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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.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/producers-and-pitching).

**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.

Craig, how are you? How was your first week of production?

**Craig:** It was good. Everything’s humming along. And that’s all I can say. [laughs]

**John:** This is your day off though, right?

**Craig:** Yeah. A little bit of a day off today.

**John:** So, what people may not understand is that when you’re in production you’re usually shooting either 5-day weeks or 6-day weeks. You’re in town, so it’s a 5-day week?

**Craig:** Yeah, well, sort of. I mean, for a lot of the schedules that I get involved in sometimes you have — I mean, I haven’t done a 6-day week in a long, long time. That’s really a low budget kind of thing to do. But some weeks you do do six days, and then other weeks you’ll do four days, because when you’re dealing with actors, particularly in comedies, almost every — no, half, let’s say, of comic actors are also on TV shows. And you can’t always shoot inside of everyone’s hiatus.

So, sometimes you have to adjust your schedule to work with their TV schedule. So you end up with odd weeks. I mean, our weeks are mostly 5-day weeks, but they’re offset in strange ways. So I have weird weekends that aren’t actually the weekend.

**John:** Yeah. If you talk to people who work on movies or on TV shows, you often find that their weekend is like a Sunday and a Monday, or a Monday and a Tuesday. And some of that reason may be because they need to shoot locations that would be occupied during weekdays. And so they need to shoot those locations during weekends, Saturdays and Sundays. And so their schedule might be Tuesday through Saturday or Wednesday through Sunday. And it’s a busy, complicated life.

The other thing to understand is that typically over the course of a week’s production you might start like at 6am on the first day and you’re shooting 12 hours or however many hours you’re shooting. But your schedule sort of drifts over the course of that week. And so by the time you’re into your Friday or your Saturday you may be starting at like three in the afternoon and going to like three in the morning. And your turnaround, which is the time between when you wrap it up and where you start the next day’s production, or your weekend in that case, you may have really eaten half of that day because you shot so late into the next day.

**Craig:** Yeah. Production isn’t exactly the healthiest thing for your body. I mean, we have rhythms and we like to sort of wake up around the same time and we like to go to bed around the same time. And you simply can’t do that with production. Two reasons: One, as you mentioned, there are locations that sometimes don’t allow you to be in certain places. The other issue is that when we shoot at night you have to suddenly be nocturnal. And then there are splits where you shoot half of day, half of night.

And then the phenomenon you’re describing, the kind of call time creep occurs because there are rules governing how much time off, crew, everybody gets between when you finish a day’s work and when you start the next day’s work. And I think it’s 12 hours. So, if you go over your normal 12-hour day, and that often happens, the next day you just start that much later in the morning, and so, you know, when you have movies that are constantly going over, by the time you roll around to Friday you might be starting at three in the afternoon because you finished at 3am the night before.

**John:** Yeah. So it becomes complicated based on your locations, based on your actors, based on everything else. And as you get more experience with this as a screenwriter you may find yourself not writing so many night exteriors that sort of demand to be shot out at night.

My first movie that was in production, of course, was Go. And Go takes place entirely at night really. And that meant we were outside at night, all night, for 30 days of production. And that got to be a real drag.

So, I wouldn’t do anything different about Go, but other movies I’ve written in the future I’ve been very mindful of “Is this a movie I would want to direct,” for example, “that takes place so much at night, so much in exteriors?”

**Craig:** You know, it’s one of those things when you’re in the middle of it you think, frankly everything about movie production I’m constantly thinking, “I can’t believe this is the best way of doing this.”

And I start to understand why guys who have been around for a long, long time start to drift towards mo-cap, because for somebody like Zemeckis or Spielberg, and they’ve done all these movies, they’ve gone through this harrowing physical trial so many times. The thought of being able to just shoot a movie in an air-conditioned room without running around and standing in the heat, it’s very seductive.

But, the truth is I love writing stuff that happens at night because I find night to be just more cinematic. You know? I’m always writing stuff — I love it.

**John:** The best part of shooting at night is also sometimes things just are quiet, and there’s not a lot of hubbub, and you can sort of create your world yourself, and there’s not just distractions. You just do your thing. It can be a nice thing, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I don’t know, there’s a weird, there’s just a cool vibe at night. I don’t know for whatever reason. And the weirdest thing, you know, when you make movies you hear about this in pop culture, people know about this phrase, “We’re losing the light.” You know, you’re always racing daylight if you’re doing a day shoot and trying to get that last shot in before the DP says, “No, we officially have crossed into evening.”

But the weirdest thing is when you’re chasing dark.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know?

**John:** That was Go.

**Craig:** It’s just wild, yeah.

**John:** Because we were shooting these last little… I was directing second unit on Go, and we’d be shooting these insert shots like in an alley. And the sun would be coming up and you’re like, “No, no, no, hurry, hurry!” And just trying to block off the light. You’re trying to pick up flags just to make it a little bit darker here so you get his one last shot.

And you’re so exhausted. I remember thinking, like, “We should just build some sort of rocket that we could shoot at the sun to a make it dark.” And you can’t. That would not be a good — probably — thing for the world.

**Craig:** [laughs] I just like the idea that people would look up and riots would begin as everybody understood that the world was ending, the sun was not coming up, and then finally somebody would announce, “No, no, no, it’s okay; it’s just for the next 20 minutes because a guy somewhere needs a shot for second unit.”

**John:** Totally. It’s completely worth it.

Today, Craig, I thought we would talk about two main topics. The first is what producers do, and specifically what they kind of don’t do. And I also thought we’d talk about pitching and sort of how pitches work, because I’m busy with a pitch right now and I think I have some things to say about it. But we also have some follow up, so let’s start with some follow up.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** First up, a couple weeks ago on the podcast I was sort of venting about how, or at least my perception is that if you look through negative reviews of a movie, they’re much more likely to mention the screenwriter than they are in a positive review of the movie. And I didn’t have any scientific facts to back this up. There is just my perception.

And so I asked if there’s anybody out there who wants to do a study where they’re looking through all the reviews in Rotten Tomatoes for a subset of movies and figure out if that’s true or not, and I would really value that data. So, someone stepped up and did it. So this guy named Tim in Hollywood did it.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** And so he just sent the report, which I haven’t looked through, so I’m only going to read you a little bit from his email. He says, “The report is enclosed, but the short version is: you’re wrong. The opposite is true. Critics are much more likely to mention the writer in a positive review, at least based on this data.”

**Craig:** Wow. Well that’s really encouraging. I mean, I’m glad we’re wrong. We’re wrong, because I agreed with you. That’s great to hear.

**John:** Yeah. So I will look through it and I will post it if it’s something that we can discuss and share with everybody else. But I just thought that preliminary finding was interesting. And I’m happy to be wrong. I think people who always want the facts to back them up, they don’t really want the facts, they just want validation.

**Craig:** Listen, you and I…very early on I understood shared one thing strongly in common, and that was our love for human fallibility, and fallacies, and broken thinking. I’ve always been fascinated with that. And obviously this is a great example of kind of the fallacy of the observer. You know, we see the things that are connected to us emotionally or meaningful and we skip over the things that aren’t. And so I love that. Good.

**John:** Good.

Second piece of follow up. Dave writes in: “In episode 33 someone asked about an immigration issue. I am still at the point of my career where I have a day job, and that day job is at an immigration law firm doing what is called 01 visas. 01 visas are for ‘aliens of extraordinary ability,’ basically successful individuals in the entertainment industries. In theory this is for Academy Award winners and movie stars, but I get in many people with as little experience as one or two credits for independent films.

“I know what a pain it is to get legal working status and how difficult it must be for that reader dealing with doubly uncertain futures, both as a screenwriter and a non-citizen, so I just wanted to reach out in case there’s a question you find yourself addressing again.”

So, thank you, Dave, for writing in. So what Dave is doing is he works at an immigration law firm, and the kinds of people who want to come to America to work in film or television, he’s the kind of guy who processes that stuff. And so if you find yourself having made a movie oversea and wanting to come to the US, that’s good news.

**Craig:** I get it. So if you’re Daniel Day-Lewis, and I presume he’s a citizen of the UK, and you need to come here to do a movie, you actually do have to get a work visa, and somebody has to actually tick off which box you are. And it turns out that somebody like Daniel Day-Lewis is an alien of extraordinary ability.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** I like that term.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Another piece of follow up on HSX, which I think we talked about in the last podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So Hunter Daniels, he writes in: “Cantor Fitzgerald did try to make a real-life HSX a few years ago and it fail for a plethora of obvious reasons, but you left out one important fact. Cantor Fitzgerald actually owns and operates HSX. They’ve been using the game to develop the real world version for a number of years. I know because I was part of the beta testing when they got close to asking for regulatory approval.

“Also in regards to your contention that nobody looks at HSX and that it’s an inaccurate tool for box office prognostication: I would have to agree. See, Cantor Fitzgerald runs HSX at a profit because they do mine data from stock movements on the site and sell them to someone for market research purposes. A few weeks out from release, HSX is a very good tool for those who track US grosses.

“For example, the current HSX for Frankenweenie is $46.33, which works out to an expected opening weekend of $17.1 million. It’s not always accurate. For example, fan-boy movies like Prometheus and Scott Pilgrim will always be overpriced while African-American themed movies are almost always underpriced, but again, this actually mimics real world tracking data which is almost always wrong about black-centric breakouts and fan-boy bombs.”

**Craig:** Ah, okay. I mean, well that’s interesting to know that they own it. The fact that they sell that data doesn’t necessarily mean that the data is valuable. It just means that somebody is agreeing to buy it.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** I mean, I’m still skeptical about the relative value of it. I mean, for instance, NRG, which is the largest box office prognosticator and tracker in our business may very well purchase information from HSX to help them perform their analysis. But, I’m not sure it’s reasonable to say that simply because someone’s buying it it means it’s worth something.

**John:** Yeah. Again, this does feel like a thing that someone could study and really figure out: how close were they to predicting box office? And I’m sure somebody has studied that. So if you have a great link that shows how accurate the prognostication is from HSX, that would help back up this assertion.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

So, a question, not a follow up here. Micah from LA asks, “What are the rules pertaining to naming screenplays the same as previously published films? Or, to take it a step further, what if you have dreams of adapting your screenplay into a different medium like a graphic novel, but there’s already a graphic novel with the same name? Are there any copyright rules for doing this? One search for IMDb for a film called Heat and you see a bunch of different films, so I imagine it’s doable. I don’t want to bring litigation monsters to my doorstep. What do I do?”

So it’s really a couple different questions tangled together, first about how you name movies, and then about how you name other properties, and what’s protectable and what is not protectable. So, should we start about how movies get named?

**Craig:** Well, yeah, movie titles are actually governed by the MPAA, the same organization that handles the ratings for movies. It’s a trade organization. And so all the members of the MPAA, and you would want to be writing — I mean, I’m assuming you’re writing this for a studio and not for a little independent thing. But, all the members of the MPAA, the big studios, they just agree that this central governing body is going to kind of serve as a clearinghouse for titles.

And the rules about what title you can and can’t use are rather arcane, as you might imagine, because it essentially is kind of a Star Chamber thing. For instance, the very first movie that I ever wrote, I wrote with my then partner Greg, and we titled it Space Cadet. And Disney bought Space Cadet and they made Space Cadet, but as they were going to production as a matter of course they registered the title with the MPAA.

