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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: Well. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 665 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we often talk about characters needing agency, but what does that look like on the page? We’ll explore agency on the scene level and in the script overall. Then it’s listener questions on sign language, screenwriting while blind, and credits when something is written for television, but then goes theatrical.

In our bonus segment for premium members, Disneyland. Craig, I just went to Disneyland for the first time in many, many years. I want to talk about Disneyland and our experience of theme parks as folks who create entertainment for those giant corporations.

Craig: My wife loves Disneyland.

John: But I’m guessing you don’t so much.

Craig: I’m not against it.

John: I’m not against it either.

Craig: I like Disney World, but it’s so far away and I’m never going to Florida again. So I guess I should probably get back into Disneyland.

John: Mike and I are not Disney adults, but we went as adults on election day to avoid all the anxiety of election time.

Craig: How’d that work out?

John: It was actually a very good distraction for the period of time that we were at Disneyland. Then we just did not open up any social media on the phone. Then we got home and eventually we had to break the seal and the bottom fell out of the world.

Maybe we’ll start with that. Remember back in 2016, we actually did a bonus episode of Scriptnotes the day after the election saying the title was Everything Will Be Okay but I was genuinely freaked out then. I was also really upset this time, but not as astonished, I guess.

Craig: First, let’s try and find some vague silver lining here even though a lot of people have very good reason to be concerned. This was eight years ago and we said everything will be okay. Everything’s not okay but the world didn’t end.

John: Did not end.

Craig: So that’s something. That’s a data point. Things definitely didn’t go great. This time it doesn’t feel good again. We’re going to have to see what happens. The only weird psychological difference for me this time was A, I already knew what it was like to feel this. It wasn’t a new feeling.

And B, and this might feel counterintuitive, the first time it seemed like everybody just made a really crazy mistake. People were just goofing around and mistakenly elected a guy. This time, no, they fully chose. They fully chose. This is the country we live in. This is the choice they made, and now we live with it. It’s not going to be great, and who knows?

John: The who knows is a big factor here because it’s as we talked about on our last episode, the uncertainty and the anxiety that comes with uncertainty is big. In that episode, we were talking about waiting on a decision for a thing and the situation of knowing that we have x number of years ahead of us of this stuff and that it’s going to be remembering how exhausting 2016 through 2020 was and just getting through that. Yet we know we got through it.

We also know that people throughout history have gotten through things. A thing that I’ve talked about on the show before is that the Great Big Book of Horrible Things, which is this book I read every couple of years which recounts the hundred greatest losses of life over the course of human history. It sounds so depressing, but what you learn about when you look at those terrible events in history is yes, but we still got here. For all the suffering that happened in the moment, humanity did pull through.

Craig: I think it’s unlikely that we will vaporize. The other, I wouldn’t call this hope or silver lining as much as notably pragmatic, is that now everyone is prepared. We take care of the people that we love. We look out for people that aren’t living in States where the laws are good, and we take action to help the people we need to help as best we can. And we do whatever we can. Acknowledging that there are limitations to what we can do until such time as this democracy chooses otherwise. That’s the best we can do. Yes, 2016 to 2020 was exhausting. There was also this insane pandemic. He didn’t cause that pandemic as far as we know.

John: Here’s the thing is that there’s going to be a bunch of unexpected surprises logged our way. You want to have people in those positions who can best deal with those things. I don’t feel like we’re going to have a highly staffed, competent government to do those things and that is a concern for me. For example, I’m concerned about the safety of the AI systems that are being developed. I don’t feel like this is a group of decision-makers who are particularly well-suited for the task.

Craig: They don’t seem particularly well suited for any task. I don’t know how that will end up, but I’m very focused on a couple of realities. The most important of which is, I must be aware of the things that are within my control. I know I can vote, I know I can donate money, I know I can talk to people, but I also know that there are some things I cannot influence whatsoever. I am not able to influence legislation about AI. No.

John: I’m not able to influence this man’s relationship with Putin, which I think is incredibly alarming, but not. We talked last week about the circle of concern and circle of control, and that they don’t overlap very much. Yet what I have found very helpful in these days after this election result was to make a list of the things I’m actually worried about. Actually, just chart them, because sometimes it’s just as a amorphous blob but when you actually list them down, you’re like, “This is a long list, but I can see them.”

For each one of them, is there anything I can control or effect about this? In most cases, a lot of cases, no, but in some cases yes. For example, I’m really alarmed about the damage that can be done to our US healthcare system under this person. But the actual steps I’m going to take is I can make sure I got my flu shot, I got my COVID booster, make sure I’m up to date on other vaccinations. I can get extra copies of the prescription medicines that I actually need. I can have those. My daughter can get plan B which lasts for four years. There are some things like that you can do.

I’m really concerned about the economy just blowing up. An individual can save money, they can also just think about, “What are the plans you could take if things got bad. What are the roommate situations? What are the moving home situations? What are the things you could do?” Because at least that’s something you can think about that’s under your control versus these uncontrollable issues.

Craig: If you extend that too far, you end up a prepper. You have to find the balance, which is difficult but trying to reengage the neocortex and kick the lizard brain back a little bit is valuable. It does help put things in context and it does give you at least a sense that you’re not just running around in circles screaming. That’s pretty much about the best you can do.

John: The other thing you can remind yourself is that it’s okay to feel grief and upset and outrage, but it’s also okay to feel joy and happy. You don’t have to live inside a horror movie.

Craig: It’s actually critical. I was talking about this with my older kid, how living a joyous life is the best revenge. We will have to do things to try and make sure that we can live a joyous life, including choosing where we live. If it seems to me over the course of time, if I look around and I’m like, “Oh dear, this is sliding towards something horrible, even here in California,” I’ll leave. I will. I’ve always felt like you got to keep one eye on reality.

Now, generally, I’ve never actually thought about that as an American, really. I’ve never thought, “Oh, would I ever have to leave?” I don’t believe I would ever have to leave here because I don’t really think that there is an America. I think there are two Americas. I think there are in a cold civil wars, how I would call it. It’s not a shooting war, but it’s a cold civil war. There’s a really good article in Wired. I guess I’ll make it one of my cool things about California and how California, despite everyone else’s screaming and gnashing of teeth, is just dragging everybody toward the future.

It’s what we do but the other thing that isn’t within my control and that I’ve absolutely exercised is even though I had a very diminished footprint on social media, I’ve turned it off entirely. Because I think at this point, it is fair to say nobody knows what the hell they’re talking about. Everybody is under the delusion that they can influence other people. They can’t. They are simply talking to each other and reverberating. I am totally with you, John, that the most important thing is that we don’t let any person steal our joy. Even in the midst of other people’s suffering, we do what we can to help them.

John: You and I are in the business of hopefully making joy or hopefully we’re making entertainment. It feels so trivial to be doing that in time when things could be– Things aren’t awful right now. But they could get awful. How are you going to continue to work? I do remember in 2016, I was writing the second of the Arlo Finch books, which is the best of the Arlo Finch books. It actually was a terrific privilege to just be able to disappear into that work at that time. So I would say, yes, all of the stress outside stressors can be a negative impact on your work, but they can also invite you into your work to focus on those and create meaning in them.

Craig: We’re in post-production. I gathered everyone together and I don’t presume what people’s politics are. I don’t talk to them in any way about, oh, everyone here hates what happened. I don’t presume that but what I did say was I imagine that there are quite a few feelings right now. We talked through what options were for people. Then I just reminded them that making shows like the one we make, it’s one of the last things that Americans seem to enjoy doing together, are watching sporting events, watching certain television shows, going to certain movies. Everybody’s happy to just do that together. There’s not much left. We don’t watch the same news, we don’t live in the same states, we don’t believe the same things, we don’t listen to the same music.

It’s all over the place. Then there are these moments where we’re all like the way it used to be, where everybody just does things together and we’re something that people can do together. It matters. It actually matters. We’re not making vaccines, we know that. We’re not curing cancer. But it’s actually significant.

John: It feels like a natural segue into our main topic today, which is on agency. Back in episode 627, Aline was here and she and I were talking about this term agentic, which is related to main character energy. People describing themselves as wanted to be agentic.

Craig: I hate that word so much.

John: You were gone for that episode. Here’s what I do respect about it. It’s about taking the reins of your destiny to do things the way you want to do them. It’s being the protagonist in your story. It can relate to that grind in hustle culture, but also about taking risks socially and professionally and not being afraid to take space and demand attention, which are generally noble goals. Sometimes we have this instinct to hide back in the corner when we shouldn’t do that.

It’s about taking that step outside of yourself and saying, “What should this person who is me do in this situation to achieve those goals?” Let’s now turn this back to the actual work that we do, which is our characters and our stories. How do we think about agency and what does agency really mean for them? Craig, what’s your definition of agency? What does agency mean for a character and a story?

Craig: I always think of it as giving a character qualities that allows them to change the plot. Basically they can make choices that change the plot.

John: Absolutely. They have autonomy. They have the ability to make choices themselves. They’re self-driven rather than be directed by others. They’re not on rails that they really have to do a thing.

Craig: And there are choices to make.

John: There are choices to make. Absolutely, and that they’re making those choices with intentionality. There’s a reason why they’re making this choice versus that choice. Sometimes they can make the wrong choices, but they still had the ability to make that choice. I think that last point is so crucial that there’s the possibility of effectiveness. It’s plausible that the choices could have an impact on their situation and in a meta-level, change the story.

Craig: Sometimes when people write stories, they’ll have a character make a choice because they, the writer, need them to make that choice to make stuff work. We can feel it every time. That’s where you’ll start to hear, “We’re not sure this character has agency because they just made a choice for no reason. It’s not particularly consistent with what we know about them or how they’ve lived before. They’re just doing it and it worked out well for your plot.” That’s not ideal. Then we don’t really feel the illusion of a real person there, because, of course, it is all an illusion.

John: Absolutely. I think the Inside Out movies do a great job with a sense of characters who are making choices that are having a direct impact on the story overall. In both movies, Joy has a goal. In trying to achieve her goal, she’s creating the plot of the story and her misguided assumptions are changing what’s happening there. You see that reflected in the real world too, in terms of the real-world character who’s trying to do things that we can understand why she’s trying to do them, even though they’re the wrong choices she’s making.

Craig: We, as we write, have to basically be all of the emotions of our character. We are joy and we’re anger and we’re sadness and anxiety. We’re all those things. We just have to figure out in these moments which one of those things is going to be driving the character.

There are some characters that play as purely logical, very rational. They are almost never the hero because we are not interested in investing our emotions in somebody who is not driven by their emotions.

Spock is a great side character. In the team that’s breaking into, the Russian intelligence building, there’s always one character who has no emotions and is just incredibly dry and matter-of-fact, but that’s never your hero. Your hero has to get angry, your hero has to be scared, your hero has to have worries, and your hero has to love something.

John: Those emotions that we need to be able to see. We need to find ways to externalize these internal stakes so we can actually see what they’re doing. We need to believe that they are informing the choices that they make, that they’re actually contributing to, that the actions that we’re seeing them take, that next line of dialog comes out of what is underneath the surface there that we believe exists.

Craig: Choices are difficult. If it’s an easy choice, it’s not a choice.

John: You brought up the idea of like, we mostly hear about agency when we get the note. It feels like the character lacks agency. Let’s translate that. What is an executive really saying when they’re giving you that note?

Craig: Usually that everybody else in the story is laying out for that character what needs to be done and that character picks one of the options that they’ve laid out, or the character is stuck. Someone says, “We’ve got to go rescue this person. They’re here. We’ve got to do this and this.” You’re like, “Okay. I’m going.” Then really what you’re left with as a character is, “How well do I aim a gun?” That’s not agency. That’s just skill, which is cheap. You start to feel like there isn’t a person there who is in charge of their life. They’re just an NPC.

John: I can envision two different scenarios where you might hear the agency note. They’re different situations. There’s the, it feels like this person is giving these choices and they’re just doing this thing, but they’re on autopilot, and it’s almost like they’ve been assigned a mission. Like, you’re going to do these things in this order, and this is how you’re going to do it. That feels like a lack of agency. That feels like a lack of choice.

You also see characters who, because of the situation you’ve put them in, like it’s a depressed young mother in a small town who can’t get out of her thing. It’s like, she feels like she doesn’t have agency. I’ve not created a situation where that person can actually make a choice that can influence their life. Those are different things and require very different solutions.

Craig: We used to hear passive. That was really what we, then somebody came up with agency and our business loves a buzzword.

John: At the end of the day, our business loves a buzzword.

Craig: The business of it all loves a buzzword or buzzphrase. Agency took over from passive but it’s similar. It is similar. There’s nothing wrong to be clear with a character who you define as somebody who is trapped because they have no agency. And then they are forced by your plot hand to start to make difficult choices, which forces them to experience what it means to have agency. 40-year-old Virgin, there’s no agency there. He’s just going through life on autopilot and then he is forced to try and do stuff.

John: I think what’s comparing that like, here’s the mission you’ve been assigned versus kicking you out of your comfort zone. The work the writer needs to do is so very different. The passive character lacks agency because they have no choice put before them. Fundamentally your story is different. You need to find a reason why you’re telling this one-time story of this character who’s changed and has to undertake this quest to do a thing versus the “you’ve been assigned this mission.”

That’s the carpentry job that you and I are sometimes hired to do is like, “How do I get these beats to happen in a way where our character is actually making the choices to do these things?” That’s why Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible, he gets the self-destructing message, but then he’s making his– charting his own course.

Craig: This is our version of magicians forcing cards. They give you the impression that you have agency, that you get to pick a card, any card. That is what we’re doing too. You do not get to pick any card. This character actually doesn’t have agency. They don’t exist. But our job is to make it seem like they do.

John: A thing I’ve said often talking about character wants and motivations is the hero’s allowed to drive wherever they want to drive. We’re building the roads. Yes, you can drive anywhere you want. These are the roads you got. We are laying out the roads and it feels natural because there have to be roads, and so we built the roads for them.

Craig: It’s a weird job that we do.

John: It’s a very weird job.

Craig: It’s very strange.

