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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/verbs-are-whats-happening).

**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 was your Father’s Day?

**Craig:** It was actually great. It didn’t start so great, [laughs] ’cause my son plays baseball — I think I’ve mentioned this before on the podcast — and he’s 10. And we’re on this tournament league; we’re in a tournament league. And what happens is on these weekends they’ll put together these ad hoc tournaments and six or seven or eight teams will get together and play at one place, usually some town that has good parks like, in this case it was Thousand Oaks.

So, I had to drag my butt to Thousand Oaks for Father’s Day weekend. But on the upside, he pitched really, really well. He was very proud. I was very proud of him. It was a good finish to the tournament season. So, all in all good Father’s Day for me. How about you?

**John:** You know, my Father’s Day also involved pitching because Derek Haas brought his kids over, his two young boys, and after there was some swimming and there were some cookies being eaten. Derek Haas, whose new TV show on NBC is called Chicago Fire, he’s in the process of breaking all the stories for the season.

And so he had his boys and now my daughter pitch stories, pitch storylines for Chicago Fire.

**Craig:** [laughs] That is such a Derek thing to do.

**John:** And it was honestly kind of amazing because you realize that these kids have never seen an hour-long drama, but the premise of Chicago Fire is essentially ER with fires. And so I would say give me a story about firefighters and some of the stories were actually kind of okay.

There were a lot of things about basements or barbeques or things like that. Very much like kids were glomming onto the idea that kind of worked in a previous pitch and were sort of massaging it. But it pretty much felt like most TV writer rooms. So, anyway, it was a good fun time. We got some good spec work out of our kids which is crucial.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** Also my daughter started the morning by giving us the little Father’s Day things that she made at school, like little special projects that sort of look like a jacket and then inside there’s a little note. And of course she had like two dads she had to do this for. And so she had to do twice the work of all the other kids in her class.

**Craig:** So annoying.

**John:** Yeah. And so I was thinking, like, oh, well she got out of it for Mother’s Day. But for Mother’s Day she had to do one and she sent it to one of her grandmothers. Just one of her grandmothers, so…

**Craig:** But now, I don’t know if you noticed my… — I tweet once every 79 hours. But my tweet for Father’s Day was that essentially it is inherent to being a father to just not give a crap about Father’s Day. I mean, do you really care about Father’s Day?

**John:** Not one iota.

**Craig:** No. No. And I’ve never met a dad who gave a damn. In fact, frankly it’s annoying because it’s almost like we have to remember it. But, man, mothers care about Mother’s Day. Oh-hoo, do not forget it.

**John:** There’s no flowers for Father’s Day. Here’s what I got as a special bonus for being a father on Father’s Day. At the Counter, we went to the Counter for lunch, and the waitress told me like the special code for getting my kid’s meal free on Father’s Day. That’s basically it.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s nice.

**John:** Yeah. But, I mean, it was like a $5 mini turkey burger.

**Craig:** Listen, man. I know what I like for Father’s Day. I got it. [laughs] That was all I cared about. End of discussion.

**John:** So let’s talk about what we’re going to talk about today. I thought today we would answer three of our listener questions and then talk a little bit about my very favorite part of speech, which is verbs.

**Craig:** Well okay. It beats adverbs, which are everyone’s least favorite part.

**John:** Yes. True.

We’ll start with two things of follow up. Last week we talked about — there was a script that I was asked to read over the weekend and they sent it to me on a locked iPad. Do you remember that?

**Craig:** I do remember that, yes.

**John:** I felt it was kind of a cool thing. You know, it’s sort of a pain in the ass to send an iPad around, but I can understand why it was; because they had it locked down so much it really wasn’t possible for me to try to copy it or do anything strange with it.

So, one of our listeners wrote in to say, he was like, “Well why couldn’t you just distribute the script as an app?” So that basically is a third-party app so that a person couldn’t copy the stuff out of it because apps are actually kind of locked down on an iPad, which I think was kind of a smart idea.

For people who have developed applications for the iPhone or for the iPad, yes, ultimately applications go through the App Store, but there’s another way to put apps onto an iPad through… — TestFlight is one of the services that does it. So, I could imagine that someone might just develop a service that’s sort of like TestFlight, but it’s just for distributing locked down scripts that you couldn’t possibly copy. So, it was a clever idea. So someone, maybe Jimmy, he might implement that as a business idea.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, I still feel like the world of “locking a script” or protecting a script from other people seeing it is, you know… — If people really want to get their hands on a script they’re gonna do it, you know?

**John:** And you’re of course talking to the person who makes Bronson Watermarker which is the foremost watermarking application for the Macintosh.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** But I do agree with you on a fundamental level. Any kind of protection you’re putting on something is making it more difficult to do something. You’re never going to make it impossible to do something.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right.

**John:** The second point of follow up. Last week we talked about the Flight trailer; that was your One Cool Thing, which is for the John Gatins-scripted/Robert Zemeckis-directed movie with Denzel Washington, which looks great, and the trailer was great. And you asked who did the trailer.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And we have a name now. It’s Bill Neil at Buddha Jones is who we believe cut that trailer.

**Craig:** Very cool.

**John:** And it’s great. And I thought we might talk just for a second about that knowledge that somebody at a trailer house cut that, because that’s a thing that listeners who are not actively in the industry might not know is that the trailers for most of the movies, it’s not the filmmakers who are usually cutting those trailers. Sometimes they cut a trailer, but most cases trailers are done at trailer houses and they are these competing — you can think of them like agencies but they are basically like little creative labs that will compete to cut trailers for movies, cut trailers for TV projects. And they’re really… — They’re basically a bunch of smart editors at Avids and they take all the movie footage and cut a trailer.

And based on the footage they have, they usually have the script, their just sort of trying to sell the idea of the movie. And it’s a very different thing than I think what people would expect to have happening in trailer land.

**Craig:** That’s right. Basically the business of marketing is there are marketing departments at studios who are executives. The executives know that they have to market a movie. The first thing they do is they figure out which of the vendors, that’s our parlance for it here, which vendors would be appropriate. They have those vendors pitch on it and then they select one.

There’s a lot of money in this. The places charge a lot of money to create these campaigns for these movies. And they have editors and they have copy writers who are writing all that VO, you know, “In a world…” all that stuff. And they also, the bigger places do both AV work, audio/visual and also the prints. So they will handle the bus sides, the one sheets — that’s our term for posters — and all that good stuff.

So, it’s all done out of house, out of studio by vendors that then come in and then everybody looks at it. And the funny thing is that having started in marketing I can tell you, and everyone, that marketing departments tend to look at the filmmakers with suspicion, and reasonably so. Filmmakers often are wrapped up in what their movie is and are less concerned with what the job of the marketer is. So they either have goofy ideas about what the campaign should be — either they are up their own butts about it or they are really precious about not giving anything anyway — or they just think the movie is about something that it’s not. Or what it is about to them isn’t what would appeal to people.

So, the marketing department a lot of times keeps the filmmakers at arm’s length. And there are big wars that go on between filmmakers and marketing departments.

It used to be, a long time ago, that the marketing department was sort of, you know, a little bit of a red-headed stepchild and the filmmakers had more power. But, as we’ve mentioned before, that’s changed, that’s essentially flipped, because now for many movies it costs more to market than to make. And he who costs the most money wins. So marketing is a big deal now.

**John:** Yeah. In the development process, before you actually get a green light on a movie, the head of marketing will always weigh in and will have a big vote on whether the movie proceeds. Because you’re going to ask this man or this woman, “Do you know how to market this movie? Is this a movie that you can market? Is it a movie that we can make our money back and be able to sell to the world?” And that’s the marketing department head’s job is to figure out like, “Yes, I think I know how to sell this movie.”

**Craig:** That’s right. And if they say, “I don’t know how to sell it,” it’s not getting made.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Bottom line.

**John:** And this last week I was in New York working on the musical project that I don’t ever name, and it turns out there’s the exact same sort of parallel industry there. So, there’s two major vendors, two or three major vendors who do all the same kinds of things that we have in Hollywood to do all of our trailers and stuff. So, all the outdoor campaigns, there’s just a few companies that do all of the Broadway musical campaigns. And they have the very specific mandate and it’s the same kind of thing where they’re coming up with 50 concepts and those get narrowed down to five concepts. And they show you those five concepts and then you end up working off of those to find your next set of revisions. So, same thing.

**Craig:** Well, congrats to the… — Is it Bill you said?

**John:** Bill.

**Craig:** At Buddha Jones. Yeah, Buddha Jones is a huge place. And you can tell these trailer houses are kind of cool because they have names like Buddha Jones. But Bill cut a hell of a trailer there. Got to give him a lot of credit.

And, you know, usually the editor will have a creative director working with him. There will be a marketing executive who’s assigned to the project that monitors them. I’m sure everybody pitched in. They did a great job.

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s start with three questions.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** First we’ll start with the question that was emailed, that you’d emailed me, so I think it was something you got off of DoneDealPro. Chris writes, “Recently I had my hand slapped by my rep for talking to some industry folk without his involvement. It got me thinking: as a new writer with his first rep I’m finding it difficult to gauge what I can and can’t do on my own. I understand there are certain places and people you’re rep is responsible for communicating with or soliciting your ideas to. However, a screenwriter can’t simply wait around for his or her rep to harvest Hollywood for them. I want to reach out, but not reach around. What’s a young screenwriter to do?”

**Craig:** That’s such a good question, isn’t it?

**John:** Yeah. That’s why I’m glad you emailed it to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I sympathize with you. I remember kind of struggling with this, too, in the beginning. The reason that your representatives slap your wrist typically isn’t because of ego or that they are standing on formality. It’s because you can get yourself in trouble.

I always use the bar analogy. The screenwriters are the really pretty 19-year-old girl in the bar. And all these other guys are the 28-year-old dudes with a pocket full of Rohypnol. And if you start talking to the wrong person without your representative and you start getting seduced by them or making promises or assurances it can really come back to hurt you. And they know that. They love to separate writers from their representatives. And then, when the rep calls, they’re like, “Whoa, hold on a second. You’re guy already said he was willing to kind of do this just on the fly, on spec, da-da-da. You can’t get in the way now. You’re client already told me.”

So the sort of simple rule of thumb is: be polite, talk to everybody, field interest always, and just use a simple disclaimer. Just say, “Listen, you know, I always let Jim handle the business end of things. Please give him a call. But I’m certainly interested in hearing what you have to say. It sounds great.” And just be really non-committal but interested.

It’s that school, that sort of vanilla school of sports interview skills that you just kind of have to master.

**John:** We always say that a representative wants a client who works and a client who will be able to get work, and really you want the client who you will have to do the least amount of work for this client in order to keep them continuously employed. And so hopefully you will develop relationships with people that are kind of independent of the agent needing to get involved all the time.

Like for a long time I was working on a ton of projects over at Sony, and my agent was involved in sort of making the deal but like I was dealing directly with them and if stuff would come up people felt free to call me and that’s okay. The thing you have to always remember is that when that executive calls you about a project or a producer calls you about something, you do need to lob in a call to your agent to let them know that this is happening and let them know what else is going on.

Another example of why Chris may have had a situation with his representative there is that representative may have other clients who are working with that producer or with that industry person at the same time; there may be complications there. For all you know they may be going after the same job. And so if you’re doing this and run around, stuff could get very complicated very quickly.

**Craig:** Yeah. But I do think you’re right to not to suggest that Chris or any writer shouldn’t be afraid to talk to people. Don’t clam up and don’t get tight over this sort of thing. The easiest slapping you can get in this business is from your own representative. Just say, “Got it, I understand.” And you learn each time and that’s fine. But any working writer will tell you agents don’t get you jobs, you get you jobs. Agents negotiate you the deal and help sort of spread the word of who you are. But, you are going to need to talk to people.

**John:** No agent is every going to complain, like, “My client works too hard to find himself work.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “My client talks to people too much.” That’s not a problem so much.

**Craig:** Yeah. “I wish my client were less friendly to decision makers.” I mean, that’s a good problem to have. It’s just, you know, and he didn’t indicate what the content was that got him the spanking, but just be careful to not — when you start saying things that you think an agent would be better off saying, let them say it.

**John:** And I would also, be careful about committing to, “Yes, I want to do that next; I’m happy to write this up for you.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah. Don’t talk about the actual work you’re going to do. And try not to be too specific about your schedule, too, if you’re actually juggling multiple projects and you’re making it sound like this is the next thing you’re going to work on that can become complicated as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, go ahead and ask me if I’m available, John

**John:** Are you available, Craig?

**Craig:** Um, you know technology, yes. I’m going to say mostly, sure.

Now what the hell does that mean? [laughs] It means, “God, if it’s great, yes. Otherwise, no.” Which means nothing. And so I did my job.

**John:** You did your job. You sound like an agent.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Yeah, he could be available for the right thing. He’s working on some stuff but, you know, things could change around and dates shift.”

**Craig:** I mean, yeah, because as writers we have to, remember, we have to be — a lot of these people are our friends and we have to be friendly. Agents, it’s a more formalized business relationship. When they call up your agent they say, “Is John August available?” It’s perfectly fine for them to say, “Depends. What is it? I can make him available for the right thing.” He can do that; you can’t do that. You sound like a jerk if you do that. So, good question.

**John:** Stacy Ashworth writes, “I was curious about yours and Craig’s opinion on business cards, or for that matter, personal websites. Do you think they’re necessary/helpful for screenwriters in Los Angeles?”

I’m going to start by saying yes. I think they’re both helpful. Here’s why: If you’re an executive and you’re curious about a writer, like you just sort of read their script that was sitting on a sample, you’re probably going to Google their name. It would be very helpful if the very first thing you got when you Googled their name was something about them, like a site from them, that looked professional enough and made them seem like they’re not a crazy person. So, that’s my argument for a personal website.

**Craig:** Absolutely. I absolutely agree. What made me giggle was the business card thing because I feel like if I were getting started now the first thing I would do is make a website, only if to control the message better than Google does, or what some knucklehead might be saying about you somewhere.

But business cards, to me, have the opposite effect. They feel — and people hand them to me all the time, and they always say, “Do you have a business card?” And I always say no, because I don’t. And I don’t really know what the value of the thing is. If I want to give you my email address I’ll just tell it to you and you’ll type it in your phone and we’re done. But business cards seem so kind of…

**John:** Mad Men?

**Craig:** Dunder Mifflin kind of. They just do. They just seem very, I don’t know, clunky. Clunky and old and a little amateurish.

**John:** I was once like you, Craig, where people would say like, “Hey, do you have a business card?” and I’m like, no, I don’t have a business card. And most of the time I still will say no. But I actually do have business cards now which just have my site address which is johnaugust.com, which is so simple that I feel like people don’t need that.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I decided I would just do business cards for the people who I actually do have that longer conversation with. Like I was at this Sundance Theatre workshop thing in New York and I’m talking to this Brooklyn-based photographer. And it was actually really interesting. And so he gave me his card and I wanted to have a reciprocal card. And we actually have sort of kind of kept up in touch since then. So it was useful enough that I actually have like five business cards that keep going into my wallet and maybe once a month I will use one.

**Craig:** But let’s be honest here. Your business card is your name with dot-com.

**John:** Yeah, largely it is.

**Craig:** I mean, you could just tell him, “Just go to johnaugust.com and contact me through that.”

**John:** But if he forgets my name. Because this is a case where I wasn’t a comparatively famous person. So like if I’m going at a screenwriter kind of event, a lot of people there are going to know, like, “Oh, that’s John August.” And so, “Oh, johnaugust.com.” But this, there was no context for anything. So he was going to forget my name by 8:30pm. It was useful…

**Craig:** Hmm. How drunk was this guy?

**John:** Ah, well we were all drinking.

**Craig:** All right. Nice.

**John:** Because the food was slow coming, so there was a lot of wine being consumed first.

**Craig:** I guess I can see your argument that business cards are useful in situations where everyone’s getting completely loaded. But otherwise, here’s the deal: like — I don’t want to talk to anybody anyway. [laughs] So that’s why for me, the business card thing? No.

But, I mean, for this, was it Stacy?

**John:** Yeah, for Stacy.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Sure. I would say: Don’t push your business cards on people. But if it comes to a situation where they ask for a business card, yeah, give them a business card.

**Craig:** And also like no goofy business cards. I remember I did a talk once on screenwriting for a group, a local screenwriting group in Los Angeles. And they were huge; it was like 200 people. I was actually quite surprised how many people were at this thing. And then afterwards they do that thing where they sort of line up to ask you their individual questions.

**John:** Oh god.

**Craig:** And really 10% of them have questions and then 90% of them are just telling you about their lives or pitching you stuff. And I would say half of them — just to continue my fraction theme here — had these horrendously ugly business cards, like multicolored, and like sun bursting through clouds behind their name and in 3D. I was just shocked at the aesthetic depravity of it all. Just what’s wrong with a normal business card?

**John:** Nothing.

**Craig:** Nothing!

**John:** Nothing. Yeah. Oh, and I also do have business cards for Bronson Watermarker because sometimes I will be talking to somebody who is will ask me what I do and I actually make this app and they say, “That sounds really fascinating.” And so then I can just give them this card that actually has that link on there.

**Craig:** That makes sense. I understand that.

**John:** Next question, Dave, who I’m thinking is from England because of his verbiage here.

**Craig:** [British Accent] Dave.

**John:** [British Accent] Dave.

**Craig:** [British Accent] Dave.

**John:** “My question, you know when you pull a loose thread out of a jumper and before you know it an entire sleeve has disappeared?”

**Craig:** What’s a jumper now? [laughs] What’s that?

**John:** A sweater.

**Craig:** Oh, is that what that is?

**John:** Yeah, that’s why I think it’s from England or some place across the pond.

**Craig:** [British Accent] You know how you pull a loose thread out of jumper?

**John:** Thread?

**Craig:** [British Accent] Right. I’m not big on riddles. What am I? Please, sir, can I have some more?

**John:** Okay, I forget the name for the term, I’ll Google it after we’re off the air, but the British, the fairly new British habit of the TH sound becoming an F…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, oh, my.

**Craig:** [British Accent] Happy Birfday.

**John:** [British Accent] Birfday.

**Craig:** [British Accent] Birfday.

**John:** Yeah. So he says, “I’m rewriting a spec of mine and I’m getting that same feeling. If I change this, then I’ll have to change this, and this character can no longer, and that one will have to. You can picture. I’d love to her your thoughts on this problem of rewriting.”

**Craig:** It’s not a problem. That’s called rewriting. [laughs] It’s a good thing. I think it’s a good thing. It means that you actually did a pretty decent job of writing in the first place. If you can just start lifting chunks out without causing ripples in the rest of the script, something is terribly wrong. The joy of rewriting is not panicking over that and, in fact, seeing how the changes you make in a small place must end and should change things throughout with rare exception.

So, it’s a good thing. You should be excited by that. It means you’re actually thinking about the screenplay in the right way. You’re thinking about it in its totality. Don’t panic. And you may say, “Well, but I like that thing.” Well, I must say then, do you really like it? If it’s built on a foundation of something you don’t like, do you really like it? And is it possible that there might be something better?

**John:** Here is my counter-argument against that, which I’ll call the Will Smith problem: There are certain people who will see a possible loose thread, or something maybe that actually isn’t a loose thread. Maybe that thread is actually supposed to be there. But they see that little thread and they say, “I’m just gonna start pulling on that thread. I’m gonna pull, and pull, and pull, and pull.” And they will unravel everything before your eyes.

And, that can be really dangerous, because you are seeing like, well, rather than the simple solution to maybe tuck that thread back in there, they will insist on pulling the entire thing apart.

**Craig:** Well you’re saying “they.”

**John:** They or you. Yes.

**Craig:** You mean to say that the writer themselves will do this to themselves?

**John:** Yeah. Rarely does a writer do it to himself.

**Craig:** So you’re talking about somebody else coming in?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Well that I agree with. I mean, that’s bad. When other people do it it’s bad

**John:** But I guess then I would agree with you if the writer himself feels like, okay, I’m going to do this thought experiment of like, “I’m going to pull this through and see what it is.” You as the writer, you’re the only person who has actually seen the movie, so you do have the opportunity to say, “Okay, if I’ve made all those changes, what would happen, and what would the new thing be pulling that all apart? ”

The only danger I would say is that sometimes you can end up just rewriting that one script 1,000 times and never doing the next thing. So, you have to remember, like, “What was the movie that I actually set out to write?” and making sure that the intrigue of the excitement about doing this next thing isn’t going to keep you from working on other new stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. The analogy for when you’re directing you’re always trapped as you sort of, you get take three under your belt, you’re always trapped between a desire to make sure you don’t move on without getting it right. You don’t want to be that guy that just does three takes and says, “Good enough.” But you also don’t want to be that guy that just starts chasing things and unraveling and undoing pointlessly.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** So you’re constantly working between two fears, and that’s your Scylla and your Charybdis. And for rewriting this is our Scylla and your Charybdis: Don’t want to change to much, don’t want to not change enough. That, unfortunately, is something you’re going to have to feel over time.

