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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 52 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, 52!

**Craig:** A year of podcasts.

**John:** I was going to say it’s hard to believe, but it’s actually not hard to believe. It feels like 52 episodes to me. Does it feel like it to you?

**Craig:** I don’t think so. To me I would have… — If you had said we were over 40 I would have still been a little skeptical. I don’t know. They just go by kind of quickly.

**John:** They do. But I’m happy that we made it this far. I’m happy that people seem to be liking our show, so this is a good thing. And last week you treated us with a song.

**Craig:** A song.

**John:** That was very nice, Craig. Because we actually just let you play it out I didn’t get to sort of clap or applaud afterwards or hold up my little virtual lighter, but I thought you did a terrific job, so thank you very much for doing that.

**Craig:** Thank you. How nice of you to say. There were a lot of lovely comments from people on Twitter.

**John:** Good.

**Craig:** I now get to say stuff like, “Yeah, it’s blowing up on twitter, y’all.”

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Although it’s not really blowing up. But it was fun to do and I think maybe I’ll do it again if we can get to…150?

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’ll see.

**Craig:** We’ll pick an appropriate benchmark, because we can either do it more regularly or you could really go nuts and just say we’ve got to hit 500.

**John:** Yeah. That would be a lot. Another option might be a benchmark of like where we rank on iTunes, because that might be a little bit more indicative of people who are listening to it now or subscribing now versus just people who are catching up on previous episodes, because downloads can be people who are just going back through the whole catalog. We need those new, fresh listeners for some imaginary metric that doesn’t really mean anything because we’re not selling any advertising. So it’s just ego gratification, really.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, that’s what this is all about.

**John:** And on the topic of ego gratification, last week I… — we were doing the Three Page Challenges — and while reading one of the Three Page Challenges, I speculated that one of the people who wrote in was not a native English speaker. And you took a little umbrage at that. You took umbrage on his behalf that I did not believe that he was a native English speaker.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yup.

**John:** And I was right. So, Mario DiPesa wrote in to say, “I am from Montreal, Quebec and my native language is French. Although as most Montrealers I’ve been exposed to English at a pretty early age through TV, comic books, and movies, I’ve only been in the US for about five years and I just started using English as my main language.”

So some of his odd word choices that I noticed, that was because English is not his native language.

**Craig:** You were absolutely right. I was completely wrong. And I’m embarrassed, because this is the kind of thing I feel like I should be good at. It’s language. You picked up on something. I’m mortified. And the only way I can think of to rectify this error is to kill you. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** If I kill you, I feel like I set it right.

**John:** Yeah. There are times I’m very happy that we’re not recording this in the same space, that you are far off in Pasadena while I’m safely here in Hancock Park at an address you’ve never been to.

Ah, that’s not true; you’ve been to my house once.

**Craig:** I have. I’ve been there. I know exactly where to go. And I know exactly how I’m going to kill you. [laughs] So enjoy this victory.

**John:** Yes. By the time this podcast airs it will be past.

**Craig:** You’re dead.

**John:** But I wanted to talk a little bit about sort of what I noticed in Mario DiPesa’s writing and the sense… — Because it wasn’t ungrammatical in the sense of “these are the rules of English and he broke the rules of English.” It wasn’t that at all. Like everything in it was by the rules grammatical. But grammar is really how we speak; it’s how a native person speaks. And it didn’t sound like how a native person would use the language.

And that’s something I want to start talking about. We’ll get into some questions later on, but I want to start talking about this and get your feedback on it.

A lot of times when we talk about English and we talk about sort of people coming in from other languages, we always assume there’s a one-to-one correlation between the things we do in English and the things that people do in other languages. But that’s not really true, and you start to notice those things as you meet people who are writing in something that’s not their native language.

One example that often occurs to me is the sense of time. Because when you think of time as being, well there’s the past, the present, and the future, but if you actually listen to how we speak, our sense of time in spoken language and written language is actually quite a bit more complicated.

We have actions that were started in the past and completed in the past. We have actions that were started in the past but are still ongoing. We have things that we think are going to happen. Things that we know are going to happen. It’s much more complicated and a lot of languages treat it very differently.

One thing I notice from time to time is our nanny who is native Spanish speaking, her English is fantastic but she — if you ask her like what did she have for dinner tonight, she says, “Oh, she eats green beans and broccoli and chicken,” which would actually be a really good meal for my kid because my kid is a terrible eater. But she says, “She eats,” or like I’ll ask did she have a bath, it’s like, “She does.” And so she’s answering back in our present tense verb for something that we would use a past tense verb. And that’s just the way that Spanish works versus how English works.

Their sense of what you use the present tense for is wider than what we use the present tense for. In Spanish they put a wider umbrella over the present tense than we do in English. And so those things don’t match up perfectly.

**Craig:** No, that’s true. And the language where you’ll see huge differences like that, where it’s not even subtle, is Chinese. The Chinese language has a bunch of quirks. We would call them quirks. I assume that they would look at our language and call our language quirks. Here’s a sentence that — you can’t ask the following question in Chinese: You can’t say, “You’re not really thinking of doing that, are you?” They don’t recognize negatively phrased questions.

**John:** Yeah. And in Spanish that would kick into the subjunctive probably. And it’s more complicated. And I think people want to reduce things to simple rules that like could be machine translated between things, and it’s more complicated than that. It’s more subtle.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are a lot of strange things, just the way that — and I think we’ve had a Chomsky festival before on this podcast — but the grammar that we use reflects our consciousness and the way we think about things. But there are gaps. And you obviously picked up on a very subtle one in Mario’s language that I did not. I’m still going to kill you over this.

**John:** Which is fine.

A reader a couple of months ago sent in through — he had gone to one of those paid coverage services and he sent through the coverage. And it was too long to really talk about either on the website or on the podcast, but looking through it, I was a little bit frustrated by what this reader wrote in terms of his comments, like things to change in his script.

And it was something like he was criticizing him for using the passive voice. And the example the guy cited was something like, “Mary is cooking dinner.” And the reader said, “No, it should be, ‘Mary cooks dinner,'” which is wrong sort of on two levels. First off, that’s not passive voice.

**Craig:** Right. “The dinner was cooked by Mary” is passive.

**John:** Exactly. So passive is any construction in which the subject of the sentence is receiving the action of the verb. So, “The casket is lowered into the ground by the men.” That’s a passive voice.

And, first off, there is nothing wrong with a passive voice. There are a lot of reasons why you might want to use an active voice and there are a lot of reasons why in screenwriting you should be thinking about, like, “Wait — does the active voice make more sense for this?” Rather than “The blindfold is removed,” it’s like, you know, “The bandit removes the blindfold.” There may be reasons why the active voice works better for you. That’s not to say that passive voice is wrong.

But with, “Mary is cooking dinner,” that’s actually the present progressive, and that’s like a remarkably good thing that English has that not every language has. The present progressive is that “ing” form, so the “to be” plus an “ing.” So, “Mary is cooking. Bob is running.” And what’s great about the present progressive for screenwriting is that you can interrupt it. And so if a scene starts with, “Todd is running down the street.” You can — “Todd is running down the street when…” something happens. You can stop that action.

If it’s, “Todd runs down the street,” well, does he finish running down the street? It implies that something has been completed when it may be something that you want to stop midway.

**Craig:** This is one of those “rules” that you hear tossed around by halfwits on the internet who don’t know anything about what it means to write a screenplay effectively. They’ll say things like, “Go through your script and remove all ‘ing’ verbs.” No. No. Swallow poison, idiot, because that’s the… — These reductive nonsense rules that people use for screenplays make me crazier than anything.

Of course there are times when you want to say “is running’ or “is doing,” especially in a screenplay which is attempting to invite the reader into an immediate present. Something is happening RIGHT NOW. Isn’t that more dramatic than a thing happened?

So, not to highjack this and turn it into a celebration of my hatred for so many people, but you definitely hit upon something that invokes great umbrage-taking from me.

**John:** Oh, it wouldn’t be a year anniversary podcast without some umbrage.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And really most of these so-called “rules” are people trying to implement Latin and English, or they’re trying to sort of pull rules from a perfect language, which they believe to be Latin, into English. So they say, “Well, Latin doesn’t do this so therefore we shouldn’t do this.” Like Latin doesn’t break up infinitives, so like, “To slowly roast…” they won’t put a word in between the “to” and the infinitive form of the verb. And so therefore we shouldn’t do it.

Well, Latin is different. And in English it tends to make a lot more sense to split up that infinitive in a lot of cases. And if it sounds better to the ear, well that’s the point.

**Craig:** I’m with you on that. Like I don’t understand the whole rule against split infinitive. Who cares? Sometimes it’s much better and much more expressive to do it that way. I’m not one of these people that fetishizes avoiding prepositions at the end of a sentence. It’s all silly.

And certainly when we talk about writing, the nice thing about screenwriting is you can write anything you want because it’s not going to be read.

**John:** Yeah. A weird thing happened in a script that I just finished, and Stuart and I went back and forth a couple times on this one line of dialogue. And the line is, “Ethics is easy when you’re winning.”

And so is it “ethics is easy” or “ethics are easy when you’re winning?” And so when you actually look it up it turns out ethic and ethics are two different words and they actually mean two different things.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So it became a very subtle, like, “Well what is the definition of this?” “What is the definition of this?” “What is the real sense in which the character is using this?” But it also became, “Which sounds better coming out of someone’s mouth?” “Which would you actually say?”

**Craig:** You could do it either. I think you could do it either way presuming that you’re not talking about the study of ethics but rather individual ethics, like having ethics. You could say, “Ethics is easy,” meaning the concept of having ethics which is silently implied. Or, ethics — plural — having them “are easy.” I think you could do either one.

But if you were talking about “ethics is easy when you’re winning,” meaning the class where they teach ethics, that would be “ethics is.”

**John:** The class Ethics — Ethics 101 is easy in winning.

**Craig:** Or the study of ethics or the field of ethics.

**John:** But ultimately it came down to which is going to sound better coming out of this character’s mouth, because this character isn’t going to know the distinction between these two things. I mean, maybe if he were a linguist he would… — If he were a linguist he would use the right one.

But he wasn’t a linguist. He was a sports coach, so it didn’t make sense he would actually say the grammatically correct one or the definitely correct one. So it’s which one sounds better.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** I thought this would be a good transition into some things that will always sound terrible. And this was a list that a listener sent in, which I thought is just terrific. It’s from Go Into The Story, and it’s a list of bits of dialogue that you should probably always avoid.

And so it’s a lengthy list and we’re going to do our best to sort of sell you on how they sound and why you should never hear them. They will all be familiar to you. And if you were going to use any of the lines we’re about to state, you can, but you’re going to have to spin them somehow to take the curse off them, because they are all kind of cursed lines.

**Craig:** Hmm. Or just don’t use them.

**John:** Or just don’t use them. But I would say in a comedy there is probably a way you could use them, but you’d have to do something very smart to spin it in a new direction. Or not.

**Craig:** Yes. I agree. Some of these unfortunately are already attempts to spin something. They are jokes that have been beaten to death, so I don’t know how you spin something that’s already poorly spun and over spun.

**John:** Yeah. Jane Espenson defines these as “clams.” And so they were funny once but through repetition they become really not funny and smell horrible.

**Craig:** Yes. [laughs] Correct. Clams.

**John:** So shall we do this? “Are you ready?”

**Craig:** “I was born ready.”

**John:** “Are you sitting down?”

**Craig:** “Let’s get out of here!”

**John:** “_____ is my middle name.”

**Craig:** “Is that all you got?” “I’m just getting started.”

**John:** “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

**Craig:** “Don’t you die on me!”

**John:** “Tell my wife and kids I love them.”

**Craig:** “Breathe, dammit!”

**John:** “Cover me. I’m going in.”

**Craig:** “He’s standing right behind me, isn’t he?”

**John:** “No, no, no, no, no, no, I’m not going.” Cut to them going.

**Craig:** “No, come in. _____ was just leaving.”

**John:** “You better come in.”

**Craig:** “So, we meet again.”

**John:** “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

**Craig:** “Well, if it isn’t _____.”

**John:** “I’m just doing my job.”

**Craig:** “You give ______ a bad name.” / “Calling you a ______ is an insult to ______.”

**John:** “You’ll never get away with this.” “Watch me.”

**Craig:** “Lookin’ good,” said into a mirror.

**John:** “Now, where were we?”

**Craig:** “What the…?”

**John:** “How hard can it be?”

**Craig:** “Time to die.”

**John:** “Follow that car!”

**Craig:** “Let’s do this thing!”

**John:** “You go girl!”

**Craig:** “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

**John:** “Yeah, a little too quiet.”

**Craig:** “If I’m not back in five minutes get out of here,” or, “blow the whole thing up,” or, “call the cops.”

**John:** “What part of _____ don’t you understand?”

**Craig:** “I’m not leaving you!” “You have to go on without me.”

**John:** “Don’t even go there.”

**Craig:** “I’ve always wanted to say that.”

**John:** “Ready when you are.”

**Craig:** “Is this some kind of sick joke?”

**John:** “Oh, ha, ha, very funny.”

**Craig:** “Did I just say that out loud?”

**John:** “Wait. Do you hear something?”

**Craig:** “It’s…just a scratch.”

**John:** “How is he?” “He’ll live.”

**Craig:** “I’m…so…cold!”

**John:** “Is that clear?” “Crystal.”

**Craig:** “What if…nah, it would never work.”

**John:** “And there’s nothing you or anyone else can do to stop me.”

**Craig:** “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

**John:** “Note to self.”

**Craig:** “Honey, is that you?”

**John:** “What’s the meaning of this?”

**Craig:** “What seems to be the problem officer?”

**John:** “What’s the worst that could happen?” / “What have we got to lose?”

**Craig:** “I have a bad feeling about this.”

**John:** “Leave it. They’re already dead.”

**Craig:** “Don’t you think I know that?”

**John:** “Whatever you do, don’t look down.”

**Craig:** “Why won’t you die!”

**John:** “I eat guys like you for breakfast.”

**Craig:** “Oh, now you’re really starting to piss me off.”

**John:** “We’ve got company.”

**Craig:** “Hang on. If you’re here, then that means…uh-oh.”

**John:** “Oh, that’s not good.”

**Craig:** “Awkward!”

**John:** “What just happened?”

**Craig:** “We’ll never make it in time!”

**John:** “Stay here.” “No way, I’m coming with you.”

**Craig:** “This isn’t over.”

**John:** “Jesus H. Christ!”

**Craig:** “It’s no use!”

**John:** “It’s a trap!”

**Craig:** “She’s gonna blow!”

**John:** “Okay. Here’s what we do…” And cut to a different scene.

**Craig:** “Wait a minute. Are you saying…?”

**John:** “You’ll never take me alive.”

**Craig:** “Okay. Let’s call that Plan B.”

**John:** “I always knew you’d come crawling back.”

**Craig:** “Try to get some sleep.”

**John:** “I just threw up in my mouth a little.”

**Craig:** “Leave this to me. I’ve got a plan.”

**John:** “No. That’s what they want us to think.”

**Craig:** “Why are you doing this to me?!”

**John:** “When I’m through with you…”

**Craig:** “Impossible!”

**John:** “Wait! I can explain. This isn’t what it looks like.”

**Craig:** “Showtime!”

**John:** “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

**Craig:** “If we make this out alive…”

**John:** “That’s it! You’re off the case.”

**Craig:** “How long have we known each other?” “We go back a long way.”

**John:** “Well. Well. Well.”

**Craig:** “Ah-ha! I knew it!”

**John:** “Done and done!”

**Craig:** “Leave it. He’s not worth it.”

**John:** “In English please?”

**Craig:** “As many of you know…” and then a bunch of exposition.

**John:** “Too much information!”

**Craig:** “Yeah, you better run!”

**John:** “Unless…” “Unless what?”

**Craig:** “What are you doing here?” “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

**John:** “So, who died? Oh…”

**Craig:** “You’re either brave or very stupid. ”

**John:** “Oh, yeah? You and whose army?”

**Craig:** “Now that’s what I’m talking about.”

**John:** “Don’t call us. We’ll call you.”

**Craig:** “It’s not you. It’s me.”

**John:** “This just gets better and better.”

**Craig:** “This is not happening. This is not happening!”

**John:** “Make it stop!”

**Craig:** “Shut up and kiss me.”

**John:** “I’ll see you in hell.”

**Craig:** “Lock and load!”

**John:** “Oh, hell no!”

**Craig:** That was too white. [laughs]

**John:** [trying again] “Oh hell no!”

**Craig:** Yes. I love that one.

“Not on my watch!”

