let me then also ask myself is it possible that maybe there’s a little bit of magic there that is not just the result of a roll of the dice but some craft, because it is craft. So, start from a place of respect.

**John:** Yes. My general advice that I’ve been using the last couple of months is assume good intention. And so whenever someday says something that’s like kind of offensive to me, I stop for a second and think, “Well, you know what? They probably meant that not at all the way I heard that and they actually meant that in a positive way.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I find a lot of conversations with actors can be like that way because they’ll say like, “This doesn’t make sense, or my character would never do this.” And, they’re wrong, because the character — I know the character really well. I was all the characters before they were those characters.

But, they’re saying that because they are feeling that they cannot actually achieve this thing here, or they can’t get from point A to point B in a way that is going to make sense for them on film. And if it’s not going to make sense for them on film, it’s not going to make sense in the finished product.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, they’re asking you for help. They’re just asking you for help in a frustrating way.

**Craig:** They are. And sometimes you may find yourself feeling like, “Well, why am I always the one that has to sort of not throw a tantrum?” You can throw a tantrum if you want. It’s not going to get you very far in the world.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And I don’t really think of these people as throwing tantrums. I think that when an actor says, “Well, my character wouldn’t do that,” they mean my character, meaning me playing this character wouldn’t do that. And they’re right. Their character wouldn’t do it. You wrote a character that wasn’t their character, it was your character, and now it’s their character. And it has to go through their brain, their mind, their memories, their abilities, their character wouldn’t do that.

There are two great fears that I remind myself I think all actors have all the time. One is that they don’t understand how they’re supposed to play something, which is terrifying the way that it’s terrifying for us when we don’t know how to write something. And the other great fear they have is of being embarrassed. And the embarrassment that you suffer as an actor is so much more profound, public, and visible than the embarrassment we suffer as writers.

So, when an actor, this is great — I’m glad you brought that up. Because when an actor says, “My character wouldn’t do this,” take it seriously. And then explain as best you can what you were going for without shackling them to what’s there. And just say, “Well, forget what’s there. Here’s what I was going for and here’s what my reasoning was. And let’s just have a discussion.”

A lot of times just by talking it through it comes around to the smallest thing. The smallest thing. And you walk away thinking, “That was all about that?!” Yeah, okay. So it was, but they needed that. And god knows we have enough of our own foibles that we can’t really afford to point fingers at others.

**John:** The other thing I would stress is remember that you’re talking to — you’re usually talking to them about specific moments and specific scenes. And your answer as the writer can never be, “Because we need this to happen here or to do this.” You can never talk in terms of the story, because the story is not interesting to the actor. The actor is trying to focus on what they do in this moment.

So, generally, you’re going to be focusing on what is the journey of this character in this moment, to the next moment, to the next moment, and it has to seem like the character is in control of all these things and that the character is not doing something because the movie needs him to do it.

**Craig:** And that’s bad writing anyway if that’s what you — you know, that’s embarrassing for you to say, “Well, I know it doesn’t make any — really, it’s not necessarily connected to character. We just need to because we need that thing/explosion to happen, or we just need you to say that so we can be able to walk through the door there. It’s bad writing.

**John:** Well, yeah, but no, it’s not necessarily bad writing. Because, to be fair, there are times where we are cutting out of scene on a specific moment because that cut was going to give us power to get to the next thing, but the actor doesn’t feel that because the actor sees like, “But I would say this, and I would say this, and I would say this.” And you’re like, yes, you would, but the scene has already cut by that point.

**Craig:** Oh, I’ve never really had an experience where that was going on. Sometimes when actors ask to go a little longer in the scene, I think it’s perfectly fine to say great, do it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If you know you’re getting the scissors in earlier, go nuts. [laughs] You know, to me, also, being a good editor and being able to edit in your mind will save you some battles that you don’t need to fight.

**John:** Yeah. But that’s honestly, that’s the luxury of being the empowered writer who is allowed to sort of say that, “Oh, you can keep going on.” So, if you’re saying like, oh, you’re going to keep improving after this point, but if the writer is now being expected to make a scene go longer than it would ever possibly be, and to have to defend that longer scene to the director, to the producers, to everybody else.

**Craig:** Oh, no, no, no. That’s where you go to the director and you’re just like, “Look, they want to just keep talking. You want me to just write this to make them feel good and we’ll just shoot a little bit of it?” Which, you can do.

I mean, I have to say, I’ve actually never had this come up. That’s never come up. I mean, usually because a responsible actor has read the script, knows what’s coming next, understands things. And that’s really also the director at that point should be stepping in to sort of defend his cut, because ultimately that’s what we’re talking about is transitions and cuts.

**John:** In general I found one of the most helpful processes to this part of getting the movie ready to with you have the script, you have the actors, is to get everyone in a room and read the script aloud at least once.

**Craig:** For sure.

**John:** Because that way you know that every actor at that table has at least heard the whole movie once. Because otherwise actors will focus on the scenes that they’re in and really won’t have a good sense of what the rest of the movie is. And so not only will that make them understand why those scenes are those scenes, but they’ll also know like who everybody else in the movie actually is in a way that’s very, very helpful

**Craig:** Right. I do agree with that. I think every movie should have that read through, even if you just do — I think on Identity Thief we just did a read through really with Melissa and Jason. And that was fine.

**John:** That’s fine.

**Craig:** We didn’t need to do like all the side parts. As long as those two understood everything and that I was able to hear it and then go, by the way, the other thing is you have to, when you start to hear your actors, they’re now the cast. They will be those characters forever. Forever.

So, you have to listen now and you have to go back and you have to adjust to fit the way they are doing it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And don’t be tight about that. Be okay with that. The intentions, the motivations as we discussed, don’t have to change. Your structure, all of the dramatic import is there. It’s just the expression of it, because ultimately — you know, there’s this really funny audio clip on the internet of William Shatner berating some poor director that he’s recording some voiceover for.

And so he’s doing this voiceover. It sounds like it’s for a museum or something about exploring the galaxy or something. And the guy says, “Well, I was kind of hoping you’d do it a little more like this, more like that.” And William Shatner goes, “Well, how would you like me to do it? How do you hear it?” And the guy makes the terrible mistake of doing it.

**John:** Oh, no, never a good idea.

**Craig:** And Shatner is, “Oh, is that what you want? Okay.” And then Shatner does an amazing impression of that guy doing it and it’s awful. And while Shatner is a terrible person for doing that, [laughs], he does have a point which is, “Hey, I get that it’s not the way you heard it in your head. I’m not in your head. I’m not you. I’m me. I’m the movie star. Maybe there might be value in the way I’m doing it. So, perhaps you can help adjust the way I’m doing it, but still make it the way I do it, because I’m me.” And I think there’s wisdom in that.

**John:** There is. One of the things that has been most interesting about Big Fish is that unlike movies or a TV show where obviously you’re going to film it once and that actor is that character, it’s all the same, ideally in a Broadway show the Broadway show should be the same Broadway show no matter who is actually playing those parts. And that’s been a fascinating thing is that we’ve had moments where an understudy has to go in, or someone else has to go in, or we just have to fill in for whatever reason. So, it’s that balance between tailoring it for one specific person’s voice and making it something that can be played by a range of people.

**Craig:** Well, it’s funny, my son and I have been listening to Fiddler on the Roof lately a lot. And so, you know, I started with the original Broadway recording, which for me is the superior recording with Zero Mostel. And then we started listening to the Topol version, which was the London cast, which I hate. But I know a lot of people like Topol. I do not.

And it is remarkable how you can see that the part was very difficult for somebody who wasn’t a — for lack of a better word — a New York Yiddish theater troupe kind of actor to do. The jokes are very kind of old school Yiddish jokes. And Topol is Israeli and just doesn’t get them. He doesn’t get the jokes, you know? It is interesting to see how that translates so oddly.

I mean, the other thing is I was watching — I finally got around to watching the movie version of Les Miserables. And there are just so many choices where I went, whoa, that was weird.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, forget the directorial choices, just the actors the way they performed it, the way they chose to inflect things and approach things. It was just like, “That was weird.” But, you know, when you sort of think about it, do you think, well, the idea here is this is my A cast, and eventually they will go away one day, if the show is a hit, and it goes on and on. Eventually they will go away and a second refreshed cast will come in like they have for instance for Mormon.

And the idea is that that second cast coming in should be essentially copying the first cast?

**John:** That is a very interesting question and sometimes you would love to have copying, where essentially one person sets the template and the next cast, person cast in that role, does the same thing and sort of hits the same beats and inflects things the same way and it’s just like you’ve slotted in the clone for somebody.

But other times that’s not the right choice and a different energy is a fascinating great energy.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, two recent things I can say about this is I saw Wicked when it first opened ten years ago, it was still in previews ten years ago. And then we took our daughter to see it last week and I loved it both times. The first time I saw it with Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, and this last time it was with new actors, and the Elphaba was a very different characterization than I remember from when I first saw it, when I first saw Idina Menzel do it. But I really dug what she did. She made some really strange sort of nerdy choices that were kind of great for it.

And the woman playing Glinda, she was terrific also, but I could not see that without seeing Kristin Chenoweth. I felt like Kristin Chenoweth and that Glinda role were fused in a way that is very hard to separate. And I’m sure you could do a Glinda that didn’t do any of Kristin Chenoweth’s stuff, but it feels like it would be really hard to.

**Craig:** Well, I wonder if maybe for musicals it’s a question of time as well. You know, like Mormon, this is the second cast. They’re still in their kind of — it feels like the first run of it, still. So, it’s kind of like, here, we’re letting those guys off the hook but we still have a few people that are in it like Nikki, oh geez, I’m blanking on her last name. I apologize. But she’s still there from the original cast, so it’s still kind of like the original show. So it just copied those guys.

But if it comes back, or if it keeps going, if it’s eight years down the road let’s just change it up because it’s going to get stale. And, of course, if you revive something, change it up just to be interesting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, anyway, that will be a good problem for you to worry about.

**John:** These would be luxury problems that we have to think about how we’re going to — what we’re going to do as we recast.

**Craig:** Luxury problems.

**John:** And, honestly, it is a thing that comes up because right now we have Norbert Leo Butz playing the lead, and he’s phenomenal. And he’s a terrific actor, and a terrific dancer, and a terrific singer, and to find somebody who could do all those things as well as he does is going to be terrifically challenging. But that’s, again, luxury problems.

**Craig:** Doogie Howser. That’s my vote.

**John:** So, let’s segue to our third topic here which is sort of on the set writing and sort of what that kit is because that’s all I’ve been doing the last two months is making those changes day by day and creating those pages for what’s actually happening. So, I’m curious when you’re doing the Hangover movies, what is your setup — ?

**Craig:** I got it so I got a real system there, because the Hangover movies take us to some strange places obviously, whether it’s hot and muggy and traffic-y Bangkok, or I’m in the middle of the desert somewhere. And the truth is the writing never stops, so there’s a couple of things that I think about. One is, what’s my equipment that I need, and two, what’s my process, so that I can be as efficient as all the people around me.

So, first, let’s just talk about stuff, because — this is probably less important for theater because you’re inside and it’s theoretically air-conditioning, but for movies you could be on rocks, you could be on water, you could be anywhere.

You want to have a very rugged laptop case, something that can take a little bit of a beating. You don’t need one of those Alienware moon laptops. A regular laptop is fine. But you do need some stuff. You probably want an internet connection. It would behoove you to have one. A lot of movie productions now have WiFi bases that they broadcast from the generator truck and elsewhere so you can hook into that. The signal is iffy a lot.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, the other option is to get one of those little Verizon USB thingies that pick up a cell signal. And hopefully you can have one or the other. You definitely want a couple of USB thumb drives. Those become super important when you can’t necessarily email stuff back and forth. You want a good portable printer. There are a bunch out there that are lightweight. You want to be able to print either wirelessly or back it up to print via a USB cable. And you’ll need some paper, of course. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy there, just some paper.

The printer should be small and it doesn’t need to be super fast because you’re never going to be printing out lots of pages. The most pages that will be printing out at a time? Probably three, because that’s about how many pages you’re shooting on a day, unless you’re shooting in India and then it’s seven, so it’s not that big of a deal. Right? It’s portable better than huge.

When you — if you are going to be an onset writer, then what you want to do is find your First AD pretty early on before the movie starts and say, look, we’re going to be doing some writing day by day. I don’t need much. All I need is this. I need a cart that I can put my laptop on. Obviously I need a chair from props. They make those little foldy chairs. I need in the morning just as a matter of routine I need the electricians to hook up power to the cart and I need a power strip duct-taped to the cart. So, it’s just a cart, a seat, and a functioning power strip. That’s all I need. I’ll take care of the rest. [laughs]

And they can do that. They can do that anywhere you go. Once you have your cart, your power strip, you can do whatever you need to do.

**John:** So, do you leave your portable printer on the cart?

**Craig:** I do. You can leave stuff on the cart and they’ll just pack it up on the truck and then bring it back the next day and they will appreciate the fact that it’s not this massive laser printer, but an eight pound piece of plastic that fits on the bottom of the cart.

All of your charging cables and all the rest of that you put back in your laptop bag. Your laptop you take with you. All that stuff you take with you. I usually leave — on the cart I leave the printer and the paper, the ream of paper. That’s it. Everything else goes.

The cart is usually the domain of the video playback guy, so be very nice to him and be good friends with him. Usually the cart is part and parcel with the producer area or a secondary thing. If you’re not going to be part and parcel with the producer area then you just need a secondary cart. That’s it. And you get one.

**John:** That’s awesome. Craig, I’ve actually learned a lot from that because I’ve never had to do that kind of stuff. And so the times that I’ve been writing on set I’ve generally been back in the trailer, because I’ve not been on the kind of things where I’m going to be generating a new page literally five feet away from where that thing is filming.

I’ve always been able to go back to my trailer to do stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah, I find that when you go away, just be going away you open the door to other people solving problems, and some of them aren’t people you want solving problems.

**John:** I hear you.

**Craig:** The fact that you’re there, present, typing — everybody lets you do it. [laughs] Then you print it out. Now, the other thing that I find very useful for film production is, and I would do this on the Hangover movies, before each day, when I would get in in the morning, you know, somebody hands you sides which is just your little miniature page printed up version of that day’s work. So, let’s say you’re doing scene 120 today and it’s three pages, so here’s three little mini pages.

And I watch as the director and the actors talk about blocking and all the rest and if there are any questions for me, I’m there if that should happen. Once that’s over, there’s usually at least an hour where they’re in hair and makeup and the crew is lighting the set, or the location. That’s when I go back to my cart, open up my laptop, and then I go into my document and I pull out the day’s work. And I make a new document that’s just Day This for that day, and that thing.

Because, I don’t have these little sides-y things in my computer. And I don’t necessarily want to be making constant changes in the master script, because a lot of this stuff you’re not issuing as official, “official pages.” So, I’ll do it just as a side document. And then at the end of the day I take the side document that was finalized and I paste it back into the master. And eventually I get to a point where I’m like, okay, if you want we can issue a whole bunch of changed pages or not. It depends on how that production works.

**John:** So, on scenarios like this when you are making some changes to this little document, is it mostly in consultation with the director before the actors come back to set, or is it once they’ve come back and they’ve started kind of playing around in the scene and you figure out who’s actually going to say what, when, and how you’re going to move stuff around?

**Craig:** Kind of a crapshoot depending on the day’s work. So, on some days they would come back in and it wouldn’t feel right and we’d take a break and Todd and I would sit and work on something. Some days Todd and I would work on things while they were in that hair and makeup session and get it dialed in. Sometimes we would just come up with some alt lines when we were doing coverage and so we would work on those.

So, you just stay flexible within the day’s work. And you’re always there to do what you need to do. And just be flexible. So, the last thing you want is to have anything getting in the way of you being able to deliver work to wherever you are, whether it’s on a boat, or on the top of a building. I’ve been on both of those, or, you know, in a field, or in a desert. I’ve been in those. You want your rig so you can do your work.

**John:** Now, I want to make sure that listeners understand that what Craig is describing isn’t actually typical for a lot of screenwriters in that I’ve never had to do that and I’ve had a lot of movies made. And I’ve been the writer on set on those movies to the degree that there was a set to be a writer on. But at most I would sort of like answer a question or talk about the next day’s shooting work. But was very rarely involved in any rewrites on what was actually happening that day.

**Craig:** You’re hearing of it more and more. I’ve been doing it like this for a long time. I don’t know why, it’s just for whatever reason this is how my life and my career has gone. But, for instance, I know that Chris McQuarrie did it on World War Z. And, I’m trying to think of somebody else who I know was in the trenches on a movie. I know Chris Morgan does it on the Fast & Furious movies.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** So, people are doing it more and more. And I wasn’t able to do it on Identity Thief. I would have liked to have been able to do it. But for that what happened is I would usually get calls about, okay, tomorrow’s work, or next week’s work. And so then I would send those so there would be kind of a — all right, well, when you wake up in the morning the elves will have made you pages. That kind of thing.

**John:** That’s usually the case of what I’m facing is that as something comes up in the schedule that’s about to shoot and there are issues about it, then I’ll have those conversations and do whatever needs to get done. But, for a movie like Go I was there for every frame shot, but it was literally like, “You’re going to shoot what I wrote.” And that sometimes works out very nicely, too.

**Craig:** For sure. I mean, the thing about the Hangover movies is they weren’t my movies. I was a Johnny Come Lately in the trilogy anyway. And I wrote them with Todd. So, really, it was about being a co-writer and a partner to him. And since he’s the director, he can rewrite anything he wants. [laughs] And he’s a writer. So, then it was just about sometimes the two of us.

And, you know, sometimes it was really hard and sometimes it was great. Sometimes it was fun. I remember one scene, I just remember the two of us sitting on like a piece of scenery on a soundstage with a laptop and it was one of those moment where you’re like, look at us, we’re like movie guys. And there was another day where we were struggling with something and we got in the golf cart and drove around Warner Bros. until we figured it out. And that was another, look at us, this is like right out of a movie about how they make movies.

Most of the time it was just me at my cart, with a cup of bad craft service coffee, banging away.

**John:** Yup. To give a quick version of what the theater equivalent of that is, so we go through two stages. Obviously we are writing, just me and Andrew Lippa, doing all our stuff and performing for the producers for a long time, but once we’re sort of — our equivalent of being onset is in the rehearsal hall which is where we sort of go through and we stage the whole thing just with temporary props and rehearsal clothes and not the real anything, and in that, you’re trying to get what you wrote to actually make sense on the stage, but there’s constant adjustments based on what’s actually going to be possible or when you can get somebody on or off.

For that, I have my little MacBook Air. There’s a printer down at the edge where I can print to and I will generate new pages. Usually we’ll put out pages at the end of the day, and so we’ll reflect what we have done that changed today, and what we want to change — the stuff that’s going to effect tomorrow — and so I will print out those pages. Director Susan Stroman and I will go through and we’ll agree that these are the real pages and that changes the master script. And that’s a big difference from everything that we do really in film and in television where because that’s now the template for how we’re going to make the show from here on out…

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** …everything has to be reflected in the script or else it just doesn’t actually happen. And it’s not just like the actors need to know their lines. That script is also what all the cues are called off of. And so if one line has changed, that could affect the music department, the lighting department, projections, everybody else.

**Craig:** It’s so different, yeah. Because in movies and in TV when you finish your day it’s like you’ve eaten food. It’s gone. It’s eaten. It’s not coming back. You’re not doing that again. It’s onto the next. And when you make changes in a show like this that’s meant to be performed over and over, it’s never eaten. It’s always there. Like an embalmed body, it’s always there.

I have a question for you. Do you ever feel this inner pull? Sometimes I feel it and I always shut it down because I think it’s bad news. But this little voice that goes, “Don’t you just want to be done?”

**John:** Absolutely. It’s the inherent unfinishability of theater that is both terrific and really maddening. Is that there’s no post-production because you’re never actually finished. And so we will open the show on October 6, and that will be the end of probably writing for this version that’s on the stage right now.

But then there will be immediate conversations about all of the other versions we have to do. So, god-willing, we wanted to stage this somewhere else, we’d have to be able to figure out how we’re going to do that. And every department will have challenges about how we’re going to do that. Are we going to be able to have this large of a cast? Are we going to be able to have this kind of set? If we don’t have this kind of set, what would make sense?

