Search Results for: book rights

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/uncomfortable-ambiguity-or-nobody-wants-me-at-their-orgy).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 141 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, how are you?

**Craig:** Not bad, not bad. Turned in a script last week; went really, really well, so that’s good. I get two weeks off now before I start my next thing.

**John:** And what are you going to do with your two weeks?

**Craig:** Well, let me tell you. Job number one for these two weeks is to kind of flush my system out. Like I don’t know about you but as I’m writing something I tend to eat worse and worse.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you know, right afterwards there’s a nice two-week period where I really try and flush my system out. Now, I don’t do any of these crazy — what do they call them, cleanses?

**John:** Yeah, apple juice, lemon peel, little cayenne pepper.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, here’s the story with those. They don’t clean anything. There is absolutely no good science behind that stuff whatsoever. Your liver is super good at cleaning your blood. You don’t need a cleanse to clean anything. You know me. Anytime I see the word toxin or energy, I get all itchy, but I’m just eating much less and I’m doing a lot of reading. So eating less, reading, and catching up on some video games.

**John:** That’s a great idea.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now, Craig, Have you staring playing Hearthstone on the iPad? Do you know what that is?

**Craig:** I don’t know what that is. No.

**John:** So it’s a card game that’s sort of like the Magic: The Gathering, but it’s all the Blizzard universe kind of things and it’s totally addictive. And so I recommend you fall into a deep K-hole and play Hearthstone.

**Craig:** All right. Well, right now, I’m catching up on my console games so I’m playing — I’m just finishing up the Arkham Origins DLC Cold, Cold Heart. And I have already started playing the South Park Game which is awesome.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Love, I mean, the actual game play, eh. The game play actually stinks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But what’s great about it is in addition to all the normal South Park fun stuff, they’re very smartly making fun of some video games that I’m very well familiar with. There’s at one point you’re wandering in an alien ship and you keep finding these little audio logs and as you play them the person who’s recorded the audio logs keeps commenting on how he doesn’t even understand why he’s making audio logs.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And he’s found other people’s audio logs and he keeps listening to their audio logs thinking that he’ll learn something important and he never ever does and he just keeps…but yet he still listens to the audio logs. [laughs] It was a great tweak at BioShock.

**John:** What’s so fascinating about that trope of audio logs is that very rarely do you actually see a character over the course of the narrative recording an audio log and yet there are all these audio logs. So when exactly do they record these?

**Craig:** Right. Like, why are they recording them? I mean, the first audio log was, [laughs], he’s on the ship and he’s just saying, “I don’t know why I’m doing this. The aliens are coming there about to break the door and why am I wasting time recording this, I don’t know.” [laughs] It’s pretty great and then why do they leave them around? Yeah, no, audio logs are absurd. But they also did a really nice job of parodying, in a kind of a very straight way, nearly copying the music from Elder Scrolls.

**John:** That’s nice.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s good stuff.

**John:** Yeah. Those are smart guys, those South Park folks.

**Craig:** They are.

**John:** Today, on the podcast, we are going to talk about Game of Thrones. We’re going to talk about some Bryan Singer situation. And we’re going to talk about the numbers of women employed by the WGA —

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And minorities and older people. We’re going talk about this situation where the woman who wrote The Vampire Diaries is now writing Vampire Diaries fan fiction which seems absurd but it’s actually because of work-for-hire law and it’s just really an odd time that we’re living in.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We’re going to answer a question about craft. We’re going to go through our old One Cool Things. So we have a lot today.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Big show.

**Craig:** Big show, big show.

**John:** First though, follow up. So we have our live show coming up on May 15th. The cocktail party hosted by Aline Brosh McKenna is all sold out, but there are still some tickets left for the show itself.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** So if you’d like to come see —

**Craig:** What?

**John:** I think there are.

**Craig:** I can’t believe it.

**John:** Well, we’re recording on a Thursday. So by the time this podcast airs, we don’t know if there are still tickets but there might still be tickets. But the special news for people who have tickets is we have an extra guest who wasn’t even a part of the original package. Susannah Grant is going to be joining us for the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** And she’s amazing. So she’s the screenwriter of Erin Brockovich, Charlotte’s Web. She’s the director of Catch and Release. She’s awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So she will be up there on stage helping us figure how these three pages could be even better.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s great. I mean, I can’t believe that these tickets haven’t sold out. First of all, let me just reiterate, we are the Jon Bon Jovi of screenwriting podcasts.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So that makes no sense. I’m glad that people bought the cocktail party things.

**John:** Yeah. The expensive ones.

**Craig:** Yeah, and we promise to talk to you guys and not each other at the cocktail party. [laughs] We promise. But, yeah, these other tickets, how much do they cost?

**John:** 20 bucks.

**Craig:** 20 bucks to see David Goyer. 20 bucks to see McFeely and Markus. 20 bucks to see Susannah Grant. I mean, forget us. I mean, how much is those people.

**John:** They’re pretty amazing.

**Craig:** It’s just 20 bucks, yeah.

**John:** It’s just 20 bucks and like you pay $20 for any one of those people, but no, you get them all together as package.

**Craig:** You get them all together as a package and the money goes to the Writers Guild Foundation which is a charitable non-profit organization that supports screenwriters and people who are interested in screenwriting all day long.

**John:** That’s what they do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, they help veterans. They help young people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, for the Three Page Challenge, how are we going to do it? So last week on the podcast I said there would be a special way that people will submit for it. That is up and running as of today. So here is how you submit to it. You go to the same URL you’ve always gone to, johnaugust.com/threepage. When you get there, you’ll see that there’s now a form. And with that form, you will click some boxes and enter your name and information. You’ll click a box that says Attach File and you will attach your script there. It could be Fountain or a PDF. And you will click Submit.

And when you click Submit, it will magically get whisked into the system and the database from which we will call our entrants for just this live Three Page Challenge, the one that we’re actually going to do on May 15th. If the system works well, it’ll become the real system for Three Page Challenges from now forward.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** But we’re just trying it out for this one-time deal.

**Craig:** And if your script is picked, pages are picked, do we let them know ahead of time?

**John:** We will let people know that they’re in the final contention for that. Essentially, if you are going to be submitting under the auspices of this live Three Page Challenge, we’re asking, like, are you going to be there?

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** And so we’re only going to be looking at the ones of people who say they’re going to be there. What’s special about this one event is all of our listeners will get to read those three pages as well. So not only the final ones are picked, the listeners are going to help choose which one is going to be discussed live.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** So for one week starting today, Tuesday through next Tuesday, so starting on Tuesday April 29th through Tuesday May 6th, for that one week you can submit your scripts.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** That next Wednesday, for one week, you can vote on which one of those entrants you really want to see up there on stage. So you can read them both on the site. There’ll be links at johnaugust.com so you can read those samples. And I don’t know if there’s going to be 10 or 20 or 50 but there’s going to be some there.

We’ll also, if we can, put them on Weekend Read, so if you’re on your iPhone, you can read through them on there as well.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** Technology!

**Craig:** Woo!

**John:** While I was talking about Weekend Read, there’s a new update for Weekend Read, so people should update their app if they have it. There’s also an update for Highland. So if you’re on your app store, click on those.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool.

Let’s get to our business at hand. So I love Game of Thrones.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** I’m just a huge fan of not just the show I watch but just the fact that it can exist because it’s so incredibly complicated to make and they do such an amazingly good job. And I watched this last Sunday’s episodes which was really two Sundays ago for people who are listening to the show and the minute I saw this scene I said, “Well, there’s going to be a conversation about this one specific scene.”

**Craig:** Yeah, and I [laughs]…so I was little taken aback by the fact that there was a conversation about it and we’re talking about the scene where —

**John:** We should say, I guess we should say there’s a mild spoiler here but it’s actually not.

**Craig:** No, you know what —

**John:** On the order of spoilers for Game of Thrones this is incredibly minor. This isn’t like a death of a major character.

**Craig:** And it’s two week later, so forget it, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s like keep up or don’t. So Joffrey is dead of course and he’s lying in state so to speak in the Sept…Septum? Septom? Sept?

**John:** I think they call it a Sept.

**Craig:** Yeah, the septum is the thing in your nose.

**John:** And I think is it called Sept because there are seven gods? Is that why it’s called a Sept?

**Craig:** Maybe. Maybe so. I don’t know, but that’s where they are.

So he’s lying there and Cersei, his mom, is there and Jaime Lannister comes in. That’s Cersei’s brother and, of course, Cersei and Jaime incestuous lovers and Joffrey their incestuous son. Everybody else is cleared out of the room and basically Jaime comes on to Cersei and she says no and then he rapes her right there next to the body of their dead incest kid. And I thought, “All right!” you know, like, “Here we go again, Game of Thrones getting sick,” but people really got upset.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they got upset for a bunch of reasons. And I wanted to talk a little bit about it because it kind of ties into I think this interesting phenomenon. It’s a very human thing of what I call narrative directionality.

So some people got upset because they didn’t like the idea that Jaime Lannister raped his sister. Just forget the fact that he was a good guy now as opposed to before. They didn’t like that he raped his sister and I just thought, well, but you were okay with him up to this point when he pushed a kid out a window callously and didn’t even seem to care —

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** When he was going to kill Ned Stark for no good reason. I mean, this is a bad guy.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Oh, oh, and the fact that he had sex with his sister and had an incest baby and then lied about it and knew that his sister was aborting the babies that she’s having with her actual husband. I mean, this is a terrible person by any definition of behavior.

But people really got upset about the rape part. And, you know, my feeling was that what was underlying this was that they were, and in the book it’s not rape. It’s sort of — it turns into like a weird consensual kinky sex bit.

And so they were saying, “Well, in the book it’s not rape but in the show they chose to make it rape so it’s that choice and that’s super bad.” But, you know, again, it’s like, well, forget that there was a choice between the book and the show. The book had Daenerys Targaryen raped repeatedly by her husband that she was forced to marry.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then she started to like it and then she fell in love with him. Nobody had a problem with that either apparently.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But this, they have a problem with it. And I think their problem is this: Jaime Lannister’s character was starting to go through this process where he was seeing things differently and behaving differently in a way that people thought he’s getting better and this fits into a very clean narrative direction. A bad person starts to change their evil ways. And what that moment did was reverse that directionality and say, no, actually, he’s still the same guy that did all that stuff. And people got really angry I think because the narrative turned left on them like that. And for me, I actually kind of think that’s great.

**John:** Yeah, there’s a lot to sort of unpack here. First off, you described it as being rape. And so when I first saw the scene, I’m like, oh, one of the first points of controversy will be was it rape or was it like bad consensual sex. And I think it’s better just to call it rape and just like discuss it as a rape and not just that they’re two really screwed up people and therefore that’s sort of the nature of their relationship.

**Craig:** Oh, no, it was definitely rape.

**John:** Yeah, and it was rape because of specific choices of what she was saying and her trying to push him away and —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So let’s call it rape and like not even sort of open that.

**Craig:** For sure.

**John:** But I would say the first day after the episode aired, that was a lot of the discussion like was it rape, was it not rape. Let’s just call it rape.

About directionality, I want to stick up a little bit for the sense of people’s ownership of the Jaime Lannister character and the arc they believed him to be on. And that’s understandable why you are starting to identify him as being a heroic character rather than a villainous character. And that’s natural. I think it’s okay to feel a little betrayed by him.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And by proxy, this shows creators, because they had given you good reason to believe that he had made a change for the better. He was a crippled man who had learned the errors of his ways, who wanted to do better by his sister/lover and everyone else around him seemed to be doing the right kinds of things. So for him to change course in that moment felt wrong.

**Craig:** Well, you know, it’s not wrong though. I guess —

**John:** No, I’m saying, it felt wrong —

**Craig:** It felt wrong.

**John:** I can understand why it felt wrong to the viewer.

**Craig:** I am with you on the point that I think we’re supposed to feel betrayed and disappointed by him. What I was confused by was the extension of that to Dan and Dave because I thought, frankly, what this show does better than most every other show I’ve seen is repeatedly confound and thwart our desire to see a natural narrative path occur from wherever a character is in a given point in the show. I mean, starting with the beheading of Ned Stark and going onward from there, I mean, there’s a great moment in that episode I believe where The Hound says to Arya, you know, essentially I see the world for what is, how many Starks need to be beheaded before you start.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And it kind of, like to me, that was the theme of the show like, hey, this is the way — we don’t — this isn’t the kind of show where somebody who casually murders children and then quips about it as they’re falling to their, what should have been their death, that person doesn’t have some mid-life, good golly, I’m going to be a sweetheart kind of changeup. No, he’s a bad person.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And bad people have moments, but, you know.

**John:** Yeah, I agree with you that the moments between Arya and The Hound and sort of their — to the beats of their storyline in that episode were basically you were a fool for thinking that I changed. I didn’t change. I’m going to steal this guy’s money and keep moving on, because that’s who I am.

**Craig:** Right, right.

**John:** And, you know, he wasn’t wearing like the scorpion jacket but it was essentially that sort of scorpion quality of like, you know, this is what I am.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s that trope of like, I am genuinely irredeemable.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** I think what’s different about Jaime Lannister is like you have a handsome guy who looks like he should be a knight hero and he’s sort of dressed like a knight hero. So it feels like a greater betrayal that he is doing it. Whereas The Hound, well, he’s ugly, so of course he’s going to ultimately be evil and do that thing.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, I just think that if the people that are complaining about what happened there go and watch the first episode and look at the way that Jaime Lannister delivers his line, “The things I do for love,” after he pushes that kid out the window.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I think you can’t reconcile — that’s an adult. That is a grown man who is clearly got a sociopathic streak a mile wide. The fact that he’s been humbled and the fact that he can have a friend and that he maybe sees things differently vis-à-vis himself and his family, that’s doesn’t change the fact that he’s just an — he’s an awful person.

**John:** Yes. So what we’re really talking here I think is ambiguity, is that it’s frustrating sometimes as a viewer just to see this thing and say like, “No, but I want this person to be good or bad. I want this person to easily be placed in one box and I want this situation to be clear to me.”

And what Game of Thrones is saying is like, no, we are never going to make it clear and easy for you to say, this is a good person you should be rooting for. This is a bad person you should be rooting against. We’re always going to make it difficult for you.

**Craig:** I agree. And I think in this sense what they’re doing with things like this is very important. Because what happens in the way we experience narrative is we accept that there are certain rules in place to give narrative a structure. And then, every now and then somebody comes along and breaks it on purpose. Sometimes people break it because they’re just bad and they don’t know what they’re doing and everybody rejects it.

But sometimes people break it and they’re yelled at and it’s not understood or appreciated. But then, now the line about how flexible a character can be presented in narrative changes. Because it starts to make it freer for everybody else to say, “You know what? I actually think this person can do this and I think it becomes narratively interesting because there’s a context for it. Now, we’ve seen it before.”

So the first time, what is it, Rites of Spring was played people rioted because it was atonal. [laughs] But now that just seems bizarre to us. But I think that these things are important. When they are done with expertise and they’re done — and listen, this is not to say, just so that everyone is really clear, in no way am I defending what this character did. I mean, that was terrible, you know, but again he’s a murderer and a sociopath. So it didn’t shock me maybe the way it shocked other people but I’m not — I was a little surprised at how many people, because it was rape suddenly got super upset but didn’t get upset about the rape of Daenerys and didn’t get upset about the fact that Jaime Lannister tried to kill a kid.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But the rape here was the thing that really got them going.

**John:** If I’m being honest, my not loving the scene was largely because I didn’t necessarily believe that it was happening right beside the body of Joffrey. And that to me just felt a little soap opera-ish in ways that the show usually isn’t. And so, it wasn’t that this rape happened, that it happened in that moment right there. I just didn’t fully believe it. And that’s just my own personal response to how that situation was created. But I think that’s actually not the important thing to discuss. I think what we’ve been talking about of the nature of what he did is really the meat of this.

**Craig:** Yeah. I do think that that location was directly taken from the book, so they —

**John:** Yeah. That’s true.

**Craig:** It’s interesting to see how they drift from and stick to the book. But in any case, so I guess I’m sticking up for the showrunners on that one.

**John:** Sounds good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s switch to our next uncomfortable and ambiguous situation, which is that on April 16th a guy named Michael Egan filed a lawsuit against Director Bryan Singer.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Describing abuse he said began when he was 15 years old. So we’re recording on this on a Thursday. I’m sure there’s been a thousand developments since we recorded this. So it probably doesn’t behoove us to get into too many details about the nature of this one allegation. But more to talk about sort of like what it is like to have this lawsuit happening now when Bryan Singer’s movie X-Men: Days of Future Past is supposed to be coming out. The nature of power in Hollywood gets questioned. The nature of relationships in Hollywood gets questioned. And sort of the big bag of hurt that this kind of accusation unleashes.

**Craig:** Yeah, this is not a good thing. I mean, we’re — part of the problem, this is a little different than some of the allegations that you’ll see sometimes because people do claim all sorts of stuff. I mean, you and I talked about how every movie gets accused of stealing some, you know, another idea or something like that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But this is — even when you’re talking about situations of assault and sexual assault which is always a very messy and tricky thing, sometimes these things don’t pan out. In this case, it’s a little disturbing to me that part of the deal here is that Singer apparently was associated somehow with this guy Marc Rector-Collins who has already, I think, been to prison for this sort of thing before or had been indicted or convicted or something. So there are some shady players involved here and this one I think is not going go away anytime soon.

**John:** Yeah, I don’t a crystal ball to tell you what’s going to happen. I can only look back at the past. And so, I can sort of share my own personal experience with the edges of this and sort of what’s been discussed because this one allegation came out.

So I don’t think I’ve ever met Bryan Singer in person. But I did encounter him for the very first time when I was an assistant. I was answering phones for producers and he called to invite my boss to a party and I don’t remember whether my boss was going to go or not. But he also, just on the phone, Bryan Singer invited me and I think just correctly surmising that I was a 20-something year old gay guy who might want to come to party at his house.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** I didn’t go and that’s great and fine. But, in the years past and the decades since then, I would be at parties and Bryan Singer would show up with this posse of really good-looking guys who were about 20 and I —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** This allegation of this guy was like he’s 15 and like I don’t remember seeing anybody that young, but it was sort of a thing and like everyone knew that like Bryan Singer would show up at a party with this group of guys. They’d swarm for like 30 minutes and then they go onto the next party. And that was just the thing that happened.

So a lot of the real meat of the story is more about like this posse of guys and sort of with that lifestyle was versus the nature of what actually happened in this one case. And I want to make sure that whatever the criminal or civil — whatever happens with this one thing is judged based on that one thing and that it doesn’t become this sort of indictment of this swarm of 20 year olds around him.

**Craig:** Well, sure. Yeah, I mean, it’s not illegal to have sex with 20 year olds. It’s illegal to have sex with, whatever, 17 year olds, I don’t know. [laughs] I should probably, I should look into that.

**John:** Yeah, well, there’s a complete age consent issue and there’s also the ability to give consent.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And those are two incredibly important things that anytime you’re talking about sexual abuse, rape, or anything like that you have to keep in mind were the people participating in the situation able to give consent.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Based on age or based on everything else.

**Craig:** And in this case, there are allegations that some of the people were not of age to give consent at all and other people were under the influence of drugs and were coerced either by drugs that they weren’t even — they didn’t even realized they were ingesting — or by threats of violence in some cases I believe. This is not the first time that Bryan Singer’s name has been mentioned in connection with something like this.

He got in to a bit of hot water over a situation when he was making the movie Apt Pupil as I recall. There were some underage kids in a locker room scene and, [sighs], you know, look, I’m not a big believer in where there’s smoke there’s fire, so we can’t, we don’t know. All I know is this: there’s enough stuff around this one to make me nervous that — if I were Bryan Singer I would be very nervous right now.

And here is the other issue is that it’s spreading now to these other people and, you know, people can take a swing at somebody. When you start taking swings at five people, six people, seven people, my guess is you’ve got something behind those punches because otherwise you’re just going to, you know, what lawyer is necessarily going to start going that nuts, you know?

**John:** Well, yes and no. I do, and again, this is probably pretty early days of this so we don’t know sort of how many people they’re going to start pointing fingers at. The issue is, to me, basically you ask why now and sort of why did this person — why is this person coming out and saying, making these accusations about things that happened many years ago? Is it because Bryan Singer is suddenly a much bigger name because he has a big movie coming out and that it’s more lucrative to make these accusations now when there’s a much better reason to make them all go away? That’s going to be the natural question that sort of comes up out of sort of why this thing happens right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m really confused by that too.

**John:** I don’t —

**Craig:** Because, I mean, Bryan Singer has had big movies out between the time of the allegation, you know, when he said these incidences occurred and now. I don’t know why now, and frankly waited past the statute of limitations. The whole thing is odd —

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But disconcerting. I will say this: I have never encountered any kind of weird sexual situation in Hollywood because I’m a married guy, right. I mean, I’m — so there’s just, there was never any — and I’m me. [laughs] Nobody wants me at their orgy, okay.

But I do know that this sort of thing does happen. This sort of thing happens between men and women. It happens between men and men. It happens between women and women. And there are a lot of bad people in our business.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Who have appetites in which they indulge and they feel entitled. And there are waves of young, impressionable, naive, desperate people who are here in this town looking for mommies and daddies and looking for fame and fortune.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And this tale is as old as Hollywood. I can’t speak to whether or not any of the people that have been accused are guilty or innocent. But I can say there are guilty people out there and I would love to see things get cleaned up because sexual abuse in Hollywood is pervasive I believe and it is just awful. It is awful that it exist and frankly it’s awful that we all kind of walk around knowing it exists but never being able to do anything about it.

**John:** Okay. Well, let’s talk though about like how would you actually implement these changes? Is it — do you basically start figuring out who the bad people are and stop hiring them?

**Craig:** Well —

**John:** Because, I mean, you and I off mic could make a list of like these are terrible people, and maybe do you stop hiring them because you are worried about the kind of PR disaster that this clearly has the potential to be. Well, even when we talked about like Orson Scott Card many, many episodes ago, we talked about that weird thing like you never want somebody involved as a creator to become like this negative anchor on your movie and that’s what we’re talking about here.

**Craig:** Well, I think that it’s — the tricky part is you don’t want to black list people and you don’t want to go on witch hunts, because suddenly, you know, let’s say this all turns into something very, very real and Bryan Singer ends up in prison. Now you’ve got, you know, what are you going to have a witch hunt of every gay director in his 30s? I mean, you got to be careful about this. But on the other hand, I actually think the only thing that can stop this is for these people to be exposed and stand trial and if they’re guilty go to prison because they’re doing criminal things.

Listen, you could be a sleaze. If you want to be a legal sleaze all day long, I don’t have to like it but, you know, it’s not —

**John:** But, Craig, a lot of, I mean, with this bad behavior we’re talking about though, maybe we should distinguish these kinds of bad behavior. There’s actually, genuinely criminal things where you’re doing things with underage people or people who cannot give consent because of drugs or coercion or whatever else.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But what about sort of the 18-year-old actress from Iowa who gets sent out for an audition with a skeezy producer/director or whatever and feels kind of coerced into —

**Craig:** Well…

**John:** Coerced is the wrong word.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** But we got to make sure that, I mean, there’s — I mean, again, there’s uncomfortable ambiguity here about like what is just like recognizing a bad situation and how do you deal with sort of skeevy producers and directors even if they’re not actually breaking the law, do you still hire them?