**John:** “You just don’t get it, do you?”

**Craig:** “I have got to get me one of these.”

**John:** “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

**Craig:** “It’s called _____. You should try it sometime.”

**John:** “That went well.”

**Craig:** That did go well.

**John:** And scene.

**Craig:** So that was a pretty great list of awful, awful lines to not write. And there are so many more. I mean, people can write in. It’s a fun game of coming up with the cliché awful lines. I think in comedy it’s particularly embarrassing when you trot one of these things out as if you haven’t already seen it a hundred times on a sitcom. And for dramas, these kind of overwrought lines are actually indicative usually of stories and character issues.

I mean, in comedy, okay, you’re just going for an easy laugh with a joke. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there is wrought. But if you’re writing a drama and you have a scene where someone has tripped and fallen and the other person is trying to drag them away and they say, “No. Leave me. You go on.” You just…you blew it. There’s a big problem there.

**John:** Some of these are transitional phrases that they are trying to, like — the scene was going in this direction and then it has to go in a different direction. Like someone has to start some exposition or someone has to do something different. The energy of the scene has to change. And they are just space killers; you have to find a way to not do them, because in real world situations you wouldn’t say that, they wouldn’t be there. You would just actually start the next thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. This kind of stuff actually came in very handy when I was writing spoof movies, because the spoof characters almost only speak in these things. I used to talk about it with Anna Faris, because we were trying to figure out how it was that these sort of lines worked in spoof but not in anything else; in anything else they were horrible. And we both realized that in spoof, characters have no subtext whatsoever; they simply say what’s on their mind. [laughs] They’re just very, very stupid people.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And this is the way very, very stupid people talk. So don’t make your characters very, very stupid.

**John:** All of these lines sort of sound like a Tracy Jordan movie, from 30 Rock. So when they do the cutaways to one of the movies that Tracy has made, these are all lines that he would have said in one of his movies.

**Craig:** Exactly, like, “I’ve gotta get me one of these.” It’s just so…You’re just not trying at that point. And I don’t like using the word “lazy” for writing, because I feel like writing is super hard and there’s nothing lazy about it, but in that case it’s actually not hard to write that line. It was written for you, chewed up, and spat out 100 times. So now you’re just sort of retyping something. It’s not very inventive.

**John:** One of these lines, the first time I heard it was in Rawson Thurber’s script and his movie for Dodgeball, which was, “I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.” And maybe it was originally Rawson, or maybe it had been there for a long time and I just happened to never hear it, but Christine Taylor says it to Ben Stiller, and it actually works really well in the scene. But that was the first time I heard it. I don’t know if that that was the origin of it.

**Craig:** It long predates Dodgeball. When it showed up in Dodgeball it was kind of just sort of… — He was still in the safe zone, but it was already tilting into clamage. And the thing about those kinds of lines is that once they appear in something big and prominent and they use that in the ads, it’s done. Like, nobody else should go near it. So, you might say, “Oh man, you know, I came up with that line, I put it in a show and no one saw the show and then three years later I see it pop up in an ad for a movie, and now everyone thinks the movie came up with it.”

Well, you know, suck it up. That’s part of comedy and we’re all in this together. But, once it does show up in something like that, one cannot go near it again. It is done.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** And yet I will still see it. You know, my daughter watches the Disney Channel sitcoms and they’re just clam festivals.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a clambake.

**Craig:** It’s a clambake like you have no idea. Yeah.

**John:** So here’s how I would use the “I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.” In a situation where that could be a line, why don’t you just have the character kind of throw up in their mouth and literally have to spit out the vomit? It’s funny again.

**Craig:** Right. Like I actually threw up in mouth.

**John:** So they don’t even have to say anything because we sort of know what it is. And so just, like, have them upchuck a little bit and have to put it in a little towel and it would be great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Or in their hand, because bodily fluids in hands is funny.

**Craig:** Or like a man kisses a woman in a bar and she says, “I think I threw up in your mouth a little.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] That’s funnier.

**Craig:** However you need to put something on it.

**John:** Yeah. I think if he says, “I think you just threw up in my mouth a little.”

**Craig:** “Did you just throw up in my mouth a little?” [laughs] It could be a question.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah.

**Craig:** “I think I might have thrown up in your mouth a little.” Yeah. Hmm.

**John:** Hmm. It’s good. See, we’re writing here.

We have some questions, so let’s get to some questions, which is I think one of the things I’ve enjoyed most about doing this podcast over the last two years, answering some questions and getting some multiple opinions here.

So the question is from Jared in Weston, Connecticut. He asks, “What is the process of selling a spec script as a completely new writer? Maybe you could use Go as an example. Do you have to have representation in order to sell a spec? Who buys a spec — producers or studios? I totally understand if this is one of those cringe-worthy ‘how do I get an agent’ questions, but I’d really love to hear your insight into the process.”

So, yeah, I think some 101 questions are valid every once and awhile.

**Craig:** It’s a good question.

**John:** Good question. A spec is a script — just so we’ll define terms here from the start — a spec is a script that you wrote yourself that is not based on anything. It’s just you sat down at your computer and you wrote a spec script. This was 100 percent your idea and something you did. And you own it, completely, so no one owns any other part of it.

Generally, if it’s not a movie you’re going to make yourself but you’re trying to sell it to someone else to make it, that would go out into the world with an agent or a manager or someone else who is representing you and the script to buyers. Those buyers could be producers. Those buyers could be big studios. They could be some sort of in between production entity. But generally it’s pretty rare, I think, for a production company to find your script and directly buy it without some other intermediary force. Craig, you can correct me if you disagree.

**Craig:** No. I think that that’s absolutely correct and it’s going to be the studio that buys it, not a producer. Producers attach themselves to specs. Producers aren’t really employers. This is a hard concept for people to wrap their minds around when they haven’t been exposed to the very strange business of studios versus producers.

Producers basically are just hired guns by the studio to shepherd projects, but they don’t actually pay you. They don’t buy stuff. They may option things. I mean, occasionally they buy things if they have a discretionary fund, which is a pool of development money that the producer has access to and can use freely.

Still, even in those cases the money is from the studio. But you were right on.

**John:** So, the advantage of writing a spec script is that obviously you can just write it and it’s free and clear and it’s yours and you can do whatever you want with it. Maybe you will sell that script to somebody, and that script will not become a movie. Most cases, no one will buy that script. That doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly valuable.

So the first script I wrote was this romantic tragedy set in Boulder, Colorado. It never sold. God bless it, it should never have sold because it really is not a movie, but people read it because they could read it. And they liked it enough that it got me my first jobs, my first assignments.

Go was the first spec script that I sold, and that sold to a tiny little production company. But it was sent around all over town, so at that point I had an agent who sent it to all the studios who said, “We love the writing. We can’t make this movie.” And a little tiny company said yes and that was the start of that.

**Craig:** And that’s the case now more than ever. There once was a burgeoning spec market, not so much anymore. Occasionally still people sell specs. But more often than not the specs today are calling cards for people to advertise their talent and their abilities.

**John:** And so there are weird exceptions. Like Amazon Studios will buy things that has no agent or manager or sort of anybody representing it. But Amazon Studios is a weird, sort of special case that I wouldn’t strongly recommend to anybody.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** A question from Armin in Tehran, Iran. We have a listener in Tehran.

**Craig:** Cool!

**John:** How great is the world?

**Craig:** The world is pretty great. Iran is not so great. I just read that they are now banning women from various classes in their universities. Not cool.

**John:** Not cool at all.

**Craig:** But, you know, the other fascinating thing about Iran, and we’ll get to his question in a second, is that did you know that there are no gay people in Iran?

**John:** That’s fascinating.

**Craig:** Yeah. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad assures us that there are no gay people in Iran. [laughs] It’s the one place in the world where they just don’t grow.

**John:** Yeah. Wow. They figured something out!

**Craig:** Cool guy. So, what’s the question? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] “I’m a screenwriter and I wrote some screenplays that I think have a chance to sell. Would you please help me know about ways to save my rights? As you know, unfortunately Iran isn’t under copyright law or a WTO copyright registration. So if I register my works at the WGA, how can I present them? I have a trustful friend in the USA, so is it possible to ship to him? If yes, what are the legal stages? Thanks for your attention.”

**Craig:** Oh boy. Wow.

**John:** So, way outside of our realm of experience. First off, I don’t know this to be true, so I’m taking him at his word that Iran actually doesn’t abide by copyright law. But that just kind of throws a wrench in everything.

**Craig:** It does. I mean, it may be true. There is copyright law which is country to country. And then there is essentially the Berne Convention, which is a kind of overarching regulator of copyright throughout the world, but even for instance the United States doesn’t subscribe to all the parts of the Berne Convention.

For instance, droit moral and so forth, we have work-for-hire, Europe doesn’t. Our copyright here in the United States is actually enshrined in the Constitution itself. Most people don’t know that. There’s part of the constitution that just talks about copyright. I have no idea what the situation is in Iran. I’m going to take his word for it that they don’t have any copyright protection, which seems odd to me.

And if that is the case and this person was trying to sell screenplays not in Iran, which I would imagine is the case given the situation there, then what I would do is probably send the script to, I guess, to the United States Copyright Office. Because the truth is anybody anywhere can register something with the Copyright Office in the United States. I don’t think you need to be a citizen, per se. And you would get the protections of that copyright where it applies, mainly the United States. But other people would respect it as well.

**John:** Yeah. My first line of investigation would be to figure out — there are Iranian filmmakers, and so obviously they are doing something. But, look at Iranian novelists or sort of anyone who is publishing outside of Iran and try to figure out how they’re doing what they’re doing, because they must have some copyright protection in places outside of Iran. So that would probably the first and best way to pursue — whatever they’re doing is probably the right thing to do.

US Copyright Office, certainly if a non-citizen can do that, that’s a great idea, too. Worse comes to worst, I think there might also be a way that if he has this trusted American friend — and again, this is just speculation, because it could be a work-for-hire in which the copyright vests in the employer — you could do something where potentially the person is buying it here for a nominal fee and registering that as being the owner — registering himself as being the owner of this copyrighted material.

**Craig:** You don’t actually need to do work-for-hire for that. You can transfer copyrights. The other thing is, the simplest thing if you wanted to go that route would simply be to send the script to your friend and have them register it as their own copyrighted work.

However, the purpose of copyright and all of this ultimately is to properly credit authorship. And the person who is writing the question is the author, not his friend. I have to believe somewhat that that can be protected. But, you know, this is one we’ll have to do a little research on and come back to, because that’s tricky. And I feel like I need more facts before I can answer properly.

**John:** Yeah. But I’m just excited that somebody in Iran is listening to our podcast.

**Craig:** That is fantastic, by the way. And we have here in Los Angeles we have a very large, very significant Persian community. I have a lot of Persian friends. And I am a fan of the people of Iran. Not so much the government, but the people.

**John:** We all hope for a very positive outcome in the decade to come for Iran.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** A question about following up after a meeting. So, Bin Lee writes in to ask, “By dumb luck I ran into an established Hollywood writer at an airport in Cleveland this weekend. He was very nice and gave me his email since we ran out of business cards.” We had an earlier conversation about business cards.

“The next day I sent him an email reminding him who I was and it was nice to meet him. I also asked if he was free to meet up for lunch so I could pick his brain on some topics. Was it too forward of me to ask him to meet for lunch? I know there’s a fine line between friendly and too aggressive. I’m sure he’s super busy and I’m a small fish, but let’s say he doesn’t reply to my email. How long should I wait before I try to email him again? Two weeks? One month?”

**Craig:** Well, there’s nothing wrong with asking somebody to lunch. There’s nothing particularly too forward about that. It’s only forward to presume that they must have lunch with you. And he doesn’t have to have lunch with you and he may not want to, because like you said he’s busy. I think you could always shoot him another one in a month I think is fair and just say, “Hey, doesn’t have to be lunch, by the way, maybe just coffee. Or maybe we just get on the phone for 20 minutes. I just have some questions.”

I think you should err on the side of making it as easy as possible for this person to help you.

**John:** I would agree. I would also… — The huge advantage to me for coffee is that coffee has a much more limited time commitment implicit. And so I will tend to do coffee with people who are sort of in the situation where he’s a friend of a friend who, you know, I don’t know whether this is going to be a good time or a not so good time. Coffee could be 15 minutes. It could be an hour. But it’s much less of a commitment, so that’s a helpful thing for me.

In terms of following up, I think it’s a great use of the email, that’s good initiative. If after a week you heard nothing, maybe lob another, but after two contacts and you hear nothing, let it be done, because it’s not something that’s going to… — More follow up isn’t going to make that better.

**Craig:** I totally agree. Two emails is plenty. The lack of response should be presumed to be a “no,” and while it may seem rude, and it technically is rude, the truth is I get a lot of emails from people. I don’t even know how some of them get my email. And what happens is I find myself suddenly spending an hour helping people with stuff. And I don’t have an hour sometimes.

Sometimes I have the hour, I just don’t want to do it. I just want to lie down.

**John:** Yeah, that’s fair.

Brendan writes, “My writing partner and I have recently collaborated with a director on an idea he had for a movie. It was made clear at the beginning that the director wanted a shared ‘Story by’ credit and some form of compensation since the pitch was based on his original idea. We agreed in principle to this — no contracts yet — and used the WGA residual formula to determine the percentage of any initial sale. Therefore, one-half of a ‘Story by’ credit is 12.5 percent. We then sold the pitch to a studio, and between our lawyers and studio business affairs no one can seem to come up with a clean way to execute what seems to be a standard type of situation. How does this not happen all the time? WGA says their jurisdiction begins at the written story treatment level and do not cover pitches. Any suggestions on how to proceed?”

**Craig:** Oh, boy. This sort of stuff happens all the time. The Writers Guild is correct. The problem is: What writers sell is written material; what producers sell are ideas. So, what I would suggest, since the director appears to have not written anything but rather tossed ideas around with you, gave you an idea which you then took and started to write, what I would suggest is that you take the amount of money that the studio is willing to pay you — let’s just say, we’ll call it $100,000. You take 87.5 percent of that. So you say to the studio reduce the amount you would give me for the writing by 12.5 percent. You are the only writer employed. Take that remaining money, whatever I just said, $12,500, give that to the director and pay him under a producing deal.

**John:** But here’s the problem: Ultimately if the movie gets made there’s nothing guaranteeing that director a ‘Story by’ credit when it comes to determining credits.