We have a giant USO number in the show. And will that make sense in Europe? Probably not. So, there may be some real fundamental changes that I’ll be making on the show and I’ll probably be writing some version of it the rest of my life. And that’s maddening to some degree, not just because, oh, I love this project, but having to continue to rewrite this project keeps me from writing the next thing.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. Yeah. And even just on a small basis, even on things that are finishable, there’s that feeling sometimes of let’s just do — let’s stop trying to do things to it. And, you know, there is such a thing as over-writing and there is such a thing as getting bored with your own work and hurting it by working on it too much. But more often than not the more willing you are to entertain even the craziest suggestion, the better off you are.

You just have to be willing to not look at that pain as pain.

**John:** Yes. I mean, the luxury we have is that we have a test screening every night. So, we get to know every night how is it working.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so you can polish and refine it in ways that are very difficult to do in a movie. In a movie you can do your test screenings, and maybe you can do some reshooting, but like you’re not going to vastly change things.

We have vastly changed the first act from Chicago to here and it’s a much better show for it. And we could do that because we could do that, because we had the resources, we had the time, we had the stamina to actually like rip things apart and put them back together in a better way. So, that’s a great luxury.

So, I, too, am a fan of cheap printers. It’s really remarkable how cheap printers have become. The ink jet ones, the printer is essentially disposable because the ink cartridges cost more than the actual printer does.

**Craig:** I know, it’s sick.

**John:** But Nima Yousefi who now works for me found on Amazon this really amazing Brother HL printer that’s $70. It’s like a laser printer that’s actually surprisingly fast. So, I have that in my apartment here in New York and that’s the printer I use here as I’m generating stuff, so like we’re putting out new pages tomorrow so that’s been my test printer for that.

**Craig:** I can’t recommend the printer I was using on The Hangover because I hated it. I hated it. It was a Canon. It was crap.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I was angry at it all the time.

**John:** But there’s something lovely about putting something on paper once just to make sure it’s looking right. But most of what you’re going to end up doing is going to be emails and Dropbox. And that’s why an internet connection is so important.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a big help. I mean, if you, for instance, need to quickly — sometimes they’re waiting — sometimes what happens is you watch the scene, everybody works on the scene together, me, the director, the actors, we all come up with a version. And what I’m doing while we’re doing it is I’m writing it on the sides in pen. And then we get it, and we’re happy, and we’re good.

Now, okay, they’re all going to do five minute touch-ups, and then we’ve got to shoot. I’ve got to go type that so that they have it, so they can read it, because no one can read my scrawl and it’s only on one little thing.

So, now I type it up really quickly, I get it right. Now, how do I make, okay, it’s a scene with six people. It’s three pages. I’ve got to print out 18 pages. How quickly can I get that done, you know? So, sometimes it’s easier to just email it to the production trailer and have them run it over.

**John:** Yeah. The thing I found very useful about theater is that index cards are heavily used. And so on an index card if I change a line I will write it in pen on an index card and hand it to the actor directly if it’s something where we’re literally changing the line in front of the actor, or I’ll hand it to Stroman, the director, for like this is what the new line is so that before there’s a new page there’s at least a card that reflects what that new line is.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Index cards are sort of one of the main forms of documentation in this part of the business.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** So, Craig, I think it’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And my One Cool Thing is, again, I feel like I’ve cheated on you a little bit because I did another broadcast. But I just did KCRW’s The Business, which is a great podcast. I know you don’t listen to other podcasts, but it’s a radio show and a podcast hosted by Kim Masters.

**Craig:** I’ve done that before.

**John:** Ah, in that case you’ve been in that little crazy basement at Santa Monica College?

**Craig:** No, I did it by phone. I phoned it in. Literally phoned it in.

**John:** You literally phoned it in. Dan Jinks and I went and did an interview with her about the business of making Big Fish and sort of like the whole process and how that all works. And I was reminded that I never actually I think hyped that podcast or that show on the air. And it really is a terrific look at sort of mostly how Hollywood functions. And she takes one or two topics each week and really sort of drills in with interviews.

She does this sort of news recap with John Horn of the LA Times. And then Darby Maloney who is the producer and editor of it just does a terrific job distilling stuff down.

You and I when we talk, it’s just this sort of raw, unfiltered, people blathering, but this is a much more carefully crafted thing. I would highly recommend it.

**Craig:** But our raw, unfiltered blathering is remarkably well organized. Do you ever read the transcripts of our podcasts?

**John:** Sometimes it really does seem like we were, you know, we planned it.

**Craig:** That we were reading off of sheets of paper. We’re really good at this, John. We’re really good at this.

**John:** Oh, we’re incredibly good.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** Although, one listener did email in this last week pointing out that my elocution, my diction has taken a nosedive.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And it’s honestly true. And I hear it myself even as I’m doing this now. I am so tired, Craig. I am zombie tired. And today was supposed to be — we’re recording this on a Sunday — was supposed to be my day off, but then we had six hours of meetings.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So, it has not been a day off.

**Craig:** Well, I think it’s terrific that you are using the euphemism six hours of meetings to describe your obvious alcoholism.

**John:** [laughs] That’s really what it is. It’s all a desperate cry for help.

**Craig:** I had a six hour meeting with this bottle of rye. Uh, you’re a drunk. There’s no other possible explanation for “inneresting.”

**John:** Yeah, I’m drunk at —

**Craig:** All moment. Constantly drunk.

**John:** Either drunk or I’m from Colorado. Those are the two choices.

**Craig:** Is there a difference?

**John:** It’s attitude.

**Craig:** It’s altitude sickness. Well, I have a Cool Thing this week that was, as are so many of my Cool Things, recommend by a Twitter follower. But this one really has the potential to be awesome. It’s almost there. It’s not quite there yet, but they’re working on it. It’s called writerduet.com. It is free. And the idea of writerduet.com is to provide functionality that already exists in Final Draft and Movie Magic.

Well, what would be so cool about that, you ask. Well, the functionality in Final Draft and Movie Magic, that is to say the ability to write and collaborate with another writer via an online connection is offered but it doesn’t work in either software. It has never worked. It is insane. The way they’ve set it up and what they require is ridiculous. It will never work.

So, what one of those companies should have done but failed to do years ago was to setup a server and make it web-based and allow people to upload a script, an existing script, to that, or to begin to write an existing script in that service. And to do it collaboratively a la Google Docs.

And that’s what writerduet.com has done. They do accept PDF and FDX imports. I’m not sure how they’re converting the PDF to text. Perhaps they’re using some form of your Highland. I don’t know.

**John:** Perhaps.

**Craig:** Ripping you off. I’m sure you’re immediately hitting —

**John:** No, it’s absolutely fair. I think, I kind of believe they may actually be using Fountain as their underlying, because I have heard of the service. I will Google them after.

**Craig:** And it works. So, I tested it with my assistant and the two of us worked and it worked. And it was good. It’s a little slow, a little kludgy here and there. There’s some things that they’ve got to work out. And when I uploaded a full Final Draft script, a full 115 page script, my browser got really slow, to the point of just not being usable.

So, I mentioned that to the developer and he said, “Okay, got it. I’m going to work on that.” And I find that these guys do work on these things and they do make them better.

So, I think if you’re interested in something like this and you at least want to poke around at it, it’s the future, I think. I think this is where things are going to go. Writerduet.com.

**John:** Fantastic. I will point out that several writers I know do use Google Docs for exactly this purpose. And they just use Fountain. They use the plain text markup language in Fountain to do it. And that works great for them, too. So, it’s nice that there are multiple places trying to do the same things and try to do them a bit more smartly than the big behemoth apps.

**Craig:** Yeah. Agreed.

**John:** Cool. Craig, thank you for getting me through another podcast.

**Craig:** You did it. You did it, buddy. Hang in there. I’ll be there soon. And, [sirens in background], oh, and look, the sirens are here. That means it’s time to sign off and say goodnight.

**John:** All right, Craig, thank you.

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

**John:** Goodnight.

Links:

* [Shofars](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shofar) on Wikipedia
* [Submit your Three Pages now](http://johnaugust.com/threepage) and let us know you’ll be at the [2013 Austin Film Festival](http://www.austinfilmfestival.com/)
* [The William Shatner recording session](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfDHIqmUUMs)
* [Brother HL2230 Laser Printer](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004H1PB9I/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* John and Dan Jinks on [KCRW’s The Business](http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/tb/tb130909john_august_and_dan_)
* [Writerduet.com](https://writerduet.com/) lets you collaborate in real-time
* Outro by Scriptnotes listener Kurt Kuenne

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/50-random-questions).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Mera naam hai Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 90 of Scriptnotes, a podcast this week not so much about screenwriting, but things that could be interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, how are you?

**Craig:** I’m fine. I have to tell you that I just spoke Hindi and you didn’t even — you didn’t care.

**John:** Yeah. I just accept that you’re going to do weird things every week, so I just…

**Craig:** I spoke Hindi, per a listener’s request.

**John:** That’s pretty great.

**Craig:** Yeah! I feel good about it.

**John:** You should feel good about it.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** I’m sorry. I should acknowledge when you jump out of your comfort zone.

**Craig:** [laughs] Because it doesn’t happen very frequently.

**John:** I should tell listeners that I offered to let you actually do the intro today, and you said, “No, no, no.” And now I know the reason why you didn’t want to do the whole intro is because you’d already practiced how you were going to do your Hindi for just your one thing. And that’s why you didn’t want to do the whole “Welcome to Scriptnotes.”

**Craig:** Allow me to embarrass myself. I didn’t even think that through.

**John:** Okay. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] I really just think, you’re right, I mean, in retrospect that’s a good point. But more than anything I’m just becoming Rain Man-ish, and I don’t like change.

**John:** Yes. So, last night I hosted this thing at The Academy and it was tremendously fun. And we had like a thousand people there, which was great and nuts, and so I want to thank everyone for coming.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** People came up afterwards. But, it struck me — I knew I would need to start off the evening, and I just wanted to get through the first three sentences without messing up. And so I was going to start like, “Hello and good evening on behalf — my name is John August — on behalf of The Academy it is my pleasure to welcome you.”

But because I always start the podcast as, “Hello and welcome,” it was so hard to break myself of that. And so before I was going up on stage I was just in a loop going, “Hello and good evening. Hello and good evening. Hello and good evening.” But I got through it!

**Craig:** You got through it, buddy. I’m super proud of you.

**John:** Oh, thank you so much. And it made me think about our live episodes of Scriptnotes coming up this summer and how excited I am about those.

The one for the Writers Guild Foundation is a lock. And that is definitely going to happen. The second one in July, dates could be shifting a little bit, but there’s going to be something in July to celebrate our hundredth anniversary. So, I look forward to seeing more of our people in person then.

**Craig:** Yes, our people.

**John:** Our people.

**Craig:** Come to us, our people.

**John:** Craig, you had two items for the agenda before we get to all of these great questions that listeners have submitted. So, let’s talk through the agenda items first.

**Craig:** Yeah, real quick, because we have so much to talk about today. So many questions to answer. Two topics. One, Zach Braff redux. And, two, what’s going on with E! and the Fashion Police strike.

So, real quick on Zach Braff. There was kind of a weird thing that happened over the last couple of days where The Hollywood Reporter basically said, “Hey look, this other film financier came in and gave him a whole big bunch of money, like another $8 million or whatever.” So, he is, according to that article, he is funding his movie with traditional funding and all of you people that gave him $2 million, why? Why would you have done that?

Turns out that’s not exactly the case. Really what’s going on is that it’s gap financing. And Zach Braff had always said in his Kickstarter, “Look, I’m going to fund this movie through Kickstarter and foreign presales.” And foreign presales kind of work in such a way that you sell the movie to people before you make it based on who’s in it. And they say, “Okay, we’ll buy it for this.”

But you need to make the movie now. That’s money is not showing up for awhile. So, these gap financiers come in and say, “We’ll loan you that money, because we have the collateral of all these people who have agreed to pay you the money.” And so that’s kind of how that works.

However, I should just add, I don’t think people really understood how foreign financing presales work and, frankly, the truth is even though he told you this from the start, he was really saying, “Look, I’m going to finance this movie half traditionally for people that get something for what they give, and half not traditionally — you get nothing for what you give.” So, I’m not surprised that people are confused. This is going to come up and up again.

**John:** I didn’t follow it all that closely, but it seemed like there was backlash. And there was backlash-backlash, and it just becomes this big cycle of whatever. It’s very common — what you’re talking about with gap financing — is actually very, very common. It’s how a lot of indies get made. And so there’s nothing wrong with that. It just gets swirled into all of this crowd sourced excitement and enthusiasm and it just becomes weird.

So, I can understand everyone’s perspective on why they’re frustrated.

**Craig:** Right. Normally this isn’t an issue because films are financed by financiers who are in it for profit and not for joy and pro-social activity. Now, we’ve kind of — it’s a strange thing to fund an enterprise with both charity and traditional profit investment.

**John:** Now, while I know almost nothing about the Zach Braff situation, I know even less about this E! Fashion Police thing, so catch me up to speed on that.

**Craig:** So, Fashion Police, I don’t know if you ever watch it.

**John:** No. I don’t. I never actually turn on E! — like for years I haven’t seen E!. So, tell me about it. It’s a Joan Rivers show?

**Craig:** It’s a Joan Rivers show. So, it’s a panel show, Joan Rivers, and Kelly Osbourne, and a very thin woman, and a very funny fashion guy, they critique red carpet fashion. And it’s just a super gay catty show and it’s really, really funny. My wife watches it religiously, so I kind of absorb it. You know, she has her thing of Fashion Police and then The Soup. And it’s actually really, really funny. I mean, Joan Rivers is still super, duper funny.

But, the problem is that the writers of that show just haven’t been paid very well. And they essentially want to be unionized. They want it to be a WGA show. A lot of them are WGA writers, which kind of drives me crazy a little bit, because if you’re a WGA writer you’re not allowed to write on shows that are not WGA shows if there is a contract that exists to cover that show, or that could cover it. You know what I mean?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s one of our rules. And it kind of makes me nuts, but I guess it’s so widespread you can’t do anything about it. Long story short, they walked off and basically said, “Look, we want a union deal.”

And E! said, “Um, yeah, listen, um, all you have to is vote. If you just have an official union election governed by the NLRB then we’ll let you be WGA.”

And I just wanted to tell people following along at home, if you’ve read that, that’s basically baloney. The deal is the writers have already expressed that they want t be union. The great majority of them want to be union. E! has the ability to just say, “Oh, okay, you all want to be union, or a great majority of you want to be union. Poof. Let’s just start negotiating a union deal.”

The reason they’re insisting on an official NLRB election process is because that drags it out, it gives them a lot more control over the process. They have the potential to try and fire some people, even though that’s illegal they do it all the time. They also have the ability to put a lot of pressure on the writers to not vote. They get a chance to make their case very strongly. It’s essentially a union-busty kind of thing.

But the fact is all they have to do, when they’re like, “Just vote.” They don’t need to vote. Everybody that understands how unions work knows what they’re doing, so anyway, what I’m really saying is, hey, E!, come on. They want to be Writers Guild. It’s the right thing to do. It’s a funny show. I’m sure you guys make a lot of money on it. Please, just come on.

**John:** Yeah. In previous situations we’ve talked about reality shows and it’s a question of like is that really writing, what are they really doing, and there was a whole controversy when the WGA was trying to cover these shows. There was a real question of is that the kind of thing that should really be covered.

But here, this is writing…

**Craig:** Oh, clearly.

**John:** You’re writing material that’s being performed on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a comedy variety show. So, come on, E!. Enough with the, “Oh, we need an election.” Gee, golly, if only they would just vote.” Yeah, come on, please. Too smart for you.

Okay. So, those were my follow ups.

**John:** Hooray. My only bit of news that I will launch before we go into our big questions is Highland Version 1.0.2 is in the Mac App Store right now, so if people are using Highland they can download the new version. The new version has a really cool way of making things uppercase. You can hit shift-return and it makes that line uppercase, which is incredibly useful in Fountain.

And it has lyrics, because I needed people to sing. So, this is completely scratching my own itch. I needed lyrics, and now there are lyrics.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Hooray.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** But our podcast today, I’m so excited, is all about things other than screenwriting. That will be the last screenwriting thing we’ll mention today, because for now on it’s just John and Craig talking about stuff we are probably not really qualified to talk about, but we’re going to talk about anyway. We’re going to answer these questions.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** So, people wrote in. We had 90 questions or something. We had a tremendous amount of questions. We culled the list down a little bit. People wrote in at ask@johnaugust.com. They sent us Twitter questions. They went on our Facebook page and asked questions. So, let’s hit it.

**Craig:** Let’s do it.

**John:** Maybe we’ll alternate, so I’ll start with the first question which is from a guy named Jason. “If I someday have the opportunity to be uploaded into a robot body, should I do it?”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I say yes also. And, obviously, the topic of mortality and sort of what it means to be alive are valid questions. They’re good philosophical questions. They’re good questions for a movie. But, if I had the opportunity to like not die, and be a robot, I’m okay with that.

**Craig:** Yeah. You definitely want to do this, because you are just your brain. I’m assuming when you say “uploaded into” you mean your brain as exists uploaded in.

I’ve often wondered what happens if — I guess it doesn’t matter — you upload your brain, you make a copy of your brain into a robot. Now, you and your robot friend are kind of in that moment the same, but now it’s just that your robot friend who is you just diverges from that point because of their different experiences.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, it would be fun to know that person.

**John:** It’s like the software has forked and it’s gone in different directions. It comes down to the question of software and hardware. And is the person the hardware, is the person the software? I am a software person. I think the person is the code that’s running. And if that code can run without your physical body, I’m cool with that.

**Craig:** Totally. Now, the key for me is if you upload me into robot body, I kind of actually want you to kill my other self. [laughs] Because there can only be one.

Next question. Do we say who wrote in, or no?

**John:** Yes, we’ll say the person, but not the last name. But you can say Vancouver.

**Craig:** Yeah, Sarah in Vancouver. “This year I decided to stop coloring my hair and let my natural dusky silver grow in. Seeing as you’re both the same vintage as me, and the kind of men I’d be attracted to…”

**John:** Mmm.

**Craig:** Oh, hmmm…”I’m wondering what your thoughts are on the attractiveness and sex appeal of women with gray hair. I seem to be the only one excited about being natural again. People either find it amusing or disturbing. Am I alone out here? What should I do?”

**John:** Yeah. She didn’t include a photo, so we don’t know whether she’s a woman who looks amazing with gray or silver hair.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Look, I think natural can be awesome. And I think if you like being natural the way your hair is, that’s great. The most important thing about being attractive is being confident. And if being natural gives you confidence there, that’s terrific.

**Craig:** Yeah. I basically agree. I mean, definitely what happens is your physical appearance is the thing that kind of starts the ball rolling with men, but those of us who are into women, a lot of it then is what happens after. So much of it is what happens after. What happens when you open your mouth and you start talking? Are you interesting? Are you fascinating? Are you funny? Are you cool?

It’s a fact that biologically men are programmed to be attracted to youth. It just comes down to the whole spread your genetic material around pregnancy, animal behavior theory of sex and sexual attraction. So, it will probably stop a few guys in their tracks. It may make it a little more difficult for some guys.

But, you know, whatever. Who cares? If you’re cool and you’re awesome, I don’t really think it’s going to stop anyone.

**John:** I would agree. Next question comes from Ben in San Angelo, Texas. “If you had to start from scratch, let’s say your current mind got zapped to your teenage body, would you do it all over again?”

**Craig:** Interesting theme that keeps emerging. Well, yeah, I would do it all over again because I love my life, and I love all of it, even the parts that are terrible.

**John:** Yeah. I thought about this a lot. And if I could go back and sort of do junior high and high school, all that stuff over again, I would because there was stuff I definitely enjoyed, but there is stuff I know I would enjoy differently knowing what I know now.

**Craig:** Oh, wait, you know what you know now?

**John:** Yeah. That’s the trick of the question — do you get to take your current experience with you back to the past?

**Craig:** Oh, no, I don’t want to do that. I just want to basically do everything that’s happened already again. I want to rewatch the episode.

