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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/wed-like-to-make-an-offer).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 77 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, your voice is back, but your voice was gone for a few days, is that correct?

**Craig:** Yeah. I got a virus, so I wasn’t able to speak very well and I’m still pretty rundown and sluggish. So, if I sound sluggish it’s viral. It’s viral sluggishness.

**John:** So, I hope that a lot of people in your life have come up to you with suggestions for things you should do to get rid of this virus. Hopefully like really kind of impractical or sort of new-age things; I think that would go well with you, right?

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m the perfect person to come up to and recommend Echinacea because it gives me a chance to talk about how Echinacea has been proven to not work. Or things like zinc, which works sort of very minorly and in a tiny, tiny window, or other nonsense, none of which works.

**John:** Maybe a cleanse. Craig, maybe you need a cleanse?

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah, you know, I feel dirty. I feel dirty. No, no cleanses for me. I’m a big believer in the immune system.

**John:** Ah, that’s a good one, yeah. And bolstering the immune system when the immune system needs to be bolstered, but there’s good ways to do that through vaccinations. But you’re not going to vaccinate against whatever this virus was, because who knows what this virus was.

**Craig:** It’s pretty much your standard rhinitis. Your typical upper respiratory tract infection. Nothing you can do about it accept suffer until it is gone.

**John:** All right. Well, let us not suffer anymore. Let’s get to our topics. Today I thought we’d talk about three things. First off is a new Vanity Fair article about the history of the spec market –the spec script market — which I thought was really good, so let’s talk about that.

Second, I want to talk about how you get ready for a pitch, if you’re going in to pitch something. What are those things you do in those last hours before you go in to pitch something.

And thirdly, I want to talk about your movie, Stolen Identity…

**Craig:** [laughs] Well played, sir.

**John:** Opened at $36.4 million this past weekend. We are recording this on Valentine’s Day, actually. So, Happy Valentine’s Day, Craig.

**Craig:** Happy Valentine’s to you. And if you wouldn’t mind, there’s just a couple of quick follow up things I wanted to mention before we roll into the spec stuff.

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** First, I owe a bit of a retraction / apology and then a nice little follow up on our Raiders thing. So, real quick, many podcasts ago I told a story about Kevin Smith at Comic-Con dressing down film critic Jeff Wells. And it turns out that I screwed up. That, in fact, the film critic that he dressed down was not Jeff Wells. It was a guy named Ron Wells. So, sorry Jeff. [laughs] That was my fault completely. And I apologize. Obviously a somewhat understandable mistake, the last name is the same, the first name is one syllable; not understandable in the sense that nobody likes to hear their name being called out and associated with a story that is all about how they screwed up and it’s not them.

So, Jeff Wells, I’m super sorry. Ron Wells, it was you all along.

So, that’s the retraction apology. And now a little follow up on Raiders. I got an email from Larry Kasdan. And here’s what it said. And it was for both of us, but he didn’t have your email, so he sent it just to me and then I forwarded it to you:

“Craig and John. Your podcast about Raiders blew my mind. Fantastic. The best analysis I’ve ever seen by a power of ten. I loved it and I learned a lot. Lawrence Kasdan.”

Now, how about that as a little feather in our cap?

**John:** Well, that’s fantastic. And for folks who really have no idea what we’re talking about, Lawrence Kasdan wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark. And so our podcast talking about it, apparently he listened to which is just weird, and meta, but great. So, hooray.

**Craig:** Pretty great. And, always nice to engage in an hour long discussion of a movie and then have the writer respond back and say, “Hey, you got it right.”

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, good for us. We win, again.

**John:** We do. Craig, it is weird to have you doing business on the podcast. It’s so — like you came with a prepared list of things you wanted to talk about. It’s just unusual.

**Craig:** It is unusual because, and I suppose people have picked up on this by now, my entire approach to podcasting is to be as ill-prepared as possible, almost really to be aggressively unprepared.

So, this time I came slightly prepared.

**John:** And you did ask Stuart to remind you about your note there.

**Craig:** Yeah. No one should be under the impression that I was really on the ball here. I was not.

**John:** I’m just saying, like if you were to go in that direction in the future, I would welcome it.

**Craig:** Oh, I see. This is a gentle suggestion that maybe I should actually…

**John:** There’s carrots. There’s sticks. There are many things. I can offer you carrot sticks, but it’s something that in the future as I get busier and busier with Big Fish, if you were to choose to do that, that’s just a thing that could happen.

**Craig:** I love that we’re having this discussion here on the podcast. And, you know what? You’re right. I’ve always been very careful to tell people when they compliment me on the podcast that you do all the work. That is correct. You pick the topics. You edit the show. You really do everything.

So, you’re right. I should step up and do more and maybe even come up with a thought about what we should talk about.

**John:** Every once in a while you do. I will give you credit for that. There have been times where I said, “Hey, we’re going to record a podcast.” You’ll say, “Let’s talk about this.” And we have talked about that.

**Craig:** Right. Those are far and few between. Probably of our 77 podcasts, maybe I’ve done that four times.

**John:** Well, today we’re going to talk about three good topics, and I think we’re going to have some good conversation on them, so let’s get started.

First off, this Vanity Fair article in the March 2013 issue is by Margaret Heidenry, I’m guessing, which I thought did a terrific job explaining sort of the history of spec scripts as a sales thing. I mean, screenwriters have always written scripts by themselves, and just defining terms, a spec script is technically any script that you’re writing just for yourself, that you’re not under contract to write it for somebody; you’re just writing it because you can just write a book. The same way novels are often written on spec.

But, what this article does is sort of track the history of when that began as a process of “I’m going to write this script and sell it to a studio,” which was a new thing, when it became really huge, which is the ’90s, and sort of what’s happened to it since then.

So, I strongly recommend everyone read it. But, I want to talk through some of the points because I thought they were really, really interesting.

The story, if I were to fault it for anything, it got a little bit heavy in the Schmucks with Underwoods references and the Sunset Boulevard of it all.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But the history stuff of it was really new to me, so I thought that was cool.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And we’ve talked on the podcast before about sort of the danger of this lottery mentality. I think a lot of people approach screenwriting as a career thinking, like, “Oh, I will write a script and I will sell that script and then I’ll have a million dollars. And then people will make my movie and I’ll be set.” And that’s not the way that most screenwriting works, particularly now. But it didn’t work back then that way, either.

So, this article starts back in the days of the studio contract writer system, which I guess we should really talk about because it’s such a different experience than what we have right now.

**Craig:** Yeah, so, in the old days writers were essentially employees of studios. They got buildings to work in called The Writer’s Building. And they were under contract the way that actors used to be under contract. And you would work for a studio. You wouldn’t work on a project; you’d work for a studio and the studio would assign you to projects and off you’d go. And you would earn your weekly salary.

And you would type up what they told you to type up. And, frankly, a lot of wonderful movies came out of that system, but also a lot of junk, too. I mean, let’s not get too rose-colored about the past. Barton Fink does a great job of sort of portraying the worst of the old studio system days where writers were cogs in machines being assigned to Wallace Beery wrestling pictures.

**John:** I was just at a meeting over at The Lot, which is the old Warner Hollywood, and they sent me to the wrong place. But they said, “Oh, you’re going to The Writers Building.” I just love that there’s still a building called The Writers Building.

**Craig:** That’s right. In fact we have Phil Hay, and Matt Manfredi, and Ted Griffin, and Alec Berg, and Dave Mandel all have their offices in that building, which I love.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, you know, just as in professional sports, there was the emergence of free agency. At some point in — that studio system collapsed and writers became freelance and able to sell their wares wherever. And they weren’t tied down by these contracts.

And essentially the era of the entrepreneurial screenwriter began. And it began perhaps most in earnest with one script in particular, and that’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

**John:** Yeah. So, her article goes through, she thinks the first spec screenplay that would sort of count under our terms is the 1933 Preston Sturges’s script called The Power and the Glory, which sold to Fox for $17,000 back in 1933.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s probably — that feels right. It was unusual for a writer at that time to just have the time and initiative to go off and write something for himself, but he did. And so that was the first thing that sold, and didn’t do very well, but Butch Cassidy has got to be what we think about for the first groundbreaking spec sale.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, Butch Cassidy managed to do two things at once. It sold for a big huge amount of money and it was a big huge hit.

**John:** Yes. Those are good things.

**Craig:** And Hollywood is as susceptible to confirmation bias as anyone. They say, “Look, we spent a lot of money on a completely original screenplay and we got this big huge hit movie out of it. Maybe we should do this more?” And so began the heyday of the spec seller.

**John:** It wasn’t overnight. And it’s important to understand that William Goldman at that point had already written other scripts. He had had movies produced. But this was a thing he chose to do, just write for himself. He was at a point in his career that he could have gone and just pitched it to somebody, attached some actors, and set it up at a studio in a normal way. But he just decided to go off and write the script by himself and let his agent try to sell it.

And so it was a surprise that it sold for $400,000, which is a little over $2 million now. And that was unique, and wonderful, and great. And it was unusual at that time to come in with, like, “Here’s a fully developed script. We can make them make this movie and attach actors and succeed.”

What — I don’t know sort of the movies that have come directly before and after that, but my perception of Butch Cassidy is that it was so different that it might have been hard to pitch it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so that is a good argument even now for when you spec some things rather than pitch some things is if it’s going to be so hard to explain what your vision is for the movie in a pitch, sometimes a spec is a better place to spend your time.

**Craig:** That’s right. And even if people can understand the pitch, and want to buy the pitch, you are no longer able to work in isolation. You don’t get the opportunity to present your screenplay and say, “This is how I want it to be.” You are immediately involved in a collaboration. Sometimes that collaboration is rewarding and sometimes it’s not. Either way, it’s a collaboration.

William Goldman obviously thought to himself, “I would like to write the screenplay without anybody in my ear saying, ‘Don’t do that. Do this instead.'”

**John:** Yes. So, in the article they point to the 1988 Writers Guild strike as being the other major turning point for spec sales.

The 1988 strike was a five month strike, which is a very long time for screenwriters to be not working in their normal capacity. So, during that time a lot of people wrote spec scripts. They wrote scripts because they could. During that strike you could not work for the studios, but you could work for yourself.

And so the wonderful thing about being a writer is you can just write. And so many scripts were written during that time. And as the strike wore down and was resolved, those went onto the market.

It was also a time when the business was expanding. So, you had studios like Disney that were going and trying to make a lot more movies over the course of the year. I remember during the Katzenberg era, wasn’t it like he wanted to make 30 movies a year?

**Craig:** Well, you know, between all of their divisions — Miramax, Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures, and Walt Disney Pictures — one year they released more than a movie a week.

**John:** Yeah. Which is crazy now. We would never do that.

**Craig:** Crazy.

**John:** So, the business was expanding. You had a bunch of writers who had written stuff who could now sell that stuff. It was a really great time to be selling a spec script. And so suddenly you had — “common” makes it sound like everyone was doing it, but it was not unprecedented to sell your script for six figures, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even seven figures.

The first million dollar sale, which is in the article but I also think I remember, that was Ticking Man, which is the Brain Helgeland and Manny Coto script, which still has never been made.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s right. It was an interesting time because the reason the strike occurred in the first place was also in part the reason that the spec boom occurred. The strike in 1988 was in a weird way a redo of a failed two-week long squib of a strike in 1985.

The studios on their own had unilaterally decided that they were only going to pay one-fifth out on video residuals. And their argument in 1985 when they did this, or ’84 when they first started doing it, was that the video market, this VHS market, was very new and they needed a break on all the residuals because it was a new emerging market. It was a bunch of baloney.

But if you remember at the time, 1982/1983 was really when video was just starting to take off. The Betamax/VHS war had been settled. By the time 1988 rolled around it was quite clear that video was enormous. It was an industry all of a sudden. Renting videos and watching videos and buying videos — this was a huge part of the Hollywood system.

In fact, video was so lucrative for the companies that essentially the name of the game was make as much as possible and get it on video. So, the studios were incentivized by the market place, by the consumer, to create an enormous amount of product. The writers, angry about how they’d been screwed over in the early part of the ’80s decided to go on strike to undo the residuals formula that they detested.

They failed to do so, even after the longest strike the Writers Guild has ever endured. But what happened at the end of that strike was a confluence of the following things. Studios needed to make a lot of movies because video made almost all movies profitable on some absurd level. They were incredibly short on movies to make because nobody had been writing anything for a half a year. And writers had been writing stuff during that time for themselves that they were now willing to sell.

Talk about a seller’s marketplace. So, all of these writers went out with all of these scripts. The studios were desperate to make movies. And people started buying things. And, of course, this being Hollywood, when something sells for $500,000 every agent gets on the phone and says, “Okay, it’s the new deal, $500,000 now for a script like this.” And then it just goes up, and up, and up.

And at some point what ends up happening, like in any marketplace, whether it’s for visual art, art you hang on your wall, or whether it’s for tulips, you start to get into the realm of a bubble.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s kind of what happened.

**John:** And this is the point where we move from history, like all that stuff that happened before we got here, to literally this is what Los Angeles and Hollywood was like when I got out of my car, sort of 1992. The business was expanding. Spec sales were happening. There wasn’t a lot of sort of common popular press about Hollywood, but there was Premiere Magazine. So, Premiere Magazine would write the articles about the big spec sales and like, “Oh, my, I want to be in screenwriting because the spec sales are happening.”

You’d see big articles about Joe Eszterhas selling a script for $3 million.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And, yes, it feeds that bubble. You know, like all bubbles, more people enter and it seems like it’s going to keep growing forever. What I think the article does a nice job is also pointing out a few of the unique factors that were happening right then.

First off, this was still a phone call and paper business, and so if you had a spec script going out you were literally making a bunch of copies, or the agency was making a bunch of copies, sticking them in envelopes, messengering them out to the studios. And agents were on the phone.

And that’s inefficient, but that inefficiency actually probably jacked up prices because no one had perfect information. You didn’t really know who was bidding on things. And so if the agent said, “I’ve got an offer,” it was very hard to check to see whether that was true or that wasn’t true. Even things like tracking boards were very new. There wasn’t a lot of ways to share information. So, you had to sort of take it on faith that, “This thing that I’m kind of into, that I would like to buy, well, I need to hurry and buy it right now because otherwise it’s going to become unavailable.”

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a very simple human phenomenon: We want what other people want. Not always, but often. And I think for a lot of that period when you were an agent you would simply just lie and say, “I’ve got two studios. I’m not going to tell you who, but they’ve already put bids in, so you’re stupid if you’re not putting a bid in. And also, your boss is going to beat you over the head with this when it’s a hit at this other studio.”

I’m not a studio executive, but I hear something like that and I start to get sweaty because, what if it’s true? And, of course, nobody knows anything. And it might be right; that might be right. If two other people want it, maybe I should want it, too.

It was much easier to create hype back in the day. And it didn’t hurt that some of the big notable spec sales continued to work out. Lethal Weapon is a great example.

**John:** Absolutely. So, Lethal Weapon was a very big sale at its time, but that became a huge franchise. And so you look, and that was money very, very well spent.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you had, in the article they cite Alan Gasmer who one year sold like 30 spec scripts, which was remarkable.

But friends of mine were in that pool of those spec scripts. I was in my first year of Stark at USC and this was the very early days of cell phones, so not very many people had cell phones at that point.

My friend Jen, we were at a night class, and my friend Jen, her cell phone rang, she ran out into the hallway, and it was sort of a big deal to run out of a classroom and to take a phone call. But she came back in and she said, “Al and Miles just sold their script for a million dollars.” And so, Al Gough and Miles Millar.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And it was very, very exciting. And we applauded for them and she hung up the phone and we got back to…poor Mitchell Block who was teaching a class about how to get money from public television to do small documentaries.

**Craig:** [laughs] What a hard class to keep teaching after that news.

**John:** Exactly. But, I mean, that fever does continue. And I think “bubble” is a really nice way to describe it, because I remember the housing bubble that happened in Los Angeles where suddenly you would go to an open house on a Tuesday and there’d be five offers by the end of the day. And you’re putting in backup offers. That was really, really common at one point. And now it’s gone away. And the same thing happened with specs.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is general human nature but it’s exacerbated by this business which is such a chasey business. Everybody is always chasing things, you know. And so they get so excited whenever there’s this — nobody wants to feel like they’ve been left out of a party in Los Angeles. This is their biggest fear. Whereas my fear is having to actually go to a party.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, when the spec market was booming, it sort of fed in on itself. But with all things like this, eventually there is a correction as they say in the Wall Street Journal.

**John:** And that correction came partly because of overspending, but also because of other factors, just a change in times.

First off, most of the studios became bought by much bigger corporations. And so those corporations sometimes had deep pockets, but they were also very risk-adverse. They also had reasons to be using the material that they already owned, intellectual property that they already owned, or to gather up intellectual property that they could use and exploit.

So, it became much more reasonable for Disney to try to base things off of theme park rides, or for Fox to sort of look at what their publishing arm had and try to base off the books that they had. They wanted synergies. And that whole word synergy came about because these corporations were getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and looking for reasons to sort of justify why they were all under one big umbrella.