I will tell you, nothing like yanking on a thread, watching the whole thing fall into yarn in front of you, and then realizing you should have never pulled on it in the first place to teach you an important lesson, but similarly there have been times very early on when I handed something to somebody thinking in the back of my head there’s something not right here, but, eh, no one will notice it. Everybody notices. They notice much faster than you notice.

So, you have to kind of give yourself license to be brave enough to pull on the thread but confident enough to leave it be when you think it’s okay.

**John:** Yeah, here’s the danger, just to wrap this up. The danger is that in pulling on this thread and just seeing like the loose pile of stuff that’s in front of you, you’re going to be building a new script with all these new things. And the new script you’re imagining is going to be much better than the script that was there because you haven’t written it yet. And so you’re comparing this fantasy script that you could write out of all these new things versus what you did write which you have now recognized the problems.

And, so, just be aware that there may be the temptation of pursuing something that will be great, and new, and fun versus the hard work of what’s in front of you.

**Craig:** Right. [British Accent] Don’t touch my jumper.

**John:** [British Accent] My jumper.

**Craig:** [British Accent] Leave my jumper.

**John:** So, one of the things you may be doing as you’re rewriting a script is looking at the words you choose to use in your script. And so I wanted to close up today by talking about verbs, because I’m sort of — my weekly obsession this week is verbs.

So, here are three sample sentences I read in bad scripts all the time.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** “There are four men in the room.”

“A large suitcase is by the door.”

“The fire is intense.”

So, those sentences, there’s nothing actually grammatically wrong with those sentences. They’re fine sentences. But they’re incredibly boring sentences. And the reason why they’re boring sentences is you are using to “to be” just to sort of state the existence of something rather than having the thing you’re causing to exist actually do something.

They sort of read like Dungeons and Dragons descriptions. Like when you walk into a new room in Dungeons and Dragons and this little bubble text of this is what’s in the room.

**Craig:** Right. “There is a phantom by the door. There is a puddle on the floor.”

**John:** Exactly. And so these aren’t — this isn’t Dungeons and Dragons. This is supposed to be a movie. Things are supposed to be happening.

**Craig:** Unless it’s a Dungeons and Dragons movie. Then I think it would be okay to do what you’re saying.

**John:** Yeah. [laughs] That would be great. I think it should actually just be a scroll that comes across the screen with like, you know, description and stuff and then they show it to you.

**Craig:** [laughs] Exactly. Or don’t show it and just after it say, “There was a dragon.”

**John:** “There was a dragon.”

**Craig:** “There was.”

**John:** And every time the character swings a sword you see the little hit points go down. That’s pretty good.

**Craig:** I have to tell you. It never crystallized for me why that was so annoying because I’ve read that very kind of clumsy, robotic sort of description before. And by the way, I’m not a huge fan of florid description or a lot of purple prose. But was it — the suitcase is what?

**John:** “A large suitcase is by the floor.”

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean shouldn’t the suitcase be leaning against the door? [laughs] Should the suitcase, “A large suitcase has been left by the door.”

**John:** Or better yet, rather than having the thing already be there, why don’t you have somebody put it there? Or why don’t you have your hero clock it or have your hero do something to it?

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s like, because if the suitcase was left behind by somebody, let’s say, and you’re a detective and you walk in the room, somebody should say, “Take a look,” you know, “he looks over a suitcase toppled in place by the door as if somebody had left in a hurry.”

**John:** A big problem with “A large suitcase is by the door” is like well what is the shot here? Are we cutting away from our characters to show that suitcase by the door?

**Craig:** Right. Do you know what the shot is? It’s a 20mm lens way, way back like a stage. [laughs] And the room is empty. And it’s just a suitcase. And a door.

**John:** Yeah. So, my pointing out this frustration of scene description in screenplays is that I sometimes get the sense — this is an ongoing pet peeve. I hate screenwriters who say, “I could write a screenplay but I could never write a novel,” as if like writing is something that novelists and sentences and worrying about the words, that’s for novelists, but like, eh, screenwriting, whatever.

Those words do matter. Those words do count. And so when you see people making bad or boring choices here… Here’s the thing: If I see that the screenwriter doesn’t really care, I’m going to stop reading the scene description.

**Craig:** I’ve got to be honest with you. I don’t think it’s that the screenwriter doesn’t care. You’re so much more kinder in that assessment than I’m about to be. It’s that they can’t write. They don’t have an ear.

If you’re writing lines like that as you just described, you’re really not very good at writing. And you’re not going to get much better at writing. I really do believe that we just need to start thinning the herd with this podcast. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Let’s start whacking away. So, there, if you find yourself constantly wanting to express things in the most generic, bland way, do something else.

**John:** I will be optimistic only in the sense that I feel like some people, some new screenwriters, either they just read a bunch of bad scripts a lot, or they’ve read scripts by writer-directors who end up making really good movies but who write kind of boring scripts. They may come to believe, like, “Oh, well screenwriting is supposed to be this spare, Hemingway-esque kind of thing.” And it’s true…

**Craig:** It can be.

**John:** Screenwriting should be sort of efficient. And I’m never one for sentences that are longer than they need to be. But the style does matter.

**Craig:** Style matters, man. Make me feel something. You can walk in the room and, you know, “Olsen looks around. A suitcase closed. A gun. No one here.” Fine, good. Be staccato. Be something. Make me feel something with the way you’re presenting the room. But don’t just give me a laundry list. People overwrite nonsense.

I go on DoneDealPro sometimes, I read their first three pages, and typically the problem is the opposite of this, it’s just endless discussions of the quality of the vermillion on the grass, and the dew, and the light, and the shining, and all the rest of it. And you’re like, yes, but that shot was literally the establishing of a park and we’re off of it in a second and frankly we can’t sit there all day capturing vermillion.

People go crazy with that sort of thing. But then on the other hand sometimes there is this kind of very sort of Asperger’s-y, tin ear, no social skills. I don’t know how to describe it. Just a kind of clumsy… — You know when you talk to somebody at a party and they’re incredibly boring? Their voice is boring. Their monotonic. They don’t give you anything. They’re like really bad improve artists that just shut down every possible line of interest. I feel like some of them are writing screenplays. [laughs] And then they do this. And they shouldn’t be. They shouldn’t be.

You know, it’s one of the great sad and frustrating ironies about screenwriting is that it does take a certain amount of internal nerdiness to write a screenplay. It’s very hard to write a screenplay and not on some level be a huge dork that’s steeped in words and in inner life and solitude. On the other hand, if you just told a little more you are completely disconnected from what is human and matters.

So, it’s like you have to fit right in this narrow channel of dorkiness. And I believe that you and I are in that channel.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’re there.

**John:** It’s worked.

**Craig:** Yeah. We are both nerds. Every writer I know is a nerd. Even the cool ones are nerds. John Gatins, coolest writer in the world, right?

**John:** Yeah, nerd.

**Craig:** Nerd.

**John:** Nerd.

**Craig:** Nerd. Just doesn’t want to admit it.

**John:** So, to amp our nerdiness on this verb discussion, probably what got me thinking about it was I’m reading Steven Pinker’s… — I wanted to say it was his new book, but it’s actually his old book, it’s like 2007 — called The Stuff of Thought. Which, Steven Pinker writes a lot about English and words and such, but not just sort of like how our words came to be, but sort of the underlying meanings behind them. So not just etymology but sort of what the underlying framework is that is causing our language to exist.

And, so this was a really cool example that he had in this last book. Our verbs — and not just English verbs, this is sort of verbs across all different languages — there is some underlying structure behind them that gets revealed in certain situations like sentences that will make sense or will not make sense for reasons that seem kind of strange. So, I’ll give you two examples.

“Tell the joke to Tom.” “Tell Tom the joke.”

Those are functionally basically the same. A little more emphasis on “to Tom” in the first one, but those work both ways. And “Tell” is a pretty generic word. And it turns out you can use it either way and that’s fine.

**Craig:** But, boy, they mean totally different things though, to me at least.

**John:** Yeah. But they both make sense.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Tom is going to hear the joke.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So now I’ll give you another example.

“Whisper the joke to Tom.” “Whisper Tom the joke.”

You can’t really say “Whisper Tom the joke.”

**Craig:** No, you cannot do that.

**John:** Why can’t you do that? “Whisper” is not that different than “tell.”

**Craig:** Because whisper doesn’t take a direct object like that.

**John:** Why doesn’t whisper take a direct object like that?

**Craig:** Um, because, the…

**John:** It’s the indirect object is the problem. So, it’s the “to Tom.”

**Craig:** Yes, you’re right, it’s the indirect object. I don’t know why. Why? [laughs]

**John:** That’s the whole question. That’s what they are trying to figure out and study.

**Craig:** I actually want to go back to that other example because it’s fascinating to me how there are two… — Okay, what was, the first one was?

**John:** “Tell the joke to Tom.”

**Craig:** Okay, “Tell Tom the joke.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Tell the joke to Tom. You know what’s funny is? Even though they mean the same one, the first one to me is a syntax you would use when you just heard a joke and you want that person to tell it immediately to Tom.

**John:** Yeah. “Tell the joke to Tom.”

**Craig:** “Tell the joke to Tom” is almost like, “I heard a joke that is not funny and I don’t like it [laughs] and now you tell it to him because I don’t know why.” Like, “Tell the joke to Tom because he’s going to agree with me that it was stupid.”

The first one is a joke you like and the second one is a dumb joke.

**John:** Yeah. But both sentences make sense.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Both sentences are good English.

**Craig:** But you’re right, “Whisper Tom the joke.” You cannot whisper Tom anything.

**John:** And so they studied why can’t you do that, and it turns out there’s a whole bunch of micro classes that are sort of behind the scenes and stuff. So, specificity is one of those micro classes. And so the generic case of tell, like tell and give…

**Craig:** Oh, I have a… — Oh, I’m sorry to interrupt. But there is one thing is that “whisper” does take direct objects and tell doesn’t. That’s why it’s confusing.

**John:** No, “tell” does take a direct object. “Tell the joke.”

**Craig:** Yeah, “tell, joke.” “Tell the joke.” You’re right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Dammit.

**John:** And apparently when you get to like the higher language discussion you don’t really say “direct object” and “indirect object.” You say “object one” and “object two.” But, anyway, so they studied these micro classes behind it and they figured out that it’s not just English that this is a situation. It actually travels across all different languages.

So, the underlying behind our language, what’s actually happening in your brain, the thought process, you are making distinctions between kinds of verbs. Even things that seem really closely related. So, “tell” is a very generic sense, it doesn’t specify the manner. But the minute you specify the manner it doesn’t let you do that thing where we move the indirect object up.

**Craig:** That makes sense.

**John:** So just the same way you can’t “Yell Tom the joke,” you can’t, “Shout Tom the joke.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But sometimes the new nouns that we’ve coined into being verbs, you can do that. So, “Send Tom the joke.” Fine. “Fax Tom the joke” we decided is okay. And so you can use the nouns that we’ve made into verbs.

**Craig:** Yes. You can “email Tom something.”

**John:** Exactly. But some nouns haven’t yet crossed over there yet. So you can’t “Facebook Tom the joke.”

**Craig:** You can. I believe you can. You know why? Because I hear people saying, “Facebook me that.”

**John:** Okay, so then it’s something that is starting to happen. But we’ve decided that Twitter, the verb is tweet. So, like, “Tweet me the joke,” but you don’t Twitter somebody something. And everyone says like, “Oh, you don’t know what you’re talking about if you use Twitter as a verb.”

**Craig:** They’re right. Yes. You tweet something to somebody, but I wouldn’t say tweet me that because that sounds dumb. Maybe because also tweeting is rarely “to me.” You should just tweet the joke. The point is, that’s the way Twitter is used, it’s generic.

**John:** You’re right. Absolutely. The idea of the, we’ll call it indirect object, is not a part of the concept of Twitter. You can say, “DM me your phone number.” Or, you will say, like, “DM me your email address so I can tell you more about this.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah. “Direct message.”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** So, verbs, specificity. Specificity usually a good thing. Some complications.

**Craig:** I agree. I agree.

**John:** And your obsession about the “Tell a joke to Tom” and “Tell Tom the joke” is exactly the kind of thing an actual screenwriter should obsess about.

**Craig:** Always. Always. I cannot tell you. Especially in comedy. Phillips and I will sit sometimes for 20 minutes and just move the “to” and the “the” around because one way is funny and one way is wrong. And it’s not because there’s a rule, it’s just “Tell Tom the joke” and “Tell the joke to Tom,” they mean two different things.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They mean two different… — “Tell Tom the joke” almost sounds like you’re in trouble.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m ready for One Cool Thing if you’re ready for One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So my One Cool Thing this week is: I was in New York this whole last week. And used a new app, or actually an app that I had on my phone for awhile but I made better use of it this last time, called Embark. And Embark is a really good transit app. They have it for New York City. They have it for other cities, too. What’s great about it is if you use the normal built-in maps function on the iPhone it will show you the subway stuff, but it’s not terrific at it.

With Embark you can say, like, “Start me here, I want to go there, and go.” And it will build options for routes to get you there. But it also knows when the trains are coming and sort of walks you through it. So, each step along the way it will show you a walking map of how to get to that subway stop. This is the train you take. You get off at this stop. From there you’re going to walk to this place. And each step along the way you can pull up the map for how you do that.

It’s really, really smart. And, it works offline when you are down in the tunnel and you have no internet connectivity.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know if that was the one I used the last time I was in the city with the kids. But I remember thinking, “Oh my god, this is the greatest.” Like the subway is now my preferred… — I want to go everywhere on the subway because I know where to go.

I mean, the subway system when I was a kid was the most frightening thing for 100 reasons. Marauding gangs of criminals. Crack. Bernie Goetz. Graffiti. No air-conditioning. And, of course, 14,000 different lines with screaming trains and electricity. And you could not figure out where you were going. And now it’s like, “Beep-boop-boop, take me there.” It’s great.

**John:** My favorite trains, and I can’t remember which lines have them, which lines don’t, but my favorite trains are the ones that actually show you up on the wall on the side of the car, it shows you this is the stop you’re at and this is the next stop. I feel like all trains should have it, because it just takes away the questions. Like, “Am I headed in the right direction?” “Is this an express train?” “Is it going to stop at the places I expect it to stop?”

**Craig:** Right. The little dots. Yes, exactly.

**John:** The only sort of transit issues I’ve had in New York over the last few years have been those exceptions where I had to get out to this film school in the Bronx. And for some reason they would say, “This train is now an express and we’re going to skip these three stops.” And so they made that really awful announcement while you’re on the train. “What was that? Did I hear the right thing?” And then you’ve overshot you’re stop.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s all gone. Those days are over.

**John:** Do you have something cool to share with us?

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Aw, Craig, always forgetting to do his homework.

**Craig:** You know what I got today?

**John:** What’s this?

**Craig:** You know what came by Federal Express?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** MacBook Pro with Retina Display.

**John:** Holy cow. That is probably the coolest thing you could get this week.

**Craig:** Let me tell you something. It’s awesome. It’s awesome.

First of all, so my former computer, the computer that used to be my Woody but now is staring at the Buzz Lightyear going, “What happened?” was a MacBook Pro. But it was standard hard drive. And this one has the solid state drive.

So, first of all, it’s a faster computer. It’s a much faster computer. And it’s got the solid state drive. So, I rebooted ’cause I had to install a few little software cells, a few little software things. And I turned around and I had looked back and it had rebooted already. It was actually kind of like The Birds. It was really creepy. I actually got scared.

And the display is nuts. It’s just so great. It makes me never want to look at the other one again. Sorry, Woody.

And I love it. A lot.

**John:** That’s great. Congratulations.

**Craig:** And I want to hug it. Yeah. It’s great. I can’t… — Oh, and in terms of, just for people, a point of comparison, if you do have the other MacBook Pro, because it’s hard to sort of tell from all their pictures and measurements, but basically the whole computer folded up is the thickness of the bottom part of the MacBook Pro, the old one.

**John:** Yeah, without the lid.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly. And it weighs like four pounds and it’s the coolest thing in the world.

**John:** So my travel computer is the MacBook Air. And I think I’ll stick with the MacBook Air because that’s good for me for traveling. My desktop is still my desktop. They didn’t announce cool new Mac Pros.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But it does seem like an amazing computer. We’re trying to figure out what we’re gonna do here in the office because Ryan, who does all the art stuff for us, ultimately needs that new monitor to figure out, like make the websites look right. So, at some point we’re going to have to invest in that so that we can have the modern technology, and all the pixels we need.

**Craig:** I think — there was some speculation that Apple was going to just give up on the whole Mac Pro line and just concede to the fact that everybody is using laptops. I mean, even I in my office power an external. I got a new Cinema Display and I have a keyboard. So I use the Cinema Display and an external keyboard when I’m typing in the office, just hooked up to the laptop.

But, I just read something yesterday where Tim Cook apparently said, “Oh, no, no, no.” So we know something awesome is coming.

**John:** Yeah. The reason why they need to keep the big towery kind of things, sometimes you actually need — I have four hard drives in mine, and I actually need to use the four hard drives in mine. If you’re editing video you actually need to have the ability to stick special cards in there.

**Craig:** Well, I know, but now with Thunderbolt you can daisy chain a bunch of drives together. Run them off your laptop.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not as slick or as awesome.

**Craig:** I will say, I get it. I mean, here, the good news for you is it sounds like basically they’re going to have a computer that comes out next year that can tear the fabric of space and time apart.

**John:** Which would be great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I want full rending capability.

**Craig:** [roars]

**John:** [roars]

**Craig:** There is a wormhole. There is a rip in space time.

**John:** I want my new computer to be a verb.

**Craig:** [laughs] Rend.

**John:** Rend. I want the Render. Ah, see, that’s what that’s for, is for rendering.

**Craig:** Oh, we finished on a pun.

**John:** I like that.

**Craig:** I do not. [laughs] Thumbs down.

**John:** [laughs] Sorry. Thumbs down.

**Craig:** Wah-wah.

**John:** Vote us down.

So, Craig, thank you very much for a fun podcast. I should say anything we talked about on this podcast is very likely going to be in the show notes. And so if you’re listening to this on iTunes. And, by the way, thank you so many people who listen to us on iTunes. Our numbers are kind of crazy great, so thank you for that.

**Craig:** What are they, John? Tell us.

**John:** We have about 65,000 listeners every week.

**Craig:** Wow. Wow.

**John:** Yeah. That’s a lot of listeners.

**Craig:** That is a lot of people. That’s more people than can fit in Yankee Stadium. I feel like Robinson Canó right now.

**John:** That’s a good, big number.

**Craig:** You don’t know who that is.

**John:** I have no idea who that is.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** That’s why I’m so productive. I don’t know anything about sports.

**Craig:** [laughs] Exactly. That’s why.

**John:** So anything you hear that we talk about on the show, the show notes are at johnaugust.com. So just look for this episode. And, Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. “This is a podcast.”

**John:** Yes. Take care.

**Craig:** See you next time. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Feeling good, buddy, how about you?

**John:** Good. What did you write today?

**Craig:** Nothing. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] I wrote a lot today.

**Craig:** Oh, well, screw you.

**John:** Well good for me. There are many days I don’t get stuff written, so I’m happy today. But I was writing action, and action is just so not fun most times. I actually tweeted about it last night because I tweeted something like, “I think about writing action sequences the same way a tailor must approach doing button holes.”

**Craig:** I saw that. Yup.

**John:** Because, you know, you absolutely need them, and it’s such fine detailed work, and no one is ever going to notice it.

**Craig:** Yeah, because the action itself on the screen is obviously so much more impactful than what you see on the page. And when you write it on the page it really does feel like technical writing, like writing an instruction manual or something.

I remember talking about this with Richard LaGravenese who is a spectacular screenwriter, and he and I both bonded over our shared hatred and boredom of writing out action.

**John:** Yeah. And you can’t really skip it. I mean, it’s crucial to provide a sense of what the reader is going to see if this were a movie. I mean, I always treat writing a screenplay as I’m sitting in the theater watching a movie up on the big screen, so I’m writing what I’m seeing, or writing what the experience is of watching the movie. And that includes action, so you have to get that in there; the challenge is to make that interesting for the reader in a way that they just don’t want to kill themselves, or that they’re going to skip over it, because that’s the temptation that they are going to be like, “Okay, this paragraph is too long, I’m going to skip over it and just read the next bit of dialogue; this makes my eyes feel happy.”