And the MPAA came back and said, “Oh you can’t. George Lucas actually has already registered Space Cadet. He’s going to make a movie called Space Cadet.” And I think Disney said, “Prove it.” Like you can’t just register a title and have nothing. I mean, but you know, if you can show some documentation that you’re working on, sometimes you can buy the title from people. But George Lucas said, “No, no, no. I’m definitely making a movie called Space Cadet,” which as far as I know he has never done.

So we had to change the name of the movie. But that’s really an internal battle between the studios. It doesn’t impact us as screenwriters. The only real rule of titling for me is don’t title it something that’s overtly misleading. Don’t title your screenplay Raiders of the Lost Ark 5, because that’s ridiculous.

But, it’s not our problem. It ultimately is the studio’s problem. Now, this other issue — what was the other issue exactly?

**John:** The other issue is if he wanted to do a graphic novel or something that wasn’t a movie, and he was concerned about a conflicting title. And so this really gets into understanding that copyright does not protect title. And some titles can be protected by trademark, but trademark is a whole other separate crazy barrel of fish.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And trademark is something that can protect a brand when it’s more than just a title for a graphic novel or for something else. It can protect like a toy line, or a line of licensed merchandise. And I just don’t know enough about it to speak.

**Craig:** Well the basic rule of thumb with trade… — See, copyright is something that’s hard. Either you have authored this unique expression in fixed form, or you haven’t. And then there’s proof in the documentation and the documents are compared. Trademark ultimately turns on a question of interpretation. And the interpretation boils down roughly to: Are you capitalizing on marketplace confusion? That’s basically the deal.

So, I trademark something, you can’t come along and use my trademark in a way that confuses the market into thinking that I’m doing it or you’re a part of me. This is why, for instance, when Apple was sued by the Beatles Apple, part of the deal, part of the settlement, was Apple Computer will stay out of the music business, because that’s what the Apple Publishing was in the UK. And they’re basically saying, “You’re confusing the marketplace. Apple here means music, so stay out of music.”

Then, of course, Apple went into music in a huge way and so on and so forth. But, that’s why for instance companies that have these — brand names that have become generically used like Kleenex…

**John:** Linoleum.

**Craig:** Vaseline. If they don’t aggressively protect and defend their trademarks they lose them, because basically the courts say, “You haven’t really been trying to stop marketplace confusion; in fact, you’re kind of capitalizing on marketplace confusion. You like that everybody calls petroleum jelly Vaseline. So, no, now everybody can.”

And so this is why as of late companies get super duper uptight about — like Pampers, I remember when I was a kid. Pampers, I think, at some point had to really struggle to not have all diapers called Pampers.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, again, not a writers problem. We don’t have to worry about this so much. As long as you’re not being intentionally misleading, you are fine.

**John:** Yeah. You should be focusing on, like, what is the best title that feels right for your movie, and don’t worry that back in 1947 there was something else called that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because when you sell it, or when somebody publishes it, their legal department will step in and lay it out for you. And then you’ll make a decision.

**John:** A couple helpful suggestions. So, a project I setup fairly recently we haven’t announced yet, but when I turned it in they were like, “Okay, and now we’re going to make sure we can clear that title.” So what they’re really trying to do is they’re going to register that title with the MPAA and make sure that there’s nothing else that’s going to fight it, because they really do believe they’re going to be able to make a movie out of it pretty soon.

When I had the idea for the title, one of the things I could do was register the domain name for it. That doesn’t help me protect anything about trademark, or title, or the movie version of it, but it just means that I can have the URL for the movie, which is helpful down the road, just for promotional purposes.

For a TV project, you will hear the same kind of thing, where if you have a title they really like they will try to clear it. And by “clear it” they mean making sure that there’s no other competing TV projects this season or any nearby season that’s going to confuse people.

**Craig:** Exactly. I mean, you can’t, and even though Cheers has been off the air for decades, you can’t call your new show Cheers.

**John:** Yeah. Cool.

So, let’s get into some of our bigger topics here. And this is actually — a couple different listeners sent this in saying like, “Hey, what do you think about this?” And I’m like, oh, I didn’t even want to open the URL when I recognized what it was from, but it’s probably worth talking about.

So, there’s a blog called Scriptshadow, and my first interaction with Scriptshadow was when the man who runs the blog, Carson Reeves, had reviewed a project that I was currently rewriting. So he had read the script and written a detailed blog review of this script, this early draft by another writer, and I was the currently employed writer on it. It was, like, a pretty high profile project at that point. And so the studio I was working for went ballistic and got him to pull the review.

And that was the end of it, I think, from his perspective. From my perspective, his publishing this review of this other writer’s draft made my life horribly worse, because suddenly I was having to sign all these things about, like, I couldn’t send this script to anybody. I couldn’t show it to my agent. I couldn’t show it to my sort of trusted friends. I could only send it to this one executive. Everything had to be watermarked, and they got super paranoid about this.

And in a blog post I wrote up sort of my frustration, and so the blog post was called “Why Scriptshadow hurts screenwriters.” I explained that reviewing a script of a movie that hasn’t shot yet, hasn’t come out yet, is really damaging for both the movie and for screenwriters. It’s damaging for the movie because you’re trying to review something that’s still its fetal form. So you’re pretending that this movie is the way it’s going to finally be. But it’s not. This is just a plan for, “At this moment this is what we kind of think the movie is going to be.”

For screenwriters overall, it’s incredibly damaging, because I suddenly couldn’t go to the trusted people who I want to have read my script. What’s worse is that sort of forcing us to lock down the script, I can’t let anyone else read that script if it’s sort of stuck in development for awhile.

You have to understand that when you’re hiring screenwriters you are going to read scripts, their spec scripts. You’re going to read stuff that’s of movies that have been made, but you’re also going to read the stuff that’s in development, and that stuff does get handed around. And the rule is, like, just everybody be cool about it. Like you can pass the stuff around, just don’t talk about it that much.

This script I wrote for them I can’t show anybody now because they sort of had it on this crazy lockdown. So those were my frustrations with Carson Reeves’s Scriptshadow that is the back story that I needed to sort of setup for this newest blog post.

**Craig:** And just to echo your thoughts here: Reviewing screenplays that are in development is a stupid, counterproductive thing to do. It is anti-writer. And it will make movies worse. Please don’t do it.

You don’t review food as the chef is cooking it. We have drafts for a reason. You cannot write a final draft first. Anyone who actually writes for a living, who understands what writing, or painting, or writing a song, or sculpting something knows what I mean when I say it’s not done. We’re working — ING — on it. So if you put it on the internet like it’s done and review it like it’s done, you are hurting something that was not meant to be read or seen.

Please be respectful enough to just wait until it’s done. How hard is that? How hard is that? And I just find it so frustrating that people in their desperate need to be involved somehow, or to release a secret for whatever small burst of adrenaline that gives you, ruin something that somebody is working on. And they don’t all turn out great.

But, you know, the example I always give is The Sixth Sense, which is one of my favorite screenplays. He wasn’t dead the whole time until like the sixth draft. You know what I mean? You have to wait. Just wait.

**John:** Yup. It’s that need to be first, and that thrill at being first is why you — is that instinct to talk about it before it’s ready to be talked about. But I think your cooking analogy is exactly right. It’s not done. It’s still in the oven. Stop. And that’s maddening.

**Craig:** Yeah. Stop.

**John:** So, anyway, that was my earlier rant, so recycling a rant from two or three years ago. So, the thing that people sent in this last week was about this guy Carson Reeves who has continued to read a lot of screenplays, and I guess to his credit I will say he’s moved his focus from reviewing in-development drafts at major studios to things that people send in, like aspiring screenwriters’ stuff. Things that would kind of show up on the Black List, that kind of stuff.

And I still don’t think that’s right. I think reviewing something that a writer has written without sort of their blessing to review it is a concern, but it’s not — this isn’t in the development chain. So, I’ll at least acknowledge that.

Now his new thing, so I’ll quote little parts of the blog. “My readers are asking me, ‘Why aren’t you producing. You’re finding material. You’re bringing it to the rest of the town. That’s one of the hardest and most important things a producer does — find material.’ Hmm, I thought, I guess they were right. I was finding material. I could do that.

“All of a sudden I looked at producing a whole new way. Therefore, what I’d like to do instead is find material through Scriptshadow, partner up with a much more established producer — say Scott Rudin — sell the script to one the studios with both of us attached, and then let him use his muscle and expertise to get it through the system. In essence, I would be more of a silent producer. I’m in it to learn because, let’s face it, I don’t know what I’m doing yet. I mean, I can help a writer whip the script into shape, but I can’t call Tom Hardy and ask him if he’s free in three months to shoot a desert zombie film.”

So that’s an excerpt from a much longer blog post which I’ll link to in the show notes. But I thought it was worth discussing because it raises some misconceptions about what producers are, what producing is.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, first of all, John, you know, a lot of people say to me, “You have all these really cool thoughts about movies. You should write some movies.” And I thought, yeah, that’s right. I do have really cool thoughts about movies. I should write some movies. But, I don’t know how to write a movie. So what I should do is partner up with somebody that does know how to write a movie like, say, John August. And then he’ll write the movie and I’ll just be sort of be like a silent writer.

And then we’ll sell that screenplay to the studios with both of us on the title page, but I’ll let him use his talent and expertise to kind of get it there, and on the way I’ll learn.

**John:** And I know that’s meant in a mocking way, but I think he actually does think that way — I think a lot of people do think that way, too. It’s like, I get emails and the person is like, “Hey, I have a really good idea. Would you want to partner up on a script with me?” And I’m like, “…But! …But! …No.

**Craig:** No. Why? I don’t need to partner on a script with you. You know who I need to partner up on a script with? A writer who’s writing pages. And my point is here — ugh — okay.

**John:** This is really, just, so much umbrage, yeah.

**Craig:** So I don’t want to go crazy too early. I don’t want to peak here at minute 20, or wherever we are.

Look, yes, people are sending screenplays to this guy because they don’t have anywhere else to send screenplays to. Or, I should take that back: They have lots of places to send screenplays. Those places aren’t reading their screenplays, or they’re rejecting their screenplays. So they send it to this guy.

And I do think anybody that finds unfound screenplays and loves those screenplays and reviews them positively and promotes them is doing god’s work. For the life of me, I don’t understand what the value is in finding somebody’s screenplay that is unfound, not liking it, and trashing it, because I don’t really think you’re changing the universe at all there, you’re just complaining. But promoting, I get it.

Like the Black List is a really, really cool thing. And if Scriptshadow promotes, finds a great script and promotes it, and somebody picks it up and buys it, fantastic. But, sir, that’s where your value is and that’s where it ends. Producing has nothing to do with that, at all. There’s no finder’s fee here. Wouldn’t it be great if that’s the way the world worked? But, in fact, you haven’t done the work beyond just simply reading it.

There are people who kind of have offices in Hollywood and sort of do that kind of thing. They end up very tangential to the process anyway. And ultimately the people that do the real work of producing, which we’ll discuss in a second, just employ a lot of kids out of college to do what you’re doing, which is just to read stuff.