Second off, we talked about how paper and phone calls sort of helped inflate things, because information was hard to come by. But with PDFs they were just attached to an email, so they could zip out and everyone could have it at once. It was much easier to sort of leak things to other people just through email. And emails were just faster and quicker. And we didn’t have to wait on somebody calling back.

Like one of the most powerful plays an agent can have sometimes is just not calling somebody back and driving that paranoia. Email doesn’t do the same thing really.

**Craig:** No, it doesn’t. And then you also had the rise of the tracking boards online, which essentially eliminated the chicanery that would go on where you could essentially pump and dump a spec. People started talking to each other. Simple as that. The business had… — You know, it’s funny. It’s all sort of probably an antitrust violation, but one of the things that goes on at studios is they get very angry at any studio that breaks ranks and overspends on something.

When Jim Carrey got $20 million for Cable Guy, every other studio went bananas at — I think it was Sony that paid the $20 million — went bananas at them for basically resetting the pay scale for every A-list actor. They hadn’t just cost themselves $20 million. They’d cost everybody $20 million. And they do this with screenplays as well.

When you work in Hollywood, you have a quote. That’s what you get paid. And the way that business affairs departments work is, okay, if you got paid this and then your movie got made, then you get a little extra. And if your movie was a hit you get a little extra after that. They have all these little formulas. If anyone dares violate the formula and overpay somebody, everybody else goes bananas.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so I think there is a natural tendency once the tools are in place for the studios to start talking to each other and saying, “Let’s not get suckered anymore, not by the writers, by the agencies.” The agency became the enemy here. CAA and William Morris and ICM and UTA and Endeavor were and continue to do everything they can to get as much money out of the studios as possible. And the studios, frankly, have gotten much better about talking to each other to prevent that.

**John:** Yeah. We talked about how the rise in spec sale prices came because of supply and demand. Essentially the studios had demand and then they would buy scripts because they had to fill a pipe. Those pipes became much smaller. They didn’t need as many scripts. And so as demand fell so did the prices for these things.

You know, first off, they’re just making fewer movies. Like that idea of, “Oh, we’re going to make a movie every weekend,” that went away because home video became less lucrative, less important. Movies themselves became more expensive, so we’re going to step up to the plate fewer times and bat at fewer things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Plus, as these corporations grew, there were fewer buyers. There were fewer buyers because Warner Brothers takes over New Line, so you can’t — Warner doesn’t want to bid against New Line on a property.

**Craig:** They can’t.

**John:** As more labels get folded under each other they start having to negotiate who gets to buy something. So, if Fox 2000 doesn’t want to bid against Fox on a property, even if they might both want it, only one person is going to bid, so you can’t play them against each other.

**Craig:** That’s right. And there was this whole world of mini majors that existed with the Carolco and Orion and MGM and UA. And all these people just started disappearing and boiling down to five major buyers who were very corporate, who realized that marketing expenditures now were so enormous that it almost seemed that that department was the one to satisfy more than any other department. Specs were considered an inordinate risk.

The success of Batman in the late ’80s, I think, woke the whole town up to the notion of franchises that they were already sitting on that they should just exploit.

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

**Craig:** And then as things were sort of struggling and petering, the writers decided to go on strike again.

**John:** Yeah. That probably didn’t help. It was a rough time to do that. I think we should fast-forward to today because we talked I think two or three weeks ago about that spec sale report which showed sort of how many total spec scripts sold over the course of this last year, which I thought was really fascinating. And the numbers have trended up over the last three years. And there are more spec sales selling now than before.

They’re not nearly at the stratospheric prices that they used to be, but there are some that do sell. And often they’re selling for smaller figures to smaller places/labels that you may not necessarily have heard of. They’re happening in genres that are less expensive. So, it’s the horror and thriller ones are the ones that are selling. It’s not the giant action tent-poles.

It’s not Lethal Weapons that are selling. It’s smaller movies that they can make for a price that are selling specs, but they are still selling. They are still selling.

**Craig:** In general, yeah. I mean, there are some exceptions. All You Need Is Kill is a big huge action-adventure that sold for a lot. But, yeah, it does seem like a lot of the smaller genre movies are what they’re picking up.

**John:** Yeah. So, I want to sort of wrap this up by saying our sort of standard disclaimers that it’s interesting to think about and talk about spec sales because that’s often what people think about when they think about the life of a screenwriter is like, “Oh, you’re going off and writing a script and someone will buy the script and make that into a movie.” But that’s not the bread and butter of what most actual writers do.

And it’s not really necessarily the reason to write a spec script. Most spec scripts will never sell, but those good spec scripts will get those writers future work and future employment. Most of the things that are on the Black List won’t sell, and they won’t get made. But those good scripts on there will get those writers meetings and give those writers projects down the road to write and keep food on the table.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** Cool. So, one of the things that a writer is going to be doing if he’s not selling a script is going out to pitch a project, and so I thought that would be our second topic today, because yesterday I had to pitch two different movies in the same day…

**Craig:** Eke.

**John:** …which was exhausting. Have you had to do that?

**Craig:** No! That sounds crazy. Why?

**John:** it’s just the way my schedule worked out. Because I’m heading off to New York to start some Big Fish stuff, so it was the only day where I could go in and meet on these two different projects. And it was tough. One of them was a phone pitch and one of them was in person.

But I want to talk a little bit about getting ready for a pitch, not the days of prep going up to it, but just like literally the couple hours ahead of time. Because one of the projects was the very first time I’d ever really pitched it, and so it was all sort of new and fresh, and it could be a little bit less formed because it was one of those pitches, like, is there even an idea here that we feel like could make a movie? It was a property that they owned the underlying rights and they weren’t sure if they wanted to make something out of it, but I thought there was something cool to make out of it.

The other one was based on a book, and so they’d already read the book, and I’d already pitched it other places so I definitely knew what the pitch was. But that was a pitch that I hadn’t done for four weeks. And so I had to refresh myself on it.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** So, I thought we’d talk about that.

What was the last thing you had to pitch, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, you mean to pitch to say get a job as opposed to pitching an original thing?

**John:** Either. And we can talk about what the difference is there.

**Craig:** Probably, well, it’s been a long time frankly. I mean, I was with a director the other day talking about rewriting a project that he’s attached to. So, I was sharing my thoughts and my opinions about how it should go, but that wasn’t really a formal pitch.

**John:** No. You’re sort of describing a take but it’s not “buy this.”

**Craig:** I think if I collect enough information together to sort of say, “Okay, yeah, I do want to do this, and here’s the story,” and he agrees, then I’ll go and pitch it probably to the studio. But it’s been awhile.

**John:** Yeah. I find every couple months I have to sort of dust off my sort of pitching brain and go in and do that. And I genuinely enjoy it. A few things that I found really helpful, and so I’ll talk first about this one project that I’d already pitched before, so I sort of had it worked out, but I had to sort of refresh myself on it.

If I’ve written something down, a lot of times I will write up sort of the pitch. And I’ll write it up sort of the way I would normally speak it. And that’s a document I will carry with me, but I’ll never really look at. So, for Chosen, I had to pitch the Chosen pilot to Josh, and then I had to pitch it to Fox, or 20th, and then 20th again, and then I had to pitch it to NBC and ABC. And so I had to pitch that thing a lot.

And, in that case I would only have a couple days off, but what I found to be really, really helpful is because I had this written document, in the couple hours before I would have a meeting I would go through and I would rewrite the document. And I found that actually just going through and rewriting and sort of putting it in my — the way I was thinking about it today, really helped it fit — it helped it come out of my mouth better when I was speaking it to a group because I had just written it, and so it felt real and it felt sort of alive in my head. I could sort of see it all again.

Just reading it didn’t do enough. Sometimes reading is sort of passive. Writing forced me to really engage with what the story was and what the points were. I could remember sort of like how I was getting from A, to B, to C, to D.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. Yeah, you want to be able to inspire confidence. And part of what inspires confidence is sounding like you’re in control of your own story. Sounding like you’re in control of your story doesn’t mean you are; it just means you sound that way.

But it’s important to sound that way because the worst thing is to be in control of your story and sound like you’re not. Then you’re pitching yourself out of a gig that you deserve.

**John:** For this other property I pitched yesterday, I didn’t have a written pitch, but I had slides. So, I’d done slides and keynote on the iPad. And so because there were some very distinct visual images I needed to be able to show, I just brought in a little keynote presentation I did with it.

And it had been a couple weeks since I looked through it, so I went through and I sort of did the quick version of it just to myself going through the slides, and that helped me sort of put it all back together. Basically you’re just trying to recreate the best performance you have of what it is you’re doing.

And think of it like an audition. And I do definitely treat it like an audition. Even in that drive over as I’m headed there, I won’t listen to the radio. I won’t listen to a podcast. I will just speak the pitch. And I will start the pitch. And get the pitch rolling. If I can’t get my mouth to move right I will do those little vocal exercises I learned in college to, you know, just be able to speak, and speak clearly and intelligently.

I definitely find that the beginning of the pitch is crucial. And if the first few minutes are awkward you will never recover. You’re never going to get them back. So, you have to really think about, like, how are you going to introduce this property? How are you going to introduce this project? You can talk about: If there’s an anecdote, that’s great; if it’s something about the people who are in the room, that’s fantastic. With this book I could talk about…the producer had called me, we traded voice mails, and finally I just bought the book on my Kindle and I read it overnight and loved it.

And that’s not important in a weird way, but it just gets the ball rolling. It gets stuff started.

**Craig:** Well, it is important though because it shows that you care. I mean, we’ve talked about this before. It’s a weird thing to pitch something because you’re a salesperson. And when sales people come up to me, I’m annoyed and skeptical frankly, as I should be. Because we all know enough about sales — we’ve all seen Glengarry Glen Ross to know that there’s a lot of flimflam often involved.

But, if you care, and you are passionate about the material, then it’s not flimflam. Frankly, you are doing them a favor. You are giving them a chance to buy something that should be bought, because you’re going to do a really good job. And if you convey that and you get that across, it’s a very important thing. But it has to be true.

**John:** It has to be true. I mean, I think it’s a good idea to acknowledge someone else on your side, on your team who’s in the room with you. Just because if you’re going to be doing most of the talking, at least you’re sort of giving them a nod to say, like, this is an important person who’s here and there’s a reason why this person is in the room.

Then you’re going to talk about the things, you know, this is sort of Pitching 101, but you’re going to talk about what the story feels like. Sort of what the world of the story is and what kind of movie it is. You’re going to talk about the most important characters. If it’s based on an underlying property, you’re going to talk about what’s fantastic about the property, but also be honest about these are the challenges with this and this is where I think we can go in a better direction.

Because, they would hopefully have some exposure to what the underlying thing is. And they probably have some genuine concerns. So, if you head them off and sort of state their concerns, like you’re going to be worried about these three things, then they feel, “Oh, not only am I smart, but this writer is smart and understands what it is that I need to hear from him to get me past my basic objections.”

So, if you can start that way and then get into your actual, “This is how we open,” you’re going to be in a much better place.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the “This is how we open” is important because, you know, you pointed out it’s sometimes hard to begin a pitch. It’s such a formal, strange thing to do. And we’ve all seen parodies of it in movies about Hollywood. It seems so ridiculous.

You know, in The Player it’s, “Night. Chinese Lanterns.” It’s always so absurd sounding and kind of gross. But, what saves you is your first scene. Because the first scene of a movie is a similar difficult transition. People are in their seats, and they’re eating popcorn. It’s quiet. There’s a company logo. And then something happens. And that something is designed to be a wakeup and an introduction, whether it’s gentle or abrupt. That’s why it’s there. So, use that.

If you’re not pitching your first scene the way people would experience it in the theater, I think you’re pitching it wrong. You may spend three or four minutes pitching that first scene, and then eight minutes pitching the rest of the movie. That’s okay. But there’s an excitement about a first scene, a well-crafted introduction to a world, and a character, and a problem, and a situation that gets everybody in the front of their seat and makes them think, “Okay, that’s a sample of how this person is going to be in control of this story, hopefully.”

**John:** In my experience I’ve found that the degree to which it’s not quite clear when you started pitching is often very helpful. And so a lot of times you can start by talking about the character. And obviously you’re talking about your main character, and you can just sort of describe him. And we meet him and this is what’s happening. And because you’re often meeting your hero in the opening scene, that’s a nice way to transition into it. So, like you’ve gotten into it without the sudden like stop, and then like “Tracking through the Los Angeles hill sides.”

It makes it feel like you are starting your story with your hero if that is the right way to start your movie.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** Cool. So, that’s pitching.

And now I want to get to the third topic which is what I’m sort of most excited to talk about which is your movie, Stolen Identity, which opened so huge…

**Craig:** I think that’s great. [laughs] We should have called it that.

**John:** [laughs] Which opened so terrifically over this last weekend. And I got to see it at the ArcLight and loved it. I saw like a 5:30 show. It was pretty full.

And it’s always weird when you go to see a friend’s movie, in this case two friends’ movies, because I wanted it to be good for you, and I really wanted it to be good for Melissa. And Jason Bateman I know, but he’s fine. Whatever, Jason Bateman. But I wanted it to be good for both of you, and it was really good for both of you. I was very, very excited to see it.

**Craig:** Thank you. I had a weird week.

**John:** Yeah. I know you did. So, tell us about that.

**Craig:** Well, I will. So, we’ll start with the good news. The good news is the movie is a big success. And the audience that we set out to make the movie for showed up in droves. We’ve gotten great word of mouth. It had a terrific opening weekend, far beyond our expectations. Frankly, if it hadn’t been for the snow storm we could have made upward — nearly $40 million. So, it’s a lot of people buying tickets; a ton of people buying tickets for the movie.

And we’re still doing well. I mean, even on Tuesday, a Tuesday in February we made almost $3 million. So, that’s great. That is incredibly gratifying and it confirms what I suspected, because I watched the movie with test audiences long before the movie ever came out. So, I got to see audiences enjoy the movie and laugh all the way through and have a great time. Not everybody, but most of them.

And that’s why probably if you look back a couple of podcasts ago when we talk about Stolen Identity, or Identiweenie, as I like to call it.

**John:** I was also going with Identi-Thiefy.

**Craig:** Identi-Thiefy. When I was talking about Identi-Thiefy I was like, “Oh, and you know, I think the critics will like it.” Oh Craig. Oh stupid, stupid Craig.

So, my love affair with critics continues. Not big fans of mine. And this is the bad part of the week. And I want to talk about this in a way that perhaps people aren’t anticipating. Here’s what I don’t want to do: I am not going to discuss why the critics didn’t like it. Why so many of them seemed very, very angry about it. I’m not going to talk about Rex Reed. I’m not going to talk about the state of film criticism or try and explain any of it. I’m not going to do any of that. Not interested.

The critics will continue to do what they do. And I will continue to do what I do. And there’s nothing that either party is going to say to each other that’s going to change anything. So it goes. So it goes.

What I want to talk about is how terrible it all made me feel. And I want to talk about it because this is a podcast for screenwriters. And some of you out there are trying to be screenwriters and in success will have a movie in theaters. Some of you already are and have had movies in theaters. All of us who have movies in theaters, me more often than some, [laughs] but all of us will come face to face with bad reviews at some point or another. Or at all points.

And I am going to be very, very frank with all of you. It feels terrible. It was awful. I hated it because I think in part I love the movie, and I was proud of what I had done. I had watched it with people and I saw how Melissa and Jason had made people laugh, but also moved them to tears. And it was so great to watch. And then here come these reviews that basically say everybody stinks, especially this Mazin guy, how atrocious, how stupid, and illiterate, and so forth.

And for about three or four days I was kind of paralyzed in emotional anguish and misery. And I felt very, very stupid and very, very sad for myself. And rejected. And frankly just in pain. It really hurt. It hurt my feelings. Sometimes these phrases from childhood express our emotional states the best: My feelings were hurt.

And I wish that I could say to anybody out there that there’s a strategy to avoid this. There isn’t. In fact, I think this is what needs to happen: It is a sign that you care. Do not bargain this pain away. It may sound foolish, but the reason you’re in pain is because you care. The reason you’re in pain is because they’ve attacked you and your expression. And they’ve discounted it, and debased it, and frankly just made fun of it which is very much what goes on now in film criticism. There’s a mocking quality, all of it. You feel like a kid in the school yard who’s just been beaten up.

And good. That power that they have over us to some extent is real and will always be there. If you begin to close yourself off to being hurt, I fear that you begin to close yourself off from caring about what you’re doing. So, a good sign, I think, that I was in such terrible pain. But that’s not really to paint it with any kind of a brush. It stank. I’m just now kind of coming out of it.

I can’t even say that the big weekend sort of cured me of anything, because the truth is if you read terrible things about yourself and then lots of people go to see the movie and they send you all of these wonderful cards and things — cards? Sorry, what am I, in 1970? — emails and Facebook posts and so forth, we have a natural tendency to discount the positive and over-emphasize the negative because the negative feels more honest somehow or more real. That is an illusion.

I think that there is just as much dishonesty in negativity as there is in positivity. So, when it happens to you, or if it has happened to you, all I can say is, “Yup, that stinks.” And there is nothing we can do about it except to endure it, and then when it’s done let it go and then get back to work.