**John:** Yeah, I don’t know that I want to do everything that’s happened again. I mean, I’ve had…

**Craig:** So, you don’t want to meet Mike? You’re going to meet some other guy. You might not have a kid. You get run over, [laughs], by a cart.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a Sliding Doors quality of like if you got to live your life again would stuff necessarily turn out better for having the information. Maybe not.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** All right. Cool.

**Craig:** So, finally a difference there. Justin from Arlington, Virginia with a great question. “Croissant, English muffin, or biscuit?”

**John:** I think they’re all excellent choices. I can enjoy any one of those things. I find that a great biscuit at the right moment with a little butter, a little honey, there’s maybe nothing better.

**Craig:** I find biscuits to be big handfuls of glue and croissants are too greasy for me. I’m an English muffin guy.

**John:** English muffin for a hamburger, by the way, a fantastic choice.

**Craig:** Yeah, I do it all the time. Whole wheat English muffin. Hard to beat.

**John:** Ed writes, this is a question for you, “What E-cigarette brand do you recommend? Any cons to e-cigging?”

**Craig:** Interesting that this question comes up because I quit smoking those things.

**John:** I’m so glad, Craig.

**Craig:** You know, you don’t have to be that glad. It’s not that big of a deal, although I have to say it’s — ugh, quitting nicotine is the worst. What it does to your brain? Ugh, anyway. It’s been a weird week. You can imagine.

So, look, what I recommend is just not starting, but if you’re smoking regular cigarettes, definitely. And you don’t want to deal with cold turkey. Definitely switching over to e-cigarettes is good. I recommend just generically using the Boge Cartomizer. That’s B-O-G-E.

And you can get standard — there are these standard batteries. I can’t remember the model number, but they’re sort of skinny black batteries with either blue or red tips at the end. If you go to — there’s a cool website called Cignot. Cignot.com. They sell all that stuff.

And then in terms of the liquid, I recommend Johnson Creek because they are made here and it is actually looked over by people that seem to care as opposed to, I don’t know, a Chinese factory somewhere just dumping spare melamine and liquid lead into a vat. [laughs]

Yeah, the cons of e-cigging: incredibly addictive and when you quit those it will suck.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Did I tell you that we were at Disneyland, and so we were on the Silly Symphony which is those swings that spin around? There’s never a line because it’s never actually all that fun.

**Craig:** I know those, yeah.

**John:** But my kid likes it. So, there’s this woman in front of me and she had something glowing in her hand. I’m like, oh my god, she has an eCig and she’s like using her eCig while she’s on that swing.

**Craig:** Cool lady. I mean, she just doesn’t care. [crosstalk] Yeah, I like it.

Here’s a question for you, [laughs], from…

**John:** I think it’s really a question for you.

**Craig:** I know, it’s really a question for both of us, I think. It’s from our friend TS and he wants to know, “Should I seduce a married man?”

I’m pretty sure we have the same answer.

**John:** I would say probably not.

**Craig:** No. No.

**John:** Yeah, here’s the question — are you wrong to go into, not knowing what somebody’s marital situation is. You know, somebody could be married but they could be separated, or they could have an open relationship. There could be reasons why you’re not a terrible person for going into that situation. You’re not a morally terrible person.

Are you going to be emotionally hurt trying to seduce a married man? Yeah, very likely. So, I think you’re better off sticking with people who are actually available.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s the word “seduce” that’s the problem.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, “sleep with,” if the guy is living a closeted life and he’s into you, whatever. But “seduce” is sort of, that’s a tougher one.

**John:** Yeah. Should you seduce anyone? Well, yeah, I guess you can seduce a single person.

**Craig:** Yeah, no of course. Yeah, sure. But seducing married people is kind of — don’t do that.

**John:** Yeah. It’s kind of crappy.

**Craig:** That’s not nice.

**John:** Clint asks, “I’m considering replacing my lawn with Buffalo grass. If memory serves, John August made the change a while back. How is that working out? Is it worth the expense and effort? Anything you’d do differently?”

So, yes, and I’m actually looking at the Buffalo grass that is growing in our backyard right at this moment. And it was pretty good.

So, the deal with Buffalo grass is unlike normal grass where you can put out a seed or you can roll out the big long strips of it, Buffalo grass actually has much, much deeper roots, and so you have to plant little plugs. It’s sort of like you are getting a hair transplant and they’re putting those little plugs into the dirt.

And that’s a hassle and it just took a tremendous amount of work. And the crows came after the plugs and pulled them out, so we had to scare away the crows and redo it. But, once it grew in it’s been really, really solid. And you kind of don’t have to water it much at all. And it looks pretty good. So, I would do it again.

We used UC Verde Buffalo Grass. It was the type that they figured it… It was the UC System that studied all the kinds of Buffalo grass and this is the one that actually works well on lawns.

It’s been really solid. And if you have dogs or cats or whatever, they won’t burn holes in the lawn they way they can with normal grass. So, that’s a good thing.

**Craig:** Nice. That would be — maybe I should think about that.

So, Patrick here in Los Angeles writes, “What’s your favorite weeknight meal to cook for your families?”

**John:** Do you cook, Craig?

**Craig:** I do. I love cooking. But when I cook it’s either like a big, adventuresome cooking thing, or I tend to do little smaller things like on-the-spot breakfasts or lunches. So, I don’t have a routine weeknight meal that I cook. But my daughter does love my famous grilled cheese sandwich. I like making a nice grilled cheese with a little tomato soup. But when I cook I go crazy and I just go nuts.

I like making desserts.

**John:** Yeah. So, I am by nature more of a baker rather than a cook. So, for a long time I would make like a lot of desserts. And I’d bake cakes, and cookies, and all that kind of stuff. And now I don’t do that very much anymore because we don’t eat that kind of stuff anymore.

My husband does most of the daily cooking, but when I do do cooking, turkey meatloaf is sort of a good staple for us. We have a really good turkey meatloaf that we like. Mini turkey meatloaf — that’s the crucial thing. When you make that giant meatloaf, only the little outside of it gets browned. But if you make little small meatloafs, then it all gets good and brown.

**Craig:** Like in little ramekins?

**John:** No, you actually do it on a baking sheet, flat on a baking sheet.

**Craig:** Oh, okay. You just make like little mounds on it.

**John:** Little mounds. And the key I have learned is to sort of mound them up like a shark fin, because they will sort of soften down a bit as it bakes, but it will end up with a nice shape if it’s sort of pointy at the start. And every little bit gets a little more ketchup. So, that plus roasted cauliflower and maybe some spinach or something else, that’s a really good weeknight meal.

**Craig:** That’s good. I’m still kind of into making desserts. I like making pies from scratch, crusts from scratch.

**John:** I like pie crust, too.

**Craig:** Chocolate mousse. I like chocolate mousse. I like making complicated things. I feel like I like the chemistry a little.

**John:** And people are always intimidated by like a Thanksgiving turkey dinner. Turkey is one of the easiest things you could possibly ever make.

**Craig:** Brine.

**John:** Well, yes, we’ve talked about the brine. But essentially, you know what you do? You clean the bird and you stick it in a hot oven. People make too much of a deal of it.

**Craig:** Brine it, stick it, don’t put stuffing in it like a dope.

All right, so what do we have next?

**John:** Billie Jean asks, “What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve done in front of an idol, or a celebrity, or a mentor?”

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, I can remember mine. It’s so stupid. So, it was — I’m going to say it was 1993. And I was sitting with a friend. We were by Johnny Rockets at the Beverly Connection. And we look over, it’s like around 10pm actually. And we look over and there’s Jerry Seinfeld talking with a friend.

Oh my god. Jerry Seinfeld. You know, it’s 1993; Jerry Seinfeld is the king of the world. And I’m like, “I got to go, I got to go say hi to Jerry Seinfeld. I’ve got to shake his hand or do something.” And he’s like, well, do it.

So, as we’re leaving, I start walking, I’m parallel to Jerry Seinfeld. I’m too scared. I’m now a step past him and I’m like, no, no, no, I can’t not do it. So then I just whirl around and I go, “Mr. Seinfeld, it’s really nice to meet you.”

And he was like, “What?” Because he really thought that I was going to stab him. Because that’s the motion I made. It was the motion of a guy walking past somebody and then suddenly flinging themselves into their personal space and then saying, “It’s really nice to meet you.” But he hasn’t met me. There’s just a man suddenly in his face. It was terrible.

**John:** That’s pretty bad.

**Craig:** It was so stupid.

**John:** Mine is not embarrassing as much as just like really, really awkward, and especially awkward because there’s a photo of it that my husband insists on keeping because it’s just so awkward.

So, this is at the opening of the USC Film School. They had this big gala event where they had celebrities and famous people there. And so I was downstairs touring the post-production area and Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise are there. And so I know Katie Holmes but I hadn’t seen her in years. And so, they’re like, oh, say hi to Tom and Katie. Like, oh great.

So, we’re in this really narrow space, and so I’m shaking hands with Katie. And it’s like, “Hey, how are you?” Trying to talk about her kid, because we have a kid about the same age. And I meet Tom Cruise. And Tom Cruise, anyone who has met Tom Cruise, he sort of like locks eyes on you. And it’s just this weird sort of like tractor beam thing that Tom Cruise does.

And so there’s this photo of us having this really awkward meeting in this narrow hallway from this angle, and I look bizarre in it. I look like I’m some sort of Martian who is talking to people from Venus. And it was incredibly awkward because of just…and then of course the whole Tom and Katie of it all, because this is right when, you know, their sort of sudden relationship and what all that was.

**Craig:** Yeah. That does sound weird.

**John:** That’s an odd thing.

**Craig:** That is odd.

**John:** One thing I should say about meeting a celebrity is it’s also that always awkward thing of like, you know, “Hi, I’m this person,” and they’ll say their name back. It’s like, well, of course you’re that person because you’re Tom Cruise.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** So, when they say like, “Hi, I’m Tom,” it’s like, yeah, I know you’re Tom Cruise.

**Craig:** Isn’t that funny? There’s like a weird contract that you have with famous people that they’re going to tell you their name and you’re going to go, “Hi, I’m Craig,” like, I did not know that. This is a normal meeting. You’re not famous.

**John:** What I found, like even last night at The Academy thing, when someone is coming up, and there was a little bit of a receiving line kind of quality that happens, the next person that comes up, I’ll just say, “Hi, I’m John,” because it just starts the conversation. So, it’s natural that we do it.

**Craig:** Maybe that’s why these people do these things. I find it easier to deal with celebrities and famous people now because I think once you hit 40 you start to realize you’re older than a lot of them.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** You know? I’m older than Bradley Cooper. It’s kind of weird.

**John:** It is weird.

**Craig:** But I am, because I don’t know, he seems like a man. He is a man.

Here’s a question from JD. “You’re both in love and in some states both married.” I think you’re just married. “Do you think it’s important to have more common interests than not with a significant other? Or, are opposite interests okay as long your personalities and respect for one another’s wants and needs remain constant?”

**John:** I would say that shared interests are very, very useful so that you have something to talk about. And I think it’s going to be hard to get very far in a relationship if you don’t have some good overlap in things that you are interested in other than sort of like kind of generally digging the person. But you don’t need to have that 100 percent match. And there should be things that one person loves and obsesses over and the other person couldn’t care less about, as long as they don’t openly mock. That’s good and fine.

But you want to be able to go places and do things and have some reason to be able to go out to certain events at nighttime. If one person hates the theater, that’s fine. You’ll always find other people to go to the theater with. But, if that person hates theater, and movies, and concerts, and everything else, and you like those things, then it’s not going to work out well.

**Craig:** I tend to shade a little bit more to saying opposite interests are actually a great thing. And what keeps us together as bonded pairs is our intangible love and assistance for each other. And the things that are going around outside of us are so much less important. And, frankly, it’s nice to be able to get away from my wife and do things I like doing that she doesn’t care about and vice versa.

It’s so hard to find someone, I mean, of course, if really there is no common interests it is unlikely that the two people will fall in love anyway. But, I think that sometimes people make too much of “we both like doing the same thing.” Uh, yeah. It’s that we do something for each other that we like.

**John:** Absolutely. I mean, the ideal spouse is somebody who is always on your side, is like always on your team. And that’s a really crucial thing. It doesn’t mean you have to have 100 percent alignment on everything.

I’m always amazed though by the mixed marriages where people have radically different beliefs and somehow they make it work. And that I just don’t know how they do it.

**Craig:** I get it. Because, the truth is for those people they’re getting something from the other person that’s so much more valuable than agreement on a topic. You know, there are things that go to our survival, our sense of safety and security and feeling loved.

You know what? Look at children and their parents. So many children have different political views than their parents. The still love their parents. The parents still love the kids, you know?

**John:** Well, that’s a central theme of Big Fish, though, is that throughout your entire life you get to pick your relationships, you get to pick the people who are going to be your friends, you get to pick the people you are going to marry, but parents are just sort of assigned to you. It’s just like a big lottery and you end up with these people. And you’re supposed to have this amazing relationship with these people.

But, you didn’t pick them. They didn’t pick you. And somehow you’re supposed to get along on everything. I think sometimes we put unrealistic expectations on what that relationship is supposed to be, “Because he’s your father, how could you not love him?”

“Well, I didn’t pick him.”

**Craig:** Yeah, you don’t have to get me started on that topic.

**John:** Ah-ha.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, I totally agree with you on that one.

**John:** Kristen in Seattle writes, “I would like to know if you guys like cats. And if you know why of all the animals in the animal kingdom cats purr?”

**Craig:** Well, a two part question. No, I don’t like cats. I find them annoying. I love dogs. Actually, I once talked to a veterinarian about this whole purring thing, and the truth is they don’t really know. I mean, there’s like some cockamamie theory that purring helps healing because there’s like some vibration thing that happens. I don’t believe that.

I think it’s probably just something they do.

**John:** Yeah. Because I think big cats purr, too. So, it’s not something that we kind of bred into cats. I think it’s a natural thing that cats do. But, it’s like there’s lot of other animals that do weird things, just they’re not around us all the time so we don’t notice it.

I like cats. And I did not grow up with cats. And I’ve always been very allergic to cats. But I learned to love cats because my friend, Elizabeth, had cats. And so I would talk to her on the phone, this is sort of pre-internet, so we would just talk to each other on the phone for like an hour a night. And so I would hear all about her cats. And so I knew all these details about her cats.

And then in our house here we don’t have cats because I’m allergic to cats, but in Los Angeles people should understand that there are cats everywhere. Los Angeles is just full of cats. And so there are some feral cats, but also some house cats that sort of just wander through our yard. And they’re really cool. And like one of them is actually Patricia Arquette’s cat wanders through our yard.

**Craig:** Is her name Patricia Arcat?

**John:** Wouldn’t that be amazing? I never even thought of that. That’s why you’re the comedy writer.

**Craig:** Yeah, that was a really good joke, man. [laughs]

**John:** That’s a great joke. You could get fifty bucks for that on Fashion Police.

**Craig:** At least.

**John:** [laughs] Rollie is just the best cat in the world. So, we eat lunch outside — Stuart, Ryan, and I eat lunch outside — and Rollie will just come over and hang out. Just the best cat in the world. But I like cats that are sort of like dogs, and that’s why I like Rollie so much.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, cats don’t do it for me.

**John:** Cats are great.

Next up is Victor from Pittsburgh.

**Craig:** Victor, yeah. Are you reading this one? I’m reading this one?

**John:** Go.

**Craig:** Okay, this guy is moving, and Victor is “moving into an apartment that for the first time is all [his] own, a real home to call [his] own.” I guess he’s been living in dorms and things like that. “It’s a blank slate coming with no furniture. As the hip artsy fellows that you are, I’m sure your lovely LA homes are decked out with only the finest in furniture and decor. What do you suggest for a first time home renter? Goodwill, IKEA, or anything else? Standing desk? Specific recommendations? First time apartment stories worth sharing?”

**John:** I think IKEA gets a bad rap. I think some stuff from IKEA is absolutely fine. And, I mean, that’s the motto for IKEA: For now it’s fine. That should just be their tag line. I give it to them for free.

Because there’s decent stuff you can get that will work okay in your apartment for a while. So, IKEA or CB2 or sort of the lower rent brands for sort of the big furniture companies, they’re absolutely fine. I would say you’re not going to have a lot of stuff, so sort of embrace a nice minimalism that looks good.

The best thing you can do for your apartment to look nice is to clean it and to not let it be a mess.

**Craig:** Yeah. I totally agree. Don’t get cluttery with it. Apartments are small. In general, small spaces look best when they are minimally appointed, because they can’t handle a lot of clutter, they can’t handle a lot of different heights, and shapes, and things. Low, sleek, simple, small. I totally agree on IKEA as far as, you know, look, your job at this point is to succeed and move on save your money. Don’t spend money on furniture now, that’s crazy.

So, yeah, sure, go to IKEA. Get disposable Swedish furniture. Enjoy putting it together yourself. There are some nice tasteful things that they have there. And just do it.

There are people that really get into, “Ooh, look at my cool vintage sofa that I found at Goodwill, that’s full of bed bugs or smells.” Eh, you know, you’re going to have to move it, you know? You’re not living in this apartment the rest of your life. Think about that, too.

**John:** One of my favorite pieces of apartment furniture was something I found in the dumpster of the apartment building. It was this big green dresser. And it had these really handles on it, so I took them off and I put like cool handles on it. And that was my dresser for six years.

And that stuff is fine and good, too. Yeah, don’t worry about it too much.

**Craig:** Do not.

**John:** Steve asks, “How much can you guys bench press?”

**Craig:** Hmm, good question. Well, I haven’t been to the gym lately, and you know, my maximum bench press, I was never that strong. I think like one time, like one up and down, I think maybe like — I don’t know — probably I could do 200 pounds or something like that.

**John:** I did 205 for eight.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Yeah, so I was checking with my trainer today, because I asked him. And he said, “Oh, that’s what you can do.” So, that’s great. I actually probably couldn’t do that right now because I’ve been in Chicago and I haven’t had a trainer for awhile, but that’s what I could theoretically do.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was more, I like dumbbells. So, I like to do multiples with like two-50s. You know, not 250s, but two individual 50-pounds dumbbells and do like twelve reps or something like that.

**John:** Yeah, I do find that dumbbells, I don’t have that fear of dying, because there’s not going to be that bar that’s going to crush me.

**Craig:** Right!

**John:** That’s the thing about bench pressing is that fear of like you’re actually going to be trapped underneath this forever. At least I could also like drop free weights.

**Craig:** And dumbbells are harder because you have to individually steer and balance, you know, whereas the bar of a bench press bar helps kind of stabilize.

Kyle from Salt Lake City says, “If you could have any super power, what would it be and why?”

**John:** I would choose flight, the two-handed arms pointed out at the sky flight.

**Craig:** I would go with invisibility. Super useful.

**John:** Yeah, that one is really useful.

**Craig:** Super useful. Flying, though, would be great though.

**John:** Yeah. Lawrence from New York City asks, for me, I guess, “Are you spoken to in a different manor because you are gay/straight??? Do they expect more or less of you because of your sexuality??? Do they believe you should be better at melodrama and weepy stuff, and sports films or action??? How does sexuality affect your career??? Does it???” All of these questions end with three question marks, which…stop doing that.

Lawrence, stop asking questions with three question marks.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So, Lawrence’s basic question is has being gay impacted my career at all in Hollywood. I don’t think it’s had a huge impact. I think, yes, I don’t get considered for sports movies as much. That’s not a huge tragedy in my life. But John Logan who’s gay, he wrote Any Given Sunday.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t think that’s because you’re gay.

**John:** No. I think it’s because I don’t give a rat’s ass about sports.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I write action movies and people call me in for that. I don’t think that it ever comes up that much. I will say that when I was writing the first TV show I did, D.C., it was the only situation in my whole Hollywood time where I walked into a room and I felt like “faggot” had just been said, because it was this weird energy that had happened.

And I’m not sure who it was, or what was going on, but it was really, really uncomfortable. But that’s kind of been it.

And so a lot of times I will, they’ll ask me like, “Hey, do you want to become a bigger part of the Writers Guild Gay Writers Group?” I’m just like I don’t know that I need it. I don’t know that we need it. I don’t know that it’s actually a hue problem. It hasn’t been a huge problem for me, so I don’t relate to it.