John: Talking about the note about character slack agency, I think sometimes it’s a mismatch of character and story. You’ve created a character who doesn’t have the tools or expertise for this really interesting plot. You may have just picked the wrong hero for this plot or the wrong plot for this hero. And the gears don’t match, and so therefore the engine doesn’t work right.

Craig: None of my skills, abilities, desires, none of them have anything to do with the story that’s happening. The plot that we choose is designed specifically to test a certain human being who has certain limitations, needs, wants, or undiscovered strengths. If we don’t pick that plot for them, then it really doesn’t matter if we give them a choice because the choices don’t matter and it doesn’t feel like it’s purposeful.

John: The other problem I see sometimes is you have characters who feel like they are rats in a maze. It happens a lot in horror movies where they are just responding to the stimulus that’s being put there. Some of the very best horror movies, Alien is a great example of a scary movie that where the characters do have agency and are making choices and there are conflicts between characters because of the choices that they’re making. That is when it feels great. But when it’s just we have to get away from this madman and I can go through this door or through that door, that doesn’t really feel like agency.

Craig: No. That’s running. Now, usually, there is a character early on in horror films that has no agency on purpose who just gets chewed up. Poor woman swimming when the shark gets her. She has no agency. Usually, the first person that Jason or Freddy gets has no agency. That’s what NPCs are for, to demonstrate the formidable nature of the villain. Then our hero, they’re the ones who are like, and in horror movies, this does happen where you’re like, “Clearly plot armor has come into play.”

Plot armor exists specifically to protect characters who have agency. The reason we call plot armor is it’s not working well enough because the choices that they’re making in theory aren’t good enough to keep them alive based on the rules of what we know. You got to watch out for that one or else you just stop worrying about your characters.

John: Indeed. Let’s talk about what agency looks like on the page. In the course of a scene, how do you think about agency within a scene? You talked about it from your protagonist or from other characters in the scene. What does agency look like in a scene for you?

Craig: I always start with, what is the point of this scene? The point–

John: Your point as-

Craig: My point as the writer.

John: -as the writer.

Craig: The point is surely to change this character in some way, to express a need or want, or to fail. All of those things require the person to make choices. If they just walk outside and get walloped, it’s not interesting. They make a choice in every scene. No matter what, they must choose something. If they just walk outside and it’s like, “We’ve got to figure out how to get from here to here,” and there’s no choice, even if the choice is, “There’s only one way to get there, but it’s incredibly dangerous. Should we do it or not? We should do it.” I need to understand that choice and I need to know what the ramifications are of it.

John: They’re making a choice. They’re deciding to make a choice. They’re not being forced to make a choice. They’re deciding to make a choice. It’s plausible that the choice that they’re making is effective. You can believe that they think that that choice is effective.

Craig: That the choice is effective. It is also important to make sure that the choice is not irrevocable because if it is, then it doesn’t matter what they think. They can’t choose their way out of it. So running away is a great choice to always keep for your characters in whatever form running away would take, so that you know that you can back out of it. You don’t have to go through with it. Therefore when you do, it is either because of courage or folly. It’s a smart idea or it’s a bad idea, but the choice remains all the way.

John: Absolutely. If you’re designing your character as well, each different character would make us a different choice in that moment. Both in what they’re going to say and what they’re going to do, the choice that they’re making should reveal more about that character and more about why they are such a unique person in this situation but it has to be specific to who they are and what they’re doing.

Craig: You brought up the idea of arguing. Debating the choice is important. It underscores where each person is coming from. Arguing is a great instrument that we have, like sleigh of hand for magicians to create the illusion of agency because people are arguing for their points of view, which means they have a perspective that is individual and individuated from each other, which is also important. If everybody agrees, and everybody is like, it can either be A or B, and everybody votes B, we got a problem with the story.

John: I will agree. An argument or disagreement should reveal the differences, it should reveal power imbalances, it should reveal hidden things that are not being spoken about. If characters are disagreeing, it should be more than about A or B, it should really be about some other situation that’s behind the scenes.

Let’s talk about agency within a sequence. By this, I mean a collection of scenes that are driving towards one specific point. To me, even if you’re given a task, a mission of what to do, you want characters to have autonomy on how they do it. If we know that we need to blow up that bridge, great. If that’s the goal, fantastic, but let’s see our characters making the decisions about how to do that and then we as storytellers frustrate those decisions and force them to rethink their plans along the way.

Craig: Yes. There are also sequences that are defined by characters revealing, and this is a double negative, revealing that they really don’t have agency. Characters that are obsessive, that are losing the plot, so to speak, who convinced you they were being rational and then you realize they’re not. That’s a very uncomfortable feeling.

I love Star Trek: First Contact. That movie is great. A lot of it is basically lifted from Moby-Dick. Captain Ahab pretends he has agency. He makes you believe he has agency and then he exhibits this quality that we recognize in people, which is, okay now it’s a notable lack of agency. It’s not mistaken. It’s notable. They’re trying to hide it. That’s also fine. A lot of humans move through life without any real ability to shift the levers. They just keep doing what they do.

John: They keep pulling the slot machine and expecting the reward. Finally, let’s zoom all the way back out to a movie, an episode of that, a series, or the whole series in terms of what agency looks like in the course of those. Sometimes I’ve seen problems where it’s like, “You’ve made the wrong choices because you focused on characters who didn’t have agency or you had to make smart choices about who you were focusing on because of lack of agency. I was thinking about the movie Thirteen Lives, which focuses on the tie soccer team that’s trapped in the caves, the flooded caves. It’s important to see their perspective. Yet those characters, once they’re trapped, they have very little agency.

Craig: Correct. They’re trapped.

John: Exactly. Once we’re there and we have the means to get them out, then seeing that their decision making process about how they’re going to do it makes a lot of sense. They’re basically like Baby Jessica did down the well. It’s a story about them, but they’re not actually the central characters.

Craig: There are situations where we have an expectation that there won’t be agency. Let’s say for instance, you live in the Soviet Union and someone calls you and says, “We need you to do what the government is telling you to do.” You’re like, “Guess I’m filing that report.” Then the character’s expression of agency is underlined as some startling act that then has to be encouraged somehow, or else you, again take it away.

Or you have a story where you imply to somebody that they have agency and then you behave in a way that undermines them completely because only you deserved agency, not them. That’s also fun. Those arcs go across all the episodes or the whole movie, and you will find at the end of things, seasons or movies that you find out who really gets to choose and who doesn’t.

John: Looking at TV series, Lost is like– Let me talk about what you’re looking for overall. The audience has characters and wants to see those heroes accomplish a thing. You really can’t talk about agency without some goal or larger purpose. In Lost, it’s that you want those characters to get off the island. Severance of series you and I both like is a lot about agency and its characters deliberately severing their agency.

Craig: Then trying to get it back.

John: Exactly. We want them as an audience to be able to get that back and figure out just how to reconnect it. In Big Fish, we want to see the father and the son reconcile. They both have quite a lot of agency in trying to do that. But the mismatch of how they’re going about trying to do it is the frustration and ultimately hopefully the success of their story.

Craig: Every romance involves people who have a choice and we just keep waiting for them to make the choice and want them to make. If they just made it, there wouldn’t be a good story.

Then the question is, why aren’t you making the choice we want you to make? You got to give them a really good reason to not make the choice that you want them to make. It has to be compelling. Otherwise, you end up with a situation where you think you’ve given these characters agency and people who read your script will say it just seemed like they were not getting together for no good reason other than you needing to keep them apart until page 98. Now you’ve put your finger on a problem, you need to give them a reason.

John: Yes. Its tough. Let’s wrap up this agency conversation with, I’m trying to think if there’s any good general takeaways. Agency is one of those telescoping things. You see it on the very small scale. You see it on the very large scale. It’s not just for our heroes. We’ve mostly been talking about our protagonist.

Craig: Oh yes. The villains must have it.

John: Villains must have it. Yes, if you do a freeze frame and you’re looking at that third guard over there–

Craig: NPC.

John: NPC, we won’t care. Supporting characters too, we need to believe that they’re there for reasons beyond just the plot and to help out the protagonist.

Craig: Anybody that you want to foreground, needs to feel like they are not dancing on your string. If we can see the strings, it’s over.

John: I think you particularly notice that if a character who has been supporting character is allowed to drive scenes by themselves, if they actually can be a POV character on things, that it doesn’t feel like they have any agency. It doesn’t feel like they can make independent decisions. Oh shit, something’s wrong there.

Craig: You don’t want to follow what should be a day player. You have a scene between your hero and your villain are facing off at a diner. You don’t want to spend time with the waiter in the kitchen for any reason because they don’t have agency. They will be making no choices that impact the plot whatsoever.

John: I will never write this movie, so I’m fine to talk about it on the air. I’ve always wanted to do a romcom that was set inside the movie world of The Spy Who Loved Me. What I love about The Spy Who Loved Me is they’re inside this giant tanker ship, and we see all these other henchmen who are working for —

Craig: So many henchmen.

John: So many henchmen and I just want those henchmen to fall in love. I want to see their story, and I want basically a Rosencrantz and Guild’s turn in there. That’s a question of agency. They have no agency when it comes to doing their bosses deeds, or they have a lot of agency in terms of falling in love.

Craig: Mike Myers did this joke in Austin Powers where a henchman is killed, and then you just leave to go to his family, and they get the phone call to figure out what to do with that dad. It’s great and it’s funny because the notion that that person’s a real human being is hysterical to us because we just know they’re not. They’re just people dying in the background so that our heroes and villains can finally get to each other. It is amazing how we compartmentalize these things. We watch human beings literally murdered and we don’t feel their humanity whatsoever. None.

John: But if our guy get’s like, a cut on the arm, “Oh, no. Indiana Jones, you’re hurt.”

Craig: What will happen? This is important. Meanwhile, there’s guys in the background just dying. That’s Kevin Smith’s thing in Clerks, that Luke Skywalker is a war criminal because all the people on the Death Star were just doing their jobs.

John: Absolutely. They’re maintenance.

Craig: Literally. They don’t even know what the Death Star does. They certainly don’t know that it’s called the Death Star. Who would take that gig?

John: Let’s answer some listener questions. We’ll start with Seb in London.

Drew: Seb writes, I’m writing a pilot script where one of my characters is deaf and communicates through BSL. There are times when one other character in a group communicates with them through BSL, similarly to Sam and Henry in The Last of Us. How do I convey this when writing the script? Is it as simple as one line of action in the very first scene to give the reader the information, or do I have to preface every line of dialogue that’s signed?

Craig: Do not preface every line of dialogue.

John: No, that will be exhausting.

Craig: You can do a little indication early. I think, I’m pretty sure for that script, I just put that stuff in italics.

John: I have it in one of my scripts for a main character who’s deaf. The first time where it’s introduced, Garrett, who’s deaf, signs to Leyhill, parenthesis, we will always subtitle this so you know that it’s there. I boldface those lines just because it was a little easier to spot because there’s other languages that were sometimes in italics. To me, it’s important that I always show what that character is signing, even if other characters are translating the scene because there can be a difference in discrepancy there. I don’t just have the character who’s talking and doing the interpreting. I want to make sure that it’s actually clear that this person specifically had lines.

Craig: Sam would have dialogue.

John: Sam has dialogue in there.

Craig: It’s just in italics. We would understand he would be signing. By the way, that is how Keyvan understood what to perform. It was a little easier, I think, for us because so many of those scenes were really just between two brothers. It was quite clear how that conversation would go. But I think for the purposes of a page, even if you have 12 characters, 3 are deaf and 9 are not, just indicate how you’re doing it. Stick to some consistent method, whether it’s bolding or italicizing.

My personal opinion is don’t put too much garnish on the dialogue because you start to almost put something between you and that character. You don’t want to feel any difference there. Then step back and let the script be the script.

John: At a certain point, I remember I was listening to a podcast when they were talking about CODAs or how they did all the sign language in CODA. There’s a stage called glossing. Glossing, it’s specifically how are you going to sign that line because it’s not a one-to-one transition at all. That’s like when we had Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo talking about the Japanese in Shogun. You want the people who can really figure out exactly the best way for that character to express that.

Craig: That’s exactly how we did it. It’s not enough even to have a translator because as Justin and Rachel said, translators just translate, then you need somebody to understand the craft. So we had somebody whose job is to really understand from a literary point of view what was the context of this line, what’s the intention, what does it mean? Now let me figure out how that should be signed in a way that matches the intent here. Then the translator is really there just to facilitate communication between the filmmakers and the actors.

John: Absolutely. This thing that Seb is writing, if this gets produced, you would be working with the director, the actors, and some other person in there to help make sure that what is being signed accurately reflects what the intention is there. Let’s move on to Oren’s question.

Drew: Oren writes, my name is Oren, and I’m a blind scriptwriter living in Ireland. As a new writer who requires a screen reader to navigate programs on my computer, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to find a script-writing program or application that is accessible with industry-standard screen readers.

In case you don’t know, a screen reader is a text-to-voice software application used by blind or vision-impaired people, which will read aloud any information, including text, button controls, menu ribbons, form controls, edit boxes, et cetera.

I’ve tested most script writing software, including Fade In, Arc Studio, Celtx, and Final Draft. Ironically, I would say Final Draft is the most accessible so far, and by accessible, I mean about 2% of the application is usable for the screen reader.

Craig: That is definitely stretching the meaning of the word accessible.

Drew: I understand that you created your own screenwriting software called Highlands, John. However, as I work on Windows and your product seems to be only available for Mac, I can’t try it out. I would even consider purchasing a cheap Mac just to run your software if I knew it was accessible with Mac’s built in software VoiceOver.

Would you consider talking briefly about this accessibility issue on your podcast as it might help kick start a conversation with developers and persuade them to look more seriously at this problem? A lot of these screenwriting software applications claim to be the industry standard, but I fail to see how they can claim that right if they’re not making products that are inclusive for all.

John: Ryan Knighton has been on the show a couple times. He’s a blind screenwriter and a friend of mine. He had been using Final Draft on this Toshiba laptop for many, many years, and then it stopped working with Final Draft. He was in a panic situation so he came to us. Highland fortunately works really well for him. He first tried it on his iPhone to make sure the voice over worked. He had to learn how voice over worked with it. He now does it on his Mac. He wrote us this really lovely message about he’s spent his first year on a room writing entirely in Highland. One of the nice things about Highland is because it’s only an Apple ecosystem, it just actually works with all the Apple stuff, and so it can actually tie into all the stuff.