**Craig:** Well, it’s —

**John:** Interesting, even if they’re not found guilty , there’s till that PR disaster. That’s really what I’m talking about. It’s like —

**Craig:** No, I hear you. I mean, look, if you think that somebody is a ticking time bomb for activity that will impact your business negatively regardless of its legality, yeah, I would say, you probably should think twice before hiring them. Even if you’re just amoral. From a business point of view you should think twice about hiring them for sure. In terms of where the line gets drawn on the behavior, I think that our criminal justice system is fairly conservative in this regard. There’s a, you know, innocent before proven guilty. There’s got to be evidence. You get a lawyer. There is a trial. So if it’s not illegal, then it’s not illegal, then you just have to make a decision about whether it’s distasteful and embarrassing and detracting to your business. And you also have to be careful that you’re right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That you’re not simply acting on rumors. This business, in particular when it comes to gay men, less of gay women but gay men, this business since the beginning has just had this enormous percentage of closeted gay man who had to live kind of completely in secret in this way. And there is a culture of secrecy about it. And cultures of secrecy which are born out of necessity serve as a shield for then bad people who do bad things. Now, granted straight people have done probably I would say a larger proportion of the bad things. [laughs]

**John:** I would say a greatly larger proportion.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think the stereotype of the skeevy producer or director and the, you know, the girl just off the bus from Iowa, it exists for a reason because we see it happening all the time.

**Craig:** Right. That’s every day.

**John:** And maybe because it’s so commonly out there, we can sort of recognize the warning signs of it a little bit more easily. I am, I think I am generally in a macro sense most worried about the witch hunt aspect of it because even if it’s not a publicly-declared witch hunt , it’s that slow — it’s that reticence to hire anybody. You wonder like could there by some problem here. And the person who comes to mind is Lana Wachowski, because back when Lana Wachowski was Larry Wachowski —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You know, that was a big transition. And there’s a lot of reasons why you could worry that that was going to be a time bomb situation. It ended up not being a time bomb situation and things kind of turned out just fine. But I’m worried that you could create a culture in which you feel very nervous about hiring The Wachowskis because of this Bryan Singer situation or some other potential law suit out there.

**Craig:** You know, my point of view is that Hollywood is a fairly progressive place. One of the more progressive industries in the world. And when it comes to somebody, something like, someone who’s transgender, now at least in 2014, so who is transgender and who’s transitioning between genders, I don’t think that’s embarrassing at all for anybody.

I think, frankly, that people sort of line up to be first in line to say I support this person because we don’t look at it here, at least In Hollywood, we don’t look at that as anything wrong at all. I think where most reasonable people agree is that sexual coercion, sexual assault, rape and statutory rape, that these things are criminal and that they are not connected to gender issues.

I mean, listen, poor Lee Tamahori, remember his story

**John:** I don’t remember it well, but I recognize the name.

**Craig:** Lee Tamahori is a director and he was arrested for basically soliciting, I think, in drag on Santa Monica. And, you know, this was I think like 2000 — I want to say it was like 2005. And it was really embarrassing for him. And it clearly impacted his career in a way that Eddie Murphy and Hugh Grant’s careers were not impacted, I should point out.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I think were that to happen now, I think it would be a different situation. I agree with you. Look, the last thing we want is a witch hunt. But also the last thing we want is to allow… — Listen, there was a culture going on. We know this because the guys that ran that Digital Entertainment Network, this guy Mark Collins, director, and a couple of these other guys, they fled the country and then got extradited and there were criminal charges. And one of them, I’m sure of it, I seem to recall was convicted.

There were bad things going on. And there are bad things going on. And so we have to balance witch hunter-y against, but I… — Listen, man, I have a daughter, you know? If I heard that somebody I knew professionally had sexually assaulted a woman, so we’re talking now heterosexual sexual assault, I mean, they’re out of my life, for sure.

Now, I also know as you do the odds of us not knowing somebody like that without knowing is zero, right? I mean, we have worked with somebody that we don’t know has done this. Has to be, right?

**John:** We have worked with a Jaime Lannister without knowing it.

**Craig:** That’s right. We have worked with a Jaime Lannister without knowing it. And I hope that all of the Jaime Lannisters get a light shone on them, because this is the worst, you know. It’s a terrible crime. And if Bryan Singer is not a Jaime Lannister, I hope he is exonerated. And if he is, I hope he goes to prison. I mean, you know, other people will make the X-Men movies. We’ll survive.

**John:** Yeah.

All right, next topic. Also on April 14th, or I guess two days before the Bryan Singer, the WGA released a report. I think it’s every two years they do this report. How often do they do the report?

**Craig:** I think they do it every year.

**John:** All right. This report was on sort of a representation of women and minorities and older people among writers in Hollywood. We’re going to put a link up to the executive summary, but some of the statistics were about female writers accounted for 15% of feature film work in 2012, the latest figure tracked in the survey, down from 17% in 2009. So, it dropped two points since 2009.

Minority writers remain stuck at 5% of film jobs, unchanged from 2009. But the survey shows minority writer earnings declined over the same period, even as paydays for white male writers increased. So, it was not a bundle of good news.

There was actually some good news in the TV side where women’s numbers had increased somewhat.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, looking through this, so if we’re looking for good news and there is not much here to celebrate. So, sort of good news, I guess, is that things didn’t really get that much worse. I mean, statistically speaking the percentage for instance of women working in film went like this from 2008 to 2012: 16, 17, 17, 16, 15. That 15 may just be an outlier. It may be up to 17 again next year.

And the numbers were very steady across the board for television: 28, 28, 27, 28, 27. And total overall employment is actually like one tick higher than it was in 2008. And it’s basically 24% to 25%. So, did it get much worse, no. I guess can we say that it’s good news that the bad situation stayed roughly the same bad? No, that’s not so great.

The one other bit of sort of good news is that there’s not much of a significant gender earnings gap in television. There is a slight gap, which obviously we don’t want to see again. Well, you know, it’s significant. In 2012 median television earnings $112,000 and for white males it was $121,000. That’s a difference of $9,000. That is significant, but it’s not — you don’t look at that and your heart doesn’t sink to the floor.

And what’s also interesting is that as male earnings went up, white male earnings went up, the female earnings went up as well. So, the lines kind of followed each other.

**John:** Yeah. It’s one of those things where if you actually look at it on the chart you’re like, oh, that’s not so bad at all. But then when you actually look at it like the actual numbers, it’s like, oh, women are still getting significantly less.

**Craig:** No, there is a clear problem there.

**John:** Really, the gap remained the same, it’s just that the numbers overall were the same.

**Craig:** Yeah, I guess my theme of the good news is a bad situation stayed roughly as bad as it’s been. Yeah, I mean, for film the gap has narrowed somewhat significantly since 2008. The gap is much wider in film than it is in television which doesn’t surprise me because the income disparity in general in film is much wider than it is in television in terms of writing.

**John:** My takeaway from looking at this overall report, particularly in features, I felt like one of the realities is like there were fewer feature jobs. Overall the whole pot of future jobs, there were fewer of them. And that women and minorities probably seemed to take the biggest hit of those fewer jobs.

And so they took a disproportionately large hit I guess I should say. And also when there is more competition for fewer jobs, it becomes harder to push quotes up. And so if you are one of them women who got the job, or minority who got that writing job, it becomes harder to push your quote up higher because there’s a thousand other people who could do that same thing.

Another thing I thought was interesting was this statistic that since 2008 writers aged 41 to 50 have replaced younger writers age 31 to 40 as the age group who enjoyed the largest share of film employment. So, it went from younger writers claimed 37% of all employment to just 33% of all employment. That got flipped in 2010. So, writers age 41 to 50 were 39% of film employment. Writers age 31 to 40 dropped five percentage points to 32%.

So, it’s basically good news for John August and Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Well, it’s good news for John August and Craig Mazin, two white men working in film in their forties. I will say that the bad news for the studios here, if they’re concerned at all, and this is a point that I’ve made to them when we’ve gone out with the guild to talk about the professional status of screenwriters is that they’re not doing a very good job of training the next generation of screenwriters.

First of all, there’s this myth that twenty-somethings, everybody wants twenty-somethings. Nobody apparently wants twenty-somethings. You want to talk about a group that’s discriminated against? Twenty-somethings.

So, traditionally — and frankly if you look at these numbers, I really have to question the guild’s commitment to this notion that age 40+ is now a protected class, when frankly 40 to 60, that’s the largest earning class in the guild. And that the class that is hammered and needs promotion is the under-30 group. They are —

**John:** Well, Craig, let’s talk about how many people could really fit in that cohort though of the under-30. Because let’s really realistically 25 is about as young as a writer you’re going to get, so there’s really only five years of that.

**Craig:** Well, if you double the percentages —

**John:** It’s still really low.

**Craig:** It’s still much lower than 51 to 60. And I think what we’re going to see is this trend that you pointed out here of the flip between the 30s and the 40s, that’s like guys like you and me going from our 30s to our 40s, which is exactly what happened in 2011.

Because I don’t think the studios are doing as good of a job as they used to bringing people up, bringing them through, and bringing them along. I think, frankly, you’re looking at a bunch of people that are just dropping out in their 20s and 30s because there is not a living to be made as a feature screenwriter.

**John:** Well, I would also argue that a lot of those people who would be the 25-year-old feature writer are now 25-year-old TV writers, because that’s where the jobs are. And so perhaps the feature jobs —

**Craig:** Not according to their chair. It suggests similarly terrible numbers.

**John:** Let’s see. I’m looking at my television one.

**Craig:** Well, for the 30s they’re solid, but still your 40 to 50, that’s the highest numbers.

**John:** That’s the bulk. Right.

**Craig:** And the under 31s is, again, dismal. I mean, that’s a pretty remarkable thing. I have to say like of all the — and let’s add onto that number, because that’s the one that really jumped out at me. That a lot of the efforts that have been made to bring woman and minorities into professional writing positions have been made in the last five to 10 years. Which means a lot of the efforts are going to be for newer writers who are in their 20s, so you’ve got this triple problem where suddenly you’re in your 20s and you’re a woman and you’re a minority, or you’re a minority, and you’re in this like jammed up class that’s just getting hammered out there.

Why? I guess — let’s take a step back, John. What do you think is going on here? Do you think that there is an explanation other than just flat out sexism, racism, ageism?

**John:** Oh, I think you can’t ever have just one explanation behind things, but I think there are fewer candidates than they want for some of those things.

So, let’s take, oh, I’ll talk about my experience dealing with a producer of a big TV show. And we were talking about hiring directors, but hiring writers is really the same situation. And she said that they actively really tried to hire female directors for the show and the first season they were able to get two on. And they brought one back the second time because she was great.

And that one female director was so good they could never get her back again. And they tried other people — they had a hard time finding candidates that they thought were actually good enough to do this.

That’s on the buyer side. But, you can also — there’s also the challenge of you have to want to become a screenwriter, or a television writer. And in some ways there is a self-perpetuating cycle. If you’re a young woman who doesn’t believe that she can make it as a TV writer, or as a feature writer, you may never try to make it as a feature writer or a TV writer. And that can take the numbers down, too.

We saw it to some degree even in the Three Page Challenges, looking at sort of what percentage of people who submitted to Three Page Challenge were men or women. And it was surprisingly there was a huge disparity of men to women writing in for that.

**Craig:** Right. And I think you see that also in the Nicholl Fellowship that I think they get roughly about 30% submissions from women, which is obviously out of whack.

I mean, look, it may be that that number is depressed because women are negatively influenced by the fact that they are a minority in success, or it may be a depressed number because there just may be less interest. We don’t know.

Look, if you’re a woman and you’re interested in screenwriting, that’s not a very satisfying answer, but of course you might be one of the 30%.

**John:** Yes. Well, because the minute I say what I just said, there’s a natural response to it, it’s like, but no, I’m one of those women who wants to be this thing and you saying that I don’t want this thing is negative. I’m like, I’m actually saying exactly the opposite.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I’m saying that in some ways in my conversations with people who are trying to make hiring decisions, they are often saying that we are really looking for women or minorities for these things and we’re having a hard time finding them. And so be that there need to better programs to get people trained to do those things, better mentorship of writers to writers, specifically women writers to women writers to try to make sure all those connections are actually happening, I’m saying that, yes, there is a problem. I’m just saying that the problem isn’t necessarily that these people aren’t willing to hire somebody; they just may not be able to find a person they feel is qualified to hire.

**Craig:** I agree. There is no real clear path to figure this out.

**John:** I’m going to back up if I can to page ten of that report, because if you actually —

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m looking at that now. The employment rate by age group. Yeah.

**John:** So, it’s really interesting. So, yeah.

**Craig:** I’m puzzled, because so here it’s saying, all right, employment rate by age group is the highest in the twenty-somethings, where in 2012 it’s arguing that 80% of the twenty-somethings got employment versus a lower percentage. But, how do they figure that out exactly? How do they — ?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Employment rate is defined as a percentage of current guild members who are actually employed. Okay, well that’s a very misleading thing. Because I would imagine that the current guild membership is probably skewed more heavily in the older ages, which means that the percentage of people employed would be lower because there are fewer guild members in the 20s. This is a bad graph.

**John:** Okay, I can see what you’re saying.

**Craig:** You know what I mean?

**John:** It’s because the guild has so many —

**Craig:** Current members between 30 and 60, right. So, if there are very few current guild members in their 20s, so yeah, if there’s like, you know, 40 of them that get work —

**John:** So, if you are a guild member in your 20s you’re likely a working guild member in your 20s.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** You’re actually actively working. I guess that’s true.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a bad graph. I think the graph that matters is the share. Because if you look at share of film employment, there’s no reason frankly… — Like I grant you, forget 20 to 25, but if you look at 25 to 30, there’s no reason that 25 to 30 year olds should be employed at such a lower rate than 30 to 35 year olds even, you know?

That’s a little odd to me.

**John:** I’m trying to read through to understand what share film employment actually means. Does it mean out of 100 jobs how many were occupied by people of a certain age? Or total amount of dollars earned in film? And it’s really unclear from this.

**Craig:** I would imagine it has to do with how many jobs, like how many workers worked. You know, like how many jobs out of the available jobs went to twenty-somethings. How many jobs out of the available jobs, you know what I mean?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m guessing.

**John:** We’ll see.

**Craig:** That’s the problem with these statistics. They get a little crazy.

**John:** Yeah. But what’s so fascinating about those two charts is if you look at them you can draw completely opposite conclusions about where the real problem is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because you were saying the real problem is that we’re not doing enough to help the younger people. The other chart makes it seem like the younger people are doing just great. It’s the older people who are —

**Craig:** Yeah, that other chart sucks. [laughs] I will tell you there is a chart that, I mean, you want to look at the only chart that matters? How about money? Let’s just look at money, because that’s the only thing that matters in terms of like what’s actually happening for people. Average earnings by age group.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Under 31s are way — I mean, you want to talk about a disparity. Like we’re here talking like, man, there is a 10% gap between men and women. Absolutely. There is a 100% gap between twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings in television. And there is similarly a very large gap as well in film. The 40-somethings like you and me, their median earnings in film in 2012 were about $90,000 and for twenty-somethings they were more like $50,000.

**John:** 50.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that is absolutely shocking. And I will point out to you, and this is why sometimes the guild makes me nuts. They will never mention this because it doesn’t fit their narrative. Their narrative is… — And do you know why it doesn’t fit their narrative? Because there are so few twenty-somethings and because the grouchiest people, forgive me for being stereotypical, [laughs], but the old people are grouchier.

Like me and you, right? We’re part of the old people now. And they’re grouchy.

**John:** I do find it fascinating — we’re looking at figure 13 in the chart if you’re following with us. And so there’s, I don’t know if you call it an S-curve or what you want to call it, but essentially earnings peak in that 41 to 50-year-old, and they go down 61 to 70 they’re at the lowest point back down to where the twenty-somethings are.

But then it actually rises again. And if you’re 71 to 80, because I think basically if you’re 71 years old and you’re still getting hired, you’re getting a big paycheck.

**Craig:** You’re the best. Like basically you —

**John:** You’re Alvin Sargent.

**Craig:** You are exactly right. Yeah. And frankly there are so few screenwriters in that cohort that Alvin Sargent has a huge impact on this graph. [laughs]

**John:** Exactly. One Alvin Sargent. He’s the entire dot there.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, but this is to me, when you look at these graphs the thought that the Writers Guild actually considers white men in their 40s to be a protected class somehow is insane. And frankly speaks to who runs the guild, which would be men in their 40s and 50s.

I look at this report and I mean I recognize women and minorities, we got a long way to go there. A long way to go. But I’m also looking at twenty-somethings because I feel like the bottom is just not there anymore.

**John:** Well, also the women and minorities who we need to get started in the film industry are largely those people in the 20s.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** So, you help that whole cohort up, you’re going to help people.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** Craig, how often should we do this kind of report? How often should the guild do it?

**Craig:** Well, you know, my feeling because this report is expensive and it uses our dues, my feeling is I think if we did it once every four years or once every five years we would be fine. And by that I mean even collect the data, because it doesn’t change. The data simply doesn’t change in any significant way. Look at figure 8. This is median earnings for employed women, minority, and white male writers. And it’s just the same crap. From 2002 to 2012 it’s the same.

And my issue with the guild is that they shell out cash to do these reports to make themselves feel better. Frankly, they could do it once every ten years. Hell, at this point you could probably do it once every 20 years, because all they do is they put this out there and go, “Isn’t this terrible?”

But, hey, how about, I don’t know, like doing something about it. Like creating a program. Why doesn’t the guild take the money they’ve thrown to these reports and just start doing specific training or sponsoring positions or, I don’t know, something. Try something else other than just putting the same damn graph out every year going, “Oh, dear, no.”

**John:** Yeah. I’m going to take the counterpoint that I think you need to do it more often than that because it just becomes too easy to forget about all together. So, the good thing about this report coming out is it creates a moment of conversation about the problem itself.

And so I totally hear you in terms of the spending a tremendous amount of money on it, so perhaps a better way to do smaller, much cheaper reports that don’t try to be as comprehensive or cost so much, but that remind us of the actual nature of the problem.

**Craig:** Well, I’m with you on that. Look, if this report were followed by action, and then that action was subject to a follow up report to test for efficacy, I would be all for it. And I feel like sometimes the guild hates to try things because they think that they’ll fail. I don’t mind failure. That’s part of the scientific process. And this is a scientific problem. Sociology is a science.

So, try something. See if it works. If it does, keep doing it. Do it more. If it doesn’t, try a new thing. But you have to try something. You can’t simply just collect data for the rest of your life and bemoan the fate of everything. I mean, geez, if I were a black kid, I’m 22 years old, I want to be a screenwriter and I’m looking at these reports going back all these years I’d think, well, so I can pretty much assume the next 10 years will be the same. Why wouldn’t they be?

**John:** Yeah. There’s no reason.

**Craig:** Yeah. This trend is pretty steady. It’s bad.

**John:** I think you’re probably right.

All right, our next topic. This is based on a Wall Street Journal article that we’ll have a link to in the show notes. But it’s about The Vampire Diaries and the woman who wrote The Vampire Diaries. So, this is a little snippet from it:

Lisa Jane Smith started writing her first book, “The Night of the Solstice,” when she was in high school, and was around 20 when MacMillan published the novel in 1987. The book, a middle-grade fantasy novel, was a commercial failure that sold around 5,000 copies. But it captured the attention of an editor at Alloy, who asked Ms. Smith if she’d be interested in writing a new young-adult series, concocted as “Interview with the Vampire” for teens.

So, basically she wrote this book about a high school girl who is torn between vampire brothers. She wrote it as a trilogy in nine months for a small advance of a few thousand dollars. What she apparently didn’t realize is that she was writing it as a work-for-hire and that became a huge issue because down the road as The Vampire Diaries, actually many years later as The Vampire Diaries became a TV series, they decided to have someone else start writing the books for The Vampire Diaries and shut her out.

The strange twist that happened recently is, so Alloy made some sort of deal with Kindle for Kindle World, which is their fan fiction thing, so that writers who wish to write fan fiction for The Vampire Diaries can and they can sell their fan fiction through the Kindle World store. So, Lisa Jane Smith, or LJ Smith, started writing paid fan fiction for the series that she herself created, which is just bizarre.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** It’s just a weird — I think it’s just a fascinating case study in like what it is like to be a writer now and sort of just the importance of understanding what rights you control or don’t control as a writer.

**Craig:** No question. I mean, look, on the one hand this is actually a wonderful story because the way technology has advanced it’s actually given an opportunity to a writer that would simply not have existed. She just would have suffered the indignity of this had her career been shifted back twenty years. When you are hired under work-for-hire, what it means is you’re being commissioned to do a work by somebody else.

And this, by the way, only exists in the United States. As you are commissioned to do that work, you are considered an employee. You do not own the copyright on the work. The copyright is controlled and owned by the commissioner. You and I when we write screenplays for studios, it’s work-for-hire. So, we don’t own our copyrights. We are typically compensated quite well and we also get the benefit of the union because we’re employees, so there are certain terms that are collectively bargained and residuals that approximate royalties and things like that.

But in the book business, I would imagine it gets pretty bad.

**John:** It could.

**Craig:** Because I don’t believe there is a union, like a true federally-chartered labor union that organizes writers who are writing novels on a work-for-hire basis. I don’t know what she got paid. She might have been paid very little. I’m kind of shocked that she didn’t know the nature of the contract. Some lawyer must have understood it and explained it.

But the other fascinating part of this is that these companies realize that there’s money to be made in allowing fan fiction to occur. So, fan fiction exists sort of on an underground basis and these companies realized, well, if these people are going to do it, you know the deal with fan fiction is if you want to actually take it to the next level, like for instance E.L. James did when she wrote Fifty Shades of Grey, at some point if you want to sell the stuff you have to change the names and you’ve got to change certain details so you’re not infringing on the copyright of in the case of Fifty Shades of Grey, Twilight.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it turns out that Twilight is some weird touchstone for S&M. I don’t understand why, but it is. [laughs] Like a Mormon lady wrote this thing that everybody else looks at and goes S&M. Whatever.

So, things have to be changed. But these companies that own these properties, and they have to own them. See, that’s the key. If an individual author wants to do this, like let’s say Stephanie Meyer did say I want people to be able to write Twilight FanFic, she can individually license that right to Amazon and then get money for it and then people can go ahead and use the real names and the real places.

But in the case of something like The Vampire Diaries, because the company was commissioning these works as a work-for-hire, it’s their — they can do that. And now it’s open the door for the actual writer to write these things again. And the fans of her work are really passionate and they’re very excited about reading what they consider to be the real sequels to those books, and not the ones written by the other authors.

**John:** And Alloy Entertainment still gets paid for it.

**Craig:** They get paid.

**John:** I think because of the deal with Kindle Worlds, like they still — they actually own the copyright on it, which is also crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s interesting to me that the deal with Kindle World is that the company or the copyright holder, which may be an individual author, licenses the right to Kindle World for their user, for Kindle World users to write fan fiction, approved fan fiction, with the character names and all the rest. But, then if the FanFic writers want to do that, they have to sign away their copyrights back to the company?

**John:** Yeah. There’s something crazy like that. So, Alloy is still making money off of that, which is crazy.

**Craig:** Wow. And so what’s now, I really get it, because now what’s going on is these companies are going, “Well, why should E.L. James make $40 billion? We should be making the $40 billion.”

**John:** So, Craig, I have a question for you. Let’s bring it back to us. So, let’s say you write a spec script and it becomes a movie, it becomes a worldwide phenomenon. You write Raiders of the Lost Ark and it becomes a worldwide phenomenon. And people want to start writing fan fiction for it and put it in this kind of situation. Do you think that you have that as one of your separated rights? Or is that something that they own as part of their separated rights?