**Craig:** He shouldn’t have a “Story by” credit. Here’s the deal: He didn’t write it. And sometimes people get really cranky about this because they feel like, “Well but it was my idea and I talked it out and I told them what to do.” Yeah, but you didn’t write it. Trust me, pal, and I’m being mean to this guy, it’s not fair — I’ll be nice to him. Trust me, friend, [laughs], the reason that you told that thing to him and then had him write it is because writing is annoying and/or hard.

There is actually value in the writing itself. And that’s what screen credit is for. Writing credit is for written words on a page, not for ideas or thoughts. If you want to open up the notion that credit be for ideas and thoughts, everybody gets credit. You’re not the only one who is going to be asking for story credit. Why won’t the producer, the executives, the actors, everybody — the writing credit is a really specific thing. Words fixed on a page literary material.

**John:** So, I basically agree. I think Craig’s solution is probably the best solution for the situation as it exists right now. Let’s play time machine, though. If you decided at the start that this director wanted “Story by” credit, shared “Story by” credit, what you should have probably done is worked up the pitch in a written form with him involved in writing up the pitch so that he was one of the people who helped write the pitch for it. And therefore there was some literary material that you could register and say this was the underlying material behind this so that it was natural that he was going to be getting his percentage down the road, that this “Story by” credit was going to be shared between the three of you.

**Craig:** And if my solution doesn’t fly for any number of reasons, I guess the only remaining thing to do would be to resubmit the original treatment as written-by the two of you. And then the problem is solved.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It may not be true, though; in fact, it isn’t true. So the Writers Guild at that point may do something called a participating writer investigation or a pre-arbitration to make sure that you weren’t strong-armed into this sort of thing.

**John:** And it doesn’t sound like he was strong-armed. It sounds like from the very start this was the intention. And we don’t know all the facts on what this collaboration was. And maybe there were zillions of emails back and forth, and so there is writing happening on what this project was way back when. So, we’ll see.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A question from Josh. Josh writes, “Scriptnotes has introduced me to podcasts and now I’m hungry for more. John has mentioned a few times listening to podcasts while doing dishes, so I’m wondering what other podcasts do you recommend for your listeners, either screenwriting related if there are others, or otherwise?”

So, Craig, if I recall correctly you don’t listen to any podcasts at all?

**Craig:** No. I do not listen to podcasts. I’m not a very auditory — auditorily inclined learner. I’m much more visual. So, I tend to read everything and listen to very little, except for music.

**John:** So I listen to a lot of podcasts. So, the four or five that I picked out, which I think are fantastic, which won’t be to everyone’s taste, but I recommend them so you should try them in iTunes. First is a comedy podcast called Throwing Shade with Erin Gibson and Bryan Safi. It’s absolutely filthy and it’s great fun.

Build & Analyze is a Mac iOS development centered — really iOS development centered podcast with Marco Arment that is fantastic, and Dave Benjamin.

John Gruber’s podcast I was on a couple months ago. He’s great. And so he’s been doing a podcast for quite a long time. He describes it as being the director’s commentary for Daring Fireball, his website, which is very popular and is good.

And then for all my political stuff I really love the Slate Political Gabfest, which is a weekly podcast which has three very smart people from Slate talking about three issues that are on the national stage. And so listening through the Republican primaries and sort of getting into the actual campaign season, it’s been a great source of both information and commentary about that.

For screenwriting, the only other one that I listen to with some regularity is the Nerdist Writer’s Podcast, which is actually fantastic. And so it’s a TV-focused podcast that talks to showrunners and other television writers about the craft, and it tends to be more of a roundtable setting, and it’s really great. And so we’ve talked about doing some sort of shared podcast with them at some point which hopefully in this next year will get to happen.

**Craig:** Oh, that sounds kind of cool.

**John:** Yeah. Our last question of the day is about finishing, so I thought this appropriate. Josh in LA writes, “I have a problem. And that problem is finishing a script. It may sound pathetic, but for me it’s very real and very worrisome. I have what I think are great ideas. I understand mechanics of writing and all that, but I find that during the process I either begin to dislike the idea or I’ll come up with some reason why it’s not the right script to be writing, and once that happens I’m zapped of all motivation.

“I produce a lot of material. I think it’s good material, but I seem to struggle with crossing the finish line. I have attention deficit disorder and I don’t take medication for it, which may have something to do with impatience or lack of focus, but outside of that I’m curious if this is a common problem and would be grateful to hear you or Craig give advice.”

**Craig:** I’m sorry. I just love “I have attention deficit disorder but I don’t take medication for it.” You know, maybe you do have attention deficit disorder; I don’t know. That has nothing to do with why you can’t finish your screenplay.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** If you enough attention to write 70 pages, you have enough attention to write 110 pages. The problem that you’re experiencing is very common and I would argue almost always is the result of poor planning before you start it. There is no reason that you shouldn’t know precisely what the ending of your movie is before you start writing it.

The beginning and the ending are married to each other. And the fun of writing the movie is moving from one to the other in an interesting way, taking a character from one to the other in an interesting way. So, if you don’t know how the movie ends or you lose sight of what the movie’s ending should be, it’s because you just didn’t start right. So I would suggest if you are not already doing this, you — specifically you — should outline your movie completely.

You should be able to describe the movie to somebody as if you just saw it scene by scene before you write “Fade In.”

**John:** A lot of what he’s facing I think is also the-grass-is-always-greener problem. When you are in the middle of a script, you see all the problems with your script because you’re facing them every day. And so every time you sit down to work on it, you’re bombarded by everything that’s not working right in your script.

And so there’s always going to be that shiny other idea that’s like, “Oh, well that would be a better thing for me to write because that’s all new.” It’s the pretty girl sitting over there that doesn’t have all the baggage of the girl who’s sitting in front of you.

So you are fascinated by that other thing because you are not aware of its problems. And so of course that other idea is going to look better. And you want to go off and write that one instead of the one you’re in right now.

You’ve got to finish. And what I think a lot of people don’t understand about screenwriting when they first start to work in the form is 120 pages is really long. I mean, it’s the longest thing that most people ever have to write. And it can be a challenge to get through it all. And so with good planning you’ll hopefully be able to know what the next thing is. When you encounter that second act malaise, which really I think encounter that moment of like, “Oh, I’m stuck in the middle of this and it doesn’t seem like it will ever end,” jump forward and write something else that is exciting for you to write. Write those things at the end. Write those things that got you excited about it.

And I always forget which writer first told me about this idea, but it’s a really good idea that I’ve never actually implemented but I sort of should. Right when you first get excited to write a project, when you first set out, this woman, she writes a letter to herself about how much she loves this project and why she’s writing it. She writes it. She seals it in an envelope. And then when she hits that moment where she can’t do anymore with it, she rips open the envelope and reads that letter and that helps her get through the draft.

**Craig:** Aw. She gives herself a hug.

**John:** She gives herself a big hug.

**Craig:** Aw!

**John:** Which is nice. So, I say, Josh, give yourself a big hug. Know that really every script sort of feels like it’s never going to be finished. I mean, this thing I just turned, it wasn’t that I was even struggling with the work — I wasn’t struggling with any scene or any one moment of it. I was just like, “I can never get this thing finished.” But then I got it finished and it’s mostly just sitting down, or in my case standing up, and doing the work.

**Craig:** Yeah. You certainly can’t let despair stop you. If you let despair stop you — if everyone who wrote screenplays let despair stop them, your multiplex would be empty.

**John:** Yup. And with that, I want to talk about One Cool Things. Do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

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

**John:** I hope ours isn’t the same thing. I worry that it might be the same thing.

**Craig:** There’s not a chance.

**John:** Okay, good.

**Craig:** You go first.

**John:** My one cool thing is a book trailer for a book by Derek Haas, who is a friend of both of ours.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, I liked his book trailer.

**John:** It’s a good book trailer. So, Derek Haas is a very prolific screenwriter and now a TV writer, and he has a new show, Chicago Fire, on NBC which was advertised incessantly during the Olympics. I felt like the Olympics were on fire how often they were showing that commercial. He writes with a writing partner, Michael Brandt, but he also by himself writes books.

And I don’t know how he does it. It’s some sort of drug that lets him just create a tremendous amount of words. But he has a new book coming out this fall called The Right Hand. And there is a trailer for the book which is actually really good. They did a great job with it.

And I’m not sure I completely believe in trailers for books, but this kind of sells me on it, because it feels like this is a spy novel and I see sort of why a person might see this and think, “Wow, I’d see that movie. Since the movie doesn’t exist yet I’ll read this book.”

So, in the show notes you’ll see a link to The Right Hand, a book by Derek Haas.

**Craig:** Excellent. Yeah. It’s very cool. And Derek is a good guy. I just, in fact, came back from lunch with him.

**John:** Ah.

**Craig:** He’s my friend. I have a Cool Thing this week that I don’t understand. And I think one of the great things about this podcast is that while ostensibly it’s about us helping people, I feel like we have this amazing cohort of listeners out there who are really smart. And I notice in the comments and tweets and things, sometimes they’re just a step ahead of us on some things. And I feel like somebody, one of our listeners, is going to be able to explain to me, because I’m so fascinated by it.

So there was this really cool article in Gizmodo, a website I love, and it was titled The Algorithm that Controls Your Life. Did you read this, John?

**John:** I did not.

**Craig:** It’s really cool. Okay. So an algorithm is basically a decision-making chart. It’s just a way of approaching how to make decisions and determine outcomes. And so, for instance, “A fund manager,” I’m reading from the article, “a fund manager might want to arrange a portfolio optimally to balance risk and expected return over a range of stocks. Or, a railway timetabler wants to decide how to best roster staff for trains. Or a factory manager tries to work out how to juggle finite machine resources. This is the job of the algorithm.”

There is one algorithm that emerged in the ’40s from the work of a mathematician here in the United States named George Dantzig. And his job back then was to increase the logistical efficiency of the US Air Force, a pretty mundane kind of problem. But what he came up with was an algorithm that is represented by something called a polytope; it’s basically a chart — a pathway decision chart. And it’s this kooky looking sort of — it looks like a weird gem almost. And his particular algorithm was called the simplex algorithm.

And it turns out that the simplex algorithm is the most useful algorithm of all. And it is used in everything — search engines, how food gets to the market, everything. One academic quoted in the article says, “Tens or hundreds of thousands of calls of the simplex method are made every minute.”

So, to you out there: What is this? [laughs] I need to know. I need you to explain the simplex algorithm and I need to understand how an algorithm is represented by a shape and why this one is so powerful.

**John:** That’s great. That’s a great call to action, because I think we have some very smart listeners who will be able to describe it in terms that are not necessarily layman, but smart-but-not-maybe-gear-heady people can understand. That would be great.

**Craig:** Yeah. I just love that there’s some dude in the ’40s who came up with a shape and the shape is controlling our lives. [laughs] It’s so cool. And I need to understand how. So thank you. Thank you, unnamed person.

**John:** I find all these kinds of optimization and sort of, you know, trying to look at how decisions are made fascinating. So, economics, I loved taking the classes but none of it really stuck. Like supply and demand stuck, but the bigger implications of it always sort of went over my head. And so I like that people understand it. I guess I trust that people understand it. Sometimes I have moments of doubt that where I think that people are sort of just making stuff up. But it’s neat.

**Craig:** The fun thing about economics — and I’m with you by the way, exactly with you; I understand basic concepts but then once they leap past those I’m gone — but economics is one of the few areas of academic study where no one seems to agree at all. It’s almost to the point where it’s useless. I mean, there’s a predominance of people who believe that something is true in terms of medicine or biology or physics.

I mean, most physicists believe that the Higgs boson was real. Some didn’t. But most did. Economics, it just seems like, well, you’ve got Vienna over here and you’ve got the other one over there. [laughs] Keynes. And they just don’t agree at all. And they argue all the time.

**John:** Well the trouble becomes is you’re trying to control — it all looks really pretty on a chart, but in the real world you are controlling for so many variables; you really can’t say whether that had this impact or had this impact. So, did raising that marginal tax rate make this change, or did it have all of these other manifestations in ways that you can’t have anticipated? So, that’s where I get confused.

And so it’s always fun to talk about, “oh, guns and butter,” but then when you actually really drill down and get into more specifics it’s not as simple or fun.

**Craig:** I feel like psychology is a bit like that, too. Psychology is so open-ended. It can almost account for any outcome. Any one theory can account for any outcome which makes all of it useless.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But not the simplex algorithm. That will someday tell us what to do. I think it already is, actually.

**John:** Yeah. Right now. It has told us that it is time to end this podcast.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Craig, thank you for a fun year of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** And here’s to many more. We should have a little cake. We should make a little cake and give it to our microphones.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** The microphone is one year old. So cute!

**John:** Which microphone are you using, by the way?

**Craig:** I use the same one you do, the AT2020.

**John:** It has a little glowing blue light.

**Craig:** The glowing blue light.

**John:** It makes me so happy.

**Craig:** Yeah. The glowing blue light is very comforting.

**John:** Craig, thank you again. Talk to you next week.

**Craig:** Thank you. You got it.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/what-script-should-you-write).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name, Craig Mazin.

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

**Craig:** I’m doing fine, John. Enjoying a nice day of not writing. It’s my favorite kind of day.

**John:** Those can be very good days. This last week my Tuesday, for whatever reason, was spectacular and I really considered maybe just calling it a week. And it’s like — I’m just not even going to try to work the rest of the week. I’m not going to try to do anything. I’ll just say that was a really good week and it was only Tuesday. Everything was coming up roses on Tuesday.

**Craig:** I’ve done it. I’ve done it. I’ve started on a Monday morning and thought, “You know what? Don’t feel it.” And that feeling stayed with me all the way through Friday. [laughs]

You know, I sometimes feel a little weird because when I do write I’m very intense and I can write a whole lot all at one time. I can kind of sprint. And then there are times where I just do nothing. And I always feel guilty because sometimes people say, “How do you do all the stuff you do? You have a podcast. And you write…and you…”

And I go, “Well yeah, that’s true. But I must tell you I actually spend enormous quantities of time doing nothing at all.” But I don’t say that because I think that would make them feel even worse. Like not only am I lapping you but I’m sleeping for most of the race.

**John:** Yeah. What was so marvelous about my Tuesday, it wasn’t really a writing Tuesday, but it was all the other parts of screenwriting, which is like the taking the meeting and the doing the stuff and making the phone calls. And so I was over at the Fox lot for some of this, and I always forget that like when you have lunch on the lot you see all the other people there.

And so like I met Seth Grahame-Smith, who weirdly we’d worked together and we talked on the phone but I’d never met him in person, so I met him. I saw my friend Josh. I saw my friend Dana who has a TV show. I got to see her wonderful offices. It was great. So, a very fun, good afternoon spent at the Fox lot.

**Craig:** You know what? I had that experience over at Warner Bros. I was over there the other day, and normally I’ll sit in the office with Todd Phillips and we’ll eat there while we’re working, but on this particular day we decided to go out and we sat on their little dining area and Chris Nolan came by. I met Chris Nolan — how cool is that?

**John:** Oooh!

**Craig:** Let’s see…Chris Nolan. Jay Roach. Baz Luhrmann came by.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, it was so much fun for me. And, you know, they all know Todd. They don’t know me. I’m just sort of sitting there. Then at the very end I’m like, “Hi, how are you?” I get so awestruck.

I was standing in front of Todd’s office and Paul Thomas Anderson came by, which was crazy. I just love meeting people like that. If I ever don’t get star struck by these people, I’m done, as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a different kind of thing. It’s like I’m not star struck in the way of like I want somebody’s autograph. But when you meet somebody in a social situation where they know the other person, it is a little bit unusual. Like Seth Rogan for the first time I met in a cafeteria situation. And it was like, “Oh, that’s Seth Rogan.” And he’s like, “Oh hey. I’m a big fan.”