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a chore.

**John:** And there are times where you can summarize a bit, where you can just give a taste of… — Sometimes if there’s like a football game you can get a sense of after a few plays we’re up by three, and you are getting sort of a lyrical sense of what is happening there, and it’s going to be left to the filmmakers to sort of show what that is. But there are also times where you need to be fairly specific because there’s comedy that’s happening because of what’s going on there. There are distinct moments in that action and you really do have to script them and choreograph them.

And that’s what I had to do for this. This was a sports thing, but there was comedy that needed to happen during it. And so it needed to be specific enough, and that’s where it just gets to be tough.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then eventually if the movie goes into production you will have to sit there… — And I remember sitting with Todd Phillips and the second unit director for The Hangover Part II. And sort of laying out exactly how the car chase would work. Every single bullet fired, because everybody has to know. Everybody needs to know, “Okay, where does the bullet hit, because we’re going to need a car that has a bullet hole, and da-da-da.”

And then you’re sitting after that meeting literally doing technical writing. I like to say this to screenwriters when they complain about how we have no power: Everybody is staring at it like it’s the Bible at that point. Every single word becomes incredibly informative.

**John:** What you were saying about that moment in The Hangover, I know exactly the sequence you’re describing. It becomes so important because there’s a change in state of the set that you’re in, which I guess is a car, so that joke can only happen at a certain time because you can’t take a moment from earlier in the scene later because you’ve changed the nature of the car. So you can’t move stuff around once you’re in there.

Versus a lot of times, if it’s just two people in a normal car that’s driving, you can change any of the lines around. Characters can adlib and do a whole bunch of different stuff because the car is staying exactly the same the whole time. If something is changing physically in the scene so that you can’t go back and forward in time, you’re locked in. And that can be really tough.

**Craig:** Right. And you have to choreograph it. And you are choreographing it just for the point of view of the production. Any kind of action becomes a very highly choreographed thing, to avoid accidents, and to avoid — and sadly there was an accident on that movie. That had nothing to do with our writing or anything. But, you are trying to make sure that everything is choreographed down to the slightest little movement.

And, so, yeah, when you’re talking about something that in a movie when you watch you think is a little nothing, like they shoot out the rear windshield — that’s a big deal. Because you’re right; every shot after that needs a missing windshield. So it just becomes, it’s a grind. I find writing action to be a grind for sure.

**John:** I was describing to somebody else that is working on a musical right now: Musicals are a lot like action movies in that every few minutes there’s a song being song rather than a big action set piece happening. And, working on several movie musicals, yes, everything has to be sort of carefully planned, but you have some flexibility, you can move stuff around.

Working on the stage show, it’s been really interesting that every day the script would change because we literally had moved one lyric in front of one line, or some character’s entrance was just a little bit later. And you had to accommodate all that stuff because it wasn’t just the script or the dancing, or the speaking; it was also the music department. Everything had to fit together in a way that was very, very tough.

And so you wanted to create as much room for the moment, for the acting, and for the possibility. But you’re on rails; you basically had to stay on this track or it wasn’t going to work.

**Craig:** In production, I honestly feel production of all kinds is so awful. I’ve never been on a movie where I didn’t look around at least once and think, “There’s got to be a better way.”

And I understand why directors, particularly very successful directors who reach a certain age and have done a certain amount of movies suddenly say, “You know what? Let’s just do this mo-cap then, you know. Let’s make Tintin on a green stage.” Because, it just takes away so much of the misery of production. It’s a very arduous task.

**John:** We should tell everybody that you’re on set for — our friends Derek Haas and Michael Brandt just had their show picked up, Chicago Fire.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so you’re doing a little production rewrite there for them, helping them out, getting a few jokes in there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Chicago Fire is going to be the funniest show on TV. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] It’s an NBC show.

Change in topics, this is a very exciting week because this is the week of Upfronts. So this is where all of the…

**Craig:** Exciting for you. [laughs]

**John:** Exciting for people who care about TV. Not exciting at all for Craig Mazin. This is where all the networks decide which shows are going to be on the fall season, and which shows are not coming back, and which ones they’re most excited about, which ones they’re nervous about, which ones they’re gonna stick in mid-season and cross their fingers and pray.

So we have several friends who have shows being picked up which is fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah. A lot of them.

**John:** And we have friends whose shows didn’t get picked up and we’re sad for them. But what I’ve said before on the podcast is the amazing, wonderful thing about TV is that not getting your show picked up isn’t really considered a failure because most shows aren’t supposed to get picked up. Most pilots aren’t supposed to get picked up. So it’s not a big mark against you.

**Craig:** Right. If you got to pilot you have succeeded in some big way.

**John:** Yeah. I think I told you about this off-air last week, but I cheated on you. You know that?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I went and did another podcast. I recorded an episode of Jay Mohr’s podcast, Jay Mohr who I knew from Go, who I hadn’t seen for like 20 years or something so it was great to catch up. And so as I was driving over to Jay Mohr’s house to do his podcast, and he does one of those old school podcasts where they people actually look at each other…

**Craig:** Weird.

**John:** …unlike our podcast where I haven’t seen you in months.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which is a blessing.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s beautiful. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] So one of the things in our mutual contract was that we couldn’t see each other.

**Craig:** Never see each other. Yeah. It was one of my demands.

**John:** So, as I was driving over to Jay’s house I listened to an episode of his show because I figured, you know that’s probably good preparation to listen to one episode of the guy’s show before you’re on his show. And so his guest that week was Ralph Garman who is a very, very funny radio personality on KROQ. He’s on the Kevin and Bean show. You don’t listen to the radio either, do you?

**Craig:** Actually I used to listen to whatever those — Kevin and Bean in the morning. And Ralph does the Hollywood…

**John:** He does the Hollywood Showbiz.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. He’s a funny guy.

**John:** He’s a very funny guy. So, both he and Jay are impressionists; they do a lot of impersonations. So they got talking about that and it was really fascinating to hear people talk about their craft, and especially when they can do things that I can’t do at all.

And so Ralph Garman was talking about this one other guy he had met who could do a dead-on Jason Lee impression.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And so Jason Lee, who’s the guy on My Name is Earl, he was in the Chipmunks movies, and Ralph was saying like he had no idea how to even begin a Jason Lee impression. His quote, I think, was, “I wouldn’t even know where to hang my hat on that,” which is that when you are doing an impersonation there has to be something that you can start and you can build out from.

So, if you are doing a Christopher Walken thing you have this weird phrasing and sort of how he falls back into it. With an Al Pacino you sort of have his physicality that becomes sort of his voice. And like how do you do a Jason Lee impersonation?

And it is amazing when you see somebody doing an impression or impersonation that you’ve never even considered before. Like I remember when Jay Pharoah joined Saturday Night Live, Jay Pharoah does this brilliant Denzel Washington.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** He also does Will Smith and Jay-Z. But particularly the Denzel Washington, it’s like you never even thought there could be a Denzel Washington impression, and he just nails it. And there’s not always comedy to back it up, but it’s just uncanny that he’s able to do this Denzel Washington.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think his thing is like he went in on the “my man,” like that’s his thing, you know?

**John:** Mm-hmm. He found something very specific and he sort of built out from that thing. And there is a difference between sort of voice acting; there’s people who can double and what we think about impressions or impersonations is really kind of a caricature. It’s like they are taking that one thing and blowing it out to this crazy distortion.

I mean, Ralph Garman describes it as like when you go to visit the Santa Monica pier and there’s those guys who will draw cartoon caricatures of you. And so they will pick like one thing on your face and make your head huge, and then give you a skateboard for some reason. That’s what a lot of that comedy is. But you have to find that one little thing.

And their conversation about finding a character’s voice, finding an actor’s voice for an impression got me thinking about what a character’s voice is. And so I thought we might start talking about that.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Because to me, the mark of good writing is never really about structure, or where the beats are falling. I can tell if it’s a good writer or a bad writer mostly by whether they can handle a character’s voice. If they can convince me that the characters I’m reading on the page are distinct, and alive, and unique. I would happily read many scripts that are kind of a mess story wise, but you can tell someone’s a good writer because their characters have a voice.

**Craig:** Right. You can suggest ways to improve story structure. And you can always come up with ideas for interesting scenes. But what you can’t do is tell somebody to write characters convincingly. Either they can do it or they can’t.

**John:** Yeah. So this isn’t going to be a how-to-give-your-characters-a-voice thing, because I think it is one of those inherent skills; like you sort of have it or you don’t. You can work on it, and you can sort of notice when things are missing and apply yourself again. And, there are sometimes where… — There is a project that has been sitting on a shelf for awhile that a friend and I are going to take another look at. And looking through it again I realized that the biggest problem here is that our hero could sort of be anybody. We made him such an everyman that he kind of is every man. And because of that you don’t really care about him.

And so I thought of four questions, sort of four tests, to see whether character’s voices are working. So here are my four tests and maybe you can think of some more.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** First test — could you take the dialogue from one character in the script and have another character say it?

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a common complaint that you’ll hear from producers or executives that the character voice is not unique, that the characters all sound the same. And that’s a common error — I don’t even say a common rookie error. I think people misuse the term rookie error. It’s really a common stinky writer error, because rookies who are good writers I think automatically know to not do this. And that they write the characters as them, so they’re speaking through cardboard cutouts. They’re speaking through policeman. They’re speaking through Lady on Street.

**John:** Or worse, they’re just talking as “cop.” They’re talking like a cop. And they’re not talking like a specific human being; they’re talking like, “this is what a cop would say.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Well, that’s actually not especially helpful for your movie because this is not supposed to be any cop; it’s supposed to be a specific cop with a back story, and a name, and a role in your specific movie. And so if you’re making someone the generic version of that, that’s going to be a problem.

You already hit on my next thing which is is a character speaking for himself or is he speaking for the writer.

**Craig:** A-ha, I read your mind.

**John:** You did read my mind. And so that is the thing. Are you speaking really through your own voice? And some screenwriters are very, very funny. And so they have very funny voices themselves. But if every character in the movie has their same funny voice, that’s not going to be an especially successful outcome.

It may be an amusing read, but I doubt that the final product is going to be the best it could be.

**Craig:** Some people will say that there’re highly stylized writers who do a little bit of that, and I actually disagree. Like some people say, “Well in Mamet everybody sounds so hype literate and in Tarantino everybody sounds so deliberate, and quirky, and fascinated with pop culture, and thoughtful.” But the truth is, if you watch those movies you realize that he actually is crafting — yes, he has a style; yes, both of those brilliant writers have unique styles, but they do shade them for the different characters.

Sorkin is another one who… — It’s interesting. There’s a group of writers who have a very distinct style that exists through the movie. And yet the characters are distinct. That’s pretty advanced stuff to me.

**John:** Yeah. Diablo Cody often gets that knock. And she gets that knock off of her first movie, but then if you see Young Adult, those characters aren’t talking the same way.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** Those characters are very specific and very unique.

**Craig:** That’s a good example.

**John:** Sort of a corollary to that, maybe I should break it out to its own point — is the character saying what he wants to say, or what the movie needs him to say? And that is is the character expressing his or her own feeling in the moment, or is he expressing what needs to happen next so that we can get on to the next thing? And that’s the subtle line that the screenwriter works is that screenwriting is always about what’s next. And you as a screenwriter have to be in control of the scene and make sure that this scene is existing so that we can get to the next story point.

At the same time, you can really feel it when a character is just giving exposition or setting up the ball so another character can spike it. And those are not good things to have happen.

**Craig:** No. You don’t want to set up straw dummies. And you don’t’ want to put things in their mouth because the screenwriter needed people to hear it. And frankly, I think of all those things as great opportunities. We all run into moments where we need the audience to learn information, or we need another character to learn information. So then it’s a great opportunity to sort of sit there and think, “Well how can I do this in a crafty way? How can I do this in a surprising way?”

Sometimes the answer is to be completely contradictory and to have people say the opposite of what they think and then be clear through the writing that you’re using subtext or you’re relying on performance.

I mean, the other thing is bad characters, and maybe I’m cheating ahead again, bad characters tend to speak like they’re on radio. And their dialogue ignores the fact that their faces will speak louder than any words coming out of their mouth. Was that number four?

**John:** No, no. That’s good. Not radio. So I’m going to add Not Radio Voices.

**Craig:** No radio plays.

**John:** In situations, I don’t want to get too off track talking about exposition, but in situations where you need to have the audience understand something, or you need to make it clear that a character has been caught up with another character, like the characters split up and now they’re back together and you need to make sure the audience understands that they all have the same information. Characters in real life cut each other off a lot, and they are often ahead of each other. So there may be opportunities to literally have one character stop the other and tell what they already know so that we don’t have to sort of walk through all of those conversations again.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there’s all sorts of ways to kind of recap. Simple rule of thumb is if the audience hears it once, don’t make them hear it twice. So, if you need to catch somebody up on what that bank robbery was like, and it was a crazy bank robbery, then the scene begins with the person who has been listening staring at the other person. They’re both silent. And then the person who was listening says, “Wow. That was insane.” “I know. You don’t have to tell me.”

The only important matter is that they they’re reacting to what they just heard, but certainly you don’t want to repeat anything ever.

**John:** Wherever possible, characters should speak in order to communicate their inner emotion and not to communicate just information.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This is what I would throw out. What would a joke sound like from that character? And this is actually from… — Jane Espenson was on a recent edition of the Nerdist Writers Panel; Jane Espenson, who is a TV writer who has done a lot of stuff and had a blog.

**Craig:** And a lovely woman.

**John:** And a lovely woman. During the strike our three blogs came together and we all picketed at Warner Bros. Lovely woman. And so smart about comedy, and especially TV. She was on the Nerdist Writers Panel talking about Once Upon A Time, which is what she’s writing on right now. And she’s talking about having the Snow White character tell a joke, and that it was tough because it’s not a very particularly funny character, but you needed to find specific moments that she could be funny. And in finding what kind of joke can she tell is where you really get a sense of like, “Okay, I know who this person is.”

And so even if you’re not writing a comedy, I think it’s worthwhile thinking about how can that character be funny. Because almost everybody is funny in some way, or at least tries to be funny in some way, so what is the nature of their humor? What is the nature of their comedy? And when you know that, then you will also have a sense of how they are going to respond in stressful situations. How they’re going to respond in sad situations. It gives you an insight into them.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I also like to think about power. I always think in terms of the power dynamic between any two or three characters or four, whatever you have in your scene. Who holds the gun? And how does that change the way they talk to the other person? Obviously the gun in this instance could be anything. It could be anything from information, to an actual gun, to “you’re in love with me, and I’m not in love with you.”

And then is there a way to change who holds the gun in the middle of the scene? And allow the character’s voice to adapt to what we would normally adapt to. I mean, think of how many times in life we have had conversations where we thought we were unassailable at the beginning and by the end we were getting our lunches handed to us? No, our lunches eaten, and our hats handed to us. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And so use that. Scenes are all to me, they are all about variation, and they’re all about growth. So, allow the voices to respond to the dynamics of the moment.

**John:** Agreed. My last test, and we’ll think of some more after this — can you picture a given actor in the role? Or at least preclude certain actors from the role because it doesn’t feel like they would say those things?

And so my example here is Angelina Jolie. So let’s say you’re writing a woman’s role and she’s funny. It’s not going to be Angelina Jolie.

**Craig:** Yeah. Probably not.

**John:** Probably not. Angelina Jolie has done at least comedy I know, but you don’t think of Angelina Jolie as being funny.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, it depends. I guess, like Mr. & Mrs. Smith, I thought she was very funny, but it was…

**John:** But it’s not telling a joke funny.

**Craig:** No, it was sort of clipped and wry which is…

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** She has a great arched brow, so to me like, it’s funny — when you think about doing impressions, I guess in my head I’m always doing impressions of actors as I’m writing for them. And so I think, okay, what’s that thing where I would go, okay, I can see her sort of arching her brow. And I always think of Angelina Jolie as somebody that has power. So, she can be confident and cut you down with one or two words.

I mean, in writing ID Theft for Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy, I kept thinking about how Melissa was sort of, you know, she’s somebody who would ramble and Jason is somebody who would be very short. And it was an interesting thing because it goes counter to the normal thing which is the rambler is the weak one and the short talking person, the terse person is the strong one.

But in this case it’s the opposite. You have the terse person who is weak, interestingly, and the rambler is strong. And that was actually fun; that was a fun dynamic to play around with because it felt, it just made those scenes more interesting to me. And if you’re not thinking in those terms of how language, the quantity, the quality, the size of the words, how many pauses, the speed; I mean, language is music and you should be musical about it, I think.

**John:** The project I’m writing right now, one of the reasons I had struggled with it a bit is I was writing it with one very specific actor in mind, who is great and funny, but is a tough fit for what this story kind of needs. And so once I got past that that it has to be this, and I started thinking of the broader picture, I landed on the other actors — oh, that’s inherently funny; him in that premise is inherently funny.

Now, ultimately, will we cast either of these actors? Who knows? But it helped me figure out the voice because I could hear what it would sound like if this actor were saying it, and I could shape the lines so that it would be very, very funny coming from that person.

It doesn’t mean that that’s the only actor who can ever play it. Famously, Will Smith was not the original choice for Men in Black. And it’s hard to imagine that it was supposed to be Matthew Perry, but it was supposed to be Matthew Perry. So don’t think you have to be locked into a specific cast. But if you can’t think of someone who should play the role, that’s also probably a problem.

**Craig:** Yeah. Those things are sort of proof of concept, you know. If it’s funny with two particular actors, then at least you know it can be funny. If you can’t think of any two actors that it could be funny in combination, then screw it. It ain’t gonna work, for sure.

**John:** Any more on voice? We have a couple questions here.

**Craig:** Eh, let’s go to questions.

**John:** Let’s go to questions. James from Oregon. His question, I think, is about recycling, which, recycling is good. “My question regards ownership of your work during development. If I understand it correctly, once you sell a script to the studio they own it. Now say you have written a unique character or a specific funny gag and it is not used in the final film. Are you free to use that same gag or character in a new script? Or, does the studio own every word of every draft, and could they prevent you from incorporating that unused idea is another script?”

**Craig:** Yes and yes, kind of. I mean, for sure they own it. They are the copyright authors of that. You cannot use it in other scripts legally. In practice, however, we all will occasionally do this sort of thing where it’s like, “Look, you didn’t use it, you’re never gonna use it, I’m gonna steal it and stick it in this other thing because I wrote it really. And it has value to you.”

But you’ve got to be really careful about it, ’cause technically it is verboten.

**John:** Yeah. I had a couple thoughts here. First off, this is talking about the movie shot and they didn’t use it, and so that’s a very specific situation. So, like, that script that you wrote is never going to get made again because that already shot. Sometimes there’s things that just linger in development forever. Like I have this Shazam! project that, who knows if it’s ever going to happen over at Warner Bros. So, I would never feel safe taking anything out of that because, who knows, they could dust it off and shoot it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But if something has already shot and you know that they didn’t use it, technically they own it. But are they going to come after you for doing something that was in there? Like for the first Charlie’s Angels there was a, I think I may have mentioned this on the podcast before; there was a sequence where the Angels had to, in the script, in there’s a sequence where the Angels had to rescue somebody, and it was on top of a mountain.

And they end up in a van going down a bobsled run. And it was actually a really fun sequence. And Amy Pascal came in on like a Friday at 5pm and says, “We’re cutting $5 million out of this movie. And we’re not leaving the room until we do it.” And so she picks up the script and she rips out those five pages. They’re gone.

And so that bobsled sequence I sort of felt like was fair game. And so if another alpine action movie came up in some case, I would feel pretty good using that same kind of beat again.

**Craig:** Maybe now, but… — The only thing to be aware of is sequels because they will occasionally go back and want to re-mine the stuff that was there from the first thing. if the movie comes out and it’s a bomb, which wasn’t the case in Charlie’s Angels, I think you’re pretty much on safe ground. But if it’s a hit, you’ve got to be careful.

**John:** But we were also talking about how dialogue is sort of musical, and I think a lesson that I’ve learned from people who write musicals is that you always think like, “Oh, we cut that song out of that show.” And so I asked, “Well the song is great, why don’t you use it in a different show?” And the truth is, songs are kind of written for certain shows. It’s kind of tough to sort of take all the ideas that were in there and really apply them to this new show.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the same happens with most stuff that’s in your movie. We were talking about voices just a second ago. If a character has a very specific joke, and that joke works in his voice, it’s unlikely that it’s going to work as well in whatever thing you’re trying to shoehorn it into.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s probably right.