And I’ll tell you for me the tough part is I know it will happen again, and again, and again, because I think what I like and what I do, they don’t like. [laughs] And never will. And so this will happen again to me, and again and again. And I just have to find solace in the fact that the audiences do seem to like it. And they are who I make the movies for, for sure.

And so this pain goes along. There’s this phrase that Nietzsche popularized. I’m a big fan of Nietzsche, John. Have you ever read any Nietzsche?

**John:** [laughs] I’ve read some Nietzsche. It’s a little sad that you’re bring this up in the podcast, but yes I have.

**Craig:** Oh, why is it sad? [laughs]

**John:** It’s such a paragon of bleak times for me, yes.

**Craig:** Oh, it is? You mean when you read Nietzsche?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, I’m sorry. Well, we’ll work you through your therapy after. But Nietzsche is my favorite of all philosophers, if you can even call him a philosopher. I think he’s sort of something more than that. But he spoke often of this concept of Amor Fati, which is the Latin phrase that means essentially “love your fate.”

And this is my fate. [laughs] I get it. I am not to be feted at fancy dinners. I will not get awards. I will not get Red Ripe Tomatoes. I will for many, many people always be looked at as a goof and a bad writer. But, I don’t believe I am one. And so I just have to accept it. That’s the way it is and that’s the way it’s going to continue to be. And so it goes. Amor Fati.

And here’s what he wrote. I just want to read one little thing that he wrote because this is sort of how I feel about it all. Nietzsche wrote, “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.” And I love that.

And so I’m going to really try next time to — I’m going to try looking away. That shall be my only negation. So, next movie I have out, please remind me to look away.

**John:** Can I challenge some of your theses here?

**Craig:** Yes, of course.

**John:** Great. So, I’ll start with this last one, which I won’t challenge, but I will actually encourage. And Frankenweenie was the first movie that I did not read reviews. And the reviews were pretty good. So, it was kind of easy to not read the reviews because I’d say they were going to be good reviews, so that’s fantastic, and most people seemed to really like the movie. But I didn’t read them.

And because I didn’t read them I didn’t become obsessed with them. Because my experience has been even in times — exactly your point, that you will read ten glowing reviews and one negative review, and you will focus on the negative review. So, I decided, you know what, I’m not going to read any of them this time. On Frankenweenie I read none of them. And I would encourage that.

Second point. I would remind you of an earlier conversation we had where we discussed film criticism versus film reviewing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so film criticism is the actual study of film and what film is doing and what it means, what the trends in film are. Film reviewing is, “This is what opened at the movies this week.” And film reviewers are the people who had it out for you with long knives this last time.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** My third point is that I feel like some of the reasons why they had their long knives out for you is because you are the guy who wrote Hangover 2. And that if this exact same movie, if exactly the same print was shown on the screen, but that opening card had read Kristen some-last-name, and it was her first script sale, they would not have been anywhere nearly as harsh.

It’s because you were the guy who wrote the Hangover that I felt like, well…

**Craig:** Well, the Hangover and Scary Movie whatever.

**John:** Oh, yeah, and Scary Movie, yes, yes.

**Craig:** That is true, contextually I think there is — and it’s human, you know, but here I am, I’m trying to explain it away. I don’t want to do that. I’m willing to stipulate that they genuinely hated it.

**John:** Yes. And so I would stipulate that there were people who genuinely did not like the movie, but I would also argue that any reasons for singling you out for it in many cases was because you are that guy.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My next point, and I would offer as a counter example: Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck was a joke. Ben Affleck was a punch line. And Ben Affleck is now considered the best director. So, for you to say that this is your fate, and that you will always be perceived as this person, that’s absurd. And the fact that Ben Affleck…

**Craig:** Well, I know what you mean…

**John:** That like Ben Affleck can go from being the punch line and the guy who was dating J-Lo to acknowledged as a really good writer-director, I think, should be some evidence that you can arc.

**Craig:** Yes. You’re right. And really all I’m saying — I’m not saying that I am incapable of writing something that maybe one day critics will like, although that’s not certainly my goal. I guess what I’m saying is I have to be okay with the fact that it might not ever happen. That essentially I have to stop caring about it at all because the truth is it’s immaterial to what I do. It’s immaterial to what we all do, I think.

I don’t know any writer that thinks that writing towards critics is a good idea.

**John:** I would agree. I think we talked about as part of my New Year’s resolution is not counting chickens before they hatch. This is not counting your emotional chickens before they hatch. And it’s trying to divorce yourself from the expectation of like “I will be a better person if a lot of people like this thing I just made.” And that’s not the reality and that doesn’t last.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. So, not counting the emotional chickens, precisely. And, you know, in a very real way I want to thank you. I’m so glad that you liked the movie, because I know that you are a very, very honest person. And that means, frankly, more to me than buckets of bloggers and their pun-based reviews. So, thank you.

And I’ve heard some great things from a lot of people actually. I feel bad in a sense, I feel goofy, and that’s why I needed to do this, frankly. I needed to be a little mawkish. But I also wanted to be honest because, look, in the end, what the hell else are we doing this for but to help each other? Not you and me helping each other, but to help our little community of people. And this is something that happens and it wrecks people, you know? It does. It really messes them up and it makes them sad. And I don’t like that. I don’t want any writer to be out there feeling as bad as I felt last week. It sucks.

And when I talk to writers, suddenly they have their stories and you start to realize, god, this isn’t cool. This isn’t healthy. We shouldn’t get quite so dark about it. But yet by the same token it’s kind of a sign that we care.

The only thing I can say about reviews that I know is wrong is when they say, “It was cynical” or “It was lazy.” No. If it were cynical or lazy, believe me, I would not have shed a single tear about the reviews.

**John:** Yeah. Now, Craig, I enjoyed so many things about it. And I don’t want to sort of spoil it for people who haven’t seen it by focusing on any one, although having directed a movie and having directed several things with Melissa, it’s so fascinating when you recognize an actor’s face so well that you recognize like, “Oh, that’s what Melissa looks like when she cries.” And so when she cries in the movie — not a huge spoiler, there’s some actual genuine tears in there — it was fantastic. And it was just so exciting to see like, “Oh, that’s Melissa. That’s what it looks like when she cries.”

But I also can’t watch a movie without some sort of producer brain kicking in, or someone who has been through the experience of making movies. And so I have one question for you which if you’ll indulge me.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Which is a game I like to play called Guess the Reshoot.

**Craig:** [laughs] Go.

**John:** So, I’m guessing that when they go from St. Louis back to Denver there’s a car shot which was a reshoot which was done significantly after the fact. Because they shot the car, it’s daylight.

**Craig:** You mean that little car ride back to Denver?

**John:** Yes. It’s the one where she’s sleeping with her eyes open.

**Craig:** No. Not a reshoot.

**John:** That’s crazy. Because it looks like he’s in a wig. It just looks like it was shot seven months later.

**Craig:** You know what? I think something kooky happened with the green screen at some point. You know, these days… — Well, first of all, the movie did not have a large budget. I think it was maybe $33 million or something like that. Pretty tight schedule because Melissa has her show, Mike & Molly, and then literally the day after we wrapped on Identity Thief she flew to Boston to shoot The Heat which is coming out this summer, which also looks really, really good.

So, there was a tight schedule. And sometimes you’ll still shoot characters driving in cars in actual cars on little trailers which you pull around, but largely now they’ll kind of cheat and they’ll do a green screen thing. And then put plates in and so it looks like they’re driving but they’re not. And something seemed to go a little kablooey on a few of those. [laughs] I don’t know what else to say.

**John:** Sorry, it was a bad plate shot rather than a reshoot. It’s weird; I noticed first that his hair just looked bizarre in it, so I assumed he was wigged because his hair had changed for some other role. And I’ve been through that so many times, on Charlie’s Angels and on The Nines.

**Craig:** There was, I think, only two or three days of additional photography. And that wasn’t where it was. But it was elsewhere.

**John:** Okay. Then I have to single out, first off, Amanda Peet who is just a national treasure, and she’s so good in your movie playing, you know, what seems like a — it’s basically a reactive role. She’s sympathetic but she’s strong enough to say, “Well, this is not a good idea.” And yet she actually can bend to the fact that the plans change.

The scene with Melissa and Amanda at the kitchen is so good. [laughs] It’s so specific.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I have to give Amanda credit because when she came onboard, the idea of that scene was her suggestion. And I loved it. And so then I went and wrote it and then, you know, shot it. And Melissa, definitely the Bermuda Triangle is Melissa’s invention inside of that scene. But, yeah, big fan. Big fan of Amanda.

And, obviously, look, Melissa McCarthy is spectacular. And I love Jason, too. I think they’re both great. And it was — not to drag it back to mawkishness, but I was so angry about some of the stuff that was said about her. It just…ugh. I got very, very angry.

**John:** I got angry to hear the reports about it. But, again, I deliberately didn’t read it because I knew, “Don’t read things that you know are going to just piss you off.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you’re smart.

**John:** Craig, over the course of this podcast have you come up with a One Cool Thing that you want to talk about?

**Craig:** I’ll bet I can figure one out by the time you finish your One Cool Thing.

**John:** Great. My One Cool Thing is something called Dungeon World, which sounds like it’s a fetish magazine, but it’s actually a role-playing game. It’s a new take on something that’s like Dungeons & Dragons. And it’s incredibly simplified and stripped down.

And so I had tweeted a few weeks ago about TSR which is now part of Wizards of the Coast, they had released all of their old modules as PDFs. And so I’ll have a link to that in the show notes. But this thing, Dungeon World, another reader had sent me the link to it. And it’s very, very cool. It’s a cool idea.

So, it takes all the sort of, the stuff of D&D and boils it down to a really, really simple system that doesn’t have turns or initiative. It’s all just talking. And it’s a very clever idea.

It’s a Kickstarter project that got funded, so it’s in this weird in between state where it’s sort of open source and sort of a physical product you can buy, but I’ll have a link to it. And if you’re at all curious about sort of what a reboot of Dungeons & Dragons would look like. It’s worth your time to check it out.

**Craig:** Well, while you were talking I did actually think of a possible Cool Thing. And, you know, I love Possible Cool Things. You do things that actually are currently cool, and I do things that might be cool if they ever happen. And you know I love science and I love medicine.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** So, the Holy Grail — what do you think, John, if you ran a pharmaceutical company, what to you would be the Holy Grail medicine, to find, to discover, and bring to market?

**John:** A cure for cancer.

**Craig:** Exactly. And you would be right if companies were interested in saving lives, but they’re not. Remember, you are the CEO of a corporation with shareholders and they want money. Now, reevaluate your answer. What would be, you, money bags, what would be the drug you’d want to bring to market?

**John:** A sexual aid?

**Craig:** No. Although sexual aids definitely have sold well. If I were in charge of a pharmaceutical company and I did not care about saving lives, I only cared about my bottom line, I would want to bring an anti-obesity drug to market.

**John:** Oh yeah. I’m an idiot, of course, that’s exactly right.

**Craig:** Boom. Yeah, I mean, you would just make a killing, right?

**John:** And at times they have had anti-obesity drugs, but they’ve always done terrible things to you and they get pulled from the market.

**Craig:** That’s the thing. Here are the problems with anti-obesity drugs to date: A, they don’t work; or, B, they work but they’re addictive because they’re basically speed and they mess up your brain and your metabolism; or, C, they have terrible life impinging side effects like damage to your valves, the cardiac valves. All sorts of problems.

And it makes sense because if you try and pull on strings and gears inside the metabolism to move it one way, it seems like you’re affecting the body in a huge important way. It’s going to, perhaps throw other things out of stasis, and then you have a huge problem.

So, they keep trying and they keep trying. There is some glimmer of hope all of a sudden. You know how Viagra came to be discovered as a sexual aid?

**John:** It was as a side effect on another drug they were testing, right? It was a heart medicine I thought.

**Craig:** Yes, it was a heart medicine. I believe you’re exactly right. Same thing for what’s the Minoxidil…

**John:** Yeah, Propecia.

**Craig:** Yeah, the stuff that grows your hair. That also, I think, was for some sort of heart condition and they went, oh look, people are suddenly hairy.

**John:** I’m correcting myself already. So, Propecia is a different thing than Minoxidil, but Minoxidil, you’re right, was a heart thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was a heart thing. So, they call these off-label applications. You have a drug that does one thing, it’s intended to do one thing, it’s FDA-rated to do one thing, but then, “Oh off-label it also does this other thing. Maybe we should use it for that.”

Of all things, there is a drug that is used to treat canker sores. And what researchers have found is that this drug happens to be extraordinarily good at turning obese mice into normal weight mice. And apparently does so safely. That this drug is one of those drugs that’s been around forever. There’s a ton of research to back up its general safety to people. It doesn’t seem to do anything wrong. It just, at least in fat mice, makes them skinny.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, soon they’ll be starting clinical trials on people. Now, at that point we’ll read about how their hands are falling off, or their hearts are exploding, but still, considering the enormous health implications out there for being extremely overweight or dangerously overweight, the idea that there might be a medicine for something like this, particularly for people who are just biologically inclined to gain weight like myself, it’s encouraging.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Because, let’s face it, the whole eat less and exercise thing for 99 percent of people doesn’t seem to work.

**John:** It’s a very challenging chore.

**Craig:** So One Almost Cool Thing.

**John:** That’s a very cool thing. And if I were to be writing a spec TV pilot, for example, I would think of House of Cards but in the pharmaceutical industry and you have that drug. So, writers, go off and do that.

**Craig:** Come on guys. Go off and just kick us back 1 percent.

**John:** We’d like it.

Craig, thank you so much for a fun podcast. This is our last one that we will be recording in the Los Angeles region. I will be in New York and then Chicago doing Big Fish stuff, so I’ll have a different microphone so I’ll sound different, but it will still be fun.

**Craig:** Well, you know what? You’ll always be you.

**John:** I’ll always be me. I’ll always be me no matter what time zone I’m in.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, standard reminders: If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe to us in iTunes because that’s how we can actually know that you’re listening to it. While you’re there you could leave us a nice review, because we like those, and we actually do read those. And they’re lovely and they’re a great counter to the negative reviews of movies we’ve made.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. It would be nice to read a couple of good reviews for once. [laughs] Sure, why not? I’ve admitted I’m human.

**John:** Those are reviews we actually will read. People have continued to fill out the screenwriting survey, but I think we’re kind of done. So, thank you so much for all the people who contributed to that, we’re going to take that link down because we have like thousands of responses, which is great, and we’ve learned a lot about who our readers are and what we want to do.

And that is our show for the week.

**Craig:** And just remember we are Lawrence Kasdan approved.

**John:** We are. That’s nice.

**Craig:** See you next week.

**John:** Thanks bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

LINKS:

* [When the Spec Script was king](http://m.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2013/03/will-spec-script-screenwriters-rise-again) by Margaret Heidenry in Vanity Fair
* [Examples of early screenplay formats](http://www.screenplayology.com/content-sections/screenplay-style-use/1-1/)
* [Amor Fati](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amor_fati) on Wikipedia
* [Dungeon World RPG](http://www.dungeon-world.com)
* [Canker sore drug helps mice lose weight without diet, exercise](http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/10/health/mice-weight-loss-drug/index.html)
* OUTRO: [Roll a D6](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54VJWHL2K3I)

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 75 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, originally we were supposed to be airing a different episode this week, one that we’d already recorded with our dear friend, Aline Brosh McKenna.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I saw her this last week and I said, “Oh, we’re going to air you episode this week.” And she’s like, “That’s so great and so exciting.” And now I feel like she’s become the Matt Damon to our Jimmy Kimmel Show.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re so sorry. Apologies to Aline Brosh McKenna; we ran out of time.

**John:** So, we do have an amazing episode saved and banked, and that’s partly why I can sleep well at night is knowing that we have this great episode to share in the future. But this week a lot of stuff happened suddenly and we realized like, wow, if we didn’t talk about it this week then it’s going to be two weeks until we talk about it, and it’s going to be far too long to talk about it.

So, we’re doing a new one. We’re recording this actually on Sunday night, after the Super Bowl, but I haven’t even seen the game, so I have no idea what happened.

**Craig:** It was amazing.

**John:** Oh good.

**Craig:** Yeah. Stuff happened in it.

**John:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** With that kind of precise description we could have just recording this on Saturday.

**Craig:** I know. I really want to talk about it, but I can’t spoil the game for you because you have it TiVod so, alas.

**John:** Cool. I’ll watch it and I’ll skip through that part where they throw the ball until I see the commercials and that will be great.

**Craig:** [laughs] I know. Kevin Williamson had a pretty funny tweet. It was something like, “I don’t understand all this stuff that’s surrounding the Beyoncé.” [laughs]

**John:** Oh, Kevin.

**Craig:** Oh, Kevin.

**John:** So, this is a busy week for a lot of reasons. First and by far most importantly, your movie opens this week. Your movie opens this Friday.