I’m like, “Wow, you know who I am.” That’s incredibly exciting to me. So that is nice when it happens.

**Craig:** I never believe it when anybody says they even know who I am. I never believe it. I just don’t believe it. I don’t think it’s true. Jay Roach was like, “Oh hey.” He did that. And I’m like, “Nah, I don’t believe it; I don’t think you know who I am.”

But I guess the star struck part of it for me is when I meet people who are operating…who do the craft of filmmaking at a level that is just astounding to me. I’m particularly enamored of people who do things that I don’t even understand. I don’t understand how Paul Thomas Anderson does what he does. I don’t understand how Baz Luhrmann does what he does. I could never do it in a million years. It’s so much fun for me to watch. Chris Nolan.

So when I meet them I feel like I’m meeting wizards. It’s great. I just love it. I love it.

**John:** That’s nice.

So this week I thought we would talk about a couple of listener questions, just random stuff that came into the mailbag. And also talk about really an evergreen question that I often get after I’m on a panel for something, which is somebody comes up to me and asks, “Hey, I’m thinking about these two different things. I’m trying to decide which one to write.” And so I thought we would talk about which movie you should write.

**Craig:** Good idea.

**John:** So, for follow up, I have a couple things to go through. First off, last week was our first Three Page Challenge. And, Craig, how did you feel about the Three Page Challenge?

**Craig:** I enjoyed doing it. I felt a little guilty afterwards.

**John:** How so?

**Craig:** I don’t know. I just feel like, god, we were a little hard on the Beaver, but that’s kind of what people need, I think. So, I mean, I love the exercise. I was a little nervous that maybe I in particular was too harsh.

**John:** I can hear that. I temper that with the realization that everybody sent in those scripts anticipating criticism, so not just like a, “Hey — that was great.” It was, like, we were talking about what could make it better. And hopefully we had some suggestions for making it better. And most people who wrote in with responses, a lot of them on Twitter, and some on the actual blog post itself, seemed to dig the exercise, so I think we should do it again.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree.

**John:** Not this week, but maybe every couple weeks we’ll do a few more of those. Because it is constructive and it’s very much about the words on the page which is hard to do in a podcast otherwise.

**Craig:** I also think it’s one of the only opportunities people can have to sample what’s coming. You know, if you’re not in the business you have no idea the kind of scrutiny and criticism you’re going to be in for. I’d like to think that you and are particularly good at it as opposed to what they might get at a lower level in Hollywood where ding-a-lings are reading it and giving notes. But this is what’s coming.

So, it’s probably a good thing. And I was very pleased with the feedback. I think it was sort of unanimously positive, so that’s great.

**John:** A few things to clarify. Craig and I — actually it was Stuart who picked which of the three scripts we were going to read. So, Stuart has read everything and Stuart picked three really good ones. And so that was actually a criteria going into it. Like these were three of the best ones that came in, not necessarily the very, very best, but of the sample that we had at that time those were three of the best ones.

I did write to each of the people who wrote in, each of those three guys who submitted their scripts, to let them know that they were going to be on the podcast, so it wasn’t a shock and a surprise. And two of the people wrote back after listening to the podcast and said, “Hey, that was actually really great. And it was scary but it was good.” And they thanked us for doing it.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So good. I’m glad it was helpful for them.

So far we had 204 entries. Of those, 12% were written by women.

**Craig:** 12% were written by women?

**John:** And I don’t know quite how to process that. Is it that there are not more women writers? Is it that women don’t feel like writing into the thing?

**Craig:** No, there’s not…

**John:** I think there’s just not more women writers.

**Craig:** There’s just not more women writers. And this is, you know, I’ll go ahead and just jump on the third rail because I hate tiptoeing up to third rails; I like to hug them and let all the voltage course through my body.

You know, the Writers Guild every year does a study that tell us what we already know, which is that women are underrepresented as professional screen and television writers. Racial minorities are underrepresented. Gay people are underrepresented.

**John:** Are gay people actually underrepresented?

**Craig:** Well, nobody really knows because no one knows how many gay people there are.

**John:** Because there’s not a form to mark on the boxes.

**Craig:** Correct, that’s true. But, I’ll withdraw that. Transgendered people are underrepresented. But the argument has always been: Is this because of racism? Is it because of sexism? Is it because simply fewer of those underrepresented groups are actually going for these jobs?

The truth is, I don’t know the answer when it comes to race at all. I suspect that there’s got to be some element of racism going on. It’s just too stark. And also because I know too many black writers who tell me stories and I go, “God. Yup, that’s blatant.”

But when it comes to gender, and I’ve always said, look, women in very high positions at all these studios. There was a time when the majority of studios were being run by women, or if not run by women, women at very high levels. Women are heavily represented, I would assume equitably represented in the ranks of development executives. It seems to me that they are.

So what’s going on with screenwriters? And then we run this little…it’s not scientific, but here’s just the thing, open to anyone. And I know that we have women who listen to us and men, and only 12% of women send scripts in. — I’m sorry, 12% of scripts are sent in by women. I have to presume it’s because women just are less interested.

Am I wrong?

**John:** I don’t know that you’re wrong. And what’s interesting is I think this contest, this challenge, is really targeted at sort of new, incoming screenwriters. So this isn’t something that’s targeted towards people who may have left the industry for whatever reason. Like, is there a reason why women are coming into the industry and then leaving the industry because there aren’t opportunities there?

I would suspect most of the people who are writing into this challenge are new, young, aspiring screenwriters. And so, if there are fewer women who are new, young aspiring screenwriters that’s going to ripple up through the whole way. If there’s fewer women trying to enter the pool there’s going to be fewer women down the road.

**Craig:** No question. And, look, that’s not to say that there isn’t also sexism going on. I’m sure there is, which only makes it harder once you’re there. But, some of the numbers that you see when we say, “Why aren’t there more female screenwriters?” The kneejerk conclusion is because Hollywood is evil and hates women. And, in fact, part of the issue is women just aren’t as interested. And I don’t know why.

Are they more interested in other kinds of writing? Are they smarter because this is a really stupid thing to do?

**John:** [laughs] Because they recognize it’s a dying field that they should stay away from?

**Craig:** [laughs] Right. Exactly.

**John:** I think it’s worth studying. And I think what you’re pointing out is that we’ve always looked at the demand aspect of it as that women can’t get jobs as screenwriters, and maybe that’s true, but we should also look at is there a limitation somehow on supply of women screenwriters. And is that something that needs to be addressed as well?

**Craig:** Well, if you are one of our many female listeners, and we run this Three Page thing again, you know, come on.

**John:** And when we do this next time we’ll make sure to pick some women writers just to make sure that they are heard as well.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So after the last podcast we had a bit of bad news. Dick Zanuck died. Dick Zanuck, who is a legendary producer, who produced Jaws, Cocoon, Driving Miss Daisy. He produced Big Fish of mine and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He passed away, which was a surprise.

Dick Zanuck was 77 years old. And often when you have an older person who’s in your life, somewhere there’s like a little mental tick box on the record you keep for that person, like, “could die.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** That sounds horrible and morbid, but I think there’s a reason why it’s shocking when a…

**Craig:** It’s not horrible and morbid; it’s just so you. I just love that you have, like there’s a MySQL column. There’s a thing called “Might Die.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And it’s checked “yes” or “no.” Am I still in the “no” column though?

**John:** There’s some faculty we have in us that sort of when a person is a certain age we recognize the fact that, okay, we should be ready for the fact that this person might not be around forever. And the reason why it is so shocking and surprising when a child dies, or when a younger person dies, and it’s less surprising and shocking when an older person dies. I think that’s a natural instinct.

Zanuck was sort of a weird special case because while he was 77 years old, he was like nowhere near retirement. He was one of the most fit and active people you’re ever going to meet. And a very active producer. He produced all of Tim’s movies.

And on an earlier podcast you and I talked about the different kinds of producers and the different roles that producers play. And Dick Zanuck was a protector. He was the bodyguard. He would protect Tim Burton from the studio, or whichever director of the movie from the studio, but he’d also protect the studio. The studio felt comfortable with him because he would help protect the movie to make sure it didn’t get knocked off track. He was really good that that.

And what was so fascinating about his funeral which was yesterday — we’re recording this on Friday, the funeral was Thursday — was to hear people from all parts of his life reflect on not just what his skills as a producer but sort of his skills as a person. And it was a very Big Fishy kind of funeral in the sense that you had your laughter and your tears. And you had the recognition that this is a man who lived a very, very full life and had the love of his life and the love of his life up the very last moment of his life, Lili Zanuck.

And it, I don’t know, weirdly I hadn’t gotten emotional until I’d gotten to the funeral and suddenly I’m like, “Oh my god, I won’t stop crying.” It was the recognition that, I don’t know — I don’t ever want to die, but if I were to die that would be the way to die is to, like, you have breakfast in the morning, you have lunch with friends, you talk to your kids twice a day — he talks to his kids every day — he has everything just right, and then suddenly gone. There’s not that long dragged out thing. It was like — to go out happy and on top.

**Craig:** I want to die covered in snakes, like most people.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, Zanuck was — you don’t want to use the phrase dying breed when somebody just died, but it’s true, it’s a dying breed of producer. The people who understood how to do what he did and when you described protecting both the director from the studio, and protecting the studio from the studio, and protecting the movie from the director and the studio, that to me is what producing really is. It’s protecting. And it’s just gone. You don’t see it anymore. It’s so hard to find guys who really know how to do that, you know.

They’re out there. I have been lucky to work with a few of them recently. But so many fewer than used to be. And it’s a bummer. It’s a sad thing.

But you’re right. I mean, there is something to be said to kind of go out like that. Personally, I’m going to retire long before I die. That’s my whole thing.

**John:** No. I’m never going to retire. He was actually one of the people who I thought about when I recognized like, oh, do I want to retire at some point? I’m like, no. I’m not going to retire. I don’t want to golf. I don’t want to do that. I want to keep making new stuff. And he kept making new stuff until the very end.

One of the things I tweeted about right when I found out that he passed away, I got an email from my agent saying we’ve heard that Dick Zanuck died but it’s not confirmed yet. And so I was sort of sitting on it for 20 minutes, like do I say anything about that, do I acknowledge it? Or do I wait for some confirmation?

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh my god. You’re News Rooming.

**John:** I was totally News Rooming it.

**Craig:** You were News Rooming.

**John:** And then I was like, “Oh, but I hope it’s not Deadline Hollywood Daily that prints it first.” But then they did say it first. And so like it was confirmation so I could say what I wanted to say, but then it felt like I was responding to her post.

**Craig:** Yeah, god.

**John:** But what I needed to say, and what I appreciated so much about Zanuck was that he recognized the long game of it all. And he recognized that relationships were more important than any one movie. And so when we would have to call me with bad news, he would pick up the phone and call me with bad news. And he would call me to tell me that I was fired, or that they weren’t making a movie, or that stuff had fallen apart, and he was brilliant at being able to that and not making it feel like the world was going to end. And so many people are so afraid to share negative news, and you have to. And he was terrific at that.

So I will very much miss him. But I will also miss the qualities that I thought he brought to that part of the industry.

**Craig:** That was so beautiful that I can’t help but fondly imagine what it’s going to be like when I die and you do that first podcast after I’m gone.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. The eulogy podcast will be the new trend by that point.

**Craig:** I think actually that podcast will just be like, “Hi, this is John August. This Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. I’m John August. And, anyway, today we’re gonna go on. We have some news. There’s nothing really to follow up on.”

**John:** That was the moment of silence was when you should have spoken.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s like a weird little pause.

**John:** Let’s answer some questions, Craig.

**Craig:** Let’s do it, while I’m still alive.

**John:** Paul from Onalaska, Wisconsin — come on, Onalaska, Wisconsin? That’s a great name.

**Craig:** Onalaska.

**John:** Onalaska. “In a previous podcast you told the story about how Hayden Christensen and his brother were pitching a show to a USA studio exec. That exec turned around and developed a similar show, seemingly based on Christensen’s idea.” Emphasis on seemingly, allegedly. The court case that happened said that they did actually have to proceed and investigate further, so.

“With that in mind, what are your thoughts on pitch festivals or websites like logline.com? It seems very risky putting your ideas out there, especially at pitch festivals for aspiring screenwriters looking for a foot in the door. To me it seems like a bunch of production companies and producer wannabes are getting together to find good ideas without having to hire the creator of the ideas. Will they likely take it, put their own people on it, and develop it as their own? Is it worth it, or do we stay away from these things?”

**Craig:** And, you know, this is one thing where I think everybody involved is silly. They’re not going to steal… — Let me just say this, because I know you and I [laughs] have said this.

**John:** We’ve said it so many times. But say it again.

**Craig:** I’m gonna say it again.

**John:** Or put it on a tee-shirt.

**Craig:** Now the umbrage is coming.

No one wants to steal you idea.

This is, for our podcast, this is the “You don’t have Lupus.” It’s not Lupus, okay? Nobody wants to steal your idea people. This fantasy you have that you’ve come up with the flux capacitor and they’re going to take it from you and stick it into the DeLorean and rip you off…

**John:** Or how about the windshield wiper…

**Craig:** Is not valid. The pitch festivals — listen to me carefully — the pitch festivals are not there to steal your ideas. You know what they are there to steal? Your money. Okay? That’s what it’s about. Yes, it’s a scam and stupid — don’t do it because no movies come out of pitch festivals. The point is, they’re gathering $50 to $100 from each one of you people. That’s the thing.

Get it? It’s like Die Hard. They’re not terrorists. It’s just a bank robbery. Okay? So that’s the deal. John?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** John? I feel good. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, your instincts were right but wrong.

**Craig:** I feel really good about that.

**John:** Yeah, you got the umbrage out? You hulked out there?

**Craig:** [yarr] I feel good. I’m calm. I’m calm.

**John:** So, to summarize: pitch festivals — probably a bad idea because they’re a scam that wants to take your money, not because they want to take your idea.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. I mean, this whole concern that — first of all, I’m sure they make you sign a billion waivers anyway. Yeah, of course they’re making you sign away your rights. But they’re not there for your ideas.

I mean, if John and I ran a pitch fest, we could make a lot of money, just to listen to you, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And these things are enormous, right? Have you ever — I’ve never gone to like whatever that one is downtown.

**John:** At one point, I think in Austin, I was on a pitch panel festival thing, and I found it painful because people were trying to pitch their ideas and there was a special format they were supposed to do and it was awkward and some of the things were terrible.

So, no, but I’ve never been paid to do this. Blech. No.

**Craig:** Yeah, no. So, anyway, the point is no they’re not trying to rip you off. No, you shouldn’t be doing them anyway. No one is trying to steal your idea. They’re just trying to make money off of you. You do not have Lupus.

**John:** Question number two. Oh, I think I should respond to this one first because you’re just going to go into full umbrage mode.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** Sharice asks, “Me and a couple friends are very interested in shooting a pilot for TV show on any network about our lives and daily activities. Who should we contact? Sent from my iPad.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So, Sharice, so here is why I’m going to treat your question seriously and sort of not mock you for it, because I think it is great that you are probably a younger person who wrote in with a question and you said, like, “I want to make a TV show and I’m going to go online and figure out who makes TV shows and ask my question.” So, I don’t want to mock you for doing that, because maybe you’re like 16, and baby, that’s awesome.

So, here is what I will say about you wanting to make a TV show with your friends: I think there’s probably never been a better time for you just to make a TV show with your friends. And that’s what YouTube is for, honestly. You should be shooting whatever you want to shoot on whatever cameras you sort of feel like shooting. Write as much as you feel like writing beforehand. And just try to make it together.