**Craig:** Now there are so many gay producers, so many gay executives. It’s just, I don’t know. Yeah.

**John:** I think it would be much harder to be homophobic in this town than to be gay.

**Craig:** Openly homophobic? Oh, yeah, good luck. [laughs] I don’t think that can work. No.

**John:** It’s not going to go well.

**Craig:** I don’t think that would work. And, frankly, you’re just in the wrong business. I mean, if you don’t enjoy gay people and you don’t enjoy the expression of gay culture and gay humor and gay aesthetic, you’re just in the wrong business.

Earling writes, “Can either of you actually sing? Which musical production do you wish you could have had the chance to experience in person? And which musical to film do you think has resulted in the greatest or poorest film adaptation?”

**John:** Great. So, we’ve established that Craig can sing, because Craig sang on an earlier podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah, come on Earling.

**John:** Yeah, go back and do your research.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I can sing well enough to get the point of a song across. And so I’ve gotten to be a better singer through Big Fish. So, I can sing a little bit. I can’t sing the way that the actors can sing in Big Fish, but I can sing well enough that I’m not scared to sing.

Which musical production do you wish you could have seen in person? I don’t know.

**Craig:** Good question.

**John:** I mean, I’ve never actually seen any production of Funny Girl, but Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl was probably awesome.

**Craig:** It probably was awesome. Yeah. I’d probably go with Fiddler on the Roof. The original Fiddler on the Roof. I just love that show. And I just think that would have been amazing to see that. Every song is just so great.

And what do you think about this musical to film, up and down?

**John:** I loved Chicago. And I love Chicago as a stage play, but I love it as a movie, too. And I think it was just a really, really smart version that captured the stuff I loved about the stage version and made it a movie.

**Craig:** It did. That’s a very good choice. I would probably go with West Side Story only because it may be the best musical ever and it also happens to be a great, great film, too. So, that’s a very high risk/high reward kind of thing to go from something that’s truly brilliant, take it to film, and not blow it.

Poorest, you know, I hate doing this, but The Producers, because The Producers was a great movie, and then they surprised everybody by doing a terrific musical of it. But the movie of the musical of the movie just didn’t work.

**John:** I have not seen it.

**Craig:** It just didn’t work. And I love everybody in it. And, yeah, it didn’t work. Plus, they cut out the best song, King of All Broadway.

Anyway, those are our answers.

**John:** Cool.

CC from Calabasas asks, “I love to hear about your solar panels and your electric cars. What are some other fun high end toys or home improvements that you recommend?”

**Craig:** Well, there’s one thing that I’ve signed up for, you know, when they make a big splashy thing, “Look, we have this new product coming but it’s not ready yet,” so you put your email on it and they tell you when it’s ready. And it’s called Kevo and it’s basically a lockset for your door that fits right in the regular deadbolt that locks that thing, but it’s controlled by your phone.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** And I think it’s as simple as like a Bluetooth thing. So, you walk up to your door and it unlocks.

**John:** That would be great.

I like our Nest Thermostats. They’ve been really useful for us.

**Craig:** Love those.

**John:** I love that I can on my iPhone app see like, is the air conditioner running? I will turn it on. Or, I can turn it on like when I’m at the restaurant saying like let’s get it cooled down before I get home. That’s been awesome and great.

My husband has also been really good about sort of switching out all of our light bulbs to LEDs and energy efficient lights. So, throughout the whole house we’re all that way, and that’s part of the reason why we’re able to generate so much power and sell so much power back to the City of Los Angeles. We actually use very little power now which has been terrific.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Next question, John Ligget asks, “Hey, I think you should talk about food on your podcast and your favorite restaurants.”

Favorite restaurants in Los Angeles. I love Mozza. I love — both Osteria Mozza and the Pizzeria Mozza are fantastic. What are your favorite restaurants in Los Angeles?

**Craig:** You know, I’m not like a favorite restaurant guy. I guess if I had to say one, I really love Sasabune.

**John:** Okay. I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** Sushi place on the west side. And Sushi Nozawa and Sugarfish. I like really, really good sushi. But I’ll go to any restaurant. I’m pretty easygoing about restaurants. I’m not really a foodie. I love interesting food. I love the food that foodies eat, I just don’t love obsessing about food, and the trucks, and, oh, this new spot, and this guy used to own this place, and opens that place. And when people start having that discussion my eyes roll back in my head and I lose consciousness.

**John:** Yeah. I like to go to dinner with friends, but I’d much rather go to a mediocre restaurant with good friends than a great restaurant with people I don’t like.

**Craig:** 100 percent.

**John:** Next up.

**Craig:** All right, next up we’ve got Hanu Carl. [laughs] Hanu Carl — so cute, in the Valley, question mark, exclamation point, exclamation point. “Kwanzaa or Diwali? Which of the non-Christmas holidays is cooler? Feel free to address history, music, fashion, and food.” My answer is none of them. The only cool holiday around Christmastime is Christmas. Sorry.

**John:** I’m 100 percent Diwali. I love Diwali. I love kind of everything Indian and I love Indian food. Come on, Diwali for me.

**Craig:** I love Indian food, too. I love everything Indian. I’m a big fan of the culture. I don’t need to celebrate Diwali though, or Kwanzaa. Frankly, I don’t even celebrate Christmas. Here’s the truth: I’m the Grinch and I don’t like celebrations. But I do love Indian food.

**John:** You’ll love the hundredth episode of Scriptnotes celebration, though. That’s a celebration you’ll endorse?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not a holiday, you know?

**John:** I heard they’re actually going to shut down the town, though. I mean, everyone is going to take the day off and it’s going to be big deal.

**Craig:** Fantastic!

**John:** Carmen in Missouri asks, “What are your thoughts on bacon? What are your thoughts on bacon in desserts?”

**Craig:** Yeah. Bacon is very good, it’s very tasty. I don’t care for the ridiculous internet obsession with bacon. You know, this is the worst of the internet. Take something that’s perfectly good but a little downscale and then turn it into like a meta, quasi-ironic worship thing. Yeah, it’s bacon, whatever. Isn’t there other stuff to talk about?

I do think that bacon in desserts is perfectly fine in the sense that savory plus sweet can be a nice thing. But, the whole bacon thing, it drives me nuts.

**John:** I’m glad to hear you say, because it drives me nuts, too.

**Craig:** What is that, John?

**John:** I don’t know. It’s the obsession over things that you don’t need to worry about being obsessed with. So, I don’t eat normal bacon, because I don’t eat beef, or pork, or mammals. So, I eat turkey bacon. And so I obviously like suspect because I eat turkey bacon which is not really a thing and I should be shunned for eating turkey bacon.

But I like turkey bacon just fine.

**Craig:** Turkey bacon is good. I like turkey bacon.

**John:** It’s delicious. And so whatever you want to do with bacon, great, go for it. But don’t push it at me.

**Craig:** Yeah. And like stop inventing fake obsessions, the point of which is that obsessions are silly but yet cool. All right, hipsters, go ahead with your bacon.

Ooh, Fabrizio from Italy. “If your podcasts weren’t about screenwriting or anything related to filmmaking, what would it be about?” Huh? What?

**John:** Mine would be yet another tech podcast, another sort of Mac Geekery podcast. And so I guest on some of those podcasts at times and I enjoy talking about that stuff, but really we don’t need another one, so I shouldn’t do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think I would talk about anything else. I’m just simply not qualified. I’m barely qualified to talk about this. Let’s put it that way.

**John:** Chris Han in East LA writes, “What lessons do you have for nerds for a successful marriage?”

**Craig:** Uh, I don’t know. Because they’re nerds?

**John:** Or for anybody.

**Craig:** You know, okay, here’s my big lessons — these are not shocking. Be faithful to your spouse. Don’t be afraid to spend a little bit of time on your own. Don’t be afraid if they spend a little bit of time on their own. Don’t be contemptuous of your spouse. And, you know, avoid things like violence. I mean, it’s not really — I’ll tell you the number one, the number one thing. Honestly, everybody’s going to give you a bunch of platitudes. Number one thing: Be faithful. Be faithful. There you go.

**John:** I think all your points are very good. The other thing I would say is to always understand that your spouse is his or her own person and to always keep in mind what do they want or what do they need to do. And to figure out how you can be supportive to what they want or what they need to do, because their needs and wants may not immediately line up with what your needs and wants are. But you need to be aware of what they are so you can together both get to places you want to get to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, part of that is respect, but that’s also understanding that it’s not just about the two of you. It’s also about you as individuals.

**Craig:** Correct.

Oh, look at this, Robert…

**John:** Robert James Cross asks…

**Craig:** Robert is, yeah, he’s going for this question we’ve kind of trotted all over, kind of gone over this a little bit. “Where’s the best place for sushi or pizza in Los Angeles?”

**John:** Yeah, so when I was in Chicago we had the conversation about Chicago pizza and New York pizza. Honestly, the pizza I love the most is Los Angeles pizza. It is at Pizzeria Mozza. I think it’s just the best pizza you’re going to find.

**Craig:** That pizza is not what I call pizza, but that’s sort of what I call Italian fancy pizza. And that is excellent Italian fancy pizza. No question.

For traditional pizza, the kind of pizza that comes from New York, there are a couple places in and around there. There’s a Joe’s, I think, in Santa Monica now which is a transplant from New York. And there’s actually a little booth in The Americana on Brand in Glendale that sells pretty good pizza.

Sushi wise, like I said, Sasabune. Big fan of that. Nozawa. Sugarfish.

**John:** So, I go to Nobu and I like Nobu quite a lot. I’ve been to Nobus in many different countries, but the Nobu in Los Angeles is lovely, as is Matsuhisa.

But my favorite sushi, actually Sushi Azami which closed, but the owner Niki has opened up another restaurant on the west side which is amazing, but it’s always omakase, and it’s like a three-hour thing to eat dinner there. It’s completely worth it, it’s just that you have to plan for three-hours to do it. So, I’ll have a link to her restaurant.

**Craig:** That’s interesting that it’s three hours long, because Sasabune is the same thing, it’s omakase, but it doesn’t take that long.

**John:** Yeah. I was with Josh Friedman and we drank a lot of wine, so maybe that’s why it took three hours.

**Craig:** Maybe you thought it was three hours, it was 20 minutes.

**John:** Ha. We actually had to walk around the block just a few time just to, you know, settle your stomach and feel like you could actually move in a car again.

**Craig:** I like it.

**John:** “You’re on the first passenger flight to the moon,” oh, this is a question from Jessup, I love Jessup, from Vacaville. “You’re on the first passenger flight to the moon. Because of carryon restrictions you only get to bring one book, one snack, one beverage. What are they?”

**Craig:** I don’t care.

**John:** I have answers for all of this. My book would be Pride & Prejudice, because I just love Pride & Prejudice. I could just read it again and again. One snack would be almond butter. And it would specifically be Whole Foods Almond Butter, the one that you can actually get from the grinder. Like fresh ground almond butter is one of the best substances on earth. And one beverage, I suppose if I’m going to go…well, it’s a question, do you go for the alcohol? You’re flying to the moon…

**Craig:** You’re going to the moon. This is what I don’t understand about this question. You’re going to the moon and you’re reading? My eyes are glued. I’m like, I want to just watch the trip entirely. I don’t care what my snack is. I’m going to the moon!

**John:** Yeah, the moon.

**Craig:** You know what I’ll have, moon snack. Whatever moon plane gives me. I feel so simple.

**John:** I will say one of the things I miss most about Chicago is a chain called Protein Bar. And Protein Bar is this sort of healthy fast food that is all over Chicago, and I haven’t seen here, and I really which were here. But they have these amazing smoothies. And they have like a peanut butter/chocolate chip smoothie that’s actually kind of healthy that’s really great. So that would be my beverage.

**Craig:** That sounds good.

Josh from San Luis Obispo. “If you had the option to either own a real life light saber, or an actual working hover board from Back to the Future, which would you choose and why?”

**John:** I’m full on light saber. I would love to have a light saber.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course. That’s not even a good question.

**John:** It’s not a good question at all.

**Craig:** No, it’s not a fair question.

**John:** It’s a light saber. How can you not pick light saber?

**Craig:** Yeah, working hover board? Who cares?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Oh, look at me, I’m on my hover board. Whoop-de-do.” All right. Or, you can just go get a Segway and also look like a dork.

Or, you can have a light saber. Come on, Josh. [laughs] I’m getting angry.

**John:** Mark Thorson writes, “Now that even Rush Limbaugh has admitted the gay marriage issue is lost, what’s the next milestone for gay rights? The only thing I can think of is the first gay president. Is anything more important that happens earlier?”

Uh, yeah, I think marriage is happening really quickly, and I’m delighted that it’s happening so quickly, and delighted that just last week we picked up another giant state. And whatever the Supreme Court decision is, it will be incredibly useful. And I’m excited to be able to get off of planes and be married in more states. That’s a wonderful thing.

I talk to the people who run these organizations and one of the things I say when I talk to these people is it’s fantastic that gay and lesbian couples can have the rights they need, I think the next frontier is going to be to make sure that people who don’t fit into nice categories, transgendered people, get the same rights that everyone else does. And I think that’s one of the things where, you know, we talk about gay people as minorities. Those people are super minorities. And making sure that they have full and inclusive rights to things that every American should have.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, ultimately the most meaningful milestone beyond this one is that there’s no longer a topic because it’s just nobody cares and everything is equal and fine and it’s just not an issue.

I think that employment rights are probably where I would look if I were running one of these organizations, because there are going to be states soon, I think, if the Supreme Court rules in favor of federal gay marriage — there are going to be states where it is legally possible for two men to get married but also legally possible for both of them to be fired from their jobs because they’re gay. That’s bizarre.

**John:** Yeah. That is bizarre.

**Craig:** So, I mean, it’s bizarre right now, obviously. So, that’s where I would probably — that’s where I would load up my ammo.

Let’s see, we have Brian from Tampa, “Morally speaking, what’s the worst thing you’ve done to get out of some type of obligation?”

**John:** I will say personally I feel good that I’ve never used my kid as an excuse. I’ve never pretended that it was like my kid that was why I couldn’t do something. But I have, I feel like I’m coming down with something, I have done that. And I feel terrible when I do it. And sometimes I get sort of the symptomatic cold that I imagined from doing that. But, I’ve feigned some illness to get out of a meeting or to reschedule something.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m sure I’ve done that, too. I mean, it’s hard to quarrel with somebody who’s telling you that they just threw up. Even if you think they’re lying, even if you think there’s a 90 percent chance they’re lying, that means there’s a 10 percent chance that you’re forcing somebody to show up in your office and they might throw up.

**John:** Yeah. You don’t want to do that.

**Craig:** Near you. Yeah.

**John:** Malibu Jack asks, “If the universe is infinite, how can it be expanding? And if space is mostly empty, how can it be warped by gravity?”

**Craig:** I can’t answer the first question, because I don’t know. The second question I think misunderstands gravity and space time. But, I’m not smart enough to explain why. I just know that in my head I’m looking at that diagram in A Brief History of Time and Thinking. No, that’s not a good question.

**John:** I think it’s a reasonable question, but it’s not a good question in the sense that we are not — as human beings we’re not well set up to deal with things at a giant, giant, giant scale, or at a really tiny scale. We’re used to being able to deal with things at a scale that we can see.

Our whole mind is set up for like there’s that bison over there. I will throw this rock and hit this bison. And so our minds work really well for that scale of thing. And so scale of things we can see and scale of things we can do.

And so we have this tendency to try to use our understanding of that kind of world and apply it to much bigger things, and it actually just doesn’t hold up very well. And so we say the universe is expanding, but it’s infinite. Well, that makes sense at the giant levels that we’re talking about. And, you know, say, “Well what is this expanding into?” It’s like, well, that’s actually not meaningful in a way that you sort of want it to make sense. This is because we think in very physical, relatable terms that aren’t actually accurate to how the big universe works or how the tiny universe works.

**Craig:** Yeah. Or, spice.

**John:** The spice. The spice explains it all.

**Craig:** The worm. The spice. What is the connection?

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** That’s my favorite line from a movie ever. “The connection is that the worm is the spice.”

**John:** The worm is the spice.

**Craig:** And then he just kept asking the question. “It’s got to have something…the worm and the spice. What is it?” [laughs] “They’re the same. They’re the same thing.”

**John:** Let’s skip this next question because another one down the list asks the same thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Agreed.

**John:** Ferdinand from Constantinople asks, “If Craig and John did a life swap, who would be better at being the other?”

**Craig:** I think I’m good at impressions, so I think I could actually convince some people that I was you.

**John:** Yeah. I think you’d actually do a pretty good job with my life. And my life is not that difficult. I think I would have a harder time being you because I don’t care anything about baseball and I would not be able to coach your son’s baseball team.

**Craig:** Yeah. But there are lot of dads that also can’t coach their kid’s baseball teams. And, you know, you would just watch.

**John:** But I could love your woman. There’s no question.

**Craig:** [laughs] I’d like to see you try!

**John:** [laughs] Gary from Orlando, Florida asks, “Craig, how’s the Tesla been so far?”

**Craig:** Awesome! Greatest car in the world. And it was terrific to see that Consumer Reports, which is very fussy, super nerdy guys — one thing I like about Consumer Reports, when they review cars they don’t get a car from the factory. They have somebody go and buy a car anonymously. So, it’s actually just a random car and they put it through ridiculous paces. And it got a 99 out of 100. Only one other car in history has every gotten that. It was a Lexus from 10 years ago.

And they said essentially, “This may be the best car we’ve ever tested.”

**John:** Oh, fantastic.

**Craig:** It’s an awesome car. Awesome, awesome, awesome.

**John:** Hooray. And for the record, I still love my Leaf. It’s been a great car, too.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** Doug Jay asks, “What are your thoughts on automobile safety ratings? Would a bad safety rating be a deal breaker for you?”

**Craig:** It would for me. Absolutely.

**John:** It would for me, too.

**Craig:** Yeah, this guy mentions that the Camry rated poor in the IHS Small Offset Crash Test. Well, it turns out that most crashes are offset. I mean, very few people just slam into each other headlight to headlight. And if a car structurally is doing very poorly in a test like that, well, yeah, of course it’s a deal breaker. What, like a Camry is so awesome that I need to overlook the fact that it could possibly be a death trap? It’s a Camry.

**John:** I honestly feel the same way about motorcycles. Because, you know what, no motorcycle survives a crash well.

**Craig:** That’s right. No, motorcycles are just dumb. And, listen, if you ride a motorcycle, I get it, and that’s cool. I understand. My wife has this whole theory — you deserve to die. It’s the whole “you deserve to die theory.” That she just can’t muster sympathy for people who die doing things that are kind of safe but just generally not safe. Like it’s kind of safe to go skydiving. But not really. So, if you die skydiving, screw you. [laughs] That’s basically her theory. So, I don’t do a lot of — I used to go diving in the ocean. Don’t do that as much anymore. No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Bryce from LA wonders, “What were both of your drinking habits before you made it and while you were rising the echelons of the industry? Perhaps to a lesser degree, what are they now? And would you mind speaking to Hollywood’s atmosphere of rejection in conjunction with the drunken writer stereotype?”

**John:** Yeah, so I think, you know, we have this stereotype that like writers are drunks who, you know, are functioning alcoholics and that kind of thing. And there are some. I don’t think there’s very many. And you won’t meet a lot of drunks and you won’t meet a lot of drug addicts who are actually working in the industry. That’s been my experience.

**Craig:** Yeah, people go through their phases, like everybody else. Personally, I’ve never had a problem with alcohol, at all. I’ve had a problem with nicotine, food, wanking. I don’t have any problems with drinking. I am that guy who can have one or two glasses and then just drop, in fact, prefers to stop.

You know, it’s funny — I often think, sometimes my wife will buy like a cake. And the cake will sit there for four days in the fridge. And I’ll think, “How is she buying the cake and not eating it?” Like if I buy a cake it’s to eat it. Do you know what I mean? So, she’ll just buy a cake and just leave it there. And then I think, but wait a second, that’s the way I am with alcohol. Like I’ll buy a bottle of wine or a fancy bottle of scotch or something. I won’t open it for a year. I don’t care. So, there you go.