**Craig:** That’s right. This Friday, in theaters near you.

**John:** Hooray.

**Craig:** Please, all of you loyal listeners, we don’t charge you for this, and you all are so nice to give us nice reviews, and you send us tweets and emails. But, nothing says love like a little bit of money. So, would you consider this wonderful weekend, beginning on February 8, Friday, seeing Identity Thief, of course if you are 17 or older, or if you’re not, accompanied by a somebody who is 17 or older.

**John:** That would be very nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. But I’m proud of the movie. And I’d love for you all to see it. And we will, probably a couple of weeks after the movie comes out, maybe I’ll wait for three or four weeks just so it sort of has it’s run in theaters, I will put the script up on your site so people can check it out.

**John:** Oh, that’s very nice of you. Very generous. Now, tell us a little bit more about Identity Thief and what we should be looking for as we’re watching this movie. Is there anything that people who are fans of the podcast should really keep an eye out for?

**Craig:** Well, you know, in general I think people should just watch the movie and enjoy it and not think about it in any other way. But, I will say that of the movies that I’ve done, this one is probably the closest to being… — Well, I guess it’s probably the purest expression of what I’ve wanted to do in movies for a long time. And as it turns out, you often just don’t get the chance. Sometimes you are either writing movies that, because you can, and people have asked you to do it, and you’re happy to do it, and you want to do it, but it’s not necessarily your thing.

Sometimes you write screenplays that are your thing and they don’t get made. And so I’ve been doing this for a long time; I have a decent number of credits. This is the first one we’re looking at and I go, “Okay, well, it’s mine.” You know, even Hangover II, it’s not mine. Those characters were there. I came along, and I love that movie, and I loved working on III as well. But this one is mine, in a sense.

And, so, I’m very pleased with it. It’s very funny, I think, but it’s also very sweet. And there’s some nice emotion to it. So, I’ll be happy to talk about it more. I mean, obviously, when we do our next podcast we will have the verdict.

**John:** Yes. Both critically and…

**Craig:** Exactly. [laughs]

**John:** …financially.

**Craig:** Critically I’ve given up. [laughs] I just have to say I’ve given up. I mean, I don’t think this is the kind of movie, I don’t expect that critics will beat this up. My expectation is that they will like it, but I’ve had that expectation before and been, you know, bathed in icy cold water of rejection.

More than anything, I just want the audience to enjoy it, and I want people to go see it. Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy are spectacular in it. And so go out and check it out. And then we can talk sort of about the differences between — and there aren’t many, you know — of what I wanted to do and what happened. I mean, there’s not too many of those. But, you know, we’ll go through it.

**John:** Cool. Also on today’s podcast I wanted to talk about some other bits of news. Big Fish tickets are on sale.

**Craig:** Nice!

**John:** I want to do some follow-up on Courier Prime. The TV show that Josh Friedman and I set up at ABC, Chosen, did not get chosen, and so it’s not going to pilot.

**Craig:** Aw…

**John:** But, I want to talk through what that process was like, because it was actually really interesting to see what TV was like this season versus like five seasons ago was the last time I tried to do a TV show.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** I want to talk about villains, because both in trying to do Chosen and this other project I’m trying to set up, and actually a lot of listener questions this last week were about villains. And I want to sort of dig in on villains. And then get to some One Cool Things.

So, let’s start.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Big Fish. Tickets for the Broadway Musical version of Big Fish in Chicago, which is where we’re doing our out-of-town tryout, they’re on sale right now. And you’re going to hear this on Tuesday, and so they went on sale yesterday, which was Monday.

If you live in Chicago, or if you’re planning to head to Chicago this spring, you should come check out Big Fish. Our first performance is April 2 at the Oriental Theater. We run for five weeks and five weeks only, because another show comes in and takes over for us. So, if you’re a fan who wants to see what Big Fish is like as a musical, with singing, and dancing, and lights, and hopefully some tears, go visit broadwayinchicago.com and get some tickets.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** Next topic. Courier Prime. So, last week on the podcast we talked about Courier Prime, which is this better version of Courier that we made. Alan Dague-Greene designed it and did a fantastic job. And people seem to really like it. And nice people wrote up nice things about us in Boing Boing and the New Yorker blog and Paris Review.

And that’s fantastic. And thank you so much for sharing it and it’s been weirdly the most popular, successful downloaded thing we’ve made.

A couple people have written with questions. I wanted to talk about a few common pitfalls and see if I can talk people through before they become pitfalls.

So, Craig, if you are going to be delivering a PDF to somebody, how do you create that PDF? What is the method you go through?

**Craig:** Well, you’re going to tell me I’m doing it wrong.

**John:** Okay. Usually, probably. That’s how I function.

**Craig:** Usually because I use a Mac, and so I find the simplest thing to do, typically, is to print the document and then select “Print to PDF” or “Save as PDF” and then I save a PDF. Although I think in Final Draft sometimes I run into trouble with that method. So, they have an actual menu option to print to PDF.

**John:** Yeah. You should always do your first choice there. Going to the print dialog box is almost always your best bet on a Macintosh. The reason why is that when you go through print the system really treats it like, “Okay, you were sending it to a printer and we will send all the information that we need to send to a printer to this document that we are making.” And that’s really helpful, especially when you’re using a different font because it sends that font information along with the file.

So, when you go through the print dialog box and print that way and do the “Save to PDF” as part of the print process, you’re much more likely to have a great outcome. And if you send that file to somebody else who doesn’t have your fonts installed, who’s on a different system, who’s on something else, there’s a very good chance it’s going to look and print perfectly.

If you go to Movie Magic Screenwriter’s “Export as a PDF” or “Save as PDF” in Final Draft, a lot of time it will work, but a lot of times it won’t work because it won’t have quite set all the information right. So, I would encourage everyone who is experimenting with Courier Prime, do that. If you’re going to send somebody a PDF that you’ve made with Courier Prime and you want them to actually see Courier Prime, do the print method of that.

Here’s a question for you, again. If you are in Final Draft and you want to change from another Courier to Courier Prime, how do you do that?

**Craig:** I think that there’s a set font command in there. You can change everything globally, I think.

**John:** There is. And it’s a little bit buried. Here is what you typically do in other programs. You might do a select-all, and then just choose a new font. That’s unlikely to have a very good outcome in Final Draft. And so the best way to change your fonts in Final Draft is you go into the “Elements” dialog box, and Elements being like scene headers and character names and dialog.

Go into that dialog box, pick General, or pick of the things, change that to Courier Prime or whichever face you want to use, and then there’s a button that says, “Apply font size to all.” And that will tend to do it globally.

Where people often run into problems and run into page count problems or other weird, spazzy things where suddenly like scene headers are in mixed case or they’re not all uppercase/lower case, is that they just try to globally apply, if they try to do a “Select All” and change the font.

So, especially in Final Draft, do that. I would recommend — you will have a good outcome that way.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Cool. So, Craig, what are you writing right now?

**Craig:** Good question. I’m actually, I’m in that fun place. This is the most fun time for a screenwriter when I’ve finished my writing assignments. So, I finished Identity Thief which you think, well yeah, because it’s coming out on Friday. But, the truth is that movie was supposed to come out in May and then they moved the date up because Melissa McCarthy’s other movie, I think it’s called The Heat, tried to jump in front of us into April.

**John:** How dare they!

**Craig:** So, of course, Universal properly said, “Well, wait, we want to be the first Melissa McCarthy movie. We don’t want to be the leftover.” So, they pulled the date up all the way up to February. And then Fox went, “Well, okay, if you’re going to be in February we might as well go to July.” I think they moved the other direction. [laughs]

But, suddenly, this movie that was supposed to be released in May had to be released in February. So, actually, I didn’t really stop working on that movie in terms of just all the stuff that happens even during production and post-production until, I don’t know, maybe a month ago.

So, I’d been working on that. And, of course, I’ve been working on The Hangover, and I’m working with Todd right now in post, just helping out in the editing room. But, I’m starting to look at what the next thing is. And it’s fun because now the way the agencies work is there’s sort of a red light/green light system. Either the writer is available, or they’re not available. And when they switch to green light, then you sort of feel like a, [laughs] like a newly single woman walking into a bar, and everybody is saying, “Well, would you like to write this? Would you like to write that?” And so I get to look at all these things.

It’s fun. So, I don’t know. I’ll probably figure it out in the next week or so what I’m going to do.

**John:** That’s nice.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m in a sort of similar situation. There was a book that I was going to adapt and the deal took an incredibly long time to get to happen, and ultimately it just didn’t happen, which sometimes is the best situation where, “You know what, this just doesn’t feel quite right.” And so something didn’t feel quite right, and so the deal did not make, and so suddenly I had a free spot on the dance card.

And so there is this possibility that the TV show that Josh Friedman and I did, Chosen, was going to get picked for pilot, and it did not. And so I am kind of free right now, which has actually been kind of remarkable and nice.

So, there are these looming things like, “Oh, I would work on this, but then I have to do this other thing first.” And so actually this last week I got to do some stuff that I really wanted to do that had been pushed back for quite a long time.

I do want to talk a little bit about Chosen going away because that’s one of the weird thing about television is sometimes things just stop and they really are done. And I really kind of like that. One of the things about being a feature writer is that you work on these projects, and you work, and you work, and you draft after draft, and you’re just never quite sure if it’s going to happen.

You get a green light, sure, but there’s a large sort of like yellow light period where it’s just like, maybe, maybe, maybe you get an element attached, maybe something happens. Because TV has a season, and they have to decide like, “We’ve got to start shooting some pilots,” if they don’t decide to shoot your pilot, well, then you’re done. And it’s actually a lovely, nice thing.

**Craig:** There is a lot of built-in certainty. And there is a conclusion in television. I mean, well, if they do pick up your pilot then you’re right back into the yellow light zone because they won’t necessarily say that your pilot is going to get a series order. And then if you do get a series order then you don’t necessarily know if it will be back for another season, or is it going to get a full season, or a half a season.

But, you never get this in movies. Never once has anyone ever said to me, “We read your script. We don’t want to make it now, and actually we’re never going to make it.” [laughs] It just doesn’t work that way.

They’ll keep… — I was talking to a producer just this week about a script I wrote five years ago that he’s trying to get started again. It never ends. But in television, I mean, if we’re going to find a silver lining I guess is that there is a finality. You get to actually take a breath and say, “Well, that chapter is done. Let’s move on.”

**John:** Exactly. So, the TV show that Josh and I did, and I didn’t talk a lot about it on the podcast before, and we really never released the log line and we still are not going to quite release the log line, but it is a family drama with a supernatural element. And the sort of space it occupies is kind of like My So Called Life with Rosemary’s Baby quality to it.

Like, there’s something very, very wrong in the world and yet you’re following this family that’s entering into the situation. And it was a good experience. I wrote it. Josh executive produced it. Josh did an amazing job with the notes and getting everything to make sense and sort of helping me get the best version of the script together.

What was different this time than previous times, for this project I was writing it for 20th. And in television you call the part of Fox that makes TV shows, you call that 20th. And you call Fox the part that actually airs the shows. And so this was 20th, but instead of being for Fox it was 20th for ABC.

And so the studio was 20th and the network was ABC. And so every draft you turn in, I turned in a draft to Josh. Josh reads it quickly, gives me good notes and feedback. Both, sort of these are my notes and these are the notes that I would anticipate getting down the road. And he was always spot-on accurate with the notes that were down the road.

I would do some work there, turn it into the studio. The studio would call with notes. And in feature land when studios call with notes, it’s like, “Oh, give us a week or two and we’ll give you notes.” It would be like later that afternoon. Like you turned it in the morning and, like, whoop, here’s the notes call.

You might do some work on that. Once again, they’ll give you their notes and they also give you what they’re anticipating the network’s notes are going to be. Then you go into the network. They read it over the weekend. They call back with notes.

And, so, there’s a really fast churn through these things, but it’s also kind of exciting. And partly because the form of a one-hour drama, it’s only 60 pages, so you really can do some major changes on things if you want to.

We ended up collapsing two acts down into one act, building a new fifth act. And it was a good, rewarding experience. And it was all very, very fast, up until the point where it just became this waiting game where everyone had turned in all their pilots. And so the studio gets to look through all their pilots. And then it just became this game of listening and hearing people talk about what the network was looking for.

And so you’d hear these words like, “Oh, they’re looking for these four qualities of things,” or like, “they only want one-word titles.” And it was sort of amusing, but it was also sort of pointless to sort of pay that much attention.

So, once I stopped hearing a lot about our show, I was like, “Uh, you know, I don’t think we’re going to happen.” Also, we started to see what other shows they were picking up. You’re like, “I don’t know where we fit into this world. I don’t know how they would put us with these other shows.”

So, it wasn’t a big surprise when we got the final call that it wasn’t happening. But I just like that there was a call. I have so many movies that I’ve written over time where like eventually you just stop getting calls back from the producers and you just know that the project is probably not going to happen. Here there was actually some closure and everybody who I worked with could call and say, “Hey, great job. This didn’t go.” From the studio’s level, at some point they go to cable and they go to other places, but like this part is done. And that was nice.

I did enjoy that part of the process this year.

**Craig:** It’s good that you can. There is an art to dealing with bad news.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And we have it all the time. And it’s very easy to internalize and to take it personally. And that’s simply no help at all.

**John:** One of the things that came up in Chosen, and it’s also come up in this other project that I’ve been working on this last week, is the idea of who the villains are and what the villain’s goal is. And so I thought would be something we could dig into this week. Because many properties are going to have some villain. There’s going to be somebody else who has a different agenda than our hero, and our hero and that villain are going to come to terms with each other over the course of the story.

What happened in the discussion on this other project, they kept coming back to me with questions about the villain, what the villain’s story was, and what the villain’s motivation was. And it became clear that eventually they were really seeing this as a villain-driven story rather than a hero-driven story. So, I want to talk through those dynamics as well.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Craig, who are the villains you think of when you think of movie villains? Who are the big ones?

**Craig:** Well, you know, immediately one’s mind goes to the broadest, most obvious back hat villains, like Darth Vader, and Buffalo Bill, you know, people like that.

**John:** Well, it’s interesting you say Buffalo Bill. It’s like Buffalo Bill versus Hannibal Lecter.

**Craig:** Hannibal Lecter is not a villain.

**John:** And I think that’s an important distinction. I want to get into that as well.

When you think about villains, you need to really talk about what kinds of genres can support a villain that is actually a driving force villain. Because Identity Thief has bad guys, clearly; I’ve seen them in the trailer. But, do they have their own agenda that could be thwarted by our heroes?

**Craig:** No, they don’t. I mean, that’s the part of the movie that I think least reflects what my initial intention was. And to me those villains really are obstacles. To me, the villain in the movie is Melissa McCarthy. But, she’s an interesting villain that you sort of overcome and find your way to love. But she’s the villain.

**John:** Yeah, she’s the villain. She’s the antagonist.

**Craig:** Right. Right. Dramatically she’s the villain.

**John:** Yeah, so I think I want to make that distinction that almost all movies are going to have a protagonist and antagonist structure. So, you’re going to have a protagonist who is generally your hero. It’s the person who changes over the course of the movie. You’re going to have an antagonist who’s the person who is standing in opposition to the protagonist and is causing the change to happen.

So, sometimes, just based on the trailer, you can see, “Well, there’s two people in the movie.” They are going to be those two people generally.

A villain is a sort of different situation. A villain is somebody who wants to do something specific that is generally bad for the world, or bad for other people in the world. So, we could talk about sort of general categories of what villains could be. There’s the villains who want to control things, who want to run things. So, your Voldemorts, your Darth Vaders, your General Zods. I would say Hal from 2001 is sort of that kind of controlling villain where he has this order that he wants to impose on things. And if you don’t obey you’re going to suffer for it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You have your revenge villains. You have Khan. You have. You have De Niro in Cape Fear.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I would argue the witch in The Wizard of Oz is really a revenge villain. If you think about it, this outsider killed her sister and stole her shoes and she wants revenge.

**Craig:** She wants revenge. She also sort of falls into the power-hungry model also.

**John:** Yeah…

**Craig:** Dual villain motivation.

**John:** She does. But I think the power hungriness is something we sort of put on the movie after the fact. If you actually at what she’s trying to do in the course of it, like she doesn’t have this big plan for Oz that we see over the course of this movie.

**Craig:** You’re right. Basically, “You killed my sister and I’m going to get you. And your little dog, too.”

**John:** “And your little dog, too.” And, speaking of animals suffering, we have Glenn Close who is sort of the great villain in Fatal Attraction.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Who wants revenge. I mean, basically, “How dare you jilt me, and this is what I’m going to do to show you.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Then there’s the simpler, you know, this villain wants something and is trying to take something. So, you have Hans Gruber in Die Hard.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** What I love about Hans Gruber is Hans Gruber probably sees himself as he’s Ocean’s 11. He probably sees himself as like, “We’re pulling off this amazing heist. And it would have been an amazing heist if not for John McClane getting in the way.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You have Salieri in Amadeus. And Salieri is like he’s envy — he wants that thing that Mozart has. You have Gollum who wants the ring. Like those are really sort of simple motivations.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The last kind of villain I would classify is sort of the insatiability. And these are the really scary ones who like they’re just going to keep going no matter what. The Terminator. You can’t — unstoppable. Anton Chigurh, from No Country for Old Men, he scares me more than probably anybody else I’ve seen on screen.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, and they embody the same sort of thing that attracts us to zombies as a kind of personality-less villain, and that is inevitability. They basically represent time.