Because, if you are this 16-year-old girl who has interesting friends, maybe someone will see it and want to do something more with it. So I don’t want to sort of squash your dreams of that.

Sometimes there are really talented people who get together and it’s like, “Oh, we’re just gonna shoot something,” and it becomes something useful. Like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Those guys were smart and they wrote a show, and they shot their show, and people liked it.

What I would say, and what Craig would throw a chair at you for, is the idea that, “Oh, I have an idea. And if I have an idea then someone’s going to want to pay me to write and make this show.” That’s not going to happen because you’ve not shown that you actually have the ability to write something, to do something, to make something. So, you’re going to have to do that, and there’s probably never been a better time to do that than now.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, everybody’s experience with their friends is colored by the fact that it’s their friends. It’s, you know, “you had to be there” — you ever hear of that expression?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** My guess is that your friends, like 99.9999% of everybody’s friends, are not interesting enough to anyone else to actually pay money to watch. I mean, if you go to a restaurant and people literally all stop eating and just gather around you and listen and applaud as you and your friends do your stuff, then you’re on to something. But other than that, it’s just funny to you guys, you know.

You can be inspired by it to create characters that are universal that people might relate to, but generally speaking you don’t want to start from a position of narcissism. Very, very difficult to make a show out of yourself and your buddies.

**John:** Yeah. So Go, my first produced script, is very much influenced by people I knew and grew up with. And that said, I wasn’t trying to make a movie about them. I was just taking the very, very most interesting things I could find about them and their lives, and in most cases asking permission to say like, “Can I borrow that thing where you set the hotel room on fire?” And I put those together as a package, but it wasn’t literally about them.

You may find that you actually have a life that’s interesting enough that it’s worth becoming a TV show. You might be Lena Dunham and you just wrote kind of a lame email. Who knows?

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. And even in Go you took characters that were influenced by people that you knew in real life but you put them in a situation that was very compressed and very dramatic.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You weren’t just sitting around Diner style. I mean, I think movies like Diner have ruined more people than anyone else. I mean, because they seem easy. They’re not. [laughs]. And it kind of helps to be really, really smart and really, really funny when you write them. But ultimately they’re about bigger things. You watch Diner, there’s quite a bit of drama in there as well, so, there you go.

**John:** There you go. Question three is actually related to this. “If someone writes a screenplay that includes characters taking part in illegal activity that’s a comedy, but part of the comedy is that the screenplay is based on true events and the writer is totally open about that, then when the film is released can the writer or their characters,” basically, the writer’s real friends, “get arrested for that illegal activity?”

**Craig:** Oh, wait, hold on. [laughs] First of all, no one’s getting arrested. But can you explain what this guy is talking about?

**John:** “Does the law look at films and can investigations get underway based simply on speculation? I may just a neurotic plagued to paranoia, but it’s a concern for me.”

Well, he answered his own question. You are a neurotic plagued with paranoia. Basically this guy is saying, “I want to write a script about some crazy stuff that happened. It’s kind of based on my friends,” and he’s worried that because everyone will know, or it will be promoted as like sort of based on some real stuff that happened, that the police could come after him for…

**Craig:** Hey listen, listen. Here they come. [police sirens] Here they come, buddy. They’re coming for your script. “Uh, we have a report of a possibly too-true-real-life scene in route.”

Yeah, listen: You can’t use someone’s life freely. They actually own their life. You have to get the rights to their life if you’re going to use their life. However, if you’re picking little incidents, things that would… — At the end of movies they say, “Any resemblance to persons living or dead are intentional,” I think is the language. You should ask for permission if there’s something specific. If you have a friend, however, that exhibits some behavior that you find interesting that other people also exhibit, it’s fair game.

If there’s something real specific though that you’re taking, then you should ask them and get permission. Either way, you’re not arrested; it’s not a crime. It’s a tort.

**John:** His concern isn’t for himself and being sued for having taken somebody’s life rights. His concern is that the people who he is fictionalizing in his story, that would become the basis for them getting in trouble.

So, the examples he brings up…

**Craig:** Oh, I see, like the law will say, “You wrote a character that did a crime; we’re going to come after this guy because of your script?”

**John:** Yeah, examples he has, like being of a foreign nationality and working under the table in the US. Collecting disability checks but working part-time as an independent limo driver.

**Craig:** No. No, it’s fiction. You’re creating fiction. Your script is evidence of nothing in a court of law.

**John:** I agree. So don’t be paranoid.

**Craig:** I mean, neither one of us are lawyers, so if somebody ends up in jail, whoops. But I just don’t see how a lawyer could possibly say, “Look, he wrote a script…”

The only instance where I could see that — now I understand the question, I’m so sorry — but the only way I could possibly see a screenplay being evidentiary is if, for instance, you killed Mike. And a week before you killed Mike you sent a spec out about how this guy kills his husband. And it was the same exact method, and motive, and all the rest. Then they would go, “Um, this is admissible.”

But if somebody reads a script and says, “Well this character reminds me a lot of his friend. And in the movie this character is doing something illegal.” No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Don’t worry about.

So, let’s get onto our big topic this week which is what script should you write, which is kind of an evergreen question because when I was first starting to work as a screenwriter I was writing spec scripts. And so I could write anything. I could write a comedy. I could write a drama. I could write an alien western. I could do anything I wanted to do. And that freedom was great, but it was also a little terrifying because I wasn’t sure if I was spending my time writing the right thing.

That question continues throughout your whole career, because you’re always choosing, well what is it that I’m going to spend my time working on? It gets more complicated as you become a writer for hire because there could be money involved. There could be personalities involved. There could be reasons why you want to take one project or another project, or why you don’t want to take any of the projects you’re being offered and go off and write that spec script for the thing you want to do.

So, the decision about what you’re going to spend your time doing is going to be a factor in every screenwriter’s life, at every stage of the career. So I thought we’d spend a few minutes talking about that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I see this online a lot, too, where people are juggling three or four different things. I mean, I like the notion of thinking, “Which one of these ideas would actually seem most like a movie? Would people want to see one of these?” Although I still think the primary question should be, “Which one of these do I feel the most interested in writing? Which one of these ideas inspires the most passion?” Ultimately that will lead to the better script.

And I’m confused by people that are like, “I don’t’ know. I like them both the same.” And I feel like, eh, you’re not really a writer.

**John:** So here’s some criteria that I thought of and maybe we can add to this list as we go through in that sort of decision matrix of how to figure out which of these projects you want to write.

First off, people always say “write what you know,” which I think is terrible advice.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** From people who don’t know anything.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** To me, the criteria should be write the movie you wish you could see. And by wish you could see, I’m literally talking like write the movie you would pay money to see opening weekend. Don’t waste your time writing a movie that you’re like, “Oh, I’d catch it on cable.” Why are you writing that movie?

If it’s not a movie that you were dying to see you shouldn’t be spending your time writing the movie.

**Craig:** Right. That’s good advice.

**John:** If you’re writing something because you think it will sell, it’s probably the wrong movie to write. And that is just personal experience. The movie that I wrote, I was like, “Oh, I’m going to do this because I think I can totally sell it and I see other movies that are like it that are selling, and I read on Deadline Hollywood that this thing sold.” Don’t. Because it’s unlikely that it’s going to be the movie you really want to make. You’re going to be thinking about the dollar signs every time you sit down at the computer. And trends change. And so by the time you finish that script six months from now, that may not be the kind of movie that’s big or selling right now.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, the process of writing a movie, selling it, getting it into production, having it made, edited, released, marketed, that entire process after you type The End is a very cynical process. It cynicizes everything — that’s not a verb but I’m going to make it up. So if you start that cynical it’s just going to get even worse. Start pure. Let everybody else smear mud all over it because they will.

**John:** Yeah. Another question from me. If you think there’s any chance at all you might be a director or that you might want to direct a movie, or might want to direct the movie that you’re writing, write the smaller thing that you could actually direct yourself. Write the one that was in your wheel house and range ability to direct.

So, if you’re thinking about writing a giant Fast-and-the-Furious-but-with-robots movie, or Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and you want to direct, probably Sex, Lies, and Videotape would be your way to go — you know, characters in a contained setting.

I say this just because while there are rare exceptions, there’s the Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, where some guy just writes a script and somehow makes it, most cases you’re going to need to write something that’s actually of a scale that you could do it yourself if it’s really going to be your first movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. And in that case I think production experience helps, if you’ve actually spent time on movie sets you can see the dramatic difference between a day of shooting where two people are talking over a table, and a day of shooting where there is a car chase. The amount of screen minutes you can generate in a day is dramatically different. And so if, you know, “What I’d like to do is make a little movie and I have $100,000 cobbled together from various sources to spend,” write with that budget in mind. No question.

**John:** Yeah. Or do Buried. Buried was very much written as a script that the writer could direct. The writer ended up letting another director do it, but it’s a guy in a coffin. I mean, it’s obviously a huge challenge to write that movie, but it’s a very specific — it’s a script that was written to be shot, and there’s a lot to be said for that, if that’s your goal. If your goal is to direct. Or, I think in his case, he was actually an actor as well, so like in his head he might have been acting in that movie. That’s smart.

**Craig:** I have another one to add on. I don’t know if it’s on your list, but the sort of the better version of “write what you know” is “write what you’re supposed to write.” I know the kinds of movies I’m supposed to write, and I write those. And that’s not — it’s not narrow. There’s actually a pretty decent range of kinds of comedies I can do. Like for instance, Identity Theft is, I think, the closest to the sort of movie I ought to be writing more of, and I’d like to be writing more of, but I can also do this kind or that kind. But what I don’t do is I don’t write horror movies. And I don’t write romantic comedies because I don’t understand them.

There was a romantic comedy that very good directors were talking to me about, and it was a really good idea, and they had really good casting ideas, and we had lots of interesting conversations. But in the end I realized I’m actually not capable of writing a romantic comedy. It’s not what I ought to be writing. I don’t have that gear.

You have to accept the kind of writer you are. Forget writing fancier or writing less fancy, just write what you ought to be writing.

**John:** My agent has a list beside his phone, or he did at some point earlier on in my career, of like “These are the genres that John just won’t write.” And because these things would keep coming up and it’s like, no, because that’s not my kind of movie.

And so, prison movies. I like prison movies but I’m just not going to write a prison movie. That’s just not my thing. Futuristic prison movies, which is like a subcategory that was really big for a while, and so I had to keep passing on futuristic prison movies. Jewel heist movies. I don’t care. I don’t like them. I don’t like caper movies. That’s not my thing at all. And kind of war movies. There’s people who are great at writing movies, and so you should go to one of the war movie people to write the war movies because I’m just never going to be that guy.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you can try if you want. it will just come out dead. It’s just not a good idea.

**John:** So write something that intrigues you. And so often I will pick something that is like I’m a little bit nervous about writing it because it’s not exactly what I’m sort of known for, and I think I have a wider range of genres than many other screenwriters do, and so sometimes I’ll pick something that I’m a little bit scared of, but I’m not going to pick something that’s just completely out of left field.

And it’s not for fear of being pigeon-holed. It’s for fear of like I’m not going to care about that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you want to be… — Look, the nice thing is you want to be able to have some sort of… You want to be in touch with your own voice so you know if you are straying a little bit outside of your wheel house that you’re still bringing your voice to whatever it is.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If you can’t — I can’t bring my voice. I mean, I suppose I could. Well, I think about for instance horror movies. You know, I could take a stab at one of those, but I’d rather watch Kevin Williamson do it. He’s better at being funny horror writer than I ever could be, so what’s the point? Just let him do it. He’s really good at it.

**John:** Yeah. And potentially a controversial note, but I think one you might agree with. All things being equal, write a comedy. So, if you’re choosing between the drama and the comedy, and all the other criteria has sort of balanced themselves out, if you’re a funny person write the comedy.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Because you will get more enjoyment out of writing the comedy. They’re generally more fun to write. They’re generally more fun to read. It’s easier to keep the ball up in the air in a comedy than it is in a drama. And there’s a lot to kind of be said for that.

This thing I just, a friend of mine just read this last week, which is one of the first originals I’ve written in quite a long time, it’s a comedy. And he said, and he didn’t mean to say it in a bad way, he’s like, “Oh, I didn’t realize you were funny.” And I was like, “Oh, well, thanks.” But I’m not sort of known for doing comedies recently. And so it was new for him to see me writing a comedy and it made him want to write comedy more because I said, like, yeah, you know, it’s actually kind of great. And it’s like stuff is easier. It’s…

**Craig:** If you’re funny.

**John:** If you’re funny. And that’s the thing. And you may not be funny. And, you know, maybe you won’t know until you write something, until you write the first 30 pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, if you’re not funny it’s harder. You know, David Zucker has a great saying. “Kids, don’t try this at home.” Comedy looks easier from the outside, and in some ways there are a lot of things that work in your favor as a writer, but it’s very specialized and either you’re going to be able to do it or you’re not going to be able to do it. Your premise is well-put. All things being equal, yeah, of course.

Writing comedy in Hollywood is a little bit like being a left-handed pitcher in the major leagues. There’s fewer of you. And you’re needed more. So it’s a great thing to be. if you’re a left-handed pitcher nobody tries to make you a right-handed pitcher. Ever. It’s just a good skill. It’s a rare skill in Hollywood. So, yeah, jeez, all things being equal, if you love writing comedy and you’re good at it, absolutely.

**John:** And let’s see if we have more bullet points to add as we try to wrap these up. And the reason why this topic is on here at all is I was speaking at the Writers Guild a couple weeks ago and these two guys came up. They were writing partners. And they said — I think they may have been brothers even — “We’re considering these two things.” So I had them describe like the one sentence version of what the two projects were. And I said, “You need to write that one.”

And I could do it because I could tell there’s one they actually cared about and there’s one they were just going to write because they thought it could sell. And if you’re writing something just because you think it can sell it’s not going to be the interesting one.

And here’s the other thing: Just because you’re picking this one to write, that doesn’t mean you never get to write the other one. Write the one that is sort of most appealing to you to write, get it done, and then quickly write the next one.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, the summary would be: Write the movie you wish you could see. And write the movie you would actually pay money, your own dollars to see in the movie theater on Friday. So, if you can’t say that you’d really see that movie, you’re probably writing the wrong movie. It’s probably not the movie for you to be writing.

And I think that’s a good criteria because if the movie you desperately want to see is the four-hour version of Pride and Prejudice done with puppets, then that’s the movie you should probably write because it’s going to be different than every other movie that’s out there right now. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy to make, but I can respect the person who writes that movie because they really want to see that movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Write comedy if you’re funny. And write small if it’s something you want to direct yourself. Don’t write super small if it’s something you want someone else to direct.

**Craig:** I agree with all of that.

**John:** Craig, do you have a Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** I have a Relatively Cool Thing.

**John:** Uh-oh.

**Craig:** I say “relatively cool” because in fact it’s not cool. But it’s cooler than the alternative. I was sort of hesitating to even talk about it, but I think it’s probably a good thing to talk about.

So, I am a cigar smoker. I love cigars.

**John:** Oh no.

**Craig:** No, oh yes.

**John:** Craig, I want you to be alive for the podcast in 57 years.

**Craig:** I know. Now here’s the thing: Cigars…

**John:** Oh, they’re healthy.

**Craig:** They’re not healthy. [laughs] But on the other hand, as far as I can tell from the various research, if you smoke a cigar without inhaling any of the smoke, which is the way I smoke, and most cigar smokers do, the incidence of cancer and so forth is actually fairly low. It’s pretty close to the baseline. But that said, not a great idea anyway. There’s still carcinogens in the smoke and there’s a slightly elevated risk for lip, tongue, and so-forth cancer.