**Craig:** It is not one of our separated rights. Yeah, no.

**John:** So, they can license that and be making money off of people writing fan fiction.

**Craig:** Absolutely. We have, our separated rights are quite limited. And the closest thing we have to something like this is the right to a novelization. Under certain circumstances we have a right to publish our screenplay, under certain circumstances. But, no, they can absolutely… — Listen, they can remake your movie and they can have somebody else right a sequel to your movie, no problem. And I can easily see a situation where they went ahead and licensed this stuff to Kindle World, said go ahead, write your own sequels to this stuff and you can use Indiana Jones’ name and we’ll own it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, which I think frankly if they don’t do it I’ll be shocked. I’m sure the studios are looking at this now and thinking, “Why shouldn’t we do that?”

And to everybody out there, don’t do it! [laughs] Okay? Don’t write anything that is a work-for-hire ever unless you’re getting paid a lot of money and it’s under a collective bargaining agreement. Just don’t do it. I mean, works of fiction —

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** You know, works of fiction. Just don’t do it.

**John:** Yeah. I agree with you. I think it’s going to be fascinating because it’s going to happen. And it will be really curious to see what the first incarnations of that are. And I also think there are some interesting challenges to put, because we do have the ability to write the novelization. And to what degree can you stretch the ability to write the novelization to mean to write essentially literary derivative works of that original creation.

Actually, I’ll run through — I was going to do a Go coloring book, and so I engaged with my lawyer to figure out like can I do that? And basically like is it an illustrated screenplay? And we ended up not doing it, but it was a really kind of fascinating test case like whether I still owned those rights as part of my separated rights.

**Craig:** If they can argue that it is something like a graphic novel or a comic book, then the answer is no because that falls under the heading of merchandising. And so a coloring book I think they would easily argue is merchandising and, no. [laughs]

**John:** It’s crazy.

**Craig:** We have a very — our separated rights you can —

**John:** And who would determine that? Is it their list of arbiters, or how would they figure that out?

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean essentially if there were a real challenge. I mean, first of all the guild’s lawyers would have to agree with you. Because the injured party would be the guild. And so the guild’s lawyers have to agree with you. And I’ve found that quite often they don’t agree with writers. You want them to sort of naturally want to advocate and push the boundaries. The legal department at the guild, one of my big gripes is that they are far more concerned about their case load and winning cases than they are about taking chances and pushing the ball down the field.

I understand they’re always concerned about setting a negative precedent, which I understand.

**John:** Exactly. They just don’t want to lose because losing can cost them more.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Let’s go to a question. We have a question from Henry Fosdike who says, “Chatting with other writers, we find that we all have those words we just can’t seem to break away from. He nods is my curse, for about 40 or 50 times in the first draft. Other friends struggle with synonyms for walk, pace, trudge, trundle, or to explain a character turning on the spot. He spins, turns, twirls. I’d be intrigued to hear which words crop up in your drafts a lot.”

**Craig:** Oh, good question.

**John:** I would say my first instinct is to sort of go back to the Hemingway of it all, and like Hemingway famously didn’t want to use anything other than He Said for dialogue. You don’t try to put synonyms for that. Just like basically use the generic word that sort of gets rid of it.

But, I do find myself sometimes a little bit frustrated by, particularly when you have to write a lot of action. You start to recognize that walks, heads to, spots, notices. I started using “clocks” too much, like just to recognize something. And it’s like I stopped using clocks.

How about you?

**Craig:** Well, my philosophy about this is that it is far less important for us as screenwriters to dwell on this than it is for novelists because our work is not meant to be read by the consumer or the audience. It’s meant to instruct our dramatic intention of people making a movie.

So, there are certain words that I give myself full license to use because I understand they have a function like seize, crosses to. I like crosses to as opposed to walks to. Nods is really just about somebody shares a look with. I do a lot of that. Smiles. I’ll do smiles, really just to say that somebody is kind of listening and paying attention and absorbing it in a certain way as opposed to another way.

There are a bunch of things I do like that, but they’re really all there just to give a — to let the director and the cast know, oh, there’s a moment here where the actor is going to respond or react. And that’s all it is. Just holding a place there so that you don’t think that you’re not supposed to respond or react, that the writer is saying now cut to this person. It’s almost like an editorial thing, you know.

I don’t have any sort of, I mean like clocks, maybe I’ll throw that in once in a script or something if it’s really appropriate. But I try and keep it to very bland, vanilla kinds of things like that because I want them really to be editorial input and not purple prose. There’s not much sense in evocative action descriptions because, you know, no one is going to hear them.

**John:** Well, let’s throw this back to listeners. If you have a phrase you’re sick of seeing a thousand times in scripts or that you find yourself using too much and you’re trying to avoid, just tweet that to us because we would love to see what those are.

**Craig:** I will give you one that I’ve worked on a lot. Chris McQuarrie has this theory that every time you use an exclamation point it’s a failure, in dialogue. So, I’ve really been trying to cut back on any use of an exclamation point ever.

**John:** Yeah. And all your double exclamation points, even those?

**Craig:** I actually never — occasionally there is the —

**John:** I don’t think I’ve ever used a double exclamation point.

**Craig:** How about an interrobang?

**John:** I have used, not the true interrobang, but I have used an exclamation point/question mark probably three times in my career.

**Craig:** Yeah. Nine times out of 10 you actually can get rid of the exclamation point. And basically texters have ruined exclamation points. 13-year-old kids have ruined exclamation points for all of us.

**John:** Well, they have. Also I find in emails sometimes now you can’t just say thanks, period, because it sounds negative.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, it sounds like you’re a dick.

**John:** “Thanks.”

**Craig:** Yeah, like it’s sardonic. Like you’re eye-rolling in a thanks. Yeah, everything has to be, “Thanks!”

**John:** “Thanks!” Yeah. A little up talk.

**Craig:** Right. A little up talk.

**John:** Let’s go to our Old One Cool Things. So, if you want to follow along with us, every week on the podcast at least I have a One Cool Thing. Craig sometimes has a One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And so last week we started going through our list of old ones to talk through which ones are actually still cool, which ones we barely remember even mentioning before. So, if you want to follow along with us, we are at johnaugust.com/onecoolthings, all one word. And I think we were at number 61 last time.

**Craig:** Yeah. We got to 61. Oh, I don’t think you got to 61. Maybe you did.

**John:** So, my 61 was What If? which is still a great blog to follow. There’s going to be a book coming out, so we’ll link to the book, too. Basically it’s scientific explanations, answers to questions like what would happen if a baseball thrown at the speed of light hit the earth. And it really talks through the physics of that and has great illustrations.

**Craig:** Excellent. Let’s see, number 62, mine was Red Cross donations to Hurricane Sandy relief, which I think they probably capped those off now.

**John:** I think so. Mine was Letterpress for iOS which is still a great game.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t play it as much now, but for awhile there it was awesome.

**John:** Yeah, it was 3s before there was 3s.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Mine for 63 was Reach Gum Care Soft Woven Mint Floss which is still the best floss in the world.

**Craig:** I didn’t have one that week, probably because I was stunned by that one.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Then, let’s see, we didn’t have one for 64. 65, mine was brining which I swear by still to this day and you should all do it.

**John:** Ticket to Ride is still a great board game, but the iPad version is incredibly solid. The multi-player for like local people in a room is also terrific.

**Craig:** The next week I had the only one and that was Don Rhymer’s cancer blog, Let’s Radiate Don. Sadly Don did pass away last year, but I think about him all the time. My office is still next to the one that he occupied. And he will remain cool for all of time.

**John:** I agree. The week after that I had Soulver which was a calculator kind of thing for iOS and for the Mac. I do use this occasionally, but I don’t use it as much as I sort of thought I would use it.

**Craig:** Mine was Scanadu which I think is still possibly vaporware that’s like an all-purposes medical device that would attach to your phone and tell you if your kid had a fever, or an ear infection, or something. I think they’re still working on that.

**John:** I had Karateka for iOS which was the game version that we made of Jordan Mechner’s Karateka. I also had Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. Both are still really great. So, full disclosure, I actually tried to make the movie version of Mr. Penumbra and we couldn’t actually get it to all happen. But I got to talk to Mr. Sloan over a couple weeks about that and it’s still a great book and I highly recommend it.

**Craig:** Excellent. Mine was Seth Rudetsky’s Seth TV. And Seth TV, he is the best. He is the best. And I got to meet him. And I was on his show. And bravo, he is the greatest.

**John:** Bravo!

**Craig:** Bravo! And you should definitely if you care about music at all, you should take a look particularly at the things he does called Seth Deconstructs. They’re fantastic. They are sort of the Scriptnotes of Broadway.

**John:** I had a thing about Coffeescript which is my favorite scripting language, like for quick and dirty programming stuff. It’s still the thing I go to most whenever I need to actually write some code.

**Craig:** And mine was Poutine, the national food of Quebec, which continues to be incredibly delicious.

**John:** My One Cool Thing was Starred changes, which is basically I don’t think people necessarily understand this, at least they didn’t understand it in Broadway, is the idea of putting asterisks in the margin to show what is different from this draft to the next draft. I think it’s genuinely useful. It’s a thing we are working to try to get into the Fountain spec.

**Craig:** And mine was the Tesla Model S.

**John:** Ah, you loved your car so much.

**Craig:** So, you saw in the news I was on the PCH there naked in my Tesla Model S. Anything that happens with the Tesla Model S I get 4,000 tweets. People, you got to understand something: I’m not Elon Musk. I don’t make the Tesla. I’m not driving every Tesla. Everyone is like, oh yeah. There are I think 60,000 Teslas on the road and I’m merely one of them. But I do love it so.

**John:** My One Cool Thing was Pat Moran from The Credits. I really don’t remember this all that well, but I’m pretty sure Pat Moran was talking about sort of what a casting director does. I love casting directors.

**Craig:** Well, the next week I had the Easton-Bell pitcher’s helmet. They are still working on this. And there have been more incidents in Major League Baseball, of pitchers getting hit. No one in the head. There’s been a couple in the face that this would not have helped, but the whole idea of this helmet is to prevent brain injury. So, they’re working on it. I’m hoping it gets out there.

**John:** Let’s do five more. Mine was Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, which was a best-selling books, so it’s like I’m not the first person to tell you that it’s really, really good. But it’s really, really good. And I was so excited this last week to see the trailer for David Fincher’s movie adaptation starring Ben Affleck who is perfect casting for that. I’m really curious to see how that movie is going to play.

**Craig:** Excellent. My next week was a canker sore drug that helped mice lose weight without diet or exercise. I have been just drinking that stuff. And, [laughs], I don’t know if it works or not. But it’ll take them years to test it.

**John:** Mine was Dungeon World, the role-playing game, and we played it. We played it a bunch.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was awesome.

**John:** It’s good. It’s a good lightweight system. Lots of really smart things.

**Craig:** We haven’t finished that game.

**John:** Yeah. We do. You basically got to the part with the gnomes and then Malcolm Spellman had to leave because of his dog. But there’s still stuff.

The week before that I had Apple TV. Apple TV remains great. I’m really curious what the next iteration of that will be.

**Craig:** As am I. I had — really, I had? No, this is backwards. I was going to say, I had Homeland on Amazon Instant and Blu-ray? I’ve never watched that show. My wife watches it.

No, I had Waking Mars for iOS. You know what? Very beautiful game. I actually never ended up playing much of it. I got a bit bored.

**John:** Mine was Homeland, which I still just love, although I’ve only seen the first two seasons, so I need to get to the third season here pretty soon. But it’s one of those great shows to catch up on and see that it really was as good as everyone was saying.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** My One Cool Thing this week is a movie that people should see in theaters if they have a chance to see it in theaters because I dug it. I saw it with Kelly Marcel. It’s called Under the Skin. It is written by Walter Campbell, based on a book by Michel Faber, directed by Jonathan Glazer who did Sexy Beast.

The IMDb description of it says “an alien seductress preys upon hitchhikers in Scotland,” which is kind of true but actually not really what the movie feels like at all. And so I went into it thinking it’s going to be like Species but like classier. And it sort of is. And yet what ends up becoming to me is sort of amazing meditation on sort of life beyond good and evil. Because she’s not actually — she’s not evil in any classic sense. It’s just she’s just a predator. She’s like a lioness who’s just out there. Even though she looks, Scarlett Johansson looks like a beautiful Scarlett Johansson human being, she isn’t at all. And her performance is fantastic. The way the movie sort of limits to her perspective is great.

I dug it. And there’s moments in it that are Kubrickian in just the most remarkable sense. So, I highly recommend it.

**Craig:** I’ve heard it’s awesome. I’ve got to go see that. I might go —

**John:** Oh, and it has a great soundtrack as well. So, beyond that you’ll probably want to get the soundtrack because I’ve been playing it nonstop.

**Craig:** I’m going to go see some movies this week I think. I’ve got to say that. I still haven’t seen The Grand Budapest.

**John:** Oh, you have to see that.

**Craig:** I know. I know! That’s why I said —

**John:** And I was the guy who didn’t like Wes Anderson and now I’m fully —

**Craig:** I’ve always liked Wes Anderson, so I’m really stupid for not seeing it.

My One Cool Thing this week is CarboLite. CarboLite is a fake frozen yogurt that has eight calories an ounce. I have no idea. I assume it’s manufactured in some Gotham City chemical factory. It’s manufacture in an ACE Chemical Plant where the Joker —

**John:** Smilex?

**Craig:** Yeah. It fell into a vat of Smilex. My wife and I call it Plastic Cream because we’re pretty sure that that’s what it is. It’s — I can’t understand how they make it. Sometimes it’s disgusting, and sometimes it’s quite tasty. Either way, it’s like eating yogurt except that there’s nothing there. It’s the weirdest thing. And it’s not sold in too many places, but if you can find it give it a try. They have lots of different flavors, but basically the flavors come down to this: brown and white. [laughs] And they’ll tell you that this week’s brown is Chocolate Pudding. And next week’s brown is Nutella. And this week’s white is Vanilla. And next week’s is Angel Food Cake.

Yeah, it’s brown and white.

**John:** So, is this something you get in the supermarket or something you get at like a Yogurt Land?

**Craig:** It’s at a yogurt store. And it’s never at Yogurt Land because they don’t have it. So, it’s usually at some sort of independent yogurt store. There is a place in La Cañada called Penguins that does it. There’s a place in, you know the Ventura and Laurel Canyon shopping center with the Daily Grill? That place underneath it does it.

It really is like eating the future. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** God only knows what’s in it. God only knows.

**John:** We’ll see if we can find a link to it, but it reminds me of this SNL sketch, That’s Not Yogurt, and these guys are eating this delicious white thing. It’s like, “Wow, this yogurt is really tasty.” And the announcer keeps going, “That’s not yogurt.” No, well what is it? Really, I’m concerned. I want to know.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s no way you could possibly be allergic to anything in CarboLite because I believe it’s all completely inert. [laughs] It is a horror show, but I kind of love it.

**John:** When you see Under the Skin, there is this viscous goop in it, and maybe that’s what CarboLite actually is.

**Craig:** I mean, just the name alone. CarboLite. Isn’t that what they — oh, that’s Carbonite. They froze Han Solo in Carbonite and then when they melt Carbonite it turns into CarboLite.

**John:** I was mortified because on the new page for Highland’s release we talked about how your scripts are no longer frozen in Carbonate, and I let that slide. But, no, it’s Carbonite.

**Craig:** It’s Carbonite.

**John:** And someone wrote in to say, “Uh, uh, uh,” and we got it fixed.

**Craig:** Carbonate is right out. Wrong.

**John:** Wrong. It’s like silicon and silicone. It’s not the same thing.

**Craig:** It’s totally different.

**John:** That’s our show this week. You can find links to the things we talked about in our show notes at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes, which is also where you can find transcripts for all of our back episodes. If you want to listen to the back episodes you can do it through scriptnotes.net, which is where we have all the back episodes listed there. The subscription for $1.99 a month, you get free access to all of those and occasional bonus episodes.

You can also get them through the apps. We have one for iPhone, for iOS, and Android. So, check your app store.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Adrian Tanner. If you would like to write us an outro, there’s a link in the show notes for that.

If you have a question for me, you can write to @johnaugust on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Wow. This was a good show.

**John:** And that’s it. It’s a good show. It’s long, but we got a lot done.

**Craig:** You know what? Listen, man, we’re given them more for their money.

**John:** That’s really what it is. Your zero dollars got you about 90 minutes of show this week.

**Craig:** Oh, god. Well spent people.

**John:** Well done. All right. See you next week.

**Craig:** Bye.

LINKS:

* [HearthStone](http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/)
* IGN on [Cold, Cold Heart](http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/04/25/batman-arkham-origins-cold-cold-heart-dlc-review) Arkham Origins DLC
* [South Park: The Stick of Truth](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006IOAHPK/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Get your tickets now](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-summer-superhero-spectacular/) for the Scriptnotes Summer Superhero Spectacular
* If you are attending the show, [submit your Three Page Challenge here](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [Weekend Read](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/) and [Highland](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/)
* [Game of Thrones season 4, episode 3](http://www.hbogo.com/#series/browse&assetID=GOROSTGP42365?seriesID=GOROSTGP31734?assetType=SEASON?browseMode=browseGrid/) on HBO Go
* LA Times on the [Bryan Singer lawsuit](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-xmen-director-bryan-singer-accused-of-1999-sexual-assault-20140417,0,5240173.story#axzz30Dlb8J5C)
* The [2014 (and past) WGAw Writers Report Executive Summary](http://www.wga.org/subpage_whoweare.aspx?id=922)
* [Alvin Sargent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Sargent) on Wikipedia
* [Vampire Diaries Writer Bites Back](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304058204579495491652398358), from The Wall Street Journal
* [Interrobang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang) on Wikipedia
* All our [One Cool Things](http://johnaugust.com/onecoolthings)
* Preorder xkcd’s [What If? book](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0544272994/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Under the Skin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Skin_(2013_film)) on Wikipedia
* CarboLite [nutrition facts on MyFitnessPal](http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/carbolite-frozen-yogurt-467427) and Yelp on [where to find it in Los Angeles](http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=carbolite&find_loc=Los+Angeles%2C+CA)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Adrian Tanner ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-deal-with-the-deal).

**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, you’re at home, your son was using up all the bandwidth. We’ve had some challenges but I think we’re doing better now.

**Craig:** Yeah, basically I just yelled at him and now everything is fine.

**John:** That’s great, great parenting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Last weekend I had a parenting challenge and we actually did something new where I asked five questions on a piece of paper and had her sort of fill out like what she thought was like the right amount of screen time, what she thought would be the right consequences of these kind of actions, and drew up a little agreement. And so far so good. Better.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know if it’s a gender thing or if it’s just an individual thing. With my son, I find that what seems to work best is a kind of a military precision with him. So generally speaking to help guide him we don’t discuss the why he’s doing things or why it’s wrong or what it’s supposed to be. Instead it’s just very like, here’s the rules, this and this and this. And he says, got it. [laughs] Then he just does it.

But we do have this interesting thing we do where sometimes at night he’ll write up a little something where he expresses his feelings. It’s easier for him to just write it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then he gives it to me and he goes to bed because he doesn’t want to talk about it. And then I read it and then I write back a response. It’s very parental and nice. And then I slip it under his door and when he wakes up in the morning he reads it. And in a very kind of father-son way that works really well for us. We are allowed to be kind of vulnerable and sweet with each other that way.

**John:** Yeah. I do the exact same thing with my daughter, so it’s a good idea.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** So our parenting advice for the episode would be to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But we have a show chock full of other stuff today, so let’s get to it.

We’re going to talk about the Writers Guild and producers who have reached a new agreement. And so we will have Chris Keyser on to talk about that.

We are going to talk about screenplay formats and not just our sort of new format but sort of how we got to the current screenplay format and some of the alternatives that have already been out there and sort of what they look like and their pros and cons of that.

And then I also want to talk about the process of assembling a first draft, because I just today shipped in a brand new first draft of something and it was a completely different way than I had ever written before. So I want to talk about that process.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** But before we get to Chris Keyser I have a little bit of follow up. James in London emailed us two episodes ago about Courier Prime and how the underlining wasn’t right. Do you remember that?

**Craig:** Yeah, I do, yeah.

**John:** And I was like, well, you’re wrong because I underline things in script a lot. And I think the underlining in Courier Prime is really good. The underlining does actually, like the Gs carve out in the underlining, which I think is a good thing.

He emailed us back to say, “I have since looked further into the matter and I feel I owe you an apology. The difference in underlining is due to changes in Final Draft 9 and not the fonts. I have attached a couple of screenshots showing the difference.”

**Craig:** Oh! Ha, that’s weird because they did spend three years on that.

**John:** So I will describe for our listeners sort of what the difference is. Like the underline is weirdly, bizarrely thin in the Final Draft 9 version. I don’t have an answer for why it is that way. But actually it’s a Final Draft 9 thing and he was not being crazy, we were not being crazy. It was a Final Draft thing.

**Craig:** How many times they —

**John:** Final Draft.

**Craig:** Do we say, oh it’s just a Final Draft thing?

[*Intro tone*]

**John:** So on Wednesday this past week the Writers Guild and the studios reached a tentative agreement for another three years of contract, which is great news. Press releases don’t work very well on radio, so we’re so excited to have Chris Keyser, the President of the Writers Guild of America, on the show today to talk us through what is new in the deal.

Chris, welcome to the Scriptnotes podcast.

**Chris Keyser:** Thanks, guys. Thanks, John. Thanks, Craig.

I haven’t seen you in over a day, John.

**John:** It’s been a very long day without you.

So I was on the negotiating committee, so I got to see Chris in action sitting at the table right next to me as we were negotiating this deal and this contract. And you went off and shot a whole pilot in the meantime too, so.

**Chris:** I did. And now I’m editing it. So I’ve stepped out of the editing room and — but I’m glad to talk to you guys.

**John:** Good, fantastic. So what should writers know about this deal and sort of what has happened over the course of this negotiation?

**Chris:** There are actually a lot of things that I think this negotiation accomplished. Most people I think will look at it in that it’s two separate things. One is a whole bunch of stuff that we got that came off of what people will think of as the DGA pattern, a pattern that in fact we had a lot to do with because there were conversations that went on for a long time between the WGA and the DGA about all the stuff that had been negotiated. And then separately the new provisions on options and exclusivity which are the first time for those issues to be discussed in the MBA. And actually I think potentially a big step forward.

So we should probably talk about one and then the other. And I’m happy to do whichever thing you want to do first.

**John:** Let’s do the basics, because a lot of stuff going into this negotiation was about talk of really rollbacks.

So I think far in the distance as this negotiation was approaching, there’s a sense like, okay, it’s just going to be a very standard negotiation. We’re going to end up doing a lot of the same things the DGA deal did. It should not be complicated.

And then the first proposals we got from the studios were actually not what we expected.

**Chris:** No, they actually contained about $60 million in rollbacks which seemed outrageous during the time of unprecedented profitability for the companies. Nevertheless, that’s where we began. And so that’s coming off of an initial list of rollbacks and then a decision on the part of the studios, the companies not to come in for any early conversations but just to arrive on the first day with those rollbacks on the table.

We began on our end with a letter, as you probably all remember from the co-chairs of our committee, from Chip Johannessen and Billy Ray, essentially informing our members of what those rollbacks were. And I think that was a really important moment in the course of the negotiations. It put the companies on notice that we were not taking this lightly. I think it energized the membership in a way.