**John:** There’s a script I wrote that actually I still own completely. And I considered going back through and like pulling out some of the action sequences I love in it for this other project, and the more I think about it the less likely I am to really do that, because it’s not… — Those worked really well in that movie because it was that movie. They’re not going to work at all in this one.

**Craig:** It was for that movie. Yeah. Look, you wrote one good scene, or one good line, or one good sequence before, you can do it again. Yeah. It’s better in general to be — I can’t think of any instances where I actually did lift something from an abandoned project.

**John:** Two things that came to mind, just as we were talking right now. When I was writing the novelization of Natural Born Killers a zillion years ago — it was one of the first paid things I ever did. I literally had three weeks to write an entire book. And I was also in the middle of finals in grad school, and I was working a full time job. It was a very crazy time.

And at a certain point I was like, “I just need more stuff.” And so I ended up going through my hard drive and going through like old short stories I’d written and other little things, and I found these moments that were interesting, and I did just sort of pull them in and use them. And it felt like — it was like I was making quilt out of all the little scraps I had.

And that’s okay. They’re yours. That’s fine. But you are not going to…

**Craig:** Not for something you care about.

**John:** Yeah. I did — it worked really well in the book because that book was so pastiche-y anyway. Here’s the other point I was going to make. Sometimes I will have something that I have always wanted to use, and I’ll be on a weekly. And this is nothing I used in any other project; it was something I had half developed for myself. I’ll totally use it in that weekly because I know, you know what, they are gonna probably shoot this. This idea I’ve had in my head can actually be shot and be used, and then I can stop thinking about it.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s cool. I like that.

**John:** William asks, “When writing action where a group of characters are involved, do you need to list them all in each new scene? If not, how else could this be handled?”

That’s a reasonable question. A little rookie, but not too bad.

**Craig:** I’m not quite sure. What do you mean in each new scene?

**John:** So what he’s talking about, let’s talk about The Hangover. In the second Hangover you were cutting back and forth between two groups. And do you need to remind the reader who’s in which group when we cut back to them?

**Craig:** Yeah, but there’s sort of short hand ways to do it. You don’t want to keep saying, “Phil, Allen, and Stu are still in the car.” We assume — there are certain things we presume if we’re going back and forth. I do know that Todd and I are often, we often do sort of say, “Okay, we’ve started a new scene, the guys say, ‘All right, let’s get in the car. We’ve gotta go to this place.’ And then the next shot is them in the car. Do we need to say Phil, Stu, and Allen are in the car? We actually do. We just lay out who’s driving, who’s sitting in the front seat, who’s sitting in the back.”

But in a sequence, so a group of scenes that are connected by action as opposed to location, like a car chase, running through a casino, or moving through different rooms of a house, it’s okay to sort of elide over that, or shorthand things with “the guys” or “the policemen” or whatever kind of group name you can come up with.

It’s really all about just making sure that it’s clear for the reader without it being boring and repetitive.

**John:** The thing I’m working on right now, the action sequence that I was talking about, it’s a sports thing. And so I do need to be clear about which players are actually playing at that time, because there are some characters who are back on the bench. Bu there’s also times where I can just refer to “the team” and it’s helpful just to refer to the team. And if a character needs to do something that’s distinct, I see them talking, so I know that they’re there at the moment.

But that will come up sometimes as a conversation during preproduction is they will check to make sure that who exactly is in this scene. And as the writer, that’s part of your job is to make sure that they really do have everybody in that scene who needs to be in that scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think it’s okay to leave out certain bits of information like that for the reader of the script, as long as you know. Because eventually somebody is going to ask you, and I do feel like it’s a wonderful thing to be able to immediately say to that person, “Here’s who’s playing, here’s who’s on the bench.”

Years ago I wrote a blog piece called You Can’t Just Walk Into a Building, which Josh Olson disagreed with — imagine that.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Dope. Anyway. In that piece I basically said, “Look, you can say your characters walk into a building in a script, and that’s fine, but down the line somebody may very well ask you what kind of building exactly are you talking about here? Are we talking skyscraper, this, that, whatever?” You should know. You should know your settings. You should have a sense of all of these things in your mind at the very least, because they will ask you.

On every movie I’ve ever done, I have sat down and been asked these questions by either the AD, the director, the costume people. Everybody. It’s amazing how many people actually do directly ask the screenwriter these questions. So know the answers.

**John:** Know the answers.

Luke from Poland asks, “I follow Derek Haas’s Popcorn Fiction site,” which is great, so we’ll provide a link for that, “which is all kinds of awesome. And I know that both of you wrote short stories for Derek’s site. Therefore writing prose is not completely alien to you. So I was wondering, have you ever considered writing a novel?”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Is there a John August or Craig Mazin novel on the horizon?”

**Craig:** Those are two different questions. [laughs] Yes, and no. Yes I have. I have an idea for a novel. It’s really sad, and dark, and depressing, which I love. And I even have a couple of chapters of it. But I’m so fastidious about it. It’s funny, when we were talking last week about writer’s block and how you just have to keep moving. I don’t have writer’s block, but I am overly fastidious because I feel like, look, this is it. You write these sentences and they exist forever in that state, never to be amended.

So, I’m rather fastidious about it, and it’s very slow going. But I do kind of love it. I don’t know, maybe one day I’ll finish it and publish it. I don’t beat myself up over it.

**John:** How much is written?

**Craig:** I have two chapters, and they’re sizable chapters. But, I mean it’s probably one-fifteenth of what it should be, if that.

**John:** I have considered writing a novel. And it’s one of those things that loosely on the horizon, so I will talk to my agent or my lawyer about it once a year or so. And the thing I would want to write, it’s very much sort of in my wheelhouse. You could say, “Oh, what would John August write well?” John August — I adapt a lot of kid and young adult things and it would be one of those kind of projects.

So I’ve definitely considered it. I just know the amount of time it would take would pull me away from other things, and so it’s not my highest priority right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s where I’m at.

**John:** But, I would love to do it. And I love books, and I love writing, and I love the sense of completion and finality that you have in a book that’s wonderful. And world building, is that so much of the time I am writing these screenplays and I’m creating the world, and creating the characters in the world, but it’s only for a very specific small purpose. And I like that when you write a novel or write a series of novels you can really expand and expound and create stuff beyond the borders of just a two-hour movie. And that’s an amazing thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. And also there’s an ability to express an inner world in a novel, to really go into the kind of hard to articulate consciousness that we all think we understand, which you cannot do in movies. Movies are entirely about what you see in here.

**John:** Yeah. The toolbox is much bigger in novels. And you can spend five pages on the feeling of the sheets, and you maybe shouldn’t do that, but you can. And there are amazing opportunities in novels that are great.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m a big Conrad fan. I’ve always been a big fan of his. And I always loved how impressionistic his style was, that he would sort of describe things to you in a way where almost he as the author didn’t quite see them clearly until maybe a scene later when it suddenly became clear what had happened. And that’s something, again, that you can do as a novelist. You can be impressionistic. You can have people misunderstand what they see, but in movies it’s very difficult. If someone gets stabbed…

There’s a wonderful moment in Heart of Darkness where they’re on the boat, and one of the natives who are, I guess, part of the crew of the boat. I think in the novel it’s something like, “He grasps in his hands what appears to be a cane, and then falls down.” And then only afterwards do you realize, no, a spear was thrown from the banks of the river, and pierced him through the chest and killed him. But in that moment it was like Conrad was as confused as all of us about what was going on. Can’t do that in a movie. Spear through the chest is a spear through the chest.

**John:** Yeah. In a movie you would have to pay that off within about 10 seconds, or else we would have forgotten what happened there.

**Craig:** It’s also hard to even just pretend that it’s anything other than what it is. Because we can’t — the lens is objective. It is not clouded by anxiety, or tension, or squinting.

**John:** When you write prose, we may have talked about this before, I’ve enjoyed writing stuff for Derek’s site, and it was one of the first times I have written prose in quite a few years was writing those two short stories, Snake People and The Variant which you can both find on Amazon. I found dialogue to be really frustrating. I got better at it as I would sort of go through it, but like the first day or two of trying to write those short stories, it killed me writing when characters had to speak.

Because I find that the form of dialogue in American novels incredibly frustrating the way we do the comma, open quotes, I speak a line, closed quotes, and the “he said”s. It’s really weird. Because when you read it, here’s what the difference is, I think: In screenwriting every word counts except for, of course, the character cues above dialogue. Those are ignored, you never say those. But everywhere it otherwise counts.

In books the “he said”s are supposed to be invisible, like they are supposed to not really exist. And I just find our way of writing really artificial.

**Craig:** Well, it is. And it definitely took a little bit of adjustment, but on the other hand when I would read it back I realized that they were invisible to me as well. And also I noticed that, well, a couple things. One, it definitely drives your interest in dialogue down which I think is kind of a good thing, because I don’t really like dialogue heavy books.

And it also, I noticed that if you had kind of established if there was sort of a back and forth conversation, it was legal to leave out the “he said”s/”she said”s if there was a run.

**John:** Exactly. As long as the rhythm was established, like your characters were all trading lines, then you can go through quite a bit without having to do that.

So, Craig, do you have One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** I do have One Cool Thing this week.

**John:** Why don’t you go first.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing this week is 1Password. I don’t know if you use 1Password.

**John:** I use 1Password. I like 1Password.

**Craig:** It’s the greatest thing ever. So, 1Password, it’s software that you can freely purchase for money, so it’s not free, online. Available for both Mac and PC.

**John:** And iOS.

**Craig:** And iOS, that’s correct. And 1Password is kind of brilliant. So, we all have a thousand accounts for a thousand different things and we tend to use one password or maybe two passwords because we can only memorize a certain amount of passwords. And those passwords tend to be fairly low security. Go ahead — there’s sites where you can test the security of your own password, and most people fail pretty miserably.

And then of course there are some websites that demand that you use a capital, and lower case. Some ask for a number. I mean, as we said in Hangover 1, my password used to be just “bologna,” but now they make you add numbers. [laughs]

So, hundreds of these passwords, and many of them are duplicates and many of them are unsecure. So, what 1Password does brilliantly is it says “No, no. Come up with one really secure password that’s a bunch of numbers and uppercases/lowercases, whatever you want to do, and we’ll help you come up with it. That’s the one you memorize.

“Then, when you go to a website, we’ll come up with a password for you that will be a huge gobbledygook 14 string combination of nonsense that no one could possibly remember, including you — you won’t have to.

“Then, if you go to that website and you want to get in, you just click on the 1Password icon which there is an extension for Safari, Chrome, and Explorer. Type in your master password, it then plugs in the password for that site and you are unlocked.” And it is spectacular. And, you don’t even need — you might think, “Well, what if I’m not at home on my computer that has all that stuff?” No problem, because if you have a Dropbox account, a free Dropbox account, you can use a web-based version of 1Password through Dropbox.

It’s spectacular. You should all get it. It’s the greatest thing ever.

**John:** See, I’ve had less success with it than you have. And so I have had situations where, especially the plug-ins weren’t working quite right. The browser plug-ins weren’t working quite right.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** So then it would fill in the wrong thing. I may need to sort of reinstall and redo some stuff. What I have found it very useful for though is overall control of passwords, especially the things you kind of forgot about from a long time ago. And so my general password philosophy is I have a schema for sort of how passwords work that every password for every site is different, but if I stare at a site I can probably figure out what my password for it is.

Now, that may not be the most secure, because somebody else could figure out what my schema is, but I think it’s going to be challenging for them to figure out what my schema is.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t even like to wait or even do that much thinking about it. I just like knowing that I’ve got one thing. I don’t know my email password, for instance. I have no idea what it is. But I know 1Password.

**John:** Ah, that’s faith. You have a lot of faith in that 1Password.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. But the point is I am no more faith in that than I am in any password. I mean, you’re hoping that the password…

**John:** No, but you’re putting a lot of faith in that 1Password, the application, is not going to completely self-destruct.

**Craig:** Well, you can if you’re really wigged out about it use the 1Password app to print out all of them and stick them in a safe somewhere.

**John:** That’s a good idea.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I do find myself using 1Password for credit card information. And so my American Express card, I used to have it memorized for a long time, and then of course someone stole it at a certain point, and we had to get a new number, and I don’t remember my new number. So I just go to 1Password and have that plug it in.

**Craig:** Exactly. And it works out o 80% of the time. There are some sites where just the way they set up their fields, 1Password can’t figure out what the hell they are talking about. But usually it will be able to fill in your number, your security code, your expiration date, etc.

**John:** On the topic of passwords, an application that you probably don’t have to use, and you should thank god you don’t have to use, I’m just gonna bitch for one second about iTunes Connect. So, if you’re selling apps in the app store, Apple has an app for iOS called iTunes Connect which will let you know how many copies you’ve sold. So like we have Bronson Watermarker there, and FDX Reader; those are the two apps that we’re selling today.

And so we can see how many did we sell today. It asks you for your password every single time you launch it. And you can’t actually change anything. It’s not like a thing where someone could grab your phone and steal your money or anything. No, it just tells you how many you have sold. And the fact that it asks you for your password every time is infuriating. And there’s no good way to get around it so you have to type it in.

And, of course, you don’t want to have an easy password for it, so you have to have a difficult password that you are trying to type in and the dots are hiding what you’re typing.

**Craig:** Well, if the point is that there’s really no secure information on it, why not just do 123412341234?

**John:** That’s the problem, is that the password to get into it is your real master password for iTunes Connect.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s super annoying.

**John:** So it has to be your real solid fear of god password because there’s tens of thousands of dollars at stake there.

**Craig:** That’s annoying, yeah. Annoying. Well, I guess that’s why they do it.

**John:** So, my one cool thing is a guaranteed time waster. So, probably the worst thing I should ever share with screenwriters. But it’s an amazing game that I’ve been playing the whole week. I’ve been playing far too much the whole week called Ski Safari, which is not a great title by any means.

So here’s the thing in Ski Safari. You are this little guy who’s skiing down a hill…

**Craig:** Well first tell us what platform it’s on.

**John:** Oh, it’s for iPad.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** And so the good thing about it being for iPad is that you can’t play it on your phone, so that you’re not wasting all your time on your phone with it. And also because it’s on iPad I don’t need to play it at my computer, which is good. So, it’s not one of those things.

I’ve also set myself a rule that I will only play it while standing up because as writers we sit down way too much. So I can stand at the counter and play this. And when I get tired of standing I should just sit down. So, it’s an incredibly simple game. It’s very much like Tiny Wings if you have played Tiny Wings, and it’s an Endless Runner. So, basically you’re leaping, you’re sliding, you’re leaping, you’re sliding. But the character design and sort of the world of it is really, really nicely done. It’s incredibly smartly thought out and it feels to me like a perfect pop song. Like you know Kelly Clarkson’s Since U Been Gone…

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** …is an amazing perfect pop song, this is sort of an amazing iOS game. It feels like it does exactly what it should be doing right at this moment and just knocks it out of the park.

**Craig:** I’m going to download it. Is it S-K-I Safari?

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** I’m gonna download it tonight.

**John:** Yeah. It’s cheap. And it’s one of those things where, I think it’s $0.99, everyone who plays it will love it and will become addicted to it, I suspect. And then at some point the game designers will probably make some little change, and everyone will be up in arms about how they ruined the game, and demand their money back, their $0.99, after they played it for probably 100 hours.

**Craig:** Or maybe Zynga jerks will just copy it.

**John:** The Zynga jerks — I’m sure the Zynga people already have their photocopiers ready.

**Craig:** Are the Zynga people just the worst?

**John:** Yeah. I don’t know. They might be.

**Craig:** I think they might be. I just feel like they really are bad.

**John:** I didn’t really begrudge them for Farmville, because like, oh, great, you found a new kind of crack. Okay. Or Mafia Wars. You and I played Mafia Wars way back in the day, didn’t we?

**Craig:** Yeah. They’ve stolen, I mean, I feel like there’s 100 lawsuits against these guys.

**John:** So here’s what pushed me over the edge, is that there’s this kind of cute little iPad game called Tiny Tower where you are running this little tower and you’re building new floors, and you’re running the elevator to get people to places.

And then I saw the Zynga knock-off, which was exactly the same. I mean, completely 100% the same thing. And that’s not cool.

**Craig:** I hate it. No, it’s not cool. I mean, everybody likes to go after EA because EA… — The big crime of Electronic Arts in the gaming community is that they tend to swallow up independent game publishers or raid independent game publishers of their staff, their key personnel. And so they have a general depressing effect on game innovation and the indie game scene.

And I get that. But on the other hand, everybody’s an adult. If you own an independent game company and you feel like selling it to EA, that’s your choice. And if you work at an independent game company and you feel like going to work for EA, that’s your choice, too.

But Zynga, it seems like they’re ripping these other people off, to me, as a lay person when I read these things. And that’s kind of gross.

**John:** Yeah. That shouldn’t happen.

**Craig:** That’s One Bad Thing.

**John:** One Bad Thing.

**Craig:** One Uncool Thing. Zynga.

**John:** Zynga. Craig!

**Craig:** John!

**John:** Thank you for another fun podcast.

**Craig:** Oh, and John.

**John:** Oh, there’s more.

**Craig:** One last little addendum. I just wanted to say congratulations to you and all of my gay, lesbian, transgendered friends, because the President of the United States for the first time ever in our history has come out in support of same sex marriage, and I think that’s fantastic.

**John:** I think that is really fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a good deal.

**John:** Yeah. I was happy it happened.

**Craig:** Yeah, me too.

**John:** Yay!

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** All right, so I’ll pick appropriately triumphant end music.

**Craig:** Yeah, something good! But not, like no I Will Survive. No Gloria Gaynor.

**John:** No, it will be some good other anthem.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** My thinking cap is already running. And, in fact, it’s already playing under our talking right now.

**Craig:** Is it It’s Raining Men? [laughs] ‘Cause no Weather Girls will do. I can’t take it.

**John:** Thank you, Craig. Have a great week.

**Craig:** Thank you, too, John. Bye-bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-disney-dilemma).

**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. So, Craig, has anyone called to offer you the Disney job yet?

**Craig:** Ah, no, they haven’t called. I’m a little surprised.

**John:** Disney Studios is lacking a studio chief right now.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And based on our previous podcast conversations, I think, Craig, you might be the right person for the job.

**Craig:** I think so. I started at Disney. I know the culture there. I live in La Cañada like former Disney legendary employee Dick Cook. So I feel like that is a nice little bit of continuity.

**John:** But can you find your way around the lot? That is really the key. Because I was on the Disney lot just last week, I got completely lost.

**Craig:** Oh, no, that lot is burned in my brain. I even have my secret little spots where I got to think. I know that lot backwards and forwards.

**John:** This last time they had me park in the Zorro lot, which I was not even aware existed, and so the Riverside — and I remember when I was doing a TV show with ABC parking at the Riverside gate, but I think the lot is new from when I was really last there, because I got just completely confused.

**Craig:** Yeah. That structure by the Riverside Gate entrance, which they like to shove people down there now. When I started at Disney there were no parking structures at all; it was just a flat parking lot, which was brutal. But then they put this big parking structure over by the Alameda Gate side, and then that filled up with employees. So now the primary guest lot is the Zorro lot which is by the Riverside Gate, and now everyone is asleep.

**John:** This is a podcast about parking, evidently.

**Craig:** This is podcast about parking, and things that are interesting to parkers.

**John:** So, my meeting was in the… — The reason why I parked there, I guess I parked there because they told me to park there, but they said the animation building, so I’m thinking, oh, it’s the animation building, the one that looks like the little wizard hat. But of course it is really the old animation building.

**Craig:** Old animation building, yes.

**John:** And so it is so funny that the old animation building, I don’t know, it’s probably 50 years old, but the new animation building is still like 15 years old or something, but it is still the new animation building.

**Craig:** And the new animation building, frankly, I find to be god awful. I think it is an atrocity. Whereas the old animation building is this beautiful great old art deco classic Hollywood structure. I love it.

**John:** It’s nice. If you guys are ever at meeting over at Disney, you are probably going to be in the Dwarf building, the one that has the dwarfs are holding up the roof. But the nice building that is next to it is the animation building. And wander around it. It’s very nice.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I was thinking about sort of as I was having my meeting at Disney that it is lacking a studio chief right now. Disney is sort of in a weird place, and I have seen some articles about it since they lost their studio chief; they have so many deals with other people now that they not going to be making a lot of movies themselves necessarily. So, they have a deal with Marvel. And Marvel is going to make two or three movies a year.

**Craig:** DreamWorks.

**John:** DreamWorks is maybe five, maybe?

**Craig:** And then Pixar.

**John:** And Pixar. Pixar and all the other animation, because last year sort of took over all the other animation responsibilities. So, Frankenweenie is a Disney movie, and I think it is sort of more under his auspices than sort of main Disney, I don’t know.