Again, if you don’t inhale at all. If you inhale even a little bit you’re in big trouble. But, given that, I wanted to sort of wean myself off. But the truth is I love nicotine. Nicotine does wonderful things to my brain. I smoked cigarettes for seven years, many years ago. I quit the week before I got married actually because I thought, can’t do that to my wife, you know. And so I haven’t smoked a cigarette in over 15 years. But what do you do if you like nicotine, which is a spectacular drug — it’s sort of like caffeine but much, much better.

What do you do? So, here’s my sort of Cool Thing for the week to help wean myself off cigars and reduce the number down to maybe one a week. They now have electronic cigarettes. Have you seen these, John?

**John:** I’ve heard of them. I’ve never seen them so I want a full description.

**Craig:** It’s actually a pretty amazing invention. And I’m talking about it mostly because I know there are people out there that smoke regular cigarettes and I want them to stop because that in fact is absolutely 100% for sure super duper bad, as we all know.

So, the idea of the electronic cigarette is: what if we could make a device that would allow you to inhale vapor that had nicotine in it and then just a bunch of inert stuff that doesn’t do anything? And typically the stuff is propylene glycol which is the inert substance that they use in fog machines or in asthma inhalers. Or, vegetable glycerin which is, again, just an inert substance. It does nothing to you.

So, we create this little device. And the only chemical that’s in it is just nicotine, which in and of itself is not carcinogenic at all. So the way it works is there is a battery and there are two kinds of batteries that they use. One is manual and one is automatic — the automatic one is the one that is sort of amazing to me. There’s a little membrane inside of it, and as you inhale the membrane moves forward and closes a circuit that then sends electricity into the next part of this thing which is what they call a cartomizer which…is bowdlerization the word when you combine words together to make a word?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a bowdlerization of cartridge and atomizer. And all that really is is a cylinder, and inside the cylinder is cotton wadding of some kind, some fibrous wadding, and a wire. So, the battery, so you inhale, the membrane in the battery closes circuit. Electricity goes through the battery, hits the atomizer wire. Wire heats up, heats up the liquid that’s soaked up in the cotton wadding. That essentially vaporizes. You inhale the vapor. You breathe it out. It’s water vapor when you breathe it out.

**John:** So there’s no second-hand smoke?

**Craig:** No second-hand smoke. No smell. No odor. No ash. And also none of the carcinogenic byproducts of combustion, and there’s a whole big bunch of them, because as it turns out the things that kill you in tobacco are not nicotine at all.

**John:** Yeah. The tars, the resins, and everything else.

**Craig:** All of that stuff. Exactly. So then the question is: what about nicotine in and of itself? Is that bad for you? And you know, it’s kind of interesting. Some people sort of say, well, it’s a little bit bad for you the way caffeine is a little bit bad for you. And some people say, in moderation, frankly no, it’s not that bad for you. So certainly if you smoke cigarettes there’s no question that you should stop and smoke one of these things instead. No question.

**John:** Thank you for your description of the actual cigarette, because I didn’t understand how they actually worked. So, do you throw away that thing when you’re done with it?

**Craig:** Well, there’s a couple different kinds. The kind that you might see, gas stations are starting to sell these things now, these sort of disposable ones, and yes, you would throw one of those away.

For people that do this regularly you would actually buy some batteries and some cartridges that you could refill on your own.

**John:** I was thinking about throwing away the battery, it feels horrible. So that’s not a great thing for the world.

**Craig:** True. You don’t want to just chuck batteries. The batteries that you can buy for these things are rechargeable batteries, and you can use them over, and over, and over, and over, and the cartridges. And then you can even buy, there’s like a whole cottage industry — it’s one of the dumbest words I’ve ever heard: vaping. So that’s what they call it, vaping, instead of smoking, which is really annoying.

But, regardless, there’s a whole cottage industry of people that make what they call E-Juice or Electronic Cigarette Juice which comes in various flavors, some of which are to mimic tobacco flavors. Some of which are kooky flavors like chocolate, and cherry, and all this nonsense, which I don’t go near.

But, it’s so much better for you than smoking a real cigarette and I think it’s better for you than smoking a cigar. And, also, you can do it indoors because there’s no smell. You can smoke it anywhere.

**John:** Yeah. I grew up in a smoking household. And so smoking has appalled me my entire life. So, this does sound vastly better. What I wonder, and you know, there’s obviously the possibility that it becomes a gateway to like somebody trying this and then going to real cigarettes. I also wonder if there’s a happy gateway where like someone who smokes goes to this and says, “This just feels really stupid and plasticy now. I’m just going to stop doing it all together,” which could also be great.

**Craig:** That would be great. And they do have various levels of nicotine. I mean, I only use the kind that is the literally the lowest possible amount of nicotine. And there are some indications that very little bit of nicotine actually even makes it into your bloodstream by the time you heat the wire up and do all this stuff. But it is, to me, it should be viewed as a way to get yourself off of this other stuff. Because the truth is we can say to people quit smoking or smoke less, and they don’t. This is sort of like the smoking equivalent of a needle exchange.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. A reasonable solution to a problem that is going to be there whether you like it or not.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. I mean, we can say that people with free needles are going to go heroin crazy, but the truth is, no, they’re already kind of crazy with the heroin so you might as well keep them from getting AIDS. I mean, bottom line.

So I think that this thing is actually a spectacular invention and I urge anybody that is struggling with cigarettes to give it a shot. The version I use, a very popular one, it’s the Joyetech 510. The 510 model.

**John:** When Apple comes out with theirs it will be so much better than all the other ones.

**Craig:** Oh my god, it will be the best. It will be the best. But until that time I use the 510 with a Boge cartomizer. And I use E-Juice from Johnson. So there you go.

**John:** Good. My One Cool Thing is similar in a way in that it’s nothing I can actually fully recommend to people to use, but maybe to borrow a friend’s to see sort of what it’s like because it’s an intriguing vision of the future.

I bought one of the Nexus 7s, which is the little small Android-powered tablets that Google sells directly from their website. And I bought it because I really wanted to see what that form factor was like, because it’s a 7-inch which is sort of in-between what an iPhone size is and what a full iPad size is. And I wanted to see what that was like. I wanted to see what the most up-to-date version of Android was like, and what it felt like on the tablets. And consistent with a lot of the reviews — I didn’t read the reviews ahead of time, but now that I’ve gone back and read the reviews, I think a lot of them are largely right, is that it’s a pretty good little tablet.

And for $200 there’s actually a very valid case to be made for buying this if you can’t buy an iPad. Like if you were a kid who was using his own money to buy something, and you have $200 and you want a tablet, you can get this tablet and it would actually be pretty good.

I’m not in love with the Android of it all. And there’s stuff that gets to be very frustratingly… — I try to differentiate between stuff that’s just different from how I’m used to it on Apple stuff and stuff that it’s just like, well, that didn’t seem like a very smart decision.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And there’s some things which are interface stuff which is just really kind of random. You can’t figure out where you are at in the applications. But the size of it is actually kind of appealing. And for an e-reader, for a book, it’s actually really good. It’s a nice size. I find the iPad is really heavy to read a book on.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** This is a much more reasonable size. So, it was interesting. Part of the reason why I bought it is I wanted to see whether we should be converting some of our apps that are on iOS over to Android and whether this is going to become a really viable tablet. I don’t feel the pressing need to be working on a Reader app, a Screenplay Reader app for this now, quite yet, because it doesn’t feel…

**Craig:** What is the app store situation for that? Because I don’t have any Android stuff. Is the app store full?

**John:** The Android app store is — here’s a difference, is that on Android platforms you can install things from multiple places, and so you’re not locked to just the one official app store. There’s Google Play which is the main app store. And installing the apps from there or from Amazon’s app stores are the most places you’d find them.

For developers, it becomes much more complicated because with an iPhone or an iPad there’s only very few number of devices you have to be able to build for. With Android you really have no idea what screen size you’re going to end up on. You have to make so many more allowances for what the actual hardware is, then it becomes much more problematic. And because of that, sometimes the apps aren’t as sort of fit and finished as they are in the iOS thing. But there are official places where you can buy apps and people could theoretically — some developers make money selling apps there.

**Craig:** It used to be when we were young, if you recall, John, that the knock on Apple was that they were restricted by the fact that they controlled the software and hardware together at the same time. And it seems — and they were restricted in part because the PC clone industry was able to essentially outsource a billion little pieces form a billion different people and reduce the price on these things. And Microsoft was sort of the king in terms of the software.

But now you can see how controlling that pipeline completely from soup to nuts has given Apple a tremendous advantage.

**John:** Yes. If you read the articles on how Apple sort of buys the future, because in success they have so much money that they are able to go to factories and say, “Hey, you are working on this new display technology. We will give you $200 billion to build a new factory, but we’re going to ask for the first 18 months of your output. We get to buy all of it.” And that’s how they sort of get the new technology before anyone else can because they have enough money and leverage to be able to do that.

So, controlling that whole thing has been amazing for them.

**Craig:** Yeah. The guy that run that is now running the whole company. Obviously they take supply chain extremely seriously. They’re clearly the best at it. No one comes close.

**John:** So, my bottom line on the Nexus 7, because also my mother-in-law has the Kindle Fire, so I’ve also been able to try that. It’s a much better device than the Kindle Fire for just using, like maps on this thing is terrific. And a couple years ago on the maps application on this all by itself would have been worth the price of admission.

The Kindle Fire has a better catalog just because Amazon has so many more movies, and shows, and books you can get on it. The Google Play thing is okay. But you also have the Amazon Kindle store is an app just on the Nexus 7 and it’s really good.

Part of the reason I also bought this is because I was curious; there’s all this talk about there’s going to be an iPad Mini probably coming down the pike, and I thought that’s going to be a terrible idea. That’s going to be a really bad size for a screen for everything. And I was wrong. And I think it’s a good size for a lot of people, especially if it comes down to price where more people can buy it. I think it can be terrifically successful.

And I definitely recognize that the iOS apps that we’re building right now, we’re going to have to plan for screens that size and I think they’ll be successful.

**Craig:** And this is the Nexus 7?

**John:** The Nexus 7. So I would recommend, like listen: If you’re really curious about where the Android platform is and sort of what the best of it is, I think it’s a good way to spend $200 because you get like the actual most recent device. You don’t have to pay for a contract if you’re buying a phone. You get a chance to play around with it.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** And if this device becomes popular or if the iPad version of this becomes popular, you can definitely see like loading up schools with these, because if it’s a $200 thing you can actually afford to buy them for the whole classroom and use them as books for things. Whereas at $400 or $500 the iPad becomes too expensive.

**Craig:** Right. And do they have a Kindle app?

**John:** They do. There’s a Kindle app on it just like there’s a Kindle app for the iPad. There’s a Kindle app for this and it’s pretty good.

**Craig:** Maybe I’ll buy one for my son. Because, you know, mostly I just want him to read books.

**John:** Yeah. And the frustration that there aren’t as many great games on it will mean that he’ll read books.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** Although I will say my favorite book reader device is still by far the $79 Kindle from Amazon, which is the non-backlit E-ink screen. It has ads on it but it’s a really good reader and it’s so lightweight that I’ll actually stick it in a jacket pocket and carry it around with me.

**Craig:** What about that Barnes & Noble one? Is that dead? The Nook?

**John:** The Nook? This, I think, is going to make a little bit harder case for the Nook. There’s a version of the Nook now that has lighting on it that people like a lot, that has a touch screen that has lighting on it that some people like a lot. So, god bless them, they’re still making stuff.

But I think a lot of nerds were buying the Nook and then rooting it to sort of put it back to a real Android software and they’re using that to develop and stuff. And I feel like this Nexus 7 would replace that instinct.

**Craig:** One last question about the Nexus 7. Can I smoke it?

**John:** You could totally smoke. And you put little batteries in there and the wire hits the membrane, and just inhale. It’s really good.

**Craig:** Even your pretend smoking didn’t sound right.

**John:** Yeah, god, I’m not an actor, but my fantasy is at some point when I become quite old — when I become 80-years old and have lived a good long life — I want be like the Gore Vidal who sort of like enters in and becomes the wise old man in movies. But they can’t have me smoke because I just couldn’t do it. And you can always tell when an actor has no idea how to smoke.

**Craig:** Clearly.

**John:** They hold a cigarette wrong. Everything’s just wrong about it.

**Craig:** They hold it wrong. They inhale sort of like a cigar and puff it out. I will tell you this, I’m on record: Once I cross 85 I’m going out, buying a pack of Marlboro Reds and get going. [laughs] Because I don’t care anymore.

**John:** A better idea might be to buy a pack right now and stick it in a vault, because they won’t be selling them.

**Craig:** They won’t. And I actually do believe, in all seriousness, that the electronic cigarette will kill regular cigarettes. I do.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** I think that — here’s the trick, not to bring it back around to that, but really it comes down to the government. If the government gets stupid in their anti-smoking zeal and bans these things, that will be a tragedy. Interestingly, there have been a number of major medical associations, I think the American Medical Association, perhaps, or the Heart and Lung — one of the larger medical associations came out and supported these things and said these should be legal for sure. This is way better than smoking for people who smoke. Way better.

**John:** Yeah, you convinced me.

**Craig:** So get smoking…

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** …and I may pick up that Nook…I mean, not the Nook, the Nexus 7 just to give it a swing and see what it’s like. And if I hate it I promise to take a video of myself smashing it with a baseball bat.

**John:** Yeah, $200, it’s not mad money. I mean, $200 is real money to be spending on something, so I don’t want people to wantonly say, “Oh, John August recommends it,” because it’s a half-hearted recommendation. But I did find it fascinating, and for people who are curious about it, I was curious and my curiosity was sated.

**Craig:** Excellent. Well that was a good Cool Thing.

**John:** Awesome. All right. Thank you so much, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Talk to next week.

**Craig:** Bye.

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

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin. [laughs]

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

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

**John:** And inside jokes that no one else will ever know.

**Craig:** [laughs] You guys…

**John:** So, Craig…

— You guys, you missed some good comedy there.

**Craig:** You missed, uh…

**John:** And Craig cursed a lot, because he doesn’t curse on the actual show, but he cursed a lot in the intro here.

**Craig:** Yes, much, much cursing.

**John:** So, Craig, on Twitter after I posted the last podcast I said, hey, if you want to leave a good review — any review for us on iTunes. Not a good review, any good review, I would be reading aloud the ones that were marked most helpful. And, in that sense of like, oh, could be constructive feedback. I kind of was kind of fishing for more good reviews.

And then you and I were looking through this list to try to figure out like oh we were going to read these things. And kind of embarrassingly they’re all five star reviews. And they’re all kind of — it was going to just feel a little braggy to read them aloud.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, I guess I’m happy that people like the podcast. I would invite constructive feedback. And it was really my goal in sort of putting that out there on Twitter is if people have constructive feedback or things they want to talk more about, or ways we could improve this. But, I was going to read them aloud and now I’m not so sure it’s going to make sense to read them aloud.

**Craig:** Yeah, probably not. I mean, I will say I’m very, very grateful for the things I read on there. I was pretty shocked and surprised. I mean the Internet is kind of famous for hating. And, [laughs] it was just love. It was nothing but love, which makes me uncomfortable. So, thank you to everybody.

**John:** Today I thought we could talk about feedback, both why we solicit feedback and sometimes why we don’t really want feedback.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I should warn listeners that this might be little bit more meta of a podcast. Less nuts and bolts about the craft of screenwriting, and a little bit more about what Craig and I do, my website, Craig’s website that he gave up, which I think is a fascinating part. So we can start right there.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s true. I built a…

**John:** You don’t have that site anymore. Well, that site is still up there technically. It’s called ArtfulWriter.com, and there are still useful articles there, but you are not actively maintaining it. Is that correct?