**John:** They represent time and death.

**Craig:** Mortality. Exactly.

**John:** You will not be able to escape them. So, Freddy Krueger is that, too. Michael Myers, he’s the zombie-slasher kind of person.

**Craig:** Freddy Krueger actually, I think, is really revenge.

**John:** Oh yeah, that’s a very good point. His underlying motivation for why he hates — why he wants to kill all the people he kills is a revenge by proxy kind of.

**Craig:** Yeah, because they burned him, because all he did was rape some kids.

**John:** Yeah. Come on. Can’t a guy have some fun?

So, one of the challenges with screenwriting I’ve found is that you’re trying to balance these two conflicting things. You want your hero to be driving the story. And yet you also want to create a great villain and that villain wants to control the story as well. And finding that sweet spot between the two is often really, really hard. And this project that I was out pitching this last week, I pitched it as very much a quest movie, and here’s our group of heroes and here’s what they’re trying to do, and these are the obstacles along the way. And this is the villain. And so all the questions sort of came back to the villain.

And the questions are sort of natural, fair questions to ask, which I hadn’t done a good enough job explaining and describing was: What is the villain’s overall motivation? What is the villain trying to do? And because we had just done the Raiders podcast I kept coming back to like, “Well, in Raiders what is the villain trying to do?”

**Craig:** Well, he’s trying to do the exact same thing that the hero is trying to do, which is kind of interesting. He just has far less moral compunction. And I guess really the point there is that what the hero was trying to do initially wasn’t what he should be doing. And you can see that that chance occurs.

And this is how I tend to think of really good villains. What they want… — It’s a good topic, because I think there’s a very common screenwriting mistake, and it’s understandable. You have a character, your protagonist, and you have perhaps his flaw, and you have the way he’s going to change. And then you think, “Well, we need a villain.”

And you come up with an interesting villain. The problem is the villain’s motivation, and the villain’s villainy has to exist specifically to fit into the space of your main character of your protagonist. They are the villain because they represent the thing that the main character is most afraid of, or is most alike and needs to destroy within himself.

And if you don’t match these things together dramatically, then you just have kind of a kooky villain in a story with your character.

**John:** Yes. One of the challenges to also keep in mind is that you want a villain who fits in the right scale for what the rest of your story is. You want somebody who feels like the things that they’re after are reasonable for what the nature of your story is.

Let’s go back to Raiders. And so you could say Belloq is the villain. And Belloq wants the same thing that Indy wants. He wants the Ark of the Covenant. But Belloq is actually an employee. He’s really working for the Nazis. And I felt like this pitch that I was going out with this last week, people kept asking for like, you know, it was also a quest movie, so you could sort of think of like Raiders in the sense that it’s a quest — you’re after this one thing.

Well, they kept pushing me for more information, like, well basically who are the Nazis and what is their agenda? And you can’t really stick that onto Raiders of the Lost Ark. I mean, I guess with Raiders of the Lost Ark, we sort of know what the Nazis are and you can sort of shorthand them for evil. But you can’t literally stick Hitler there at the opening of the Ark of the Covenant. It just wouldn’t make sense. It’s the wrong kind of thing.

**Craig:** It would be bizarre. Absolutely. You need to, and in that movie, they very smartly said, “Okay, we’re going to have a character who is obsessed objects and needs to become more interested in humanity, so let’s make our villain just like him, except that guy won’t change at all.” And so we watch our hero begin to diverge from the villain, and that’s exciting. And that’s smart.

And I have to say that there’s a trend toward this. You can find villains like this throughout film history, however, even in broader genres, like for instance superhero films, or even James Bond movies, there was a time when you could just put a kooky villain in because they were interesting. There is nothing thematically relevant about Jaws for instance from The Spy Who Loved Me.

There is nothing particularly relevant even about Blofeld. You know, they’re just mustache-twirling villains. Sometimes people will get this note, “This villain is too much of a mustache-twirler,” meaning he’s just evil because he’s evil. “Ha, ha, ha.”

And if you look at Batman, the Batman villains were very typically just kooky. They were nuts. The Riddler is a villain because he’s insane.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He’s so insane that he spends all of his time crafting bizarro riddles just because he’s criminally insane.

But, what’s happened is, for instance, take Skyfall. And whatever people’s beefs are with Skyfall, I think honestly one of the reasons the movie has done better than any Bond movie before it, in terms of reaching an audience, is because the villain was matched thematically to the hero. The hero is aging and he is concerned that he is no longer capable to do his job.

And along comes a villain who is aging, who used to do his job and was thrown away. And so all of the internal conflict and sense of divided loyalty that our hero has is brought to bear by the villain. And so suddenly things begin to suggest themselves. Maybe the opening sequence should be one in which the hero’s life is tossed aside by the person he trusts. And then he meets a villain whose life was tossed aside by the same person.

And they just take different paths to resolution. Look at, the Nolan movies I think very notably have taken Batman villain out of the realm of broad and silly and thematically matched them specifically to Batman. The first one, you have Scarecrow, who is right on target. Batman is a hero born out of fear, and your villain is a master of fear.

**John:** Yeah. Fear personified.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, it’s a trend. It’s a trend to do it more and more. And I don’t think it’s going away any time soon. And, frankly, I think it makes for better stories.

**John:** What I would point out is the challenge is you can go too far. And so I look at the second Batman movie, in which we have the Joker who is phenomenal, and we love it, and we love every moment of it. In the third Batman movie I became frustrated by sort of villain soup. And I didn’t feel like there was great opportunity for a Batman story because we’re just basically following the villains through a lot of our time on screen.

It’s also dangerous because it raises the expectation, like, “Well, the villain has to be this big, giant, magnetic character.” And any time your villain is driving your story, then your hero is going to have a harder time driving the story.

What it comes down to is, like, movies can only start once. A movie can start because the hero does something that starts the engine of the film. Or, it can start because the villain does something that starts the engine of the movie.

In many movies with a villain the villain is really starting things. And so even Jaws, like you know, the shark attacks. The shark is the problem. The shark happens first. It’s not that you can envision a scenario in which a scientist found the shark and tracked it down and became the whole start of things. But, no, the shark happens first.

Where I ran into this, both with the TV show and with this other project we’re pitching, is this fascination of who the villain is and what the villain’s motivation is, it’s good to ask those questions, but in trying to dramatize those questions on screen you’re probably going to be taking time away from your hero. And your hero should be the most interesting person on screen.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, I just don’t know enough about TV to… — I mean, I watch TV, but I don’t watch it the way that I watch movies. I don’t think about it the way I think about movies.

But certainly if you have a very oppositional kind of show, where it really is about one person versus another, they both ultimately will occupy a lot of screen time, I suppose. But, you know, that’s why I think it’s pretty smart what they do in Dexter, for instance. Every season there is one new arch villain who thematically tweaks at some part of Dexter.

But when that season is over, they’re gone because they’re dead.

**John:** Yeah. Did you watch Lost? You probably watched Lost.

**Craig:** I didn’t. My wife watched it and I should say on behalf of our friend, Damon Lindelof, my wife loved the final episode and cried copiously. I don’t know anything about it. [laughs] I know that there was an island, and a smoke monster, and in the end they were in a church.

**John:** Yeah, okay. The point I was going to make about Lost, which I could also make about Alias or many other shows that have elaborate villain mythologies, is that while it become incredibly rewarding that you did know what the villains were and why the villains were doing the things they were doing, if you had known that information from the start of the project — if you’d known what the villains whole deal was at the very start — it wouldn’t have been nearly so interesting.

Or, you would have spent so much time at the start explaining what the villain’s motivation was that you wouldn’t have been able to kick start the hero’s story. And so I guess I’m just making a pitch for there can be a good cause for understanding what the whole scope of the villain is, but you have to realize in the two hours or the one hour or the amount of time that you have allotted, how are you going to get the best version of the hero’s story to happen and service the villain that needs to be serviced.

**Craig:** Yeah. I tend to think about these things in a somewhat odd dichotomy. So, forgive me if this sounds bizarre, but villains — hero/villain relationships are either religious or atheistic in nature. Meaning this: The case where there is a villain who is doing an evil thing, and there is a hero who is trying to stop them is basically religious in nature. It’s a morality play. And good tends to win, obviously, in those morality plays. And, in fact, the satisfaction of the morality play is that good does triumph against seemingly impossible odds.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And we want to believe that about the world that we live in, that even though oftentimes it is the evil who are strong and the good who are weak, good still triumphs. So, there’s a religious nature to that struggle.

But, there are also atheistic type of stories. Or, actually they’re areligious types of stories, because they’re not making a point about the existence of god, but rather they are saying the drama that exists between the hero and the villain is one of absurd dread, the kind of existential nausea.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** For instance, the classic PBS series, The Prisoner, where the nature of evil was Kafkaesque. It was uncaring. It was inexplicable. It would simply emerge out of the ocean like a bubble or oppress you by simply being a disembodied voice. It was essentially that kind of unquantifiable dread of mortality and death. And so that will color — if you’re trying to tell a story that is steeped in existential dread, don’t over-explain your villains, because the point is there is no explanation. It’s absurd, as absurd as existence is, which is scary in and of itself.

**John:** Yeah. I think the root of all slasher films which, you know, Terminator is sort of an extension, like a smarter extension of a slasher film, but it’s that wave is coming for you and you will not be able to get away from it. Zombie movies work in the same situation, too. It’s not one zombie that you’re afraid of. It’s the fact that all the zombies are always going to be out there and the world is always a very, very, dangerous place.

**Craig:** Yeah. Zombies aren’t even evil. They’re just — they’re like the shark basically.

**John:** Yeah. They’re like the shark.

**Craig:** They just eat. And you can’t stop them. That’s why, by the way, so many zombie movies end on a downer note. They don’t make it. Heroes just don’t make it. You can’t beat zombies.

**John:** So, what I would say though is if you look at, regardless of which kind/class of villain you’re facing, you’re going to have to make to make some decisions about perspective and point of view. And to what degree are we sticking with the hero’s point of view and that we’re learning about the villain through the hero? And to what degree do we as the audience get to see things the hero doesn’t know from the villain’s point of view, and from the villain’s perspective?

And making those decisions is a very early part of the process. How much are we going to stay in point of view of our hero and to what degree are we going to see other stuff?

In Die Hard we stay with John McClane through a lot of it, but eventually we do get to see stuff from Alan Rickman’s point of view, and we see like what he’s really trying to do. With slasher movies, we tend to stay with our hero’s point of view for most of the time because it’s just actually much more frightening to not know where the bad guy is and what the bad guy is trying to do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If you have a villain who is smart, if you have a Joker, at some point you will want to see them explain themselves and have that moment at which they can talk about what it is they’re trying to do. And ideally you’d love for them to be able to communicate that mission and that goal to the protagonist. That’s often very challenging to do.

In Silence of the Lambs, to the degree that Hannibal Lecter is a villain. Hannibal Lecter is a person you fear in the movie. He’s in jail, so he can talk to her through the bars and we know that she’s safe and it’s reasonable for her to be in that situation and not be killed.

When we talked about Raiders, Belloq and Indy have that conversation at the bar. Indy’s able to get out of it, but Belloq is able to explain himself. If you can find those moments to allow those two sides to confront each other without killing each other before the end of the story, you’re often better off.

**Craig:** Yeah. You need some sense of rationality. It is discomfiting to watch a villain behave randomly. Random behavior is inherently undramatic. Even if your villain’s motivation is, in fact, just mindless chaos, they need to express that that is their motivation.

The Joker in the second Batman movie, they say, “Some men just want to watch the world burn,” and the Joker can express that. But, okay, that’s a choice, you made it. Your job now is to create chaos because you love chaos. But you’ve articulated a goal.

And if we don’t have that, then we’re just watching somebody blow stuff up willy nilly and we start wondering why. And you never want anyone to stop their engagement with the narrative.

One of the great things about all of those wonderful scenes between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter is that while they are doing this fascinating dance with each other, and falling in love in a matter of speaking, what Hannibal Lecter is promising her, and in fact the entire context of those meetings, the plot context of those meetings, is he is explaining to her why the villain of the movie is doing what he’s doing.

He is grounding that villain in some kind of rational context.

**John:** Yeah, which is spooky.

What I would recommend all writers do is if you have a story that has a villain, especially like a bigger villain, like someone who is doing some pretty serious stuff, take a second before you begin and write the whole story from the villain’s point of view. Because, remember, every villain really does see himself as the hero of the story. So, if you’re making Michael Clayton, Tilda Swinton sees herself as a savior trying to protect this company, and protect herself. But she sees herself as the good person here. And if she’s being forced into doing murder or whatever to protect herself, she will.

Even, god, the Queen Mother in Aliens, she is protecting her brood. From her perspective, these outsiders came in and started killing everything. She’s going to protect. And when you see things from their perspective you can often find some really great moments.

Figure out where the story is from their point of view. But, remember, you’re probably not going to tell it from their point of view. You’re going to tell it from our hero’s point of view, and make sure that you’re going to find those moments in which our hero is going to keep making things worse for the villain, and therefore the villain is going to be able to keep making things worse for the hero. And there is going to be a natural confrontation, but that the final confrontation won’t come until the climax that you want to have happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is a nice way of approaching certain villain stories where the movie is in many ways about figuring out the rational context for the villain. You’re trying to unearth a mystery, and that in fact if you figure out why the villain is doing what they’re doing you can stop them.

Mama, which is out in theaters right now, I don’t know if you saw it. It’s a good horror movie. It’s very thoughtful and is very thematic. It’s about something. I thought they did a good job. And that movie is sort of a good case-in-point of if you can figure out why Mama is so violent and evil, then you might have a shot at getting rid of Mama. So, you build the mystery in. And the mystery is, why is this bad person doing these bad things?

Se7en sort of worked like that, you know, with a kind of nice nihilistic ending.

**John:** Great. Well, fun to talk about villains. And our villain talk fits very well into what I want to bring up for my One Cool Thing, which is a book, a bestseller, so it feels really weird for me to be hyping a bestseller because people are buying this book anyway. But it’s Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.

And I read it just because I wanted to read a fun book that I didn’t have to think about adapting, because so much of what I read for fiction is something that has been sent to me, like, “Oh, would you consider working on this?” And this one was just a fun book that I just bought on the Kindle. I was like, oh, I’ll read it on the plane. And I loved it.

And, of course, I couldn’t turn off that adaptation part of my brain. Because I loved it so much and was thinking, oh, this is a clearly a movie. And I later found out that Reese Witherspoon had the rights and now David Fincher is probably going to direct it.

But, the reason why I’m recommending it on this podcast for people who are interesting in screenwriting is it’s a great book, but it’s also a really fascinating exercise in figuring out how you would adapt this book. Because, the book is structured as alternating chapters about a woman’s disappearance. So, you have Amy who is the wife. And her chapters go forward in time from when they first met, when she first met her husband, Nick.

And so it’s how they fell in love and how they moved to a small town and everything that happened, up to the point of the day that she disappeared. The husband’s chapters start at the day that she disappeared and move forward. And so you’re alternating between the two of these chapters.

And so, when you first start reading the book you’re like, oh, well this will work really nicely. I can see this working as a movie because you would probably start the mystery, of her disappearance, and go forward in time, and you could intercut it with this backstory stuff. And you find out more stuff about the real nature of their relationship as you’re intercutting it.

But then Flynn, to her credit, does something really, really difficult and smart at sort of the midpoint of the book and you realize that, wow, this thing that you thought you could do so straight-forwardly is just not possible. So, I highly recommend it. It’s really nicely done. It’s a good, fun, quick read. So, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.

**Craig:** Yeah. My wife read it and loved it, too. I guess I will put it on my iPad Mini.

**John:** Do it.

**Craig:** Sounds like a good one.

**John:** Great. And, Craig, you have a One Cool Thing, too, which is sports-related.

**Craig:** It is. It is Super Bowl Sunday when we record this. And I don’t know how much you follow football, or football-related news stories, but for the past, really the past few years, but accelerating there has been a rash of serious medical concerns and studies surrounding football.

And it basically goes like this: Large men smashing into each other at high speed is not good for their brains. They used to think that concussions were sort of the worst of it, and if you got a concussion in the old days they would have you sit down for two or three minutes, make sure you didn’t throw up, and then send you back into the game.

Eventually they figured out that was a really bad idea, that concussion and concussion related illness is very serious and the brain is even more susceptible to permanent injury if you get hit again while you’re in a state of concussion.

So, they treated that more seriously. But what they failed to consider was that head injuries that don’t result in concussion are still actually quite bad for you. And even worse, they are cumulative. One study suggested that even in a high school football game the average kid on the line who’s either a defensive linesman or offensive linesman smashing into each other, that it’s like being in four, or five, or six car crashes in an hour. It’s just not good for you.

And, here’s the really scary part is that as they’ve been doing studies, bad things have been happening. Specifically, former NFL stars have been killing themselves. And suicide and severe clinical depression is one of the side effects of what they call cerebral encephalopathy, which is just basically brain damage.