So, there are not a lot of movies, of live action movies, for Disney to necessarily be making. So, who do you bring in who only wants to make five movies a year?

**Craig:** Well that is the interesting thing. They are not just missing a studio chief; they are missing a studio. Disney used to have Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Miramax, and all of that seems to have dwindled to almost nothing. I mean, they have gotten rid of obviously the Touchstone, Hollywood, and Miramax labels are no longer theirs. And the Walt Disney Pictures…

**John:** But they are still using the Touchstone label though, aren’t they? Didn’t they use that for The Proposal?

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that trot it out every now and again. But it’s not like it was. You know, it was a real viable distributor. Disney seems to be out of the movie business, quite frankly. They just aren’t… — They are in the distribution business, they are in the marketing business. Obviously they are in the theme park, merchandising and cruise business, and network business with ABC. But, when it comes to making live action movies they have really shrunk down.

In fact, you could actually argue that in addition to the suppliers you mentioned, Marvel, DreamWorks, Pixar, I would include Bruckheimer, because Jerry operates almost like a little mini studio there.

**John:** He is going to make one or two movies a year.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And he’s going to soak up a tremendous amount of your capital making expensive tent pole movies.

**Craig:** Right, which I think they want. I mean, they want those tent pole movies. But he operates so independently that it is almost like he is another little mini studio there. So, it’s a very strange thing. It’s one of those jobs where you kind of would be running a studio, but kind of not.

**John:** If they were going to call me for a job interview, which they are not, I would steal some of what you said when we did the podcast about running a studio. I would reach out and try to make some deals with some writers and directors, especially some directors. Because I feel if they could make three live action movies a year, they didn’t have to be tremendously expensive, but if they could make those three movies that really fit the Disney brand, they would be in great shape.

Here’s my pitch. You figure out which directors you want, you figure out which writers you want. You bring them in and you say, “Okay, we are making essentially blind deals with you. Over the course of this next year pitch us three movies. Pitch us one at a time, however you want to do it; figure out what movies that both of you want to make, you director, you writer.

“Yow will come in and you will say, ‘This is a movie that we want to make.’ We’ll say, ‘Sure,’ and we will have you write it, and if we decide to green light it then you are making that movie.”

Because that is the thing that directors aren’t getting right now, is they are not getting the opportunity to say “This is a movie I want to go make.” Instead they are having to sort of chase after jobs.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If they could come in and say, “This is a movie I feel confident making. This is the writer I want to work with. We know how to make this movie.” And it feels like a Disney movie… — That’s a great place to be at.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that is the key. It’s got to feel like a Disney movie because Disney is unique. They are the only studio whose name implies a brand and a contract with the audience. And they don’t really, with rare exception — you mentioned one of them — they don’t really make…

Touchstone was created to make non-Disney Disney movies, essentially. But here is a great example. John Lee Hancock is going to be making a movie there called Saving Mr. Banks about which I am extraordinarily excited. And it is essentially a movie about the creation of the movie Mary Poppins, and the tremendous tension between the author of the books and Walt Disney himself. So that is going to be great.

But that is [laughs], it’s an interesting thing. It’s like Disney movies now are almost down to movies that must be made at Disney because they couldn’t be made anywhere else. It’s a very strange situation over there. And I know that in talking with producers and directors and agents, and I think agents is the one that Disney should be most worried about: no one really knows what to do with them. And no one even looks at them anymore like a real supplier or buyer of property. It’s a really weird thing.

And it is depressing for me because, like I said, I stared my career there as a screenwriter. And, you know, I just would love to see them be back in that business. It just seems like they don’t want to make movies.

**John:** You brought up John Lee Hancock who I think is exactly the kind of person they should be trying to make movies with, because The Blind Side could have completely been a Disney movie. The Blind Side could be a Disney movie. The Help could have been… — The Help was a DreamWorks movie, but if you had the Touchstone label, The Help could have totally been that kind of movie.

So, here’s some people I would try to make deals with.

— Also, a DreamWorks movie, but Real Steel would have been a great Disney movie. It would have made $20 million more if it had a Disney logo on it, I think.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So you make a deal with Shawn Levy, John Gatins, John Lee Hancock, Anne Fletcher, who did The Proposal.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Bill Condon. Susannah Grant.

**Craig:** Yeah. People who do good family… — And Aline was working on a movie there for awhile, a Cinderella movie, I think.

**John:** Oh, she was working on Cinderella, that’s right. Or Lennon and Garant, because they made Night at the Museum.

**Craig:** Night at the Museum. See, that is the thing, and you are exactly right.

**John:** That could have been a Disney movie.

**Craig:** And obviously it did extraordinarily well at Fox, but you are right, it would have done better at Disney. There is something about Disney that makes things seem classic and that name means something to parents. It certainly means something to me when I am looking for something to show my kids.

**John:** And they would have had a ride out of that for.. — They just could have cross-collateralized it. They could have transmediated it in a way that was meaningful there.

I would also add like Justin Lin, John Chu. These sort of interesting directors who are coming from action movies or coming from dance, or whatever, and who could make a Disney movie.

**Craig:** I think anyone. Yeah. If a director is interested in making family entertainment, and that doesn’t mean stupid entertainment. It must means movies for the whole family, then they could make a movie there. But the truth is the company doesn’t seem really that motivated. It’s not they are trying and failing. They are not trying [laughs] and succeeding at their goal which is to not make movies.

Now, it might be that Rich Ross, the recently deposed head of the studio, was the problem. But somehow I don’t think so. I just don’t believe that two or three months in, if he hadn’t been able to find material or had not been looking stridently for material that he wouldn’t have gotten a call, “Hey, step it up.”

I think that the company is just — they look around and go, “Look, we are paying this enormous amount of money for Marvel,” which is working out great for them. It’s about to work out hugely for them with The Avengers. “We are paying a lot of money to DreamWorks, we’ll see how that goes, and then Pixar.” I mean, let’s face it — people talk about Disney buying Pixar, but Pixar really bought Disney. That’s the big thing; that’s the big story to me.

**John:** Yeah. They have movies that are in the can and I will be curious how they work out. The Odd Life of Timothy Green, which is a small little movie my friend Jim Whitaker produced — it feels like it is a classic Disney live action movie, and it could work. And it sort of feel Christian-adjacent, which feels right for Disney as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m Christian-adjacent.

**John:** We’re all kind of Christian-adjacent. America is basically Christian-adjacent.

**Craig:** Christian-adjacent, exactly. I mean, I believe in not stealing. I guess that makes me, right? [laughs] I mean I follow quite a few of The Commandments.

**John:** That’s good.

**Craig:** Quite a few of them.

**John:** Also how the Golden Rule is considered like a Christian tradition when like every culture has the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule gets you though like 90% of morality.

**Craig:** I recall, now I have got to really dial way, way back to Hebrew School and my youth, but I recall that the Jewish version of the Golden Rule which obviously pre-dates the Christian version which was an interesting contrapositive — is contrapositive the right word? So, the Golden Rule in Christianity is do onto others as you would have them do onto you. And the Jewish version was do not do onto others as you would have them not do onto you. [laughs]

And I can’t decide which is better. I think that they are both probably pretty good. Like don’t hurt people or they are going to hurt you back makes sense. Whereas like “bring someone a cake and then you will get a cake” is nice, I just don’t think the world works that way. It’s not quite as practical. More admirable though.

**John:** More admirable. But there are so many statements, “You reap what you sow,” I mean it’s a question of has it become an active command, like this is what you should do, or just an observation that good things come to those who do well to others?

**Craig:** Yeah. I tend to think that the Jewish tradition is very legal and sort of practical and like, “Look, here’s a general good guide. This is best business practices.” And the Christian is more —

**John:** It fits very well with the no shellfish kind of structure.

**Craig:** Exactly. ‘Cause you could get sick. And Christianity is far more aspirational and it is about living an idealized life. Christ represents an idealized way of living; it’s the best possible way to live, at least according to Jesus.

**John:** So now we are a religious podcast. We are not just about vaginal issues and family and parenting, but we are also a religious podcast.

**Craig:** I wish we were just about vaginal issues. That would just… — It would be a shorter and more interesting podcast.

**John:** It would be terrific. Everything John and Craig know about women’s reproductive health.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s a lot actually.

**John:** You have kids, you learn a lot about how —

**Craig:** You learn so much. You watch two babies come out, you learn all sorts of cool stuff.

**John:** You do.

So you had sent me earlier this week an article that Greg Poirier wrote for the WGA, I don’t know if it is the WGA Magazine. I’m not really quite sure what site I linked it to, but it was this nicely written essay by Greg…Gregory — I’m calling him Greg, but I’m not sure if we are friendly or familiar enough I can do that. But he writes about his frustrations of being a feature writer now and sort of how the industry has changed and how it is better in TV.

And you had sent in through as grist for the mill and I ended up blogging about it. But tell me what was in there that sort of set you off.

**Craig:** Well, he is talking about things that you and I have talked about before on this podcast, but I really hope now that our listenership is expanding, and hopefully it is expanding here inside of our business, I kind of feel like there is a chance for us to reach some people who make some decisions.

What he is talking about is the shortsighted view of employing writers during development, specifically the mania over limiting development deals to one step. The mania of not developing anything if you are not absolutely sure you are going to make it, at which point it is not really development. And also the nonsense about requiring writers to pitch out the entire movie before they get the job.

All of this stuff makes absolute sense from a paper-pushing, number-crunching point of view. However, it is hurting the movies. That to me is absolutely clear. I don’t see how anybody could see it in any other way. It is hurting the movies. And one hit movie, or one extra hit movie easily washes away any of these meager savings you might be getting cutting these deals down.

And he goes through why, and all of the reasons are things we have discussed. Development is the R&D of our business. Any business requires R&D. The first classic mistake of a dying business is to cut down on R&D. You are basically just lying down to sleep and die.

So, if you under develop and if you are unwilling to develop things that don’t actually come to fruition, you won’t be able to get those things that do. You are way too tight and you are running way too close to the bone.

**John:** In my blog post I sort of expanded on his idea that television works differently. And in television the research and development cycle is very clear and apparent because it is pilot season. So, it is a time where everyone hears the pitches for pilot shows, the buy a lot of pilots, they shoot a lesser number of pilots, and they pick up a subset of those.

And when you go through that process, it is kind of grueling and exhausting for a writer, but it is also exciting. It’s a chance, like, “Here is my idea. Do you want my idea? Great.” You are not going though endless notes on what your idea is because the clock is ticking so fast.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You are going in. Some of those pilots get shot. It costs a tremendous amount of money to shoot pilots – $5 million, more. They are spending a lot of money to figure out which shows they may not even make. Because they know they are not going to put every pilot they shoot on the air. That has never been their business in TV. They know that less than half of the pilots they shoot are going to be a series, but they see this as a good investment; a good way to figure out which ones are going to work. And then they put some of them on the air.

And the ones they put on the air have been through a vetting process and they feel have the best chance of breaking out. And so they are taking risks, but they are also taking calculated risks because along the way they are figuring out how they are going to spend their money.

Compare that to features right now where you go in, you pitch an idea. It’s like, “Well, I don’t know what that is; I don’t know what the poster is for that, so therefore we are not even going to try.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s why —

**Craig:** We are not even going to try. Right. We will never know if your script would have gotten Brad Pitt. We will never know if it would have attracted Christopher Nolan. We’ll never know.

“We just won’t know because right now here in this room I am not sure how I can justify to my boss that that actually will be in theaters in 2.5 years.” That’s ridiculous.

**John:** Also, when you consider — look at how much money it costs to market a movie. So, they are saying, “Well, movies are becoming so expensive and it costs so much to market them.” Well, yes it does, but really that $1 million you spent for that one Super Bowl commercial, that would have bought a whole new script, a whole new project that could have gone through multiple drafts and you might have had something brand new that you could have made.

So, spending some money upfront is giving you better choices for which movies you can make which can potentially break out. I don’t know, if you are only taking a few swings, you are much less likely to have hits.

**Craig:** And tragically when they do decide to take a swing, it’s a check swing. Because making these one-step deals, and I feel like I keep saying this over and over, and it seems so obvious to me. And I just don’t understand why they don’t see this. And maybe it is because they don’t write, so they don’t get it.

When you make a one-step deal, not only are you giving this writer one bite at the apple, and writing is a process. It requires a back and forth. That’s why they have executives there to give notes; they are acknowledging it requires a back and forth, and a review, and a development.

So, not only are you chopping that guy off — or that woman off — at the knees in terms of like, “It better be right the first time,” but you are also sending that writer off to get other jobs while they are writing for you. That’s the stupidest part of it all. It used to be that you would get a job, you have two guaranteed steps. Basically you could stop and go, “Okay, I can write this first draft and not go out on meetings, and not pitch other stuff, and not pitch other takes. I’m just going to write this material. And then we will see how it goes and then I will write the second part. And if it feels like it is kind of swirling the drain, I will start looking for work then.”

Now, everybody is always looking for work, which is ridiculous, so they are not completely focused on you. And to make matters worse on top of that, looking for work has become far more arduous because now they demand more work to get work.

So, they are shooting themselves in the foot. And this is one of those areas where I kind of sound like a traditional old bitter screenwriter going, “Those stupid idiots in the studios.” But in this case they are being stupid idiots. They really are. And they need to stop and think about what they are doing here.

There was an interview with Adam Goodman. He was talking about how proud he is of Paramount that they have been cutting costs. And he cited a bunch of things like, “We are cutting all of the frills like flowers, and producing offices, and rich producer deals. And we have cut down all of those two-step deals to one-step.” And I’m like, “Whoa, whoa, that’s not flowers in an office. [laughs] That’s not a frill. That’s everything.”

You got to do that stuff. If you don’t do it, you are killing the process that makes movies. I just don’t get it. I don’t get it.

**John:** So, and it is not just us sort of ranting about this. Actually a guy wrote in under the pseudonym of Biff. It’s a very long thing, but I thought I would read it because it is a different perspective and also a very useful one. So, I apologize in advance. This is going to be like a minute of me reading, but it’s good.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** Oh, god. Right.

**Craig:** Whatever. [laughs]

**John:** So Biff writes, “I went for a walk the other day. I loaded up a bunch of Scriptnotes. I said to myself, ‘Maybe one day I will check these guys out. What could you possible know?’ So I listened to you and Craig go on for awhile. The walk was 14 miles long; I never got bored. You do an amazing job analyzing this mad world we live in.”

**Craig:** Wow, I’ll say. I mean, I’ve got to interrupt and say —

**John:** This is the part that I left in there where he just praises us.

**Craig:** And also but nice job on 14 miles. That’s like a three-quarter marathon or something?

**John:** That’s good. I love long walks.

**Craig:** Half-marathon. Nice work.

**John:** Yes. “So I’m breaking into the screenwriting business. Actually, I have been breaking in for 109 qualified quarters, or so it says on my WGA pension statement.” 109 qualifying quarters, that is 25 years? It’s more than 25 years.

**Craig:** He has been at this for a long time.

**John:** He’s been at this for a long time.

**Craig:** And qualifying quarter means that he qualified for health insurance.

**John:** So he got paid to write.

**Craig:** This guy has been working. He’s a real pro.

**John:** “I’ve written TV, features, and a novel. Done rewrites, weeklies, preproduction, and polishes during shooting.” I don’t know why I suddenly got southern there. “I’ve had a bunch of my stuff made. I have defended my deal; I’m still getting two steps. Hell, I recently got five: the two guaranteed, two optional, and a non-applicable when they moved the goal posts so much even they had to admit it was new work. We scouted that movie, movie stars were calling in to be in it. It just didn’t get made.”

So this is a real guy. I mean, he’s actually talking the way a real produced screenwriter would talk.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “I just finished a pet project for another movie star; it didn’t get made either. That doesn’t bug me — I actually like doing what I do.” So, he is not being cranky old man here. “I have no debt. I own my house. I could stop doing this tomorrow and never worry about it again.”

**Craig:** This guy is cool. I love this guy.

**John:** “However, in the last year or so the job of getting the job has become untenable.”

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** “Sweepstakes pitching, jobs that evaporate at the studio level, producers sending me material I find out they don’t even control.”

**Craig:** Ugh!

**John:** “And the latest duplicitous move it to bring in a number of known working professionals, have us all pitch, have us come back again after demanding more details, and then hire a new writer who has never had a job, fresh off the blacklist, at 10% of the quote of the guys they have been meeting with.”

**Craig:** Of course. Meanwhile everybody has been funneling them stuff that they can hand off to this guy.

**John:** They have been the research and development department for the movie.

**Craig:** Unreal. Ugh.

**John:** “So the first time happens you shrug it off. The second or third time this happens you begin to get suspicious. If he is the right guy, well hell, they should hire him; that’s how I got my first job. But I have quit believing that is what is going on. ‘The next time,’ as Sam Butera explained to Louis Prima, ‘there will be no next time.'”

**Craig:** [laughs] I love this guy. He’s the coolest.

**John:** Maybe really this was you writing in under a pseudonym.

**Craig:** I would like to think that it is me in ten years. [laughs]

**John:** I have a hunch we might actually know who this is.

**Craig:** Oh really?

**John:** I genuinely to my life don’t know who this is, but I feel like it is somebody who is in our world.

**Craig:** Alright. Well you tell me afterwards, because I love him. And first of all, I love the fact that he is obviously an older guy, or older than I am at least, and he is walking 14 miles. Hat’s off.

**John:** That’s good stuff.

**Craig:** But boy, yeah, he’s nailing it.

**John:** “I had a president of production ask for a free rewrite before he gave it to his chairman. Not a polish, he had notes. A true multi-week notes.”

**Craig:** [laughs] And a president of production asking for it. That’s unreal.

**John:** That strikes me as flat-out abusive.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** “Has the landscaped changed that much? Has the douchiness pervaded every level of the business? Have I turned into Clint Eastwood shouting ‘Get off my lawn.’ Do I get shot in the end? I have thrown up my hands and just gone back to specking stuff I love. I’m optioning books myself.”

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** “So I throw it out to you guys: How are you facing this new world? Is it a new world? Are you experiencing burnout? It’s a first for me.”

**Craig:** Look, the best question he asked, and this I want to say to you writers out there who are either trying to break in, or you are in and you are early on in your career. I want you to listen to how smart his question was at the end. “Is it just me?” Am I being that bitter guy railing against the system the way so many writers just knee-jerk their way into doing, or, perspective check, am I actually right and these guys out there are nuts?

That’s an important question to constantly ask yourself because it is so easy to slip into this sort of “it’s not me, it’s you/everything I’m doing is right/the world is unfair and unjust.”

**John:** Self-pity.

**Craig:** Self-pity. So I love that he asked that question. In this case the answer is no sir, you are not wrong, or crazy, or being Clint Eastwood on your lawn. The landscape has changed. It has changed dramatically and for the worst. No question.

No question has it changed for the worst. And this is the stuff we are talking about now that Poirier indicated. The notion that they are going to bring in all of these people and make them jump through all of these hoops is — there were always hoops, but now the hoops beyond the hoops, and the hoops within the hoops are just bizarre.

And then he said something else that really struck a chord with me. “Jobs that evaporate.” More often than not I hear from fellow screenwriters that they are not losing jobs to other writers. They are losing jobs to “we decided to not hire anyone.” They are losing jobs to “let’s just not spend money.” Which is amazing because you should really make that decision before you bring the writer in, don’t you think? [laughs] Don’t you think? That you wouldn’t bring writers in and have them come up with takes and ideas if you weren’t really sure you were going to make the movie, or god forbid didn’t control the property. It’s insane.

Insane. I’m taking umbrage. I’m taking umbrage.

**John:** He’s taking umbrage. And umbrage is important here.

He is asking do you experience burnout. And I have experienced burnout at several stages kind of along my screenwriting career, and sometimes it is just after a really bad experience where it is like I have to sort of not do this. I have to not get into the fray again after just having a really bad time on a given movie.

And I have had frustrations over the last couple years with a bunch of movies that sort of seemed like they were going to go, and then didn’t go for reasons — each of them sort of had their individual reasons, but that becomes frustrating, where you kill yourself to deliver a draft and it just doesn’t move forward.

But that is sort of the nature of being a screenwriter. That is not really unique or sort of special to the situation. Where I have become more frustrated is the kind of things that he is talking about, is the “Is that really even a job? Is this just a fishing trip? Are you really serious about making this movie?” And it is those times where I had to go in and found myself being asked to do a lot more sort of beat-by-beat-by-beat pitching out the movie. It’s like, “Well, look, this movie is sort of like Big Fish. And I wrote Big Fish. So I think I can probably write this movie.” And that gets to be frustrating.