**Craig:** That’s right. Yeah. I started that back in 2005, I think. So it was fairly early on in the whole bloggy phenomenon. And the idea in the beginning was just to talk about some of the things that you and I talk about quite a bit on here, some of the non-crafty things. I thought there was nowhere writers could go to actually learn how this whole thing worked in terms of the union, and the companies, and the business end of screenwriting.

And for awhile I just tottered along in anonymity and it was lovely. And then the strike came. [laughs] And suddenly this dinky little blog was getting profiled in the Wall Street Journal and 80,000 people a month were showing up, and it became nightmarish. Nightmarish.

**John:** You were seen as an opinion leader for an unpopular opinion I would say. Or not necessarily an unpopular opinion; there was a valued opinion and you were seen as one of the leaders of one of those opinions and therefore it attracted a lot of attention and a lot of disagreement on your site.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s fair to say. I was essentially the loyal minority. I was in dissent. And many, many people who I suspect drove around in cars that said “Dissent is Patriotic” came home and then told me that I was an idiot, [laughs] because I was ruining their thing. It was pretty remarkable actually.

The level of hypocrisy was astounding at times. People would use analogies… — These were people who were otherwise very stridently against say, for instance, the war in Iraq but would say things to me like, “You’re supposed to be a soldier, and soldiers don’t question their leaders.” It was nuts.

**John:** So on a typical blog post I remember you would be getting 50, 75, 100 comments back very, very quickly. It was sort of like how Nikki Finke gets a tremendous number of comments. But, you actually required people to register with their own names, so you could actually see who was making these points. That didn’t seem to stop people from making very long, very passionate points on your site.

**Craig:** No, they could use handles.

**John:** Okay, but they did have to register. I remember having to log in. Was that not the case?

**Craig:** They could register but they didn’t’ have to use their real names. They could use a fake name. And occasionally I would notice that certain people just because you can, you know, when you run a blog you have access to some of the information that comes in when people comment, specifically their IP address. And you can see, oh look, these 12 people who are screaming at me are actually one person, and then I would boot them for that, you know.

And I would boot them for being mean to each other, which they would do a lot. There were threads where it would get up to 300, 400 comments. But, you know, that really wasn’t why I stopped. I mean, that stuff all sort of fell off after the strike was over. And, frankly, I think it fell off also because history proved me correct I say with no false humility or false arrogance. It’s just factually correct.

I was right about almost everything. And there wasn’t much to argue about. So, I got bored. I just got bored. I’d been doing it for five, six years, and I always told myself if it ever felt like homework I would stop because I wasn’t like you; your method is to write a lot more smaller pieces. My thing was to sort of do longer essays. And so I would try and do one a week. And then it became one every two weeks. And then just frankly it got hard. And more than anything I ran out of stuff to sort of explicate in essay length.

So I just stopped. And it was a lovely feeling of stopping. And then you came calling and this couldn’t be easier. I just talk now.

**John:** It’s a half an hour of conversation.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I will say part of the reason for why I was interested in doing the podcast versus strictly just doing the blog is I got a little bored, too. I certainly got bored with comments. And I went through this whole Sturm und Drang with comments on my site where I took them down for awhile. I put them back on, but I sort of deemphasized them.

I just didn’t care to be the host of that party anymore. And I wanted to have my opinions. I didn’t sort of want to have everybody running around my house and touching my stuff anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So as I’m looking now at sort of the next thing we’re going to do with the site, I have to make some decisions about are those comments going to stay, are the comments going to go. And I really am of two minds about it, because I do enjoy feedback when it’s helpful, constructive feedback. I just don’t know that having that feedback attached to my point is the best place to do that. I feel with Twitter or email or everything else that’s a better way of actually getting my attention of something that’s going on in the world.

And yet there are some situations where someone can add a clarifying point to the end of a post and it’s genuinely helpful. And that’s a thing that I don’t actually have to go in and modify myself because somebody has added that in. So, I’m trying to decide what the right next step is for me, for the site, for what I want to do.

**Craig:** Well, people who don’t run popular websites with lots of commentary could never fathom this: Comments are exhausting. The writing of the material is the fun part because you are expressing yourself, and frankly, you are the person who had the will to do it. So, you decided that you were going to create a website. You decided you were going to write a long piece. And in the case of you, and to some extent me, we also wrote things people were interested in reading. So, we weren’t anonymous blogs in the corner of the Internet; people noticed us. And so they showed up. And then the comments happen.

And the comments on the comments. And the fights in the comments. And the stupid comments. And the racist, and insulting, and nonsense. Just waves of nonsense. And you can’t help but feel like it’s reflecting on you. I mean, there’s that one school is, well, let’s just be completely libertarian, laissez-faire about it: everybody post whatever you want, and I don’t care, and I don’t touch it. The problem is you get defined by that. The way that, frankly, I think Deadline Hollywood is defined by its atrocious commenting.

And I didn’t want that. And early on I was really encouraged by how good the comments were. But then suddenly it was like you hit that weird tipping point where it goes from a little thing to a cool thing to a fascinating gathering of likeminded people who maybe don’t agree on everything but have the same demeanor, and then all of a sudden it’s yahoo time. And everyone’s there and it’s like a bad house party. It is the end of Sixteen Candles and the house is wrecked.

And that’s what happened to me. I don’t blame you. I mean, I’d boot ’em. Who cares? Look, if people want to say things, like you said, have them tweet you or something.

**John:** The house party analogy is apt, because you get tired of picking up the plastic cups.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And just like, you know what, go have a party in your own house and maybe I’ll come by and visit your house. Send me an e-vite that you’re having a party at your house and maybe I’ll come by and visit. But I’m not going to like keep inviting you over to my house for things.

When you first start a blog it’s very lonely. And you don’t really know if anybody is reading. You can sort of look at the Google Analytics, and it’s like, oh there are some numbers. But when you first start getting feedback, someone says something about the post you made, it’s really flattering. And that attention can be flattering. And so then you can also sort of game yourself. So, it’s like, well, I know how I can get more people to leave a comment, more people to see this thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that becomes dangerous, too. One of the posts that sort of sent it over the edge was I did a post called No Trombones which was…

**Craig:** I remember that one.

**John:** So I went on my screed about, and I do truly believe that we do people a disservice by putting the band instruments in little kid’s hands. If we’re going to teach them music we should teach them piano, or guitar, or drums, and if they want to move on and study other instruments later on in their life, in junior high/high school, fantastic. We can still have marching bands. But, giving a little kid the clarinet is not providing them a future of music. It’s limiting them to one specific role in a bigger thing.

So, I wrote that post. It went kind of viral. I got 1,000 comments, almost like death threats, like how dare I say anything bad about trombone. And I got tired of it. And it wasn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back, but it was systematic of what I was feeling about my frustration with comments.

**Craig:** Yeah. People also don’t understand that when the commenters start going after each other, what will happen sometimes is you’ll go to dinner with your family, and you’ll come back and suddenly there will be an email like, “You have to do something about this. Somebody just libeled me.” And I’m like, wait, what?

So, I’ll click over and see, oh god, 300 comments just happened in the last hour and I have to read them to figure out what’s happening and who’s, because god knows I want to ignore it, but the problem is it’s on my site. I’m hosting it.

And I’m like I already have children, you know? I don’t need this. And then, of course, on top of that there’s a weird thing that happens where you suddenly realize I’m spending money and time to provide a service for people to attack me. [laughs] Why? Why am I doing that? I don’t get it.

There was one woman during the strike, a lovely human being, who commented that she wanted to punch me in the heart, [laughs], which I thought was great. I just thought that was great.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. The specificity of that is really what sets it apart.

**Craig:** And the proportion. I just thought that she kind of got the proper way to respond to a debate over a poorly run union strike. That was the idea was punch people in the heart. That made sense.

But people questioned my credits. I was accused of plagiarism. I was accused of lying. I was accused of nepotism. Obviously I was a company sellout, and a hack, and a loser, and an idiot, and unfunny. And it just went on and on and on. And I have to tell you, I’ve got a pretty thick skin. And it wasn’t like any one comment made me go, “Oh, no, I feel bad.” It was just the sense that I was wallowing in filth all the time. Like I had to take showers. Yuck. I don’t want to read stuff like this. It’s gross. These people are gross.

So, you’re site doesn’t have quite that level of madness, but it’s…

**John:** I don’t. And largely because I’ve been talking about more things related to the craft and not so much about the industry. I don’t create so many targets for myself.

But just this last week I did post something which was a follow-up on something we talked about on the podcast. We had a reader, a listener — my default is to say reader when I should say listener — a listener named Biff who wrote in…

**Craig:** Biff.

**John:** …with his perspective on being an established screenwriter who’s finding it very frustrating and then changes in the industry. And a listener named Cordy wrote in an email with his perspective as a younger, newer writer who is sort of working his way up and finding the same kinds of frustrations. And so I posted Cordy’s thing as a first person, which is my term for when an outside person comes in with a post that’s really from his or her voice.

And so it’s one of the rare posts recently that actually generated 50 comments. And I was like, I dread it. And so I just now today read through the comments because I’d see that they were there, and I’m like I don’t really want to read these. But people were leaving comments and I guess because the ball started rolling and more people started commenting and responding. And some of them were meaningful. And I kind of wish they had come as an email rather than as a comment, but I thought, it’s still feedback, and I thought we would talk through some of it now because it’s an important topic.

**Craig:** Well let’s do it.

**John:** Let’s do it. Adam writes: “There’s something I don’t understand about this recurring complaint that script assignments are hard to land. To my ears it sounds like writers are saying either a) ‘I’m ready to write a script if someone else comes up with the idea and hands me a check to write it;’ or b) ‘I want someone to pay me for my own idea before I actually take the time to make a script out of it.’

“Either way, it’s a bizarre complaint. Granted, the industry may have worked that way once, but based on the reports from the front lines, it doesn’t work that way now. Now you need to write the story first and then get someone interested in it. This is not such a strange business model; you only have to look across the desk at the person to whom you’re pitching to find an example: Studios don’t get paid in advance for the movies they make…”

**Craig:** Ugh, what an idiot this guy is.

**John:** “…they have to make them first and then try to sell them to the public.”

**Craig:** So stupid. Yeah, you know, that’s absolutely true. That’s a great point. You know, novelists also don’t get paid to write their novels. They just write their novels and then they sell them and then they get paid. But novelists also hold their copyright. We’re employees, okay? You can’t have it both ways, Biff. Right?

If the studios want to hire us and everything is a “work for hire,” even the stuff you wrote on your own in your house is a work for hire commissioned by them, they own the copyright. They are the legal authors. We don’t get royalties. We get these negotiated residuals which every three years are up for dispute. We don’t get protection so that we can’t get be rewritten. We don’t get moral rights. We get nothing of that. Okay?

So the deal is this: if they want to treat us like work for hire commissioned writers, not commissionable but commissioned writers, employees, then yeah, we kind of do get to complain about the way they employ us, Biff.

**John:** Well this isn’t Biff, this is Adam.

**Craig:** Oh!

**John:** Biff was the good guy that you liked.

**Craig:** Biff, you’re cool. [laughs] Sorry, Biff. You’re awesome.

Adam, smarten up, dude. Look, I get this vibe all the time from these guys who are like, “What are these writers complaining about? So they want to get paid before they write?” Yeah. You know why? We’re professional writers. My plumbers like to get paid, too. They like to know I can pay them before they do the plumbing. I have to agree to the price. It’s not like they come in, they unclog my toilet and then I go, “Nah, I didn’t like the way you did that. Bye.”

**John:** Here’s the faulty logic in his own analogy. He says: “This is not such a strange business model. You only have to look across the desk at the person to whom you’re pitching to find an example.”

Well, actually no. If you look across the desk at the person you’re pitching to, that executive, he’s not getting paid based on what movies get made. He’s getting paid a salary.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** He’s an employee of the studio. And so he might not keep his job if he’s not able to make some movies, and hopefully make some movies that make money; although, strangely, many executives are able to keep their jobs for a very long time after making a very terrible movie.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But, you’re exactly wrong, Adam. The person you’re pitching to is an employee of the studio and is getting paid a salary not based on which movies actually happen or don’t happen. You’re not going to tell that executive, “Oh, okay, I’m not going to pay you anything for the next three years. But if any movies happen, then I’ll pay you then.” That’s not a viable business model for them, too.

Now I will say, producers are increasingly kind of in that bind, where produces are having a very hard time getting paid anything until movies go into production. So they kind of are working on spec.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** The same way that writers are frustrated to be on spec.

The other example I’ll bring up is a Broadway musical based on a movie. I’m gonna talk about Newsies. So, Newsies is, the plot of Newsies — to the degree that there’s a plot in Newsies — is the newspaper boys rise up to say, “No, you know what? We’re not going to keep paying for these newspapers on the idea that we have to sell them later. We should be able to buy…” Actually, this is a fault analogy now that I think more about it.

[laughs] Well, they’re basically doing spec work, though. The Newsies, the news boys were required to sort of like, yeah, if you make some money, great. If you don’t make any money it’s not our thing. Well, no. If they are in your employ and you are setting the terms for how they’re going to be working, you do actually have to pay them.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’re right about producers. Producers are stuck in a weird place where they don’t really get paid and all the work is on spec until the movie gets made. And, in fact, that is increasingly the result of studio antipathy towards producers. The studios, the corporations, in their bean counter ways have sort of looked out and said, “These guys are middle men. We don’t need them anymore.”

Now, as a writer you might be surprised to hear me stand up for producers. I won’t stand up for producers. I won’t stand up for the producing industry. I’ll stand up for good producers of which there are few. But the good producers deserve to be treated better. The bad producers, and there used to be about a billion of them all snorting coke in their little bungalows — yeah, good riddance. See you later.

The point is, while they’re called producers, they aren’t directing the movies or writing them, so you can’t… — I know for sure you can’t make movies without scripts. And I know for sure you can’t make movies without directors. And I know for sure you can’t make movies without actors. So pay them.

And, Adam, all I can say is good luck at your desk job at, uh, wherever you are. You sound like such a little tool. You work for like a guy in business affairs and you’ve absorbed that whole rhetoric and I’m here to tell you, bro, ain’t that way.

And by the way, beyond that, the people who really do pull the levers at these companies on the business end don’t agree with you either. They also know how important we are, and how important it is to take care of us. That’s not where the issue is. The issue is above their heads in the board rooms.

**John:** An anonymous socialist writes…

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** Yeah. “When people respond to this kind of thing with ‘You gotta make your own opportunities! (as the internet is sometimes wont to do) I wish they would be more specific. I am willing to do webisodes if someone knows the secret to monetizing it, etc. But this is my job, it’s how I pay my rent, and I can’t do it long-term for free anymore than someone who manages a cheese shop or something.”

Which I think is largely the point we’re making. I kind of provocatively titled this post Is Screenwriting Dead, which, again, I felt a little bad doing because I know it’s going to draw a lot of eyeballs.

**Craig:** Eh, do it. Do it.

**John:** Do it. But it’s also going to draw a lot of comments. But I wanted to differentiate between… I’m not saying that the craft of screenwriting is dead, or asking the question, because clearly we’re still going to have screenwriting. We’re still going to have, people will still write scripts. The question is whether the career of screenwriting can continue to last if we’re getting rid of the actual people being paid and employed to do it.