**John:** That’s exactly what I did as my first job. I got paid $65 a script to read and write up the report.

**Craig:** That’s what it’s worth.

**John:** He’s just writing coverage.

**Craig:** Right! That’s what that’s worth. That does not make you a producer. That just makes you one of a thousand people who read scripts and go, “Ah, this is pretty good. Let me now give it to somebody that does the work of producing,” which is not the same thing as just reading through lots and lots of scripts and going, “Well this one’s pretty good.”

**John:** So let’s talk about the work of producing. And, I think the way to think about a producer is it’s the CEO of a corporation. And that corporation is the final movie. And so it’s the person who says, “I see what this idea is. I can build this idea. Bring in all the necessary talent to make this into a great movie. And put it out in the world that everyone will enjoy it and it will continue to have a life 20 years from now.”

It’s the cradle to the grave, but not even really a grave because you’re going to keep it going, vision behind the movie. And he wants to do this tiny, tiny little sliver which is, “There already was something, I thought it was pretty good, and I handed it to somebody” — that’s what he wants to do and call himself a producer.

**Craig:** Everybody wants that. Everybody. I mean, like you, I can’t tell you how many times people have said to me, “I have a great idea for a movie. You could just write it up. I just need somebody to write it, but I have a great idea.”

Well, the “I just need” part is actually 99.99999% of the job, just so you know.

**John:** So let’s talk about some of the more specifics in terms of what this — Scott Rudin — let’s just say Scott Rudin would be doing here. So, Scott Rudin was the person who was like, “Okay, this script came into my hands.” And so maybe Carson Reeves handed him that script. Okay, that’s great. You are a reader, but this reader handed him a script.

**Craig:** Right. Now what?

**John:** Scott Rudin has to say like, “Okay, reading this script I know that these are the ten different ways I can get this movie made. And I have to make decisions about who, like first off, what needs to change in the script. Is the script as good as it can be? Is it the script that it should be to make the movie we want to make?

“Next, who do I want to get involved? What studios make sense for this? What actors make sense for this? What directors make sense for this? In what order should I try and go after those writers and actors and directors and studios so that we can get to the next stage? How much should this movie cost? Where should we shoot this movie? Who should we get in all the different department heads to make the best version of this movie?

“Once we found who the director is, how can I protect this woman from all the vagaries that are going to come at her and sort of let her make her vision for what this movie is going to be? How do I step in when her vision for what this movie should be is not really the right vision for what I know this movie needs to be? And how do I serve that function?

“How do I deal with the marketing of this movie? How do I yell at the marketing chief when I don’t like any of the one sheets that they’ve presented me?”

**Craig:** “When is the movie going to be released?”

**John:** Exactly. “And is this the right data based on all the competing movies that might be coming out on that date?”

**Craig:** Exactly. “Is the final cut too long? Is the final cut too short? What scenes should we keep? What scenes should we lose?” It’s a never ending job.

It’s sort of like if you combine matchmaker and wedding planner into one gig, you know. The producer isn’t the person that provides the love. I always think of the writer and director and cast as providing what is the love of the marriage, but the matchmaker puts them together. The wedding planner makes sure that the caterer is there on time, does all the stuff you don’t see. Makes sure that everybody’s in place and the video is there, and the DJ doesn’t play the wrong song. All that stuff.

Movies are a massive undertaking. You’re turning this huge ship all the time. And at every stage there is something different you have to deal with. And at every stage there are different powerful people you have to deal with. And doing all of that — I mean, I wish there were more people that were good at it. There are a bunch of people out there that are good at it, probably fewer now than ever, before because studios I think very intentionally have limited the power of the producer to reserve more of it for themselves.

But, the least of it, I mean the least of it, is doing what the average $20-an-hour coverage person does.

**John:** Yes. So, here’s what I would say: If Carson Reeves were serious about taking that next step and becoming a producer, some of his instincts are almost kind of right, is that he does need to learn — he understands what he doesn’t understand, which is good. He’s like, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

He would need to find somebody who actually does know what they’re doing, but he would also need just to learn the job. And he would need to learn the job making a tiny movie and doing all of the stuff that he has to do. That sense of like, “I’m going to go from 0 to 60” is crazy. And that anybody would want to help in and involve him at this stage is nuts.

**Craig:** It’s naïve. And I think that, you’re right, there is something refreshing about his honesty here, but I want to point out this — there is something that comes out of the internet that I find fascinating, and revealing.

A lot of people who address what I’ll call Inside Baseball Hollywood Topics, like producing for instance, from the vantage point of the internet, come at it from a “we’re the cool new guys and they’re the old school guys, and we get it; we have this really cool perspective on it. We are the next generation.” The closer they get, suddenly the more they are interested in getting the hell away from the internet and getting over to that apparently old stale institution called Hollywood, because the truth is everybody that gets close understands pretty quickly in fact that’s where the real deal is.

That the internet is no more than really just a very good megaphone for individuals writing flyers, and actually making movies is still where it’s at. So, what I would say to anybody who’s on the internet who is kind of tangential in this way and wants to get involved in the real deal: Do what people who want to get involved in the real deal do, and don’t overestimate the value of your blog experience, which is essentially zero.

I mean, you are now definitely, I would say, anybody that does what he does is certainly qualified to be a reader at a studio, but again, that’s a galaxy away from being a producer. So, start by becoming a PA. Start by working for a production coordinator. However you want to get there, do it the old fashioned way, because that’s pretty much the only way that it works, as far as I can tell. You actually have to learn the gig.

**John:** This reminds me of an article I real this last week about Pauline Kael, who was a tremendously gifted and influential film critic. And what I hadn’t realized is that at one point in her career, like after she was a successful critic, she was brought in to, like, “Well, help us out on movies. Help us out — produce some movies for us.”

**Craig:** Yeah, I read that.

**John:** And it didn’t work out well.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Because it’s a very different skill. And the skills that made her good at analyzing movies, the finished product of movies, and made reading her writing about those movies so rewarding, did not translate to the actual making of the movies.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And that’s because it’s a very different thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Analysis and creation are so dramatically different. And I guess the way I would put it is people who analyze know how to analyze; people who create know how to create and analyze.

**John:** Mm-hmm. And god bless analysts. God bless people who can figure out stuff. God bless Tim in Hollywood who went through all that data on movie reviews for me so he could prove me wrong. That’s great. But analysis isn’t creation.

**Craig:** Correct. Correct. But those who create must also know how to analyze, at least in Hollywood. And so I just feel like, I love the guy for sort of saying, “I don’t understand what producing really is, and I wonder what it is,” but this is a very naïve approach.

**John:** I would agree.

**Craig:** The internet is really good at confusing people into overvaluing. I mean, look: If we’re to take these podcast numbers seriously, you know, eventually we’ll get to a million people listening to this. But, you know, it’s a podcast. [laughs] You know what I mean? We’re not on Sirius XM. We’re not Howard Stern.

**John:** We’re not.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** That’s okay. I don’t need to be Howard Stern.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, I think it would be cool. [laughs] Just a little bit.

**John:** So, switching topics. Next I really want to talk about pitching, because I have a new project that I’m taking out and pitching this week, and it’s actually been really kind of fun. And when I first started out doing this crazy thing of screenwriting, pitching was by far my least favorite part. I would get completely nervous. I’d freak out the night before and I was like sort of rewriting it and trying to figure out how much I wrote down beforehand and how much I was sort of delivering a canned performance versus sort of making it feel extemporaneous and free.

And it’s gotten much, much easier. So, I wanted to share a few things I’ve learned along the way and hopefully you can chip in with some good suggestions.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I always describe a pitch as imagining you just saw a great movie and you wanted to tell your best friend they had to see the movie. You had to convince them. A pitch isn’t going to lay out every beat that happens, exactly how it happens. You’re sort of going to give them the highlight reel. It’s sort of almost like a trailer for what your project is.

You’re going to start with, “This is the world, these are the characters; these are the big things that happen along the way.” It doesn’t have to be exactly in sequence. The logic doesn’t even necessarily need to be the same logic that you will use in your final screenplay. It’s just giving them the sense of, like, “This is what the movie feels like.” If they were sitting there watching the trailer, this is the experience they’d get.

A crucial thing I learned early on is that you will go in with a plan for, “If I need to pitch the whole movie and people start to ask for real details, I know it all. But I can also give them like the two-minute version, the five-minute version, the 10-minute version.” You have to be able to sort of telescope in and out a little bit, because you’re reading the room and hopefully they’re going to love everything you’re saying, but you look for that moment where like their eyes start to close a little bit and their attention is starting to fall off. You have to be ready to jump to the next thing and sort of get through it more quickly.

Craig, when you’re going into pitch a comedy how much detail do you know about the whole world? How much are you trying to create a performance for just that room versus sell the whole movie?

**Craig:** Well, I approach it pretty much the way you approach the job. I mean, to me pitching is really about saying, “I just saw this awesome movie; let me tell you what I saw,” and pitching it the way we used to — remember when we were kids and we came back from Empire and we were like, “Oh my god, you’re not going to believe it…” Because we didn’t respect spoilers back then. We were 9 and it was just so exciting.

“And then, and then, and then,” but that was all very plot-oriented, and I think now as I go into these things I try and tell the story as if I just saw the movie, but I also try and ground as much as possible inside of the character, and what the character is thinking, and what the theme is, and why it matters.

And I liked what you said about prefacing everything with a little bit of an introduction. And I like to introduce things by saying, “This is why I’ve always wanted to write a movie like this.” Or, “This is what I’m interested in.” I want to put the story I’m telling in the context of a personal passion, because I just think that immediately, that immediately dispels what — there’s a stink in the room. And the stink is cynicism, because when somebody’s coming into pitch, they’re there to sell you something. They’re knocking on your door with a vacuum cleaner set and they want to sell you something. And everybody knows it and it’s a little bit cynical.

And I like to kind of broom that stink out by saying, “Yes, sure, I’m here to sell you vacuum, but actually this is emotional for me, and here’s why.” Even for a comedy. There’s something at the core of it that matters to me.

**John:** You need to sell them on, “This is the movie I want to make.” “This is the TV show I want to create.” “This is the vision I have for it.” So, it’s not about, “This is the show I want you to pay me money for,” it’s like, “This is the movie or the TV show I want to see on screen in a year.”

**Craig:** Exactly. And that’s for everything. Even if the movie itself is a genre piece that most people would consider to be crassly commercial, you have to love it somehow, or else everybody is like, “Okay, well I get it. You’re selling widgets. And you’re calling it widget. And we’re widget buyers. Ah, I don’t know. I could I guess.”

**John:** I would also stress you have to really look at it from their perspective and try to make sure that you’re tracking the logic from their perspective. Like, what is the next question they’re going to ask. And sometimes you have to just let them ask the question. You have to sort of anticipate, “Well, they’re going to ask me a question about this now,” and so you need to be able to answer that question. Lay it out from the perspective of the characters. And so talk to them at the start — “these are the four characters we really need to pay attention to” — so they can listen for those and they can actually track what’s going on in your story through those characters.

And they can see like, “Okay, we’re here, and now we’re here, and we’re here.” And if you end up with one on of those stories that is complicated, where there are like these subplots and stuff, sort of bundle them together. And you can say, “Okay, let’s stick a pin in that for a second because I need to tell you about this.” Or, like, “Meanwhile back at the ranch,” so they can understand sort of where your story is flowing.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this requires some practice. It’s a good thing to pitch to somebody and just have them stop you every time they get confused, lost, or bored.