Craig: Because Apple’s already got a framework for how to be accessible for people who are blind.

John: It’s not like we created a special version for blind writers. We just did it properly and have proper labels on all the controls so he can hear what’s there. He will text me occasionally saying, “How do I do this one thing? How do I see what page number this is on?” It’s like, “We’ll fix that.”

Craig: We’ll figure that out. I think, Ken Testman, who makes Fade In listens to the show. I’m pretty sure that the way he wrote it is native for Mac.

John: It’s not.

Craig: Oh, it’s not.

John: That’s how he gets it to put on the PC too, because it’s it goes through Adobe Air. That’s the challenge. The web-based ones, in theory, should be relatively accessible because there are–

Craig: They’re agnostic?

John: It’s agnostic. What’s challenged is inside the browser window that these things are working. It’s like, can the reader actually figure out everything that’s inside there? But there is accessibility stuff for the web that should work. It’s a question of could Arc Studio or the other ones or Celtx, could they do better? Probably they should.

Craig: Let’s put this out there in the world and see if it’s something that these folks can do. He’s absolutely right. He could get, I guess, a “cheap” Mac.

John: Get a cheap Mac or iPad now because we work on that.

Craig: That’s the other thing. There may be something that is cost effective. It is a bummer to have to buy an entire computer just because the one piece of software that takes advantage of this stuff only works on that platform.

John: My guess is that Warren probably is using an iPhone because from every blind person I’ve spoken with they tend to go towards the Apple ecosystem when they can.

Craig: Because it works.

John: It works for them.

Craig: Then he could theoretically be working on iOS in Highland. That’s a possibility.

John: We’ll send him a code to the beta and see if it helps him out.

Craig: Sweet.

John: Cool. Last question here is from Dan.

Drew: I’ve been fascinated by Disney’s decision to turn the Moana TV series into a feature length movie. Do you know how writing credits would get determined in this situation? Assuming there was some writer’s room for the TV series, how do they decide who gets the screenplay writing credit, and how does this impact royalties?

John: Oh, boy.

Craig: What a spaghetti pile of trouble.

John: Let’s talk about this from a couple different levels. Writing credit is one thing. Let’s just talk about why you make the decision to originally do it as a series and make us a movie. I think it’s because this started in the pandemic, and they’re, like, “Oh, we need to make series for Disney Plus. We’ll do Moana.” Then it probably turned out– It was going to be really good and really expensive. They were, “We can make so much more money theatrically.”

Craig: If we make fewer episodes, like one big episode, and put it in theaters, it’ll– Because the animation’s expensive.

John: So in terms of credit, I will tell you that there’s other stuff behind the scenes, which is, you’re going to start seeing some teleplay body credits on theatrical movies, and it will drive me crazy. Craig is already shaking his head.

Craig: Jesus.

John: It’s because these things were contracted under TV contracts.

Craig: This is where I feel for our credits department because they are tasked with codifying a system that is routinely rocked by the insane things that happen in the industry. The employers have no concern whatsoever about it. Their whole thing is, “We hired you under a WGA deal. That was our responsibility. You guys handle credits. See ya. Just let us know what to put on the screen.” Then it’s up to the WGA to hash through this.

That is a very, very difficult question. If you have, let’s say, eight episodes and then you turn to another writer and you’re like, “Take all eight episodes. We’re hiring you to make a movie out of these. Pull stuff from all of them or none of them, whatever. Make a movie.” They’re all participating writers but they weren’t under the feature thing. How do you consider the contributions? It’s a mess and my heart goes out to the arbiters and the pre-arbiters who will have to deal with this. But that is what we do at the Writer’s Guild. We handle our own credits. It’s the best of the worst systems possible.

John: 100%. The answer is a lot of internal discussion and figuring out what is the best way to apply the rules as written to situations that are new.

Craig: I’ll say, I would rather that, I would rather deal with this rat’s nest than be like, say, another union in our town that’s just one person pick a name, that’s who did it. No, it isn’t. That’s not right, but that’s how they do it. Hint. It’s not SAG.

John: No.

Craig: It’s not IA.

John: Those IA credits is like “Cool. Which gaffer gets credit for this?”

Craig: Many gaffers.

John: Many gaffers.

Craig: Multiple gaffers.

John: All right, it’s time for one cool things. I have two, one cool things I want. First is a Netflix documentary by RJ Cutler on Martha Stewart called Martha. Some backstory here. Back when Dana Fox was my assistant, she and I would watch the original Martha Stewart show, the one-hour highly produced version almost every day. It was so good and so specifically Martha’s taste. You could tell she loved doing it and that she had absolute control over every little thing. Well, she went to prison for lying to the feds.

Craig: What a world we live in.

John: Then did a season of The Apprentice, and then did this talk show aversion, which you could tell she hated. I spoke to people who were guests on her show and she hated doing it. She really hated it.

Craig: Really?

John: Yes. In the documentary, she’s also clear she hates it. Anyway, this documentary is really delightful if you enjoy Martha Stewart. If you don’t like Martha Stewart, you might still find it fascinating.

Craig: You might still actually like it.

John: Because she is such a fascinating character because she’s very blunt and she has self-awareness, but not necessarily insight. You see-

Craig: It’s so weird.

John: – that she’s talking about these things like, well, you don’t understand that that’s not how any other person would respond to this situation.

Craig: Right. Well, she’s special.

John: She is special.

Craig: She’s special.

John: She had a very distant father who loved her very much, but loved her on very certain conditions. That tracks.

Craig: Definitely tracks.

John: I really recommend seeing this if, at all, interested in Martha Stewart on what she’s done. My other, it’s a good thing, it’s a one cool thing, is the replacement ear pads we got for our headphones. We use the very classic headphones that everybody uses, which is the Sony MDR-7506s, which are these great headphones. The covers are this pleather thing that just flakes away and it just leaves detritus everywhere.

Craig: It feels like the kind of thing where later, when we’re dead, they’ll pull us out of the ground to measure how much of the pleather was absorbed into our bones. Like, “Why did they both die on the same day under circumstances that are not really–“

John: Pleather.

Craig: It was the pleather. It’s just inhaling pleather flakes. What will we do when the podcast population is decimated by pleather flakes? We will all be happy.

John: Our new replacement pads for these headphones, but the headphones, they’re going to last forever, but the new pads have a mesh coating, which is not going to–

Craig: They’re very lovely.

John: We have two other small, tiny one cool things, which are two new babies born into the John August ecosystem. Stuart Friedel, our former Scriptnotes producer, welcomed his second child. Very excited for new baby on that front.

Craig: Weirdly, his second child was born and then it said, “Two weeks earlier.”

John: The Stuart special right there.

Craig: His child was born at two weeks of age, bizarrely.

John: That’s crazy.

Craig: Incredible.

John: Chad Creasey, who is also one of my former assistants who have been on the show also welcomed new baby. I love babies.

Craig: I do too and their world will be good and they will never know some things.

John: 100%.

Craig: They just won’t know.

John: They won’t know.

Craig: They won’t know. Lucky.

Well, I mentioned earlier an article in WIRED about California and setting the pace and we’ll dig that link up. There’s another WIRED article that I’m obsessed with right now. The title of it is the kind of title that generally I’m like, “Hungh.” The Quantum Geometry That Exists Outside of Space and Time. Now, usually, I go, “Ehh” because I’m like, “Either this is going to be some oversimplification bad science article like most of them are, or this will be impenetrable.”

There’s very little middle ground. This article actually appeared in Quantum Magazine and it has been, I guess, repurposed for WIRED and it’s outstanding. It does a great job of explaining what a big deal it is for how the mathematicians and physicists who think about the underpinnings of reality have started to reimagine it. It turns out that what was going on was we were stuck in a model. The model was all about what happens when collisions occur. The only way to figure it out was just to grind out like, “Here’s–“ oh my God, I think it was Feynman came up with the method, but it was the best we had.

Then through this combination of scientists, they’ve figured out like, “Oh no, no, this is a vastly simpler way to start to model how this works.” They reference it. They’re like, “It’s literally you could teach it to a fifth grader.” Which kind of makes sense. That when you really get down to it, what’s underneath, reality tends to weirdly be simple, like how weird is it that energy is mass times the speed of light squared? There’s three letters in that equation. What we keep finding when you really dig, dig, dig, dig, dig is it’s actually simple which is, of course, because we’re in a simulation, obviously.

Drew: No.

Craig: Of course, we are. We’re figuring it out right now. There’s no problem. It’s fine. Don’t let that upset you. Of course, it’s a simulation, but we’re figuring out how it works and we’re getting better at it, which I think is amazing.

John: It reminds me of you’ll see these formulas for weird things that don’t seem like they have anything to do with normal geometry and Pi is in there or E is in there.

Craig: Pi is a perfect example. Why does that keep showing up? Why would that be how circles work? Then when you look at it, you’re like, “Well, this totally makes sense.” They find that they can layer paths on polyhedrons in very simple ways to explain so much of what’s going on.

Now, I’m simplifying this because we don’t have the time for me to read this whole thing, but I would say if you are even a B-plus science student, and if you’re a B and lower, I’ll probably skip this one, but if you’re a B-plus science student–

Drew: You keep pointing at me when you say B or lower.

Craig: I don’t know how you were in school with this. I don’t know. See, I nailed it. B or lower.

John: He went to drama school.

Craig: Aww. Well, this isn’t for you. You take physics for poets.

John: Maybe have your wife explain it to you.

Craig: Yes. Have your wife explain this to you. Even if you have moderate scientific interest and capacity, this article really is mind-blowing and a great little, almost, like many science stories are, an exciting hunt with an awesome conclusion.

John: Oh, I love that. Very nice. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for a weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re all great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments. A reminder that we have a live show on December 6th. I thought we were sold out, but apparently, we still have some VIP tickets left. If you don’t have, come to that.

Craig: VIP tickets?

John: VIP tickets.

Craig: What do they get?

John: You get cool first-row things. What else?

Drew: You get a drink ticket, so free drink and you get to stick around for an after party where you get to meet John and Craig and me, and maybe some other guests.

Craig: I like that you slipped in you.

Drew: I’m important.

Craig: You’re like, “This is what’s going to move those VIP tickets, folks.” I agree with you. I think a lot of these people have already seen us. Megana is basically a celebrity.

John: If Megana is back, we’ll bring her too.

Craig: Ooh. Yes. Let’s bring Megana. Everybody. People love– When you graduate to Megana status, you too will be–

John: It’ll be a different, yes.

Craig: It’ll be a thing.

John: We had some great cast we got lined up.

Craig: Yes. We always do. Who will we be benefiting this time for this show?

John: This is Hollywood HEART. Hollywood HEART is a fantastic charity that helps kids who otherwise couldn’t go to summer camp, go to a special summer camp.

Craig: We’re doing what we can do to spread some joy and make things better.

John: That’s all we can do.

Craig: That’s all we can do. Craig, thank you so much.

John: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: So Craig, as I mentioned on the pre-show or the early part of the show, whatever you want to call the intro, we went to Disneyland, which I had not been to for five or six years. Since pre-pandemic. It was good. It was a good distraction for this and it was already on our– I’ve talked about like Mike and I have this list of 24 for 24. We made a list of 24 things we wanted to do in 2024.

Craig: God, you guys are organized.

John: Going to Disneyland was one of them.

Craig: It was one of them.

John: Scratched that off the list.

Craig: Take that right off. My wife is a big fan of Disneyland. We have an old college friend of ours named Andrew. He’s a Disney adult. I wouldn’t say that Melissa’s a Disney adult, but she’s a Disney aficionado and she and Andrew will go, oh, probably three times a year. She goes quite a lot and she loves it. I haven’t been in quite some time.

John: Have you been there without kids?

Craig: I don’t know if I– maybe. Yes. One time. I do remember this very specifically. There was one time Melissa and I went with a couple of friends of ours, another husband and wife. It was four of us. We went to Disneyland, we did adult Disneyland. We made a reservation to eat dinner at the Blue Bayou. Melissa got food poisoning. We had to leave early. I will tell you this about my wife. She can hold on to not throwing up longer than anyone in the world who needs to throw up. That ride is not short. It’s like an hour. We drove, she just sat there clenching her jaw and trying to not throw up for an hour. Succeeded. Stepped out of the car and barfed.

John: Oh God.

Craig: It was like she was just waiting the whole time. Me, I’m like, “Pull over right now.” That, I think, may have been the last time.

John: Not a good memory there.

Craig: No.

John: No.

Craig: No, but a fun one because it’s funny now. I’m telling you, it’s an amazing thing to see somebody sit there for an hour. The second they open the car, they’re like, “Oh, good. Finally.” Blah. I’m like, “How did she do that?”

John: Incredible.

Craig: Oh my God. The willpower on this woman.

John: Part of the reason we wanted to go is we’d not been there since the whole Star Wars land opened up. Man, they did a great job with the Star Wars land.

Craig: See, I haven’t been there.

John: That Imagineering is fantastic. Rise to the Resistance is a great well-constructed narrative story in there, which is fantastic.

Craig: The showcase ride is on the Millennium Falcon or something?

John: There is a Millennium Falcon ride as well, which I didn’t think was quite as good. The full Millennium Falcon there is incredibly impressive. I took some photo there, which you should. There’s a ride that goes there, which I didn’t think was actually as good. It’s a little bit motion simulator kind of, I don’t really care.

Craig: Sure. We’ve done that before.

John: There’s some really good surprises in Rise to the Resistance, you get the Storm Troopers, you get like surly like Imperial Guard or First Order. Disney people being mean to you is just like a such a nice-

Craig: That’s hot.

John: -change.

Craig: That’s pretty hot.

John: Absolutely. I know you always like the empire and sort of the–

Craig: That’s my love language is park employees abusing me. I love that.

John: Really enjoyed that. It’s also just nice to see the attention to detail where we got our Bontu garden wraps, our veggie wraps at the little shop there. I was tapping to pay, but they even changed the font on the little card reader was like the Star Wars font.

Craig: Oh, the Star Wars font.

John: It was all tracked.