And so some of the reason why I have gone off and done more stuff, developing apps, or why I went off to do the Broadway show, is because it is a different world. This is a different thing where it is new and exciting and fresh, and I am not charging to the same frustrating battles every day.

**Craig:** Yeah. I haven’t gotten burnt out. And it may be that because this gentleman is essentially nine years beyond where I am in terms of the longevity of his career, and how many meetings he has been through. I would imagine the grind eventually catches up to you. It has to.

But my strategy has been to try and be a producer. I’m not interested in being a producer-producer with a deal and a thing, but I approach everything like a producer. And I try and write screenplays now for a director or for an actor that means a lot. That is what I try and do. I have lost interest in random development. I just don’t want to do it anymore. Because I don’t believe in it. Because they don’t believe in it either.

So, in a weird way I have kind of shifted the way I work toward what they want. And the shame of it all is that the old way, the development way, was a good way. And made/produced a ton of good movies, and if you didn’t even like the movies, a ton of successful movies, how about that, if you are thinking about it just from the point of view of money.

But since that system is broken, I just don’t play the game anymore. I don’t like to play a game where the rules have been changed in such a way that it is pointless. I don’t pay Black Jack if they don’t give you a little extra when you get Black Jack. So, that’s been my move.

And I think, by the way, in a weird way he is already kind of going there. He innately understood, “Okay, that’s not doing it, so I am going to go make specs. I’m going to go option my own books.” Brilliant. Brilliant. I mean, obviously he has a great long-standing track record. He knows what he is doing. He has been doing it long enough that he is a pro, for sure.

So, that’s good. He is essentially avoiding the unfair game.

**John:** Yeah. But, still, frustrating.

**Craig:** Very. Very.

**John:** Let’s touch a craft question. Frank from Philadelphia writes, “Can you offer any before and after examples of characters who in one draft lack depth and in a subsequent draft have become more robust? I’m hoping to see side by side examples of how the action or dialogue changed to deepen a character.”

So, this is audio, so side by side is hard in audio. But I included his question because I think it is a useful thing to talk about is that sometimes you read a script and it is just flat. And the characters read flat. And you are trying to figure out what it is that is making you not care about these characters.

And, to me, it is generally that when I first meet the character, if I can see him as a stock person in this kind of movie, I won’t care. And so if this is a comedy and he is like the stock guy who hits his alarm clock in the morning and that is like the first shot of the movie, and we see him go to work in the morning. I’m unlikely to care. If I don’t know sort of what it is that is unique about this guy, and why this is a different movie because this character is in it, I’m not going to care.

So, it may be an interaction that happens very early in the story that lets me know something special about this guy. I can tell you, it’s almost never going to be a flashback. People try to add depth to characters by creating a flashback where they see how their father was killed. No.

But it is an action that the character takes very early in the story that is surprising, that tells me something unique and special about this character. It makes me curious to find out more about the character.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m sort of a little puzzled. I don’t really — I don’t write a character that isn’t interesting to me. I mean, I may have to improve the character as I go and maybe increase the specificity. Simply the act of getting though the first draft makes me realize that there is more of an interesting role or more subtlety to add to a character.

But if I don’t actually know what is interesting or unique about the character, I don’t even know what to write anyway. You know, it’s interesting — there are writers who do these things called “vomit drafts,” where they just get it out, “I just get it out on paper, and it’s terrible, and I don’t care, because then I can go back…” And I’m not one of them. I need to know what the hell is going on.

**John:** I’ve never been a vomit draft person either. Every scene, once it’s typed in there I feel like it could shoot. It’s never just sort of the random —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I should say, I kind of reframed Frank’s question as I was answering it, so I wasn’t sort of talking about in my own script where like, “Oh, that character was flat in that draft, and now in the second draft it pops more.” I’m really more talking about something was sent to me, I’m scrolling through it on the screen as I need to rewrite it. And the things I am looking at to change are often those setup details and really those first moments of interaction that sort of set who are expectation is for that character.

And so as I am sent something to rewrite, I will look for sort of how does it begin. And what do I know about this character at the start? What am I curious to know more about? And how can I move this guy from being exactly the stock character that I am expecting to be in this movie?

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. That’s a good answer.

**John:** Thank you.

Next question. A reader writes, “I’ve recently graduated from college in Colorado.” Colorado is awesome, so congratulations. “During that time I wrote three feature screenplays with the intent of producing and directing them myself. However, I would like to see if I can sell them.”

Okay, well fine. You want to do everything because you just graduated from college. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Exactly. I’m not going to chastise him for the optimism of a new college graduate.

**Craig:** Mean John August is the best.

**John:** Alright. “What would be the next step? Do I try to get an agent? Can I do that while I’m still in Colorado? What is the process of finding representation as a writer?”

Well, an early step you might take is to go back through our old podcasts and find our second podcast, I think, which is about how do I find an agent. So that would be useful. But I kept this question in for the larger sake of you are a new college graduate, “Can I do this living in Colorado?”

No. You should move to Los Angeles if you want to make Hollywood movies. Because you are in the best position of your life because you are just now graduating from college. You have no expectations of quality or standard of living. You can move out to Los Angeles and be broke and work for minuscule money interning at places and making copies and running stuff around, and doing all the stuff you should be doing as a 21 or 22-year-old recent college graduate who wants to be breaking into screenwriting.

So, you should take advantage of your youth and your poverty and move out to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** I think this is a tougher thing for this generation to wrap their heads around than our generation, because the kind of telemetrics of social activity have expanded dramatically. You don’t feel a great need to be in a room with anyone anymore. But, in this business so much happens just in the gaze between two people sitting across a table.

And we have talked before about how being a professional screenwriter is built on a base of writing talent, but what escalates the base towards a pyramidal point is your ability to sit in a room and make scared people feel comfortable that their very scary proposition of giving you a lot of money for a screenplay is going to work out. And that requires eye contact and a physical presence, and that requires you being here.

So, get a ticket, or get in your car and come on out.

**John:** One of the other crucial advantages of being in Los Angeles is a lot of people in Los Angeles are trying to do what you are trying to do. And while that might seem like, oh, well that’s competition, it is also going to help you. Because that guy in the next apartment over, he is trying to work on this, too. Or maybe he is going off to direct a short film and you can help out on his short film and you strike up a friendship.

There is going to be a bunch of people who you can — networking is really gross. I hate the word networking, but there are people who can help you, and you can help. And you can all sort of rise up as a generation together. And that is not going to happen online.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It’s going to happen if you are around actual real people. The random person you meet at the supermarket is going to be more helpful than the people you are going to meet in Boulder, or Colorado, wherever you are.

**Craig:** That’s right. And I get it, it’s scary. I mean, I remember when I first came out and started in the business, I was overwhelmed by the culture of it all, just how many people had so many strong opinions about so much stuff.

You were surrounded by people who hated things and loved things with a passion, people who were dismissive of other people. Everyone was hyper critical, and everything seemed to move at this fast pace. It’s all a con game, right? And confidence. It was so many people with so much confidence. And I remember thinking, “I really feel like 10% of this is valid, and 90% of it is nonsense.” But that 10% was useful.

So, by the way, was my ability to discern the 90%. And I feel like if you are a smart, self-assured individual who can keep your own center, who doesn’t feel the need to absorb the flavors around you like a brick of tofu, you will be able to parse out what is valuable and interesting and productive. And, then of course, just as importantly, parse out the stuff that is pointless.

Because, I’m sure you had the same experience: so many of those people we started with are gone. And boy they thought they knew what they were doing.

**John:** And then they vanished.

**Craig:** Vanished.

**John:** And so if you are driving up from Colorado, you also get to go through St. George, Utah, which is an experience that no one should ever miss.

**Craig:** What’s there?

**John:** It’s sort of the very tip bottom of Nevada and Utah, and I just remember every time I have driven from LA to Colorado or back, you always drove through St. George. It’s an important milestone along the way. You are almost in California.

I’ve done the drive straight through by myself, which is not healthy. I wouldn’t recommend it.

**Craig:** You mean like in one shot?

**John:** One shot.

**Craig:** From Boulder to LA no stopping?

**John:** No stopping.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Well I stopped to get gas.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. I mean no sleeping. I drove across the country three times. One way east/west, west to east, and then east to west finally. And the longest stretch I did was New York to Chicago. That’s a good haul.

**John:** That’s a good haul.

**Craig:** Yeah. But I did get pulled over for speeding in Utah I remember. [laughs] And the cop said if you disagree with this ticket you can see the judge. And I said, “Okay, where’s the judge?” And he said, “The judge, she is available on Wednesdays and Fridays. And she is about 40 miles…” And he started, I was like, “You know what? I’m going to go ahead and pay the ticket. That’s cool.”

**John:** Yeah. Utah.

**Craig:** Utah.

**John:** Meanwhile our international listeners are like, “What is this driving?” Like, “You can’t drive from one country to another country?” No, America is so huge that you can just spend days, and days, and days trying to drive across it.

**Craig:** Unless you live in Canada or Russia, in which case we are tiny.

**John:** Yeah. We are the third or fourth largest country?

**Craig:** I think we are the third. I think it is Russia…oh, maybe China is third.

**John:** We had this debate earlier this week. And so I think China is actually smaller than the US.

**Craig:** Oh, okay. Well you know why? Because of Alaska.

**John:** Alaska gives us so much.

**Craig:** It is such a cheat. I mean, it is such a cheat.

**John:** It was a bargain. It was a bargain just to put us in number three.

**Craig:** By the way, Alaska, one of the greatest purchases. Maybe the greatest bargain ever.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Seward’s folly.

**John:** Oil.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Brian asks, “I recently signed with a literary agent on the strength of my film school material. I’m a baby television writer looking to make good, so acquiring this agent was a great step forward. My question is this — how often can I expect to talk to my agent? I’m not sure how much I should expect her attention. As her newest and least profitable client, I know I am very low on the agency totem pole. I don’t want to appear needy or high maintenance.

“However, I have noticed that when I send my agent an email or place a call to the office, I won’t receive a reply for a couple of days. Is this normal? And if not, can you suggest any strategies?”

**Craig:** No it’s not normal.

**John:** It’s not normal.

**Craig:** No!

**John:** So the rule used to be that you should make — in Hollywood you are supposed to call everybody back within 24 hours.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That may have slipped a little bit. To me, I feel like someone can email you back on the basis of a call, that’s fine. But people should get back to you faster than that.

**Craig:** No question. I mean, unless you are really annoying. And then I get it. But then that is a conversation your agent should have with you.

My rule of thumb is I don’t talk to anybody unless there is a context. I don’t call people up to chat. I don’t call people up to say, “How’s it going.” I don’t ask open-ended questions like, “Is there anything I should be doing differently or have you heard anything?” I don’t do any of that.

I call up with a problem or I call up with a need. “I have a script, I need this. I’m working and this guy is being a jerk, can you help me out. I’m calling you because you sent me on a meeting, and I am giving you a report on it.” So it is all business.

If they are not calling you back, then you send them an email saying, “Listen, if you can’t get back to me within a couple of days, then I have got to move on to somebody who can. Is there somebody else at the agency that you feel has more time for me?” Unless you are being an annoying nudge, and then you stop doing that.

**John:** The only slight bit of slack I am going to cut for this agent here is Brian does say he is in television. So, depending on what the season is, and sort of where things are at, there gets to be crazy season in television where I can see a call slipping a day.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s true.

**John:** So I’ll give a little bit of slack for that, but if that has been the overall yearly pattern that they are taking three days or four days to get back to you on things, there is a problem and you need to call and figure out what the problem is. Or, figure out your reasons to call. There can be valid reasons to give you calls back.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Sorry, Brian, but no, it should happen more often than that.

**Craig:** It should.

**John:** Kyle asks, “Where do movie pitches actually come from? How are they created? For adaptations or sequels, they are created from previous material, obviously. But what about other movies that writers come in and pitch for? Were execs just sitting around a room ad started throwing out movie ideas against a wall?”

So, that seems like a very basic question, but we haven’t addressed such a basic question. Movie pitches: sometimes a screenwriter has a great idea. And you say, this is my idea for this movie, and I’m going to go in and pitch it to producers, or studio execs, or whatever.

But sometimes the studio has internally generated saying we really want a movie about women’s golf. And so they will say, “We need to find a writer to come in and do a women’s golf movie.” So all they have is women’s golf. And then they are bringing in writers to pitch them a women’s golf movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. And also sometimes they are sitting around and they just have a day where they sit in the office and they throw a ball around and say, “Let’s come up with ideas for movies.” They are not often very good ideas, but that is where a lot of those ideas come from.

So producers will literally sit like writers and come up with ideas for movies based on things that they believe they can sell, and sometimes they are inspired by newspaper articles or real life things, or something that happened in their own life. Sort of famously The Hangover was kind of inspired by an actual thing that happened to a producer in our business who lost the best man — or, I’m sorry, the best man lost him at a wedding in Vegas, or a bachelor party in Vegas.

These things sometimes emerge like that, and sometimes, like you said, they will emerge from more structured studio calls for a certain kind of thing. It’s funny, I don’t really think that there is that much success when that happened to you, but maybe that is just my bias. I have no stats to back it up.

**John:** Brian Grazer at Imagine is famous for he has like sort of an idea, just a very, very vague idea and they will spend years trying to figure out what the movie is that goes with that idea. So, I remember there being this idea of a guy who gets a paper clip shoved up his nose, and something — becomes a genius or something happens because of that. And so there was a pitch called Clipped, and a lot people went in on Clipped. I don’t know that there will ever be a movie about that, but you go in on that.

Or like I will get a call saying, I remember getting a call, “Brian really wants to do a movie about a bathroom attendant. So all you get is “bathroom attendant.” So what is a movie about a bathroom attendant?

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s what I mean. [laughs] I just feel like that seems like a big, huge waste of time. And it sort of goes to the remarkable asynchronous nature of this particular business where somebody who has access to a studio or funding for movies can come up with a really dumb idea like a paper clip up the nose, sorry Brian. And suddenly people are jumping and driving over there and thinking about it to pitch it.

A writer can come up with a really good idea and everyone is like, “Nah. We don’t even want to hear it.”

**John:** The only advice I would give to a newly working writer is it is worth going in on some of those because it’s a chance to get you in the room and talking with people and get them to see how smart you are.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** You don’t want to pursue all of them, and you don’t want to pursue a lot of them with the same people again, and again. But if it is an excuse to get you in the room and make a new relationship, that can be time well spent.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** So, Craig, we have come to the section of the podcast I would like to start labeling and trade-marking “One Cool Thing.”

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And so I warned you about this. Did you come up with a cool thing you want to talk about at the end of this?

**Craig:** I totally did.

**John:** Do you want to go first? Or I can go first. Your choice.

**Craig:** You can go first, that’s fine. Because my thing is going to be cooler, so it’s cool.

**John:** Ah, so it’s a competition.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** So, Craig, do you play piano?

**Craig:** I did — as a kid I played.

**John:** But your wife plays piano now. I’ve heard your wife accompany you.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s right.

**John:** So, one of my goals for this last year was to get better at piano, because I played piano at grade school, and I gave it up and I played clarinet, and that was useless. And so I’ve gotten back to playing piano better. And actually I can get my way through songs now, but I’m not great.

And so whenever I see the Broadway people, they are just ridiculously good. But I can sort of work my way through stuff. So, this last week I had this Christina Perri song stuck in my head, Jar of Hearts. Do you know it?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** [hums Jar of Hearts].

**Craig:** All those “das” were the same note, by the way.

**John:** Okay, so I was humming to myself, and then I realized it is actually the same chord progression as the Radiohead song Creep. You know Creep?

**Craig:** Sure, I do.

**John:** And what is cool about it, as I’m thinking about it in my head, the two songs actually nest really well together in sort of a Glee kind of way, like kind of a Glee mash-up kind of way. So, the Christina Perri song goes, [sings] “You’re going to catch a cold, from the eyes inside your soul, so don’t come back from me. Who do you think you are? / I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo.”

So like they fit nicely together.

**Craig:** I see what you are saying. They flow. Got it.

**John:** They flow. They have good flow. And so I wanted to see, like I need to find sheet music for one of these songs to sort of try to figure this out. So, if you Google for sheet music, you can find a lot of illegal scans of sheet music, but I didn’t want to do that because it is really stealing. You are actually taking money from the songwriters who get publishing on those things.

And, I’m going to re-link to Jason Robert Brown had a really great blog post about vocal students who will write saying like, “It’s so mean that you won’t let us copy your songs for free.” And he has a very good point: “Well, that’s actually my job. You don’t Xerox Stephen King’s books.”

So, there is an online service called Musicnotes.com that I will link to, and what is great is that a lot of sheet music is just there. So I was able to find Jar of Hearts there. And so you pull it up, and it shows you just the first page. And you can see, oh, will this meet my needs? Is it something I could actually play? Does it look right? You can sort of play it on a piano and see if it makes sense.

But here is the amazing thing, and this is why it is good to live in the modern age. On the right hand side of the page they have a little menu, and you can transpose it to whatever key you need, and that is pretty amazing. And so I don’t know if it is actually doing it in real time, or if they just did different versions of it, but I mean computers can transpose things really easily, and good piano players can transpose things really easily. I just can’t.

So, this was very helpful for me. So I can get the song I wanted, in the key I wanted, and it is legal.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so Jar of Hearts was in C-minor which is three flats. And so you click, click, click. You move into E-minor is one sharp.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s easier for me to play. It’s in a range I can actually sing. So, it’s amazing. Anyway, my one cool thing for this week is Musicnotes, which feels sort of like iTunes for sheet music.

**Craig:** I have used them before. They are a little annoying because their DRM is kind of strict, and they only let you print it once as I recall.

**John:** Okay, so I don’t think I am violating anything super magic here. Rather than print it, just go to “Save as PDF.” So, in the print dialog box do a “Save as PDF” and you have a printed one, PDF. It is going to have your name watermarked on it, but that’s great.

**Craig:** That part’s dumb. I have used it. Mostly I play on guitar, and for guitar it is really chords is what matters. And there’s a hundred free databases where they just list the chords for things. And transposing on guitar is super easy. It’s really, really easy to do. I can either… — Either you are transposing strictly just for your voice, in which case you might use a capo which shortens the length of the guitar effectively.

Or, I can just do a quick transpo in my head and just go, okay, if it is in D-minor, and I prefer to play to E-minor because it is just an easier chord to finger, then I just bump everything up a step, and I can do that pretty easily.

**John:** It’s good that you can do that.

**Craig:** I can do that.

**John:** It’s interesting talking to the Broadway people because doing the workshop you end up transposing things a lot. They will move it up a step for somebody and figure out how to do that. And so I was talking to five great pianists there, and they all have different ways they do it. And some of them are actually sort of doing it mathematically. And others are really thing, they are doing what you just said with the guitar where this was at this key, now it is at this key. And they are not doing the math note by note, they are just changing the chord structure of the things.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** So that is my cool thing.

**Craig:** That is a cool thing. Well, my cool thing today comes with a little story, is vintage computers.

**John:** I love vintage computers.

**Craig:** Vintage computers. I would say right around when eBay started exploding, it posed an interesting question I thought to meet which was, “Okay, here’s all this stuff, what do I want?” And I am not a collector. I don’t really believe in collecting per se; I mean, I believe that it exists, I don’t really care for it. It just seems like obsessive hoarding. But the notion that you would buy something that matters to you that is a touchstone to you is interesting to me.

And the thing that popped into my head, really the only thing that I was interested in was to chase down my first computer. And my first computer was 1982, right around when the Apple II Plus came out, and the Plus was because I think they went to 16K. Franklin, a company that still makes, like, Speak and Spells and so forth, Franklin reverse engineered it, not realizing that this nascent Apple company would be incredibly litigious, and they made a copy all the Franklin Ace 1000 which was incrementally cheaper, not much.

The Franklin Ace 1000 went on sale, I think it was $1,300, which at the time was a lot, certainly for my dad, even though of course I come from a massive trust fund. [laughs] A public school teacher trust fund.

And I went online and I found a Franklin Ace 1000, and somebody was selling it for one dollar. And this was 1998, I think. And I bought it.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** And I was just going through my garage the other day and I found it. It had been in storage and it made its way from one house to another, and I brought it into my office today. I’ve just been looking at it, and I love it.

And I just opened it up and looked inside. And I showed it to my assistant who was marveling at it, and he was like, “Where’s the monitor?” He literally said, “Where’s the monitor,” which I just thought was so great. [laughs] And it is just amazing how far we have come.