I also say, if I’m pitching something to somebody I’ll say, “By the way, at any point if you have any questions stop me. I’m not here doing a monologue. This isn’t Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain.” Because I find questions to be a sign of interest.

If you think about when you get bored during things it’s when you start having questions about them but you don’t have any opportunity to answer those questions, so suddenly you’re drifting, and the questions start to pile up. And once you have two or three questions that have piled up in your head while you’re patiently waiting to figure out what the hell is going on, you immediately start concluding that this just isn’t very good. It might be very good.

**John:** You lost faith.

**Craig:** There might be great answers. But give people an opportunity to stop you and ask.

**John:** Yeah. So, the last thing I’ll say about pitching today is what’s been weird about this week is I’ve had to pitch the same project to multiple places, back to back to back. And you can sort of get, I mean, you get a little bit frozen. This is sort of the performance you give each time. So, I pitched it three times in a row, and then I had like a week off and had to pitch it again. And I was nervous, like, “Am I going to be able to do the same thing again? How am I going to be able to recapture all of the same sort of enthusiasm?”

What I found most helpful is I have my little pitch document, which is like a two-page thing that sort of outlines what’s in there. And I went back through and I rewrote that, because I found that the process of rewriting it sort of got it reenergized in my brain in a way that I could sort of give the pitch again and it has new life and it has new details. And so it is interesting for me.

Because if you’re not interested in the pitch, they’re not going to be interested in the pitch. So, you have to sort of be able to kind of surprise yourself with the new stuff that you’re adding.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, there is for me every pitch, even if the content doesn’t change, every room is different. And if you watch actors working together — and I always say if you want to be a screenwriter take an acting class. There’s a class that’s actually worth something. Because you learn skills in acting class that not only help you write for actors, but it helps you just talk to people.

And the secret to talking to people, and that’s what pitching is, is listening. And the first thing I do, just automatically when I go in to pitch something is I just listen for a moment to what the room sounds like. Is it a quiet room? Is it an amped up room? Is it a feminine room, a masculine room? Is it bored? Is it ready? Is it receptive? Is it scared? Just read the room.

And just adjust. Every pitch is different.

**John:** That’s why those first three or four minutes of just nonsense chit chat are actually really important for just establishing a baseline for what the room feel like. If you have to come in and like, “Okay, go. Start pitching,” you’re not going to likely have a good outcome. But if you have those little like, you know, “So what did you see?” “What are you working on?” “Oh, where did you get this trinket on your coffee table?” Those kind of things can be a huge help in getting you set or going.

Or, just honestly the conversation about, like, “This is why I’m in the room today,” can be just a good way to get started. I do often tend to rehearse that first minute of conversation just so I can have it, it can be a little bit packaged so I can start speaking and get the flow going.

**Craig:** And above all make sure when you leave, whether they buy it or not, make sure that they know your answer to this question: Why should this movie exist? Why should this show exist? It’s not enough to pitch something competently and have it be interesting in a way. It needs to want to be. So, figure out how to get that across.

**John:** Exactly. The classic test I give people is: Would you pay $15 to see this? And if you as the writer can’t answer that question affirmatively, there is no way they’re going to.

**Craig:** Right. Right.

**John:** So, Craig, I have a One Cool Thing this week. Do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** Well, you know that the answer to that question is no.

**John:** No. My One Cool Thing is actually a very simple good one. Before we started this podcast you cracked open a Diet Dr. Pepper?

**Craig:** I did. It was delicious.

**John:** Yeah. Dr. Pepper is a really good beverage. But I gave up drinking sodas all together. I gave up drinking — Diet Coke was sort of my big one. Diet Coke, or actually Coke Zero, was my sort of go-to thing. And I was like two of those a day.

And then at a friend’s recommendation he was like, “You know, you should really stop that.” And I was like, “Oh, okay, I guess it’s possible to stop that.” So I did. I stopped it all together. But I still need like a little small caffeine fix, and so I was going for iced tea.

The weird thing about iced tea is it doesn’t can or bottle well. There’s something about it that, I don’t know if it’s the essential oils in it or whatever, but like I’ve never had a good plain iced tea. Because I want the plain iced tea; I don’t want the sugar/sweetened kind of stuff, the Snapple stuff, until I found one that is actually really good. So, it’s Tejava. Have you ever had it?

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s good stuff.

**John:** Yeah. It’s good stuff. And it’s not like the best iced tea you will ever have in your world, but it’s actually really good for being in a bottle, and it works out as a really good sort of pennies per ounce kind of equation. So, I’m just recommending Tejava, which is available anywhere. And if you are a person who likes iced tea but sort of has never tried bottle iced tea because bottle iced tea is generally terrible, you should give this one a shot.

And it’s all a credit to Stuart, who is just like, “I can get you this.” I’m like, “All right, let’s try it.”

**Craig:** You guys should start making your own sun tea, and then at last you will be an old lady.

**John:** I’d be such an old lady. The thing is I’m such the kind of guy who would make sun tea, who would have a little pitcher and every morning I would sit it out there on the thing and by the afternoon it would be there. But I don’t do that.

**Craig:** No. I mean, I’ve had sun tea. It’s actually pretty good. I’m not a huge iced tea drinker. I do not for the life of me understand this phenomenon of the sweet tea thing in the south. It’s just ruinous — it is both ruinous to your body and also frankly it just tastes awful.

**John:** It does taste — it’s like thin honey. It’s just not a good thing.

**Craig:** It’s gross. I don’t know what is going on.

**John:** I was in South Carolina this last weekend and it was that phenomenon. And so you had to distinguish between iced tea and sweet tea. It was just odd.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you really get the stink eye down there when you’re like, “Can I just get it unsweetened?” And they’re like, “Ugh, yeah, whatever, outsider.”

**John:** Yankee.

**Craig:** Yeah. But I’m like, “Okay, I’m not going to lose a foot in three years.”

**John:** [laughs] Oh.

**Craig:** You know, this is just tragic. It’s tragic.

**John:** Yeah. So, Craig, I’m going to offer you a One Cool Thing, which is that I think we should open up again the Three Page Challenge, because we haven’t officially been taking in new entries, but some of them have still been coming in. And so we didn’t really close it down, so I think we should officially reopen it. So, if you follow the links on this podcast with the show notes you can always find at johnaugust.com/podcast, if you follow the links there there will be a page to go to that will explain how you can submit your entry to the Three Page Challenge.

And next week we should do another batch of Three Page Challenges and help out some writers there.

**Craig:** Open the flood gates!

**John:** The flood gates are now reopened, so poor Stuart will have to read a bunch of Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Can I just make my One Cool Thing Stuart?

**John:** Stuart. I love Stuart.

**Craig:** He really — you know, people just don’t know that he really does everything.

**John:** Yeah. Well, he does all the editing. He makes the sound coherent. In this podcast he just had a Yeoman’s task because I did not, this was not one of my better podcasts, and so by the time it’s edited hopefully I’ll sound coherent.

**Craig:** Yeah. Those of you, you’ll only hear the edited version. In the unedited version, John spoke in tongues for ten minutes. And then just cried. He cried for 20 minutes. I sat and listened to him cry for 20 minutes.

**John:** It was one of our rougher podcasts I’ll have to say.

**Craig:** He was sobbing. [laughs] Still don’t know why. Look, John is touchy. I’ve got to tell you guys out there. I’m just telling you this is between you and me.

**John:** I have some trigger words.

**Craig:** He’s unstable.

**John:** But, if you want to see this in real live action where we can’t edit out all the mistakes, you can join us in the Austin Film Festival for our first ever live Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** It’s going to be awesome.

**John:** Yeah. So, almost for sure it’s going to be October 20, which is a Saturday at Austin in a big room. We think we have a special guest who’s going to be joining us. It’s going to be great.

**Craig:** It’s going to be spectacular. And if you haven’t already purchased your passes to the Austin Film Festival and Screenwriting Conference it is one of the very few of these things that I heartily endorse, because you’re actually hearing from real screenwriters who do the actual job. How about that? I think you get more out of it then you would a year of film school in, I don’t know, Kentucky.

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

**Craig:** Thank you, John. I’ll see you next time.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/dashes-ellipses-and-underground-monsters).

**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.

Craig, I have kind of a big agenda for us today.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** I thought we might answer four questions and do three samples of the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Are you up for it?

**Craig:** I’m always up for it.

**John:** Great. Let’s get right to it. This is a question from Bianca in Ann Arbor. She writes, “I’m moving to Los Angeles in a few months and I’ve already got a final interview lined up for an assistant position at a top 4 agency. I’ve already had the first interview. I want to be a writer and I have a short film I’d like to direct. A friend of mine says I should skip the assistant job and get a steady 9 to 5 non-industry job so I can have more time and money to work on my writing and directing. I wanted your honest opinion: Am I better off pursuing an entry level industry job with long hours and low wages so I can make contacts and learn how the business works, or should I get a steady 9 to 5 job outside the industry that leaves more time for writing and directing? I’m not sure which way to go.”

**Craig:** I am. [laughs]

**John:** What’s your opinion?

**Craig:** I’m super sure which way to go. You should go work at the agency. Of course. Of course. Look, yeah, it’ll be long hours. But, did she say how old she was?

**John:** She did not. My guess is she is kind of immediately post-college.

**Craig:** Okay great. So, guess what? You’re bulletproof and immortal and you can work a lot longer hours than I can. You don’t have a family, you don’t have children. You’re going to work. Yeah, of course. But the point is by working at an agency you are going to have people to give your script to. You’re going to have access to people who represent the best writers, actors, directors in the world. You will not get any of that working at TJ Maxx. I’m sorry. I don’t understand your friend’s advice at all. It makes no sense to me.

I’m sorry you might be a little tired. Yeah, tough. That’s called breaking into the business. Your friend could not be wrongerer.

**John:** Here’s where I think the friend has the right instinct but isn’t sort of putting all the pieces together: Bianca is moving from Ann Arbor. She probably doesn’t know a lot about how the film industry works. She probably doesn’t have a lot of contacts. She would get both those things working at an agency.

She would also have a tremendous amount of stress and long hours and she probably wouldn’t get as much creative work done for the first year that she’s in Los Angeles. Maybe that’s okay, because the tradeoffs, the things she would get out of it, are pretty great.

Should she stay in a very busy industry job she despises after a year or so of experience? Maybe not. And I think there does come a point in time where if you really are going to be a writer-director, if you’re really going to be trying to do that stuff, you can’t have an agent-assistant job and still be working on being a writer-director. There could be a place in your early career where you have to sort of pull the rip cord, get a boring job, and just buckle down and write. But that’s not when you’re first moving to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Yeah. 100 percent. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. And I want to add another thing: Right now you think you want to be a writer-director. No, no, right now — I take it back. You do want to be a writer-director, but the point is you don’t really know what writing and directing professionally means exactly.

One of the interesting things that happens when people move to Los Angeles and get involved in the entertainment business is they suddenly find that there are 50 different things to do. And their skill set, their passion level, may change. What we see in front of us affects what we’re going to do.