Craig: Well, they’ve always been great with the attention to detail-thing. That’s their bread and butter. I should go. I haven’t seen Star Wars land. Also Disneyland’s little shop borne in spots, but there are some things that are nice to see just for old-time’s sake.

John: Yes, 100%. You go through Frontierland, it’s like, “I don’t really care,” but I’ll get– Sure.

Craig: Sure. Every time Melissa goes, she and Andrew will do the Haunted Mansion I think every time. You could recite the Haunted Mansion at this point.

John: I was sad that Small World, which is my sort of Haunted Mansion. I just loved Small World for sure no good reason. It was not open the day that we went there.

Craig: Oh darn.

John: Oh darn.

Craig: Worst ride in the park.

John: Then over in California Adventure, which they’ve also done a good job sort of, it wasn’t terrific when they opened it up and they’ve done a good job recognizing their mistakes and fixing them. I loved Tower of Terror and I was actually attached to do a Tower of Terror movie at Disney, which didn’t end up happening. I have deep affection for it, but I would say the risk they did for Guardians of the Galaxy, again, the Imagineers did go through and really found clever small things. Like if you’re standing in line and reading little signs like on that sink, it’s like spinal fluid must be washed off. They’re finding all this stuff. They really do find all this stuff.

Craig: I would never ever go on Tower of Terror because I do not like the feeling of falling at all. I hate it. I just don’t understand it. I don’t understand how you find joy. I’m glad you did.

John: Yes. I did like it. There were some frustrations and so there’s no comment form I can fill out. So I’m going to put this on the podcast.

Craig: Disney will be alerted.

John: Disney will be alerted. We were in the line for the Guardians ride and they only had one of the elevators open. We basically got stuck in a place where we hadn’t moved for 20 minutes and we’re like, “No, no, no. We need to leave.” It’s actually really hard to get out of a line at Disney, especially in this one. We try to walk our way back and they’re like, “Oh, no, no. You have to walk all the way to the front and then they can let you out.”

Craig: You have to constantly say, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m not cutting the line. I’m not cutting. I’m just trying to leave”?

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s terrible.

John: That’s not good design.

Craig: No, that’s not great.

John: Because people do need to leave people.

Craig: Sometimes they need to throw up.

John: Yes, exactly. If Melissa were there, she’d have to wait until-

Craig: She’s capable of it. She can do these things.

John: The other thing I would say is that there were situations where maybe they were training people or something, but we were waiting in line for five minutes to get a soda and they were like seven people at the counter–

Craig: That’s training.

John: That’s training. I felt like if I were the Disney executive, like Disney Park executive there, I would’ve had some strong words where whoever was letting guests wait around for five minutes.

Craig: Well, you went there on a Tuesday in the middle of the day.

John: That’s true.

Craig: That seems like that’s when they’re like, “Uuh.” They’re not training anyone on a Saturday.

John: The last thing I’ll say is, I fell down a little bit of a rabbit hole with– at California Adventure we went to where the Starbucks is and it’s this cafe thing. I could see there was branded stuff around it. Like, “What is this for?” It’s for the Silver Lake Sisters. It’s just like this weird imaginary story of this trio of sisters who were big singers in Los Angeles in the ‘20s who were inspired by Disney’s version of the Three Little Pigs. It was like this whole ouroboros like, and it was a fun, just brand essential because like no one would ever know or care. It felt like the way–

Craig: What a weird misfire. [chuckles]

John: Not actually misfire. I get it.

Craig: Really? It worked?

John: It kind of worked for me because I actually– I googled the fair like, “What is the deal with the Silver Lake Sisters? Were they a real thing?”

Craig: It would work if you’re a guy in your 50s doing adult Disney and like–

John: Who was supposed to write the Tower of Terror movie which they were actually– they tied into the Tower of Terror politics.

Craig: The Silver Lake Sisters.

John: Yes. They performed at the Hollywood Tower Hotel.

Craig: Got it. Inspired by Disney’s Three Little Pigs.

John: Inspired by Chateau Vermont.

Craig: It’s a big mess there.

John: It’s a big mess, but anyway, it made me think about sort of the stuff that we do in terms of storytelling. It’s about finding the story that will carry you through for two hours. The storytelling that Imagineers need to do is like, how do we make the experience of this place that you’re in rewarding for the time you’re there but feel like it actually has a bigger footprint than that? I think that’s a cool job.

Craig: Yes. It is a cool job. I never forgot when I was taking my kids to Disneyland or Disney World, because I took them there too. I never forgot how I felt when I went to Disney World as a kid, which was awe. I felt awe. I also remember how big it was because I was small. I think they do a really good job of that. There are things that I notice as an adult that I certainly didn’t notice as a kid. I didn’t notice the air vents in the ceiling of It’s a Small World.

John: Yes. Now you can’t help but see it. It’s just a black drop ceiling vents.

Craig: The first time I went on Pirates of the Caribbean, I honestly believed I was outside at night in the world. Now I’m like, that ceiling is not that far up. It really isn’t. Nice job painting it. You see everything because you’re grown and the scales have been lifted from your eyes. But the Imagineers do get how to create this for children. They know their audience. That’s why I actually love the whole adult Disneyland thing because it’s like we just love it now. We forgive it. It’s air vents.

John: I would say the Marvel Avengers area, it’s fine. The Cars Land, which I don’t like cars at all as a concept.

Craig: I’ve done the Cars Land, I believe.

John: Incredibly well-designed.

Craig: Yes, really well-designed. Because they know that’s where the kids are going. The experience of seeing the animated car people is really weird. It’s like the whole car thing is actually– I have so many questions. Do they have sex? Do they like–

John: Why does Mater have teeth?

Craig: Why does he have teeth? Why do cars race like cars even though they’re people and there are cars in the stands? I guess it’s like people watching people race, which we do, but with crashing. I have so many issues.

John: Drew, you were saying at lunch that the Marvel and Star Wars things were about the lifestyle of keeping people in the Disney ecosystem.

Drew: I heard that Disney basically has– They had for a long time too, a system that was like cradle-to-grave for women of like this is how you interact with the Disney ecosystem. When you’re a baby, it’s Mickey diapers through every phase of a woman’s life.

John: The Tinkerbell, the princesses.

Drew: You have your princess phase, you have all that stuff, through becoming a mother, and then, theoretically, the phase resets.

Craig: Resets.

Drew: That’s how you keep people in a loop. One of the reasons they bought Marvel and Star Wars was because they didn’t have that loop for boys.

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting.

John: Because it does make sense, then dads want to take their kids to see– to the Star Wars and all.

Craig: I get it. They’re like, we’ve mentally dominated half of the population. How do we mentally dominate the rest of them?

John: I did see a couple of folks who were clearly had been just married at Disney, but I also saw– one of my favorite things I saw was this group of 16 cousins. I know they’re all cousins because it was Cousins Trip 2024. On their back, they said, were they the Lopez or the Alvarado or Cousins by Choice? It was all checkmarked on the back of their shirt. I loved it.

Craig: The organization there is, coming from a family that was super isolated because everybody was in a feud with everybody, I’m always fascinated by the families with their matching shirts.

John: It was one or two women in the cousins who organized that whole thing. Of course.

Craig: Of course. Melissa’s family is pretty big. Melissa’s mother was the all-time organizer. She woke up in the morning and was like, “What can I be in charge of and how can I organize stuff?” Now that she’s gone and it’s sort of like– it was almost like everybody just went, “We’re not doing this anymore, right?” Yes. Because there were… There were so many events and they were fun and they were great and it’s actually sad, you need that bossy pants. You need bossy pants. You need bossy pants. To make you go have fun. You will have fun. But then you do.

John: Yes, absolutely. You need somebody to sort of take away some of your agency and you’re just making things. It’s like, no, this is what we’re going to do now. Full circle, folks. Craig, thank you for a fun episode.

Craig: Thank you, John. Thank you.

Links:

• Scriptnotes LIVE! December 6th at Dynasty Typewriter
• Even Under Trump, California (Yes, That Hellscape) Will Keep Moving the World Forward by James Fallows for WIRED
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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/industry-software).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** This is Episode 646 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

There are many software products aimed at the film and television industry, and more in development. But why do the bad ones persist, and why is it so hard for the better ones to succeed? Today on the show, we’ll look at the challenges and opportunities around making things that don’t suck. Then it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge, where we look at pages submitted by our listeners and give our honest feedback. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, magic, who needs it?

**Craig:** Are we talking the card game or prestidigitation?

**John:** We’re talking about our D&D campaign at the moment. We’re 10 installments into a campaign without magic. Let’s discuss what’s worked and what’s not worked so well, what’s been surprising about that campaign.

**Craig:** Fairly niche topic, but honestly-

**John:** It is a niche topic, but that’s why it’s a Bonus Segment.

**Craig:** It’s a Bonus Segment, and really our Premium Members should be playing D&D. They’re premium, for god’s sake. They should pursue quality in their life.

**John:** I think in a more general sense though, it’s like, what happens when you don’t uphold some genre premises. Take anything. If you took a horror movie and dropped out some of the aspects of what we expect out of that genre. We just saw the movie Bodies Bodies Bodies, which is an example of that, because it looks like a one-at-a-time killer thriller thing, and yet it’s not really that.

**Craig:** I like that idea. If we had an action movie, like a cop action movie, but no one ever fired a gun. It’s an interesting exercise in self-limitation to inspire some creativity and change.

**John:** We often talk about that on the show, how constraints are the writer’s best friends and that when you have constraints, it forces you to work within that. A project that I was approached by the last couple weeks, one of the problems was that it was just a world. There was no other kind of constraints to it. The first thing I had to do is like, “What constraints am I putting on myself?” because otherwise this is just an amorphous blob.

**Craig:** Yeah, I remember talking to Scott Frank when he took the job to do the Wolverine movie. He said his condition was Wolverine has to be able to die, because otherwise, who gives a crap? Everyone was like, “But Wolverine doesn’t… ” He’s like, “Mm-hmm. So anyway, Wolverine has to die.”

**John:** In a Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll talk about constraints and death, because death is a bigger factor when there’s no magic.

**Craig:** Massively so. That’s an exciting one. What do we have going on with news? Probably nothing.

**John:** There actually is some news here today, because-

**Craig:** What?

**John:** You and I are headed out of town.

**Craig:** Oh, my.

**John:** We are going to go to the Austin Film Festival, which we are often doing. We’re going this year. It’s October 24th through 31st. We are scheduled to attend. We’re gonna plan a live Scriptnotes show. We’ll probably do a Three Page Challenge. There’s talk of doing a 25th anniversary screening of Go.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s nice.

**John:** It should be fun. If you are inclined to go to Austin and are thinking about travel there, now might be a time to think about that.

**Craig:** We haven’t been there in a couple years. Is that right? Did we miss last time?

**John:** Yeah, probably two years.

**Craig:** Two, yeah.

**John:** Because I remember you didn’t go last year, and the year before that was the year you got really sick.

**Craig:** Oh my god. I got so sick. I think I got a stomach bug is what happened. No, let me revise that. I got a stomach bug. It happened. It was that 24-hour stay in bed clutching your stomach in pain after you’ve barfed your world out and then just try and drink a little Gatorade. It was miserable.

**John:** It was bad.

**Craig:** Yeah, so no one breathe on me.

**John:** A stomach bug is probably something you ate though, right?

**Craig:** Look, it may have been something I ate, but it felt like just that nasty gastritis.

**John:** We are so selling the Austin Film Festival. Come for the illness. It should be a good time. It’ll be Drew’s first time going.

**Craig:** Wow. Look, as long as your room has a toilet.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** It’s like those cruises where everyone gets norovirus. No, it’s not like that, I swear. I’ve been there many, many times. The only time I got sick. It’s actually quite fun. It’s raucous. Drew, you will be somewhat of a rockstar there.

**Drew Marquardt:** Weird.

**Craig:** It is a little weird. I gotta be honest with you. That part gets weird. People will be like, “Oh my god, it’s Drew. You sound just like… I imagined you looking different from your voice.” You get a lot of that.

**John:** Megana was a rockstar when she was there, but Megana’s always a rockstar.

**Drew:** Megana’s a rockstar though.

**Craig:** I’m not saying that you’re necessarily gonna captivate people the way Megana did.

**Drew:** I don’t have that charisma.

**Craig:** You know what? You got enough rizz. You got enough rizz.

**Drew:** I’ll take it.

**Craig:** Listen. People are gonna be talking.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to it, but Google Austin Film Festival and that’s all the information you need. Let’s do some follow-up.

Back in Episode 644, we talked about new federal reporting requirements for loan-out companies like Craig and I have and like what Scriptnotes is. That is for sure happening. But since that time, there was also a bit of a freak-out about, it looked like the California Employment Development Department was going to crack down on loan-outs in a bigger, more general sense. Cast and Crew, which is this big payroll company in Hollywood, sent out this alert right before Memorial Day, saying red alert, there could be huge changes coming here. It looks like that’s been backpedaled, but I thought we might spend a few moments talking about loan-outs, why they’re important, why a change to this would be a big, disrupting deal.

**Craig:** It’s hard to tell if Cast and Crew freaked out unnecessarily or if they freaked out necessarily. The fact is that loan-out corporations function essentially to protect Hollywood workers, duly artists, from being overtaxed, essentially. Some people could argue that loan-out corporations exist to keep artists below the line of fair taxation. There’s a fair debate to be had about it.

That said, literally every single writer, actor, director, producer that is, let’s just say, succeeding is working with a loan-out corporation. It is par for the course. California already has quite a high tax rate. We are taxed twice. You do actually get taxed as a corporation. Then you get taxed as an individual. It really exists because there are a lot of deductions that you can take as a corporation that you can’t take as an individual.

I have no doubt that once this letter went out, the unions and people that donate a lot of money to California politicians called those chips in and said no, don’t do that, and somebody then yelled at the EDD, who was probably some guy there who was like, “What is this all about? [Indiscernible 00:06:59].” Then he got like 15 texts in 12 minutes, like, “You’re gonna die.” It looks like the fight is over.