And we went into the room with interestingly I think a little bit of momentum. I don’t know whether it was a strategic mistake on the part of the companies. You’d have to ask them how they felt about it in the long run. But I think though it looked like it was a potentially dangerous moment and it could have been. There were many days sitting in the negotiation room when we were still at risk of some of those rollbacks actually trying — being imposed on us if we could not get out of them. But instead, what it turned out to do was to kind of invigorate us on our side and put us on the offensive almost from day one.

So first off, all of those rollbacks were off the table and those rollbacks included some major — would have — major concessions first of all in pension and health — mostly in health. Also some rollbacks on the screen side of the business that would have decreased the salary of screenwriters by raising the low budget minimum. So that was actually a very dangerous moment for us at the very beginning.

But all of that stuff actually went away. And by the way, those were the highlighted rollbacks. But the truth was as we got into the deal there were also a bunch of hidden potential rollbacks that we actually were able to avoid as we went and negotiated a number of the different specifics.

**John:** One of the things I found most interesting as I was sitting there learning about this stuff is that when we say the DGA deal, I sort of assumed that all the unions had kind of agreed on what the levels were for things. Like on the future side, what we describe as being a low budget or medium budget or high budget, I assumed those would be common across all of the guilds. And they’re not at all.

And so when the studios try to say like, oh we want to have the low budget and the medium budget things be similar to the DGA things, that can be really, really bad for our side because we may have much better definitions for what those terms mean than the DGA does.

**Chris:** Yeah, I think it — and you’re talking specifically about the rates for basic cable where the budget breaks for basic cable are different between the WGA and the DGA deal. So what ended up happening was we were looking at getting what’s called an outsized increase in the script minimums for hour-long dramatic basic cable series. And the question was, were we going to do it on our old budget breaks or would we be asked to adopt the DGA budget breaks. If we did that, we would have lost much of the gains that came with those minimums because the shows would not actually fit over those budget breaks.

But we held firm. So what ended up happening is it doesn’t look like a remarkable gain because in fact what we got — I mean, in terms of the budget breaks because the budget breaks are exactly the same as they’ve always been in the WGA deal. We do have, in fact, one of the gains we made was a 5, 5 and 5% bump in script minimums for basic cable dramatic series without a change in the budget breaks.

So that’s a good result of the negotiation that will not be clear in the materials that were put out for the negotiation.

So the DGA made a deal off of its contract and we made a deal off of our contract. And our point of view was you can’t change our minimums. That’s a rollback. And they didn’t get a rollback. We shouldn’t get a rollback either. So we didn’t. We both ended up with gains over what was existing in our current contract.

**Craig:** I want to take a step back for a second, Chris, because we’re going to go through all the points of what this deal means for us. But for the sake of context for people listening, there’s kind of a meta victory baked in to all of this. And that is a victory of prudence. I don’t know how else to put it.

The companies came to us with this jerky first offer. And there are so many ways to take the bait there. And quite expertly you and David Young and the negotiating committee and Billy Ray and Chip, you all chose the path of no bait. We’re not taking the bait at all. We’re not going to antagonize. We’re not going to throw a tantrum. We’re going to very calmly tell our membership. But basically, we’re not going to take the bait.

And they blinked. And I think it’s important for people to understand that there’s no fun victory in any of this. You never get to punch this guy in the nose and see him go down and then just dance around him. It’s always some quiet unseen victory. Those are the only victories worth having in these things.

**Chris:** Right.

**Craig:** So you guys did a really good job right off the bat of not taking the bait. And I think that the prudence paid off in a huge way. There is this saying that some used to promulgate years ago that the guild never won anything good without a strike. I would submit this negotiation as the perfect rebuttal to that. We got a lot here.

**Chris:** When the companies put out those rollbacks on the table and we came in with that firm undeniable response, I think they rightly believed that we could go back to our membership and take a strike vote. And that we would get a strike vote. That’s what the truth in the room that we were not going to put up with, in a period of unprecedented economic success for those companies, rollbacks in our P&H or for our most vulnerable members at this point, our screenwriters. That continued into the conversation about options and exclusivity throughout all of which I think they rightly assumed that they were sitting on a tinderbox.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Chris:** We didn’t explode anything but we made it very clear what was at risk if we didn’t get some deal on this.

**Craig:** It’s a great example of walking softly and carrying a big stick because, yeah sure, I’m sure they were probing with the theory that we were all just battle-weary still from 2007. And why not see if we can get away with something crazy. And so they do what they do and you guys had the perfect response.

I was really happy to see the term — we used to traditionally always get these 3% bumps in minimums. And for people that write in features, minimums are sort of irrelevant because it’s sort of an overscale business and most of us — most people who work in screenplays get more than scale. But even if you do get scale, 3% isn’t going to change your life.

But in television it’s the basis for residuals. It’s a really important term. And we would always get 3% and then suddenly it became 2%. And now I’m happy to see that it’s coming back for 2.5% and now 3% — back to 3% again.

**Chris:** Yeah. David Young calls it breaking the 2s and it was a very high priority for us. I’ll just quote him again, something — a quote that the negotiating committee heard over and over again. I think anyone who went to any of the outreach meetings, I think he quotes Einstein — whether it’s actually an accurate quote or not, who cares: that the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Chris:** So 3% every single year, year after year actually makes an enormous difference in income for writers both from their minimums they get paid but also in residuals. But in addition to that, I think that we believe that it drives eventually overscale income that as those minimums rise and at some point double over the course of a decade because of it, so too does above scale income rising. We all know that one of the pressures right now is on downward pressure on above scale income, not just for screenwriters but also for television writers.

And it’s a tough thing for us to take on because it’s not actually within WGA’s purview. But we do effect it indirectly by guarding our 3% bumps in minimums. And I —

**Craig:** Right.

**Chris:** And I agree with you. It was an important gain in this year’s negotiation.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure.

**John:** An unusual thing about this negotiation is generally the parties sit down, they negotiate for a long period of time and hopefully by the end of this negotiation they reach a conclusion, a deal. And this time, it didn’t happen. So we got through a bunch of it and then we announced to the members that we were taking a break and that we were coming back to focus on one specific issue which was options and exclusivity.

So can you talk us through what options and exclusivity really mean, who is affected by it, and sort of why it became an issue this round?

**Chris:** Yes. It’s a little bit of a long story and that would actually happen in the negotiations as well.

Options and exclusivity became an issue because of traditional television schedule, the 22-episode television schedule or more — 22 episodes or more television schedule which had writers writing on the same schedule essentially from the beginning of June until sometime in March or April. And then taking something around a two-month break before they were either hired again when their show came back or not or had the chance to go after a different job the exact time as everyone else.

It has begun to be replaced by a new system of short orders which meant that increasingly television writers were finding themselves working for eight or 10 or 12 episodes on a series much less time and for much less pay. And then waiting under both either exclusivity or an exclusivity and an option deal with their studios, and I’ll describe what that means for a moment, unable to get work sometimes for six, nine, 10 months in a row because you — as people know who write cable programs, you may be in a room, write all the episodes. It may be some time before all the shooting is done and then some even more months until that series airs. And then who knows how long until the studio and the network decide they’re going to pick up the show again and put you back to work.

So what ended up happening was writers had small amount of pay over a small period of time attached to which they had a very long period where they were effectively unable to get other work.

Why were they unable to get other work? One of two reasons. One, because some people had exclusivity agreements which meant that they were actually not permitted even when they were not writing to go write for anyone else. The studio that had them under contract essentially had a lock on them.

But even if they didn’t have an exclusivity deal, they had an option on them in first position for when the series came back which meant that anyone who wanted — and it’s not that they weren’t free to go look for other employment in television — could only look for employment in television in second position. So I’d go to another show and say, “Hey, I’ve got some number of months off. I’d love to be on staff on your show.” And that other show would say, “Yeah, but we don’t know when your first show is going to come back on the air and they’re going to take you out of our writers’ room potentially somewhere in the middle. And we can’t afford that. At the very least, why would we hire you as opposed to somebody else who’s free and clear?”

So effectively, what was going on is that people were working for short periods of time and being held under an option to that same studio for long periods of time without pay. At some point, that becomes an untenable financial situation for people. They can’t actually make ends meet. And what’s more and the argument that we made is it’s fundamentally unfair.

**John:** So I have friends who were in exactly that situation where they were sort of in limbo because the TV show they’d been writing on had shot. It was waiting to find out whether they were going to get another season of the TV show. And during that time, they were stuck. They couldn’t write on any other shows. They weren’t even supposed to go out and do feature work during that time, which seemed crazy. And you don’t know how long that’s going to be.

So to literally be taken out of the market for such a long period of time is so damaging to writers, especially young writers, people who are just first-time staff writers. They suddenly can’t work anywhere else.

And so these are the kind of writers who end up having to go get other jobs because like literally like Starbucks kind of jobs because they cannot work in the actual industry for which they’re supposed to be employed. It was incredibly frustrating to me. But I think it’s also frustrating for television. I think it’s bad for television.

**Chris:** That’s right. I mean, it’s difficult in a couple of ways. First of all, I think you were alluding to this: Imagine somebody who beforehand was writing 22 episodes a year, that kind of experience. And now, they’re — maybe they get eight episodes in a full year and maybe the next year they don’t get that because their show doesn’t get picked up. And so you end up with people instead of who have hundreds of episodes under their belt by the time they want to run a show or move up the ladder and become co-APs or whatever it is, they now have episodes that measure in the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s because that’s all they can add up to if you’re only doing a short order every season at best.

And so it’s very bad for that reason. The other reason why it’s bad is because — and we actually felt that the studios would respond to this and maybe they did even if they didn’t say so out loud — is that a marketplace where all the writers are tied up not working is bad for every television show that doesn’t have the dibs on that writer.

So if you, John, have a new show and you want to staff, you may well find out that there are five or six writers who are not currently writing but they’re not available to you.

The second argument really is that for every show, every studio that isn’t holding a given writer under contract, they’re at a huge disadvantage by this tight labor market because, for example, I said like say you, John, you have a new show that gets on the air and you’re looking to hire a writing staff. And in fact, there are many writers who are not currently working but they’re not available because they’re all sitting doing nothing because they’re under option to people who aren’t using them currently. How much better it would be if the labor market were freed up and that people who had shows and needed writing were able to hire those people? And those people would then be able to choose which show to work on.

In the long run, that benefits everybody. The companies certainly never expressed the feeling like this would in the long run be down to their benefit. But I actually feel like it’ll be beneficial to everyone to have a labor market in which people can work whenever they’re available.

**John:** I strongly agree.

Chris, can you talk us through what is new and different in this options and exclusivity agreement, because I think there’s some confusion as if, you know, we didn’t actually give up anything that was already in the contract. None of this was ever covered by WGA contract. This is sort of brand new territory for the MBA.

**Chris:** That’s right. This is the first time ever that options and exclusivity have been covered in the MBA. And like everything in the MBA, these are minimums which is to say that they only set a floor from which we can negotiate even better deals for ourselves and our individual contracts. There is nothing in the MBA that gives the companies the right to have an option over you or to exclusivity. They need to negotiate for that. The options and exclusivity provisions that are in the new MBA restrict the company’s ability to negotiate for options and exclusivity in the following way.

If you are a writer who earns after January 1st 2015 under $200,000 a year or after January 2016 under $210,000 a year, the companies are not permitted to negotiate options and exclusivity clauses with you. Instead, your treatment is governed by the MBA. And this is what it says. First of all, there’s no exclusivity anymore for any of those writers. So when you are not actually working, you are free to work for any other company. You want to go out and write — you get a chance to do a rewrite on a movie during your hiatus, you are free to do that and they cannot say to you, “No, we get a first look at your services.”

Second thing is about options. So the companies have a 90-day period after when payment is due for your writing services during which they still have a hold on you. This is roughly the same as the kind of hold that they might have had at the end of the 22 episodes, 22-episode order.

But beginning on the 91st day, you have the right to go out and look for any job you want. The requirement is that when you get a bona fide offer, you bring it back to the studio and they have two choices. Within three days, if your show has already been picked up, only if your show has been picked up, they may exercise your option and put you on that show and you need to begin being paid to write within 14 days. Or if your show has not been picked up, they leave you free to go. And you are then permitted to go and get another job in first position. And the company with which, the studio with which you originally work then retains second position.

So in other words, once your job is over, once that second job is over, if your original show gets picked up, they can come back to you and say, “Okay, we want to put you on that show under the terms of the deal that you negotiated.” Effectively, you are free to go get work in essentially any situation after those 90 days are done.

**Craig:** Unless they pay you a holding fee.

**Chris:** That’s right. So that’s the other thing. The other thing they can do is they can, after that 90 days, they can pay you to extend your option. And that holding fee is one-third of WGA minimum for either Article 13 or Article 14 writers plus pension and health. That’s fundamental for us because what we said was the right, which is not just the right of writers but of all human beings, is to actually be able to apply their trade, to go out and make money for the thing that they do. We don’t work for free nor do we forgo employment for free.

So beyond the reasonable period at the end of a season, of a show, there’s no reason why a writer should say you may hold me without either compensating me or, like I said, I wouldn’t put it that way, you can’t hold me without compensating me. And if you do not compensate me, you must let me go. The argument we made in the room over and over again, it was made very powerfully by a lot of members of the committee, was that anything less than that is a form of servitude. And that we would not live as indentured servants of the companies.

**Craig:** Well, one thing that I think is revolutionary about this — beyond the fact that it’s addressing an area that had not yet been addressed by the Collective Bargaining Agreement — is the idea, is the philosophy behind the idea that this applies to people who earn less than X. And in this case, X is $200,000 per contract year. Unless I’m incorrect, my memory of the MBA is that the only other place that there was anything like this was in relation to pseudonyms that we have a right guaranteed by the MBA to use a pseudonym unless we make more than I think it’s $200,000 or $250,000 on a project.

But what’s so brilliant about this is that one thing that we’ve always struggled with and what the companies throw in our face all the time is that this is a mature contract. And it is a mature contract. It’s — I mean, this is the product of — we’re coming up on 70 years now of negotiated settlements and it is a mature contract where we are literally arguing over whether we should get raises of 2.5% or 3% and so on and so forth. And we all know that certain residual formulae are set in stone. But this is shining a light. And I think this is the future of our guild and our negotiations with the companies.

And that is to say let us agree that certain areas here are mature, but let us now carve out exceptions and protections for new writers who are being paid what I call close to scale because those are the writers who are suffering the most from these kinds of practices. It’s harder to argue as some did.

When I was on the board people were still fighting the DVD battle and they were saying, “Well, we’re losing millions of dollars.” And I was listening to millionaires telling me that they were losing millions of dollars. And it was true.

But what was also true is that they were millionaires. And I really like the idea that we’re forgoing this need for a universal benefit for all union members and saying we’re okay to settle for getting the goods for the people who need it the most. To me, that’s what a union is for. And I think this is a big deal. I just think philosophically from an approach point of view, there’s a lot more to be mined from this tactic than there is from saying everybody deserves it or nobody gets it.

**John:** Well, I think it’s also — it’s looking structurally what are the biggest problems facing actual working writers. And you can’t be a working writer if you’re not allowed to work. And that’s I think a great place for the guild to come in and take a look at it.

But I would stress, though, it’s not necessarily just the people who are making below $200,000 or $210,000 in the second year of this that are going to be affected because I think the people who are above that level, their agents, their representatives are going to go back and say, “Hey, I know we’re above this cap but we want those same protections that the people below the cap have.” And some of those people will get it and some of those people won’t get it. But I think it sets a standard or a pattern for how you talk about options and exclusivity for even people who are making —

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Significantly above that level.

**Craig:** Sure. I agree. Yeah.

**Chris:** I think one of the problems that we’ve had is, look, it’s obvious, is that individual agents negotiating for individual clients have been unable to exert the leverage to avoid onerous options and exclusivity clauses in contracts. The philosophy of this is that there are some writers who are beginning, who make less for whom the job of negotiating this individually through their agents is an impossibility. Much like negotiating a minimum salary for those people would be an impossibility. They’d be under pressure to — downward pressure to accept less and less and less.

But having set a floor below which the companies cannot go, we hope to provide an opportunity for the agents of better paid writers to make an argument that said, “If you’re paying my staff writer and my story editor and not holding them under option, you’re not going to tell my co-producer and my producer that he or she needs to be under an onerous option.” We put the power back in the hands of the agents where that also belongs.

**Craig:** Chris, you and I have had a discussion about the free rewrite problem, whatever name we want to give it, that’s really what it is. And one thing that I’ve expressed to you before and I’m kind of hoping that maybe this is a little bit of an illuminated path to it is the idea of carving out a protection in the MBA for writers that are earning close to scale, particularly when it comes to one step deals.

I’d love to see a term where we were okay with going in there and saying, “We’re negotiating for a two-step deal guarantee. But not for everybody, just if you’re making this or under.” And I think there’s nice precedent now for that kind of work to be done.

**Chris:** Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s where we have to go after we hang up. It’s high on the list.

**Craig:** Great, good.

**John:** So Chris, talk to us about when the things in this deal go into effect because it’s not all at once.

**Chris:** No. In general, the terms of the deal go into effect May 2nd of this year. That’s when the new three-year term begins. Options and exclusivity are effective January 1st 2015. That’s because it actually is a very large change in the way business affairs has to do business. So it gives them, the companies, a bunch of months to actually get their houses in order. And actually for us to begin to educate writers and agents about how this is going to work.

**Craig:** It makes sense too because the term is based on a contractual year income and that hasn’t happened yet. It’s a little strange to look back at income that was accrued under a contract that didn’t have that provision.

**Chris:** That’s right, that’s right.

**John:** So before any of this goes into effect though we have to ratify this contract. So what is the process for that? What do writers need to do or WGA members need to do?

**Chris:** Well, they can either vote online or in the old-fashioned ways. And all of the packet of materials will be going out — I apologize, I don’t know exactly what day but in the next day or two. The contract has been recommended by both the guild — the Board of Directors of the West and the Council of the East and by the negotiating committee. So all that’s left is for the members to vote and I hope to ratify the contract.

And so you’ll get the material in the next few days. And I believe the voting deadline is the end of — it’s like the 29th of April. Don’t hold me to that. It could be just a day or — it can’t be a day or two later because it needs to be ratified or we need to turn it down by the date on which the contract expires which is May 1st. So voting needs to happen.

And I — look, it’s the same argument that we make all the time. I think a good turnout and I hope a good turnout that votes in favor of this contract continues what I think the negotiation began to suggest to the companies which is that we are, after all these years, and an argument I think that I’ve made and you’ve made, John and Craig, we’re actually much more unified than the companies might have perceived that we were or the world continues to claim that we are.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Chris:** And one — another piece of evidence of that and that means people voting.

**Craig:** I think for me, by far the most important factor and the most beneficial thing for us when dealing with them is our leadership and how they view our leadership. And again, I have to say they took our leadership this time around, which includes the two of you, seriously because our leadership behaved in a serious manner. Not in a loud manner but in a very serious manner. And if they feel they’re dealing with serious people, in their minds they know if serious people turn to the membership and say, “Hey, everyone, this is bad,” everyone will believe them and become instantly energized.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We don’t need to be marching around with pitchforks until such time as a reasonable man asks us to.

**Chris:** Yeah, I think —

**John:** That’s a very good point.

**Chris:** I think that — yes. Look, I mean it’s self-serving for me but I will agree with — one of the things that we are susceptible to and I think a fallacious argument is that ignoring the fact that science gives consent in fact and that the assumption that when our members are not active, they are inactive because they don’t care, I think many of them are inactive from time to time because they have many other things going on.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Chris:** They have their lives that are complicated both in a work sense and every way else. And if they feel as if things are going in the right direction, then they’re less likely to actually feel the need to actively engage. I don’t take that always as being a negative. Sometimes I think that’s a quiet sign of competence.

**John:** Chris Keyser, I would like to thank you personally for your quiet confidence during this whole negotiation. It was great to see this. And I really thought the team was terrific, including David Young who I had not really encountered before but just did a terrific job negotiating that contract. So my personal thanks to you for a really great negotiation.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean I’ll back that up. I would say, Chris, and this is self-serving for me because I’ve supported you strongly from the start but I think you’re going to go down as one of our great presidents. I really do. I think that you have accomplished not only an extraordinary amount of good during your time, which is of course not yet over, but you have set an example and kind of put forth proof of an argument of a way to do this that is better than the way it has been done. And that is extraordinarily valuable for us as a union going forward.

**John:** Well, Chris, we’ll let you get back to you cutting your pilot and thank you so much for joining us on here to talk about the deal and congratulations. And everybody, remember to vote.

**Chris:** Okay, thanks guys.

**Craig:** Thanks, Chris. Thank you.

**Chris:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

[*Intro tone*]

**John:** So Craig, we we’ve talking a lot about our potential new screenplay format and I thought today we could spend a few minutes talking about sort of how the screenplay format came to be and sort of what some of the other alternatives that have existed out there are. And it’s a little bit of a history lesson but also alternate history lesson of the way things could have gone.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I’m going to start with — actually, a guy wrote in — emailed us. His name is Stokely Dallison and he wrote, “I suspect you may have forgotten what it’s like to be a new screenwriter. In my view, it’s a wonderful comfort to adopt the same format as thousands of scripts that have come before. Every script the same font, the same spacing, the same three holes with two brass brads. It feels good to be part of something relatively old. It feels good to know that my script, however inadequate it might be, looks the same as all the great scripts that have come before.”

And I thought that was actually a really charming thought —

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Because I remember writing that first script and it’s like it just seems so weirdly magic that I — oh everything — it’s got to look just like a real script and the esoterica of the screenplay format is both something that sort of keeps people away, but once you sort of get inside it’s like, oh, I know how to do this. There’s something about that format and it does feel sort of special. And so whatever we do, we have to acknowledge that there is something special about it.

What’s interesting though is what we take as being the screenplay format is actually fairly recent. And there are other ways it could have gone and there are other ways — you’ve seen movies that were written in completely different ways.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so there’s not one magic way for it to work.

**Craig:** No. Well, I have to say that, first I hear — I can’t tell you how many times I will hear somebody say, “Well, you’ve probably forgotten what it’s like to be a new screenwriter.” No, I haven’t. No. [laughs] I don’t think there is a screenwriter alive who still doesn’t feel like a new screenwriter on some level. And certainly we don’t forget what it’s like. I do want to just put that out there. Never think that we’ve forgotten magically the pain of becoming a screenwriter or starting out.

There is something that’s comforting about being able to write in a format that makes your screenplay look professional. But unfortunately that’s not really important. And I would argue that a lot of new screenwriters will obsess over those things in order to avoid the other things that are unique to their screenplay like, you know, the content.

**John:** So let’s take a little history trip and figure out how the screenplay came to be. Because when the first movies were made, the first screenplays were really just a list of shots. And if you think about it, these are silent films. So literally you are just making a shot list and just like a train comes, close on a man’s face. And that’s sort of what the original screenplays were like, were just a list of these shots.

And it was almost — it was basically a set of instructions for like what the order of the shots were going to be. And if there was going to be a title card, there wasn’t really dialogue, so it could just be a title card or like one of those intercut cards that show like some line that someone is supposedly saying. But that’s as much as there would be.

It’s Thomas Ince who is often credited with sort of being the father of the modern screenplay because he’s also the father of the modern studio. He was the one who said — he bought a bunch of land in California and he’s like we’re going to make a bunch of movies. And in order to make a bunch of movies, he wanted to make sure that he could basically hand a blueprint to anyone, any of his directors, and say like this is what it’s supposed to be. Shoot exactly what I’m giving you.