I didn’t come out here to be a screenwriter. I just kind of found it and it was exciting. But really I came out with a very open mind. Some people do come out to be screenwriters and that’s exactly what they become. Some people want to be producers that become screenwriters. Some people want to be screenwriters that become directors.

But the point is access, friends, people that you can show your work to, people who can help you find financing — frankly, these are the things that set apart most people from the hundreds or thousands behind them who just have a script. So, I strongly urge you to take the agency job.

**John:** Yeah. Is there a chance you could become trapped in an agency job and not fulfill your dreams of writing and directing? Yes. But you would have trapped yourself. And you can’t be voluntarily trapped, so you can always leave the job if it’s not what you need it to be.

I moved out to Los Angeles to come to film school at USC. I got into a producers’ program, so I was learning sort of the nuts and bolts of the business, everything from contract negotiation to scheduling and budgeting. And development was part of it, but my whole life plan wasn’t to be a writer-director. I kind of knew I would write, but I didn’t know what it was. And that’s the place that you’re at right now. You don’t know what it is that you’re really going to end up doing. So why not go someplace where you can see as much as you possibly can, read a ton of scripts, and figure out what you want to do?

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure.

**John:** Next question. Mike writes, “I work on a TV writing staff where one of the junior writers rather brazenly bragged about writing during the WGA strike.” So, the great WGA strike of a couple of years ago. “She thought it was highly amusing that she wrote for studios at night while picketing during the day. Needless to say, no one else found this amusing. I’m very curious what you or Craig would do in the situation, which unfortunately probably happens more than anyone would like. Should I call the WGA? Should I talk to her one-on-one about how her selfish, self-centered actions affect others? Just forget she ever said it and move on?”

**Craig:** Boy. I mean, look, I have no, not one ounce of sympathy for somebody who was scabbing during the strike. I mean, if they’re a WGA member and they’re writing for signatories during a strike, I loathe them. I loathe them.

Yes, I think there is an excellent case to be made that you should pick up a phone and call the Guild and tell them what you heard. I don’t like — we all have a kind of “don’t be a tattle tale, don’t be a rat” built into us. I don’t think talking to her directly is going to do a damn thing. She’s already made herself and her position clear. I’m not sure what talking to her is going to do other than maybe she’ll think twice when the next strike rolls around?

No, I think that frankly there is a case to be made that, yeah, you pick up the phone and call the guild. I don’t like it any more than you do, but if we’re going to strike and people are going to do this, I mean, what’s the point? How do I turn around and tell somebody who’s barely hanging on, “Yeah, don’t write,” because we’re all in this together except for that person.

**John:** I think my overall concern… — I have two concerns. One is that this writer evidently did scab and write during the strike. Sort of my bigger, more immediate concern is that she’s bragging about it, and which to me sets a very dangerous culture of expectations so that, “Oh, it’s fine.” If you sort of let that go unchallenged like, “Oh, it’s fine that you did that.” If you don’t say anything, it’s sort of tacit approval. So I think having the conversation with the staff, “That’s not cool,” is make sure that everyone who has heard this conversation understands why that’s really not cool.

And then, listen, I don’t know your position on the staff, I don’t know her position on the staff. I don’t know sort of how it all works there. But I would say, “You know what, that’s not cool.” If nothing else it will probably shut her up from saying that again and again and setting this expectation that what she did was okay.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s important to make sure that she actually was scabbing. Because she’s an assistant, there’s a chance here in my mind that she actually wasn’t a Writers Guild member. If she wasn’t a Writers Guild member, she was not — I mean, she was essentially hurting the strike, but she wasn’t breaking any rules.

**John:** Well it says here, it doesn’t say that she was an assistant during that time. It says, “One of the junior writers rather brazenly…”

**Craig:** Oh, junior writer. Oh, I’m sorry. I heard wrong. Well then I’m going to presume that she was a member of the Writers Guild. So I do agree that, yes, everybody else in that room needs to know that’s not cool. Frankly, I would think about firing her for sure because that’s disgusting to me. And then on top of that I would call the Guild. I hate to say it, but yeah.

**John:** Next question from Sean. “When writing slug lines for scenes that take place in a high school, is it acceptable to write, for instance, ‘INT. HIGH SCHOOL — STAIRWAY — DAY?’ Or it preferable just to write ‘INT. HIGH SCHOOL STAIRWELL — DAY?’ The majority of the film takes place in a school, so it seemed to make sense to specify the exact area of the school in the slug line. I’m just not sure which or either is the correct approach.”

**Craig:** How would you go about that? I mean, I know what I would do.

**John:** If most of the movie is taking place at the high school, to me I would cut the “high school” out of it at a certain point.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Because it would just become an extra sort of cruft on the page. There are times where I will do the specifiers where you talk about the general location — dash — the specifying location inside that. But that’s usually if it’s going to be… — You’re always thinking about the reader. What’s going to make most sense for the reader? Is the reader going to get confused if I don’t do it this way?

**Craig:** You’re absolutely right. If most of the movie is set in this high school, or a long sequence is set in the high school moving around within different locations inside the high school, once you’ve established that you’re definitely in the high school it’s okay to just lose that part and just say INT. STAIRWAY, INT. HALLWAY, INT. PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE, INT. CLASSROOM.

The second you leave the high school when you come back you’ve got to do high school again. The whole point of the slug line stuff, at least initially, is to make sure the reader knows where the hell they are. There is no slavish need to follow some kind of orthodoxy. Eventually when the movie goes into production, if there’s any question or concern from the first AD they will come and ask you, “Is this is the high school or…?”

But, I mean, everybody should be able to get it. So, clarity should be the rule of the day.

**John:** Absolutely. So, clarity for the reader. Simplicity for the reader. Ultimately you’re trying to avoid ambiguity for production so that if it says INT. HALLWAY, “Wait, is it the hallway of the high school or is it the hallway of the house?” You have to sort that stuff out. But at this stage, generally the shorter slug line is going to be the better choice.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Next question is not really a question. It’s one of those things that it’s sort of phrased like a question, but at the end it’s just, “So what do you think?” So it’s really more of a statement.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s a little essay?

**John:** It’s a small essay with a question mark at the end.

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh, okay.

**John:** But I thought I would bring it up because it’s a guy who wrote in before and I thought it made interesting points that we can talk about. Tucker writes, “From where I sit the business looks like it’s in real trouble. The business model itself seems broken, especially on the creative side. Making big, dumb, loud movies to build international franchises is fine if people buy tickets and like the product. The problem is they don’t and they aren’t. This has been a bad year at theaters; attendance is in a major downturn.”

So I’m going to pause here for one second because I want to challenge the thesis of that second part which I think it’s reported a lot really without backup. So the idea that the business is down a lot isn’t really… — It’s harder to defend that. If you actually look at the year to date, this year versus previous years, going up through — we’re recording this on August 15th. I pulled it up on Box Office Mojo.

Year to date we’re at $7.1 billion for 2012 versus $6.8 billion in 2011. So we’re actually $300 million ahead of where we were this time last year, so you can’t say that the business is down. You can say that attendance is probably down. I don’t have it broken down by the months, but overall ticket purchases have dropped since the high in 2002, so that is true to say that it’s down. But I get frustrated by the articles that sort of preface themselves saying, “Everybody knows the movie industry is falling apart,” when in fact by the actual dollar figures it isn’t down.

So, that’s my pause.

**Craig:** I agree with your pause. I have more to say, but go ahead, keep reading.

**John:** Tucker continues, “And I feel there is a perfect storm going on. The studios need to make big bets on big franchises that makes big committees come together to manage the creative, and there are all these Hollywood pros and execs in a grip of fear from the bleeding the business is going through, and that fear makes us play either safe or stupid, so the product lacks innovation and freshness and passion. And the public notices and stays away.”

So, let’s go back to the pause.

**Craig:** Wait. Wait. Where was the question?

**John:** Oh, I had cut out the part of the question which was the, “What do you guys think?”

**Craig:** [laughs] Ah, if that was the question I would give him a… — Look, I think that he’s half right. There’s no question that the business has become obsessed with big, loud franchise event movies. They are convincing themselves that event movies are the business of movies and that that’s where all the money is going to be. Event movies lend themselves to 3D and IMAX, which allows everyone to greedily pull down higher ticket prices.

And they are doing that in part to supplant the disappearance or the continuing disappearance of the DVD market. Where he’s wrong is that people are absolutely still showing up. No question. You can’t look at The Avengers — which I think would be a prime example of what he would call big and loud, because it is big and loud, it’s an enormous, big, loud movie, although I liked it —

**John:** It’s not dumb. It’s very popcorn, but it’s not dumb.

**Craig:** It’s not dumb. I mean, look: when he says “dumb,” I don’t know what he thinks dumb is. I don’t know if he thinks dumb is anything that’s big. I don’t know what he thinks dumb is. All I can say is you can’t look at what The Avengers did and go, “Oh yeah, the movie business doesn’t work anymore and people don’t want to go see this stuff.”

They absolutely want to see it. And frankly international audiences want to see it just as much if not more so than domestic audiences. So, really part of what’s going on in Hollywood is that they’ve decided that there’s a certain kind of movie that they should make. And it’s not that the audiences are rewarding them. It’s just that the audiences are failing to punish them for it. I don’t recognize that the movie business is floundering. They still pack ’em in, all over the world.

I absolutely recognize that the movie business is under-serving a certain market. And they seem to have forgotten that you can still make a lot of money making a certain kind of movie that isn’t the big, huge, loud spectacle.

**John:** Yeah. A lot of what we talk about on the podcast comes from the perspective of screenwriters who are trying to write the movies that will three years down the road become the big movies. And as the studios have pursued these big giant tent poles, my frustration which I think you share is that a lot of times the decision is basically, “We’re going to make this movie come hell or high water. We will throw a director at it. We’ll throw an actor on it. And somehow we’ll make it happen.” And they are not actually developing movies to shoot anymore. They’re just trying to… — They’re writing a one sheet and figuring out what a trailer is and then trying to make the movies to match that.

That is absolutely true, and that’s a frustration of content creation and the process early on. But as far as what is actually hitting in theaters right now, I don’t think that’s really entirely fair to be slamming the movies that are coming out right now. Often when people talk about like, “Oh, the movie business is doomed,” they try to bring up John Carter from earlier this year. And there’s nothing at all cynical about John Carter. I saw John Carter. I mean, John Carter is a big, goofy, delightful film.

I wish it had made a lot more money, but it’s not indicative of some sort of, like, Hollywood falling apart. Yes, it was really expensive. You can talk about it being really probably too expensive. But you can’t say that it was trying to be this big, dumb movie when it was kind of a swing for the fences. And so I kind of wish we would reward the chance that it took, or acknowledge the risk that was taken on John Carter, and not be slamming it for its simplicity.

**Craig:** John Carter is the worst example for people to use. The fact is when people think about risk they are completely upside down on the reality. They think that small independent movies take on this enormous financial risk and studio films aren’t risky at all. It’s the opposite.

The little independent movies, people have to understand this: They don’t get made unless… — not unless — often unless the financiers can pre-sell that movie overseas. So if the movie is going to cost $5 million and it’s this little beautiful, not loud, not noisy, not dumb art film, they’re not making it for $5 million unless they know ahead of time, “I’ve actually already sold this movie overseas based on who’s in it, or who the director is, for $5 million.”