And very popular, I mean, Junior Seau — who was an amazing player, and also, you know, for a league that’s full of surly types, just a smiley happy guy, sort of famous for being smiley and happy — killed himself. And he’s not the only one. And these guys that are killing themselves are, now there’s this weird thing where they’re shooting themselves in the chest or stabbing themselves in the chest because they want somebody to study their brain. That’s how involved they are in their own illness.

There are also a lot of cases of just elevated, what you’d call other neuropathies, Parkinson’s and ALS, and it’s a bad deal. In fact, we have a friend, I’ll tell you once the podcast is over, whose father-in-law played in the NFL. And he had fairly early onset Alzheimer’s. So, everybody is looking at football and they’re wondering what are we going to do. And this is why I don’t let my son play football. But he does play baseball.

And in baseball no one is running into each other, but one thing that’s been coming up is that pitchers are getting injured by hit balls. So, basically they make a pitch, the hitter sends a line drive right back to the mound, it strikes the pitcher in the head. There have a been a couple of big cases recently in the MLB where pitchers have been severely injured, nearly blinded, shattered jaws.

Bu there’s at least one case I know of where a little league player got killed. And part of the problem is that really up until the major leagues, or their farm systems, even all the way through college, players can use aluminum bats. And they love aluminum bats because not only are they cheaper, and they don’t break, they send the ball back much, much quicker.

There’s just more energy. They impart more kinetic energy to the ball. And so the speed of the ball off the bat can be over 100 miles an hour. It’s scary. There is a product now that they’re starting to look into. So, this is sort of a One Cool Thing for hopefully this season, that’s basically a pitcher’s helmet.

And pitchers don’t want to wear helmets because they’re goofy and it’s hard to pitch, frankly, with this big, chunky piece of metal, or rather plastic, on your head. But it almost looks like the top of a bike helmet, you know, that sort of foamy part.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it can go underneath your cap and basically protect you from the worst of it, should you get hit in the head. And I know Easton, which is a very big sports supply company — sports equipment company, I should say — is developing one of these. I think Wilson is developing one of these. And so I kind of keep track of it and I’m hoping that they do bring it to market and that it is available for my son to wear, because I do get worried about that.

So, for those of you out there whose children play football, please be careful and monitor them carefully. And for those of you out there whose kids are pitching, look into this because I think it’s, frankly, I think Major League is going to have to adopt something. It’s just getting too dangerous out there. Protect your brains, people. It’s all you got.

**John:** Absolutely. What is the center of a person? It’s their brain. And so any trauma that is hitting you there is not going to be a — you’re going to be in trouble. You look at the boxers. You look at the boxers who got hit a thousand times, and there’s a reason why they’re not able to put a sentence together.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. Boxing is essentially the worst thing you could do for your brain, but it is odd to me that in Major League Baseball for the last, I think, 30 years, you know, if you walk into the batter’s box you must wear a helmet so that if you got hit by a 90-mile-an-hour baseball you wouldn’t get brain injured. But, the pitchers…

**John:** The ball is flying in the other direction, they’re not worrying about that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, they’re sending the ball back just as fast at their heads, and they’re not wearing anything but a wool cap. Scary.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** There. Sleep on that.

**John:** There we go. Very good.

So, we’ve talked villains, and so the inevitability of death. This is a way to possibly avoid the inevitability of death.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We’ve talked about affairs and murderous husbands, possibly in Gone Girl. Big Fish.

**Craig:** Big Fish. Tickets on sale.

**John:** Identity Thiefy.

**Craig:** Tickets on sale.

**John:** People can go see that. And Courier Prime, which is available for downloads. It’s at quoteunquoteapps.com, if you want the Courier font.

Links to everything we talked about on the podcast today are going to be at johnaugust.com/podcast. And, Craig, thank you for another fun episode.

**Craig:** This was a good one. And it was our 75th.

**John:** 75th. So, what is that, Diamond Jubilee?

**Craig:** You know, we are now that old married couple that’s the last one on the dance floor at a wedding when the DJ does that, “All right, everybody who’s been married for 50 years.” You know, we’ve got to do something for 100.

**John:** Oh we will. It’s going to be a blow out for 100.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, I should be back from New York by then, and we’ll do something great for that.

**Craig:** Maybe a big live one here in town.

**John:** I think a big live one here in town. People seem to like that idea. So, if you are a listener with a suggestion for something we should do for the 100th episode, please let us know. And thank you all for listening.

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

**John:** Thanks.

LINKS:

* [Identity Thief](http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/universal/identitythief/) trailer on Apple
* [Big Fish tickets](http://www.bigfishthemusical.com/#tktsinfo) on sale in Chicago
* [Every Villain is a Hero](http://johnaugust.com/2009/every-villain-is-a-hero)
* [Writing Better Bad Guys](http://johnaugust.com/2012/writing-better-bad-guys)
* [Screenwriting and the Problem of Evil](http://johnaugust.com/2010/screenwriting-and-the-problem-of-evil)
* [Gone Girl](http://www.amazon.com/dp/030758836X/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Gillian Flynn
* [Researchers Discover 28 New Cases of Brain Damage in Deceased Football Players](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sports/concussion-watch/researchers-discover-28-new-cases-of-brain-damage-in-deceased-football-players/)
* [Easton-Bell Sports unveils pitcher’s helmet](http://www.cbssports.com/mcc/blogs/entry/22297882/27795470)
* OUTRO: [Last Dance](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oAkDLsvI3g) by Ariana Grande

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/unless-they-pay-you-the-answer-is-no).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Je m’appelle Craig Mazin.

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

**Craig:** I’m good. How are you doing, man?

**John:** We should explain why you’re speaking French.

**Craig:** Ouais. [laughs] In French, by the way, if you’re cool you say, “Ouais,” which is like our “yes, yeah, yup, uh-huh.”

I was just en vacances en Quebec and got to polish off my French which I hadn’t used in a long time. Amazing how much you can remember once you’re there in the middle of it, you know.

But, I’ll talk more about that when we get to our One Cool Thing. I guess it’s kind of a spoiler.

**John:** Well, that sort of a spoiler there.

**Craig:** That’s okay. It’s not that much of big hoo-ha. And where were you over la vacances?

**John:** Upon la vacances, I went skiing in Colorado, which was really quite fun. And so my daughter, this is her second year going skiing. And she’s actually now good enough that she can go down the mountain with us and have a good time. And we had a very good time skiing. Very cold to start. First time we encountered the frost inside the windshield, which is not good.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But, it was all really good. And we had the rest of Christmas with my mother-in-law in Ohio, and that was all nice. We had a big giant snow, but it was one of those snows where you’re like, “Oh, great, let’s go sledding,” and you go out and you can move two inches in the sled. But it ended up being great snowman snow. And so we could build a snowman in like five minutes.

**Craig:** We kind of had weird parallel vacations, because I was also with my mother-in-law for a bit of time in Florida. And my poor wife had to figure out how to pack for Florida and Quebec. [laughs] It was pretty fascinating.

**John:** So, Craig, we had a podcast last week — that was just a clip show. It was a New Year’s Day clip show. This is our first real one of the New Year, so I thought we’d start off by talking about some resolutions and things we plan to do differently this year, or want to explore this year.

Then we’re going to talk about the WGA awards, and we’re going to answer some listener questions. Sound good?

**Craig:** That sounds fantastic. Oh my god! Yes! [laughs]

**John:** Now, previously on the podcast I talked about resolutions, and I don’t really have resolutions like I’m going to do that this year, or I’m not going to do something this year. Rather I declared areas of interest. So, previously you may recall I was interested in Austrian white wines, or archery. And this year I didn’t have any sort of affectation like that. I couldn’t think of one as December drew to a close.

But, as I was doing an interview yesterday for Big Fish — we’re doing long lead press for Big Fish for the Chicago run — the reporter was talking about how long it took to get up to this point. And I realized that I first read the book to Big Fish in 2003. I’m sorry, in 1998 is when I read the book for Big Fish, the manuscript.

2003, five years later, I finally got the movie made. And now it’s ten years after that that we’re finally doing the musical version. And I realized that, wow, I’m going to actually probably be making some version of Big Fish for the rest of my life. It’s one of those things that I will never actually finish it, because god-willing everything goes well in Chicago, and we go to New York, and we do a run there — the musical is never really finished.

It’s like a TV show, you’re done at a certain point. And a movie, you’re done at a certain point. A musical — I probably will never actually be done with it because there will always be other stagings of it. And even if it’s not all that successful, someone will want to do it somewhere. And there will always be revisions. There will always be a new cast. There will always be a new something.

So, I think my resolution is to sort of come to terms with the time of it all, and sort of the unfinishability of it, because it’s a strange thing for me that for 15 years I’ve been dealing with this one project, this little book that Daniel Wallace wrote.

**Craig:** Well, and if it’s really successful then perhaps they’ll make a movie of the musical, and then you’ll have to write the movie.

**John:** It was interesting. When we were dealing with Sony it was one of the things that came up is we had to address that ahead of time, sort of like who would have the rights to make the movie, and that gets complicated because Sony owns the rights to my screenplay, so we had to buy the rights back for my screenplay. But it’s all complicated.

And I don’t honestly even know who has the right to make the movie if it becomes that kind of thing, if it becomes the next Les Mis.

**Craig:** That probably turns on your contract with them.

**John:** Yeah. Probably.

**Craig:** But, you know, why count that chicken?

**John:** Maybe that’s a better thing I should resolve for this year is to not count chickens.

**Craig:** Don’t count them. Just let them breed.

**John:** How about you? Any resolutions for the New Year?

**Craig:** You know, I’ve never been a resolution guy. Resolutions for me are a bit like gifts. When I feel like I should have something — and it doesn’t happen often, I’m not a big consumer of goods — but when I want something I just get it. And when I feel resolved to do something, I do it.

I’ve never looked at the turning of the calendar as an excuse or as an inspiration to resolve anything. But, I think my resolutions — really what happens is then you’re left with the things you never, ever do. And your eternal resolutions. Maybe my resolution should be to just let those go.

**John:** That’s fair enough. Very Zen.

**Craig:** I think at this point, we are who we are.

**John:** Yeah, we are who we are.

So, one of the things that happened during our absence is the WGA Awards were announced, or the WGA nominations were announced. And so I want to talk through this because many of our friends are nominated for things, which is fantastic.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** For Original Screenplay, the nominees: Flight, written by a guy named John Gatins.

**Craig:** Woo!

**John:** Woo-hoo! Who we both know very well. We actually threw a little party for John to celebrate an earlier nomination. And so we’re happy that he got this.

**Craig:** Well, you threw that party very generously.

**John:** Yes. And so I’m including you in it because you were there. But you were really just a guest rather than a host. Yeah.

**Craig:** You know what was great about that party was I met a guy there…the end. [laughs] No, I met a guy there who is very good friends with John’s awesome wife, Ling, and you know I’m a big musical nerd. And he played Marius on the stage on Broadway. So, we got to talk about musicals quite a bit. That was great.

And I caught up with some people I hadn’t seen in a long time, but all of it in celebration of our excellent friend — and well deserving friend — John Gatins. One of those guys who does it right. You know, I feel, it’s funny… — I was talking to Roger Kumble and to you, I think, about this, how there are so few of us left from when we started in the mid ’90s.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And those of us who are, I feel like on some level we’ve done something right. And there’s a badge of honor for just persisting. And John has persisted over the years through thick and thin, up and down, and here he is with an amazing award for a movie that has persisted. Because the screenplay was written many years ago and he…

**John:** Yeah. I read it at least five years ago. And you probably read the draft that was sitting in the drawer, too. It’s been around for quite a long time. And I always say, “At some point the right combination of all of this is going to come together; you’ll be able to make that screenplay into a movie,” and it did. Hooray!

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly.

**John:** Another person who I’m very, very excited to see on this list is Rian Johnson for Looper. I loved Looper. And I’m so glad that the WGA voters singled that out as being an awesome screenplay, because it was great.

**Craig:** Very well deserved. Another very good friend of mine. One of my favorite Swedes, and that really means something because my wife is Swedish, and one of my best friends, Alec Berg, is Swedish, so there’s a lot of competition there. He is one of my favorite Swedes.

Yes, excellent movie. I was very lucky to see an extremely early cut of the film. He was showing it to about four or five people just to get feedback early on. And I could tell that he had done something special there. A remarkable accomplishment considering the budget. And, also, Rian really is a true author of his films. He writes and directs them. They are always original. They are always original to him. It feels like they are very purely an extension of his intension and he’s just now, I think — I think now starting to be accepted by the major studio machine, whereas before he was a little more indie.

Great guy. Wonderful person. And very original piece that he did. And so it’s terrific to see him… — Well, it’s a tough one because I’m rooting for them both. The easiest thing I guess for me to do in a situation like that is just root against all the people they’re against.

**John:** [laughs] The people they’re against are also very talented people. Paul Thomas Anderson for The Master.

**Craig:** Boo. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Moonrise Kingdom by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola.

**Craig:** Eh…

**John:** And Zero Dark Thirty by Mark Boal.

**Craig:** Ah! Three idiots! No, they’re amazing writers. Incredible filmmakers, all three of them. And it’s tough. All I can say is I’m pulling for John and I’m pulling for Rian, but it doesn’t matter. I think at this point it’s… — You know, maybe it’s because I have a unique perspective. I’ll never be nominated for anything. No one nominates the movies I write, ever. They haven’t nominated the specific ones I’ve written, and they really haven’t nominated the good versions of the specific ones I’ve written.

And so I never think about awards. I don’t have to worry about it. And I just feel like writing a good movie that is honest to what you meant, and having that audience find an audience is the only reward that matters. And John and Rian both did that, in a big way, and obviously the other three did as well, and have done in the past. They’re all great.

So, everyone’s a winner.

**John:** Everyone’s a winner! Just to complete the list, for Adapted Screenplay we have: Argo by Chris Terrio; Life of Pi by David Magee; Lincoln by Tony Kushner; Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, based on his book; and Silver Linings Playbook by David O. Russell.

And of those, the only comedy-comedy is Silver Linings Playbook, and that’s a dramatic comedy, but really more of a comedy when you actually watch it.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s definitely a comedy. And I have to pull for that one, of course, because my buddy — I should say my wrestling buddy Bradley Cooper is in it. Because weirdly, and I don’t why, [laughs], but I would say two or three times a week Bradley will just come up to me and start wrestling with me. And I’ve got to tell you: I would lose dramatically. One day he hurt me, because he’s really big, he’s really strong. And just a tough guy — a man’s man — who likes wrestling with…

**John:** Craig. I’m just going to let you talk and talk yourself deeper into this hole.

**Craig:** It’s fun. I like it. I’m just losing myself in his eyes, again, in my memory. I pull for Bradley. I think he did an amazing job, by the way.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Great performance. But yeah, I mean, look, you could say that’s a comedy, it’s kind of a comedy. But it’s the sort of comedy that gets nominated for awards because it’s David O. Russell and it’s quirky and interesting. It’s so rare that a broad, mainstream — not even broad, but just a mainstream comedy gets nominated.

Did I mention that I like to wrestle with Bradley Cooper?

**John:** Maybe once or twice.

One thing we should point out because people always ask the question like, “Oh, there are some strange omissions. There are things that you would think would be on here that aren’t on there.” The WGA Awards are only for things that are covered by the WGA contracts or by affiliated guild contracts. There are weird… — Sometimes other things can make it onto that list but not other things.

So, animated movies aren’t covered by the WGA. So, animated movies will not generally show up in these awards. Some British movies won’t show up in these awards. So, it tends to be American movies that you would see on this list.

**Craig:** Yeah. And also notably you won’t see Quentin Tarantino’s name because he withdrew as a member from the Guild, reportedly, by him.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] So, I think it’s accurate to say that he withdrew his membership from the WGA. I’m not exactly sure why. I suspect it had to do with credits or something. And these things happen.

I mean, some people get very angry about this. They say, “What is the point or value of awards if they don’t honor the best, but rather the best of people that fit the political specificities of the union that’s giving out the award?” And all I can say is, “Who cares?” I mean, it’s the Writers Guild. That’s what the Writers Guild Awards are for, it’s for Writers Guild movies, which happens to be most of them.

You don’t like it? Who cares? Nobody cares what… — I hate to say this. Because, you know, we just talked about Rian and we just talked about John, and I love them, and I want them to win an award, but nobody cares about the Writers Guild Awards anyway.

I mean, to be fair and accurate, the only awards people care about are the Oscars, of course; the Golden Globes, to a lesser extent, but only really as a predictor of the Oscars; the BAFTAs, from overseas, or perhaps as a consolation if you did not win an Oscar. But, really when you boil it down, the only award anyone really cares about is the Oscar. So, who cares?

People need to relax about this award stuff.

**John:** Yeah. It’s interesting that you go into umbrage and to pull it out saying that everyone should relax.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right! I’m upset and exerting myself in the expectation that everyone should relax.

**John:** You’re basically shouting at people to calm down.

**Craig:** I’m shouting! I’m saying, “You have to calm down! Just do it!” Oh, god, you know what’s so great? It’s 2013. Here’s my resolution: Get crazier on the podcast.