And so our idea of a screenplay being the blueprint for a movie is really credited to him. And so a bit of trivia, if you actually are down in Culver City, there’s a street of Ince. There’s the Ince Gate —

**Craig:** Ince, yeah.

**John:** To the Culver Studios or one of the studios down there. You will actually see the word Ince down there.

**Craig:** Wasn’t he the guy that got murdered on a boat or something?

**John:** I’m sure there’s a fascinating story. Like all of old Hollywood is great and wonderful. And so —

**Craig:** Right. Everybody was constantly being murdered.

**John:** Well, this was the frontier. This is like a brand new town. It was all —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It was all made up from scratch. So he’s the guy who sort of I think is generally credited with being the guy who said this is a plan for making the movie. It’s typed out this way. It’s basically those shots.

Now I still, remember, he was essentially making silent films. And as we started adding dialogue in, that’s where the scripts became a little bit more like a play because you actually have to have people talking to each other.

So scripts going back to even like Casablanca, they written in what’s called a continuity style, which is sort of like a shooting script. It’s basically a sequence of shots. And even when there’s dialogue, it’s really about the shots. And it’s as if you’re sort of directing on the page. It’s like — it feels like a director’s plan for what it is that you’re shooting.

This evolved over time to what is called the master scene format. And I don’t even — I mean, I’ve been writing scripts for a long time but I didn’t know that the way we were writing our scripts is called the master scene. Have you seen that terminology?

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve never heard it before, but I did see it in the example that they used for an early master scene format screenplay. It’s The Apartment by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond. And they wrote that in 1959. And that does look very much like the screenplay format we use, if not exactly like the screenplay format we use today, which by the way I have to say, so on like one hand you’re right that it’s not like the movie business was founded on this format that we currently use. On the other hand, we have been using it for at least 55, 60 years, which implies that maybe it’s time for, you know, a change.

**John:** Or that we got it exactly right and nothing needs to change at all.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Well, let’s talk about The Apartment, because actually I was really struck by it. And there’s going to be links in the show notes to sort of all the scripts we’re talking about. So The Apartment, it really looks like a modern screenplay. Like if someone dropped it on your desk, it’s like, well, this is a screenplay.

But it’s considerably different from the continuity style of script. It’s literary. It’s kind of designed to be read. It’s not designed just as for a director to know what shots there are. It’s designed for a person to be able to see what a scene feels like just on the page. There’s a lot description about sort of — there is screen description. It’s really talking through what the characters are doing, what things feel like, what things looks like. And in a weird way, I think this is a good point that this site that we’re going to send you to makes, is that it actually gives the director more leeway.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** And so rather than calling out every shot, it’s describing sort of what the scene is like, and sometimes the suggestions were sort of like how it’s shot. But really, it’s going to be a director to figure out what those shots are in there to tell the story. So even though the writer gets to have a more free rein and more words to describe the scene, the director actually gets a little bit more leeway for figuring out how to shoot that scene. It’s a significant evolution.

**Craig:** Yeah, you can see in the Master Screen format — that’s what they’re calling it Master Screen format?

**John:** Master Scene format.

**Craig:** Master Scene format that everybody is starting to approach filmmaking in a more artistically free way. It is being unyoked from the factory. Early Hollywood was a factory. They would just burn film and lights and people would stand in spots and they would make movies in a matter of days. I mean, it was just — they would just churn them out.

And so it was really an ADs’ business if you think about it, you know. I mean, that what we currently think of as a first AD, they are the people on the set who are scheduling, figuring out how many pages you’re shooting in the day, marshaling the crew, making sure that the props people and the this and the that and everything is in place.

ADs were kind of the early directors, in some regards were like that.

**John:** They were.

**Craig:** And then as you see the influence of European cinema and also the increasing freedom, the artistic freedom of Hollywood, which I think was just naturally building on itself, getting bored with the kinds of stories they were telling and trying to find new ways to tell them, started to — and also probably because of the influx of playwrights into the process because of the demand. You can see now that the format is allowing both the writer and the director the freedom to tell a story in a creative way.

**John:** Yes. So if you look at the Master Scene format, which is really what we think about the modern screenplay format, it’s very tempting to read the dialogue and skip over everything else because the dialogue tends to be the meat of what is happening in modern screenplays.

You can get the gist of what’s going on by reading the dialogue. And so the dialogue is centered. And your eye kind of goes — falls to the center of the page. And all the scene description and the transitions and the scene headers stay towards the edges. But that’s not the only way that it can happen. And one of our listeners, Matt Markwalder, sent through a bunch of examples of Kubrick scripts which are wildly different and actually sort of do the opposite.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I think and probably in direct response to how people read scripts, he decided to do a completely different thing. So in Clockwork Orange, first off, everything is double spaced. And dialogue has wider margins and action is sort of put over to the right. And so the action is deliberately sort of minimized and sort of put over to the side, but in a way that you tend to sort of read it. It’s like the line length is really, really short and your eye goes to it. Whereas dialogue tends to be bigger, wider blocks of things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So an example, I’m skipping to page 28 of A Clockwork Orange. Scene 22. INT. CAT LADY HOUSE. That feels kind of normal. “The cat lady enters and dials a number.” That sentence is centered in two lines in the middle of the page. So it’s like it looks in sort of the area where you would normally expect to see dialogue, that’s where that line is. And the cat lady has this long speech that’s double spaced and goes all the way to the margins of the page. Is just a really interesting way to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, and then he changes it up because then when you get to Full Metal Jacket, it reads like a novel. He’s just in — he’s burying dialogue and action description into flowing paragraphs, not really breaking them out or formatting them any differently than each other.

It’s almost as if Kubrick decided I’m just going to format my screenplay the way I feel the movie is. I’m going to let the formatting reflect the tone and the vibe of what I’m going for which is awesome. And I suspect that when the entrepreneurial screenplay market really took off, the need for screenplays to be uniformly formatted became really important because now it was a commodity. And you had to formalize it. But I regret that. And I would love to see people have the freedom to write their screenplays however they choose to get across the vibe of the story they want to tell. I think that’s very powerful. And I think you and I are going to do it.

**John:** [laughs] So in Full Metal Jacket, for those who aren’t looking at this on the screen right now, the dialogue is actually in quotation marks. It just looks like a page of normal text really. It’s a very —

**Craig:** It’s like a book.

**John:** A completely different way of doing things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I also want to take a look at some of the other types of scripts that are out there that aren’t screenplay formats or at least normal screenplay formats. The most obvious one which is similar but different is the three-camera comedy, or the multi-cam comedy. So everything you see there has a laugh track to it on television tends to be that. So I’m looking at the page from The Millers.

**Craig:** The Millers, the show, the TV show, yeah.

**John:** So in multi-cam, action is basically on the same lines, has the same margins as we sort of expect in a screenplay format, but it’s all upper case. And it’s usually minimized. They don’t try to write as much in there as you would otherwise. Everything is double spaced. The whole page is double spaced. Character names, where they expect to be. But the dialogue blocks are a little bit wider. Parentheticals fall within the dialogue block themselves.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s really different. One of the things I do sort of enjoy about multi-cam and you can see sort of why they do it is partly because you’re scheduling things sort of on the fly so quickly. Skipping to page 37 of the script I’m reading at. INT. NATHAN’S HOUSE. KITCHEN LATER, D3, D3, indicating day three. And this is a thing you’ll commonly see in TV shows indicating what day or what night it is. But underneath that line, in a parenthesis is, “(Nathan, Debbie, the Sarge),” and what it’s showing is like who is in this scene.

**Craig:** Who’s in the scene, yeah.

**John:** And that’s a really useful bit of really kind of metadata that is useful to have especially as you’re trying to schedule this thing. Who needs to be there, what characters even if they’re not speaking in the scene need to be there in the background.

**Craig:** Yeah, it is useful information. And obviously a sitcom’s script is formatted in part to serve the need of a churning production that is weekly and involves live theater essentially for most of them. But I have to say just aesthetically I find it ugly.

**John:** I find it ugly, too, but that’s what I’m used to. It’s what your — it’s what you grew up with. And I’m sure to people who are used to multi-cam, they don’t find it ugly at all.

**Craig:** I guess I would say that what I find ugly about it is that it is the most formalized, that even screenplays allow you a little more leeway about how you approach things. But it’s so rigid in that sitcom format. And, you know, my instinct now is to see how we can allow screenwriters to express a movie on the page in a way that is more idiosyncratic to the story they’re telling and how they want to tell it and their dramatic intention.

So I’m probably just reacting to that because it’s very rigid.

**John:** It’s very rigid. So actually it’s interesting because in stage plays there actually is a wide range of sort of how those stage plays look. And so something I found in Big Fish is that I was looking at other books for musicals and it’s like, oh, there isn’t really — there’s much less consensus about how those things are supposed to look.

Typically, in plays you will find action will always be put entirely in giant parentheticals, which I find maddening and really not attractive to look at. But it’s a common way to do it in stage plays. Dialogue can be sort of where we expect it now, but blocks tend to be a little bit wider. Are lyrics all the way to left, are they inset differently? Are they all upper case? That all changes.

But of course there’s another way you can do plays, which is just to have — which is more like sort of the reading plays that you and I are used to where a character name is, you know, upper case, bolded maybe even with a colon after it. And their dialogue just goes after it. Since plays are mostly people talking, that could be an efficient way to show that on the page. And it may make more sense to really let the page be dominated by the dialogue because the action is going to tend to be much more minimal than it would be under the screenplay.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you know, the key thing — the thing that’s going to unleash us all is this getting away from pagination. The more I think about it, I just know we’re right. I just know it.

**John:** So let’s talk about what those fundamental units are, because the fundamental unit could be a scene. It can be a sequence. It could some sort of other unit. But there needs to be some area of story by which you can say like, these are the outer perimeters of what this moment is because if you look at the Kubrick scripts, it’s very difficult to tell sort of where we are at in those things. And sometimes I wouldn’t even know like are we in the same location? Have we moved to a different place in time? That’s challenging to figure out in some of these Kubrick scripts.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. No, I’m not an anarchist about this sort of thing. I do think that, you know, if you are — granted if you’re directing your own material, the only person that truly needs to understand it is you and you’ll explain it to everybody else around you. But for those who are writing screenplays for other people to read, I think sequences — sequences. I think letting the dramatic action delineate where the pieces begin and end is the way to do it, not location.

**John:** So the Coen brothers’ scripts, I don’t know if you’ve actually read any of them on the page. They tend to get rid of scene headers altogether. They tend to be, you can see that we’re in the new place or new time. But they’re not using the classic sort of nomenclature for sort of what those are. That may ultimately be the way to look at this is that as you’re moving from place to place you’re showing us where we’re at, but it’s not formalized in those scene header ways. So we don’t think of those scene headers as being — we don’t give them more importance than they deserve. And right now, I think they get way too —

**Craig:** They’re so important. Yeah.

**John:** I think they get elevated too high.

**Craig:** I mean, honestly, you pick up a screenplay, if you were from another planet and you came here and you picked up a screenplay you would think that the most important part of storytelling is whether you’re inside or outside.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s the dumbest thing. And half the time now the way we shoot movies, it doesn’t — you’ll say, you know, EXT. OUTSIDE OF INTERGALACTIC FEDERATION BUILDING. That means you’re inside on a stage. There’s no inside or outside. I mean half that stuff doesn’t even matter anymore. How do you write exterior/interior on a script for Avatar? Explain that. I mean what’s the point?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I totally agree. I think the slug line thing is the weirdest thing. It forces us into categories of time. A lot of time I’m not sure if I’m supposed to say morning, afternoon, dusk, noon, or just day. What does day mean? I don’t even know what day is. What’s day?

**John:** Yeah, and how specific are you allowed to be about what time of day you’re at? Do you need to clarify if you move to a different day. Like I just like The Millers script indicated it was day three, like that is a useful bit of information yet does that need to be reflected on the page right at that moment? Perhaps not. And maybe there’s a different way that you can indicate that, so that it’s part of the metadata for that sequence, but doesn’t have to be written down the road.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. Because I’ve had this conversation with a number of ADs on a number of movies where they will sit down with me and say, “Walk me through the days of the week or the month on this? Let’s actually…” And in fact, I remember on Identify Thief, Seth and Jason and I sat down one day and really dialed in the days of the week, so we knew that this thing actually made sense and that it wasn’t taking either two days or 12 days. Because we didn’t, you know, if you have four nights in a row and then say you had a three-day road trip, it just doesn’t quite work.

So at some point, you do that. And if you want to — if we have a format that uses technology and allows us to flexibly include a file that they can pull up as they wish, that just shows a day, night, time passage summary.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That would be really cool. But I don’t need to look at it while I’m reading the script.

**John:** Exactly. So that’s a useful bit, just like costume changes. It’s one of the first things when you have a costume designer comes on to a movie is really doing that day/night breakdown to make sure like, are they still in the same outfit as they would be in the previous scene? And sometimes I will get involved with that because I need to sort of clarify like no, no, this is a different day. Like they could have changed clothes, they would have changed clothes between this time. Or no, they have to be wearing the same thing because they literary came right from there to there and it’s going to bizarre if they’re suddenly wearing new clothes.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Absolutely. In fact you’re zeroing in on something that’s really interesting about the current screenplay format, is that it overemphasizes some things, and ignores other things entirely. And what ends up happening is we go — right before you shoot a movie, right before you begin principal photography, the entire production gathers together all the heads of the department and most of their keys under them, and the director and the producers and hopefully the screenwriter is there as well. They should be. And everybody goes page by page and they ask questions.

And a lot of those questions will shock the hell out of the screenwriter because they’ll think, oh, I thought that would be obvious, but it’s technically not in the script, so yes, they don’t realize that they’re coming home in the same outfit that they went to work in, you know. But if we could help guide those things because the format allowed us to flexibly do so, that would be really cool.

**John:** Yeah. So I think that it becomes a matter of you write your script, you write what is going to be a thing. Let’s not focus on sort of what it looks like. But you’re going to write your thing and you’re going to figure, you’ll write your script, Hollywood script/screenplay. Don’t worry — we won’t worry about margins or sort of other stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But then you figure out what are the sequences? What are the units of story that are important? And within those units of story then we can sort of have those, you know, if this were the web, each of those units of story would be essentially a page and there could be extra metadata associated with that page. So you could have all the information that is about who is in the scene, day or night, where this falls in the timeline of the actual story.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And the situations where we’re in multiple locations, you can address those facts that you’re in multiple locations over the course of the sequence. So those intercut phone calls which are always a challenge, that can all be part of that because it’s — there’s a fundamental story unit that’s together.

**Craig:** What a waste of space when you have two people talking. You have interiors and exteriors, blah, blah, blah, intercut, nonsense words you don’t — it’s like, duh. You just write, you know, he calls her up. She’s sitting in her apartment. They have a discussion, on the phone. Everybody knows how phone discussions work, but somehow screenplay formats are like slogging like Frankenstein through the mud. It’s like we all know how to write our name, but if you need to program in Basic, you go 10, print name, 20, go to 10. You know, it’s just it’s so clumsy and unnecessary and we need to be free of it, John, free, free.

**John:** So the other thing I will say is, you’ve written some animation and I’ve done a lot of animation, is you recognize that they ultimately number things as sequences. And it will be a bunch of what we would consider scenes. They will consider one whole sequence. Almost more like what we think was as reel, they will think of as a sequence. And it’s a much, ultimately a much smarter way to address it because they’re not worried about sort of like this location, that location, whatever. It’s about this unit of story. And that’s probably a smarter way for us to format.

**Craig:** Yes, for sure. I mean, you start writing. Let’s say you’re writing in our new format. And when you reach the end of your first sequence, you indicate it’s time for a new sequence to begin. You might naturally say, well, how will I know when that sequence is over? You’ll know. You’ll know. [laughs] Because you’ll just know. It’s so obvious. And it will just be similarly obvious when the next — it’s like, oh god, we got to do it, John.

**John:** We got to do it. So this is actually a great segue for our last topic of the day, which is I just delivered like literary two hours ago delivered the script that I owed and so I turned it in.

**Craig:** Congrats.

**John:** But this is the first time I went hardcore on a way that I’ve kind of been working, but I went much more hardcore on it this time, which is that I wrote each bit separately. So I didn’t sit down with one file and write from the beginning to the end. I only wrote separate scenes or sequences, whatever you want to call it. And I just wrote the pieces.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I skipped all over the, you know, the story of this episode and wrote the pieces I wanted to write, I had a really good outline and I assembled it all at the end. And so I want to talk through sort of how I did it this way. And, you know, I think it’s actually useful for what we’re doing in terms of like what a format could do that could help us down the road.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So for this time, I used WorkFlowy which was a One Cool Thing from before which is an outline or it’s an online outliner that I really just love. And so even right now, I’m looking at WorkFlowy because I keep show notes for the podcast in it. But I just made a pilot and I wrote the, you know, these scenes that were in it. Basically these are the events that happened. And I rearranged them and so it was equivalent of my index cards. But I would sort of have a list of basically these are the scenes, these are the things that are happening over the course of it.

And then as I had more details I could fill in underneath those scenes. I sometimes would start writing dialogue. I’d write the important stuff that needed to happen in those things. And when I chose to write one of the scenes, I would just open up a brand new file in Highland and just type it. And I’d write it and when I was done, I would save it, I would scratch that off the list and keep moving on to the next one.

What’s so good about this is, well, once I start on a first draft I’ll go someplace and barricade myself and write drafts by hand. And I’ll do that so that I can’t go back and edit. This was sort of the same idea, is that I would write something and then I would not go back to it and futz with it. I would go on and write the next thing. And I would write the next thing. And I wouldn’t go back through and sort of start at page one and keep building forward. I actually got a lot more done I think because I wasn’t going back and tweaking all those things I’d written before.

**Craig:** You know me, I’m a big go-backer, tweaker, you know, but that’s just my flow. I like that feeling. It just makes me — I’m happy, you know, and whatever makes you happy and whatever gets you through the process. What I very much am addicted to, I don’t know, it’s probably the wrong phrase, but I’m committed to is the notion of thoroughly outlining the movie before I start because I feel like if you do it and I do think in terms of sequences when I’m outlining as supposed to locations which is an indication that we should be writing in terms of sequences and not locations.

It helps you place all of these things within the context of character and theme and all the rest of that stuff as opposed to just, there’s a car chase. Yeah, but what happens in the car chase that makes it relevant to the character beyond, you know, chase man and get him, you know, that sort of thing.

So I like outlining a lot. But there — look, there are writers who don’t and still get there on their own and do it well. I just think that when you’re putting a first draft together, you are entitled to do whatever you need to do to get there. That’s basically my feeling. You get to use anything that supports you through the very difficult process of making something out of absolutely nothing.

And just as long as you can accept that this is — there is no end to your first draft. There is simply ceasing and then returning to it. Do what you need to do.

**John:** So in this case, I ended up with a folder full of essentially 40 — 30 to 40 scenes. And classically what I would then have to do is I’d have to open up a new document and open up each one of those individually and sort of copy and paste them into one big thing and sort of get them all arranged properly.

So being the person that I am, I asked Nima to write me a new little app called Assembler.

**Craig:** Of course you did.

**John:** And because that’s what I do.

**Craig:** It’s what you do.

**John:** So Assembler is a thing which we might end up releasing or we might not. It looks ugly right now, but it did the job. Essentially, what Assembler does is it takes a folder full of little files, little text files because that’s all Fountain is little text files. And you choose a folder, it pops up, and you can just drag the order that you want the files to be assembled in. You hit a button and it assembles them and opens up in Highland. And so I had simply an assembly.

And I think that assembly is a really good way to think about that sort of pre first draft. It’s like it’s all the basic scenes, but they’re not necessarily nipped and tucked in the right way. So it’s — it wasn’t my first draft certainly, but it resembled what the script was going to be. All the scenes were there. And then I can sort of go through and then really do that detail work of making sure that this scene is really leaning into the next scene and tumbling into the next scene in ways that was useful and meaningful. Even as I was writing, I knew what had come before, I knew what was coming after. But I want to make sure I was making great word choices that were going to send me into the first line of the next scene. All that stuff.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so that was a great way. So I went from that first assembly to this first draft in, you know, four days and felt good about it because I knew all the bits were there and so I could really focus on making everything that’s best and not sort of like struggling to get those last little bits done.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s interesting. I think what I’m doing is an analog version of what you’re doing. I’m just doing it with index cards.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** That I’m basically breaking down my pieces into index cards. And the index cards typically are sequences. And that’s how I’m sort or organizing things. And what I’m doing — when I’m doing those index cards, is there’s a depth sort of textually there’s a depth because there’s a little summary on the card. And then what I like to do it is I like to have another card next to it that’s the what does this mean? Why is this in the movie? Why did this deserve to be in the movie card?

And then underneath that, the woman that sits with me and helps me, you know, takes all the notes and puts this all together for me, she’s also then writing down a whole bunch of notes related or thoughts, bits of dialogue, concepts, purposes, points, characters, et cetera that are related to those index cards.

So by the time I’m writing my draft I have this interesting assembly of headers and what’s and why’s and then details for these sequences in a non-digital, semi-digital format. And then I just start to write. It’s funny, even though we have — they look so different, there’s something very similar about the process.

**John:** I would agree. As she’s assembling this stuff, or as you’re sort of putting these things together, is that ever one file or it is just still a bunch of cards?

**Craig:** Well, we have one file that she kind of master, she sort of has this master file. And then a lot of times as I’m heading into a section, I’ll say, well, all right, let’s — now, we are on page 60. And I know that I’m about to head into this sequence where, I don’t know, the soldier is going to fly into the temple with his parachute and do a thing.

So let’s talk about it again. Let’s just run through what was there before, but now let’s rediscuss it in light of what has led up to it now through the writing. And so she’ll take that portion out of the master document and build a new thing that’s just like, okay, here’s what you’re doing for the next few days.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** And then I’ll add more detail and layers into that. That keeps in mind what’s come before it recently. And then I’ll use that. Like it will sort of sit next to me.

Sometimes I don’t even look at it because just the fact that I’ve talked it through, now I know it. And I know what to write, you know?

**John:** There’s a story that John Gatins told before, so I apologize to listeners if I’ve told this story on the podcast before, but I think it’s such a great illustration of the trap you can fall into when you just kind of start writing, is that there was a guy who was hired to paint the stripe down the middle of a road. And so the first day he had his little bucket and his paint and he painted a mile and he came back and his boss was like, “That was really good, you painted like a whole mile. That was terrific.”

And the next day, the boss comes back to see his work, he’s like, “Oh, you painted another half mile. Okay, well, that’s great. Still pretty good. That’s better than most people.” And the next day, he came back and he’d only painted a quarter of a mile. And so the supervisor said like, “What’s going on? Like why did you slow down so much?” And he’s like, “Well, I have to keep walking back to get to the paint.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And that can actually be what the situation you find yourself with a script, is that if you’re starting at page one every time and just like, write, sort of rewriting it to get up to the next page, and then rewriting it to get up to the next page, every day you sit back you’re going to have spent a lot of your creative energy rewriting those first couple of pages and you’re going to probably make less and less progress through your script. So yes, I bet those first pages are going to be incredibly tight because you went through them a bunch of times. But you’re not actually moving the ball forward.

So, you know, what I’m describing in terms of not letting myself, but just doing separate sequences and not letting myself assemble the whole thing is to keep myself from doing that, because it’s just a bad habit I’ve noticed.