“When we start to make this movie, I’m even. There’s no risk there.” That’s that model. And then it really is just about, “Okay, can we make a little bit of money, or a decent amount of money, or a lot of money for the effort?” And that’s that model.

When you look at John Carter, that’s a company that decides, “We’re going to spend $300 million just on the production alone. We’re going to make a movie that is based on a book no one has read, and almost no one has heard of, Edgar Rice Burroughs. We’re going to hire a director that is brilliant but has no live action track record whatsoever. And we’re going to let him make his movie.”

I’m sorry. Yeah, it didn’t work out. Okay? They don’t always work out. But to me, John Carter is an example of studio bravery.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And so when people bring up John Carter I go, no, no, no, that’s not the problem. The problem is Battleship. That’s the problem.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I say that as somebody who is friends with a number of people who were involved. But the issue with Battleship is when you take something and you make it for too much money because you think the audience wants it, because they know the name or the word but there’s really nothing there.

I mean, look, John Carter is a novel. It was literature. I mean, I can’t say it’s great literature, but Burroughs is no slouch. Whereas Battleship was just pegs. It was pieces of plastic that were sold to us as children. And there is no narrative inherent to it. So, let’s not blame John Carter. But let’s also not engage in this pointless sort of… — I always smell resentment underneath these essays, like, “Good, the fat cats are dying. And now it will be time for the YouTubers to take over the world.”

No. Sorry. People still go to movies. I wish it were easier for $30 million comedies that are interesting to get made. I do. And it’s hard. But, you know, the same producer that made Battleship made Identity Thief. He’s a good guy. He sees that there are plays on both ends of the spectrum.

And so I would love to see Hollywood kind of be a little less pie-eyed about these big huge movies, especially when they can get you in trouble like this, you know, the World War Z movie that’s…

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** …you know, they’re going to have to do a lot of reshoots and a lot of money because they have so much into it. But, no, I don’t think we should be dancing on… — If you want to dance on the corpse of Hollywood, don’t dance with glee. Because I’ll tell you what, buddy: when this thing goes down, nothing will take its place, not like this.

**John:** I think the only time… I’m trying to think of examples of where you can really fault Hollywood cynicism. And Battleship does feel like one of those cases because Battleship was made kind of for the wrong reasons. To me they were clearly chasing Transformers. It felt like Transformers on water. And I wasn’t rooting against the movie, but I was concerned on those levels.

I see DC Comics/Warner Brothers trying to emulate the success of The Avengers and trying to put together the whole super group of their heroes, and that feels.. — I can’t help but feel that that seems a little cynical. “Well that worked for them, so we should do it with our group.”

It’s like, well, but there was something really inherently right about doing it the way Marvel did it, and it was tremendously risky and, god bless them, they took the risk and they made it. But I’m concerned that they’re going to spend $600 million, $800 million trying to assemble these heroes to make this movie that I’m not sure that we definitely need to make.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s possible. Certainly Hollywood, this is nothing new. They’ve always chased success. There’s a movie coming out about 21 year olds who have a hangover night. There is also a movie about 70 year olds who have a hangover night. [laughs] And there’s the DC one, Justice League, I think.

They have done this throughout history. A big movie comes out and then people make movies like that movie. They’ve been doing that since I got into the business. There’s no trend here. That’s standard operating procedure. Mind you, not only in this business, in every business.

Look around at smartphones and find me one that isn’t a rip-off of the iPhone. Everyone in every business does this. Absolutely normal. But, of course, it’s the people that innovate successfully and first, I guess that’s sort of inherent in the word innovate who really reap the benefits and the rewards.

And I have to say, year after year, while things get creaky and maybe things get really, really top heavy, there are always good movies that come out. There are always movies that take us by surprise and that we really like. And I just feel like if you’re going to take a look at the business, look at it objectively and leave the resentment out f it. Because I don’t hate Hollywood. I love it. I love it enough to say, “Stop doing dumb stuff like A, B, and C, and do more smart stuff like D, E, and F.”

But I do love it. I love movies and I love Hollywood.

**John:** Yeah. Schadenfreude helps nobody. And it’s sort of a cliché, but a rising tide lifts all boats. And you want the box office to be really good because then they’re going to be spending more money to make more movies. It does actually help everybody if my movies succeed.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** All right. I’m ready for our Three Page Challenges if you are ready to start?

**Craig:** Heck yeah. Gosh yes.

**John:** Let’s start with Terrance Mulloy’s one. It’s the one that starts in New York City. It doesn’t have a title.

**Craig:** You’re going to hear pages rustling around because I printed it out again, John.

**John:** You did? That’s fine. You’re allowed to print.

**Craig:** I know you hate that.

**John:** So while you’re rustling through your pages, I will give a quick summary of what Terrance’s script is about. I should say that if you are interested in reading any of these Three Page Challenges that people sent in, they are all linked to on johnaugust.com. You can go to the podcast section and read the screenplays along with us. So, we can pause here for a moment so you can do that.

**Craig:** Pausing.

**John:** Pausing. This is Terrance Mulloy’s script. And I want to thank our three people who wrote in and volunteered to have us be talking about their things on air. That was very generous of you.

So, here’s Terrance:

So we have establishing shots of New York City. We then descend through the concrete and into a subway tunnel where two MTA maintenance workers are walking and talking. They talk about chili and try to figure out where they are on this map. They get off the tracks and the train goes passed, or sort of rushes, blasts passed. And one of them sees a human shape hop down into a hole. After the train passes, they investigate, thinking it’s maybe a homeless person, but it’s not.

And one guy gets his throat ripped out as we get to the end of page three. So it’s some sort of monstrous creature is in the subway tunnel.

**Craig:** Underneath Manhattan.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** These pages were… — Nothing wrong with the way they were written. Everything seemed okay. The dialogue was sort of fine in its craft. Everything here was fine except that I’ve seen this a billion times.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s no invention here really. I mean, if you were to say to anybody, “Can you write a scene like the one you’ve seen a million times in the horror/monster movies where two guys are just innocently walking along in the darkness, doing their job, chitchatting about nothing, and then suddenly a monster kills one of them and the other one goes, ‘Oh my god!'” It would be this. It’s incredibly generic. So, I’m not sure what else to say.

You can’t ignore the 14,000 movies that have come before you. You have to really surprise us.

**John:** Yeah. I feel like with this, the conventions, it’s following the conventions so closely that I wanted to see some pushback, because by the bottom of page one I kind of knew what was going to happen. Like, if we are descended down into the subway and two people are just walking and talking and doing normal stuff, the minute I see, like, a shadowy creature move by it’s like, “Well, I know exactly what movie this is.”

And so if you’re going to give us that shadowy creature walking by, surprise us somehow. Let us know that there’s something — there’s a reason that something different is going to be happening, that you’re aware of the conventions. I mean, it doesn’t have to be Scream where it’s meta conventions, but you need to surprise us a little bit more than I felt like we were getting in these three pages.

I would say overall I was more curious about the story than I was about the writing. And sometimes you can write something that’s kind of conventional, but if it was really, really well-written that could serve you very well. Here the writing, it was only okay. It was doing what it needed to do. There were some significant typos that I wanted to point out.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We had an “it’s” and “its” problem.

**Craig:** That kills me.

**John:** Yeah. So the possessive “its” is just I-T-S. There’s no apostrophe. And it doesn’t make sense, but it’s just how English works. “Chili” has one L. And then I want to talk about these two MTA workers who throughout the three pages are MTA Worker #1 and MTA Worker #2.

**Craig:** I got so confused. I didn’t even know who was dead at one point.

**John:** Yeah. So here’s the thing: It’s fine to say MTA Worker, but if you’re going to have two of them and they’re going to be talking for more than two lines, just give them actual names. I think they should probably have last names, so one is Ramirez and one is Jones. It doesn’t kind of really matter. You don’t have to get into great detail and you don’t have to write up whole backstories on them. But just so we can keep them straight, because there’s a lot of times in the scene description where like, “MTA Worker #1 stops to survey through his surroundings.” But it’s like, “Wait, which one is that? Is it the guy who said this, the guy who said that?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Give us some actual names so that we can focus on that a little bit more.

**Craig:** Yeah. You get trapped in the garden of “he”s and “she”s where you’re not sure to whom the pronoun is referring. And also, I’ve got to tell you: if you write the script well enough and somebody wants to make this, sooner or later some casting lady is going to be calling going, “Um, MTA Worker #1, white, back, tall, short?”

**John:** That’s where Ramirez saves your ass. It’s like, boom, helps you figure it out.

**Craig:** Yeah. Give us something. I mean, but in general I can’t… — You’re right, if for instance, there are ways where you can sort of say, “You know what? The pot of this movie is going to be incredibly generic. What’s going to be interesting is the speech of the people in it. I’m going to go Tarantino on this,” if you want. And sometimes that works. But this sort of had generic… — It just felt like kind of one of those movies, you’re flipping around late at night, and then suddenly there’s this sort of generic never-was-released monster movie starring somebody that might have been on TV once. There’s nothing to it to make me go, “Ah, cool.”

**John:** Yeah. Syfy Channel does originals of those now.

**Craig:** Yeah, even the monster. I’m like, “Okay, so it’s a pale Gollumy dude. It’s C.H.U.D.” You know what I mean?

**John:** I’m actually fine with it if it’s unapologetically that. But maybe it needs to acknowledge what it is a little. I don’t know, it felt like it wasn’t quite acknowledging what it was yet. Granted, it was only three pages so maybe there was a remarkable twist on page 6 that we see that actually there is a bigger thing happening. But I don’t necessarily have faith…

**Craig:** Yeah. There wasn’t even a sense of campiness to it, like, “Okay, that’s where the fun is going to come in. This thing is going to be just over the top and sicko,” or something. It just felt very down the middle.

**John:** So, there was a question that came in this week and I thought I would not actually raise the question because we could talk about it here just on these pages, which is the difference between ellipses and double dashes, because this is a script that uses a lot of ellipses. And so it uses them — it never really ends sentences. There’s just a lot of “…” and “…” and it’s a style. You see a lot of screenwriters that use it, and it’s absolutely fine.

It’s not a style I particularly care for, but it’s certainly a style. So, if you’re trailing off the end of a sentence that’s leading into a line of dialogue, often you’ll see, often I will use “…” so it sort of flows into the next line of dialogue. So this is going from scene description into dialogue. Dashes also work. The Wibberleys are big dash uses. And so there’s a script that they worked on, that I worked on, that they worked on, and every time it went back and forth one of the first things we would ever do is change all their dashes to ellipses, and all the ellipses to dashes.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Either one is fine. If you pick a style and you like it, that’s great. This guy is using “…” and it’s not a way I would do it, but it reads fine.

**Craig:** I didn’t mind it. I always say about these things: if the three pages had been really interesting and gripping, I wouldn’t have cared less. I will say that I tend to use “…” the way you do, to trail off things and then to break up things inside a paragraph if I’m sort of reporting. “He turns. Oh my god, a shot — ” Then I’ll do “–” because the “…”s somehow get a little…they look a little cluttery on the page. It makes my eyes hurt a little bit.

But it’s not really… — If somebody is writing a great script and they want to “…” the hell out of it, have fun.