But it also brought back a great memory for me of my dad took me into the city — we lived on Staten Island, and there is 42nd Street Photo, and 47th Street Photo, and Da-da-da Photo, there are all of these stores in Midtown Manhattan that sell electronic equipment, kind of shystery, but we are not shyster as lawyers, but sort of rip-offy a little bit.

But, they had good prices. And so my dad and I went into the city on a weekend and went to the store and bought this computer. I was super excited. And I remember we had parked, I think, east of Fifth Avenue, and had to cross over Fifth Avenue because the store was west of Fifth Avenue. By the times we came out we were stopped because it was the Gay Pride march.

And I had no idea, and I was 11. And when there is a parade in Manhattan, they don’t let you just willy-nilly cross Fifth Avenue. You have to wait. They will give you little points, like okay, 25 minutes have gone by, now you can cross.

So, I remember standing there with my dad, holding this computer, and just jaw-dropped looking around at like men in makeup and dudes kissing. And I’m like, “What is going…?!” It was so wild. And I remember my dad was so uncomfortable! And I remember he said, “You know, here’s the thing. I’m standing here on the street, I’m a 40-year-old guy. I’m standing here with a 10-year-old kid.” [laughs].

“I’m standing here with a 10-year-old boy and I just feel like we are going to be on the cover of Newsweek next week.” [laughs] He was so convinced that his picture was going to be taken. It was great. It was great.

But we took the computer home, and we turned it on, and that really was a life-changing day for me. Just falling in love with a computer. And now it is sitting right here. I’m looking at it in my office. And in its own way, as ugly and stupid as it is, it is beautiful. And I love the notion that we can have history with our devices, with our computers, and cheaply at that.

And I have an Apple II Plus also and some old floppy drives and things. And I just love them. I hope that kids sort of dig into the history of computing, because they really have changed the world.

**John:** Now your Franklin that you bought, was it originally a black computer or a white computer? What was the case?

**Craig:** Beige.

**John:** Beige. And so it got that sort of vintage/nostalgia beige, the way that all plastic things from that era sort of changed colors.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And I find it fascinating. It’s as if they were in a smoky environment all the time because they have that weird patina that they get on them.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s like a browning to them, you know. And the keys — just feeling those old spring-loaded, big chunky plastic keys.

**John:** They are very click-clacky.

**Craig:** Very click clacky. And when you pop the top of this thing off you realize how much empty space is in it, whereas now when you look at a laptop it has been engineered to the nth degree. There is no wasted space in a laptop. But in these things there was just huge open spaces because they ran so hot that they needed a ton of air just to circulate around. They hadn’t really perfected the heat-sinking yet.

And more importantly, they needed space for cards because every peripheral device, a monitor, a keyboard, your floppy drives, extra memory, a printer, all of them needed a card that would be slotted in and then a ribbon cable would go out the back. So you needed all this space, so when you pop it open you can see everything and you see little… — I mean, pop it off and there is like one little controller card that says 1978 on it. It’s so cool. It’s just cool.

**John:** And what was the storage for the Franklin when you got it? Was it a tape drive or was it a floppy at that point?

**Craig:** Floppies. Yeah, it was floppies. I had an Apple, I’m sorry, an Atari 800.

**John:** Yeah. Atari 800 was my first computer.

**Craig:** And that is long gone, but that thing had, I remember it had a tape storage drive. And I think it also had the ability for a floppy drive. And the tape storage, people don’t know this — cassette tapes, so the original, like the Atari 400 and 800 would use cassette tapes, audio cassette tapes as storage. And they would print the 1s and 0s on that magnetic tape and it was, as you would imagine, enormously slow to write and even more enormously slow to read because there was no random access. You would have to rewind the tape to get your data back. [laughs]

**John:** Obviously there was something digital, but you could hear it when it was loading it in, too. So, there would usually be three loud audio beeps to signify this is the start of a program. And then you could actually sort of hear it loading in. It was like Morse Code; it was a very manual process. But when we first got our Atari 800, I remember setting it up and they connect to TVs.

Like, Stuart had no idea that computers used to connect to TVs.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** But you connected it to the TV, and we typed in a program from I think Analog Magazine, or something like that. And so it was full of like Peeks and Pokes. And then it would generate these colored lights that moved around the screen. It was like, wow, this is great. But we didn’t have the tape drive yet. And so when you turned off the computer, that program went away.

**Craig:** It was gone.

**John:** You would never see that program again. So, like, we left it on for a couple of hours, and then like we can’t just leave the TV on all night.

**Craig:** Right. It was gone. There was no storage at all. Yeah, it’s a funny thing how tactile computing used to be. Even the floppy disks, nerds like you and me, we knew, we were like in this little secret brotherhood that knew that you could buy dual-sided floppy disks for a certain amount of money, but single-sided were cheaper. But single-side disks, obviously they were two-dimensional. There was another side to them. So all you would have to do is take a hole punch and punch a little notch on the other side of the thing so that the disk drive knew that there was a readable disk there, and you just flip it over.

And so everything was very tactile. You were really holding and touching things. All the controlling, cards, and the floppies. And you would push down on the lever to make the head push down to the circle in the middle of the floppy disk. There was something great about it. I loved it.

**John:** It was very mechanical.

**Craig:** Yeah. Beautiful.

**John:** That’s one cool thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s one cool thing.

**John:** Craig, thank you for this nostalgic trip.

**Craig:** Yeah, I hope that whoever this guy is, he gets up to a full marathon now with us.

**John:** Absolutely. This was a full hour so this will give him a fair amount of a workout.

**Craig:** It’s a good walk.

**John:** Thanks, Craig. I’ll talk to you next week.

**Craig:** You got it.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. How are you, Craig?

Craig: Doing fine over here. Getting ready to… [laughs] — It’s four o’clock in the afternoon and I’m getting ready to start.

John: Oh, that’s good.

Craig: Yeah.

John: It’s 7 o’clock in the evening here. It’s still light out. But my work is done for the day. We were working from 10 to 6, and so I got to walk home and stop at the grocery store on the way. It is all very New York and civilized.

Craig: I envy you. I get to work on what I am working on and then I also have to help my son with his science fair project.

John: Always good.

Now, I have specific ideas about science fair projects, and so let me see if we are in the same mind space about what a science fair project is: A science fair project is not, “Hey, I looked something up on Wikipedia and here is what I looked up on Wikipedia.” A science fair project… — Science involves a hypothesis and an experiment and results.

Craig: Correct.

John: If there are not those things, it’s not a science fair project, people.

Craig: You have to start with your problem, then your hypothesis, then your results — your procedure, your results, and your conclusion. There must be an experiment with recorded data, otherwise it is not a science fair project, it is just a science fair report.

John: Yeah. It’s a diorama of some kind.

Craig: Yeah. Totally agree with you on that one. This year Jack and I did an experiment about viscosity. And we made a homemade viscometer. And watched — literally [laughs] — watched molasses slowly drain out of a container into another container for 35 minutes. It was pretty good.

John: That sounds pretty amazing.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Now, of course you got into the complicated calculus behind one container emptying and sort of how that all worked, right?

Craig: Well there is a start line and stop line. So we have a… — We sort of approximated a constant volume. But we did heat the liquid, then we did it, and we checked their temperature, and then we heated them and did it again to see the difference that heat creates on viscosity. And, I’m sorry to say, we did not report any findings contrary to the natural laws of science.

John: Oh, but wouldn’t it be awesome if you did?

Craig: It would have been pretty exciting if we had discovered something new. We didn’t as it turns out.

John: You were confirming previous observations, and that is an important part of science, too.

Craig: Yeah. We like to call it “standing on the shoulders of giants.”

John: Yeah, that’s good.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Today, Craig, I thought we might talk about something that we are both involved in right now which is, it is not just that you have written the script, but now the script is going to a stage where it is entering production. And there are decisions being made about what stays, and what goes, and a lot of times you are generating new pages, you are generating a lot of new material.

And you have become not just a screenwriter, but you have also become the script department.

Craig: Yeah.

John: You are the person who is responsible for the screenplay that is in front of people’s eyes. And if the pages are changing in there, you are the person who is responsible for making sure the right pages are going into the script and not going into the script.

So I thought we would talk about that, because it is not just a produced/published “big screenwriter” kind of problem; even if you are making like an indie film with three friends, if the script is going through changes, you are responsible for making sure that everyone is shooting the same script, and that literally everybody is on the same page. So I thought we would talk about that.

Craig: It’s a great topic because it is one of the areas where screenwriters can actually screw up production in a massive way, or rescue it and be good caretakers of the production. And the other nice thing about this topic is that unlike so many screenwriting topics, this one isn’t gray, or ambiguous, or a question of taste. There is a best practices way to go about this. And we should walk through everything that is involved in script management for production.

John: Great. So, at a certain point, a screenplay becomes not just, “Okay, I’m printing out a whole new thing, or sending over a whole new PDF that someone is going to read over the weekend and you are going to talk about things.” At some point you say, “This is the script.”

Craig: Right.

John: “This is the production script. This is what we are going to base everything off of.” And at that point, the script is locked. And it will be a mutual decision based on the people involved, like when you are going to lock the script. So the producer, and the director, and the AD will also say, and you will say, “Okay, I think we are locked.”

And from that point forward, if you are in Final Draft you go to “Lock Pages.” There is an equivalent thing in Movie Magic. If you are trying to do it in some other way, just God bless you, it’s harder.

Craig: No. There’s only one way to do it. Yeah. There is one way.

The first draft of the production is the one that they base their initial schedule off of. And everybody, like you said, everybody sort of agrees, “Okay, this is the one.” That is called the “White Draft.” Everything is by color from this point forward, and the first color is white.

And you lock the pages, and you also… — Typically the AD will then number the scenes. And at this point they may say to you, “Hey, you know how in one scene where you had a slug line ‘Interior – Mall,’ you had three things as time passing, each one of those we really would like to call a scene,” because production manages scenes by numbers, not by page.

So he might make those into slug lines, but at that point they number everything. The scene numbers never change. They are locked into place. And the page breaks, in theory, don’t change. They are also locked into place.

John: So, you and the AD will… — Basically the AD will come with the script and say, and number the script, and may actually just write hand numbers on the sides of things. You will go into Final Draft or Movie Magic and you apply those scene numbers to the individual scenes. And everyone will agree on what those scene numbers are, because your scene numbers need to match what their schedule says.

Craig: Correct.

John: And this is very, very important. At the same time that they are sending this through, you should also ask for a copy of whatever the schedule is, whatever the breakdown is that they are working on, just to make sure that you are agreeing on what you are calling things. Like are you calling this “the restaurant,” or are you calling this “the diner,” because that can lead to confusion, too.

And in the schedule, oftentimes, there is a one line synopsis of what happens in the scene. You, as the screenwriter, are probably better than the AD at describing what happens in that scene. And you might volunteer to change that if that is the kind of relationship that you have.

Craig: I have never bothered doing it, only because I feel like it would just take up so much time. It would take a lot of my time. And in the end, it is really just for their internal use, you know.

John: Here is the reason why I do it on some projects, especially projects that I know I am going to be around a lot is sometimes the actor or the director will see what is coming up later in the week and go, “Oh, I’m not ready for that,” but they are not really understanding what is happening in the scene.

Craig: Hmm.

John: So like the AD will have written something that says, like, “Jack confronts Karen about something.” That is not really what the scene is about. And, so, they are in this head space of like, “Oh, this is that big moment,” but actually they are confusing one scene with another scene. I find it helpful to do that, but I am also kind of anal retentive.

Craig: Yeah. That goes above and beyond the normal call of duty.

John: So, let’s go back to the actual screenplay then. In a feature it is 120 pages. In a TV pilot it is going to be fewer pages than that. If you are doing a regular TV show, an episode of a TV show, there is a whole separate person and department whose responsibility is giving those pages out to people, so we are sort of not talking about that.

In features, or in a Broadway musical, you generally are that whole department. And so you are responsible for making sure that stuff is matching up.

Craig: Yeah. Sometimes there is a script coordinator who is different than the script supervisor. And the script coordinator is somebody on staff who manages the script processing, distribution, and changes, and so forth. And as a screenwriter, it is important for you to work with that person to make sure that everybody is a good partner about this sort of thing. Because ultimately their job is on the line if there is a mistake.

John: Exactly. So, that script coordinator would often be part of the production office staff.

Craig: Correct.

John: And so it is a bridge between sort of you as one of the creative people and the back office staff, and who is also talking to people on set.

So you have your script. It is the “White” script that has now scene numbers applied to it. And from that point forward the pages are locked, which means that if you are adding something to a scene that would cause it to generate — would case pages to move after that… — It is hard to describe…I’m using my hands a lot which is really helpful in a podcast.

Craig: [laughs]

John: If you were adding something into a scene, like let’s say you are adding three new lines of dialogue, those can potentially push everything else in the script later. So, instead it is going to kick and create an A or a B page. So, if you are on page 99, and you need to add half a page to it, that half page will automatically break and form page 99A.

Craig: Yeah. The idea here is everybody on the production gets a printed out white draft. They all have it in their binders. Everybody needs one because they all need to know… — I mean, everybody looks at a script in a different way. Grips look at it one way, and camera looks at it in a different way, and obviously wardrobe, but everybody needs the whole script.

Every time you make… — If you make a change on page 1 to your script that adds five lines, that is going to change every page break over the course of the script, which would mean you would have to hand out 300 more scripts. It’s insane. You don’t want to do that.

All you want to really do is hand people the pages that changed. So, the way we do that is we lock all the page breaks. And then if on page 1 you need to add half a page, Final Draft and Movie Magic will automatically insert a new page between 1 and 2 called 1A. And it will proceed along — 1B, 1C — so that pages 2 through 120 don’t change. And this way… — And everything is by Revision Draft.

So, you have got your white thing. You have locked that up. Now you need, they call you up and they say, “We need changes to the first scene.” You write those changes and those changes will be “Blue” pages. Everybody roughly goes in the same order of color. And then you…

John: But you should ask the first AD or line producer, or whoever seems to be the person who makes those decisions what color schedule we are going to go through.

Craig: Yeah. Get the color schedule. I mean, usually the studios have a set thing. And then so you make your changes. Every change is an asterisk which is automatic in Final Draft or Movie Magic, and when you are in revision mode, so they can see what exactly changed on the page.

And then, when you are done with that, and everybody agrees that it should be released and distributed to crew, the office will print out just the changed pages on blue paper. So what they will get if you change, if you just added a half a page to page 1, they would get a new page 1, and a page 1A, and asterisks showing what changed.

And same thing, by the way, when you take out. If I take out everything on page 3 through 6, what will happen is everybody will get a new changed page that says “Page 3-6” and then the scenes that were omitted. And we should probably talk about what happens when you omit a scene.

John: Yeah. The best practices for omitting a scene is basically instead of where the Interior/Exterior scene header is, you have the word “Omit” and you keep the scene number there. So it is clear to everyone that that scene has been omitted.

If you are omitting a lot of scenes, sometimes you will just do a dash/hyphen to show all of these scenes were omitted and that this happened.

Craig: Right. A range of scenes, yeah.

John: A range of scenes. Because often what happens, let’s say you have a sequence, and you decide to move that sequence later on in the script. What you are basically going to do is delete that sequence out of where it was. So that whole range would be deleted. It would be omitted; “omit” is usually what you use.

And then you are going to be generating new pages to stick it into where it properly fits in the script now.

Craig: That’s right. And the other reason we use omit is just like we need to keep the page count from flowing, expanding, and contracting as we make changes; we need the scene numbers to always stay rigid as well. Scene 15 will always be Scene 15. And Scene 17 will always be Scene 17. If you take out Scene 16, everything else has to stay where it is. So it is best to just keep that placeholder there — Scene 16, Omit.

And on Final Draft and Movie Magic, you can also use… — The proper way to do it is not to delete and then change the slug line to say, “Omit,” but to actually use the Omit Scene tool, because it will retain all of the stuff that you wrote. It will just hide it and just keep a little thing that says, “Omit.” So you can always bring it back.

John: Yeah. I have never done that. But, if a software tool exists to do that, use it. A lot of times I won’t end up doing that, but that is probably best practices.

Craig: Yes.

John: What I will say is you always have to think of the person who is going to be receiving these pages. And, so, a lot of times you are going to be generating maybe 12 pages at a time. And you, as the screenwriter, are responsible. You print them out. You look at them with your actual script, with the script that they should have, and make sure that they actually make sense in there, so that they flip them through and say, “Okay, if I took out this page and I insert this page, will it make sense in every person’s script?”

I always generate a new title page with those that says the date, the color of the revisions — the color and the date of the revisions so it is clear. I also almost always put a memo on the top of a set of revisions that says, “To whatever production team, from me — these are the actual page numbers that have changed.” And a quick description of why, basically what is different about them.

So a person who picks this up, their packet of pages, he is like, “Oh okay, this is to move this sequence to here, this does that, this affects these things.” I like to put the list of what pages have changed so they can actually flip through it and make sure that they have got all the right pages.

Craig: I don’t do that. I usually, because I am almost always doing these pages in concert with the director, when I send the file I will write that sort of — if I feel the need — write that summary for the director and the producer who are getting it directly. Ultimately, I think, the crew — my suspicion is they just want their pages to put in their book, and then the asterisks will theoretically guide the way.

And it is really up to the… — I actually don’t like getting in the way. I don’t like talking to the crew directly. I feel like I would rather have the director do that. That is my whole thing.

John: I love talking to the crew directly, and it is one of my few opportunities to do so.

Craig: That is true. That is true.

John: So, and the other thing in defense of the top page memo is sometimes it gets complicated. There are times where… — On Charlie and the Chocolate Factory this happened in a couple of places, where we would go through a sequence, so from page 90 to 100, went through it like three times. So there were times when it went to A and B pages, or it went to AA pages. The page numbering got strange.

So on the cover page I could say, “This range, this should be the sequence.” And I would list “99 White,” “99A Blue,” just so people could actually understand, “Okay, I’ve got my script together right.” So once they put all of their pages in they could see, “Oh okay, I did the right thing. This does reflect how the script should be.”

Craig: Right. And that is an important thing to kind of get on the same base with production with your AD, because they all have different numbering schemes, but it is a good thing to raise. If you have page 1 and page 1A, and you need to stick something between page 1 and page 1A, a lot of times it is page A1. But, everybody has a different way of doing that, and similarly with scene numbers, people have a different way of doing that because lettering scene number is fine — that is the normal move.

Let’s say I want to put a scene between 15 and 16, it is going to be scene 15A. But it is also important to remember that when they are shooting, each scene number is on the slate. And then there are also additional letters that are added to describe the shot of that scene. So, the master shot is Shot A. And then a single on Jim is Shot B. So there are a lot of letters all of a sudden.

So, some guys, a lot of times I have noticed this is a foreign thing. They like the scene letter to go first…

John: Letter to go first.

Craig: …So instead of 15A it would be A15.

John: I think it is a really good practice. And so ask your AD how they want to do it. I think it makes a lot of sense. And so between Scene 15 and Scene 16 would be A16.

Craig: Well that depends.

John: That depends. So make sure to check how they are going to do it.

Craig: Exactly. And you can force, you know, Movie Magic or Final Draft to do it whichever way you want. But, here is an important thing to keep in mind. This is a basic workflow of how I do this when I am doing revisions.

I have my White draft. Now it is time to do revisions. The first thing I do is I save the white draft as blue draft. So the white draft is now pristine, untouched, over there. Now I have a blue draft that I can do anything to it I want.

John: Yeah.

Craig: When I start, the first thing I do is I go into Revision Mode. I make sure I am in the proper color revision of blue, because I like to keep all my labels, and keep track of what is what. I make sure Auto Revision works are turned on, and now I start making my changes. If I delete scenes, I make sure to omit them. If I add scenes, I just add them. I don’t worry about the numbers just yet, because I may take it out.

Remember, when you are revising, the stuff you are revising is sort of free. You can take it in and out and not be penalized. Once you keep it there, that is when the changes happen.

So, I go through all of that. I’m done. Next thing I do is I scene number the new scenes to fit properly. And Final Draft kind of automatically does it. Make sure that you select “Keep Current Scene Numbers Fixed” so that you don’t mess that up. You don’t want to renumber everything. That is a disaster.

John: Oh god. That is why you save first.

Craig: Correct. Now I have got that file. I save it. Okay, terrific. I send it off. Everyone is happy.

Then they call me up and say, “We want to change another scene and we need…”

John: Here is where you skipped a crucial step.

Craig: Oh, I did?

John: You are not sending them the Final Draft file. You are sending them a PDF generated from Final Draft.

Craig: Oh, no, that’s not true.

John: You are actually sending them the Final Draft file?

Craig: Absolutely. I am sending the Final Draft file.

John: Oh my god, I never send them Final Draft. But tell me your process.