**John:** Yeah. I feel like I’ve been pretty lucky, too. So, I will have a glass of wine or two, and that’s been fine, and great, and good. And I was never much of a drinker-drinker. So, you go through your periods of your 20s, and those are going to be those times when you’re out drinking with friends and you’re going out to much and drinking too much with people. But you sort of grow out of it, and I just grew out of it. And I was happy and lucky.

So, there is some sort of going out with the gang to do stuff, or that sort of social drinking, that happens. But it’s not awful. I would also say that my husband when he went to get his MBA, that crew would drink so much. And they would drink all the time that it was really surprising and kind of crazy to me that they were able to sustain a graduate school program.

**Craig:** You know, I live in La Cañada, this little town, and it’s not a Hollywood town. It’s very kind of finance and law and accounting and so forth. Good god people drink in my town. I mean, I go to these parties, [laughs], and people get wasted. And they’re adults. I don’t get it.

**John:** I want to fall back on a piece of advice I gave on the blog a long time ago, but I would say if you’re out drinking, my basic rule is alternate with water. So, if you don’t want to get drunk, you don’t want to be problematically drinking, you have a drink, great. Have a full equal glass of water before you get your next drink, and that will slow you down. It doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be — it doesn’t mean you’re safe to drive, but it means that you’re not going to make a horrible decision if you were to stick to that plan.

**Craig:** Good idea.

**John:** Josh asks a series of questions that we’re going to get to really quickly. “How much weight, if any, do you give to conspiracy theories about the new world order, water fluoridation, 9/11, JFK assassination, etc?”

**Craig:** I give negative weight to those.

**John:** I give negative weight. And anyone who believes them, I have a hard time taking seriously.

**Craig:** Yeah. I just don’t like you. I think you’re an idiot.

**John:** “Do you believe in reincarnation?”

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. I think you die, you die.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “How have your feelings about money changed throughout your life?”

**Craig:** They haven’t.

**John:** I would say they really haven’t. I’ve always been like hold on to as much money as it makes sense to hold onto.

**Craig:** Save.

**John:** Save.

**Craig:** Save. Yeah. Don’t spend a lot. Don’t need to.

**John:** “Do you believe we are alone in the universe?”

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No, there have to be other civilizations. Here’s the thing — I don’t think the Earth is actually all that special. I think we’re going to find that there’s actually a lot of earth-like planets and it’s going — other planets will have life that has existed or will exist. Will we be able to talk to those other civilizations? I don’t know.

**Craig:** Not any time soon. [laughs] No, that’s narcissism to believe that we happen to live in the time…

**John:** The best of all possible worlds.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. No, no, they’re out there, but they’re way out there.

**John:** Yeah. “What’s the secret to a close and comfortable shave?”

**Craig:** Get yourself in the shower, get a nice hot shower going. Get your face nice and steamed out. And then shave with the grain, not against the grain. And then after you’re done shaving with the grain, which changes depending on what part of your face your shaving, then go against the grain.

**John:** Yeah. Shave in the shower. That’s where you should do it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** David in Wellington, New Zealand asks, “I’m ready to propose for marriage next month.” I love that he says “propose for marriage.” That’s not how we would say it in the US.

**Craig:** Yeah. Propose for…

**John:** “Can you give some creative ideas on how to ask the big question. Cheers. Please no Hobbit jokes.”

**Craig:** Well, Gimli, oh no, he was a dwarf, sorry. No, no Hobbit jokes whatsoever. I like people from New Zealand. They’re very cool people. They’re good people.

I can only tell you how I did it. I had kind of a cool idea. And that was I like cold places. So, I surprised my then girlfriend by flying us to Alaska. And, by the way, I wasn’t rich. I had no money, but it just seemed funny. I saved my money and then I flew us to Alaska. And I went all the way out to the middle of Alaska in Fairbanks, and it was around the beginning of April. And I had sort of timed it because I knew that the Northern Lights were super, duper active around that time.

And so we went outside at night under the Northern Lights and I proposed to her.

**John:** That’s beautiful.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Nice. But she kind of had the idea that you were going to propose if you were…

**Craig:** Oh, for sure.

**John:** So, I didn’t have the proper proposal because essentially we always talked like, oh, whenever marriage becomes possible let’s get married. He’s like, so of course. And so suddenly the California Supreme Court decision came down saying that yes they have to have marriage. And so suddenly it just could happen.

So, I was in Arrowhead writing on something. And so Mike called. He’s like, “Oh, it went through. Great. So, let’s get married.” And like we literally picked a date. But neither one of us asked the other person. It just happened.

**Craig:** Right. You guys actually kind of got saved. I mean, the truth is that men don’t really care about any of this stuff. We just want to jump to the conclusion. Women care.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, even if this hadn’t been shortchanged by legal maneuvering, my guess is that you probably would have been like, “Marriage? Yeah, cool.”

**John:** Yeah.

Bin Le asks, “When can we hear Stuart’s voice on the podcast?”

**Craig:** I don’t know. I mean, we could just keep him like Maris, Niles’s wife on Frasier. [laughs] Just sort of a presence.

**John:** Yeah. So people last night, Stuart was there, and people would ask, “Is Stuart…?” And I was like, yeah, I pointed, “That’s Stuart. He’s a real person. He’s not Snuffleupagus. He’s a real live little boy.”

**Craig:** And you pointed to an empty space in the room.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And everyone slowly backed away from you.

**John:** Indeed. It’s like in Fight Club the whole time through. I’ve actually been Stuart the whole time through.

**Craig:** Hercules Rockefeller the Third, certainly his real name, asks, “How can someone stop falling for the wrong woman and/or man?” Answer, you can’t.

**John:** You can’t. The heart wants what it wants.

**Craig:** That’s why they call it falling. If you can stop falling, that would be great. But, eh, I don’t think so.

**John:** But, going back to an earlier topic, you know, maybe don’t fall for married people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s a good choice. And so look for what your type is and find your type in a type that is actually available. Because maybe your type is unavailable people because you don’t actually want that commitment of a relationship. And then you need to have some therapy and deal with your issues.

**Craig:** Yeah. Deal with your issues, Hercules.

Who’s next, Hector?

**John:** Hector from Canada writes, “Serious question here, perhaps life’s most serious question. How do you cope with mortality? Does the inevitable prospect of death borrow you? If not, why not? If so, how do you cope, or do you?”

**Craig:** It bother me now, but I know that when I am — assuming that I don’t die an untimely death — I’ve talked to enough elderly people to know that you, your mind starts to prepare you for death as you get older. And you get to a point, frankly, where you’re not afraid of it at all. It’s just a natural thing. It’s almost like, well, this is what all my friends are doing. Might as well do it, too. It’s cool. It’s okay.

You don’t get scared anymore. I asked my grandmother. She was 94. And she said, “No, somewhere around like 82 or 83 you totally stop caring.”

**John:** Maybe so. I’m afraid of death, but not in a weird way. Not so much the fear of like well I will stop existing, because I don’t believe in an afterlife necessarily, but just having a family and a young kid, that’s what I think about, sort of most afraid of sort of mortality wise. And you want your kid to be able to get to a place in life where they are stable and they don’t need you as much.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** But, the truth is, they always kind of need you. And as I face sort of my own parent’s mortality, that’s, you know, it’s tough.

**Craig:** It is, but the truth is, let’s say you’re 85. You’re daughter will be 40-something I assume, or something like that, right? She’s an adult. She’s your age now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** She’ll be fine. She’ll have her own kids, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

Clint Williams asks…

**Craig:** Good question. Yeah, Clint Williams.

**John:** “Adoption of the designated hitter by the National League? Idle chatter? Good for the game? Umbrage?”

**Craig:** I think it’s idle chatter. I don’t think it’s good for the game. I don’t have any umbrage about it. I’m a Yankee fan, so I grew up in the American League. So, the designate hitter isn’t a matter of religious objection to me. But, you know, we’ve changed so much about baseball in the last ten years. You know the wild card, and the expansion of playoffs, and teams bouncing around from national, to interleague play. All this stuff. Yeah, leave it. Leave it the way it is. No DH in the National League. No DH.

**John:** I barely understood a word you said.

**Craig:** Fantastic. You’ll understand this. John from Albany, New York, says, “Should I buy my 16-year-old son condoms now that he has a steady girlfriend? And at what age did you lose your virginity? Full disclosure: I was 16. So, that’s why I ask question number one above.”

**John:** So, number one question, yes, you should buy your 16-year-old son condoms. And you should have those frank conversations. People freak out way too much about having the conversations about sex and they shouldn’t. Just have the conversations. It’s awkward at the start, but then it’s fine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s better that you have the conversations. And don’t be intrusive but just make sure they know that it’s an option there and it’s there and you want them to be around.

**Craig:** Yeah, he could also buy his own condoms. That’s what I did. [laughs] I mean, he doesn’t have to have daddy go buy him condoms. There’s no condom law, is there?

**John:** Yeah, there’s no condom law. But, I think it’s a good first gesture to buy condoms for your son.

**Craig:** I totally agree. And at what age, and certainly you should not just let him go condom-less. At what age did you lose your virginity, John?

**John:** If we were going to define virginity in a sense of the activity that I was engaged in if I was engaging with a woman could have led to a baby…so, like, it’s a question of virginity. Like, what’s fooling around and what’s more than fooling around?

**Craig:** I would say penetrative sex is virginity.

**John:** Penetrative sex — 23.

**Craig:** I was 16. I was a man-whore, obviously. [laughs]

Kevin Williamson, for real.

**John:** The real Kevin Williamson?

**Craig:** The real Kevin Williamson, creator of Scream and so many other wonderful television shows, Dawson’s Creek and so forth, his simple question, “Zoloft or Lexapro?”

**John:** I’m on neither anti-depressant, but I think they’re both good choices for people who need an anti-depressant.

**Craig:** Neither am I. I’m not on anti-depressants. And I suspect that they don’t work as well as people think. But, you know what does work? Kevin Williamson.

**John:** Yeah. He works hard.

**Craig:** Best guy ever.

**John:** Nima, the actual Nima, wrote in to ask, “I want Bride & Prejudice,” which is apparently a movie. “iTunes has it in SD to buy and HD to rent. Should I buy SD or wait for HD?”

So, I would say you should never wait. I think waiting for almost anything that’s going to cost $3 or $4 or $5 is never a good idea, because the world could end tomorrow. So, if you want to watch this movie, do whatever it takes to watch this movie now and don’t wait another second.

**Craig:** Yeah. Totally. Just rent it. Yeah, of course. I mean, how many times really are you going to watch this thing? Also, I should say that we do better on residuals when you rent things.

**John:** Yeah. Rent it.

**Craig:** Matthew Kingshot wants to know, “Where does the podcast’s opening musical riff come from?”

**John:** So, that actually is something I wrote and it is from The Remnants, which was a web pilot that I did during the strike, so 2008. And I needed some opening little jingle, so I wrote that opening little jingle. And I liked it and I needed something for the podcast, and so I put it there.

So, if you go back to really early episodes of the podcast, I would use sort of super hero or cartoon music for the thing, and I just got really tired of looking for new stuff every week.

**Craig:** Finding new ones, yeah.

**John:** Yeah, so I went to [hums opening]. And that’s what it is.

**Craig:** [hums opening] What’s next? We’ve got David Wells. David Wells, great picture.

**John:** Yes. He writes, “What surprised you about being a father?”

**Craig:** I think the — when I had my son and I became a parent I was surprised by the amount of innate violence that had been in my bloodstream and I didn’t realize it was there. I’m not a violent person. I’ve never been in a fistfight. I don’t believe in hitting. I don’t hit my kids. I don’t spank them or do any of that stuff. I’m not a violent person.

But, I remember somebody accidentally waking my baby up and I wanted to kill them. Not like, ha-ha, I want to kill them; I mean, I actually wanted to kill them. It’s powerful stuff.

**John:** I would say that I was not prepared for sort of how, I would say sort of like your violence — how primal it feels when you have a newborn kid who you are protecting. And how you are — it’s like this beautiful jailor who has like locked you to care of them. And how day becomes night, night becomes day, and you’re just in this weird dreamed fugue state of taking care of the newborn.

And eventually you sort of pass through that thing. But, because of that intensity you feel this tremendous connection to this kid. So, like any scratch on the kid becomes an affront to you.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is intense. Indeed intense.

**John:** Jeff Orrig writes, “How would Craig redesign Kickstarter?”

**Craig:** You know, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t redesign Kickstarter. I would just simply say to the people who are participating on Kickstarter to Kickstarter Emptor, you know. Oh, I’m sorry, Caveat Kickstarter. I got it totally backwards.

Just really think critically before you toss your money out there. Kickstarter can be a good thing. Kickstarter appeals to your most pro-social noble instincts. That doesn’t mean that the people appealing to you are pro-social or noble themselves. So, just be skeptical, be cautious, and if somebody is asking you for money that you think ought to just be asking a traditional investment community for money, don’t give them money. There’s other things you can do with your cash. That’s all.

**John:** Sounds fair.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s see, we got Mike Bowman in LA saying, “We often hear about the crazy things athletes and actors do with their money or fame once they have it, what was the craziest thing you did once you became a working screenwriter simply because you had the money or recognition to do it?”

**John:** So, this wasn’t right when I first became successful, but I really liked the movie Lost in Translation a lot. And so we got the idea, my husband and some friends and I, like let’s just go to Tokyo for 48 hours. And so we did. And it was kind of amazing. So, we flew to Tokyo. We stayed at the Park Hyatt, the same hotel they used in there. I swam in that same pool they shot. And we had like a Lost in Translation weekend. And it was kind of amazing.

And we sang at karaoke bars. And we went to the Imperial Palace, which happened to be open that day. And it was kind of great. So, it was a lot of money to blow, but it was also a really great time and a great experience.

**Craig:** I haven’t done really crazy things with money. I mean…

**John:** Tesla.

**Craig:** Well, is that really crazy? I mean, it’s a car and people have cars and people have expensive cars. I don’t know if that’s that crazy. You know, it’s okay. Does that count? Okay, Tesla.

**John:** I think it counts.

**Craig:** Okay. That’s it. Cool.

**John:** Hawke from Berlin, Germany writes…

**Craig:** [How-ka].

**John:** [Ho-ka], sorry, I should have put the E in there. “I always feel guilty for the Holocaust. I am 30-years-old and I had nothing to do with the war, or the Holocaust, or anything. Even my father was born in 1947 when the war was already over, but I want to apologize as soon as I meet a Jewish person. Do you think that a person should carry the weight of the most horrible crime ever, or let it die after my grandfather left this world?”

**Craig:** Hawke, you are adorable. No, Hawke, you should stop. That’s ridiculous. You don’t — first of all, don’t apologize as soon as you meet a Jewish person. As a Jewish person, that would probably be the only thing you could do to me that would make me feel kind of awkward and weird.

You didn’t do anything! And your dad didn’t do anything. And, frankly, people who were alive during the war, a lot of them didn’t do anything. A lot of them did, but a lot of them didn’t. And a lot of them were just kids, you know.

And the truth is that it was a terrible thing that happened but I don’t believe collective guilt. I don’t believe in sins of the fathers. And, no, you should just stop. You should just stop and breathe easy and be a good person. And you’ll be fine.

**John:** Yeah. Sins of the father just drives me crazy in that sense of like things carry over past a generation. You didn’t choose to be born to that person, so why should you inherit any of their guilt for things? That’s nuts.

And so we have the equivalent in America, it would be slavery. And so slavery was a terrible thing that we can look at, learn from. We can recognize, are there aspects of what happened there that are still happening in society now. But we can focus on what is the present tense and not focus on that thing that happened back then, or of feeling culpable as a modern day human being for what that was then.

We can acknowledge what happened and try to avoid that sort of situation happening again. But, we shouldn’t feel guilt about it.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not about you, basically. You know what I mean? It’s not. You don’t have to feel this personal connection to that because you’re not personally connected to it. And that’s just a fact.

Let’s see, Tim says, “Describes your home entertainment setup and talk your tech in general perfected platform/gamers. Outside of movies, what’s the first thing you read or seek information about each day?”

**John:** That was too much. Let’s just talk about home entertainment center.

**Craig:** Home entertainment center. Done. What do you got?

**John:** Our main TV, our DVR is just the standard Time Warner, no, I’m sorry, it’s the DirecTV box, which is actually just fine. It’s the DirecTV DVR.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s what I have.

**John:** It’s just fine. And I was for a long time holding onto my TiVo but then I got this thing. And you know what? It’s just fine. So, we use that and then we use a Mac Mini that we use as both our DVD player and to watch things off Hulu or Netflix or anything else with that. So, we just switch between the two. It’s fine, it’s painless, it’s easy.

Our old house had a projector and all that stuff, and we never used it because it was a giant hassle. Some people love the projector stuff, but I honestly believe in a TV that you can turn on, you can watch, and it sounds good.

**Craig:** Yeah, we have TVs and we have the DVRs for DirecTV. And then we have a couple of nice setups with surround sound, which I like. Surround sound things are — one particular super cool surround soundy thing which I like a lot. But, yeah, you know, nothing crazy.

**John:** I think people will spend way too much time and money tweaking and adapting their situations which they shouldn’t.

**Craig:** Well, and that entire industry is based on a fastidiousness that simply doesn’t apply. It just doesn’t apply. It’s ridiculous.

**John:** Treat asks, “So, how do you and Craig feel about marijuana? Have you ever smoked before writing? Do you know other screenwriters who do this, or on an occasional or regular basis?”

**Craig:** I mean, I don’t care about marijuana. I had my get high a lot in senior year of high school phase, and then I smoked a little bit in college but not that much. The truth is I don’t smoke marijuana. I don’t get high ever really anymore just because I kind of don’t want to. Again, it’s sort of the alcohol thing, frankly.

And the other issue with marijuana is the dosage concept, because I know exactly how much alcohol is in a glass of wine, or in three fingers of scotch. I just don’t know if I’m smoking marijuana, what is it, how much — how intense is it? There are so many different kinds.

No, I wouldn’t smoke before writing. I just think that that’s crazy. I don’t drink before writing, either. I just think that would be dumb.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t smoke pot. I smoked pot in college some, and a little bit since then. But, the problem with pot for me is I’m really stupid the next day. It just lingers with me for a while in a way that’s not helpful or useful. So, I think it should be legalized. I think we should tax and regulate it and treat it much the same way we treat alcohol, but it’s not a useful thing to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m with you on that one.

**John:** Next question.

**Craig:** Oh, Hugo von Giggle-Bottom.

**John:** Ha. Hugo von Giggle-Bottom writes, “I’m interested in your opinions on baldness, John more than Craig, because you are winning the race to hairlessness. Do you care? Does it affect your confidence?” And related questions.

So, here’s my hair situation. I started to lose my hair in my early 20s. And at a certain point, my friend Tom Hoffman says, “You know, if you ever want to just shave all your hair off, I’ll totally do that.”

And I was like, “You know, we should do that, and we should do it as a public event.”

So, I was at my friend Jen’s house and it was sort of like a white trash party and we were watching Miss America. And it was like, yeah, shave my head. And so we shaved it. And I don’t regret it at all. I never looked back.

The weirdest thing about shaving your head though for the first time is I would catch my reflection in a mirror or even just like walking by a window it was like, “Ah, who is that?” I did not recognize myself for a while. But, then, god, my life is just so much easier not having to think about hair.

**Craig:** Yeah. I would totally shave my head, I guess, but my wife doesn’t want me to. She just likes a very close-cropped balding look. The one thing I won’t do is anything to delay the balding. I don’t put any medicine in there. I don’t put any of that stuff. I don’t take the pills.

I know guys that are injecting stuff directly into their scalp. I don’t do anything. I don’t care. This Dr. von Giggle-Bottom, who is German nobility, apparently, says he’s been struggling with hair loss for years and “I just can’t seem to get comfortable with being a bald guy.”

Dude, you’re not a bald guy. You’re a guy. No one cares.

**John:** No one cares.

**Craig:** No one cares. Honestly. It’s just hair. It’s hair.

Let’s see, Jessie asks, “Did Craig ever get to read the rest of the script for that three-page challenge he likes so much? Did he like it?”