**John:** Yeah. Either one is okay with us.

I’m trying to think of other last notes on this. The first bit of dialogue in a script is really crucial because that gives us a sense of the tone and sort of what kind of movie this is. Right now they’re having a discussion on chili con carne with garlic, and it just wasn’t great. And there’s probably a great version of this kind of conversation. Basically, if we’re laughing because what they’re saying is so funny then the horror stuff is great. But if it’s just so two people talking, it’s not going to really work for us.

**Craig:** Yeah. The only other suggestion I would make, just something to think about: I read once that Spielberg likes to find within the first image or the first few images something that’s thematically symbolic to the movie, to the guts of the movie.

I think the opening shot of Schindler’s List is a woman praying over a candle, and we just see the smoke kind of going up in the air and the whole thing, it’s like, “This is life, it burns and then it goes to smoke and it’s gone. It’s that fragile.” And I always thought that was a really interesting idea. And a lot of times I do try and think, “Well, what is that first thing I see?”

Now here it’s a trick, and it’s a trick we’ve seen, again, a billion times, where we do the macro to micro bit, where we fly down into Manhattan, and then we’re into people, and then we’re underground. But really all that’s done is say, “Look, there’s stuff underground Manhattan.” Yeah. We know. We know about the subway. [laughs]

So then the question is: what else could you do? I mean, is it two guys walking underneath and one of them sees like a bug and crushes it? Something where we get a sense that maybe there’s a bit of hubris that we think that we’re in charge here and actually there is this whole world underneath us that’s pissed off and ready to revolt?

Just find something that makes it visually significant. This to me was just, again, a very generic, technical trick. It was empty aesthetics.

**John:** It felt like the compulsory exercises in figure skating. It did its circle 8s, and it did a good job in circle 8s, but it wasn’t expressive in a way that could be awesome.

**Craig:** It was not a Triple Lutz.

**John:** No Triple Lutz there. There was no Lutz at all.

Next, let’s go to Trunk by Mario DiPesa. Here’s a synopsis of Trunk. So, we start at a tranquil lake and then suddenly a car plunges into it and sinks. Then we get a card that reads “Seconds Before.” We’re in a new scene. We see the car parked at the edge of a cliff. There’s a driver at the wheel. He looks at two bodies in the car. The police come up from behind, tell him to surrender. Then he drives the car off the cliff into the lake, so the thing we just saw before.

A new card that says “Minutes Earlier.” We see the car racing down a road pursued by the police. The men in the car are shooting at the cops who shoot back. And we have some dialogue among the men. And that’s the three pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. So you figure out pretty quickly that we’re doing a reverse narrative here. I presume that once we see that three scenes have now occurred moving backwards through time that we’re in Memento-ville.

And obviously that’s the first thing that people are going to read is, “Oh, okay, so we’re Memento-ing some kind of heist or criminal move that’s gone bad and we’re ending with a death and going backwards to see how it all starts.” And that’s, I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that.

**John:** I don’t know. I’m not convinced…

**Craig:** If it works, and it’s great. Memento is so good and it’s so good at that, and there’s also that great Gaspar Noé, I mean, it’s kind of a sick Gaspar Noé movie called…

**John:** Irreversible?

**Craig:** …Irreversible, I believe. So, okay, you know, the reader will have to either be into that or not into that, and there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s your deal.

I like the way that this writer wrote. I thought the description was well done, because I didn’t get bored and I didn’t get lost in it. And I thought it was a nice mix of poetic but not purple. I was infuriated on page 2 when there was a type in dialogue.

**John:** That was terrible.

**Craig:** I mean, if you’re going to do the its/it’s thing in action, or you’re going to do something in action, I get it. But in dialogue, that’s just embarrassing.

**John:** You’re talking about, “Comes out now, this is your final warning.”

**Craig:** Yeah! I mean, guys, you’re only sending us three pages. We’re not asking you to proofread with a fine tooth comb 120 pages. At least read the three pages you’re sending. It’s embarrassing to you, because we’re going to make fun of you and embarrass you. [laughs] So don’t do that.

I also thought the dialogue, I liked the dialogue in the sense that it seemed very simple and realistic to the moment of what was going on. It was certainly not over-written. I’ll take under-written any day of the week when people are driving from cops, and wounded, and bleeding, and trying to get away.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, a lot of good things here to say.

**John:** I liked it too. I don’t know that this time conceit is actually going to stay for the whole movie. I feel like this may be a setup kind of thing and once, at a certain point we may not be moving backwards in time. So I’m curious whether that’s going to happen. And my curiosity is partly what would keep me reading more of the script.

So, I liked the technique and I thought it was sort of well-handled. I felt like if the driver is going to have a name he should have it by now. So right now the driver is just called Driver. And maybe that’s fine. I think he’s probably our main character. I think we’re going to follow him through the whole movie. If that’s the case, and he’s going to have a name at any point in the movie, he should have his name by now.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Maybe it’s Drive and he doesn’t have a name. And that’s fine. Maybe it’s actually a sequel to Drive.

My theory with the typo is I’m not convinced that Mario DiPesa is a native English speaker. While it’s well-written, there are some strange choices that to me indicated that English may not be his only language. On page 2 he says, “Shifts the car’s gear.” What is it, “He shifts the car’s gear.” That isn’t sort of the way we would actually say that.

**Craig:** I guess. But then so much of this other stuff feels, I mean, I agree that that’s a little awkward, but I mean a lot of this stuff feels like, the action stuff, it’s hard to imagine this isn’t somebody that speaks English.

**John:** I think he speaks English, but something feels a little wrong. Also on page 2, “Wheels SCREECH as dust fills the air behind the car.” Fills the air behind the car? That seems like it’s coming from a different language.

**Craig:** I’ve got to tell you, [laughs] if this guy isn’t foreign he’s putting a gun in his mouth right now.

**John:** He’s just mortified right now. Maybe he’s special.

**Craig:** I don’t know. But, “The car bobs like a cork for a brief moment, then slowly sinks.” That’s very colloquial.

**John:** But, and then in the next paragraph; this is a style thing which isn’t an English speaker or not, but first page: “Water explodes like a thousand broken mirrors. The car bobs like a cork for a brief moment, then slowly sinks.” The double simile isn’t the most graceful. They have two likes back to back. That’s not ideal.

So, we’re “like a thousand broken mirrors” and “like a cork” back to back. It feels a little less graceful

**Craig:** That I agree with. That’s the sort of thing you want to kind of comb through and not do, but that’s not indicative of not speaking English. That’s just indicative of…

**John:** Well I will say that if Mario DiPesa, if you do speak English natively I apologize for implying that you didn’t, but I think you’re a much better writer in English than many people are. Anyway, so…

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s terrible.

**John:** No! I’m saying…

**Craig:** Because I really do think he is. I think he’s American and I think he’s like so a better writer than people, than you are in French.

**John:** Oh my god. He’s so much better.

**Craig:** Thanks.

**John:** I’m just wondering whether maybe he’s spoken English for ten years, and so is therefore really good, but some stuff is always going to be a little bit off. I’m looking him up right now to just see if he has an international…

**Craig:** See, the “Comes out now” thing is definitely a typo. Because the captain says, “Come out of the car with your hands on your head.” And then two lines of dialogue later, “Comes out now. This is your final warning.” It has to be a typo.

Also, because S is right near E on the keyboard.

**John:** Oh my god. So I just checked through my email and I’m completely wrong. So, Mario, I believe reading an actual email from you.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** For some reason I guessed that you are not a native speaker, but you are a native speaker.

**Craig:** Hey, Mario, listen, you don’t have to take this crap from him, okay? [laughs] I want you to do something. I want you to write in and really give him hell.

**John:** He actually wrote in about our last podcast and had, like, many paragraphs. And this does not feel at all like a person who does not speak English natively.

**Craig:** Shame. On. You.

**John:** Maybe he’s just poetic.

**Craig:** I think it was just a typo.

**John:** Well, no, “the car’s gear,” that read weird to me. Like I read that three times. Like, “Wait, that doesn’t actually make sense.”

**Craig:** It’s not good.

**John:** You don’t shift the car’s gear.

**Craig:** You’re right. That should have just been, you know, “Takes a deep breath. Puts the car in gear.” We put the car in gear. We don’t shift it into gear. But, meh.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not enough to take the guy’s citizenship away.

**John:** No, it really wasn’t.

Our last Three Page Challenge entry is by, oh, here I am going to try it: Andrew Lauwasser. Lauwasser? It’s a good name. I just don’t know how to pronounce it.

**Craig:** I would say Lau-wasser.

**John:** Lau-wasser?

**Craig:** Lau-wasser. Yeah.

**John:** Let me give you a summary here. So we meet Justin and Amy in their apartment. They’re both mid-20s. Amy tells Justin she’s breaking up with him. We cut to a new house where we meet Marshall who’s around 60, and Brooke, his wife, she’s mid-30s. She’s divorcing him. We cut back and forth between Justin and Amy and Marshall and Brooke while they have dialogue and start to break up and move stuff out.

And that’s the three pages.

**Craig:** You want to start?

**John:** I’ll go first. This felt very setup-y. And setup-y in a way that I could see some credits playing underneath this maybe? It was, you know, I’ll give it this: It gets going really quickly. You see like, okay, these are two guys who are being dumped by the women in their lives. And the script is called Wingmen. I suspect they’re going to buddy up and help each other out. See the guy in his 60s and a guy in his mid-20s and they’re going to help each other out. And so I get the conceit of the character.

The Amy character is so horrible; I want her to be eaten by sled dogs. She says just the meanest things. And not in sort of like a really funny way. I didn’t… — Weirdly I had… — This happens sometimes in movies: if you see somebody who is in a relationship with somebody who is just terrible you stop having sympathy for them at a certain point. It’s like, “Why are you with this person?” So I felt that with Amy.

**Craig:** Uh…yeah. Okay, well, and by the way, I kind of suspect that this is a father and son thing. I don’t know why.

**John:** Oh, maybe.

**Craig:** I think that’s what the payoff will be. But, look, Andrew, come here. Come here, buddy. Let’s sit down, okay, let’s have a drink. You and me.

So, you got your drink? Good. I’ve got mine, too. I have written stuff like this before. Okay? So don’t take this the wrong way. This does not mean that you stink. It just means these pages stink. Okay?

I’m glad you got these out of your system. They’re terrible, but I understand why you wrote them this way, because I’ve done it before. When I was starting out, I would do this a lot. What you’re doing is you’re supplanting clever and quippy for human. These are not human beings. They are little joke glands you’re squeezing to get out lines that you think are clever. Frankly, none of them are that clever anyway, and the worst thing about being clever is you never really get credit for it anyway.

People smile at clever things. Your job as a comedy writer is to be making them laugh. To make people laugh in a theater, it’s not easy. God knows I know it’s not easy. You’re trying to cause an involuntary physical response. It’s a tough deal, okay?

People laugh when they see human things happening. They can identify with the humanity in it. Even if it’s slapstick it is partly about connecting with the humanity of it. The issue with this stuff is none of these people are real. Nobody breaks up like this. Nobody talks like this.

Oh, ah, Marshall says — he’s the older man — “You’re leaving me?” Brooke, “I don’t like to think of it as leaving. More like escaping.” I mean, that line alone is brutal. I mean, escaping from — first of all, I’m like, “What? Was he beating her? What was going on that she needs to escape?” And it’s so cold. And by the way, that’s not the character that John is talking about, who’s even worse.