**John:** The fight is over. At least it’s been stalled or it’ll change a different way of approaching it. Listen. Loan-out corporations are a weird thing. It is strange to set up a system where you have companies that basically have one employee, or sometimes two with an assistant or something. It’s a weird way to do it, and yet the way that we work is just sort of weird.

I can both understand why regulatory agencies might say, “No, listen, these are employees. You should just treat them like employees,” and it’s also strange that above a certain earning threshold it makes more sense to go through a loan company rather than me being paid directly. It is kind of weird, and yet trying to change the system now would be so, I think, disastrous. You’d have to have a real, clear plan for how you were gonna do this.

**Craig:** Yeah, it would cost so much money that you might end up losing some people to neighboring states. It would be that crazy. The name “loan-out,” you might as well say it’s a fake corporation. You might as well use the word “fake.” Yes, it’s a weird bit of paperwork dancing, but it is, what, forever, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How long have these things been going on? Long before we showed up. That’s for sure.

**John:** Oh, yeah. It’s easier for big companies to hire other big companies. For this job I’m just finishing up now, it was on a rewrite for something. It was complicated. But they chose to pay me through their payroll company rather than through just the normal way. It was a mess to do it that way. There’s reasons we do things the way we do things. It’s not just because we’re trying to save dollars. It’s because there’s a structure behind it. There’s a reason why you pay a company rather than paying an individual in some cases.

**Craig:** The system, as far as I can tell, will not be changing any time soon.

**John:** But some potentially good news for you, Craig, because we got some follow-up about your Space Cadet movie.

**Craig:** Oh, fantastic.

**John:** Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** Yeah, because you mentioned on Episode 644 that the Space Cadet title, Lucas was sitting on it for a long time. Jose Luis in Puerto Rico says that there is a Space Cadet movie coming out this year, July 4th, 2024. It’s written and directed by Liz Garcia and will be released on Amazon Prime.

**Craig:** I guess Lucas finally got off the title there. My thing was in 1997. That’s a year that Drew doesn’t even understand as a year. I think it’s fair to say that nearly, what is it, 27 years later, that yeah, Lucas probably let it go.

**John:** Which is fair and reasonable.

**Craig:** That’s fair.

**John:** Let’s get to our marquee topic this week. Over the past couple months, I’ve had some conversations with two different startup companies who are trying to make software for film and TV productions. Here’s the problem that both of these companies were trying to solve. On a film or TV production, you have all these different departments who need to work together and need to communicate with each other. You have the ADs, you have wardrobe, props, locations, transpo, VFX, everybody working on the same project, and they need information from each other. How do they get that information to each other? What is the central source of truth?

The sources of truth would be the script, obviously, and also the schedule, the breakdown, like, this is the schedule for how to plan to shoot this thing. But there’s no obvious established way to do that, so instead, a bunch of homespun solutions have come up. Some of them work for some places, don’t work for other places. But it’s not hard to imagine that there could be a better way of doing this.

If in the script we know that Scene 15 is taking place at a roller rink, how does each department weigh in on what they’re going to do? Craig, I ask you, on The Last of Us, what is that process? What is the process by which all departments can see what each other is doing?

**Craig:** You really touched on a sore spot here.

**John:** I’m not surprised. There is a problem here. That’s why.

**Craig:** There is a problem. Basically, the way is done is through, I’m now gonna editorialize, endless, repetitive meetings. Endless, repetitive meetings. I found myself in a meeting just the other day. I love my crew. The department heads work so hard. Our show is a massive aircraft carrier. It takes so much time and effort to do everything, and everything is happening all at once, all the time. But I was in a meeting, an endless, repetitive meeting, just last week that brought up a topic that had been already met upon multiple times in prep, which is a half year ago. I started to feel like I was getting punked, like how is this possible? The fact is that there is a certain amount of human, face-to-face interaction and questioning that needs to happen, and I don’t know if there even is a software solution for that.

Beyond that, we do what every production does. The script gets broken down into a schedule by ADs using whatever Movie Magic scheduler or whatever the hell they use.

**John:** Probably that.

**Craig:** Probably that.

**John:** Probably that very old program, yeah.

**Craig:** Which is annoying, because it puts on the schedule thing in a list, the things we shoot, and then at the bottom of that it’ll say what day it was. That’s stupid. It should be at the top of it. Then everything in terms of distribution goes through Scenechronize, which I believe is owned by aforementioned Entertainment Partners, which I believe also owns my least favorite writing software, Final Draft. You start to see a little bit of a monopolization problem here.

**John:** Remind us again, what do you use Scenechronize for?

**Craig:** Scenechronize is a platform that distributes documents to the crew-

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** … electronically. Scripts can only be viewed in super watermarked ways and cannot be downloaded unless you have certain privileges. If you’re a department head, they let you download it. It also releases all communications like call sheets, schedules, preliminaries, memos, everything like that.

**John:** Most of your crew is looking at the stuff that would’ve been printed paper. Instead, they’re getting it through Scenechronize. They’re seeing it on their laptops, on their phones, on their iPads, right?

**Craig:** That is correct. We don’t have any printed stuff, except in the morning we distributed printed sides for very few people, just the ADs, the actors, producers, directors.

**John:** The decision not to use paper for very much stuff, is that because it’s more efficient or because you’re worried about stuff leaking out?

**Craig:** Both. This is Canada, where when you go to throw your garbage out, there are 400 bins. They’re very green. They’re like, before you throw your garbage out, is it soft or hard plastic? Is it a pen? Is it colored blue? There’s so many. I think probably also it’s just about not burning through… Productions used to burn through forests of paper.

**John:** Paper like crazy.

**Craig:** Insane. There is that aspect. It’s certainly cheaper. There are security measures that we can use with that stuff. It’s a little frustrating, I think, for people, because they can’t really have a script and mark it up and all the rest, but it’s just a necessary evil.

**John:** We talked about scheduling. We talked about Scenechronize. What are the other pieces of software that you or members of your team are using regularly to get the show done, both during production and then in post?

**Craig:** I write on Fade In. Then once Allie, who is both my assistant and also our script coordinator, goes through and puts it through the Scenechronize machinery to distribute, she also converts it to a Final Draft file. Why is it converted to a Final Draft file? Because Chris Roufs, our script supervisor, uses a very specific program for his job that only imports in Final Draft, of course. You start to see the problem with the closed system and the proprietary formats. It just begets just this legacy system of misery.

**John:** We have that, and then for while you guys are shooting, what is the software you guys are looking at cuts on? I know you also have the ability to look at things if you’re on another set while one set is shooting. What’s that kind of stuff?

**Craig:** There are two platforms for that. For the distribution of dailies and cuts, we use PIX, which I also do not like.

**John:** Oh my god, I’ve had to do nothing but PIX the last five weeks. I think PIX’s main job is to sign you out as frequently as possible. I’ve been on Zooms where I’m just tapping the screen and wiggling 10 seconds back just so it won’t sign me out.

**Craig:** PIX will log you out if you blink. PIX will force you to change your password if you go to the bathroom. PIX also is poorly organized and difficult to use.

**John:** Oh god, their bins are really tough.

**Craig:** Horrible.

**John:** The equivalent of folders.

**Craig:** I do not like PIX. I don’t. In fact, when I say to the editor, “Okay, everything’s great here, I just need you to change this, this, and this. Can you just send me that little section?” I make them not send it to me on PIX, even though that violates everything. I apologize to Time Warner, Discovery, HBO, AOL. The other platform we use constantly is Box. Box is our digital file management system.

**John:** It’s very much like Dropbox, but it tends to be used in the industry more for various reasons.

**Craig:** There are a few of those. We used I think Frame.io in one season. Maybe for Chernobyl we used Frame, and for this we use Box. We have somebody whose job is to oversee and manage that entire system. We use that to distribute tests, images, proposals, illustrations, previses, all that. Then you can comment, and you can also annotate, draw on it and comment to that. It’s a better system.

But I will say it only functions for me because I don’t actually get any notifications from Box. They all go through a separate account that Allie manages. Then she can compile all the things that I need. Three times a day, I get an email from her with 12 Box links, describing what they are and what I need to respond to, because if you don’t have that, basically you’re getting an email every 12 seconds saying somebody commented, somebody thought, somebody did this.

**John:** Oh, god.

**Craig:** A nightmare. That’s what happened to me in Season 1. I didn’t stop looking at it. It was a real problem.

**John:** Let’s talk about email. You are still using email to communicate with certain people, or do you believe in Signal threads? Are you using Slack? What is the way you communicate with department heads?

**Craig:** With department heads, typically I’m speaking to them directly or commenting through Box. If I really, really, really need to get them ASAP, I text. We don’t have Slack. I think that’s probably a good thing. It’s a good thing for me.

Part of this discussion is who are you and what are you doing on the production. If you are in the middle of things, you need as much communication as possible. If you’re the showrunner, you need the most curated discussion as possible, because you will drown in questions and details with three minutes, and you’re trying to do other things and stay in big picture and work on shooting and all the rest of it.

We don’t have Slack, or at least I’m not aware of one. It’s just texts if I need to, or I call somebody. But more often than not, I just say to an AD, can you have somebody come over, and I’ll talk to them.

**John:** Then you also have the ability to look at what’s happening on set. If you have to step away, but you still need to see what is that shot that’s going up or the setup. What’s that that you’re using?

**Craig:** We use QTAKE, which again I believe is the industry standard. QTAKE works quite well. QTAKE is incredibly important. There’s the whole system that Amanda Trimble, our video playback operator, uses. I don’t know what she actually has loaded on her cart there, but it is some special system. There’s a special system that the DIT uses. That’s the guy that manages the information flow from the cameras, because of course it’s all digital. I also use Evercast to edit remotely with our editors.

**John:** A lot of specialized software that’s just for the industry, but also some things like Box, which are just off-the-shelf things that you guys are using because they’re there and they work.

We’ve talked a little bit about the screenwriting side of it, which most of our listeners are involved with screenwriting software. Obviously, Final Draft, or at least the FDX format, tends to be a thing that you go back to. I guess I can understand the FDX of it all, because it is at least an organized format. It is an XML format, so there’s some logic behind using that as a basis of things.

The challenge though is, if you’re passing around files for things, will the files get out of date? It would make much more sense if there was one continuously updated file that everyone was looking at the same file. That’s very hard to do.

There’s a service called Scripto, which Stephen Colbert’s company developed, which a lot of the late-night shows use, because they are all banging together to work on one script. It’s more like a Google doc, where everyone is working on one thing simultaneously, which makes sense for those kinds of shows. You would hope that in the future at some point there could be a centrally updated script that is the source that you don’t have to then redistribute scripts out to people.

**Craig:** We don’t have anything like that. We still operate under the old system of blue revision, pink revision, goldenrod revision, but it’s all done digitally.

**John:** Then there’s the programs that you and I are actually writing in. I’m writing in Highland. You’re writing in Fade In. Those are great single-computer systems. There are some things to try to do the onliney version of that. WriterDuet did that. Celtx did that. Arc Studio does that. There’s ways to do it. It can be overkill for the single writer, but it can be useful for team situations. It’s tough to say what the right solution is. Still, the script and the schedule are at the heart of what productions need. It’s not surprising that people are trying to figure out how do we organize all these things so all these different ways we do stuff can be centralized and make life happier for showrunners, for department heads, for ADs, for everybody else.

In most of these cases, I’ve been talking to folks who are ADs who naturally have this instinct to… They want information to go to places without being repeated and for people to be able to see what the plan is. They look so good on paper. I look at the slideshows and the little mock-ups. I’m like, “Yeah, that seems great.” But what you’re actually talking about doing is you actually have to build Slack, you have to build PIX, you have to build all these things that exist that are really difficult to do.

The problem is there’s not a big enough market for it. You’re not gonna be able to get somebody to pay enough to make it actually worth developing, and much worse, worth supporting, because the expectation of your users is that this has to have basically 100 percent uptime, because if PIX goes down or if QTAKE goes down, that is a crisis. You have to have this crazy expectation for your uptime.

**Craig:** Anything that is served like that has to be bulletproof. You’re absolutely right. It’s why the hammer costs $800 instead of $5, because there’s only 12 people buying the hammer. It is incredibly specialized. A lot of these things I imagine are quite expensive. I don’t know. Things that like Fade In or Highland, that’s marketable to millions of people who want to write things. But Scenechronize, it’s just the people making stuff that use Scenechronize. I don’t know what it costs, but probably a lot.

**John:** I think as we talk about both the problems and solutions, you’re gonna need to find some way to make recurring revenue from your existing customers, because you can’t just find the next customer and the next customer after that, because there’s a hard limit on the number of customers who could potentially use your software. You need to find ways to monetize each time. That means either you are charging per user, per production, per month. There has to be some way that you’re making that sustainable, because otherwise your company’s gonna go bankrupt.

That’s also the reason why it’s very hard to attract the initial kind of money it takes to build the product in the first place, because any investor will say, “I don’t think this is a survivable business. I don’t think you can actually make enough money here, so why would I invest in it?”

**Craig:** You could see a world where let’s say Disney, as large as they are, says, “We’re gonna create our own system.”

**John:** They are.

**Craig:** They are?

**John:** They are. Disney and Netflix both apparently have their own systems they’re developing. That makes sense because they’re doing so much production and they can top-down force people to use it.

**Craig:** You can force people to use it anyway. But what you are always dealing with is the fact that, A, you are at the mercy of those companies, who charge, I can only imagine, exorbitant yearly subscription fees that scale in terms of the size of your company, and B, you’re at the mercy of their features. The way they do it is how you have to do it. But the method of organizing things per production to customize it, there is no customization really like that.

The upside for a company like Disney, which is so big and makes so much stuff, is, yeah, we can completely control it, we can manage it, and we can make sure it is bulletproof and not be held hostage. The downside is people that come into your system now have to use that, which means they have to learn it, which means they have to deal with it. They’re used to using the other thing, and everybody gets very, very cranky. Either there will be a revolt or it will work and it will spread, meaning if Disney and Netflix, in their combined might, create a system like this, everyone’s gonna use it. It’s just gonna happen.