I did. And I did. It turned out that it was actually a short. It was about 10 pages, so I got super lucky. Because, you know, you ask to read something, you’re like, oh boy.

It was a very fun read. And when I read it I thought it felt very — it felt like a script for something animated which didn’t come through necessarily when we read it as just three pages. And it was a little reminiscent of Paper Man, the Oscar award-winning animated short. So, I’m actually hooking up the writer with somebody at Pixar who is going to read the script as a writing sample.

**John:** Great. That’s a perfect choice for that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I would think so.

**John:** Matthew from California writes, “I have a hard time waking up in the mornings, no matter what I do, no matter how much sleep I’ve gotten, I cannot seem to rise when my alarm says it’s time to start the day. Part of me thinks it’s a habit ingrained to me after a long period of depression, but regardless of its origins it’s really messing with my ability to get stuff done. Any advice?”

I would say that you are not a morning person and you should somehow rearrange your life so that you don’t have to be a morning person. I think it’s honestly kind of maybe okay that you’re not a morning person. Just take night shifts or something.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s possible. There are a couple things that you generally ask in a situation like this. What is your caffeine intake? Try stopping all caffeine after noon. Don’t smoke. Exercise a little bit more. And then just try for three or four days to wake up when your alarm says wake up, let’s say 8 o’clock. So, don’t get crazy and say, “I’m waking up at 6:30.” 8 o’clock. Give that a shot. Do that for three or four days in a row and see if you don’t start to get super tired around midnight.

And then you may be able to adjust, if it’s important to you.

**John:** I will say the 11 weeks I was gone in New York and Chicago, that whole time I did not have to set my alarm once, and I could just wake up when I woke up, and I was so much happier for it.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure.

**John:** Jonathan writes, “Two questions because I’m a greedy bastard. What was the clichéd love at first sight when dating? Or was there a clichéd love at first sight meeting? And since you guys are fairly popular, what would you say is the proper etiquette for people to come up and say hi?”

**Craig:** You walk past them two steps and then turn around, thrust yourself at them.

**John:** And say, “So good to meet you Jerry Seinfeld.”

**Craig:** “So good to meet you.” And then walk away.

**John:** So, let’s handle the second question first. It’s fine to say hi if we’re not clearly engaged in some other conversation or place. It’s situational, but I was at a restaurant and the server recognized who I was and could say, “Oh, I’m a big fan of your podcast.” That’s lovely. That’s great. If I’m in the middle of doing something, or if I’m sort of like doing stuff with my kid, that’s the only time it gets kind of weird, because I’m busy doing other stuff here and there isn’t a great time for me to talk with you.

But, our fans are super cool, so I’m never scared about that.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a good rule of thumb to not approach any famous people or people that you don’t know when they’re with their children for the aforementioned reason that parents get — they’re like bears with cubs. They just get weird about that. I mean, the people that have said things to me that I’ve met about the podcast have been very nice.

And, look, the truth is there’s not a great reward. There’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow of meeting me. I just go, “Oh, that’s nice, good to hear.” And then I just move on. But, yeah, just don’t trust yourself into my personal space, because that’s the sort of thing an idiot does to Jerry Seinfeld.

**John:** Yeah. Don’t be an idiot like Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Don’t be an idiot like Craig Mazin.

For me and my wife it was not love at first sight. It wasn’t not love at first sight. It was interest at first sight. I don’t know if there is a love at first sight. I’m suspicious of that sort of thing.

**John:** Yeah. I think there’s lust at first sight. And so we weren’t love at first sight, either. We were like, this is good. This is great. And then three dates became four dates, became ten dates, became, you know, everything else. So, I think sometimes we’re guilty in movies of creating this situation of love at first sight and it becomes the expectation about how love is supposed to work. And that’s not how love usually works.

**Craig:** That is exactly right. It is not.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** So many books just are lies. The world is a huge blanket woven from threads of lies. We just cover ourselves in it.

**John:** Craig, that was actually our last question.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** That’s so anticlimactic, but that was love at first sight, so that’s a good way to end a podcast.

**Craig:** Why not?

**John:** Why not? So, I have no One Cool Thing, because I thought that was about 90 Cool Things.

**Craig:** Oh my god, yeah, no, we can’t keep talking. That would be ridiculous.

**John:** But thank you everyone who sent in these questions. I’m looking at the list now. There were 106 questions. We answered maybe like 50 of them. That was a lot of questions.

**Craig:** We answered a lot of questions. I think we answered them well. We didn’t fight.

**John:** No, we didn’t really fight. We didn’t even disagree. I would say our answers lined up much more than I would have guessed they would.

**Craig:** Well, because, here’s the truth — the two of us are right.

**John:** That’s the thing.

**Craig:** We’re right. And I wish people would just stop fighting it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just let us be right.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Craig, thank you for another fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Standard boiler plate language here: If you like the show, find us on iTunes, give us a rating, tell people that you like the show. And if you have questions about screenwriting, which is mostly what we talk about here, you can send them to ask@johnaugust.com. And you can follow me on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. And thank you very much and we will talk to you guys next week.

**Craig:** [hums opening] See you later.

**John:** Thanks, bye.

LINKS:

* The Writers Guild Foundation presents [The Screenwriter’s Craft: Finding Your Voice](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/the-screenwriters-craft-finding-your-voice/) featuring Scriptnotes Live
* [Zach Braff’s response](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1869987317/wish-i-was-here-1/posts/482298) to [The Hollywood Reporter’s article](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cannes-zach-braffs-kickstarter-film-523352) on his film’s gap financer
* The Hollywood Reporter on [E!’s Fashion Police writers strike](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/fashion-police-writers-strike-begins-441421)
* [Highland v 1.0.2](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/) brings shift + return caps, lyrics and various minor bug fixes
* Try [Cignot.com](http://www.cignot.com/Default.asp) for all your eCig needs
* Thumbs up for [UC Verde Buffalo Grass](http://ucverdebuffalograss.com/)
* [Kevo](http://www.kwikset.com/Kevo/default.aspx) is on its way
* The [Nest Thermostat](http://nest.com/) is fantastic
* For LA pizza, check out [Pizzeria Mozza](http://www.pizzeriamozza.com/), [Joe’s Pizza](http://www.joespizza.com/Tel_310_395-9222.html) in Santa Monica or the pizza kiosk at [The Americana](http://www.americanaatbrand.com/)
* And for LA sushi, we like [Nobu](http://www.noburestaurants.com/) and [Matsuhisa](http://www.nobumatsuhisa.com/), [Sugarfish](http://sugarfishsushi.com/) and the former [Nozawa](http://sushinozawa.com/), [Sasabune](http://www.trustmesushi.com) and [Chef Niki Nakayama](http://www.n-naka.com/about/chef/)’s n/naka
* If you’re in Chicago (or Washington D.C.), try [Protein Bar](http://www.theproteinbar.com/)
* Craig still loves his [Tesla](http://www.teslamotors.com/) and John still loves his [Leaf](http://www.nissanusa.com/electric-cars/leaf/)
* [Alternate with water](http://johnaugust.com/2009/alternate-with-water) when you’re drinking
* OUTRO: George Michael’s [Father Figure](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_EGdiS2PEE) covered by Cantaloop

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/talking-austen-in-austin).

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today we have a very special guest.

**Craig:** Very special. To me.

**John:** To you?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And why is she special to you, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, should she say hello first and then I’ll tell you why?

**John:** She can say hello. We haven’t even introduced her by name yet.

**Craig:** That’s true. Well, say hello, and then let’s see if they can guess.

**Lindsay Doran:** Hello.

**Craig:** Yeah, no way they would guess.

**John:** No, no.

**Craig:** It’s Lindsay Doran, producer extraordinaire. Former head of studio, among other things. And she is special to me because — well, I mean without getting too weird about it, because I don’t want it to get mushy, but — Lindsay is really, really good at her job. She is one of the few producers out there who really understands what producing is, and sadly that’s a shrinking, dying breed.

**John:** And particularly the story aspect of producing.

**Craig:** For sure. And she knows writers, and she knows good writers, and I really respect her. And she’s one of the few people I’ve met in Hollywood who know quality and who knows talent and who like me. I don’t know how else to put it.

**John:** [laughs]

**Lindsay:** [laughs]

**Craig:** She’s very validating to me, the fact that Lindsay likes me is really validating to me. And she’s a terrific person and really smart. And I think a terrific role model for all producers and a good person for writers to know.

**John:** And some extra context here. I’m reading out of the Austin Film Festival, the little bio pamphlet here, but it’s helpful if you don’t know who Lindsay Doran is. “As an executive she supervised movies like This is Spinal Tap, Ghost, five John Hughes films, two James Bond films. As a producer her credits include Dead Again, Sense and Sensibility, Nanny McPhee, and Stranger than Fiction.” Those are some great movies.

**Craig:** Pretty stellar stuff?

**Lindsay:** Huh?

**Craig:** Pretty stellar stuff.

**Lindsay:** Pretty stellar stuff. Okay.

**John:** So welcome. And my first time meeting you was I had written a treatment for a little movie called The Nines, which was not the movie The Nines I ended up shooting many, many years later. I ended up rewriting it as a short story many years later for Derek Haas’s Popcorn Fiction site. But you were one of the few people I sat down with who was like really excited about, and sort of like talked through the potential of the movie. And so I was like, “Oh, that’s a smart person I hope to cross paths with again.”

**Lindsay:** When was that?

**John:** You were at UA and you, god, maybe it was…’99?

**Lindsay:** Yeah. Sounds right.

**John:** Yes. Go had come out, or Go had at least shot. Maybe it didn’t come out. And it was another thing I was thinking about writing to make.

**Lindsay:** And I read Go, hadn’t I? Because I remember that.

**John:** Yeah. Most people had read Go. That was a thing that had gone around and, yeah, it was nice.

**Lindsay:** Cool.

**John:** Welcome. And so let’s talk some.

**Lindsay:** Thanks.

**John:** What’s a good thing we should start talking about, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, you know, the traditional thing would be how did you start, and da-da-da, but I like to go out of order, so we’re going to get to how you started but I want to ask you a question that’s sort of teeing off of something I hinted at earlier. Because a lot of what we do with this podcast is try and do whatever we can to make screenwriters better, including ourselves.

Because I think you’re a very good producer and because I’m sure you are full of thoughts about your fellow producers…

**Lindsay:** Can they hear me blushing?

**Craig:** [laughs] Yes.

**Lindsay:** Okay, good. It’s audible.

**Craig:** It’s a really sensitive mic. Am I right, is there a paucity of — that’s a correct word, right?

**John:** Paucity?

**Craig:** Paucity. Is there a paucity of good producers out there? Are producers — Is the current generation of producers not quite where they used to be? And if so, what do we need to do about this, for us, and for you?

**Lindsay:** Well, to me, the most obvious thing is that studios used to support producers. It used to be that if you had any kind of traction at all as a producer, somebody would give you a deal. They would give you an office on the lot. They would give you an assistant. They might even give you money to live on. And they might even give you a little bit of money to develop scripts with. And consequently you could focus on what your job is supposed to be, which is getting a really good script right, even if it takes a long time.

You weren’t focused on — at least, you didn’t have to be focused on the start date, because as it is right now producers don’t get a dime until the movie starts. And therefore what they have to be most interested in — for completely sympathetic reasons like putting food on the table and keeping their kids in a good school and all the things that we want to have money for — they have to be focused on getting the movie made.

And I remember one of my very first experiences when I was at AVCO Embassy Pictures, I was the juniorest possible executive at AVCO Embassy, and I worked on a script there with a producer that we were both very proud of. And he went off to Canada to make the movie. And the next thing I heard was that the actor who had been cast in it wanted to rewrite the script. When the director refused he wanted to fire the director. And then I heard that the producer was backing the actor.

And I had so many horrible things to say about that. “How dare he sell his script down the river that way?” The movie was made with another director. They fired the director. They brought in somebody else who listened to the actor. The script was ruined. The movie was never released.

And when I saw him the next time, all full of the kind of high judgment that you have when you’re at the very bottom of your career, he said, “How dare you.” He said, “I was in the middle of a divorce. I had three daughters. My wife, who seemed great when I married her, turned out to be completely crazy, and I was trying to do what fathers hardly ever get to do, which is have sole custody of those three children. The only way I was going to get any kind of custody at all was to have money in the bank. The only way I was going to have money in the bank was to have that movie start shooting. The only way I was going to have that movie start shooting was with that actor. And the only way we’d have that actor was to back him, fire the director, sell out the movie.”

And I went, “Oh my gosh, I wonder if this has ever happened before?” And now I just see it all the time. When I was running United Artists, the first thing I began to notice was producers would say, “The script is coming in on Friday morning so we’ll send it out to agents on Friday afternoon.” And I’d say, “Why would you do that? You haven’t read it yet.” And they would say, “What are you talking about?” It was about the rush.

And then somebody would say, “You’re not going to believe this. I just got a call from CAA and they’re saying that such-and-such big movie start might be interested in this part.” And I would say, “Well yeah, except they’re completely wrong for the part, right?” And they would say, “What?!” And they would say, “But you don’t understand. They’re saying that they’ll get it to this actor for the weekend.”

**Craig:** “I said big movie star. What did you forget?”

**Lindsay:** And I would say, “But…” and then I’d finally say, “Well, aren’t we having this conversation backwards? Aren’t I supposed to be the jerk studio head who’s trying to ram the big movie star down your throat and you’re supposed to be the one standing up for the integrity of the screenplay and say, ‘But he’s not right for the part!'”

It was completely backwards. And I totally understood because they were trying to get to that start date and they thought with a big movie star of course they would get there.

The other thing is that producers, they don’t tell you if there’s a problem. The director could be completely on drugs and they will never tell you because they’ve got to get to the start date. There’s so many things that you rely on producers to do as a studio head. And they are absolutely disincentivized to do any…

**Craig:** By the system itself.

**Lindsay:** …by the system itself. And, of course, they are totally disincentivized from spending a long time developing a screenplay. The most — I usually spend like four years developing a screenplay. And that’s really hard.

**Craig:** Although what’s happened is that in some ways the development process has just shifted — they’ve shifted the burden onto the writer because a lot of producers now will just have the writer work for free over, and over, and over, and over, and over, because they only get one shot. And they feel like, “Well, if I turn it in and it’s not perfect then it won’t get made.”

But that wasn’t always the case. You used to get the second step, you know? [laughs]

**Lindsay:** You used to have the second. I tried, frankly, to never hand anything into a studio until I thought it was really shootable, because I didn’t want it to go into studio development. I wanted it to go right into… — So, I would always meet with writers and say, “Here’s the work I think we should do. It’s completely up to you. If you need the money, if you think it’s fine the way it is, if you think these notes are bad…”

It hardly ever happened that anybody ever said, “No, you’re right, let’s ignore those notes and just hand it in.” But it was always their choice. But now it’s a whole other thing and really it is terrifying. Do you think it’s the strike? Because people keep saying it’s the fault of the strike.

**John:** I don’t think it was the strike at all. I think it’s structural changes in the industry overall. To me it feels like as giant corporations took over all the studios, and all the studios are now aspects of giant corporations, they have reporting structures, and they’ll show like, “This is what we’re doing, this is what’s going through, and we have to be able to justify the money we’re spending because it’s coming out as this.”

So, development is just research and development, and it’s hard for them to show that the money they spent on scripts they didn’t shoot was money well spent. And it’s hard to justify like, “Well, we now have a relationship with this person after this.” That doesn’t show up on spreadsheets. And risk-taking is not generally rewarded. Risk-taking is rewarded if it’s a giant movie that just sort of should take all the boxes, so then they’ll spend $300 million. But it’s become incredibly hard to make the smaller movie that should be able to work, but if it’s too much of a risk.

Everyone’s afraid of risking their reputation and their time on the smaller thing.

**Lindsay:** Yeah. And failure. It’s a real thing. You know, I think, again, I think like a lot of people I used to think of people who ran studios as being totally focused on the bottom line and all that kind of stuff. But when I went to UA, and I was partnering, you know, MGM was its own studio and UA was its own studio, all within the same company. And MGM had a couple of movies in a row that didn’t work. And a lot of people got fired. Like 80 people lost their jobs. So, you suddenly realized, “Oh, it’s isn’t about me money-grubbing about my bonus; it’s about people literally coming to your office and saying, ‘Well, we’ve got to fire a bunch of people. Who do you want to fire, because that movie didn’t work?'” It’s the real stuff.

And usually they lose their job and you don’t lose your job, even if you green-lit the movie. So, the fear is not an un-admirable fear.

**Craig:** It’s not all impersonal and fat cat business stuff.

**Lindsay:** Not at all. With me it is, but I mean, with all other people…

**Craig:** Well, of course, you’ve always been a terror.

**Lindsay:** [laughs]

**Craig:** But it is — everyone is scared. You can feel the fear. And I don’t think, the strike was a bit of an accelerant on a fire that was already burning, but the real to me…

**Lindsay:** You’ve used the word “accelerant” and “paucity” and how long has this been going on? Like 15 minutes?

**Craig:** Well, Aline McKenna used “delectable” this morning, so she’s way ahead of me.

**Lindsay:** I like “ineluctable.” That’s my favorite.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. “Ineluctable” and “electable.” Yes. Now we’ve got both.

**Lindsay:** Yeah, we’ll get to them.

**Craig:** I’m going to get to “unelectable.”

**Lindsay:** [laughs] And “electable.”

**Craig:** Like “Ron Paul is unelectable.”

But I think what’s happened to producers, the squeeze on them is that movie studios slash the output. It’s just they don’t make… — The Writers Guild collects statistics on how many feature films they do the credit arbitrations for, which are all of them, really, all the major ones. Even if there’s not an actual fight it still counts as a thing.

And they would always land around somewhere between 293 and 310 final credits a year. And then suddenly it went down, around the strike to be fair, it went down to 200 and it hasn’t come back. So, that’s a third gone. And it seems like the third, not only have they reduced the amount of movies they make but they also have lowered the ratio of developed-to-make as you were saying, so now you have fewer and fewer producers — they have no leverage over the studios anymore. The age of the big producer is over.

And from my perspective, and I guess this is sort of a follow up to the initial question is under the lens of all that, and under the pressure of all that on producers, do you feel that the action — were producers ever good at developing material? And are they now — Were they good and are they now much worse, or were they always bad? Because there are so few producers that frankly really do know how to work with a screenwriter, talk to a screenwriter, care about the work, and approach it from the script forward.

**Lindsay:** It’s hard to know because a writer might actually know the answer to that question better than I would. I’m a producer. I’m not sure that I know how other producers do their job. I hear about it from writers but I don’t really know.

**Craig:** I guess that’s true. You never have a chance to be unimpressed by them. [laughs]

**Lindsay:** I know for example when Sydney Pollack was talking to me about running his company, he talked to a lot of people. And he told me later, after he’d hired me, he said, “Every single one of those people I talked to said, ‘But what I’m really good at is development,’ every one of them, no matter what kind of background. They all thought they were the best at that.”

But, a few years ago, actually I guess while I was still at UA, so it’s more than a few years ago, UCLA started a producer’s program, and they decided to have a board that was going to consist of studio heads and big producers, and the studio heads were either former producers or about to be producers, maybe sooner than they thought. So, here was this big room full of really well-known people.

And the head of the program said, “Maybe one of the things we can do today is define what a producer is, because it’s one of the hardest things to define in the movie business.” So, she said that towards the beginning. And then later in her talk she said, “And of course one of the things we tell our producing students is that the most important thing they’re going to learn here is how to work with a writer.”

And somebody said, “Why would you tell them that?” And what we began to realize was that the room split right down the middle between people who completely agreed with that statement and said that is the basis of a producer’s job, and the other half of the room who said you can delegate that — “You can get some girl to do that,” you know, and made big long things about, “ou better know a lot of movie stars’ home phone numbers.” “You better know a lot about foreign distribution.” “You better know a lot about raising money.” “You better know a lot about talking to a marketing guy.”