So before I would write pages by hand and fax them through to my assistant who would type up the pages and stick them in the folder. And I would do that until I got to where I felt like I was probably halfway through the script and then start assembling and then start doing it. This was just the most hardcore version of that where I wouldn’t let myself assemble it at all until I knew I actually had all the scenes written that I thought I needed and could put them together.

**Craig:** Yeah, I do see it differently than you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** My feeling is that, I guess I stick to my loose, rigid, you know, I have loose, rigid scheduling and I have loose, rigid rewriting. And that is to say there’s this much time to write it and I’m going to use that time. How I use it? That’s my prerogative.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I allow myself the — I’m okay with spending 40% of my time on the first 30 pages if I feel that that’s what’s going to help me efficiently write the last 70 pages. As long as I am productive I feel like I’m allowed to be productive in any direction I want to be.

Where I agree with you is the idea that you’re going to fastidiously whittle every word. Well, you can do that but just be aware that it would be really helpful if you were an awesome genius. And it would really helpful if you didn’t need money or to kind of work a lot.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So if you wanted to just write one astonishing script every five years, I’m okay with that, you know. I mean, look, Rian Johnson is not prolific.

**John:** No, he’s not.

**Craig:** But, you know, but when the script comes out and he makes the movie, it’s really good. So that’s cool, too. As long as you are, I guess the way I would — I would just hand it to the writer and say you know if you’re being productive or not.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Listen to yourself. And if you’re just rewriting to avoid writing then stop.

**John:** I agree. As we close this out I will say this is the first time I ever used Highland from start to finish on something. It was the first time working on a long script on Highland. And it was really good and illuminating in the sense that I recognized the pros and cons of Highland. So the new build that’s going to be coming out probably by the time or shortly after this episode airs actually reflects a lot of the stuff that were sort of happening while I was writing this much longer script because as something would break or something would annoy me, I could yell down to Nima and have him fix things.

And so one of the things, a situation which happens in all apps, but was particularly frustrating to me in Highland this time is you’re deep into the script, you’re on page 40 into the script or something and you need to refer back to something that happened earlier on. So how do you go back there and then find your place, find your way back to where you were at?

So assuming you’re in the middle sort of page 40, but you need to find something earlier on, how do you get back to where you were on page 40?

**Craig:** Well, I’m the worst because I’m a scroller.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** [laughs] So, I, you know, I have — most major programs have some sort of outliner available to you, but I just scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll because I can kind of like see as the pages are flying by roughly. I know where to land. So it’s not efficient, but I’m a scroller.

**John:** So the thing which we put in this next build which I really love and found myself using a lot was called Markers. And so it’s really something I took from Final Cut Pro which is the video editing software. And a marker is something you can just drop and then you can find it again. And so you hit Control M and it puts a marker wherever you are. And then you can go wherever else you want to go in the document and the Control option then will take you back there.

So you can drop as many markers as you need. It’s like a little shortcut to get back to that place you’re at.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So if you end up scrolling back and like did a little something, you know, on page 20, but you need to get back to where that thing is, Control option M it will take you back to where you were before.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s cool. And I would love to sort of see the ability, you know, we talk about our new format and obviously we’re not talking about an application to read that format, but rather we would hope that applications like Highland and others would take advantage of what the format would offer.

And I would love to see sort of tabbed sequences. That would be great. You know, so when I’m working, I could just go up and go, okay, I’m going to go back to the car chase. I’m going to go back to the beginning, I’m going to back to the middle, wherever it is.

**John:** So Final Draft 9 has an aspect of that. It’s not great. But you can add sort of the information that gets you there. Slugline already does have a really good version of that. So in Slugline you drop little hashtags and those become your sections. And so you can do things for individual scenes. And it shows you an outline view that you can hop to anything in the script at any point. So it may be worth taking another look at that because it’s really — that is really good. It’s a kind of thing that they did great.

**Craig:** Is it — yeah, I mean, like you know, for instance Fade In has the outline that’s sort of running along the right side of the screen. So I can just jump, you know, from that. But there’s something about — I like what you’re saying about Slugline where it’s I can basically say, they’re chapter headings and they’re like little — it’s almost like a little Rolodex-y kind of thing along the top of the screen —

**John:** That’s exactly what it is.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s smart. I like that.

**John:** It’s on the left side of the screen, but it’s the same idea.

**Craig:** Oh, I like it on the top

**John:** So you can either have it show all your section headings or if you have notes, it will show you the notes and you can jump to wherever those notes are.

**Craig:** All right. Good.

**John:** I have a One Cool Thing this week. Mine is a book. It is called The Way to Go by Kate Ascher. And it’s a book that I think you will love, Craig. I think, you know, most screenwriters will love because screenwriters are curious.

And so what Kate Ascher did in this book and she’s done two other books that are sort of similar to it, is she looked at how planes and trains and cars work. And it’s like a big illustrated book, almost like kind of like one of those kids books where they talk through like, you know, how engines work. But this is like really sophisticated details. So it gets into like lots of details about like the modern air transportation system and sort of like how cargo containers are constructed and how things fit together, how locks work, how the Panama Canal works. And so it’s this great, incredibly well-illustrated book that sort of shows how stuff works for transportation. So I think it’s something you will enjoy.

**Craig:** There were those — I think it was David McCullough was the guy that did the books where he broke out the buildings for you.

**John:** It’s very much in that style.

**Craig:** Yeah, I love that stuff. All right, and it’s called The Way to Go?

**John:** The Way to Go.

**Craig:** All right. Well, my One Cool Thing this week is a character. It’s a little random, but I watched Pitch Perfect last night. I hadn’t seen it before. I really, really liked it a lot. But my favorite character in the movie is the character of Lilly. Have you seen Pitch Perfect?

**John:** I saw Pitch Perfect. And I love Pitch Perfect.

**Craig:** Do you remember, Lilly?

**John:** Is Lilly Rebel Wilson?

**Craig:** No. Although Rebel Wilson was hysterical.

**John:** Oh, is Lilly the one who wouldn’t sing and then finally sings at the very end?

**Craig:** Lilly is the one that’s super-duper quiet and really, really weird.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I’m just obsessed with this character. So her name is Lilly. And the actress is Hana Mae Lee. And Kay Cannon is a very nice lady and a very good writer. I just love her name because it’s Cake And really. It’s like Kofi Annan is like Cake and On.

Anyway, so Hana Mae Lee portrays Lilly. And she is just the strangest thing. She barely speaks. She has this tiny little whisper. That’s why I did my little name that way. And in the movie does one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen any character do in any film including Lynch films. I mean it was the weirdest.

So Aubrey, this character Aubrey is the very controlling head of the group. And she’s so tightly wound that she has this problem where when she gets really upset and really emotional, she pukes, which is funny. And at one point in the movie, she gets super-duper angry at everybody and she just pukes like a ton. And it’s gross. And you’re like, okay, it’s just like one of those scenes in a comedy where somebody pukes and it’s like, ahh.

[laughs] And then at some point, they start fighting and Lilly trips and falls and lands in the puke.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then lies back in the puke and calmly begins making like a snow angel.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And it was so shocking to me. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I just — I just stared at it. And I watched it like three times because I couldn’t believe they did it, and I’m not even sure why they did it. And nobody in the movie really comments on the fact that she did that. But she did it.

And so anyway, I love her. And I just want to read a few lines because she doesn’t say much. She just says these individual tiny little lines. One of which is, “I ate my twin in the womb.”

**John:** I love it.

**Craig:** And one of which is, “Hi, my name is Lilly Onakuramara. I was born with gills like fish.” And then she says — they’re discussing the fact that Aubrey had puked the year prior, and they’re like, “Oh, we don’t want to have what happened last year happen again.” And Lilly says, “What happened last year and do you guys want to see a dead body?” [laughs]

It’s so weird. She’s such a strange subversive character in the middle of this very mainstream comedy. So my One Cool Thing this week is Lilly.

**John:** That is awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Great. And that’s our show. So you can find links to the things we talked about at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. There you can also find transcripts to all the back episodes. You can also find the actual audio for episodes online both through the app, we have an app for Android and for iOS devices so you can listen to them there. And you can also subscribe and get to all the back episodes, back to episode one where we barely knew what we were doing.

**Craig:** Barely. Now we slightly more than barely know what we’re doing.

**John:** Yeah, we still have Skype issue sometimes. You can also buy the first 100 episodes on a few of our last remaining USB drives. That’s at store.johnaugust.com.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Blake Kuehn. It’s great. It’s sort of this ’80s awesome kind of tribute thing. So thank you, Blake, for that. If you’d like to write us an outro, there’s a link in the show notes for how you can do that.

If you have a question for me, you can write to @johnaugust on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions go to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s our show.

**Craig:** That was a big, huge, long, great show.

**John:** It’s a huge episode.

**Craig:** Yeah, huge.

**John:** And cutting back and forth in time and so it’s —

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** This has been almost 90 minutes of —

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** No, it’s been 100 minutes of our taping this show.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, we need to charge people for this one. That’s it.

**John:** That’s it.

**Craig:** Yeah, see you next time.

**John:** Thanks, Craig. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Courier Prime](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/)
* WGA President Chris Keyser on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0450899/) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Keyser)
* Deadline’s January article on [Chip Johannessen and Billy Ray’s letter to WGA members](http://www.deadline.com/2014/01/writers-guild-producers-pension-health-contribution-cuts-new-contract/)
* [Thomas Ince](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_H._Ince) on Wikipedia
* [Sample pages](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/four-alternate-formats-final.pdf) from alternatively formatted screenplays
* Screenwriting.io on [multicamera script formatting](http://screenwriting.io/how-are-multicamera-tv-scripts-formatted/)
* [Highland](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/)
* [The Way to Go](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594204683/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Kate Ascher
* Lilly Onakuramara on [the Pitch Perfect wiki](http://pitch-perfect.wikia.com/wiki/Lilly_Onakuramara), and [a YouTube compilation of some of her best moments](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdG6v7gkxm4)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Blake Kuehn ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

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.

Craig, welcome back.

Craig: Yes. Here we are, face-to-face, a couple of silver spoons.

John: Now, Craig, do you have memory of what happened to you last week? What actually happened?

Craig: Uh…it was bad. I was on my way to the podcast and my car was hit from behind.

John: Ouch!

Craig: I hit my head on the dashboard.

John: That’s awful.

Craig: When I come to I’m in Aline Brosh McKenna’s basement, [laughs], Misery style. And she’s hobbled me. Yeah. She hobbled me good. She wants to take my place.

John: It’s really pretty clear that Aline wants to take your place, but she was fantastic as a guest host.

Craig: She did a great job. And Jennifer Lee was terrific to come on the show. Thank you, Jennifer. And very exciting. I’m going to get to meet her anyway because she’s going to be a neighbor of mine soon.

John: The hinterlands of Los Angeles.

Craig: We like to call it the privileged place where people like Jennifer Lee choose to live.

John: Exactly.

Today on the podcast we have two special guests. We have Marc Madnick, who is the CEO and co-founder of Final Draft. And Joe Jarvis, who is the product manager. They’re going to talk to us about Final Draft 9 and our interactions with Final Draft 9.

Craig: And we’ve had some. And we are, I have to say, I’m very excited to talk to them. And I think it’s very cool that that they came on the show knowing perfectly well that this wasn’t going to be a softball interview.

John: I have a hunch, because we already recorded it, that you will ask some pointed questions.

So, we’ll do the Final Draft segment. Then we’ll come back. We’ll talk about the Tarantino script, the WGA negotiations, we’ll answer some listener questions. It’s going to be a very big show.

So, first I need five notes.

[Scriptnotes theme music]

John: We were just talking sort of our history with Final Draft. So, my first experience with Final Draft was Final Draft 5. And I remember buying it, I think it was in 2000, and it was like $245 which was like a lot – $249.

Marc Madnick: Still is.

John: Still is. Which was a lot more money back then because of inflation.

Marc: Actually, I think versions one and two were about $349 we started out selling.

John: But I remember I think I bought it at the Writer’s Store, which is a physical place at that point.

Marc: Yup, still is.

John: Out in Westwood. And before then I’d written Go just in Microsoft Word. And you can write a script obviously in a normal word processor, but it’s a giant pain in the ass, and revisions are a giant pain in the ass. So, Final Draft was just an amazing godsend that I could do these things that were so difficult to do before. And they were strange to do, but I could actually do them then, so it was great.

Marc: Thank you.

John: So, that was my first experience with it. Then Final Draft 6 was 2002. Final Draft 7, 2004.

Marc: Boy, you know this better than I do. I have it in front of me. It wasn’t that quick probably.

Craig: Sounds about right.

Marc: It sounds close, yeah.

John: And then Final Draft 8 which was a bigger revision. The FDX format in 2008.

Marc: Right. 2009.

John: And this last year, just this month —

Marc: Three weeks ago.

John: Three weeks ago we have Final Draft 9.

Marc: Yes, doing wonderful so far. Thank you.

John: Fantastic. So, thank you very much for coming here.

So the voices you’re hearing are Marc Madnick. I’m pronouncing your name right, I hope.

Marc: That’s correct. With a C, John.

John: Yes. Marc with a C, Madnick, who is the co-founder and CEO of Final Draft.

Marc: Yes. I’ve been doing this 23 years now.

John: Holy cow.

Marc: I wanted to be you two guys and it led me to this. So, like I always say, those who can’t do make software.

Craig: Make software. John does both.

Marc: I can’t use that joke anymore.

Joe Jarvis: John can do it all.

Craig: John does it all.

John: And Joe Jarvis, what is your official title?

Joe: I’m the Product Manager at Final Draft. And you and I have talked quite a bit about all kinds of — high level, low level stuff. Just all the time. And by the way, I saw Go at a screening back then, probably when you were buying that first copy of Final Draft.

John: Yes, a good time machine back.

So, the reason why we talked this last week was because you were getting, was it phone calls or people were being jerks to you and it seemed like it was coming from stuff that had happened from the podcast. Can you tell us what was going on?

Marc: We listen to the podcast. And Craig is very passionate about his…

Craig: Everything.

Marc: …wants, desires, and likes and dislikes.

Craig: Yes.

Marc: And I guess he got riled up the other day and, you know, listen, I’m the owner of this business. So, I’m never going to have 100 percent of the people love us. So, we take the criticism and I’m used to it. Just like I know you guys write great films and there’s always 10 percent of the people.

Craig: Ooh, sometimes a little more than 10 percent.

Marc: Who are happy to think that you didn’t put your best effort or whatever, which is obviously not true. And you get a few tweets. People, employees, a Facebook thing, an email, “Craig says you guys should die.” It scares people. [laughs]

Craig: No humans should die.

Marc: We can put it behind us. You were very nice to put out a statement about it. That’s why we prompted the call. It’s perfectly fine. We invite the criticism. If I may say that we do survey, obviously, our customer base from time to time. Last time we did it, 92 percent of the people graded us an A or a B. That’s our software, company, and everything. 92 percent of the people.

I bring my office staff, 40 of us. We’re not Microsoft. We’re 40. Some people think we’re really big. We’re still a small, privately-held company. And told them, “Don’t congratulate ourselves. There’s 8 percent of the people, Craig being the number one of them, who do not like us and do not like our software.” So, that’s what keeps me up at night is the 8 percent.

So, I’m used to it.

Craig: We’ll talk a little bit about that 8 percent, and I think even that number is probably a little misleading in a sense.

Marc: Well, it’s a survey.

Craig: It’s a survey. The thing is you guys don’t exist in a vacuum anymore. I think that’s one of the things I want to talk about with you. And first of all, just to go on the record, I’m really sorry. Anybody that called you guys and was abusive or anything, that’s gross. And I was very clear about that on Twitter.

Marc: Thank you for an apology. And we have hourly employees or — “Is somebody going to throw a brick through our window or something?” [laughs]

Craig: Yeah, that’s terrible.

Marc: I had to calm them down. I said, you know, it’s not a problem. People get heated.

Craig: Nobody should be throwing anything. But the truth is there’s no — the satisfaction you can have with a product where you say, okay, it’s an A, or it’s a B, or whatever, is to that product. But if there’s another product where people are an A+, you might as well have a C or a D, if people start to leave you.

And one thing I want to talk to you guys about is what’s happened to Final Draft because as we were saying before the show started I bought Final Draft back in — I think it was 1993. And I drove to Santa Monica where you guys had your initial bungalows like on the second floor kind of thing.

Marc: There were about three or four of us then.

Craig: Yeah. There were three or four of you guys. I remember meeting you. I remember meeting Ben who was your partner. And I bought it directly from you. I wrote a check. And I didn’t have, you know, I was making $20,000 at the time. This was a lot of money. And I got two floppy disks and I guarded them with my life.

And so I was a very early adopter of Final Draft. And I stayed with Final Draft through the revisions. And along the way I got disillusioned. And I’ve become increasingly disillusioned. An particularly disillusioned with what happened with Final Draft 9.

Now, I don’t know if we’re jumping, should we be jumping into this right away? Do we have other stuff to do?

Marc: I don’t understand what happened.

Craig: Well, I’m going to tell you.

Marc: I mean…

Craig: From my point of view. And listen, I’m glad that you guys are listening, you know.

Marc: I’ve heard your point of views before on the show and, [sighs], it’s partially our fault, so I’m obviously — some critiques are warranted. And we listen. But a lot of times it’s misinformation.

John: That’s honestly why I’m so glad you’re here to talk about this.

Marc: Yes. And that’s what I want I to do, too.

Craig: Sure.

Marc: Literally, more times than not, it’s misinformation. People, person A says the software doesn’t do X, Y, and Z, but it does. Now, whose fault is this? Probably our fault. We’re not informing the people as well. But, that’s frustrating when we get comments that aren’t…

John: Accurate.

Marc: Accurate. “Final Draft doesn’t care about the writer. Final Draft doesn’t listen.” There’s 40 people in our office every day —

Craig: Yeah, they’ll listen if you pay $25 or $29 when you call. I mean, you’ve got tech support. I’ve got to pay you, right?

Marc: Actually, misinformation.

Craig: Okay, tell me.

Joe: We also have free chat support and we also have free email support. And you know nobody pays to ring my phone number. I mean, I talk to people all day long.

Craig: All right.

Marc: You’re listeners should know that Final Draft provides free support many different ways.

John: Great.

Marc: We have a knowledge space. Costs money to run a knowledge space. Every question and every question we ever got is up there and searchable. We provide email support free that you get back within an hour if you happen to email us between 8:30 and 5:30 when we’re in our offices. If you do it over the weekend, it might take a day or two.

Craig: Okay.

Marc: We have live chat from 8:30 to 5:30. If you have problems installing or getting started, we have a free telephone number. What Craig is alluding to is that we started to charge $25 per phone call. About 40 or 50 people take advantage just month. It was meant to be a deterrent and it is a deterrent to call. Let me tell you what happened.

For 10 years we provided free phone support. 10 percent of the people — remember now, I run a business; we have to make business decisions. Okay? We’re in business not to go out of business. — 10 percent of people would call up when it was free with no clock and talk and start asking about their printer not working and how do I get Microsoft Word. I mean, things that had nothing to do with us.

Joe: How to write a screenplay.

Marc: How to write a screenplay. And then when John August wanted to call that one time he couldn’t get through. Actually got worse press when we had free phone support then I do today. You don’t like it, but I’m telling you the customers do get serviced.

Craig: Okay, you’re right, I don’t like it. And part of why I don’t like it has to do with the pricing of your product which can… — Now, when Final Draft was the only game in town, I got it. And listen, I’m a capitalist. I understand the way the world works.

Marc: First of all, I was never the only game in town. I’ve always had competitors.

John: That’s — I want us to talk about that —

Joe: True.

Marc: I’ve always had competitors. I wasn’t even the first.

John: But you were always the industry standard. And you always marketed yourself as the standard.

Marc: Why are we the industry standard?

John: Well, that’s a great question, because it’s always —

Marc: Take all the bells and whistles out of everybody’s product, all the competitor’s products, okay. Take them all out. What it comes down to is pagination. Period. A minute a page. Break it down in eighths. Right, you guys are directors as well, okay. So, we are trusted because it’s the proper pagination. You get a script, it’s 120 pages, you can estimate it’s going to be approximately 120 minutes. That’s really what it comes down to. Does it paginate properly?

All the other things are bells and whistles. Okay, really, if you want to break it down.

Craig: Kinda. I mean, revisions aren’t bells and whistles. I mean, that’s a huge part of what we do.

Marc: But, I mean, I’m saying what got us started and what was really important was the pagination.

Craig: Was this many lines per page.

John: Clearly. And I will say going right back to the history of sort of Final Draft, part of the reason why you started the product originally was because you got so frustrated by trying to write a screenplay in a normal word processor.

Marc: Correct.

Joe: Right.

John: And that is honestly one of the things I appreciated about Final Draft so much is that, oh, this is actually set up to do exactly the thing I’m trying to do.

Marc: There you go. Thank you. And that’s the key for us.

John: But who are you competitors now as you see it?

Marc: There are 24 apps, competitors. Adobe has a competing product.

John: Yeah, Adobe Story.

Marc: You know, they come and go. We’re here. We’re still standing. We’re still number one, clearly. And it’s because we believe — I’ll give you a perfect example what makes us stand out.

We made an iPad app called the iPad Writer. It took, ready for this, two years. And you’ll say to me, “Marc, some of these apps that are much less expensive, by the way some of them are even free, they told me they took two, three, four months. Why does it take Final Draft two years?”

A year and a half of that two years was spent making sure that your script of 119 pages was 119 pages there. And also on your IBM, your Windows, I’m sorry, look at IBM, I’m old school.

Craig: That is old school.

Marc: And any device you have of Final Draft it’s the same. We can’t go to a reading, a rehearsal, a whatever we do and say, “Let’s turn to page 16,” and everybody has got a different page 16. Every — I’ll repeat — every — all of my competitors today do not do that. They may have great bells and whistles. They may be… — And by the way, I never talk about my —

Craig: I think Fade In does that.

Marc: No. It does not.

Craig: You’re saying that the Fade In app on the iPad doesn’t match the —

Marc: That’s correct. I took a 215 page script of Final Draft —

Craig: It worked for me.

Marc: It’s the same page count?

Craig: Yeah.

Marc: Oh, our tests showed it different.

John: Craig is lucky and he’s touched. Well, let’s talk about what’s —

Marc: Not on the iPad.

Craig: That’s what I use.

John: The iPad app took two years because it was a huge undertaking to move something that was working on the Mac and in Windows onto an iPad device.

Marc: Right.

John: Final Draft 9 is about four years after 8.

Marc: Mm-hmm.

John: What were the challenges there?

Marc: The biggest one was about 10 years ago Apple, even though we’re a developer and they love us and we have friends over there, they don’t tell you anything. 10 years ago they made you do Carbon language. And you’re familiar with this. And you had to go down there and strip it, you know, put Carbon in.

I’m not a techie, by the way. But, now they come to us three, four years ago and say, “You need to do Cocoa.” That means a page one rewrite for us. What does that mean to the customer? Well, version 8 they came out with MacBook retina displays. Guess when we found out that our font wasn’t really looking as crisp as it should? When somebody came to our office with a MacBook retina display.

It’s not like we got a call, or they mentioned it to us. We didn’t even know until it happened. So, what do we have to do? We have to spend a year and a half rewriting our software so it works on not only today’s latest Mac operating system —

Joe: With the Cocoa.

Marc: But their future ones. Okay? So, now we can take advantage of their dictation, some of the things they provide in there. It can take advantage of —

Joe: Full screen.

Marc: So, there’s a year and a half there.

John: Yeah, that’s a lot.