The problem with writing specs is that you have no idea if that spec is going to sell. And spec is really another word for gamble, like I’m going to gamble, I’m going to gamble on this idea that this idea will sell to somebody. That someone will read this and say, “Well this is fantastic. I need to buy this. I need to make this into a movie.”

And so the argument is going to be that corporations are gambling too by taking a chance on writers and stuff like that. Not really. Corporations are investing. This is investment. Corporations are buying up, ideally, a range of properties. They’re deciding which ones they’re going to make into movies, and the ones they make into movies, some of them are going to be hits. That’s investment. That’s picking a range of stocks.

Whereas you as the screenwriter, if all you’re doing is specking you are sort of buying only one stock and you’re putting all of your money into that one stock because that’s the only script you’re going to be able to write for quite a long time. To say, like, oh, well your business model should be, a screenwriter’s business model should be “I’m just going to write a spec, and I’ll sell a spec, and then I’ll sell another spec, and then I’ll sell another spec,” well, some of those are not going to sell. Some of those are not going to become movies.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And you are not going to be able to do this long-term unless you have a trust fund. And we’re back to trust funds.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] If it really is going to be that kind of model you’re going to have to have people who have some other source of income that they don’t actually need to be doing this which isn’t a model.

**Craig:** It’s not going to be that model. It’s just not going to be. Look, that model kind of almost sort of existed for a little while in the ’80s and ’90s. The truth is, when someone says, “Writers should just spec stuff,” they’re being ignorant of the business. The business doesn’t want your specs. It’s not like it used to be. They don’t want your spec.

The reason to write a spec now is to turn them onto your writing so that they can come hire you to write what they want. They don’t want your spec. They want what they want. Even while movies with silly underlying properties that aren’t story based crash and burn around us, they’ll keep making properties based on books, and they’ll keep making properties based on video games, and they’ll keep making properties based on old TV shows. And it’s never going to stop; that keeps going. A lot of the original material you see in Hollywood frankly comes from people that sort of negate the risk of the originality. And when I say risk of — I mean from the corporate side it’s risky.

So, when Todd Phillips comes in with an original idea, or Judd Apatow comes in with an original idea, it’s like, “Okay, well that’s not…” The point is we know that that is going to be done and it’s okay. Those guys have a track record. When Chris Nolan does it, it’s like, it’s okay. Inception? No problem. That’s okay.

**John:** If anyone other than Christopher Nolan tries to do Inception, no way.

**Craig:** Forget it. Forget it. They don’t want it. [laughs] They don’t want it. They don’t want it because they don’t even know how to make it. That’s the point. Their big panic is, how do we make something if we don’t have a great director and we don’t have a vision. So, when they just get a script they’re like, “Okay, cool…” — I mean, yes, it happens. I know now people are going to go, “What happened three weeks when we got…” Yes, correct.

But, the point is it’s the exception now, it’s not the rule. You can’t build a career around specs.

**John:** If someone else had written the Inception script, some Joe Smodcast wrote the Inception script, people would read it, and people would like it I bet. I bet it could place on the Black List. People would say, “Wow, that’s a really interesting script but it’s far too expensive and no one will ever make it.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the truth is, no one would ever make it.

**Craig:** They wouldn’t. They wouldn’t make it. But what they would say is, “We want to make a movie with this actor based on this property.”

**John:** The guy who wrote that would be called in to have many meetings over town. Will Smith would fly him out to wherever the set is and he would sit in a long meeting with Will Smith. And Will Smith would pitch him this idea and he would spend six months developing this idea with Will Smith that might end up being a movie. It probably wouldn’t end up being a movie but he’d get paid for it maybe.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Yeah. So, I mean, good things could happen. But that script would not get made.

**Craig:** Right. Look at Chris McQuarrie. This is one of the best writers I know. And Chris McQuarrie broke into the business with this amazing original script…

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** …for The Usual Suspects. But, you know, even a guy like Chris McQuarrie, like right now for instance he is the writer and director of One Shot, which looks spectacular by the way. I think it’s going to be really cool. But it’s an adaptation of a novel, you know? Because that’s what the studios are making and Chris is smart enough to go, “Okay, I mean I could keep bashing my head against the wall to try and get more Usual Suspects out there, or I could apply my craft and skill to adapt a novel that’s actually difficult to adapt and adapt it beautifully and direct it.”

So, that’s where the business is. I mean, look, you don’t have to like it, but you can’t sit there like that one guy that refused to leave his hut on Mount St. Helens. [laughs] You’ve got to react. You have to adapt. And I think sort of planting your stick in the group and going, “Specs are nothing,” is so old man; it’s so like 40-year-old man in 1983 to me.

**John:** I want to go back to one point that Anonymous Socialist made. “When people say make your own opportunities — I’ll do webisodes if someone knows the secret to monetizing it.” I have full sympathy for that. And I get frustrated by the, well Kickstarter, we’ll do a Kickstarter and we’ll make it all happen with that.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And here’s the thing: like somebody will be successful and do that. And things will get made. And god bless Ed Burns who has been able to make his movies on his terms for his budget and his price. That’s great. And I think it’s wonderful that new models are succeeding, but they’re not going to succeed for enough people for everyone to be able to make actual movies that people see in theaters.

So, I’m saying, like, yes, please write for any screen you want to write for. Don’t be precious. Experiment with new things. But the idea that, oh, that the future will take care of all that for you, technology will take care of that, the internet — the internet will do it! — is naïve and doesn’t speak to any understanding of not just the way the business is now but sort of how business overall is, or how economics works.

You say like, “Oh, well we’re going to make these. It’s going to cost us $10,000 each to make these little webisodes and we’ll put them on YouTube and then, money!”

**Craig:** Right. No.

**John:** And in the end, who knows what that is.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And some very smart people have not been able to make this work. And so certainly it’s possible that you will be the person to make this work, but please allow for the fact that it very well could not happen, too.

**Craig:** And let’s also remember, anything that makes it easier for you to break in makes it easier for everyone to break in. It’s not just you that can do this. It’s a thousand other guys with a thousand other ideas. The Internet makes it harder. I really do believe that. It makes it harder. There’s so much noise, so everything just becomes cheaper and more fleeting. The Internet is great for right now, today, this week, an awesome video that everybody’s talking about, and no one will be talking about it tomorrow. Nobody.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It’s danger. Danger.

**John:** This project that we have coming out… — There’s a project we haven’t announced that we have coming out in the fall, and we shot a promo video for it. And so the question is, how close to launch should we release the promo video for it? And we really came down to we should release the promo video at launch. Like, at the minute you can actually do the thing, the minute the thing is actually available to purchase, that’s when you release the promo video. Because otherwise there’s no sense that you’re going to be able to hold onto any of that enthusiasm you’ve built up.

That idea of like, “Oh, it’s a long lead kind of this, and we’re just going to carefully sneak in and do stuff –” No. You have your one shot and it needs to be immediately purchasable/downloadable right then and there because otherwise the next face-eating man zombie is going to be running down the street in Florida and you’ve lost any attention that you had.

**Craig:** That guy’s cool. I mean, he’s dead now, but he’s cool.

**John:** Yeah, I have not clicked any links. And by the time this podcast airs it will be old news. Thank goodness.

**Craig:** But, by the way, there’s an even cooler guy. So, the man goes and eats another dude’s face which is obviously the result of some kind of PCP or Bath Salts psychosis. — I’m fascinated by this Bath Salts thing. — But then the next day a dude in New Jersey, I think, literally woke up and said, “What could I do to get face-eating guy out of the news cycle?”

So, police are called to his apartment where he has stabbed himself repeatedly in the abdomen. He pulls his own intestines out and throws them at the police officers. He threw his own intestines at them. And, lived.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not fair.

**Craig:** Which makes me think that we’re actually a lot more sturdy than we think. I mean, if you can take a handful of colon and just whip it at a dude, and the worst that we could say is, “You know, it was a rough week there in ICU, but you’ll be all right, buddy. You’ll poop again.” Smart. Remarkable.

**John:** [laughs] It is remarkable.

On that, let us wrap this little podcast up. My One Cool Thing is actually something that’s very sturdy, sort of like the human body when you remove its intestines. So, my One Cool Thing is US Verde Buffalo Grass. I don’t know if you’ve heard of what this stuff is?

So our front of our house, we took out the front lawn because we’re sort of on this hill and there was really no good reason to have grass because you couldn’t enjoy the grass, and it was taking a tremendous amount of water to water that grass. So we put in native plants in the front. It looks nice. It’s wonderful. But in the back we actually have some lawn area where a kid can play soccer or kickball or some elaborate sport she just invented that involves kicking the ball and then doing math, because she’s that kind of kid.

But normal grass is sort of a huge water drain. So, we ended up putting in this new stuff called UC Verde Buffalo Grass. And it’s actually kind of amazing. So what they did is they took Buffalo Grass and sort of refined it, and refined it, and refined it, and sort of cross-bred it with this different thing. So they came up with a Buffalo Grass that takes very, very little water but really resembles normal grass. And so you can buy it, and if you’re putting in a new lawn someplace, or you’re working on your old lawn and thinking about something new, I’d really recommend it. It’s worked out very well.

The caveats for it: it’s not the kind of lawn that you can roll out, nor can you seed it. You actually have to buy these little plugs. And you just buy these little sort of one-square-inch plugs and you have to plant them. And you plant them six inches apart, and so that’s tedious and it takes a long time. But once it grows in it has been really, really good. And we basically don’t have to water for like months during the year, which is great.

**Craig:** Does it feel like normal grass?

**John:** It really feels like normal grass. It looks like normal grass and it feels like normal grass. As it is first growing in it’s a little too soft, like you could sort of push through to the ground a little too easily. But now that it’s grown in denser it’s really, really strong. And the roots are much deeper than normal grass which is why you don’t have to water it so much. So, it’s been a good investment.

**Craig:** I like that. David Zucker is very environmentally conscious. And a few years ago he did that ridiculous — I mean, I can’t stop making fun of this — that ridiculous thing where he got the fake grass, you know, the synthetic grass that’s basically like fancier Astro Turf.

**John:** Recycled plastic.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s basically plasticy Astro Turf. So they got Astro Turf to leave that sort of terrible highway motel carpeting and to look like real grass, but the problem is, you don’t water it at all, but the problem is it heats up and just burns everybody that steps on it. [laughs] And it’s the dumbest thing ever. It kills me. I just think it’s so ridiculous.

**John:** But where I will… — We don’t have any of the plastic grass. Where I will say friends who’ve put in the plastic grass is where you have a place where grass just can’t grow because it’s too shaded by a tree. That’s actually kind of a great place for plastic grass.

**Craig:** Sure. That’s fine. I buy that. Although, you know, there’s other options there.

**John:** Yeah. There’s shade-living things.

**Craig:** Yeah, there are. There are shade-living things. There are wee people that appreciate the shade. If you give them toadstools they will come. They will come. And they will grant wishes.

**John:** The other good thing about this grass is it seems to be very dog pee sturdy, so your dog can pee all over it and it won’t do weird things. It won’t die.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** That’s a nice thing. Any cool things on your side?

**Craig:** Ah, man, you know, I’m just full of hatred, bro. I’ve got nothing but bile for the world. I felt, this was good though. I like this… — This podcast helped me expel some of it. That Adam. Not Biff, but Adam.

**John:** [laughs] Hey, do you think you’re going to keep your site up and running for perpetuity or would you take it down at some point? Would you restart it?

**Craig:** You know, I’ve been thinking about it. I don’t even know what to do with it because on the one hand I think, oh look, it’s like a weird mausoleum of stuff that happened. And I certainly wrote a lot on it. And there are things on it that weren’t sort of topical. I remember, for instance, I did a piece on just dealing with pressure which was sort of a useful thing.

But I don’t know. What do you think I should do with it?

**John:** That’s a good question. And let’s put that out for the listenership. If you have suggestions for what Craig should do you can do a couple different things. You could leave a comment on this post on the site, but that’s really the worst thing to do.

**Craig:** We don’t like comments.

**John:** My suggestion would be to tweet Craig. He’s @clmazin.

**Craig:** Yeah, @clmazin.

**John:** So tweet Craig and tell him whether he should keep his site up or down or do something different. I’m on Twitter, @johnaugust. Just @johnaugust.

And a few sort of housekeeping notes for the show. A lot of people aren’t aware that we are one of the few podcasts you’re going to find that actually has a full written transcript. A couple days after the podcast airs we post a transcript of the show. So if you go to the actual post at johnaugust.com, there will always be a link to it so you can see it there.

I had lunch with another writer who said, “Oh, I love your podcast. I never listen to it but I read the transcripts.”

**Craig:** Oh, cool.

**John:** So bless him.

**Craig:** Well done.

**John:** And, I should also say that anything that we mention in the podcast, or almost anything we mention on the podcast that seems at all interesting or relevant, there will be a link for it in the show notes. And so the show notes are always at johnaugust.com. You can see things about UC Verde Buffalo Grass and stuff that Craig mentioned. What did you mention this week? What would your show notes be?

**Craig:** A lot of hatred mostly.

**John:** And there will be a link to Craig’s site which may be taken down soon.

**Craig:** Hey, have we mentioned, you know, the thing that we’re gonna do?

**John:** Oh, that thing in Austin?

**Craig:** Yeah. Have we talked about it?

**John:** Yeah, we totally should do that. So, tell them.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, so John and I are both attending the Austin Film Festival or at least the screenwriting conference portion of the Austin Film Festival. You’ve been there many times I assume?

**John:** Four or five at least.

**Craig:** So we’re both longtime participants. Great, great thing. I feel like there are so few things you should ever spend money on, but Austin is great because they really do get an amazing breadth of screenwriters. I mean, last year I was there with Larry Kasden, and Scott Frank, and John Lee Hancock, and Haas and Brandt, and Alec Berg. It was just amazing.

And this year among the other things we’re doing there, John and I are going to be doing a live podcast, live. I mean, not live in the sense that you can listen while we’re doing it, but we will be in a big room full of people doing it. And it should be fun, and raucous, and maybe a little drunk.

**John:** We will have a special guest who I don’t think is quite confirmed yet. But, if we have this special guest I think that would be quite amazing. And it’s been a goal of ours for awhile to try to do a live podcast. And we’ve talked about venues in Los Angeles that we could do it, and we haven’t quite figured that out. So Austin is a good trial run because there’s already a bunch of people who want to hear. People talk about screenwriting.

So, that will be our first trial run. But, I will say if people, listeners, have suggestions for a place here in town that we could do a live show, we’d still definitely be into that. We talked about the Writers Guild Theater. The challenge with the Writers Guild Theater is it’s kind of huge and kind of expensive. So if you have a place that’s not so huge and not so expensive, that could be great. If you have a place that could serve alcohol, that might not be a bad idea either.

So, we’ll still keep that in mind. But I think the Austin Film Festival will be the first live Scriptnotes. So, there will be people in the room. We’ll record it. We’ll put it up just like a normal episode. But there will be people —

**Craig:** And if you are thinking about spending a few hundred bucks to learn from actual screenwriters… — Oh, and I should also add some great producers, too, like Lindsay Doran… — They just get great people there. It’s really worth your while. And it’s in October.

**John:** If you’re going to attend one film festival as a screenwriter, I’d probably go to Austin.

**Craig:** Sounds right to me.

**John:** Sundance is lovely. And you’ll see a lot of movies at Sundance. But the sessions you’ll go to in Austin are probably the most useful for an aspiring screenwriter.

**Craig:** And they do have movies there, too. The Duplass brothers I think premiered a movie there last time. It’s pretty cool. Awesome.

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

**Craig:** John, thank you right back. And I’ll see you next time.

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

**Craig:** Bye.