And they’re not wrong, but the idea that development can be delegated and that they’re there for the big stuff… — And in the midst of that discussion I said something like, “I consider myself on the set to be the,” I’m trying to think what the phrase was I used, because I heard it back from a lot of people who said, “What was that hilarious thing you said?”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Lindsay:** Oh, “– the guardian of the intentions of the screenplay.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Lindsay:** That’s what I said. That’s what I’m there for. If somebody starts changing a script on the set I want to be there to say, “Let me tell you why this is the way it was.” “Let me tell you why this line was here.” Or, “Let me tell you why it was set in a big room and not a small room.” “Let me tell you why this was an interior instead of an exterior.” “Let me tell you why she was supposed to be above the bridge instead of below the bridge.”

There’s a reason for that. Then if the director says, “No, I like it better this way,” and we’ve had the fight, then that’s the scene we’re going to shoot. But somebody should be there to say, “If you cut that line it’s really going to hurt you in the third act. Maybe you didn’t realize you were even cutting.” Oh my gosh, a lot of the time they’ll go, “Oh yeah, you’re absolutely right.”

So, I think that’s… — And I cannot tell you how people laughed at that.

**Craig:** Laughed derisively I hear?

**Lindsay:** Derisively at that.

**Craig:** Really?

**Lindsay:** Yeah. I like laughter, but not that kind.

**Craig:** Right. Bad laughter.

**Lindsay:** And later people would literally run into me saying, “Oh, what was that hilarious thing you said? The guardian, or the what, or the what? And we’re still laughing about that!”

**Craig:** Wow.

**Lindsay:** So, for some people it’s the sacred duty of the producer and the other one it’s like, “How silly is that? That’s the least important thing that we do.”

**Craig:** “Where’s Chinese financing?” I don’t have time for that.

**Lindsay:** But they’re not wrong about Chinese financing.

**Craig:** They probably don’t also know the intention of the script, so they wouldn’t know what to guard anyway, even if they took it seriously.

**John:** Well, what it comes down to, is it realistic to expect all of those functions to fall on one person? Is it realistic that the creative producer who is the guardian of the script, or sort of the quality control to some degree of the creative vision of the script, is it realistic to assume that that person is also going to be excellent in all the other functions, which are really valid functions of a producer which is how to sort of browbeat people into getting the movie started, and how to talk the people out of their trailer, and to sort of yell at the marketing department.

Those are different functions. I often describe that most movies, even if the person isn’t called a producer, just different kind of roles you would perform. And there’s like the one person who sits at the monitor and sort of watches, makes sure that this actually the movie we’re trying to make. There is the peacemaker, the one who actually can sort of deal with all the stuff. And peacemaker is also sort of combined with a bodyguard, like the person who, like Dick Zanuck who recently passed away who I loved, his best function for Tim Burton was he would throw himself in front of any bullet aimed at Tim Burton to protect him from studio craziness.

So, that’s a crucial function.

**Lindsay:** A literal guardian.

**John:** Yeah, literally.

**Lindsay:** The hell with the intention to the screenplay.

**John:** Yeah. Wiry and strong. And the third person is you need sort of like the maniac. And sometimes you need the person who like, “You see this ball, you see this ball? Go get this ball.” And will knock down all the buildings in the way.

**Lindsay:** [laughs]

**John:** And I first encountered this, the first movie I got shot was Go. And we luckily had — those three people were actually all producers. And sometimes one of them is a line producer, one is this, but you know, Paul Rosenberg was the “go get this ball.” And amazing things could just happen because he would have no shame and would just knock everything down and we could lose all our financing and get all of our financing back the next day because he would call everyone to do that.

It may not be realistic that one person is always going to be able to do all those roles.

**Lindsay:** Yeah. I think that’s true. I mean, I’ve mostly been able to work on things where there was a sort of straight line. But, again, I was able to take the time to make sure that straight line existed.

I mean, Sense and Sensibility is the easiest one to talk about because that was my favorite book. I looked for ten years for the right writer. When I met Emma Thompson she’d never written a screenplay before. But I saw some television skits she’d written in England and there was the voice that I’d been looking for all that time. It was really funny, it was emotional, the period language stuff was fantastic and really accessible.

And we spent years doing that. Now, Sydney Pollack, I was running his company at the time. He was incredibly great at looking at the script and telling us the American point of view and all that kind of stuff. He’d never read Jane Austen, which was really, really useful.

But, when we got, you know, Amy Pascal was somebody that I knew and I knew that she actually cared about Jane Austen. So, setting it up there as a total straight development deal, there was nothing indie about that movie at all. It was a Columbia development deal. And of course she left, but Gareth Wigan, who was somebody else who really got it —

**John:** A gentleman, yeah.

**Lindsay:** And so eventually we got to the point where everybody loved the script, and then by the time Lisa Henson was running the company and she said, “Look, go get a director. Here’s all I ask for: An interesting announcement. That’s all I want. I don’t want you to come back with some English director who sounds you’re going to go right back into…”

And that’s exactly what I wanted because I didn’t want — we had spent all these years trying to make Sense and Sensibility kind of galloping entertainment that was really fun, and full-blooded, and hilarious, and really made people cry. And the last thing I wanted was to turn it back into a little English movie.

So, I started meeting with a lot of people and I kept meeting people who didn’t know what movie we were making. They’d never mentioned it was funny. You know, I would say, “What about the humor?” and they’d go, “What humor?”

It would go on, and on, and on, or they were talking about a completely different movie, and some of them were big, and some of them were little. And then I met Ang Lee, who was the weirdest choice in the world, but who talked immediately about how funny it was, and then said, “I want this movie to break people’s hearts so badly they’ll still be recovering from it three weeks later.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Lindsay:** That’s a direct quote. And I went, “Okay, this is it. This is the guy who wants to make the full…” — So, there was this straight line, even though it was a weird line as it was, it was the right line. So, we had the right studio, the right director, for the right script. I was very involved in the casting. You know what I mean?

And then the marketing people came up with a campaign that had nothing to do with the movie that we were talking about. “From the mind of Jane Austen.” It was like, “No, we’ve spent all these years getting out of the mind of Jane Austen. Why are you doing this?” And they went, “Oh, you know,” and saying “We want it to feel really, really fun and really entertaining.” It was like, “Oh, okay.”

So, it was that same sensibility — for lack of a better word — all the way through. But it was about choosing the right people to begin with so there wasn’t really that much of a need for the hammer and the ball thrower, and the yeller, and all of that stuff, because everybody was trying to do the same thing.

**Craig:** But then in that regard so much of good producing is matchmaking, you know?

**Lindsay:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, I feel — And I haven’t worked with many producers. I’ve been doing it for a long time, but for whatever reason I’ve spent a lot of time working with studios directly. And I can’t quite figure out why.

**Lindsay:** Producers won’t work with you.

**Craig:** They literally will not sit in a room with me. [laughs]

**Lindsay:** We should talk about that later when the tape machine is off.

**Craig:** Yeah. Can you explain why?

**Lindsay:** Yeah. Do I need to? [laughs]

**Craig:** But on Identity Thief, Scott Stuber, match made. It was a lovely thing. He called me up and he said, “Here’s Jason Bateman, I’d like you to meet him. And here’s Melissa McCarthy. And the three of you get together.” And that really, that’s the biggest of all the stuff I’m sure he’s done on the movie, I mean, because I’m not there watching him do a lot of the stuff that he does, but that was the biggest thing was his matchmaking and picking the right people.

But even then I feel like producers — that agency has been taken away from them a little bit. That a lot of times now producers feel a little bit like the way we feel when you just get an assignment. “Here it is.” You know, sometimes we’re called and they’ll say, “It’s these two people in this movie starting now, two weeks. Fixed third act.”

**Lindsay:** Right.

**Craig:** And you go, “Oh, okay. Fine.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Got it. I mean, you’ve taken away all my choices, so this is a very simple thing. I’m now like a horse on a trail.” And I feel like that’s happening to producers, too. They don’t even have a chance to match make.

**Lindsay:** Yeah. It really is true. You want ideally to be able to have the time and the blessing to do that. But, and one of the things I notice right away, and you tell me if this is still true: When I had my deal at MGM after, you know, when I became a producer again. You know, agents call you up and they say, “Okay, we’re going out with this spec this week. And we’re going to send it to you for MGM and eight other people for all the other studios.” And you hand it in, mostly without reading it, is what you’re supposed to do. Everybody was, like, stunned. It was like, “What, you’re going to read it first and you might say no? Nobody’s ever done that before!”

And I would say, “But why would you want me producing your client’s script if I haven’t even read it, and loved it, and understood it? And, actually, shouldn’t I be meeting the writer?”

“No, that’s not how this works.” So, there would be an auction. The script would sell. And then you’d meet the producer who’s producing your movie and it could be someone who’s never…

**Craig:** That’s the worst possible.

**Lindsay:** And yet, I do understand. When I tried to do it a different way, when I was developing something with a writer and I said, “You know, I think we should hand pick our studio. We shouldn’t just do one of those auction things. We should say, ‘This is a Columbia Pictures — Amy Pascal will love this,'” or whoever it would be.

The hard thing was if you only give it to one studio, nobody will read it. There’s no competition. “I don’t get to screw somebody over the weekend,” and that’s a lot of it.

Once I understood agents saying, you know, “Producers call me on Monday whenever they’ve bought something and say, ‘Who did I screw this weekend?'” It’s like “What did I get…” — But that’s part of the fun; that competition really does fuel so much of it that only when things went out to a million places, or if they got hold of it, that’s when stuff started to happen.

So, it’s a feeding frenzy but it seems to me insane to be a writer, to meet the producer after it’s sold. That’s just nuts.

**Craig:** Crazy. It’s a shotgun wedding.

**John:** Yeah.

**Lindsay:** It’s a complete shotgun wedding. And, I don’t know. I don’t know.

**John:** A question: Now, you described the Sense and Sensibility development process, and if you wanted to do that now how would you do it? Here’s another book that you love, that you want to see made. As a producer what would you do now in 2012 to try to get it going?

**Lindsay:** I wouldn’t do anything differently than what I did then. I mean, that was a public domain book and it was at a moment when nobody had made a Jane Austen movie in 50 years. So, it wasn’t like anybody was hammering, “Where’s that Jane Austen project of yours?!”

I was able to spend all those years looking for the writer with the right…

**John:** My question though is: so you would have found the right writer, but who would you have gotten to pay them? Because you couldn’t go to a Columbia right now to try to do Sense and Sensibility.

**Lindsay:** I don’t know. I’m not really sure.

**John:** I mean, there’s still like the Fox 2000s. There are still little small slices…

**Lindsay:** Yeah. There’s Fox 2000. And I suppose I could go to Focus Features. And, I mean, the idea of doing that as a development deal at a major studio seems less likely, but Amy’s still there. And she does make movies every single year that are very, very close to her heart. So, I don’t think that it would necessarily be impossible.

But, yeah, I would probably be more focused on Focus.

**John:** But you described it as Sense and Sensibility was a mainstream Columbia Pictures release. And so it wasn’t like everyone has to take a pay cut to go do it. And I feel like now to try to do anything that’s not Transformers 9, they talk like, “Well, everyone’s going to have to take a little pay cut because it’s not a big movie, it’s a tiny movie.”

I feel like it’s very hard to do that — this is a movie for grownups in any way along. It’s hard to get the green light, but it’s hard to get even the start.

**Lindsay:** Yeah, it’s true. It really is true.

But, the thing is, I think what people don’t understand is that people are people. They love movies. You know what I mean? We love to go to the movies. I’ve really liked the last five movies in a row that I saw. That’s pretty great when you think about it.

And they all got made. And they’re all pretty grownup-y. And, you know, some of them are more youth-oriented than others, but I thought they were all good. And everybody felt that they were trying to make a quality movie all the way along. You don’t want to feel like you’re beating off people to try to hang on to your quality.

But, I think there are people at every studio who want to make quality movies. And they want to make sure that they’re going to have the right package to do that.

**John:** How do we fix things? How do we make things better? What are some options? Are we going to get back to those producers who can do that stuff? Do producers have to get their own money so they can develop things themselves?

**Lindsay:** Well, I don’t know. I wondered for awhile if there was a way, because I do understand. It does seem to be the case, or it did seem to be the case, when producers had deals at studios that you would inevitably make your biggest hit movies and the movies that won the most awards for a studio other than the one where you had your deal.

It was some sort of God’s joke on Hollywood, but it had partly to do with that competition thing. You know, I remember when I was working at Paramount for Dawn Steel and a producer on the lot would hand something in and weeks would go before she would read it. And finally she said to me one day, “I don’t have to read that. I own that.” [laughs] “What I have to read are the things that I’m competing with the whole town for. That can wait.”

And so somebody said, “Buying something from a producer on your own lot is like kissing your sister.” It’s like, where’s the excitement in that?

— I guess that means a guy kissing his sister. I guess there would be more excitement if it was a girl kissing her sister.

**Craig:** See, this is why you’re a good producer. You get that.

**Lindsay:** [laughs] I get that. I really do get that.

**Craig:** You just know in your bones that that’s better.

**Lindsay:** So, that lack of competition actually weirdly ends up that, I mean, when I was at Universal, that’s when I decided I wanted to hire Emma to do that. And the head of the studio at the time, I was in his office for something else and he was turning us down because he said, “Really what I need right now are just straight out commercial movies. I don’t need things like this.”

So, as I was leaving the office I said, “So, I guess you don’t like a Jane Austen project, ha-ha.” I got back to the office and he called and he said, “Do you really have a Jane Austen project?” And I said yeah. He said, “Jane Austen is my favorite author of all time.” I said I would never have known that. He said, “What do you have?”

And I told him and I said, “Have you ever heard of Emma Thompson?” And he said, “No,” because nobody had at that point. And I said, “Well, she’s got five lines in Henry V.” And he said, “You know, she’s going to want to be in it.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Lindsay:** That’s the problem, you know. It’s like, “We’re going to do this whole thing, and then she’s going to want to star in it.” So, cut to by the time we hand it in…

**John:** She’s a movie star.

**Lindsay:** …it’s like, “We’re only making this movie if Emma Thompson plays the lead.” She’s, you know, 35 and the character is 19 or whatever it was, but even Emma by that point realized that she’d written it for her own voice. But she said all the way along this is totally up to the director. “If the director wants me, I’ll do it. If the director doesn’t want me, I won’t do it.” And Ang said, “Only if it’s Emma Thompson. That’s the only way I’ll do it.”

So, what was the question?

**John:** We were talking about, is there a way to fix this? Is there a way to go back?

**Lindsay:** Okay. So there’s that problem. Where I have a deal at Universal and it gets made at Columbia and it wins an Academy Award for Best Screenplay and all that kind of stuff. And it happened all the time with Sydney’s movies and we had a deal at Universal, making The Firm at Paramount, then we moved to Paramount and he makes…

So, I was wondering at one point if there could be a revolving fund, where every studio puts so much money into a fund. That you could get young producers, middle level producers, older producers, and let them have an office, and an assistant, and a little bit of money, and then teach people how to develop screenplays. There’s none of that going on.

**Craig:** Who’s going to teach them?

**Lindsay:** I would. I would be happy to do that. And I bet other people would be happy to do that. They come all the way to Austin. Don’t you think they’d go to North Hollywood to do that?

**John:** There was some conversation about: could the Writers Guild and Producers Guild get together and set up sort of a certificate program for young development executives saying, “This is what development is,” and sort of best practices and these are things you can focus on — like how to talk to writers?

I worry that people move up so fast or they sort of come into a culture that’s already so toxic that they never learn how things could be, how things used to be. How, you know, you could actually not screw people over in one-step situations. There might be some good way to tweak it to motivate the young generation going through to get a little stamp in their book saying they went through this program and got it.

**Craig:** I have to say that one of the things that works against all of this, works against hope, you know, because I like to work against hope —

**Lindsay:** That’s nice. That’s touching.

**Craig:** What I’m always concerned about is that Hollywood is very much about popularity and heat and competition, which all of that is homogenizing. And what I’ve always loved about you is that even in the beginning when you would say things like, “But I’m the guardian of the intention of the script…”

**Lindsay:** [laughs]

**Craig:** — and then everyone laughed at you, but you didn’t change your mind. It’s very rare. I’ve always felt alone. [laughs] You know what I mean? And maybe, I don’t know if you understand this, but I’ve always felt alone.

There have been so many times in my career where I thought, “Either I’m crazy or all of these people around me are wrong. Either way, I’m not changing. Right? I’m just going to stay doing this. And I’m going to keep thinking this way because I just feel like that’s the way, that’s important. This is what I value. And I don’t value all of the other things that people are telling me I should value.”

**Lindsay:** God. You’re like the hero of How to Train Your Dragon.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Always. I’ve always felt that.

**Lindsay:** It’s completely based on you.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. Exactly. Well, also, I do have a fairly lucrative dragon-raising business on the side. It’s not technically legal.

But, I do feel like that’s what we’re always struggling against, that people coming in as development executives… — And I read this great article once where a guy was sort of wondering, “Why are car salesmen so gross? Why do car salesmen dress that way? Why do car salesmen smell that way with that cologne and have those ties and the ridiculous hair? What is that?”

So, he decided to go undercover and actually get a job as a car salesman. And he said — and this is it — in any group you’re in, after three weeks you just want to fit in.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s it. “And suddenly I kind of wanted to wear a wide tie and have that cologne on because everybody did. And it was just like they were looking at me like I’m the weirdo.”

**Lindsay:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I worry that now in development everybody is just homogenizing down, too, you know.

**Lindsay:** Well, I had lunch with two agents awhile ago. It was right after, it was in January. And both of them had gone skiing over the holidays, a man and a woman. And they were talking about skiing and I don’t ski, so I was just listening.

And then one of them said, or the woman said, “You know, I’m so bummed because I’m going to Sundance next week and I hear that the powder is perfect and I’m not going to get to go skiing.” And the guy said, “Why not?” And she said, “Because I’m going to Sundance.” And he said, “So what?”

And she said, “I’m going to the film festival. I’m going to be seeing films all day.” And he said, “That’s funny. When I got to Sundance I go up to the top of the slopes in the morning. I meet a lot of people. I ski all day. I come down at night. I find somebody like you. I say, ‘What’s good?’ You tell me. I say, ‘Who made it?’ You tell me. I go to the party. I meet him. You know, I find him, I meet him, I schmooze him. I sign him. And then the next day I’m at the top of the mountain again.”

And I went, “Oh my gosh, there are two Hollywoods.” There are these distinct Hollywoods. There are the worker bees and the extractor bees. And really you can’t crossover, and you don’t really want to crossover. Those guys don’t want to be in all the screenings and reading the script three times. And she didn’t want to be that guy who was only kind of pretending to have seen the work and signing the people. “I can’t do what that guy does, and he can’t do what I do.”

And I think at a certain point people will fall into one camp or the other. And I think Hollywood does need both camps, but I do think that for people who are sort of natural worker bees, the ones who actually are going to do the work, it seems to me there should be a way to say to them, “All right. Let’s teach you how to do the work better.”

**Craig:** And that it’s okay to want to do the work.

**Lindsay:** That it’s okay to want to do the work.

**Craig:** That it’s okay to be a script nerd.

**Lindsay:** Yeah. Well, because, somebody has to call somebody and say, “What is the…”

I worked for one studio head once who before any meeting would say, “Um, tell me what we don’t like about this script again?” You know. [laughs] And that’s what I was there for was to say, “This, this, this, this, and this.” Right. And then they’d be brilliant in the meeting. You’d swear they’d been up all night coming up with those notes.

**Craig:** Well, it’s Broadcast News, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Lindsay:** But it really is. And it was like, “I couldn’t do what that person was doing. That person is, you know, and has no — it isn’t even that they have no shame. That’s what they do. They don’t have any time.”

**Craig:** It’s Hollywood.

**Lindsay:** “It isn’t even about shame. They don’t have time to do what I’m doing.”

**Craig:** And then add the layer on that all of us are really working together to make a script that really beautiful people can read. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Lindsay:** [laughs]

**Craig:** You know? I mean, there are so many layers of this, and they’re spectacular and fascinating.

**Lindsay:** I know. It’s really, really true.

**John:** One of Craig’s solutions to this, or at least a possible way to make some things better would be for studios to look for, “These are writers we really want to work with, these are directors we really want to work with. Let’s get them together and say like, ‘You guys, we’re going to make our deal with you Writer A and Director A. You come to us with a movie you want to make. And if we say ‘no,’ we’ll say ‘no,’ and you have to come back to us with another one up to a certain number of tries.'”