Craig: Here is why. — It depends. If I am working with a director closely, and I almost often am, who is proficient with this, or at the office, and also for an AD, I like to send the Final Draft file because the truth of the matter is sometimes as they are rushing to get pages out, let’s say I send these off at 5 o’clock. They have to get these pages out for the next day’s shooting.

If they catch a typo or something, I want them to have the freedom to fix that while I am sleeping. If the AD says, “Oh, no, no, I actually don’t want this to be a slug line; I want it to be an action line here,” I want him to have the freedom to do that. It is a production tool.

Obviously I don’t want them changing my work, but I don’t work with people that change my work like that. They never do. Everybody is respectful.

When I am sending initial drafts to studios and things like that it’s a different story. But once I am deep into production, I feel like unless I am working with people I don’t trust, and I have been lucky enough I guess that I haven’t had that problem, I send the Final Draft file, or the Movie Magic file.

John: It’s a matter of how comfortable you are with that. I just feel like most of the people I have worked with, it’s not a matter of trust. I don’t think they are going to do something bad. They are not going to do something evil or wrong, or try to change words that they shouldn’t. I just think they are going to make a mistake, and I don’t want them to be able to make a mistake.

So, a PDF, they are not going to make a mistake.

Craig: That’s true. That is true.

John: They are going to print it.

Craig: You have to kind of gauge, I guess. There you go. You have a slightly different style.

Alright. So, we have sent my blue pages off. They have distributed them to the crew. And then they call and say, “We want to make a change to this other scene,” and it is time for pink pages. So, what do I do?

I open up my blue draft, I “Save As” pink draft. The next thing I do is… — So the blue draft is pristine and saved forever on its own. I am now working in a pink draft. I do Select All, Clear All Revision Marks. Because you don’t want to show the old revision marks. Those pages already got handed out. You don’t want to re-hand them out again.

John: Now Craig, this is a different workflow thing. Final Draft can only show the current set of revisions. So, I have more faith in Final Draft more recently than I will… — I will always save a file, just so I can have a clean saved file, but I will just add a new revision, which would be pink, and I will say, “Show only current revision,” and it will hide all of the previous revisions, and only show the new stuff that I do.

Craig: That is an option. I just, my quirk is that I like to know that each file just has its own revisions. So that if I need to go through and say, well somebody says, “Well wait — was that changed in blue or pink on this day or this day?” Then I just open that file. It is really up to you. I mean, either way we end up with the same work.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And then you start again, and you do it again, and you will start to discover things. By the way, not a bad idea to play around with a sample script to see how this all works. But you will notice, for instance, if you…

John: I’m sorry. But a great idea is to start doing it before you absolutely have to do it, because the first time you are figuring out how to use these tools is when you have a script that is shooting in a week, you could be panic-induced, and you could make mistakes.

Craig: Oh yeah. And if you incorrectly change page breaks or scene numbers, it is a disaster. It is an actual disaster because if you spend time on a set what you will notice first thing off is that the scene number drives everything. The crew never talks about locations. They talk about scenes.

They will say to you something like, they might walk up to you and say, “Hey, just a quick question — in Scene 78 you said that you were talking about a truck. Is it a truck? What kind of truck?” And you will immediately say, “I have no idea what Scene 78 is.” And you don’t. But they do.

And you don’t have to know. You can look at your script, but everything is scene number. If you mess those scene numbers up, oh boy.

John: Boy.

Craig: Bad.

John: Yeah. Then you are spending an hour or two going back through and going back to the hard copy. And that is why I love to have a PDF that I can say, “Okay, this is what this was. This is what this set of revisions was,” so you can sort of backtrack through. But that is me.

Craig: Well, yeah. I mean, I can backtrack through my Final Draft files. But, you will notice as you work with the drafts that things happen that make sense. For instance, Page 80-86, all of those scenes, everybody decided we just don’t need that in this movie. So, you omit all of those scenes. And what the program will do is issue one changed page. And on that changed page, the page range will be 80-86. And then on it it will just say Scenes 113-121 Omitted.

And so everybody gets them and they go, “Okay, I am taking all of these pages form my current script, and replacing them with this one delete page.”

John: Yup.

Craig: So you learn. You learn how it works.

John: The other thing I will tell you from experience is sometimes as you get through complicated situations where you start having A and B pages, and you start to have one-eighth of a page on a page, and you realize this is not good — what I will often do is go through and copy, and basically cut and paste all of those things together onto a new page that can replace all of those other pages.

So, instead of having…

Craig: Right.

John: …if it ended up being on-eighth of a page on a couple different things in a row, get those all down to one page and create one new page that replaces all those other pages.

Craig: Exactly.

John: It makes your life happier. And it is a little scary to do, and that is why you “Save As” and make sure it works before you try to do it, but that can make life a lot easier, especially when you are trying to do sides for actors and stuff, that you have enough on a page that it really makes sense.

Craig: Right. Yeah. The concept there is when you lop out three-quarters of a page in a locked script, it is not going to pull all the pages up again. It is just going to leave blank space on the page. Well you might have five pages in a row that just have, like John is saying, little bits. And so you may want to copy and paste them all into one page.

And what he is saying about sides is important. “Sides” is the production term for the script pages that are handed out at the beginning of every production day to everyone, the crew, the actors, the director. They are little tiny pages, I don’t know the exact measurement, but they are mini-pages.

John: Well, they are a quarter of an 8.5 x 11 sheet. So, if you fold an 8.5 x 11 sheet twice, it is that size.

Craig: That size. Okay.

John: Ah, it’s…that’s fine.

Craig: Yeah, they are bigger than that.

John: Yeah. They are a little bit bigger than that. They are.

Craig: Yeah. So they are like little mini-pages. And they have the script printed in kind of tiny words. And it is your script pages. And what they will do is they will put Xs, big marker Xs through the stuff that they are not shooting that day. They are just about the stuff they are shooting.

And if over the course of eight pages, there is really one page of material, that actually is kind of annoying to constantly be flipping through sides to see what your next line is. So, that is a good theory to sort of collapse that down if it is getting really quadricated. Polyfurcated.

John: Yeah. I like that you make these new words.

Craig: Polyfurcated should be a word.

John: It totally should be a word. We are making it now.

Craig: Yeah. Polyfurcated. Oh, and then there is this other thing that happens where — and this tends to occur very early on. You lock the white draft. Everybody does the budget and schedule, and then the writer and the director sit down and make like 50 changes. And they are all tiny little changes because of what is happening in production.

Well, the location actually is now really more like a bar that is next to the hotel instead of inside the hotel. A lot of little stupid, tiny little changes, but suddenly you have 50 pages that have an asterisk on them.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So what they will say then is everybody will get together and decide, “You know what, with this many changed pages, unlock the pages…”

John: New white.

Craig: No, not new white. “Issue a blue draft.”

John: Oh, that’s true.

Craig: Exactly. So, we will say, “Okay, for this one we are going to unlock the pages so that we don’t have a gazillion little pages, and we are just going to issue a whole new script to everybody that is all blue. And then from there we will lock the pages again.”

But the scene numbers never change.

John: Scene numbers never change.

Craig: Never. Never. Never.

John: I should also say, what I am doing right now is essentially like being in production. And there are cases where you are trying to reflect what was actually done versus what you are planning to shoot.

So, sometimes during rehearsal, and movies sometimes have rehearsal, too, you will see some changes that sort of come up along the way. And it is a good idea if you can to reflect what you are actually going to do. So, if something comes up during rehearsal for your thing, during preproduction, like location changes for your movie. As you are debating, “Oh, should I actually change it in the script, or will we remember that. Like it says gas station, but now it is at a rest area. Should I really make that change?”

Yes. You should really make that change.

Craig: Always. Always.

John: Otherwise people are going to get confused down the road, or, you have to think down the road. Because it may be three months before they are shooting that thing. People are going to say, “What happened here; what changed?”

Craig: Right.

John: Now you won’t necessarily… — You are not responsible for, usually as a screenwriter, responsible for the small little blocking things they did differently, or like you actually had the actor enter two lines later. For movies, you are not going to worry about that. For musicals, you do worry about that. For the movie, you may not really worry about that kind of continuity.

Craig: No. I mean, the stuff on the day is on the day. And you don’t have to change the script to reflect that. But in advance of the script, yes; things like locations, and anything really that you think people should know about has to go in the script. They will follow that script very, very closely. And the one sort of judgment call that sometimes you have to make is whether or not to, if you are changing a scene location should you delete and then create a new scene number. Usually I don’t.

Usually if the bulk of the scene is the same, I will keep the scene and just change the slug line.

John: Yeah. And, again, that is a conversation with your AD…

Craig: Correct.

John: …and figure out what style is going to make sense, because they are the person who is responsible for the schedule and figuring out everything else, how stuff is going to work.

Craig: Correctamundo.

John: What is dispiriting about being a screenwriter, well it is exciting to be in production. It is like seeing that all of these that were potential are actually finished. The minute they are done with a scene, everyone will sort of — they will throw away their sides and they will hope to never look at that scene again.

Craig: Right.

John: No one will think about that scene again. It will be done, and it will move on. And the script becomes not especially important the minute… — One minute after it is shot, the script is kind of forgotten.

Craig: I know. I love that.

John: Yes and no. Sometimes I get a little bit sad when I go into the editing room and I see, like, “Oh, they assembled the scene based on what was shot, but it is actually…” I don’t know. There is no recognition that, like, oh, it was actually…

Craig: Well, but you know, listen. Good editors always have that big script book with them with all of the script supervisor’s reports. And they do… — I mean, good editors will look back to the script.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I mean, they should at least. Although it is a tricky thing because ultimately they also know that the director sometimes has deviated and their first responsibility is to the director. But I would…

John: I would say the first responsibility should always be towards the movie…

Craig: Well, that is not the way it works with editors.

John: Ah, yes. But you can be a little bit sad. Although I will say some of the new editing programs, I think Avid does this now; they have a thing where you can actually load the script in and it can do voice recognition to match up lines in takes with the actually shooting script.

Craig: Oh really?

John: Which is pretty amazing.

Craig: That’s pretty cool.

John: It is great for documentaries with a transcript; it is fantastic for that, too. But it won’t be long before many shows, you can sort of like look at a script and sort of pick your favorite takes from things that have it auto-assemble.

Craig: Oh my god. That would be so cool.

John: It would pretty cool.

Craig: Finally we can get rid of editors because, you know. I mean, ultimately it is just going to come down to screenwriters and teams of robots.

John: Yeah, will actors will be the first thing we have.

Craig: No. The actors are going to ultimately…we are just going to scan them.

John: Totally.

Craig: And robots.

John: Robots. All robots. Factory.

Craig: Robots. Yeah, like a factory. Exactly.

But that is a pretty good tutorial on how this all works, I think.

John: Yeah. Yeah. You are responsible for making sure that the script you wrote can be shot by the people who need to shoot the movie. And sometimes that is you; sometimes you are the writer-director, you are going to make revisions. Sometimes it is other people. And sometimes you are not going to be all that crazily involved.

In the animated things I have done, I have always sort of gotten them to the white draft, but then it sort of just kind of goes away. And they have their own weird numbering systems, and it really becomes much about their boards and everything else.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Sometimes you give it up and go to God, and that is fine, too.

Craig: Yeah. But in live action, this is really a chance for you to channel your inner — how would I describe…? I just remember being in third grade and there was as certain kind of girl that her penmanship was excellent, and her sense of scheduling and paperwork was really good, whereas I was a disaster, you know.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Find that girl inside of you, because you need to be really fastidious about this kind of thing.

John: Yeah.

Craig: If you blow it, they will come find you. And my whole thing is, please, as a screenwriter, don’t embarrass us; don’t embarrass the rest of us by not knowing what you are doing.

John: Yeah. One last tip I will share, which is something I learned from this project, is… — First of all, binders are just amazing. And I was always a person who printed scripts and had the little brads in them, or I would print the two pages side by side for my little reading purposes. But the best thing about printing out full size with three holes and putting it in a binder is as you are going through scenes, if here is something you need to fix on a page, I put a red, plastic Post-it flag at the top.

If there is a note I have to talk to the director about, or to talk to an actor about, I use a yellow Post-it tab over on the right hand side. And so then every day as I need to sit down to do changes and do work, I can look at all the red tabs across the top and those are the pages I need to fix.

And I go through, and as I take care of one I take the Post-it flag off. If it is a note I have for an actor or for a director, I can see it there, and when it is done I can take it off. It has been really helpful.

Craig: I just use the internal Script Note function on Final Draft and Movie Magic.

John: Oh, I hate those.

Craig: You don’t like those?

John: I hate them.

Craig: Oh, I love them.

John: I’m such a digital person, but I really don’t like the internal…

Craig: You know…

John: …besides, it is a very physical process for me. I very much want to have my book open and be able to talk to people.

Craig: Listen, grandma, here is the deal: you are not that digital. You write your scripts on legal pads.

John: I do.

Craig: Yeah. You write your scripts on legal pads while you sit in your steam-powered tugboat. I know for a fact you use an abacus.

John: Often. Only.

Craig: You use a Charles Babbage machine to record this podcast.

John: Yeah. I just think it adds a certain authenticity.

Craig: [laughs]

John: Stuart has to do a lot of careful audio suppression to get around the click-click-clacking of it all. But it really does help a lot.

Craig: Correct. And then the rest of his time he spends carefully greasing the gears.

John: Well, and I do ride to work on my old tiny bike with the giant front wheel.

Craig: That’s right. I have seen you.

John: I don’t believe in steam irons. I think a proper iron is heated on the stove, and when it is nice and hot you pick it up with a rag and you rub it over.

Craig: Oh, you have rags now?

John: I have rags… — Well, basically it is the stuff on the washing board.

Craig: Got it.

John: When it has gotten too thin to really be worn anymore, that is what I do.

Craig: Exactly. Don’t give us this whole, “I’m a digital guy thing.” I’m a digital guy.

John: Although I will say one digital thing I am involved with, which very much pertains to this, we just released our new Bronson Watermarker 1.5.

Craig: That’s right. Very good.

John: And I developed Bronson for exactly the production I am working on right now, because the producers required that we watermark every script that went out. So we have like 40 things that need to get sent out.

And when you try to watermark things one by one, it was a giant pain in the ass. So we made this app that can watermark. You can give it a list of names, and it generates all the PDFs all at once.

We did have to decide at a certain point when are we going to stop watermarking, because are we going to watermark every revision that comes out? Because that means that we can’t actually go to the photocopier. We actually have to print.

And so we decided that revisions along the way are not going to get watermarked. But, today we realized that more than half of the script is no longer watermarked because of so many revisions.

Craig: Well then that is a chance for you to maybe issue a whole new script that is watermarked.

John: We could.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Ah, see! It’s intriguing.

Craig: Yup, think about that one.

John: The other tip I will add, just to talk about my physical notebooks, and people who like things on paper. If you are putting stuff in a binder, the other great thing that Post-it, it’s actually not Post-it, but you can get them at Office Depot and places like that, are these adhesive folder labels. And you use those for sequences.

And so if you were doing a musical, you would have one of those little tabs for song, but if you were doing a normal script you would have one for each sort of sequence, like a big action sequence, or sort of a new chunk of your script. And it makes it so lovely to be able to flip through to, “Oh, let’s talk about this section. Let’s talk about this section.” I highly recommend it.

Craig: Feh.

John: Feh?

Craig: Feh. [laughs]

John: They work so much better than like normal dividers that would go into a three-ring binder, because they actually adhere to the page, so you don’t have extra stuff to flip.

Craig: I don’t print. I print my scripts when I do a revision, you know, when I am going through with pen. And that is it. The next time I see my printed script is at a table read. And then from there on, the only printed stuff I see are sides on the set. I don’t do all of this binder…

John: Yeah. I’m a binder man now. I can’t get past it.

Craig: Alright.

John: To the point where we actually printed out all of my sort of current, and sort of semi-archival scripts, and have them in binders now on the shelf there. And it’s so good — I will have a question on something, I will pick it up off the shelf. It is printed here.

Craig: Oh my god. What a hive of busy work your office is. Poor Stuart. Sitting there color tabbing scripts from 1993 going, “What is going on?! I have an MBA.”

John: An MFA.

Craig: “I have an MFA.”

John: The arts.

Craig: “I have an MFA. I am a Master of Fine Arts!’

John: Yeah.

Craig: Stuart. Come on, Stuart. You love it. You love the color tabs.

John: [laughs]

Craig: Stuart, if you came and worked for me, nothing would happen. You wouldn’t even have to go to work.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah. The easiest job.

John: Maybe he could watch all the TV shows and the movies that you don’t watch.

Craig: He could just fill me in every morning. Call me up and… — It’s like TV Guide when they used to have those little synopses. That is where “Wackiness ensues” came from.

John: I like that. One of Stuart’s functions is he goes through and checks like a lot of the blogs I would look at, but also a lot of blogs I wouldn’t look at, because he looks at other blogs, and sort of puts up a list of articles of possible blog interest which has been so helpful, so like things that I might want to blog about. He has little links there for me.

Craig: Wow.

John: He is a curator for me.

Craig: He really is. [laughs] He is a curator. It’s amazing. I don’t have that. But I don’t need curation.

John: No. Yeah, you are already perfect, so…

Craig: No, you know what it is? Honestly, I really do, while you are watching Glam and Smash, are those shows? I just made them up. [laughs]

John: Glee and Smash, yes.

Craig: When you are watching Glee and Smash, I am just spidering my way through the Internet like a Web-bot, just following links, and reading.

One of my favorite sites is Fark.com.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: It’s great.

John: That’s curated, yeah.

Craig: But I also love Arts and Letters Daily. I don’t know if you read that one. aldaily.com.

John: No, but I will.

Craig: Arts and Letters Daily. Great thing to promote on the podcast. Each day they have links to three things, usually an essay, a review, and some kind of article. And they are always from really interesting and very literate sources. Online magazines you would never otherwise even know existed. Drama periodicals. Policy journals. City Journal. It’s a really great thing.

It’s like incredibly smart people writing about really interesting things, and completely off the beaten path of mainstream Internet. And I go there every day. It’s fantastic.

John: My last closing thing I love that I will rave about, which I am reading on Kindle right now, is The Great Big Book of Horrible Things. I don’t know if you have heard about this. It is billed as The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities.

So, it is military history, largely. It is basically all of the wars that killed millions of people throughout history.

Craig: Right.

John: And there’s a lot of them, man.

Craig: Yeah.

John: People are kind of terrible to each other quite frequently.

Craig: And they have been sort of increasingly less so; even though we think the world is getting worse, it is actually getting better.

John: Yeah. The tradeoff though is that we have the capacity to kill a lot more people at once.

Craig: Right.

John: So before, it was hard to kill a bunch of people with swords. We did it, but it was really hard to do. And then we developed newer ways to do a lot of those things.

What is fascinating is we always think about sort of the despot or the tyrant who killed a bunch of people, and there are certainly, there are the Attila the Huns who are tremendously successful at killing a bunch of people. But it tends to be the situations where governmental structures fall apart. It is where there is a power vacuum ended up being much more dangerous for people, because then it was a bunch of different groups all fighting each other and it wouldn’t stop for like 100 years.

Craig: I think Mao still is the winner. He gets the medal, right, for killing the most people?

John: I haven’t seen… — I didn’t cheat. So I didn’t look through to figure out who the winners are. So I am actually going through. It’s a long…

Craig: I bet you the Great Leap Forward is way high up the list.

John: It’s got to be.

Craig: And then the Writer’s Strike of 2007 is probably…my guess is that is like number 4 or 5.

John: [laughs] What is so fascinating, as I pull this up on Amazon, because I want to say how many pages it is. Because I am looking at it on a Kindle, and I know it is super long, but I didn’t have a good sense of how long it was. 668 pages.

Craig: Oh man! They should have just trimmed two pages and been cool.

John: Yeah. But that is the other weird thing about Kindle books is I have no idea how long they are.

Craig: I know. It’s weird. I wish that they would fix that.

John: Yeah. So Justin Cronin wrote this book called The Passage. And I started reading it. I was like, “Oh, I’m enjoying this; this is really good. I must be just about through.” And then I pulled up the little counter thing, and I was less than an eighth of the way through. It turns out that book was like 800 pages.

Craig: Yeah, that’s not fair.

John: And it should have been shorter.

Craig: Yeah, we need pages, for sure.

John: Craig, thank you for another productive podcast, speaking of pages, and getting pages.

Craig: Yeah, once Stuart puts little labels on the WAV forms of this thing, we will have this out to the people.

John: The people will love it, I hope.

Craig: They will love it. Awesome. Alright man.

John: Great. Thanks Craig.

Craig: See you on the next one. Bye.