**John:** Oh, yeah. That’s what we need.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s what you need.

**John:** I want to see the little gauges spiking there. We’re going into the red and Stuart has to knob you down so that you’re not so…

**Craig:** No…I never clip. I will say this: In a couple of years when they do an in-depth profile of this podcast and the two of us, they’re going to refer to you as “long-suffering co-host John August.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] It very well might happen. Although, I don’t think it’s going to be like a retrospective as much as it’s going to be evidence that’s going to be submitted in some trial.

**Craig:** Yeah. Fair enough. Whatever!

Hey, everybody needs to relax!

**John:** First question comes from Kevin in Atwater Village.

**Craig:** Relax, Kevin!

**John:** “Hi guys. I’ve been hearing recently about how movies are getting more expensive and harder to make. I was recently reading an interview where the director said, ‘They cost so much to make, you have to have a monster hit to pay it off. They’re pricing themselves out of production. Three pictures a year make enough to pay off. They’re making it so it’s impossible to make a film.’

“This was Paddy Chayefsky from an interview in 1981. So, my question is: have complaints about the cost and difficulty of movies always been around, or are we living in a time where making films has never been harder or more expensive? What’s your opinion?

“– Kevin.”

**Craig:** Ah, what do you think?

**John:** I like that he snuck in the Paddy Chayefsky quote, because it does seem to be one of those evergreen things. You’re always going to complain about how it’s never been harder. And you’re always going to say it used to be easier back then. There’s always the golden age that existed sometime in your youth when everything was wonderful and perfect. It tends to be like the 1970s for movies, or whatever. But now everything is terrible, and everything is too expensive, and everything is rough.

Although, if you were actually to talk to people in the time they would have said it was the worst time ever because they’re having a hard time making their individual movies.

I do think there are some things that are more difficult now than have probably been there before. Part of it we talked about on the podcast — it’s not just the actual negative cost of making a movie, although some movies are really expensive. It’s that it’s become so expensive to market these big giant tent pole movies. Even if your movie only costs $20 million, or $30 million, if you’re spending $50 million to market it, you’ve spent $80 million on your movie. And that’s a hard nut to earn back.

And it does feel like marketing has become more expensive every year, and that’s a genuine concern.

**Craig:** No question. That’s essentially where I’m at on this, too. Marketing is worse. I mean, marketing is very good, but the expense of marketing has gone up, I suspect, far beyond the relative costs of production. And because marketing is so expensive, it in a weird way starts to drive up production costs. Because if you know you’re going to be spending $80 million to market a movie, you want to make sure you can deliver the goods.

So, in a weird way the whole thing becomes upside down. You look at a movie like Identity Thief. I think it cost $32 million, or something like that, relatively inexpensive for today’s films. They’ll certainly spend more than that on marketing. I hope they do. [laughs] I think they’re going to.

**John:** I hope.

**Craig:** But I do agree with you that there has always been a rosy-hued, I should say, view of the past. Writers, and directors, and artists have always complained. They have always found something about their time to complain about. And that’s never going to change. I don’t think that much has changed in that regard other than if you are trying to make dramas for adults, it is unquestionably harder to do so now than it was even ten years ago.

That feels very true to me. But, other than that, I think it’s really the marketing stuff. And the cost of marketing, and the effort of marketing is entirely about the change that has occurred in our world around us. We live in a fragmented world. There are not three networks; there are 300 channels. There’s the Internet. It’s just very difficult to reach people.

**John:** I would also say that the cost of making movies, it hasn’t necessarily gone up. If you look at Steven Soderbergh’s movies, you look at Magic Mike, that’s not an expensive movie at all. And there are ways to make those movies for not a lot of money. And nobody noticed that that was an inexpensive movie.

Yes, that movie probably cost ten times as much to market as it did to make, but it was successful. And they were able to make that movie and they’re able to make more movies kind of like it on that business plan. I think it’s unfair to say that all movies are too expensive to make.

The challenge and frustration that I think is real is that the studios are only making the very expensive movies because they feel like that’s the only movie that they can justify spending the huge marketing budget on that they know how to do. Will something shift and we’ll find a way to sort of make cheaper movies that don’t have to be marketed the same way and can find an audience? Yes, probably. It will be the next generation of moviemakers will figure out how to do that and that will be great.

**Craig:** And we’ll be dead.

**John:** We’ll be dead.

**Craig:** Next question! [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I’m so loopy because I woke up at 2am LA time to get on a plane. So, you got me at my loopiest.

**John:** That’s nice. I’ve had two beers. I’ve had a beer and a half.

**Craig:** Oh boy! You’ve blown through half your beer budget for 2013.

**John:** It’s nice. A question from Raven. It’s talking about sort of how much you can fit into a scene header. “Okay, so at the beginning of the script I’m writing there’s a dream sequence in which a Vietnam war vet is reliving a traumatic experience, fighting as a tunnel rat in the Cu Chi tunnels of Vietnam in 1967.

“The very first scene begins in a tunnel in 1967. So, right now my scene header reads as follows:

Is that a fair thing to write in a scene heading or is that too much?”

**Craig:** It doesn’t seem like too much. I mean, I suppose you can just say… — If you wanted to be a little impressionistic about it you could say INT. TUNNEL. I mean. The audience is going to, unless there’s a big sign on the tunnel wall that announces the name of the tunnel or the kind of tunnel, they’re just going to see a man in a dirt tunnel. So, you might want to leave that out. Maybe just indicate it in the description. Or, if you’re going to subtitle it, indicate that there’s going to be a subtitle. But that seems reasonable to me.

**John:** Yes. It looks reasonable. You’re not seeing this in front of you on screen, but it looks reasonable.

Here’s what I would say is that always be mindful of, like, what are you telling the reader versus what are you actually telling the viewer. And if it’s something that the viewer needs to know, then you need to actually break that out as something you’re going to put on the screen as a title over to show 1967, or Vietnam. If it’s important that the viewer immediately know specifically where it is, and you’re going to print that on the screen, then give it to us in a title over.

If it’s just important for our understanding of where we are at this moment, or if we’re going back and forth between time periods and you need us to know that, “Okay, now we’re 1967 versus being the present day,” sticking that extra bit of information at the end of the scene header — totally valid — because we’ll get it.

I will say at the very start of your screenplay it tends to be helpful to be, what Craig said, is more impressionistic, where you’re just actually describing what the space is rather than trying to get a lot of specific historical detail or give things a specific name, the Cu Chi tunnel. Because if I don’t know what that is it might stop me if it’s the very first page, because, like, I don’t know what that is. Is that a description of a tunnel? Is that a kind of tunnel? Is that a specific tunnel?

So, being a manmade tunnel might be a better way to describe at the very start of your screenplay.

**Craig:** And it could indicate an interesting way to reveal something. For instance, INT. TUNNEL. That’s it. Just

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:**

Or, “He emerges outside and it’s a firefight.” You know, you can kind of lead the audience to where you want them to go, but if you’re just in a tunnel, that’s all they’re ever going to see is tunnel, so just call it a tunnel.

**John:** Agreed. And what Craig is describing there is, like, really letting the script be the camera throughout your scene and stuff. So, give us the information the way that we would experience it in the theater.

So, if we’re just with this guy running though this dark space, we can be in this dark space. We don’t need to know all the details before the audience would know the details.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Next question comes from Devin in Toronto, Canada. He asks, “What is the industry standard font for outlines, treatments, for series bibles, series documents? Is it okay to use a different font to punch up the headers in these documents?” Devin asks, in Toronto.

**Craig:** It’s Comic Sans.

**John:** Everything should be in Comic Sans from top to bottom.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Bold is great. But I really find, like, bold italics in outline, that’s how you really sell it.

**Craig:** No, I like to use shadow. [laughs]

**John:** Oh, shadow is always good. Oh my god. If you can find an old laser jet printer, or an old Apple LaserWriter, LaserWriter 2 maybe even, if you can get some Zapf Chancery. That’s how to sell it.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know what?

**John:** Sort of calligraphy.

**Craig:** Pull out your Banner Maker Pro…

**John:** That’s good. Some Banner Maker Pro. That’s great.

Here’s what I’ll say, because I’ve actually had to do it this season, and I’ve found that people don’t really care. So, a lot of times these things will be in Courier, which is fine. A lot of times they’ll be in Helvetica or something normal. I, being a former font nerd, and still kind of a font nerd, I used Chaparral Pro which is a great text serif face that people really like a lot. So, I use that for the outlines for Chosen.

No one commented negatively. People seemed to like it. But, whatever you like that’s a good, reasonable choice for a font is fine. And I found that there’s a wide variety of sort of formatting choices for what these documents look like. Sometimes they really do look sort of like scriptments, like sort of the James Cameron scriptments, where it feels like a script is slug lines and scene headers but just no dialogue.

Other times I’ve seen things that are just paragraphs, and paragraphs, and paragraphs.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s entirely up to you. This is the way I tend to do it. Basically if I’m writing up a treatment or an outline, I’ll have sort of a brief summary of the plot, like really brief, a tiny paragraph. Because I’m always thinking, “Okay, I’m going to give you this document. It’s for use. The document is not to be enjoyed, it is to be used. And ideally you, the producer or studio person, is going to use this to help me do my job. So, you’re going to either describe what’s in it to somebody you work with or work for, or you’re going to hand it to them.” So, I give them a little summary that they can use, and then I break out the main characters and do a description of each of the main characters along with a basic concept of what’s wrong with them and maybe what they need.

And then I start a new page of act one. And I do the scenes of act one and I number, sort of not scene by scene, but sort of sequence by sequence. And I like to break them into numbers. So, just number one, and then indent, and a whole paragraph there. Because this way people when they’re talking to you it’s much easier for like, “Okay, on four of act two,” so I’ll start renumbering for act two and I’ll start renumbering for act 3.

Personally, I like Baskerville.

**John:** Yeah. Baskerville is a good font. It’s a good book font.

**Craig:** It’s my font of choice. It’s very Holmesian.

**John:** Yeah. We should actually say here that handing in these documents, it’s controversial, and there’s reasons why it’s controversial. If these are for you own personal use, you’re welcome to make them — you’re welcome to sort of do whatever. But, if someone is asking you to turn this in and they’re not actually paying you to turn those in, that can be a problem. That can be something to be mindful of. And that’s a much bigger topic to get into. But, if you’re being paid to write that document, that’s great.

But if you’re being paid to write the screenplay and you’re writing this extra document before you’re writing a screenplay — or, worse than that, if you’re being asked to write this document before they’re paying you any money, before they’re making a deal for you to write a movie, that’s a real concern. Because you’re doing work for somebody without…you’re creating written material for somebody without payment, which is not good.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, real fast, my feeling on this is if you’re hired to write a screenplay there’s nothing wrong with writing that document, even if specifically you haven’t been paid for a “treatment step” or “outline step,” because in the end it helps everybody get on the same page, so that when you turn in — if you choose to do this. So, when you turn in the script nobody can say, “Whoa, huh?”

“Okay, well, no, here’s the document. We all read it. Now, it’s our problem; it’s not my problem, or your problem.”

If you have not yet been hired to write a screenplay, you may not turn this material in. It is against Writers Guild rules. You are violating our working rules. And the company if they should ask for material like this is violating the MBA. And that is a no-no. We hear it about it more and more. We hear egregious cases where these things are required in order to get employment. That is an absolute violation of our rules. And the more people who do it, the harder they make our job for the rest of us.

**John:** And the good/bad thing which will inevitably happen — and I’m giving it two to three years at the very most — is one of these studio situations will occur where someone has turned in this material for which they were not paid and it will become a copyright trial. And it will be a huge big deal because they submitted a document that was about a movie and the studio went off and made that movie with a different writer, with a different script, and that person will have a copyright claim that will be very awful for everybody involved.

And, hopefully, we can change that business practice before it happens. But I think that trial is going to have to happen.

**Craig:** No question. You know, like you I have been attending a couple of these sort of — they’re formal meetings between some guild members and the studios under the auspices of the Writers Guild meeting with the studios to say, “Look, here are some things that are not going well and we need to fix these.”

And, when it comes to this issue — I have raised this a number of times. And you can see on the other side of the table an absolute real concern. I think that people who run these studios are well aware that this is a time bomb. And they don’t need much convincing at all.

I think that part of what goes on is that this stuff happens away from them, from the people who run the studios. A lot of times it’s the producers who maybe are willing to play a little more fast and loose because, frankly, they need to get it right, at least what they think in their head means right.

But, there is a real fear. The whole business, all of Hollywood, all it is is an intellectual property business. And when you look at our contracts, the companies and their business affairs people are so thorough about making sure that when they pay us they’re buying everything for everywhere for always. That the thought that there’s bits and pieces of material that they don’t control at all, well that’s just horrifying.

So, this is an area where I think we are one of those magical “we’re all in alignment” areas and hopefully it will work out and this will go away, this problem.

**John:** Yes. But, Devin, whatever font you choose, you’re fine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I will say that if people want to look at some sample outlines, at johnaugust.com in the library I have the pitch documents and other sort of stuff for several of my movies, for TV shows, so you can see sort of what I did. And if it’s helpful you’re welcome to look through those.

Next question comes from Lori in Jerusalem. A question from Jerusalem.

**Craig:** Jerusalem! Shalom!

**John:** She writes, “My script, Whiplash, received a 9 out 10 on the Black List. And the reviewer said it had four-quadrant appeal.” So, I’m going to stop here. So, this is where, you know, I love Franklin. I’m happy that the Black List exists. This is what gets confusing. So, she’s talking about the Black List, but she’s talking about the service that she submitted to for the Black List. She’s not talking about the annual list of like the best screenplays of all time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, she submitted her script to this Black List site. It got a 9 out of 10. And it said it had four-quadrant appeal.

“According to Franklin, only 3.8% of uploaded scripts rate a 9 or a 10. And those include some pro scripts. There’s a widespread belief you simply need to write a really good script and the world will beat a path to your door. So, is it true, and can the Black List make it happen? If the Black List can’t make it happen for a 9-rated script, then why not? Is the issue the writer? The Black List? The script? Or the market?

“I thought it might be an interesting case study for the podcast to talk about.”

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know. I think that service that the Black List provides is too new for us to really draw conclusions about its ability to pick winners. There is a difference between a script that generates a lot of positive feedback and a script that anyone wants to buy. It’s just a different deal, because you can really enjoy a script but think to yourself, “No one will go see this.”

You can really enjoy a script and think, “Well, it’s got four-quadrant appeal but I think it’s too expensive to make,” or, “It can only be made with one star, and she’s not doing this sort of thing.” Who knows? There are all sorts of factors involved.

I tend to hue on the side of things that says write a great script and the world will beat a path to your door. If people really like your script then I would presume somebody would reach out at some point and say, “Hey, we either want to option this or buy it, or we have something else that we would like you to write and we’ll pay you for it.”

That seems likely to me, but I want to caution all of you to remember that the only “yes” that exists in Hollywood is money. That’s it. If no one gives you money, it is “no.” So, no matter what people say, no matter what number you aggregate, no matter what nice comments you pull in, if no one gives you money the answer is no.

**John:** Yup. To me the Black List in its new incarnation, and what Franklin is doing here, it’s analogous to sort of what happens with screenwriting competitions. And so the big screenwriting competitions like the Nicholl or the Austin, the ones that actually seem to have some merit to them, winning one of those is great, it’s fantastic, and it will get you some attention. And it could get you started. But most Nicholl scripts don’t sell. Most Austin winners don’t sell.

And a lot of times people win those awards and never really go on to write other things. So, being rated really highly on the Black List, in the paid site Black List, will probably benefit you, but it’s certainly no guarantee of any success. So, we can continue to watch you. We can continue to watch — I’m sure Franklin is running a lot of metrics on sort of what happens the next year of those well-rated and well-reviewed scripts to see how many of them actually payoff for the writers involved.

**Craig:** Yeah. And just to be clear for those of you who are wondering and don’t know what four-quadrant means, the business tends to divide the audience up into male and female, over the age of 25, under the age of 25.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So, those are the four quadrants.

**John:** There’s a movie I have over at Fox. And someone asked, “Oh, so what kind of movie is this?” And I was like, “It’s a six-quadrant.” [laughs] “I want to make sure this is for everybody. This is for the undead. Everyone who could possibly…like, bring your dog to this movie because it is very much to be that very big broad thing,” because again, this movie I’m trying to make at Fox is not inexpensive.

**Craig:** I heard that your script was only six sextants.

**John:** Oh, that wouldn’t be good.

**Craig:** Sorry. You’re missing one sextant.

**John:** That’s not good at all. So, we need to find how to get that last little seventh sliver in there.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** James Stubenrauch writes…

**Craig:** I’m sorry, James Stupid Hawk?

**John:** Stubenrauch. I’m over German pronouncing it. I bet he pronounces it Stuben-Rauch, or Stuben-Rock, but Stubenrauch sounds better to me.