**John:** Agreed, agreed. Everyone’s gonna use it who can afford to use it. Indie films will develop alternate systems. Maybe that’s appropriate. Maybe they can do some different stuff and it would make sense for them on that smaller level. Here’s the subtlety on that. If Disney or Netflix says you have to use this, people will use it, but I also suspect department heads will still go back to their own native ways of doing things and then just have to duplicate the effort to use the other system. They’ll still find off-channel ways to do stuff. I was talking to a British AD who says for their productions, they have WhatsApp channels for each scene or something, which is just-

**Craig:** Oh my god. Oh my god.

**John:** … ongoing discussions about how stuff works.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** It’s like, oh god, that seems so-

**Craig:** That’s horrible.

**John:** Yeah, it’s awful.

**Craig:** That’s just awful.

**John:** This is a person who made a giant Amazon show, and that’s how they did it.

**Craig:** “That’s how I do it,” in quotes, you’ll hear a lot. Obviously, there’s very powerful calendaring software and scheduling software. But also, when I walk into certain offices, in our production offices, I’ll see people who have calendared their wall with post-its, because that’s how they do it, and it helps them. I’m like everybody else. I have a way of doing things that I’m comfortable with. You get set in your ways. By the way, side question for you, John.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** This is a “set in your ways” question. In the old days when we would print scripts, people would have a script, and then you would make revisions. The revisions would change the way the page count would be, so instead of changing the page count, you would just make A and B pages so that the following pages didn’t change. People just had to open their huge binder, pull out pages 38 and 39, and replace them with 38A, 38B, 38C, and then a new 39. But we don’t print anything anymore, and we have scene numbers. My question is, why do we still do this with pdf?

**John:** Craig, we should absolutely not be doing this.

**Craig:** We shouldn’t be doing it.

**John:** It is ridiculous that we’re doing it. I’m sure one of the showrunners who’s listened to the show says, “No, we stopped doing that.” Let’s all do this, because it’s dumb. It’s ridiculous.

**Craig:** It’s stupid. It’s stupid, because what happens is, on the day, you get there to rehearse the scene and there’s a page with one effing line on it.

**John:** It’s crazy.

**Craig:** It’s just dumb. It’s too late for me now. I’m in too deep on this season, but next season I’m not doing it. I’m not locking pages. It doesn’t make sense. People refer to everything by scene number anyway. I am infamous for not knowing what scene numbers mean. Somebody from prosthetics will walk over to me and say, “Question about 533.” I’ll say, “I do not know what that is. You have to give me some context.” But they all have scene numbers that never change, ever. So why? Why?

**John:** Hey, Craig, instead of scene numbers, should we as the writers come up with the three-word name for that scene or that sequence that we all are gonna refer to that thing as?

**Craig:** If you think about it, the scene number really is the ultimate version of that. They really do all think in terms of scene numbers. I have the program make scene numbers and I never think about them again. But what happens is they’ll say, “Oh, it’s Jane and Vanessa are arguing in the library.” “Oh, okay, that’s what Scene 533 is. Got it, got it, got it. Okay, continue with the question.” It’s easy enough to do. But the page thing, honestly, it just occurred to me how stupid it is that we still do it.

**John:** It’s ridiculous that we’re still doing it. We shouldn’t be doing it. Hey, if you’re on a show that has given up locked pages, let us know. By the way, late-night has never had locked pages. I bet there’s other things that have never locked pages. I don’t know if – did multi-cam sitcoms lock pages? [Indiscernible 00:29:02] on that too. It feels like they should’ve.

**Craig:** I don’t know. All I know is that for movies we always had them and it made sense and I understood why, because you printed things. But now, it just doesn’t… Why?

**John:** Let’s wrap this up with some takeaways here. I think one of the real problems we’ve talked about is inertia. There is that first mover advantage. People are used to Final Draft. They’re used to Movie Magic scheduling. So when a better system comes along, like Highland or like – there’s a competing scheduling software out of Germany called Fuzzlecheck, which is a terrible name, but apparently, European productions use it and it’s a lot better and it’s all online.

**Craig:** You’re saying Germans made a great scheduling software?

**John:** That is a shocker. This apparently is great. It’s all online, which makes so much more sense that you’d have multiple users touch things rather than have one person on one computer doing the thing. But I think it’s struggling to break through into the U.S. because everyone is used to the standards. It’s hard to get people to adjust from what they’re used to doing, unless you’re forcing them to or show them this is 10 times better and then they’ll switch, which is the frustration.

**Craig:** It won’t happen from the bottom up. I think your Disney revelation here – it was a revelation to me – is how it happens. It happens from the top down when a bunch of people in a room say, “Attention, all. This is what we’re doing now.” Everyone’s gonna, “What?! No!”

**John:** If you think about it from Netflix’s point of view, Netflix is essentially a software company, and so it would make sense that they would have ways to do these things.

**Craig:** Absolutely. People will complain, gripe, moan, and then they will adjust. But it will never come from the bottom up, because making television shows and movies is chaos. It’s utter chaos. Anywhere you can find some kind of comforting repetition and security, you grab it and you hold onto it forever. You will have to pull it out of their hands and give them something new. They will freak out, but then they will adjust.

**John:** Last thing I’ll say, you have to be thinking about what is a sustainable business model for this app you’re thinking about making. The problem is not that you cannot imagine a better tool or even design a better tool. It’s that you cannot afford to make it and sustain it and to actually keep it up and running. When people get frustrated about per-month fees or per-user fees or all that stuff, it’s like, that’s because that’s how this company can stay in business.

**Craig:** You’re saying that they’re not in business to go out of business?

**John:** They’re not in business to go out of business. That’s the problem with the Final Draft. Because they sell it to you once, they’re like, “Crap, we ran out of screenwriters. Okay, we need to make a new version of Final Draft that adds a useless feature that no one needs, just so we can keep the lights on.”

**Craig:** That’s not great.

**John:** Not great. Not great. That’s how you end up with Final Draft.

**Craig:** That is how you end up with the tragedy of Final Draft.

**John:** Let’s go to something we can maybe help and fix. Let’s talk about some Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** For listeners who are new to the show, every once in a while we do a Three Page Challenge, where we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their pilot, of their feature. We look through them. We give our honest feedback. These are people who asked for our feedback. We are not picking random people off the street. We are trying to give constructive feedback on what they have sent through.

**Craig:** That would be so cruel.

**John:** What happens is we put out a call for submissions to the Three Page Challenge. People go to johnaugust.com/threepage. They read the little form. They submit their pages. Drew and our intern have to go through 100? How many generally come through?

**Drew:** A little over 100 this week.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Go through a bunch of these to find three or four that seem like they’re good for our show. The criteria are they have to have no obvious spelling mistakes or grammar mistakes. We don’t want to be talking about those. We want to talk about what’s working on the page, what’s not working on the page, what can our listeners benefit from. They’re not picking necessarily the best entries, but the most interesting ones, the things we’ll have stuff to talk about.

We have three really good ones here to discuss. For our listeners who have their phones or their iPads handy, there are links in the show notes that you can read through these pages. Pause this, read through the pages, and join us as we discuss them. Drew, for folks who are not reading along with us, can you talk us through what happens in Planet B by Christopher James?

**Drew:** Sure. It’s 2055. In the White House Situation Room, President Keiko Pearl is briefed by her advisors on the discovery of a new Goldilocks planet able to sustain life. The head of the EPA cautions about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, but he’s laughed at. We then cut to a creature smashing through terrain, only to reveal that the creature is in fact a human toddler.

**John:** Craig Mazin, talk us through your initial reactions to Planet B.

**Craig:** We have what hat appears to be possibly a comedy. I think it’s a comedy.

**John:** I think it’s a comedy.

**Craig:** Science fiction comedy where Earth is in trouble, almost certainly because of climate change, and they have managed to find a mirror Earth that they can go settle.

This is a pretty common way to start these things. There are multiple problems that are inherent to this method of starting things. The way Christopher goes about it is he’s using a situation room in the White House to introduce people and concept and character. We have, I think, a bit of an over-stuffed three pages here, because it’s trying to do so much at once that it doesn’t feel like an actual scene with human beings. It feels more like a machined thing to teach us stuff about people.

We meet Sarita Arya, and we also meet Keiko Pearl, and we also meet Anne Reiss, and we also meet Brian Dale. Everyone, by the way, has some sort of race and wardrobe, hair, makeup, except for Anne Reiss, who is none of those. Does that mean she’s white? That’s a weird-

**John:** The default white problem, yeah.

**Craig:** Default white problem there. We also meet Bear “Grizz” Norris, and we meet Ryan Arya and Nowell Arya. In three pages, that’s too many people to meet. That’s too many. Everybody is a person. Everybody is a thing. Everybody has a thing, a vibe, whatever. We’re learning all of these things.

Here’s what I learned. I’m just gonna list the things that I’ve learned here. It’s Earth. It’s 2055 and Earth is in trouble. I learned that in the White House, Sarita Arya has a “steady demeanor and short, spiky hair.” I’ve also learned that Keiko Pearl, who’s Japanese American with “shoulder-length hair and youthful skin-”

**John:** She’s the President.

**Craig:** She’s the President. I’ve learned that Anne Reiss is a science advisor and is “always on defense.” I have learned that General Brian Dale is bald and from the Army and he is a stroke survivor and he uses a cane. I have also learned that Bear “Grizz” Norris is White. Oh, so he’s White. Okay, so Anne, she’s whatever. He is “shaggy haired and bearded.” I have also learned that Nowell Arya is biracial Indian/White and his father, Ryan, is Indian American and athletic. That’s all separate and apart from the plot stuff that I’m learning. It’s too much.

**John:** It’s a lot. I would say I think Christopher is doing almost the best job you could with this kind of shotgun intro problem. One of the reasons why I like this as an example is it shows how hard it is actually to do this.

I can envision a scene. Let’s say this is actually shot and there are recognizable actors maybe in some of these roles that help you distinguish who people are and remember them. But you’re trying to do so much. There’s so much table setting to do about that there is a second planet that has breathable air, who these people are, that it’s 2055, that it doesn’t feel real or legit in a way that even in a heightened comedy setting, which this is, is not going to work especially well.

I want to talk about just on the page. It’s in Courier Prime, which looks lovely. I think the breakups of scene description and dialogue, it all reads well. I’m not terrified to look through these pages. It’s pretty easy to get yourself through them. The use of underlines and single-word sentences, also really good. All these things work nicely.

I don’t mind the character descriptions. I think a lot of times I could visualize these characters better than in many samples because you’re giving me some details that I can actually click in my head. The problem is there was just too many of these things introduced back to back to back to back. Then I got confused and a little frustrated.

**Craig:** Everything has the same importance. Everyone has the same importance, because there are so many. Then there’s the tone itself. First of all, we go from the exterior of space, where we see Earth, and then we’re interior the Situation Room in the White House. The Situation Room in the White House is just a room. You might need to see the White House itself just so we know where we are. Then Sarita, who I assume is President Pearl’s chief of staff-

**John:** Chief of staff.

**Craig:** Yeah, it says chief of staff. Sorry, that was the other bit of information. See, it’s lost in the clutter. Everyone’s talking, and she whistles to make everyone stop talking. I didn’t believe that. I don’t think that’s how it works. They show this other planet, and then President Pearl immediately gets into an argument. “Why didn’t we know about this sooner? What took so long to find it?” I guess she’s just dumb. Is she dumb?

**John:** It feels like a question that is being asked for the audience rather than for herself.

**Craig:** Exactly. Then everybody else has a very… Anne Reiss, the scientist, is very sciencey. General Brian Dale, he’s very military-y. Then Buzz [sic] “Grizz” Norris is very EPA administrator-y. They are their jobs. That’s the roughest part of this.

**John:** I would like to propose a line that is banned from future scripts, which is, “In English, please.” General Dale says it. That feels just the tropey-est, clammiest line.

**Craig:** That’s a clam, especially because what Anne Reiss, 64, nothing else to know, says, “The atmosphere is 19.5 percent O-2.” General Dale, “In English, please.” He’s a general. He knows what oxygen is.

**John:** The actual question is, is that good, because I don’t know if 19.5 is good. I don’t know if that’s appropriate. Then her answer makes sense. It’s, “It means humans can breathe.”

**Craig:** If someone said, “So too much or not enough?” “It’s about right.” That’s fine. Christopher, I’m gonna pitch you a different way of doing this.

**John:** Tell us.

**Craig:** Christopher, what if the entirety of this scene – and you could go to interior, you don’t even need to know it’s the White House yet – is Sarita and President Pearl, and we don’t even know who they are. We don’t even know that President Keiko Pearl, “42, Japanese American, shoulder-length hair and youthful skin,” is the President. We just have two people talking over lunch, and one of them is explaining to the other one, “This is what’s happening.” What that scene is about is not about the information, but rather, their relationship.

There is some relationship here that is the central relationship of the movie. If that’s not the central relationship of the movie, find one and make that the beginning. But if it’s just two people talking and then President Pearl goes, “Okay, got it,” walks out of the room, walks into another room and finds this scrum all arguing, tells them all to shh, then they’re like, “Oh, the President’s here,” and she’s like, “This is it. This is what we’re doing,” I’ll go, “Oh, that was the President, and this is important.” But we have to focus this scene and put it within the context of a relationship, or we just won’t care.

**John:** I think our expectation of the first scene of the movie is that we’re gonna meet characters who are the fundamental most important people. Sometimes that can be defeated, where a bomb can go off and all these people could die. That could be a choice too. My expectation is that Keiko Pearl is probably the most important character. She’s the one we’re gonna follow. We don’t really quite know at the end of the scene whose point of view this scene is from. That is the frustration, if one of these characters is going to be the central character of the story.

I want to talk about, just as we wrap up here, the scene on Page 3 which is basically this monster is smashing things and it’s revealed to be a toddler. That will never work, because we’re seeing something. You’re not gonna be able to hold that premise, that joke for very long. You could have the bom-bom-bom music of something stomping around, but the minute we see his-

**Craig:** Legs.

**John:** … cute little shoes, his legs or something, it’s not gonna really work. You can describe it metaphorically, like, he’s like a monster smashing things, but only on the page could you get away with the, “Oh, there’s a terrible monster smashing things. Oh, surprise, it’s a child.” That’s not gonna be a surprise to people with eyeballs.