Marc: 36, 38, something like that, other pieces of software rely on the FDX format, from your editing programs to your casting to translation companies use the FDX format for various different things. You have to make sure it works with all of these things. It takes some time. There are new features. There are corrections. There are fixes. It goes on and on and on.

Craig: Are you honestly saying that you think the amount of time that it took to do Final Draft 9 with the amount of features you’ve added and the price you’re charging, you think that all lines up right?

Marc: Yeah, absolutely.

Craig: You don’t detect a problem?

Marc: Of course, Craig. Like I said, we’re in business not to go out of business.

Craig: I understand, but —

Marc: Absolutely. It’s a mature product. It’s a very mature product. You say the same thing about Microsoft Word and Quicken. What do they actually put in? We put a lot in here. A lot.

Craig: Not really.

Marc: Of course we did. First of all, it takes advantage of all of your latest operating systems. That’s very important.

Craig: I’m sorry. Marc, Marc —

Marc: You’re sorry?

Craig: I am. I’m sorry…to interrupt. Not sorry for what I’m about to say. Adding retina display to this product when retina display has been out for two years. And listen —

Marc: It’s not one line of code.

Craig: Just give me a moment. Just give me a moment.

Marc: Okay. Okay.

Craig: We’ve given you a lot of time. And I’m just a little incredulous. There are a lot of companies out there. In fact, 100 percent of companies that make software for Mac had to deal with the fact that suddenly there was a retina display.

John: Yeah, we had to deal with it with our two apps. So, Bronson Watermarker and our other Mac app, Highland, our other Mac app were originally not retina and so we had to make them retina. It is —

Joe: Were they originally written in Carbon libraries or Cocoa library?

John: They were written in Cocoa library.

Joe: We had to go from Carbon to Cocoa, where it’s a very low level transition. So, a lot of what you’re saying —

Marc: You’re punishing us for being around since 1992.

Craig: Not at all. What I’m saying is…

Marc: That’s the way I see it.

Craig: …if you’re going to — listen, you guys have been around a long time. You’ve been charging a lot of money for a product for a long time. This change comes along and you decide we’re going to take as much time as we need and we’re going to still charge you all this money anyway when everybody else has become used to a cycle now where products update fairly frequently and things like retina display is a free update. It’s not a charged update.

And the fact that you guys had to rewrite your software is now why I have to spent $99. Is that what it is to update?

Marc: Well, $79 if you act by the end of the day. We take credit cards.

Joe: Act now.

Craig: Listen —

Marc: I don’t understand. Do you know how much work that goes into it? We’re not, you know —

Craig: I’m a customer. I’m not here to cry for you. What I’m going to —

Joe: In order to see it all.

Craig: It doesn’t matter. I don’t need to see it all.

Marc: You want to make sure —

Craig: Hold on. You guys don’t need to see what we do to make a movie. And I don’t need to see what you do to make software. All I need to know is does this make sense for me or not. And what I’m saying to you is I’m a little surprised by the fact that you’re coming here and essentially acknowledging no mistakes, no problems, we did everything right.

Marc: No…

Craig: Right? Because it seems to me, you’re in a position now, John put this article on about how Quark was just — Quark ruled the world. And then one day they didn’t. And I have to tell you, you guys — and this is not person, it’s just a business, seem willfully blind to the fact that things are so much more easily disruptable now than ever before.

I mean, listen, you used to say you need Final Draft because the studio needs it to break down for budget. No they don’t. Not anymore. They’re breaking the budget down from in Universal right now off of a PDF document. They don’t need this anymore. I can get, John, oh my gosh you guys have watermarking now. One name, John has — what does Bronson cost?

John: it’s $29.

Craig: $29.

Marc: Which is why we told people if they need — we keep improving it as it goes on.

Craig: But I don’t understand. You guys are the industry leader and you seem to be just lagging behind.

Joe: Well, there is a lot, as Marc said, a lot of legacy code, so we’re — unfortunately because we’ve been around so long it’s harder to pivot quickly because right now I’m talking all day long with our chief architect about these particular libraries that if we want to pursue opportunity A, or opportunity B, or put it on the surface, or make it Unicode for other languages, there are some legacy libraries that are going to have to get removed. And so it’s like we’re going to have to go through and take a lot of engine parts out and replace a lot of under the hood stuff.

And it unfortunately takes a long time.

Marc: And the customer doesn’t see that, but it’s necessary that is has to be — it has to happen.

John: And I actually see that.

Joe: It’s a hindrance to be as old as we are.

John: I have a tremendous amount of sympathy for you, Mark, though in a sense of software pricing. Because I think what Craig is complaining about the price, $249 is not expensive software for a thing that you’re using every day and that you’re staring at every day. And yet the price of software has fallen through the floor. And Adobe feels it. And everyone sort of feels it because I think consumers start to sense that apps should be either free or they should be $0.99 like they are on the iOS App Store.

So, I’m incredibly sympathetic to you guys in that regard. No matter what you price it at someone is going to say, “Well that should have been a free update.” That’s inevitably going to happen.

Marc: Well, you know, you get that criticism. But the only income we make is from selling you Final Draft license, which is a perpetual license that you have forever, and ever, and ever, and selling you upgrades. There is no other income revenue at Final Draft. That’s what it is.

Craig: But I can now purchase an entire new software program for half the cost of what you’re charging for an update that has a few features thrown in. And that to me seems out of whack. That’s where I just say, look, I’m not saying that it’s right or wrong. The market doesn’t have right or wrong. It’s just a market.

Marc: You are in the minority. Fact.

Craig: Well, I’m in the minority now. But, I guess I’m just sort of surprised that you guys are sort of going, “And you’ll always be in the minority. We don’t see a problem. We don’t see any icebergs.”

Marc: No.

Joe: I mean, unfortunately, like Marc said, we sell one thing. Apple gives their operating system away for free. But they sell $30 billion worth of iPads every quarter.

Craig: Oh, I’m not comparing you guys to Apple.

Marc: Our sole revenue is this.

Joe: We’ve heard the comparison, “Why can I get a whole…”

Craig: There’s a difference between free and $300.

Marc: Well, first of all, many company’s upgrades are about half the price of the full copy. Ours isn’t. $79. And even when it’s $99 is about 40 percent.

Craig: If this had been… — Look, part of the thing that I was surprised by, and I think you were surprised by, too, to be fair, was that this upgrade which you sell like a full upgrade didn’t feel like a full upgrade. It felt like, frankly, an incremental thing that should have been released as a free update or a service package like retina display. I mean, I’m paying for retina display? And what else?

Joe: Had we released it for free we would go out of business, because it takes a lot of development —

Marc: And that’s your opinion. We’re getting tremendous responses.

Joe: A lot of development for us to get to that point.

Marc: That’s our problem, I think.

Craig: I know I see it as a problem.

John: I think it’s an industry problem. I think it’s a software industry problem.

Joe: It’s a challenge in software development.

John: Especially I think for people in your situation and I know Movie Magic Screenwriter has a similar thing because they’re product feels like it’s 1983. I mean, those menus feel incredibly old. And they’re going to face the same situation. You guys were smart enough to pivot and go to FDX format. That’s a classic example of making the right choice of getting rid of FDR.

Joe: Yeah. We had to bite the bullet. We knew it was going to take a long time.

Marc: Hey, we made a lot of bad decisions over the years. You live and learn. This is what running a business is. We’re 40 people. There’s not an office really in the world that has 40 people dedicated to one thing. And that’s screenwriting and screenwriting software.

And, quite frankly, we listen every day. We service our customers. We listen every day. We love the good comments and we listen to the negative ones. Believe me, we take them to heart.

Craig: Do you think I’ve had any interesting or reasonable criticism for your product, or you think it’s all just a bunch of bunk?

Joe: I read every single podcast.

Craig: I’m not asking if you read it. I’m saying do you agree with me?

Joe: I want to absolutely know. Do I, well —

Marc: Sure, yes. Yes, some of your criticism is warranted.

Joe: I can’t think off the top of my head.

Marc: I don’t remember those. I remember the ones that aren’t warranted.

Craig: I think that’s weird. I would remember the ones that are warranted.

Marc: Hold up. This is our business.

Craig: Yes.

Marc: We know exactly, top to bottom, what the customers want, what they need, and we listen. You have to make business decisions on how you do it, when you do it, how you implement it, not implement it. It’s really what it’s all about. But we know. We’re engaged. And we understand. And we hear the criticisms. And some of your criticisms are warranted. And some of them are, I feel you might be misinformed.

Craig: All right.

Marc: I can’t pick and choose that. I don’t want to pick and choose and beat a dead horse. But this is how 40 people make a living. Believe me, we listen.

Craig: All right.

John: But let’s talk about your customers, though, because do you perceive your customers being sort of the working-working-working screenwriters or the aspiring screenwriters. What do you know about your customers?

Marc: Well, I wrote something that got produced, a theater piece, at Ford Theater. Am I professional writer?

John: You and I talked about this because that was actually the template that I used for Big Fish. I was just starting Big Fish when you did that. And it was like a patriotic —

Marc: Yeah, It’s called Liberty Smith. Actually, it was very well received.

John: Great.

Marc: 10 percent of the people, by the way, didn’t like it. [laughs]

Craig: That’s better than I’ve ever done.

Marc: Thank you. Yes, it’s correct. And I don’t write the music but I was the book writer on it. And we had a ball with it. I don’t know where this is going now. I just lost my…you got me talking about myself.

Craig: Who your customer base. Who do you see as your — ?

Marc: Oh yeah. So, am I professional writer? Well, some people would say yes. I got paid a little bit of money. But I’m not. So, it’s hard to tell when you do surveys about who’s actually professional writers or not. And I would say it comes back 30, 40 percent of our users internationally are professional writers. Okay?

We are extremely popular in India. I went to Mumbai. I went all over the place. We estimated, the Mumbai Film Office estimates there are 300,000 people using Final Draft in India. They make four times the amount of TV shows and movies we do, except we sold one copy eight years ago and didn’t even get paid for that. It’s 100 percent piracy.

But we’re very popular there, so they bring me over there and they want us to do more stuff to help make it better for them. But, if you’re not going to get paid — it’s a business like anything else. But, so we take the criticism.

John: The reason why I ask who your customers are is I think between Craig and I we know almost all the working feature writers. And a lot of them have been frustrated with Final Draft over the years, some more, some less. Most people end up using it. Like it’s still the best thing. That’s honestly what you honestly.

Craig: Sure. By default.

John: It’s by default. And so like it’s good in production stuff. You bite the bullet and you use it. But I asked a lot of people and I asked like did you use a beta of Final Draft 9. Did they come to you? Did they survey you? Were these the things you wanted?

Marc: Of course.

John: But I haven’t found anybody who did of my working —

Joe: We do have professional writers on our beta. I’m not going to give their names out, but we do. And we do consult them. And we actually pursue relationships with guys like you. You guys are our customers. And the reason that aspiring writers want to use our product is because they want to use what the pros use. And we know this.

And so primarily we’re here to make you guys happy. And if we’re not then we’re not really doing our job. That’s what we really want to do.

Marc: 24 competitors yet we’re the ones who show up everywhere. I mean, we’re everywhere. We’re at the London Screenwriting Festival.

Craig: You are —

Marc: Wait, let me — we’re in Buenos Aires for the International Film & Video Association.

Craig: Yes, you’re spending money on that.

Marc: And we put ourselves right there. The list —

Craig: You’re spending money on that. I mean, part of what —

Marc: Let me finish. We’re listening to everybody.

Craig: No, no, no. You’re promoting. That’s not listening.

Marc: Ooh!

Craig: It’s promoting! You guys run contests and you go places and you show up. And, listen, promoting is part of business. But part of what I think a lot of — when I talk to screenwriters we perceive is that Final Draft has become a company that charges a lot of money to wannabes, takes that money, converts it into marketing to get more wannabes. And there’s nothing wrong — every professional writer starts as a wannabe.

But what you’re not doing, I don’t perceive, and like John said we’ve never met a single screenwriter that you guys have talked to.

Joe: Right.

Craig: That’s a little weird, since we know almost all of the ones that work.

Marc: We might have talked to 250 people just today alone. Every day.

Craig: 250 people today?

Marc: We email, every day. Every day.

Craig: No, I mean to say talk to them in other words —

Joe: Well, you have some friends that wrote on Ride Along, right?

Craig: Yes.

Joe: One of my buddies was the original writer on that. Very close relationship with him. Talk to him every day. He wants to come in and present stuff to Marc. Every other week he’s asking me for things. CollaboWriter. Huge item on his list. He won’t shut up about it. It’s something I absolutely want to build to make him happy. He’s a pro. He had a million dollar pitch at Paramount. You’ve never heard of the title of this thing, but he’s a real guy. And he’s out there.

Craig: I’m not denying that you talk —

Joe: These are real people.

Craig: Yes. I’m not denying that you talk to some people, and I don’t know if he’s got a credit on the movie or not.

Joe: Yeah.

Craig: Okay.

Joe: For sure.

Craig: And that’s good. But I’m saying that it seems odd that there isn’t quite a bit of consulting going on with professionals.

Marc: Craig, I’m sorry to say —

Craig: I know you’re saying that I’m wrong.

Marc: You’re completely, 100 percent, mistaken.

Craig: We just don’t know the ones who talk to you.

Marc: I came here to the hot seat, didn’t I?

Craig: We just don’t know the ones that you’re talking to.

Marc: Listen, the one time I would say that 30 or 40 percent of the television market, no, what am I thinking? Yeah, the television market.

Joe: The TV shows.

Marc: The TV shows was ours. Okay? So we went out and spoke to everybody and anybody, script coordinators, everybody. Today we probably have 90, 95 percent, I don’t know. But just about every studio and TV show uses Final Draft. Why? We went and talked to them, and listened, and we put the things that they wanted in there. To assume — this is how we make our living. To assume that we’re not engaging the customer is —

Craig: Well, we’re not talking about [crosstalk] —

Marc: No, it’s my fault. It’s my fault. That you have — let me finish Craig. If you have this perception, then we did not do our job.

Craig: The only perception that I have is that it’s just a little, there’s perhaps just an odd coincidence that John and I don’t happen to know any of the theatrical screenwriters that you talk to.

Joe: They call us every day. The Family Guy, Doug Ellin. I could just go on and on and on. I mean, Modern Family. We talk to everybody. We talk to everybody that we know. We would love to know the guys you were talking to and get their input.

Craig: Well, that would be good.

Marc: You’re frustrated because there’s things that you don’t like about it and you want to know why we haven’t acted on those things. And the answer to that question is that we have to prioritize. We are a business to not go out of business.

Craig: I’m —

Marc: Let me finish. There’s only so many screenwriters in the world. You talk about price points. Okay, 40 people have to eat at Final Draft. I’m not an extremely wealthy person out of this, okay? It’s still a limited vertical piece of software. You have to balance, as a business man, and this is what I do — a small business owner — you have to balance the income and revenue with the expenses. And sometimes they get tricky and some things fall through the cracks.

But we’re not in business to go out of business. And that’s a very key point.

Craig: We’re not asking you to go out of business.

John: We’re certainly not. And I think I’ve said many times I think it’s crucial that we have people at that top end of the industry, top end of apps, so there will always be a way to do that difficult production stuff, because that’s what you guys are especially good at.

Marc: Thank you.

John: As we sort of wrap this up, I want to ask both of you what’s next, or what’s officially on the timeline for the future? Because when I talked to you last I know there were products that were being discussed, but what’s officially the next kind of thing that you guys can talk about?

Marc: Well, we’re talking to a lot of, some other companies and I’m not privy to talk about, that want to do some interesting things with Final Draft. Right on the horizon is we’re releasing — what are we releasing in the next couple weeks?

Joe: Well, right now we’re following up the release of 9 with some fixes and some enhancements.

Marc: That people found.

Joe: I would love to do some more iterations on things like watermarking and make it a little more robust and things like that. Now that it’s out in the wild, we’re getting a lot of feedback and we’re cycling through a lot of that stuff. You guys are both familiar with how that works.

But, one of the big things we’d like to do in the next couple year time frame type roadmap is a better outlining experience with the navigator being a navigator and not a true outliner. I mean, I’ve always felt that. And I’ve always felt like that’s an opportunity for us to really improve this. And so if we were looking at a version 10 or something I think that would be a cornerstone of it.

John: How about Fountain? Is Fountain anything you’re going to be incorporating into future versions?

Joe: You know, Fountain is real easy. It’s text. So, we can already read it. So, we just have to make a couple of syntax adjustments probably here and there. We could import a script right now —

John: You actually do a pretty good job of importing Fountain right now.

Joe: Yeah, because we can read text and we kind of get the context and it does that with the text document. It’s done that for a long time. So, I can pretty much get 99 percent of Fountain today really without doing anything. So, if we did a little bit of a —

Craig: So then you should do that.

Joe: Well, yeah, we should. We absolutely should. I could show you a long list of things I want to do.

Craig: I’m just saying that some of these things that are easy… — In other words, what we’ve become used to is that Final Draft will say every few years, “Here’s a bunch of stuff. Pay for it,” as opposed to as we go through, these little things that obviously don’t require a lot of effort would be nice to see. The other thing I would love to see you guys do that I think everybody would pay — look, I remember buying Final Draft and there was this collaborator thing and Todd Phillips and I were like, “Oh thank god. Finally.”

Joe: It’s absolutely something that we’re dealing with, this CollaboWriter.

Craig: It didn’t even come close to work. And you guys, that was — I had a real problem with that. I felt like I was sold bad goods.

Marc: That’s justified. [Crosstalk] As barriers that people will start building your firewalls and stuff.

Craig: It wouldn’t work on anything. [laughs]

Joe: CollaboWriter was built when it was a peer-to-peer technology with no security. And it’ll still work like that. We took it out of the program.

Craig: Sure, yeah.

Joe: If there were no internet security and firewall on everything that exists today, CollaboWriter worked. It stopped working. And then we kept trying to figure out —

Craig: It never worked.

Joe: And it failed. No, it worked in the beginning.

Craig: Where, at DARPA? It didn’t work in anyone’s office. I mean, honestly, it never worked because everybody at the very least was going through just like, even a router it would —

Marc: It worked. It just had to do some things, manipulate some things.

Joe: It got defeated by internet security and things like that. And technology changed so rapidly. And when Marc says we’re a 40 person company —

Marc: Right. We’re not Microsoft or Apple here.

Craig: No one is asking you that.

Joe: 10 to 15 percent of those people are actually programmers.

Craig: I understand. All I’m saying is…

Joe: So, I have a limited amount of —

Craig: …the company sold me a product and it didn’t work as described. I would love — I think everybody frankly was a little, I think I was — I was, I don’t think, I was shocked that after this many years you guys didn’t come out and at that price say here’s a cloud solution so that you can actually collaborate. This is being mastered across platforms by everyone else.

Joe: What we’re doing is we’re integrating Dropbox on our iPad app so that you have really deep integration with Dropbox to make that a lot easier.

Craig: Oh, come on. But I’m not talking about that.

Joe: But that’s really what our customers are asking us for.

John: Honestly, I’m sort of on your side.

Joe: That’s what our customers are asking us for.

John: All my stuff is currently in Dropbox. That’s where I sort of want to see stuff.

Joe: Yeah.

Craig: No, I understand. But I have Dropbox. See, there’s two kids that have created this writing site, you know, WriterDuet, where they — now, is that solution appropriate for Final Draft, I don’t know. But they figured something out here already. And they’re just kids!

Joe: Well, so there’s CollaboWriter and there’s like the online storage and syncing the storage.

Craig: They’re not really kids. They’re grownups.

Joe: And CollaboWriter is something we want to deal with in a completely new way, so we have a hosted environment so we can do it the right way.

Craig: Right.

Joe: But as far as syncing and sharing documents, I think there are solutions out there that we just need to integrate with rather than offering you cloud storage. There’s no reason for me to offer you storage.

Craig: We don’t need storage. We need just, yeah.

Joe: We’re making adjustments as we go along and adjustments change.

Craig: Here’s a suggestion to you. Like when I talk to all of our screenwriting friends, the number one thing that we want is to be able to open our laptop here and you open your laptop in your house and we start working in the same document just like Google Docs.

Joe: Definitely. I’m with you.

Marc: We agree.

Joe: We are going to build it. I promise we’re going to build that.

Marc: Let me apologize to the listeners if we’re a little slower than you’d like us to be.

Craig: [laughs] And you have 40 people.

Marc: Like I said, there’s 36 products that work with us. There’s a lot of people that touch Final Draft. We have a lot of — sometimes you get spread a little too thin. We do realize that we are in the screenwriting business and our job is to make screenwriters happy. Hopefully we will get Craig to be a fan.

Craig: You know me. I’m all — I’m honest.

Joe: You’re much more charming in person than on paper.

John: I told you he was going to be a charming person.

Joe: He’s a sweetheart —

Craig: This is charming? Really?

John: Thank you guys so much for coming in.

Craig: Thank you. That was brave. That was brave.

John: It was brave and wonderful for you guys to come in and talk to us about Final Draft 9

Craig: Face the music.

John: And let’s keep a good dialogue going.

Joe: Let’s stay in touch and let’s get these things worked out.

Marc: We’re open to criticism. We’re open to love. And we’re open to suggestions. And just want to remind the listeners we’re not distant. We spend every day listening, talking, interacting with writers of all kinds, from playwrights, to television writers, to people in Europe. We work very hard. My team works very hard.

Craig: I believe you.

Marc: And the reason that prompted this was that the employees might have felt taken back.

Craig: That’s a shame.

Marc: And me — throw it all at me.

Craig: And we are very, I have to say just personally I respect the hell out of you guys for coming on. I think it’s fantastic. I hope that you understand that everything I have to say — the good news about me is that I’m just a little honesty machine, so when I love it I’m going to love it hard.

Joe: What you see is what you get.

Marc: But this is why we came here. We cannot get better unless we listen to the criticism. We just can’t accept the love. I do want to thank the listeners that do love us to keep loving us. And I want the ones that don’t to tell us how to make us better. That’s the only way you get better. We are sometimes a little slower because we have a big reach. We’re not a new startup. We’re not a small company. And we have what you call a legacy product. And you have a lot of things that have to work hand in hand with that. And a lot of partners and a lot of — I could go on, and on, and on.

So, it’s a balancing act and I appreciate you having me on.

Craig: It was a pleasure.

Marc: And please feel free to keep criticizing us. It makes us better.

Craig: [laughs] Fantastic.

John: Thank you guys so much.

Joe: Something tells me they will. [laughs]

John: Yeah, probably.

Marc: As always, John, good to see you.

Craig: Thank you guys, that was great.

[Scriptnotes theme music]

Craig: So, a very interesting thing happened this week. Billy Ray and Chip Johansen — Johansen, right? Johannessen or Johansen? Well, anyway, Chip, they are the co-chairs of the negotiating committee. Very well regarded, well respected writers, not only for the work that they do but their position in the guild and their demeanor, they way they conduct themselves.

And they sent an email to the membership and it said essentially that even though the AMPTP, the organization that corrals all the companies for the purposes of bargaining, even though they’ve made a deal with the DGA, and even though we have, I think we’re coming up on 70 years of precedent where if one guild gets a deal they all get it, the AMPTP opened up with a volley that they were going to offer us something that was worth $60 million less, with all these rollbacks on the table. And basically the email said, “Well, that was surprising. And we’re not going to take that.”

And I just wanted to talk about this for a minute, because what does it mean? A lot of people are a little concerned and nervous.