**Craig:** It shouldn’t be Stoiben-Raw?

**John:** There’s not a “eeh” over the “u,” so I think it’s just a simple “u.”

James writes, “My question is about how to get quality feedback on my work.” I think it dovetails well with this last thing. “Sure, I think my latest script is pretty good, and my mom thinks it’s simply amazing. My little screenwriting interest group in my small town gave it a good review. However, I want professional critiques. It seems there are couple ways to get real feedback.”

So, he has five, and I’ll list them and I want to sort of talk through these. “Number one, move to LA or visit for awhile and try to make contacts with readers.”

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** “Two, pay those people on the Internet who pose as script consultants.”

**Craig:** No! [laughs] He already knows no. He said “posed.” Go ahead.

**John:** Yeah. It has “Umbrage” with like seven exclamation points afterwards. “Number three, enter writing contests, especially ones that provide written feedback, like Blue Cat.”

**Craig:** No.

**John:** “On average these contests charge $30 to $50 per entry, so for $150 I could get five real reviews.”

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. “Pay the Black List $125 to $175 to get two or three of Franklin Leonard’s readers to review my stuff.”

**Craig:** Possibly.

**John:** Maybe. “Do the Three Page Challenge on that nice Scriptnotes podcast.”

**Craig:** Ah, now you’re talking.

**John:** Now you’re talking. He needs some feedback, but I thought we’d talk through his five things here first. We’ll start with the Three Page Challenge thing. I think it’s lovely that people think it’s going to help them. I think we can offer some general suggestions, but I don’t think anyone is going to sort of get broken out or noticed by this. And we can give you real feedback on those first Three Pages, but that’s about what your writing is like on those first three pages. It’s not really about the quality of your whole script.

And so I want to be realistic about that. I think we could say if you had a great first three pages, you have reason to be really, really excited. If we read your first three pages and we had real concerns, you have some reasons to have real concerns. But we can’t tell you what your script is like or if it’s going to work. We’re just looking at a little photo of you; we’re not seeing the whole person.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s not really the function of it anyway. I mean, I hate to say “you get what you pay for,” but in this case you do.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Really it’s just a gut check to see if you’re on the green or on the fairway or in the rough or still in your car, you know. That’s really all we provide. It’s not going to tell you if your script is any good.

**John:** Yeah. And so the Three Page Challenge is really kind of for everybody else. And so you’re very, very brave to submit it to us, and maybe we’ll love it and that could be great, but it’s really to kind of help everybody else who listens to the podcast and reads along.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, backing up the Black List. $125 to $175. Maybe? I don’t know. I think probably that’s money better spent than one of those paid script consultants.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. I mean, of all the things out there, that’s really the only one that I can kind of swallow, you know? I mean, you are — it is being monitored by actual people in the business. So, for instance, our friend from Jerusalem, her script has a 9 out of 10 and a lot of positive feedback. It means that people are noticing and they will be taking a look at it at some point, in some form, whether they read it entirely or they have their assistant read it or somebody.

So, it seems like there’s potential value there at the very least, which is more than I can say for the millions of shysters out there looking to take your money under the heading of “script consultant.”

**John:** Yeah. Quickly, the writing contests like Blue Cat that charge: Look, I think the ones that are worth even the postage for me would be Austin and Nicholl. I don’t know if the other ones are worth anything. Maybe they are and maybe I’m just wrong and people have tremendous success coming out of those. I just don’t think they’re worth the emotional investment, not to mention the money, to submit them.

Obviously not the people who want to be your script consultants. Don’t do that.

And, the last option is move to LA for awhile and try to make contacts with readers. And that’s probably the most difficult of all these for most people, but it’s honestly the way you’re going to get the most real feedback. And my experience has been, personally and also watching all of my assistants who’ve gone through this, is you just — once you’re in a culture of people who are doing this, you’re reading their scripts and they’re reading your scripts. And, you know, your reading their scripts and you’re like, “Oh, wow, this is actually a really good writer; I really like this script.”

And if they’re reading your script and you think it’s good too, you can exchange notes, or help each other out on stuff. Or, if you read their script and it’s just terrible you’re like, “Well, I’m going to really take his or her notes with a grain of salt because I don’t think this person knows what they’re talking about.”

When you’re surrounded by a culture of screenplays, you are going to get better feedback and you’re going to get a better sense of what really is going on and where you sort of fit in this pecking order here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Remember, your job here, your goal, is not to write a script that people like and say nice things about. Your job, and your goal, is to write a movie and to get a movie made. So, all this feedback stuff to me is really over-reinforcing the fetishizing of the document.

And I understand why we fetishize the document. It’s an incredibly hard document to produce. But, it is not the end of the line. At some point you need to start thinking about writing movies. And you’re not going to write movies from your house in your small town. It’s just not going to happen.

We keep saying it over and over, and people keep saying, “Well, what if I just send in $200 and then Blue Cat will give me an award?” Who cares? Remember the last guy who won that Blue Cat award? Do you remember his name?

**John:** [laughs] No.

**Craig:** No. No you don’t. No, nobody knows his name, and nobody cares. That’s the truth. Sorry Blue Cat. Blue Cat! Come on!

**John:** Yeah. Blue. So, there probably are scenarios… — Because we’re writing a transitional document, we’re writing a document that is hopefully going to become a movie, our goal has to always be fixated on trying to make that movie.

If you were really writing a short story that you wanted to win awards with, or you’re trying to write a book, even if you’re writing a book the game is to get the agent, or the editor, or the publisher to say yes to it. So, I think the title of the podcast is like, “Unless there’s money, the answer is no.”

**Craig:** Unless there’s money, the answer is no. Isn’t that terrible? And it’s so unfortunate because there’s thousands and thousands — so many wonderful, creative ways for people to say no to you. And so many of them sound like yes, which is horrifying really to contemplate, but it’s human nature. Nobody really likes saying no to somebody. Nobody wants to be mean. No one wants to see that look reflected back to them.

Certainly any of us who have been asked for feedback and who have said, “I just don’t like this,” have gotten weird — people get angry sometimes. And suddenly you’re in a fight. So, everybody wants to just be polite. But there is really only one yes. And it’s money.

**John:** Yeah.

Our last question of the day comes from Andrew in Philadelphia who writes, “In May of 2012 I graduated from film school in my hometown with a concentration in screenwriting in an undergraduate program. Every day since then I’ve been doing what I’ve done the past four years in school: write. Not wanting to sound arrogant, I know I’m a good writer. I’m good at it because I love it, I’m dedicated; because I’ve been studying and practicing even before college.

“However, because of family and financial obligations I am unable to move to LA right now. This is very frustrating for me because I know I need to be there. There are interesting job opportunities in NYC for which I could commute, but that silver lining gives me some anxiety. But I want some additional advice. What can I do from Philly, aside from writing, to feel like I’m accomplishing something?

“Is it best to continue my day job and write at night? Is it better to get an industry job in New York?”

So, a young graduate in Philadelphia. Craig, your recommendation?

**Craig:** Well, look, if you have financial issues and you need to be working and you need to be where you are, then you need to be working and you need to be where you are and that’s that.

You should write at night, always, if you can. And it sounds like you want to, so that shouldn’t be an issue. Maybe one thing to consider is making a little movie. Easier to do now than ever before.

One thing there are lots of are actors. Philadelphia, by the way — you know a fine actor from Philadelphia: Bradley Cooper.

**John:** Ah-ha. And I hear he’s also a terrific wrestler as someone might say.

**Craig:** [laughs] There was one day Bradley had his arm tightly around me…

**John:** What color were his eyes that day?

**Craig:** Oh, boy, they were blue. God, they were blue! And as I went swimming in his limpid ocean eyes it occurred to me that he was a fine actor from Philadelphia.

Actors are always looking for things to act in. And actors are in the same boat as you are. Most of them aren’t working, and aren’t being asked to act. Forget being paid to act; they aren’t even being allowed to act.

You’re always allowed to write. They’re not even allowed to act. That is very frustrating. So, if you hook up with some programs, and Philadelphia is a big city and they have some great universities and institutions, I suspect…

**John:** Well, and Andrew went to film school in Philadelphia, so he says, so he must know people who he went to film school with.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, get yourself some actors together. Write something that you know you can direct. So, write something that is achievable and small. And make it. Make it with your iPhone, for the love of god. It’s HD.

Make it with whatever you want. Make a little movie. Make a short.

Somehow Rian Johnson managed to make Brick. And, you know, the funny thing is, I don’t even thing he was in LA at the time.

**John:** He was in LA, actually. He went to USC for film school, so I think he did.

**Craig:** Oh, he was, okay. But you don’t need to be. The point is really if you are as good as you say, and you’ve got the goods, and you can make ten, or 20 minutes, or 30 minutes, or who knows, even a full feature, a little small movie, and it’s good, you’re done. You’re good. You win. Do it.

**John:** One of the things, this sort of goes back to my New Year’s resolution. I was talking about sprinting versus marathons. And so this TV pilot, I was actually able to sort of sprint in that I could write it so fast, I could sort of sprint through it. It never sort of got to be a slog because it’s only 60 pages. I’m just sort of zooming through it. It was very quick and easy to do. And TV pilots, at least you can write them in a sprint, and they’re very quick and simple.

A movie is a marathon. A movie is, you know, just a very long process. It’s a long process to write it. Like you always feel like it’s stuck sort of halfway in the middle of it and you’re fighting your way through it, but you get it done. And this musical like doesn’t even compare. It’s like a migration. You’re just traveling across the country in it and you sort of setup camp and setup villages.

What Andrew right now needs to do, and why I think the idea of making a little movie or making a short is crucial, is he needs to sprint. He needs to do some quick little sprints to make sure he’s got his skills up and sort of keep going while he’s earning some money in Philadelphia.

But what he shouldn’t try to do is bog down in the marathon of trying to make — he shouldn’t go on a four-year odyssey to make this movie in Philadelphia. He needs to make some small things and then save up enough money that he can get out to Los Angeles if that’s really where he wants to be. Because my evergreen advice is that the luxury of being 22 years old is that you are great at being broke. You are great at sleeping on floors, and eating Top Ramen three meals a day, and being poor.

And LA is just as good of a city to be poor in as anywhere else. So, you may think like, “Oh, I don’t have enough money to come to LA,” but it may be easier to do it now then to do it five years from now. And if you need to save — if it’s a year you need to save up some money to get out here. Great. Let’s spend that year earning your money, making some little short things, writing as much as you can, but do get out here because otherwise you’re going to find it hard once you get other obligations.

**Craig:** Yeah, man, you’re 22. The one thing you have is energy. Put it to good use. You’re unstoppable and you’re immortal, and unlike me and unlike John you don’t have children, as we’ve said before, devouring your soul on a daily basis. Just sapping your energy and reminding you that you’ve been genetically replaced.

**John:** They’re beautiful little anchors tying you down.

**Craig:** That’s right. And basically just slowly burying you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, it’s come to that time, but I think we kind of already know what your One Cool Thing is so why don’t you just start.

**Craig:** Ouais. It’s Quebec. So, I was thinking maybe over the holidays I would go to Europe because my kids are old enough now, they’re 11 and 8, and I thought, “Well, you know, they could appreciate now if we went to Paris, or London.”

But, you know, the time change and the getting them back in school, it’s sort of a nightmare. And if we had had the whole time of the vacation to do it, it would have been fine, but we didn’t. We only really had just a week.

And so my wife very smartly zeroed in on Montreal and Quebec City. And, you know, Quebec City in particular really is Europe in North America. It’s great. Beautiful, beautiful place. We had a great time. The people were wonderful.

I got to use my French, which is broken and limited, but still was enough to get by. And most people — in Montreal practically everyone is bilingual. In Quebec, you know, some people are bilingual. Some people sort of speak English the way I speak French.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it was great. And it was cold. [laughs] And it was really awesome.

**John:** You had about two hours of daylight, didn’t you? Darkness fell really early, didn’t it?

**Craig:** Yeah, it definitely got dark early. But, you know, I like cold places. The whole world — Quebec City just looked like a snow globe. The streets were almost impossibly picturesque. And we ate poutine. I guess that’s specifically my One Cool Thing. You know, poutine is sort of the national snack food of French Canada, and it is French fries with gravy and cheese curds.

And everybody goes, “Oh, gross,” and I think it’s because of the word “curd,” which is a disgusting word. Curd. Not the people, Kurd. Those are lovely people. I mean C-U-R-D. Just something about it sounds nasty.

But really all cheese curds are, they’re just string cheese, you know. When we call it string cheese it’s totally cool. That’s how I got my son to try it. I’m like, “It’s just string cheese in tinier bits.”

But, you know, cheese on fries is a good thing. And then gravy with cheese and fries is spectacular. Obviously not very good for you; don’t eat a lot of it. But, it’s really, really good, particular on a negative 18 degree day.

**John:** I have good friends, Leanne and Matt, who live up in Montreal. And I would highly recommend it to anybody, particularly if you’re in the Northeast anyway; like why are you not going up there for just a lurk? Because it is the quickest European trip you can take, just across the border.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, if you’re in New York or Boston you can drive to Quebec City if you want. It’s great. And we took — to get back and forth between Montreal and Quebec we did the train, which was also awesome. It was great. Everything about it was great. Rave review. I love you, French Canada. And if you’re a fan of maple, then you should go there also, [laughs], because they’ve figured out how to make all foods out of maple.

**John:** Yes. So, my One Cool Thing this week is a tool I found myself having to use a lot this week just sort of randomly called Coffeescript. And Coffeescript is a programming language, kind of. It’s a scripting language but you can actually use it to write a little bit more sophisticated programs.

In my case I had these text documents that I needed to process in a very specific way. And I needed to write routines that could sort of go through there and filter the words and do specific things to them. And what I like about Coffeescript as opposed to other languages, like normal JavaScript, or Perl, or Ruby, or any of these other very talented and good languages, like I’m not going to knock any of those languages… — Coffeescript is so simple and so straightforward; it fits my brain so well that I can go six months without using it and like reteach it to myself in about five minutes.

And there’s something really great to be said about something that is so straightforward that I can willingly just forget it, and forget how to do it, and figure out how to use it again when I need to use it.

So, Coffeescript is available, just Coffeescript.org. And you’ll see sort of how it works. It’s actually a subset of JavaScript that’s just better and uses white space in a different way. And I would highly recommend it to anybody who needs to do a little bit of programming. Or, if you loved programming BASIC on your computer that you grew up with…

**Craig:** I loved that.

**John:** And it’s just the better version of that. It’s like if we’d started making computers and we’d all just taken a big step back and said, “What would be better than BASIC? Oh, we can do this thing called Coffeescript.” And it’s just lovely.

Or, if you loved HyperCard on the Macintosh, you know, the HyperTalk, the programming language. It’s like that in ways that are rewarding. And you can just read it in a very natural way. So, even if you’ve never experienced it before, you just look at the program and go, “Oh, yeah, I get what that does.”

**Craig:** And what are the specific applications that you would want to use Coffeescript for?

**John:** You’d use Coffeescript for things where you needed to process something through. Anything where you might want to use JavaScript. So, you can use it in web pages, and some people do use it in web pages.

It actually converts out one-to-one to JavaScript, so a lot of times if I’m mocking something up for the website or for something else I will write it in Coffeescript and it will pop it out as JavaScript and I can just paste that into something.

**Craig:** That’s actually a coding language in Quebec that is very popular there, and it’s made entirely of maple.

**John:** I bet it’s delicious.

**Craig:** You can eat it! You can eat it. You can put it on your poutine. It doesn’t do anything, [laughs], but it’s really good.

**John:** Yeah, it’s good stuff.

**Craig:** Yes. The word for maple in French is l’érable. What a great word. Well, érable is maple. L’érable is THE maple. I’m on maple again. It’s really, really delicious. Somebody should make a… — You — You! — should make a new programming language.

**John:** Called Maple.

**Craig:** Called Maple.

**John:** There already is one called Maple. I don’t even remember what it is, but it’s like Maple 5. There’s some big computer thing called Maple. And I’ll have Stuart look it up and put a link to it in the show notes.

Which is why we should say, anything talked about today in Scriptnotes including, I don’t know, maybe we’ll put a link to Quebec City and Montreal, and certainly Coffeescript, all of these things will be at the bottom of the podcast. If you listen to it in iTunes, they will be at johnaugust.com/podcast which is where we store the show notes for all of our episodes.

And thank you again for listening everybody.

**Craig:** Thanks everyone. Welcome to 2013. Hey, John, let’s have a great year.

**John:** Let’s have a fantastic year. And one last resolution if I can ask people to do. If you’re a person who listens to the podcast on the website, that’s great, we love you. Thank you for doing that.

If you have iTunes, can you just click “Subscribe” in iTunes so it actually comes through to your thing, because it’s hard for us to keep track of how many people are really listening and sort of what our ratings are if you are just listening to it on the site.

So, if you are listening to this in a browser right now and you have iTunes nearby, just hit “Subscribe” right there in iTunes so it will show up right as we are tracking the metrics for things.

**Craig:** Yeah, because we don’t know if we have — we have somewhere between two and fourteen-billion listeners.

**John:** Roughly in that territory.

**Craig:** Yeah. We finally zeroed into that range.

**John:** Craig, thank you so much. Have a good week.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. See you next week.

**John:** Bye.