Then Marshall says, “Is there anything I should do?” Which is a weird thing to say. And he’s not upset oddly, and she says, “Ah! I almost forgot. I need you to sign the divorce papers.” How? Really? You almost forgot? And the divorce papers were shoved in your purse? And he didn’t know? And he just goes ahead and signs the? Without even reading them?

And then when he says, “How long have you been carrying these around?” “Since I started seeing Ian. Sign on the…” “I know where to sign. You’re cheating on me?” Really?

This just doesn’t feel like humans responding to human things. The Amy situation is much worse because Amy just seems sociopathic. You have to ask yourself: Why was this person with this other person in the first place? I mean, he says, “We’re going to sit here and we’re going to talk this out. You can’t just throw away nine years like that.” Nine years of what? Living with this psycho? It’s crazy.

Then let’s go back to Marshall. And listen, Andrew, I know this sucks, okay? But we have to do this because I want you to get this out of your system. Okay?

Your first scene with Marshall and Brooke. Marshall is oddly calm. “(Not upset),” in parentheses, “Is there anything I should do?” “Here. Sign the divorce papers.” “Okay. You’re cheating on me?”

Next scene. “You’re such a bitch.” What?!

Then he starts talking about her tits. And now he’s complaining about the tits and now doing a joke about gravity and Parkinson’s, like a boob joke. And now she’s doing a dick joke. None of this makes me understand a single thing about who these people are. Does this really hurt either one of them? Are they real? Is this the way people really do breakup?

No. Not even in comedies. Okay? So, I want you to say with me, Andrew, because I’m your friend. Because you’re a comedy writer and we’re all friends, okay? So say this with me: I’m going to let go of this clever stuff and I’m going to start writing people. And when I write people, unless I’m writing a spoof, and then you can be an absolute idiot, okay? It grants you full license. But if you’re writing a movie that’s a romantic comedy like this is going to be, then find the comedy in the real stuff. And you can push it a little bit, but you can’t do this.

**John:** No.

A few craft things I want to talk about along the way, as he’s rewriting this, and as people are reading along with this. I kind of liked what he said about Justin, “27 years old and lean, with a mop of curls on his head and a face that only knows puppy dog sincerity.” Sure.

But he introduces both Justin and Amy in the same very, very long sentence. That sentence is five lines long. No. Don’t do that. Shorten. Each of them, they’re main characters, they deserve their own sentence. Break that into two sentences.

Both of these introductory scenes would be so much better if we cut out the first lines of them. So if the first line of the movie were actually Amy’s, “I’m keeping the apartment, so technically you’re the one who’s leaving.” That’s a much funnier start of a scene than, “You’re leaving me?”

**Craig:** That’s a great note.

**John:** Start with the answer rather than the question. And then you can cut out Marshall’s question, too. Start with Brooke like, “I don’t like to think of it as leaving, more like escaping.” That’s a good start, a funny line of a scene. Kind of everything that follows after it has to change. But it’s not a bad way to start a scene.

**Craig:** I just want to interrupt you for a second. This is why I love what you’re saying. Because by cutting out that lead-in line, my mind will fill in that there was a reasonable, rational, human exchange that led to that line. But with the lead-in line there isn’t, because it’s not. So that’s a great, great note.

**John:** Cool.

Beyond that, my notes are your notes, but probably kinder and softer, but maybe some tough love was needed.

I get what he’s kind of going for here. I think he’s just so desperate to sort of start the comedy engine that he’s not taking the time to actually make these people real human beings. And he’s making the two women so unlikeable that we don’t know what kind of reality that we’re in.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there’s another danger here, too. I’ve read a million comedy scripts, so I’m going to tell you what happens in this one. These two guys are going to get together and they’re going to go looking for women. And they both feel beaten up by women and angry at women. And then they’re going to meet women and those women are going to change their minds. Naturally.

The problem is the script starts off extraordinarily misogynistically. [laughs] There’s nothing wrong with one mean woman. I loved, I loved Rachel Harris, right, in The Hangover. That’s her name, right? Rachel Harris, the actress?

**John:** Yeah, she’s awesome. Blonde.

**Craig:** Yeah. The blonde one. Exactly. Who’s married to Ed Helms. Are they married? No, they’re going to be married. They’re engaged to be married, I think.

**John:** Congratulations to them.

**Craig:** And she was hysterical because she was this over the top horror show, but I also understood that he was an absolute weenie. That was his character. He had no spine at all. That’s why their relationship was stable. He was the beaten wife and it was actually kind of funny. But, it came inside the context of a movie where another one of his friends is getting married to a really nice girl who’s a normal, healthy human being that isn’t mean or awful.

We are starting the movie with two mean, awful, cold women. And I’ve got to tell you, there isn’t a single woman in the audience who’s going to be interested in watching past that because, frankly, it’s insulting.

It’s also just not honest. I don’t think it’s honest. And if comedy is false it’s just not going to work.

**John:** Let’s think about those first two scenes where we’re meeting the guys, if they are going to be our protagonists for the course of the movie those scenes need to be about them. And it needs to give us a sense of what they need to accomplish over the course of the movie. So, your description about Ed Helms is apt. It’s like, you know, Rachel Harris’s character was there to let us see what was wrong with him and where he needed to grow. So, as he’s rewriting these scenes and figuring out how this movie starts, those scenes need to be about those guys and not about the relationship falling apart.

**Craig:** 100 percent. Because all I know about these guys is that they made really bad choices of women. I don’t know what’s wrong with them. They are the protagonists. It has to be about them. All the more reason, frankly, if these women are leaving that they should be right. The women should be correct to leave.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Those are our pages.

**Craig:** But Andrew. Andrew, I’m serious dude, you can do this. Everybody that writes comedies makes this mistake at some point. You made yours. You can do this; I believe in you.

**John:** Yeah. Step away from the balcony.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Terrance, Andrew, and Mario, thank you so much for writing in with your three page samples. That was very brave of you and I hope it was helpful. I hope we gave you useful things to think about with this script and with the next thing. And thank you for sharing with everybody else who’s going to read these pages and get some sense of how they might want to start telling their stories.

I think the time has come for our One Cool Things. And you have a very cool thing this week in that you’re going to play us a song.

**Craig:** I’m going to play a song. That’s right. Do you have a cool — and by the way, because we have 100,000 people listening.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve consistently crossed over our 100,000 barrier. So we have a lot of good listeners out there. And 100,000 of them, at least, which is amazing.

**Craig:** It’s awesome.

**John:** And nuts. So, you will play us out this week so there won’t be a normal song, so I guess I should do my Cool Thing now, and then we can just be done.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So my Cool Thing, I recognize that a lot of times the Cool Things are like, “buy this product,” and that’s never the intention. I don’t want to have an Amazon link for everything that we talk about. So my One Cool Thing is absolutely free, which this week is the LA Public Library, and your local public library if you don’t live in Los Angeles.

Because the thing is I sort of stopped going to the library for many years until I had a kid, and then you go to the library because it saves you from having to buy a gazillion books. And so you just take them to the library and they pick a bunch of books off the shelf, and you return them after three weeks.

What’s weird is going back to the library as a grown up and recognizing that libraries are kind of amazing. It’s sort of like Netflix, but for books. And that you don’t have to like actually purchase things, you can just borrow them, and then when you’re done with them they go away and they don’t have to live in your house anymore. Because so much of what I read now I read on the Kindle or through iBooks or whatever. And that’s great for like the modern books, or the new book that you read about online and you really want to read the book.

What’s so good about the library is it’s not just… — The books that are on the shelves aren’t necessarily books that you would ever want to buy. They’re books that you wonder why they’re on the shelf at all, and that’s kind of amazing.

So these last couple weeks at the LA Public Library, I found The Anarchist Cookbook, which I can’t believe is actually…to me it always felt like the Necronomicon, like — one of those things that’s rumored but doesn’t actually exist.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But The Anarchist Cookbook, which was this sort of famous book of the late ’60s, which told you how to build bombs and stab police officers, is actually on the shelf there, which I thought was kind of amazing.

This last week I discovered that our local library actually has big books of sheet music. So there are piano songs I want to learn — they’re right there. So I would say go visit your local public library. It’s not just for homeless people who want to get out of the rain. It’s a useful resource that’s out there. And just take advantage of it. Go in there and wander.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Some of my favorite childhood memories are going with my dad to the New Dorp Library in Staten Island. New Dorp. [laughs] It’s one of the great names. New York was sort of founded and settled by the Dutch, so there are a lot of strange Dutch names. And the New Dorp Public Library was this wonderful old east coast institutional building. It was the kind that had the fallout shelter signs, you know. It was very midcentury-ish.

And I loved it. I loved going. And I would just go and just look through the stacks until I found a book that interested me. And I would always walk away with three, or four, or five of them because I loved reading. And I take my kids to the La Cañada Public Library, and it’s a great thing.

And for those of you who do live in Los Angeles, if you haven’t been to the big downtown library, just go and walk around to marvel at it. It’s gorgeous. It’s just a beautiful building. Absolutely beautiful. Even if you’re not there for a book, you just want to walk around. It’s spectacular.

**John:** Growing up, one of my favorite libraries in Boulder was this little small library they built into the Meadows Shopping Center. And it seemed so weird to stick a library in a shopping center, but it was actually kind of genius because it was around places where people already were. And so people could just, like, drop into the library. And it was close to the grocery store. I liked that it sort of took away the fanciness of like it’s its own building and has this great thing. Like, no, it’s part of the mall and you can go in there and get the books you want to get.

And libraries in all forms are great. And I think I had sort of forgotten about them until I had a kid and ended up going to the library more. They’re cool.

**Craig:** Yeah. Fantastic.

**John:** And also I should say: we’ve been trying to get rid of a lot of books. We’re sort of doing a house purge. And I have this sort of rule that if it’s a book that I haven’t touched in five years, I don’t think I’ll touch in the next five years, it’s better off on somebody else’s shelf. And so the library has been taking a lot of our old books and they sell them in book sales and they make some money. So libraries are also a great way to part with the books that you believe should be on someone else’s shelf.

**Craig:** For sure.

**John:** Cool.

So, Craig, it’s come to that time. So, what setup do we need to do for your song? Tell us about this?

**Craig:** There’s no real setup. I initially tried to figure out how to run my acoustic — I have an acoustic electric, so it’s an acoustic guitar but there’s a little pickup inside. And I bought this little Behringer thing to connect in directly so I could record the guitar on one track and my voice on the other. That thing does not work at all. [laughs] Could not get it to work at all. So, I think I’m just going to play guitar and sing into one mic. So, it’s going to sound a little different because I’ve got to adjust the mic and whatever.

But the song is by John Prine and it’s called Killing the Blues. It was made slightly more popular by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

**John:** Krauss, yeah.

**Craig:** Is that right?

**John:** Yeah. Alison Krauss.

**Craig:** Yeah. Alison Kraus. And it’s short, so it won’t bore you. And there you go.

**John:** Great. Craig, thank you very much. Have a great week and we’ll let you play us out. Thanks. Bye.

**Craig:** Here we go.

[Strums and sings]

Sorry about all the bus noise. But no sirens!