John: So, as we’ve talked about on the podcast before, I’m actually on the negotiating committee for this contact. So, while I can’t talk about specifics of what’s going on here right now, I would say in general in the town both on the writers’ side and the studios’ side, it didn’t feel like this was going to be a particularly contentious negotiation.

Craig: Yeah, like why? This wasn’t supposed to be this way. Why are they doing this?

The first thing I should say is that there was — what I didn’t read in the email from Billy and Chip was any sense of panic. And nor do I have a sense of panic. And the reason I don’t have a sense of panic is because I think that this is a fairly obvious but also fairly clumsy attempt by Carol Lombardini, who is the head negotiator for the companies, to get us to sort of bargain up towards the DGA as opposed to trying to get us — working hard to get us to bargain down to that number.

As a strategy I suppose it’s okay. It’s a little silly. A lot of this stuff is kabuki theater. The blunder here was that it was just way too aggressive. Way. It just feels like a huge mistake. And it feels like a mistake on their part strategically because, look, if they really do want to overturn pattern bargaining then I’m going on strike. I’ll go on strike without the WGA. [laughs] I don’t care.

John: Craig Mazin just walks around all the time with a blank picketing sign and he will just write whatever he needs to write on, because that’s Craig Mazin. That’s what Craig Mazin does.

Craig: Uh [laughs]. So, if you lose me that early you’ve really blown it because I’m a very moderate guy about this sort of thing. I hate strikes because I think that you can’t truly win a strike.

But in this case if we were to violate pattern bargaining, there’s no reason for the guild to exist anymore. If you accept that one time, then the next time you’ll have to do it again and again until eventually we just get paid McDonalds wages and what do we need a union for?

That’s why I know that this isn’t serious from them because they know that we would never take it. I just think it was a bungled first step by the companies and I hope that they un-bungle this quickly. It was sort of pointless.

John: I am told that my function as a member of the negotiating committee will be to sit in a room and make a counter offer, then sit while they mull that counter offer, and then sit some more, and then sit some more. So, I am bringing plenty of good reading material. I have plenty to write. I’m looking forward to hanging out with my fellow writers and trying to get this contract done.

Craig: It’s essentially the writer’s version of jury duty, because the negotiating committee exists per the constitution, the union constitution. In actuality it would be impossible to negotiate anything. By the way, it’s the same thing for the companies. They have all these people in the room. It’s very hard for the — ultimately it comes down to about four people in a sidebar deciding everything. So, you become quickly ceremonial.

But that said, I think everybody is looking at this going, “Oh, come on. That’s just ridiculous.” So, I guess I would say to my fellow writers don’t panic. Not over this. But, nor should you think for a second that we would ever in a million years accept something like that. We would not.

John: If Craig Mazin tells me not to panic I will not panic.

Now, another thing that happened this week, something that a reader wrote in about, this is from Erica Horton: “I know you guys have probably gotten a lot of questions about the Quentin Tarantino Hateful Eight script. However, I was wondering if you could address the difference between sharing a script the way one of the actors supposedly did and posting the screenplay online the way Gawker did. Is there a difference?

“I understand how someone producing a movie from a screenplay without the permission of the author is copyright infringement, or taking it and claiming it as their own. Is it against copyright law to share someone’s screenplay if you credit them as the author and don’t sell it?”

Craig: Absolutely against copyright law. 100 percent. What a shame. And then Quentin famously said, “Well, now I’m not making the movie.”

John: Which I would like to stipulate as a writer and director, that is entirely his right.

Craig: I love —

John: He can not make his movie. That’s fine.

Craig: If he weren’t already the coolest guy in the world he would have become the coolest guy in the world because of this. Strong move to the hoop.

John: So, in case people are listening to this podcast years after the fact, what happened this last week is Quentin Tarantino’s script, which is apparently called Hateful Eight, leaked online. So, I’m not even sure what the entire backstory of this was, but he had sent the script to certain actors and either through them or through their agents somehow it got out. And it was passed around town. But, more importantly it was put online by Gawker. And so people could read the screenplay. And that is what has happened to get us to this point.

Craig: The idea is that if you’ve written a screenplay, either you haven’t sold it or you have sold it, either way someone owns the copyright. And part of copyright — part of the right of copyright is the right to distribution. So, I don’t have the right to sell things that I haven’t authored unless I’ve gotten permission. And in this case copying and disseminating the screenplay is a violation of the copyright owner, which in this case I think is Quentin. I don’t think he’s sold it to anybody yet. Yeah.

Which is even — for those people who are kind of copy-fightists, then just know that his isn’t like a pro-corporation, “Well Mickey Mouse should be copyright forever,” kind of thing. This is a man who wrote a thing.

John: So, let’s talk about the difference between a script being passed around Hollywood and a script being posted online. I’ve taken my own sort of smaller John August umbrage at people posting script reviews online. And this is sort of the same kind of thing, but times a thousand.

I think as writers we can all sort of understand what this is like. This is something that I’ve written that I did not want to share to the world that is now suddenly up on Gawker. And how would you feel?

Craig: Violated. I mean, people have to understand we would never — if Stephen King sent a rough draft manuscript to his publisher and some assistant in the office took it and scanned it and threw it up on the web, everybody would be shocked by it. But somehow for screenplays we don’t have the same level of outrage, maybe because the internet geek community is so passionate about this stuff. And I use that term lovingly. And they want to celebrate and read these things and they’re obsessed with the insidery-ness of it all.

The problem is they don’t understand we don’t write screenplays for you to read on the internet period, anyway. We write them to be converted into movies. We want you to see a movie not having read the screenplay. What a shame to go into The Sixth Sense or Silence of the Lambs having read the screenplay.

And, look, I saw Silence of the Lambs having read the book, but I would have never read the screenplay to see the choices and to see the movie in my head. It’s just violation. The worst kind of violation is the ScriptShadow-y “I’m going to take your early draft and review it,” which is a double dose of why. Like who the hell gave you the right to do this? And why do you think it’s good for anyone?

John: Let’s step back and talk for a second about a screenwriter’s right to control the distribution of his or her script. Because there’s sort of two different phases a script goes through. There’s the stage where it’s just your script. You’ve written a script, you may have handed it to one or two people to read. You are trying to get their opinions, their feedback. You’re trying to know if this thing you’ve written is good.

Now, at a certain point you’re going to be going after directors or actors and that script is going to be in other people’s hands. At a certain point you give up your expectation that you can control every person who’s reading it. And sometimes that’s okay.

When you write a spec script at a certain point you want people to be passing it around. Each year we talk about the annual Black List of the people who have written the scripts that people love most in Hollywood. And most of those scripts were not a case of an executive calls the agent and says, “Can I read this script?” It’s more, “I read this great script and here I’m going to give you a copy of this great script.” That passing around is a natural part of Hollywood.

But that’s not what happened with this in Gawker. This was not a passing around of something that we loved. This was publishing it on the internet for the whole world to read. And that’s not okay. That’s not an acceptable sort of use of the screenwriter’s work.

Craig: It’s different in scale, obviously. But it’s also different in terms of whose intention is ruling the day. For instance, when I was writing the Hangover movies with Todd Phillips, we never printed a single page out. Nobody got copies of it except for him and me while we were writing it. It existed entirely on our two computers. That’s it. And then when we were done we made a hard copy for the head of Warner Bros. We presumed that he would safeguard and he did. And the three actors, you know, the three guys.

And everybody else had to come into the office, you know, like costume designers and production, everybody else, had to come into the office, read it, and leave, and not take it with them, no transmission, because we understood it was something that people would take and put on the internet.

So, there are screenplays that there will be interest in.

John: Yeah.

Craig: J.J. I’m sure is struggling with massive amounts of security around the Star Wars scripts.

John: And I want to talk about how you lock stuff down when you mean to lock stuff down, because right as the story broke people were tweeting or emailing me saying, “Oh, they should have used Bronson Watermarker,” which is an app I make that watermarks PDFs. Saying like, “Oh, if Tarantino had done this then this wouldn’t have happened.”

No, this could have still happened. I mean, the app that I make can put a watermark on your PDF and that is some protection, and we can do like a bigger deep burn thing where you’re creating an image of every page. That’s a little bit more protection.

But that’s still kind of locking your bike. If somebody wanted to put it up on the internet they could still put it up on the internet. They could retype it. There’s no real way to protect your script from anyone possibly looking at it unless you’re doing exactly what you did with The Hangover 3 which is have people come to your office to read it.

Craig: Well, and for instance on that project, and I suspect it’s the same case with any high profile movie that you know you’re making, and it’s a sequel, or even if you’re doing the first — like I’m sure when they did the first Hunger Games they were obsessive about security. The agents don’t get it.

One thing that I was puzzled by, frankly, was the way that Quentin went about this. I think that he — I can’t blame him for walking through a bad neighborhood wearing a tight dress, but he acted in a way that I would have at least counseled him to not do.

John: He did seem to be very casual about sending this script to these people with the expectation that it wouldn’t get out past them, which if you think about his previous scripts have leaked out. So, you would think he would approach this with, I don’t know, a little bit more caution. I mean, you’d think he would have them come to his house to read it, for example.

Craig: That’s right. And maybe it’s just that he — because he’s Quentin Tarantino, you know, he doesn’t know that he’s Quentin Tarantino. But if I were with him I would say, “Oh my god, you have to understand something: people would knife their brother or sister to get your scripts because people are that obsessed with it.”

John: That would actually be a great job for somebody, sort of like following Quentin Tarantino around saying, “No, you’re Quentin Tarantino. You shouldn’t do that.”

Craig: “Yeah, I’m sorry Quentin. You forgot again that you’re Quentin Tarantino.”

John: Right. That’s what you should do.

Craig: By the way, I would do it right now. If Quentin Tarantino said you can follow around all day long, I mean, I am so fascinated by him as a filmmaker. He’s probably my favorite filmmaker.

John: Well, I do recall that probably the first script I ever really truly loved was Quentin’s script for Natural Born Killers.

Craig: I read that script. It’s awesome.

John: Which wasn’t really the movie that they made, but it was the original script. And I was at USC at the time and I remember one night getting the script, reading the script, and getting to the last page and then just flipping back to page one and reading it all over again. It’s the first script I did that with because it was just so good.

Craig: And he gets away with stuff that we can’t all get — I mean, he just does things that we’re not allowed to do. He’s the best.

John: All right. We have a question from Paul. He writes, “I am a Brooklyn based filmmaker.”

Craig: [New York accent] Hey what’s up, Paul? How ya doin’?

John: “And I enjoy your show greatly which is why I wouldn’t have guessed that I would ever take umbrage at your remarks, but umbrage I have taken. In your show Women in Pilots you and Craig commented numerous time about the way kids can mess with your career. Craig even went so far as to say they prevented him from becoming a director.

“In past shows you’ve talked about how kids halt many writer’s careers and success in the industry. As a married filmmaker considering having kids these remarks are more than disconcerting. You and Craig provide too strong of an anti-kid argument for parents who clearly both revel in the joys of a family. This feels like a ‘do as a I say not as I do’ bit of wisdom. I know successful filmmakers who have families and who are permanently single. And while the responsibilities of family can be extremely difficult to manage, I don’t believe a filmmaker’s success is harmed by his or her obligations to children. I think it’s totally specific to the individual.”

Craig: I…where to begin.

John: I know.

Craig: I mean, well, my initial reaction is, Paul, I can absolutely do anything I want professionally and remain the father to my children. It’s just I’m not sure I’m doing the father to them that I want to do. So, it’s a choice. I’m just making a choice. I’m not saying don’t have kids.

First of all, family should be your priority anyway. [laughs] It’s more important to make human beings and love them to, I don’t know, get a job making a film. It’s a movie. I love movies, but they’re not people.

John: This reminds me of another podcast I was listening to this week, the Planet Money podcast. And they had this economist on who writes about love and sort of the choices people make in romantic relationships. And I think the specific bit of advice was about this guy who had written in who was polyamorous. And he’s saying, “I have three lovers and people never write about this stuff and so what do you think the economic consequences of this are?”

And the economist was very smart in saying you may have bountiful love. Your love may be endless. But your time is not endless. And your ability to be with people is not endless. And so no matter what you do you are making some choices about how you are spending your time and how you are spending your emotional energy.

And that, I think, is really what we get into with Paul’s question is that, yes, you can have a terrific filmmaking career. You can have a terrific family. But to try to put energy in both places equally, there’s only a certain number of hours in a day. There’s only so much you.

And so everything is choices and you’re making a choice between how you’re going to allot your time. And having kids may cause you to allot your time differently. And that’s, I think, just the nature of the beast.

Craig: That’s right. And, Paul, don’t misinterpret my snarky attitude. I don’t blame my children for the choices I make. I make my choices for my children. I love my kids. My wife and my kids come first. I have turned things down, repeatedly, because I thought that it would be bad.

And, by the way, I’ve also made mistakes. I’ve talked a lot about how when my son was two I went to Vancouver and I was there for about six months. And I would go back and forth. There was a stretch of about three months where I was gone. And I came home and he looked different. And it was terrifying to me.

I was talking to this to Alec Berg was actually talking about this the other day when he went off to make — he made EuroTrip. And his daughter had just been born. Had just been born. And he got back from Prague and even though she was a baby and babies don’t necessarily — when you say like, oh, a baby doesn’t recognize me, she didn’t recognize him. His own baby didn’t recognize him. It was like a soldier coming back, you know, it was terrible.

So, Paul, I don’t blame my kids for these things. I make my choices because of my kids. I love my children. And if you love children, too, have some.

John: I will also say that these are the kinds of choices that comes at every filmmaker at every point in his or her career. So, in an early incarnation of Big Fish, Steven Spielberg was attached to direct it. And so it was to the point where we were talking about when we would actually make the movie and Steven said, “Well, I want to do it during the summer so I can be with my kids.” And this is Steven Spielberg and these are the choices he’s making. He’s a director who can make any movie, but some of the choices he’s making are because this is when his kids are going to be out of school and can join him on a set.

So, it’s not just an aspiring screenwriter thing or an aspiring director thing. At every level in the filmmaking world you’re going to be making some of these choices.

Craig: Well answered.

John: Next question comes from Liz in Chicago. She writes, “I’m a filmmaker working on developing a script for a tech-inspired story involving the themes of network and cloud storage, digital storage and security, and big data analysis. The problem is I’m expert in none of these fields and want to understand the real technology behind some of these things so that the story holds some weight in terms of relative accuracy.

“How would you go about finding a trustworthy adviser in the technology field to run the viability of plot elements by?”

Craig: That’s a really good question. I don’t know if we’ve ever had a big research episode.

John: I love research.

Craig: Me too. Beats writing, doesn’t it? [laughs] Most of the movies I’ve done haven’t required a ton of research. Identity Thief was the first one where I had to do a lot of research. And the answer to your question, Liz, is you call up a company that does what you are talking about and you tell them you’re writing a movie and you would love to talk to them. And oh my god do they want to talk to you.

And if you have to sign a non-disclosure agreement or something about trade secrets or things, but just expertise. You know, I went over to Beverly Hills and I sat down with the detective that runs their identity fraud division and he talked to me for two hours.

I remember he said at the end, because he hates identity thieves as you can imagine. He hates them.

John: He figured out that she was the hero.

Craig: Well, he didn’t. But as he was leaving he turned and he said, “By the way, what happens to the identify thief in your movie?” And I said, “She’s going to end up in jail.” And he said, “She should die.”

John: [laughs]

Craig: And he wasn’t kidding at all. It was like I laughed and then I realized, oh my god, he wants her to die.

John: It would have been a very different movie. I’m glad you didn’t follow his advice. Now, I agree with Craig’s overall advice about reaching out to people but I would say reach out to a specific person.

And so a project that I’m working on I needed to find people who had a very specific disease, or a very specific sort of situation. And they were hard to track down. Fortunately I was able to find an organization, a charity that works with people who have this condition, and I could reach out to them. And so online I could figure out there was a group in LA that did this. I could figure out who the people were I needed to talk to. I could email them directly and say what I wanted to do. Could they get on the phone with me? And they were wonderful.

Because I was talking to an individual. I think if I just called up blindly it would have been very hard, but since I could target an individual person it worked out really, really well.

And, again, people do want to help you, especially if you’re making a movie. I guess I could have dropped some credits, but I don’t really think that was the reason they were talking to me. They just want to actually see the stuff they do portrayed correctly. And that’s more than anything they want to see is they want to be able to talk about their jobs and see their jobs reflected accurately in the movies.

Craig: People get fussy. And they don’t even need you to be a fancy screenwriter. Everybody loves to talk about what they do. Do you know how frequently somebody that is a big data management cloud storage specialist gets to talk about what he does with someone who cares? Never.

They start talking at a party and people are like, “Ugh….” You’re listening. They get very excited. So, you find that person. They’re going to be very happy to talk to you.

But also make sure you do your homework on your own. Don’t show up and ask dumb questions. Read a few books so that you’re not wasting their time and your time by not asking really good questions that only they could answer.

John: Last bit of advice for Liz. Remember that you will become a sort of expert in this because you will learn all these things about data and such, but your audience won’t be. And your audience doesn’t need to be. Your audience needs you to be the person who interprets all that expert information and gives them just enough so they can follow your story.

So, I want you to be David Koepp in Jurassic Park. I want you to create that clever moment that explains how you clone dinosaurs and let’s just get on with our story.

Craig: “What would Koepp do?” I’ve got a bracelet that says that.

John: All right. This is from Zack. “My sister and I are writing partners from Steubenville, Ohio. We’ve been repped on our first script but it was passed on by all the studios it was sent to. Since then we’ve written another script that was considered by a WME agent, giving us notes on two separate drafts. After our last draft we never heard back from him, so we sent to CAA. They liked it and gave us more notes. We completed them and they said the script was ‘unique and enthralling read, but it wasn’t strong enough to represent.’

“My question to you is this: What the hell do we do next? While the script may not be good enough for them, should we spend our time working on the query letters to hopefully get another agency to bite, or should we scrap that idea and focus our time on writing another script? My biggest fear in this industry is that we have a great script that we just weren’t successfully getting to the right person. Maybe that’s me being overconfident, but by killing myself on the page for the last four years, that idea is what gives me hope to keep writing.

“As a seasoned writer I hope you can understand the struggle we’re going through and hope you can give us no more than a few words of advice to get us through these tough times.”

Craig: Well, I always worry when agencies are giving notes to people. Agents have no — I mean, I love my agent. I love my agency. Agents are not in that job. They’re in the job of negotiating business deals. They don’t know what makes a script good, nor do they know what makes a script sell. They only know what make a script sell.

So, they’re always looking backwards at what just happened and then they get new material and say, “Well, does that fit the pattern I watched?” But that’s not how the actual business works, because the actual business is a disruptive business where suddenly Diablo Cody writes Juno and that’s not at all what came before it, but somebody falls in love with it.

So, my advice to you would be consider maybe a service like the Black List where the script would be read not by agents but by people who are more creatively minded. And, remember, all you need is the one.

John: Blcklst.com is certainly a choice. Or, Austin Film Festival, or Nicholl Fellowship, any of the really meaningful screenwriting competitions. Those could be good ways to send your script out there in the world.

But I think the more important thing I would stress to you is that you have one script and I’m sure it’s terrific, but agents are reading this and they’re trying to base their entire opinion on one script. If you had more for them to read with different kinds of scripts they would have a better sense of who you are as a writer. So, while, yes, don’t abandon this project, I think you need to sort of keep writing new stuff and sort of expand your portfolio of awesome.

Craig: Well, and particularly relevant if you are talking to agencies. Because they’re not looking for screenplays, they’re looking for clients.

John: They’re looking for writers who sell things.

Craig: Exactly. And so if you have that one script and that’s the only one you’re ever going to write, and there have been quite a few people, one-hit wonders like that, then you’re less attractive to an agency. They’re going to make 10 percent off of you one time.

John: Our last question comes from Timothy. “Assuming you have a spec script that everybody loves, and assuming you want to direct your own script, is it appropriate to attach a line on your title page that says something to the effect of ‘Writer Attached to Direct.’ If not, how do you go about selling a script as a writer-director?”

Craig: Yeah, you don’t want to say anything on the title page other than the title and who wrote it and the date.

John: Your email address.

Craig: Email address. Yeah. The idea being that if somebody is truly interested in the screenplay you now have leverage. And you tell them I want to direct this screenplay. At which point they’re all going to try and convince you not to. And here’s the fun part: There are a ton of stories where people said no, I must direct it.

John: Richard Kelly on our podcast.

Craig: Correct. And many of those stories fork off into Richard Kelly-ville where they do a great job and they become directors. Many fork off into — they forked off…[laughs].

John: Boondock Saints.

Craig: They got forked off, yeah, into movies where you think, “Oh, you probably should not have directed that and I can’t believe that you forced yourself on when look who could have directed it, this person, this person, this person.”

And, god, that’s the problem. You need a crystal ball there, don’t you.

John: Craig, this was a jam-packed full show.

Craig: This may have been the best show we’ve ever done.

John: I have a One Cool Thing. Do you have a One Cool Thing?

Craig: I do have a One Cool Thing. It’s very, very brief.

John: Mine is brief, too. So, every year the City of Los Angeles does this thing called Ciclavia. And if you don’t know what Ciclavia is, it’s kind of awesome and amazing. What LA does is they shut down certain streets on a Sunday an people can go ride their bikes or walk on these streets. And so streets that are normally only car traffic are suddenly pedestrian friendly or bicycle friendly.

Craig: “Get on your box and ride!”

John: The next Ciclavia is April 6. It’s down Wilshire Boulevard from downtown to about LACMA, and it’s just great. And so if you are in Central Los Angeles or if you are going to be able to come to Central Los Angeles, it’s just kind of amazing to be able to see the city in a very different way. So, we’ll put a link to the Ciclavia site so you can see what the roots are and stuff.

Yes, it messes up traffic a little bit, but it’s so worth it to see everyone out in the street enjoying a beautiful spring day.

Craig: That sounds awesome. Very briefly my One Cool Thing this week is @chuckpalahniuk. Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, brilliant writer, and one of our listeners and Twitter followers sent me something that he had posted that somebody else wrote about writing. And I thought it was really good. And then he posted something else that somebody wrote about writing that I also thought was really good that was specifically about screenwriting.

And then he posted something he wrote about writing. And all of it, in one day Chuck Palahniuk posted three things about writing that I thought all of them were terrific. So, this is a, I mean, aside from the fact that he’s a terrific writer, that is a Twitter account well worth following if you are a listener of this podcast.

John: Now, Craig, did you click through to his Twitter bio?

Craig: No.

John: Because if you did you’d see that it’s actually not Chuck Palahniuk necessarily tweeting. It’s actually run by the guy who runs his site, a guy named Dennis Widmyer.

Craig: I don’t need the actual Chuck. Whoever that guy is, he is posting great stuff. Who runs my Twitter account?

John: [laughs]

Craig: I’ve got 40 people. I’ve got 40 people running my Twitter account.

Please, for the love of god, if you’ve listened to this episode and maybe you just disagreed completely with what those guys said or are doing, don’t be jerks. Let me be king jerk and stay under my jerk level, because I’m not even that jerky. That’s the truth. Hey, don’t go beyond me. That would just be disgusting.

Links:

• Final Draft
• Scriptnotes 126: Punching the Salty Ocean
• John’s post on Final Draft, software and people
• Deadline: WGA Claims AMPTP Wants Big Pension & Health Contribution Cuts In New Contract
• LA Times on Quentin Tarantino’s Gawker suit
• Ciclavia
• @chuckpalahniuk
• Outro by Scriptnotes listener Jakob Freudenthal