**Craig:** That is correct.

**John:** I love that we now have log lines for things. Drew, tell us the log line of what the actual full movie is.

**Drew:** “In 2055, climate change is irreversible and humans live on borrowed time. When Americans discover a nearby inhabitable planet, they must consider what’s worth giving up for a future as refugees in an alien society.”

**Craig:** Just about what I thought. It doesn’t mention what the tone is, but it does feel comedic.

**John:** I think so too. I’m guessing this is a feature and not a pilot. I think something would’ve said pilot on the title page.

**Craig:** Feels featurey.

**John:** Feels featurey. Cool. Let’s go on to The Long Haul. Again, if you’re gonna read along with us, why don’t you pause and read this. But if you’re not reading along, Drew, give us a summary.

**Drew:** The Long Haul by Becca Hurd. Emmy Baxter, 24, is irritated when an Australian stranger named Angus hijacks her karaoke performance at a Chicago pub. But despite her initial annoyance, their banter turns to flirtation.

**John:** I want to start with the title page here. This is The Long Haul. The O in “Long” is a heart. Below this is an image of the country of Australia and the country of U.S. with a line between them and a heart. It’s cute, sure. I kind of get what it’s about. It feels like a lot on this cover page. I would go with either the heart or the image there.

At the bottom it says, “Sydney, Australia, February 2024,” and it has her email address. The “February 2024” generally is over on the right-hand side where she put it, but things like her email address tend to be on the left-hand side. I don’t know why Sydney, Australia is there, other than maybe to tell us she’s Australian. But I don’t know that’s useful information for a title page.

**Craig:** I’ve never actually seen the location of where the script was written on the page there. I think you’re probably right. But I enjoy the graphic quite a bit. I agree with you, the issue with putting the heart in “Long” is that you have two hearts on the page.

There’s a very clever thing. “The Long Haul, Written by Becca Hurd.” The line between Australia and the United States is the old style, when you fly, a little dotted line happens, and the dotted line does a curlicue to become a heart in between. That actually is a beautiful summary of what this is gonna be about. It’s gonna be about a long-distance relationship between somebody who lives in the U.S. and somebody who lives in Australia and flying back and forth, I suppose. But that heart is diminished by the fact that there’s another heart in the word “Long.” Make that heart special, I think, by making the O just an O in “Long.”

**John:** Agreed. Once we get into Page 1 here, it starts with a discussion between Beth and Emmy. Emmy is our central character. Beth is her friend. They are awaiting their time to do karaoke. There’s some chitchat here, which is not great. There are some lines I would love to scratch out here.

Beth says, “Thought you were off the clock.” Emmy says, “Thought you were a vegetarian. But your mouth is full of Meat Loaf?” referring to this guy she’s making out with. Meat Loaf is not a great contemporary reference. I don’t think people are gonna get the joke that you’re referring to the singer Meat Loaf here.

There’s a better joke in the next line, which is, “Where’d you find him, an episode of Stranger Things?” Great, I get that as a joke. That is the better one. If you’re going to start with these two talking, I think that is your better way in.

More trimming here. “Somehow he’s not your worst. You’re too good for these guys, Beth.” If Emmy says, “He’s not your worst,” that tells us more and it’s more efficient.

**Craig:** But they’re sisters. Why are they talking to each other like they don’t know each other? If your sister is constantly making out/dating with guys that she’s better than, you’ve had this conversation before. It feels like we’re having it for the first time.

**John:** Agreed. For a sister, it feels like a stretch. There’s a semi-friend that you could actually have these things with. Craig, I want to talk to you about Emmy’s line near the bottom of the page, “When are they gonna play my song??” question mark question mark. I kind of like the question mark question mark. I kind of hear the delivery in the line with a double question mark. What’s your take on a double question mark?

**Craig:** I’ve never used it myself. But it feels like if a drunk person is asking a question. Then two question marks does definitely indicate drunken questioning.

**John:** That’s an overall note I had on Page 2 is how drunk are these people, because once we actually get to the standoff over the karaoke song, it feels like I need a clear sense of how drunk each of these people are to believe it or get a sense of a reality check on this moment that’s happening.

**Craig:** Let’s roll back to, for a moment, where even are we? The script tells us we’re interior Chicago pub. How do I know this is Chicago? It’s important, because apparently, this is gonna be a movie about an American and an Australian. I need to know where we are. Even if you just, again, give me nice exterior of Chicago-

**John:** That helps.

**Craig:** … it would help. The beginning, Emmy “is speedily typing on her phone.” Then her sister is gonna say, “Thought you were off the clock.” I’ve now got her character down to a post-it note. Works too hard. I don’t like that. Why is Emmy there? Why is she there? If she’s there to just speedily type on her phone, why is she at the karaoke club? Beth says, “Sometimes it’s okay to just have fun and not control every little detail. Wild concept for you, I know.” Post-it note character description. Why is Emmy there?

**John:** Craig, she’s there because she wants to sing karaoke, which is established in the very next line, “When are they gonna call me?”

**Craig:** But I don’t believe that, because she’s-

**John:** I don’t believe it either.

**Craig:** … “speedily typing on her phone.” If she comes to sing karaoke, she’s gonna have a drink or whatever and have fun. But I love the idea of somebody being impatient that her song isn’t coming. That tells me more about their character-

**John:** 100 percent.

**Craig:** … than this other stuff. Also, John, we just talked about the toddler. This is another toddler moment. This is good advice here, Becca. When you’re writing, I want you to see it actually happen in your brain. Here’s what happens. Emmy is “typing on her phone while her younger sister, Beth, sucks face with an ’80s-musician-looking-dickass. Beth takes a breath and glares at Emmy.” No, she doesn’t. She’s making out with a guy. What’s happening is she’s making out with a guy, then stops making out with him to stare at her sister and then criticize her sister.

**John:** Has never happened.

**Craig:** I don’t know about you, but when I’m making out with somebody, I’m making out with them. I’m not looking around to make comments. Emmy should interrupt Beth. That I’d believe.

**John:** Yeah, or the kiss breaks off and he goes off to hit the restroom or whatever, and then she can land her sniper comment there.

**Craig:** Yes, but there’s no reason for her to stop. She can’t do both things at once. Also, just a little bit of advice here, Becca. If you do want Emmy to make comments about Beth, she’s sitting there waiting for her song. The bartender or somebody is sitting next to her. The two of them are like, “What the fuck with those two?” “Yeah,” blah blah blah. Then we find out it’s her sister. There’s ways to also just reveal these relationships and who they are, because right now I don’t know that they’re sisters. There’s no way to know, other than that the script told me.

**John:** These are all real challenges. I do think if you’re gonna start with Beth making out with the rocker guy, we know the experiences of when you’re sitting there and someone’s making out right in front of you or right beside you. That is a playable moment. It’s like, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, this terrible person. Please,” willing this person to go away. That’s a thing that can also happen.

But I agree, we’re gonna need to quickly establish they’re sisters or something else there, because it’s gonna be weird if we’re a couple scenes into the movie and we don’t know that they’re sisters.

**Craig:** It is weird. It’s also a little dangerous to introduce a character who is anachronistic right off the bat, because people will just think this is in the ’80s or they won’t know what time it is, because we don’t know what year it is either. It’s in a karaoke bar. People are singing old songs from the ’90s. I think Torn is from the ’90s. We’re gonna be like, “What year is this?”

But then we get to the meat of it. Now, this is a meet-cute. It’s a good idea for a meet-cute, except there’s a logic problem. A meet-cute has to just be solid. We have to buy it. We don’t want to stop and go, “I can feel the screenwriter.”

**John:** “We requested the same song.”

**Craig:** “We requested the same song.” Then Emmy says – great point here – “He literally just said Emmy. Is your name Emmy?” Angus’s reasoning for going up there and taking the mic is, “She’s Australian.” I guess I’m Australian, which means I have the right to just sing the song? That doesn’t make any sense at all.

If his last name was Emory and then, “We have Emmy with Torn,” and he’s like, “No, he said Emory. My last name’s Emory,” and she’s like, “No, he said Emmy. That’s my first name. And we both requested the same song,” then I would be fine. I would be fine. But that’s not what happens here. I wasn’t buying this meet-cute premise.

**John:** There’s a way you can maybe set this up where the thing comes up for the next song and it shows the Natalie Imbruglia, Torn, and the emcee is fumbling a bit to find who it was, and they both go up there. Then you finally get the emcee, like, “Whose song is this?” It’s like, “Oh, it’s Emmy.” Then he refuses to stand down, because, “No, I should be singing this song. I am the Australian. This is part of my culture.” There’s a way you could do that. But I didn’t believe the setup. I agree with you.

**Craig:** I didn’t believe it, and I also really did not like this guy. When you have a meet-cute where two people are arguing, you want to be able to see both of their sides. At that point, you’re like, “Oh, they both pulled into the parking spot at the same time, and now they’re arguing because it was a tie.” But this is not a tie. He’s just a jerk-

**John:** It’s not a tie.

**Craig:** … for doing this.

**John:** He’s a jerk. Page 3, we get after their song. I thought the actual intercut of them trying to do the verses can work. I can picture that on the page. I got the sense of what was actually happening there. On Page 3 they’re talking afterwards. They have electric chemistry. I don’t understand, “I’m a 3 wing 2, because I-” “A what?” “A 3, which is an Achiever.” Do you know what that’s about?

**Craig:** I have zero idea what any of this is about.

**John:** Drew, do you know what that’s about?

**Drew:** I have no idea.

**John:** It’s okay for people to talk about things we don’t know, but we need to have a context of what kind of thing they are talking about. I didn’t get it. At a certain point you feel dumb and you start to resent that you don’t know what’s going on there.

**Craig:** Also don’t care. It’s wasted time, because I’m not learning anything. Emmy said, “You would say that. Because you’re a 4.” What? What does that mean? Anytime somebody makes fun of “neur,” that always… I do love “neur.” Neur neur neur.

**John:** Neur neur neur neur.

**Craig:** Neur neur neur.

**John:** I think we enjoyed the potential of the premise and this as a meet-cute, because as we have discussed on the show from nearly Episode 1, we enjoy rom-coms. We want that genre to thrive. It’s nice to see when movies can succeed in doing this. We want Becca to have the best chance possible to make a rom-com. Drew, tell us the log line that Becca submitted.

**Drew:** “Determined to win back her ex, an audacious American woman sneaks into Australia by telling the government that she is in a continuing and loving relationship with the man who just dumped her.”

**Craig:** Wait, what?

**John:** I assume it’s Angus.

**Craig:** Are those two different people?

**John:** We don’t know. We don’t know from this log line.

**Craig:** Say that log line again.

**Drew:** Sure. “Determined to win back her ex-”

**Craig:** Her ex.

**Drew:** “… an audacious American woman sneaks into Australia by telling the government that she is in a continuing and loving relationship with the man who just dumped her.”

**Craig:** Who would also be the ex.

**John:** I guess so.

**Craig:** How do you sneak into Australia?

**John:** I think the idea of sneaking into Australia for love feels kind of fun.

**Craig:** If you’re talking to the officials of Australia, you’re not sneaking into Australia. In order to stay in Australia… But you can go to Australia for six months.

**John:** I don’t think so, Craig. I think Australia is a locked-down place. No, Australia is basically North Korea, Craig. You have to go through checkpoints. It’s incredibly dangerous.

**Craig:** I don’t understand.

**John:** This is a girl who’d do anything for love, like the song.

**Craig:** Like Meat Loaf. Like Meat Loaf, which Meat Loaf, referenced twice in three pages. I don’t understand. I don’t understand the log line. But there’s something very charming about the idea of this meet-cute. I’ve not seen this meet-cute before, where two people believe they each have the karaoke song, they start to sing to each other, and some little bit of magic happens. That’s a very nice way of doing things. I can see that moment. That’s encouraging.

I would say at a minimum, Becca, we’re gonna want to clean that log line up so it’s nice and sharp and doesn’t raise questions. Log lines should only raise the question you want to raise, not the questions you don’t.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s wrap it up with The Right to Party by Lucas McCutchen.

**Drew:** Captain Albert, a British officer, raises a British flag over colonial Boston. On his way home, he steps purposefully on an American child’s doll that’s fallen in a puddle. At home, his 17-year-old son, Edmund, struggles with chores, due to an injured hand, while trying to appease his stern father. Their tense interaction culminates in Captain Albert shooting at Edmund’s breakfast, inadvertently killing a passerby. Edmund and his brash friend Henry leave for school, where they discuss the dead bystander and girls they have crushes on.

**John:** This is a big swing. What I got by the end of three pages, this is a teen boy comedy but just set in this Revolutionary time, which is actually, I think, an interesting premise. A lot of stuff got in the way of the interesting premise, but I’m eager to talk about it, because I did think it was a clever idea to, again, just smash up tropes and genres and do a teen Apatow-y kind of movie but in this time period. Unfortunately, on Page 1, I have no idea what time period I’m in.

Let me read the first couple lines here. “Exterior Boston Town Square – Dawn. Sleepy merchants and townsfolk slowly begin their morning routines. Stores display their pitiful wares. Flies buzz in circles above the fruit in their baskets.” Finally, on the fourth sentence, “A prisoner locked in stocks stirs.” Until that sentence, I didn’t know that we were in the past. Boston Town Square exists now. I thought we were just in modern-day Boston. This is a problem, because I didn’t know where we were, when we were.

**Craig:** Never before has something so desperately needed “Boston, 1775.” It absolutely needs that. This is a broad comedy. Broad comedy is very, very hard to do. Take it from me. Struggled and succeeded and failed multiple times in my career.

**John:** Craig, you’re a drama writer. What would you know about broad comedy?

**Craig:** I’m a drama writer because I gave up finally. One of the most important aspects of writing broad comedy is logic. It is more of a science than an art. It’s science. Everything is about logic. Everything.

We have this very broad Monty Python-esque moment where Captain Albert, who’s this incredibly over-the-top British dickhead, fires a gun at his own breakfast, not because he’s angry at the breakfast, but rather to check if the sights are good on the pistol. They’re not good on the pistol, and a woman dies, and no one cares about the woman. The kernel of that, great. Logic problems. One, why is he firing the pistol at his breakfast? If the pistol is aligned correctly, he will ruin his breakfast. That makes no sense.