But just to start the process with, you know, “Here are people who want to make a movie, have a vision for a what a movie is,” rather than sort of everything having to be based on the book that went out that week, or the spec script, or the new toy that can be licensed out to things.

But that equation didn’t include a producer, and a producer actually feels like an important part.

**Craig:** Oh, for sure. I mean, you need an adult in the room. I think that writers and directors, we are the filmmakers. I think of us combined as the filmmakers. And the producer is the producer — they’re producing it.

**John:** It’s like the CEO of the company and the product of that company is this one movie.

**Craig:** If you have those three people working like a team I just feel… — You know, my whole beef is that the way things work typically is that a producer and writer work together for a really long time, get it just the way they want. The studio says, “Great. Go get a director.” They get a director and now it’s the producer and the director doing another thing. And then the writer is just sort of done.

**Lindsay:** Yeah, no, I don’t like that.

**Craig:** And for instance when you say, “I’m on set as the caretaker of the intention,” it would be nice if the screenwriter were also on set as the caretaker of the…

**Lindsay:** Yeah. And sometimes they are. That’s the good thing about when you work with a writer-star, then they are definitely there.

**Craig:** Right. They’re definitely there.

**Lindsay:** But I always try to have the writer on set. I mean, Scott Frank was on the set of Dead Again every single day. And so, yeah, that is good.

But sometimes the writer is just becoming a director and they’re off someplace else.

**Craig:** I’m a huge, huge, huge advocate of being on set. I would much rather skip a job and just stay on set and be there every day. And even if I say one thing in a week that impacts what happens, that’s a week well-earned to me. The movie lives forever.

**Lindsay:** Yeah. I completely agree. And also writing, I remember somebody was saying they were working on something and there was a graveyard. What are we supposed to call it now? Cemetery.

**Craig:** You can still call it graveyard.

**John:** There’s no PC problem there.

**Lindsay:** And the production designer came to the director and said, “What do you want on these graves?” And she said, “Call the writer.” That’s writing. You know? And I went, “Yeah, that’s exactly right.” You want somebody who understands that any words is writing.

And actually a lot of production design is writing. What would be in this guy’s room is part of who that character is.

**Craig:** You know, it’s so funny you say that. Everybody feels an ownership of the screenplay when they make a movie, but the funny thing is sometimes there are those little things like, “Oh, we need a sign that guides people to the meeting in the movie.” And actually no one can write it. [laughs] Just simply writing a sentence is a very specific thing.

**Lindsay:** Yeah. Well, also, something that I really didn’t understand until I worked on Stranger than Fiction, finally somebody said this to me out loud, which is people whose background is in production design, and art direction, and props usually do not have a good grasp of the English language. That’s just actually not something they do.

**Craig:** It’s not their gig.

**Lindsay:** It’s not their gig. So, things are continually misspelled, mispunctuated, and, you know, when you have a movie like Stranger than Fiction that’s all about language, and you have a fake book in it that somebody has to read, and somebody has to start turning pages of this big manuscript, or you have a notebook that somebody is carrying around that’s got — if the conversation goes this way it’s tragedy, and if it goes this…

If there were “tragedies” misspelled in the close-ups, it really matters in that kind of a movie.

**John:** It does matter.

**Craig:** Kind of a bummer. Yeah, that’s not going to work.

**Lindsay:** It might matter in all of the movies. But it’s like it took me the longest time to understand that I had to look at every single thing. Or, even the readability of, you know, there’s a bunch of trucks and we know that our guy is in this truck. And the way we’re going to know that is it says Ace Tomatoes on the side. And you get the trucks and the sign is this big and you can’t possibly see from a helicopter shot.

That’s an awful lot of what you do as a producer is run around and say, “You know the whole point of this is that the handkerchief has to have initials on it because it’s going to start out in this person’s hands, but it’s going to end up in this person’s hands an hour from now and we’ve got to recognize it. And if you make the initials — well, first of all, you didn’t make the initials at all? Okay. So, we’re going to do something else now. Go make the initials,” and they come back and they’re this big. “No. Because the way the shot is going to be…”

It’s like, who is translating all of that? And sometimes a director is doing it. But it’s much nicer to be able to just hand the director a situation without even having to think about stuff like that.

**John:** Yeah. The director is focused on the day’s work, as he or she should be. But there’s a much bigger story that has to be told. And knowing that 80 pages down the road you have to do that, that’s the time where I’ve been really helpful on the set as a writer because if there’s not you, if there’s not a creative producer who actually really knows what’s there, it can be really damning.

I remember on Go there was one night we were shooting and script supervisor — it’s a thankless job, and some of them are fantastic — but there’s one thing she hadn’t caught that in doing the close-ups, one of the characters had changed the tense on a verb, and so as we went around to do the other actor’s close-up, like it wasn’t going to cut together. He was answering a question in a way you couldn’t actually answer the question — you couldn’t actually cut those shots together anymore.

So, I’m hearing on my — and like running back to set, like you know, “No! Don’t turn around because — that doesn’t actually — that won’t make sense anymore. You can’t actually cut that in.”

**Craig:** And then you feel embarrassed, like I have a tense, and they’re like, “Oh, the writer with his tense problems. It’s just words, man.”

**John:** Yeah. Exactly. Like I’m constraining you. It’s like, “Well, I’m constraining you so it can actually make sense. Do you want to sit in the editing room and see how this doesn’t work?”

**Craig:** We are the story experts. And it’s a sad thing in features that so often we just aren’t there. And we put clues and things into the script and they — you know, it’s good that you care. I mean, it really is good that you care.

I wrote a script, they were making this movie, and there was a scene where somebody shoots a hole through a door, and the characters inside see them through the hole in the door and run. And they don’t exchange any words. And then later on in the movie they encounter each other again in a public space and it’s tense because you’re the guy that shot a hole through my door.

And I got a call from the production. The director is like, “We got a real problem. You know, I realize there’s a huge hole in the script.” And I’m like, “Oh no, what?” “Well, when they see each other, they’ve never seen each other in that moment. How does he even know?” “Because he sees him when he shoots a hole in the door.” “No.” “Yeah.”

**John:** So, he didn’t shoot it that way.

**Craig:** Didn’t shoot it that way. And I’m like, “But it’s there.” He goes, “Really?” And now I’m a little panicked. So, I go back and I look. There it is. “They meet eyes through the hole in the door.” But, you know, on the day that’s just sides.

**Lindsay:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And if you don’t have somebody there…

**Lindsay:** Absolutely. Or even, you know, and this is actually something I was very aware of working for Sydney. In The Firm, for example, there’s a whole sequence that Tom Cruise and Jeanne Tripplehorn break up, man and wife, and they break up. And you sort of see them separately. — Oh, no, they don’t break up, but she knows that he’s cheated on her but they’re still trying to hold their marriage together.

And there’s a little dinner party or something. And the costume people brought Jeanne Tripplehorn out and she looked adorable with this cute little hat and this cute little…and Sydney went, “She’s trying to hold her marriage together with every muscle in her body. You really think she got up that morning and thought, ‘That’s the cutest little hat I’ve ever even seen.'” And they went, “But this is the only scene we can put her in that cute little hat.” She’s trying to hold her marriage together, don’t you understand?!

And then there’s a scene later when, I don’t know, something where it’s even worse what’s going on with the marriage, and they put her in this cute little pin, you know what I mean.

**Craig:** She took the time to put the pin on.

**Lindsay:** And they kind of came to me and they said, “Do you think he’s going to be mad? Because this pin was made for her by the kids who are playing her kids at school, you know, the ones she teaches. And they made this for Jeanne Tripplehorn and she promised she’d wear it in the movie. And the only scene she can wear it is this one.”

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**Lindsay:** I said, “Do you really want to hear what he’s going to say to you if you put her in that little…?”

**John:** Those kids can’t see the movie anyway. It’s The Firm.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s rated R.

**John:** It will be years before they’re allowed to see that movie.

**Lindsay:** There’s always that kind of stuff. But, I mean, that’s story. That’s the whole thing. The pin is story. The hat is story. It’s all story.

**Craig:** Todd Phillips the other day, he said, it was a great definition of directing. It’s perfect — I want to crochet it on…well, if I knew how to crochet.

**John:** I can teach you.

**Craig:** How did I know? He said, “Here’s what directing is: You wake up, you have 38 fights, you go to sleep.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Lindsay:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And it’s true. Because you feel like all the people that are there, an army of people there to help you make a movie are, through no bad intentions, absolutely undermining you ever single moment. You turn around and it’s just something is absolutely wrong.

**Lindsay:** I remember Sydney said, “Why can’t they just read my mind? Why can’t they? Why can’t they just, every one of them, know what’s in my head 24 hours a day? Why is that so hard?”

**Craig:** But then if they did you wouldn’t need Sydney Pollack. You would just get one of them.

**Lindsay:** [laughs] But he would say, “It’s so clear on the page.” You know, just that kind of thing…

**Craig:** To him.

**Lindsay:** …the cute little hat. How could they not understand about the cute little hat?

**Craig:** Well, every department sees the movie through their lens. That’s it. The costume department sees moving — clothing moves through frame while there’s possibly sound. It’s remarkable. You see it all the time.

**Lindsay:** [laughs] Exactly. Art director, director of cinematography.

**John:** The best department heads I’ve worked with, though, they really do have a sense of, like, “This is what you’re trying to do in those moments.” The challenge is they had that idea and that instinct when they first started the project. But then, as in the case of wardrobe, everyone came in for the fittings and they have to deal with all of the politics and body issues and everything else that comes up when you have to actually try and put actors in clothes.

And so the Jeanne Tripplehorn situation comes up where like, well, that’s an adorable cute hat. Of course she wants to wear that outfit.

**Craig:** And she wants to look beautiful.

**John:** She wants to look beautiful.

**Lindsay:** She wants to look beautiful. And everybody when we were looking at the costume parade, everybody went, “Aw, that’s such a killer.” And then they realized that was the only place they could put it in. And then it’s not going to be in the movie because of some stupid story thing! But you see movies like that all the time where you just go, “That person didn’t get up that morning and put that on. Not in that frame of mind.” You just feel it.

And you may not be conscious of it, but it contributes to the whole thing. So, thinking about story on that deep a level, I think, is really important for a movie to work.

**John:** One thing I want to stress to listeners is that even if you’re writing and directing your own movie, sometimes the creative producer’s function is even sort of more vital because you want an extra set of eyes to remind you of the intention. This is what the scene is.

**Lindsay:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** And on The Nines I was lucky to have producers who could do that for me, because you just get so wrapped up in the thing you’re trying to shoot. That they can come up and whisper in your ear like, “Okay, I’m not trying to change what you’re trying to do. I just want to remind you that this is what I think we’re trying to do here and maybe this isn’t making sense the way…”

**Lindsay:** And somebody said to me, he said, “Here’s what I want. I want after nine takes, and we really do need to do another scene, I want somebody I can turn to and say, ‘Do I have it?'”

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Lindsay:** And you know that if they say, “You had it at take five, get going,” that you believe them. But you also know they’re going to say, “No, let me go move the schedule around. Let me see what I can do so we can do that shot at the end of the day tomorrow. Because this is this scene. You want to get this scene wrong?”

And I’ve never heard a better definition of that, of what somebody wants in a producer is somebody who knows the material as well as they do, that they really do trust their opinion. And at a moment like that, when they’re exhausted…

**Craig:** And afraid.

**Lindsay:** …and they just don’t — and afraid — and they want somebody who isn’t going to say, “What do you mean you don’t know? You’re the director. You call yourself the director and you don’t know if you have it yet?” You want somebody who is going to be there like the father —

**John:** Yeah. You also only have one set of eyes. And so if I’m looking at a shot, or I’m watching, I’m watching this very specific performance here, I have a really hard time with background action and sort of seeing what that is. So I can say like, “Please pay attention and if anything is crazy in the frame tell me, because I’m not going to see it. I’m only going to see these people’s mouths moving and saying these things.”

**Lindsay:** Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny, because Sydney was a pilot. And he was a left seat pilot. He was like the guy flying the plane. There were the guys who flew for TWA for 25 years who were in the right seat, like he was the copilot. But a lot of the time Sydney would say, “Come up into the cockpit and look around, because you never know when a plane is going to hit us.” And I loved flying up there, but he was quite serious.

It’s like, it’s never a bad idea to have somebody around no matter who’s down there, and what their job is, I’d like somebody sitting here looking around going, “Ah, there’s a plane heading right towards us.” And it’s exactly what it was like. I had seen him act out all these because he was the greatest actor in the world, so I’d seen him act out all of these scenes.

And there was a scene, a tiny little scene where Tom Cruise is getting new clothes, and Gene Hackman is there as the older statesman of the business. And I had seen Sydney act this out in his office and there was this kind of proud papa look on his face that wasn’t there when we were — and I said, “You know, I remember how you did it. Does anyone…”

“Oh my gosh, I was looking at Tom. I wasn’t thinking.” And so he was able to make that correction. And it was the same thing. Being in that cockpit and being there was exactly the same. And he rarely needed it. It was once in a great while.

**Craig:** Everybody has a moment. Because people don’t understand, when you’re a director you’re watching, there’s two actors, oftentimes you’re shooting two cameras at once, so there’s two sizes or two angles, and then there’s background. And then, frankly, there’s the camera itself. “Is the camera moving? Is it moving too fast? Too slow? Is it in focus/out of focus? Are you on the right thing? Are you supposed to go down with the guy when he drops something?”

There are so many layers. And, frankly, the attention game starts to fail you. You will miss things for sure. And having somebody trust there next to you…

**Lindsay:** I remember, I think it was on, it was some movie that I was working on and it was about a working class family. And the first day of dailies came in and the director went, “Look at those sheets. They’re pristine. They’re like out of a luxury hotel. Who are these people who iron their pillow case?”

**Craig:** And that’s the thing that you never think about.

**Lindsay:** And all he was looking at was the actors, and why not, and everything else — and it was like, “Isn’t there some way I can go back and do it again and have different pillowcases?”

**Craig:** That’s a great lesson, because no one ever thinks to look at the sheets.

**Lindsay:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, you know, this is why. The funny thing is — hair. Hair.

**Lindsay:** I mean, really. How many movies have been ruined just by hair? It’s just extraordinary.

**Craig:** There’s a director I know — I won’t say what and I won’t say what the film is, but I saw his movie and I said, “I think you did a great job. I have to say it, because it was a romantic comedy, her hair…”

And he said, “You know, every movie there are fights you have that you think to yourself, ‘Okay, I only can go to war this many times with this many things. I’m going to let some of these go.’ I should not have let that fight go. That was one — I took a fall and I shouldn’t have, because the hair is there in every scene.”

**Lindsay:** Yeah. And it’s there in the trailer.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Lindsay:** That’s what people don’t understand. It’s in the TV spots.

**Craig:** It’s in everything.

**Lindsay:** And it dominates the TV spots. You can’t look at anything else.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Bad hair will kill a movie.

**Lindsay:** Bad hair will kill a movie faster than anything else alive.

**Craig:** Amazing, right?

**Lindsay:** And it’s amazing. But also, even knowing that I still make that mistake, you know what I mean?

**Craig:** Of course.

**Lindsay:** You can’t see it. There’s some anesthesia of the intellect, somebody called it, where you just — it all goes away.

**Craig:** It seems so inconsequential. You parted your hair all the time.

**John:** Part of it is accommodation. You become accustomed to it. So like, “Oh, well, you’ve seen that hair for three days so it doesn’t strike you as strange anymore.”

**Lindsay:** That’s where that Blink thing really matters. When I read Blink, I remember thinking, I remember when I saw that actor’s hair, where they sent me a photograph before we started shooting and my first Blink moment was, “This is all wrong.” But I thought, “It’s a period movie, this is what their hair looked like then, when am I supposed to do about that?” And it really affected the way that movie did because it was not how — you know, it was a good looking guy who had been a big star in another movie where he looked great. And now the hair had been changed and those very same girls who loved him weren’t interested at all because his hair looked weird.

And we probably lost $100 million on that movie just because of the wig.

**Craig:** The hair.

**Lindsay:** The hair.

**Craig:** I think we’ve actually really dug down. I mean, we peeled the onion down so many layers and finally at the heart of producing is hair!

**John:** It’s the hair.

**Lindsay:** It’s so true.

**Craig:** And, I mean, you guys can’t see Lindsay here, although we’re going to put a picture up, won’t we?

**John:** Oh, we have to.

**Craig:** I mean, Lindsay has the best hair. So it’s actually like it’s the greatest — it’s perfect that it should finally come down to hair.

**Lindsay:** [laughs] And yet it’s the opposite of that, too. Working on Ghost, for example, when I was at Paramount. Demi Moore just walked in with that hair cut. How much money did that add to the grosses of that movie? It was the most beautiful hair cut in the whole world.

**Craig:** That was one of those hair cuts that I just remember suddenly everyone looked like the person. It was like when Jennifer Aniston had the Friends hair.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Demi Moore had the Ghost hair. It was a thing. There hasn’t been one of those recently.

**John:** Yeah, what was the most recent hair sensation? I’m trying to think what that is.

**Craig:** I don’t think there has been, not like the Jennifer Aniston one and the Demi Moore one.

**Lindsay:** Yeah. And the Meg Ryan one. That one was one for awhile. She had a certain kind of shag that everybody wanted.

**Craig:** Oh, I remember that.

**Lindsay:** Again, we’re talking a pretty long time ago.

**Craig:** That was a long time ago. We need new hair.

**Lindsay:** It’s not quite the same thing.

**Craig:** We need somebody to really get out there and hair it up.

**Lindsay:** And do that kind of stuff.

**John:** Cool. Well, this has been a good podcast.

**Lindsay:** When do we start?

**John:** We solved Hollywood.

**Lindsay:** Totally.

**John:** We figured out what’s wrong with producing.

**Lindsay:** Exactly. Not wrong with producing, we figured out what’s…

**John:** Yeah. We talked a little bit about hair.

**Craig:** Just a touch.

**Lindsay:** Mostly about hair.

**Craig:** Just a touch. And I feel like we did make the world better. I think that the great thing about you is — really, and I hope that producers listen to this — you set a great example. You know, just for us as writers, what we want from producers frankly. When you say what a director wants, they want to be able to turn and say…

What we want, really, is for somebody to make us better.

**Lindsay:** Yeah. Absolutely.

Craig. We don’t want somebody to say, “Great job. Good for you. A+. Ship it along.” And we don’t want somebody to rip it apart fruitlessly or cynically.

**Lindsay:** Or brutally. Yeah, I don’t want to be brutal.

**Craig:** I don’t mind brutal if it’s in the direction of quality. What I think we look for the most from producers is to care about what we care about. Because a lot of producers say, “Here’s the thing: I really like the script. I feel like we need to change this character to be African American to appeal to this audience. And I want this one to be a woman. And I also think we should set it in Brazil because of the foreign audience.”

And you think, “But now I’m not writing a movie anymore. I’m writing a plan.” And we want producers like you who actually do care about our intention.

**Lindsay:** Yeah. I think it’s important.

**Craig:** And hair.

**Lindsay:** And the idea is make it so good that nobody wants to change it. That’s the point. So, that’s what the goal of the writer-producer relationship is. That it just sings so beautifully on the page that nobody would even think to say something like that.

**Craig:** See, and when she says stuff like that you think, “That’s the way a producer should talk. Now that’s a producer.”

**Lindsay:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Lindsay Doran.

**John:** So, we need to find somebody, like a really, really rich person to give you a big fund to just develop movies. That would get some stuff.

**Lindsay:** Okay.

**Craig:** Is that cool with you?

**Lindsay:** Okay.

**Craig:** But you can’t have any of it. We’re going to need it for our movies.

**Lindsay:** [laughs] That’s worse than bad hair. You have it, it’s right there. It’s always right there but you can’t…

**Craig:** And the movie was always great but THE HAIR!

**Lindsay:** Oh, the hair. Oh, it’s so…

**Craig:** Thank you, Lindsay. That was fun.

**John:** Thank you very much, Lindsay. This was fun.

**Lindsay:** Thank you guys. This was really fun. Great.