**John:** He should shoot at something in the room.

**Craig:** He could shoot at something in the room. Secondly, if you’re aiming at your breakfast on a table, I don’t care how misaligned the sights are. The most misaligned they could be is you’re off by about eight inches. You cannot be off by seven feet and then go through a window and kill a woman passing by, which by the way, is very difficult to actually film, because you have to shoot in such a way that you can see both the woman outside through the window and the man as he shoots. If this were happening outside, no problem.

**John:** I can envision a scenario in which he’s shooting at a thing on the wall and then it goes out the window and kills the woman. Do you necessarily need to see the woman in that first shot, or could you hear the scream and then that’s funny?

**Craig:** What you want to do is not see the woman at all. You want him to shoot at something on the wall, it goes through a window, and then there’s a pause, and then you hear a man go, “My wife.”

**John:** “Millicent!”

**Craig:** Yeah, “Millicent, no!” That’s what you want, and then people to start crying. Then when you go outside, there’s the guy, and he’s like, “Oh, Millicent.”

**John:** There’s the payoff.

**Craig:** Millicent, as it turns out, was actually a pig. Whatever it is. There’s all sorts of ways to do this. But the concept of being so broad that a guy is gonna kill somebody and they don’t care about somebody being killed is funny. It’s just logic.

Now, the other issue is, in broad comedy we need somebody that we can identify with, especially when you have an uber-jerk like Captain Albert. He has two sons. The problem here is both sons seem just as callous as their father. Who do I like?

**John:** I think you’re supposed to like Edmund, but he’s trying to make his father happy. That’s the journey that the character needs to get past. I think that’s the goal is to have-

**Craig:** The problem is, when they walk by the small crowd around the dead woman and Henry goes, “Jeez… a bit dramatic.” Then he goes, “Your hand alright?” Edmund’s like, “Yeah, I’ll talk about my hand now. I’m not gonna have any comment about that lady whatsoever.” He doesn’t care that a woman died.

Then we’ve got a little bit of an anachronistic vibe, where there’s a cart driver who says, “Don’t hit my effing cart.” Edmund says, “Sorry. Have a nice day,” which does feel like Edmund is a bit of a nice kid. But are they afraid of the British? Are they not afraid of the British? Why is this guy yelling at them like that? Logic, logic, logic.

**John:** Logic, logic, logic.

**Craig:** That’s the key.

**John:** That’s a lot. The other thing I will say is that I was missing some uppercases that would’ve been really helpful. Generally in scripts, the first time you’re meeting a character, you’re uppercasing their name, or even if it’s just a person who’s gonna come back. I wanted those “dirty townsfolk” capitalized. I wanted “child” capitalized. We’re used to those things being uppercase the first time we’re seeing them, just to acknowledge that these are people who are gonna do something specific.

**Craig:** Yes, especially when you are creating very large bricks of action. There’s a seven-line paragraph and an eight-line paragraph. My whole thing is once I get past three lines, I start getting itchy. Seven is a lot.

**John:** It’s a lot.

**Craig:** Eight, people are just skimming.

**John:** Yeah, they are.

**Craig:** That paragraph is the gag paragraph, where he shoots. Oh, I see. He picks the plate up and “sets it on the window sill nearby.” He did do that. I totally missed that.

**John:** You didn’t read that because you skimmed.

**Craig:** Yeah, because I skimmed, because it was an eight-line brick. Then it said, “Edmund cocks his head.” You don’t want to use that. You don’t want to say “cocks his head” when there’s a pistol that can also be cocked.

He picks the food up, places it “on the window sill nearby.” Okay, so now that does make sense, except it doesn’t, because why is he using his plate to shoot at? It’s his breakfast. It’s very odd. It says, “Edmund is in shock as Albert returns and sets the gun in front of him.” Now I’m feeling like if he’s in shock, this has never happened before. But he doesn’t be in shock. He should be more like-

**John:** His father is this guy.

**Craig:** This happens all the time. If this is the first time, then I think Edmund would be vomiting. This happens all the time. Edmund should walk over to the window, look out, and just wince. There’s ways to do this.

By the way, I will say, Lucas, don’t feel bad right now. I’m serious. This is the hardest tone to get right. It is so difficult. If you Google, David Zucker has this lovely bunch of rules that he’s set forth for this kind of work, which are really compelling and useful. Just take a look at those. It’s so difficult to get right. If you don’t, then people just turn their heads. It’s incredible how technical and precise it must be. It looks like you actually did have that logic right, except that you didn’t, and also it was in too long of a paragraph.

**John:** Drew, tell us the log line.

**Drew:** “Two teenage best friends, an American colonist and the son of a British officer, set out to have the night of their lives before they’re drafted to opposite sides of the American Revolution.”

**Craig:** Such a great premise.

**John:** It’s a really good premise.

**Craig:** It’s a great premise. I don’t think these pages are setting that premise up.

**John:** I think we can do better, but I think it was a really good premise.

**Craig:** It’s a terrific premise.

**John:** Two episodes ago we had that service where you send off a sentence to describe what your script is about. If that was a sentence you sent in, they’d say, yeah, that’s a good premise. Love that.

**Craig:** That’s fun. That’s a fun premise. I really like that.

**John:** Let’s thank everybody who submitted their Three Page Challenges for us to discuss, especially these three entries. If you want to send in your pages for the next time, it is johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. We’ll occasionally look through that pile and pick some new ones. Thank you, everyone who did that. It’s very nice of you to do so. It really does help others learn.

Craig, it’s time for our One Cool Things. What is your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is a director that I’m currently working with named Stephen Williams. He’s not the One Cool Thing. It’s actually an episode of Watchmen that he directed. I’m sure Watchmen was my One Cool Thing when it was on the air back in-

**John:** It’s a good show.

**Craig:** Was it 2020? I guess something like that.

**John:** 2019, because I remember the Wash-men, which was initially during the pandemic when you had to wash your hands.

**Craig:** Stephen is a terrific director. He directed an episode of Watchmen that’s still… It’s stuck with me to this very day. Written by Damon Lindelof, Cord Jefferson, and Dave Gibbons. Damon Lindelof obviously needs no introduction. Multi-Emmy award-winning Damon Lindelof. Cord Jefferson, Oscar award winner.

**John:** Oscar, right.

**Craig:** He’s an Academy Award winner now for American Fiction. We’ve got some pretty big names there working on this, and then directed by Stephen. It is origin story of a superhero in the world of Watchmen. It uses a character that was indicated in the original graphic novel, Hooded Justice, and turns it on its ear and tells a pretty profound story of the Black American experience in, I believe it’s the ’30s or ’40s. Just an outstanding episode of television, beautifully done, moving and subtle, and directed gorgeously.

If you haven’t seen Watchmen, can you just pop that one in and watch it? No, you cannot. You have to watch up to it. I think it might be the sixth episode. Yes, it is the sixth episode of the season. You’ll have to do some watching for that. But honestly, it’s worth it. It’s such a great season of TV. It stands alone. It is the only one that exists. It’s got some so-so actors in it, like Regina King and Jean Smart and Don Johnson. It’s so stacked.

**John:** Despite that, it triumphs.

**Craig:** It’s so stacked. What a stacked lineup, as the kids say. I had watched it again, just because I’m having such a lovely time working with Stephen. He’s just such a great guy.

**John:** Great. My One Cool Thing is a show that people can also watch. Ripley on Netflix. This is the Steve Zaillian adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley. The Talented Mr. Ripley, the movie, is one of my favorite movies, one of my top 10 movies. I absolutely love it. I was a little bit nervous watching this adaptation, because I didn’t want it to spoil my love for the original or be compared. I really like this adaptation. It’s just so different. Everywhere the movie went left, this goes right. I love that the main adversary in the series is stairs, basically. Poor Ripley is always confronted by stairs.

It’s also, I think, a really great lesson in what you can do with time, and when you have the time of a series, how you can expand these moments that in the movie would be 30 seconds. You can now spend 15 minutes on, like, how do you deal with this dead body. The comedy that Zaillian’s able to find out of that is just terrific. It’s not laugh-out-loud funny, and yet it’s still funny, just because it points out the absurdity of human bodies also, which is great.

It’s black and white. It’s gorgeous. Everyone talks about that. It’s all shot in Italy. Looks terrific. Great performances. Really strange casting that works. Just check out Ripley on Netflix if you get a chance.

**Craig:** I wish you’d get Steve Zaillian on the show.

**John:** We’ll get him on the show. I’m sure we can get him on the show.

**Craig:** He’s a lovely man. He is just a towering figure in our business of what we do. There aren’t many people who have demonstrated his kind of consistent excellence for so, so long. He was excellent out of the gate and stayed excellent. Just an incredible writer and one of the best of all time.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt-

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** … with help this week by Jonathan Wigdortz.

**Craig:** Uh-uh.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** I don’t think so.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on magic and the lack thereof in our D&D campaign. Craig, it’s always magic talking with you and Drew.

**Craig:** It is not.

**John:** See you next week.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** All right, Craig, so the brief for the new D&D campaign we’re playing. We should explain to listeners that for the last four years we were playing a campaign that you were DM’ing. We finally finished that. I was gonna take over the next campaign for our group. I pitched to the crew that, what if we did a Robin Hoody kind of thing where it was a little bit more stripped down. We ultimately said let’s do the really stripped down. We’re only gonna have Humans and Halflings and maybe some Elves, but none of the other fantastical races. We would have a campaign with no magic, where it’s really grounded and you can’t cast spells, or not magic items. Everyone stepped up, and that’s what we’ve been playing.

**Craig:** It’s been kind of a delight. In Dungeons and Dragons, there are these different classes. Some classes are almost, by definition, un-magical. Wizards of the Coast-

**John:** They’re the company who runs D&D, who owns D&D.

**Craig:** They’re pretty clever in that they even will allow variants of basically every class to have some magic. Very difficult with barbarians. But you can have a Rogue, or Arcane Trickster, I think it is, and learn some spells, because spells are very powerful. There’s a spell for every circumstance. People love magic. It’s Dungeons and Dragons. But one thing that is true is that at some point, spells become so powerful and pervasive that they can make the game a little unfun for focus characters who don’t cast spells. They just at some point feel like, okay, you guys will do all this awesome stuff.

**John:** I will hit it with my sword.

**Craig:** I’m gonna hit you with a club, and then everybody else gets to do something extraordinary. Then I’m gonna run in there and, I guess, hit someone else with a club. It’s easy to play, but you can start to feel, as the characters increase in level, sort of like, I guess, the way – what’s the archer in Avengers? What’s his name again?

**John:** Oh, Hawkeye, yeah. One trick, yeah.

**Craig:** You start to feel like Hawkeye. Like, “Okay, so you’re literally a god and you can shoot lasers out of hands, and I have a bow and arrow.” “And what are you gonna do?” “Shoot my bow and arrow again.” It’s nice that we are all basically in that boat, not only us, but also the bad guys.

**John:** Talking about classes, you and I had an interesting discussion where we were talking through what is actually gonna make sense. There are Fighters. There are Barbarians. There are Rogues. There are Monks, but only certain kinds of Monks, because some of the Monks get really, really magical, and so variants that don’t have magic. And Rangers, but Rangers without the magic stuff, because Rangers have a lot of spells they would otherwise cast. But it’s a world without Wizards or Sorcerers, Clerics and Druids. You think about in a Robin Hoody kind of situation, a Bard makes a lot of sense, except the Bards in 5th Edition D&D really are Spellcasters and it doesn’t make sense to do that. Even Paladins, who you think, oh, it’s a brave knight-

**Craig:** Spells.

**John:** Yeah, but with a lot of magic there.

**Craig:** A lot of necessary magic. The thing that makes a Paladin good is that they have their various smites to add damage to their hits. We don’t have any of that, and it’s kind of a joy. When you face a bunch of bad guys, there’s no crowd control spells. There’s a lot of spells in D&D where it’s like, “I’m gonna just put you all in darkness. I’m gonna put you all in something. I’m gonna fireball you.” That’s the thing. You run up against seven guys, one person in your party can kill all of them with one spell. It’s nice to – you have to think more. There’s more strategizing. There’s more planning. The combat feels a little… I don’t know, it’s a nice gritty D&D.

Typically, everyone’s drinking a potion, or you have a Cleric or a Druid or somebody else that has healing spells that can restore all of your aches and pains – rather, alleviate your aches and pains. Here, my character took a feat which I don’t even know why anyone would take in a campaign with magic, that allows you to use an underutilized mechanic of healing kits to heal people, like a doctor would. If you’re not playing a magic-free campaign, why would anyone take the Healer feat, ever?

**John:** I don’t think they would.

**Craig:** Never.

**John:** It’s been interesting to see the ripple of changes that happen through this. I think combat speed has been a lot faster, because inevitably what happens is, like, “Oh, it’s my turn. Am I gonna cast a spell? What spell am I gonna cast? Let me look up what that’s gonna do.” Here it’s like, “No, I’m going to shoot somebody. I’m going to slash somebody.” Yes, people may use their special martial abilities to some degree, but it’s just been a lot faster to get through stuff. It can take more rounds to knock down an opponent, but that’s been nice.

I would say on the DM side I’ve been struck by just how much damage you guys can do, because you have these Rogues who can, through various mechanics, get sneak attack, get advantage on things, and they can take down a creature really quickly. I’ve had to adjust the number of monsters I’m throwing at you, just because you guys can do so much damage and take them out so quickly.

**Craig:** One of my DM tricks is – there are a few DM tricks. Now I’m telling you how to hurt us more, which is fun. One is, if there’s a big bad in the party, give him more HP. If the party is just crushing, just give him more HP. Make him last another round or two.

The other one, and this is the most useful one when you really want to mess with your party and you feel like they’re cakewalking, is to give one of the main boss guys legendary actions, because now that is essentially like increasing the number of bad guys without throwing a bunch of weak-asses on the field, who often can’t do that much damage on their own and get mowed down anyway, because our party’s capable of killing a couple of guys, three guys a turn if they’re just scrubs.

**John:** A thing I hadn’t considered until we got into this section of the campaign is that you guys are now underground, and light is a real factor. Often in these campaigns you’ll have more characters who have dark vision because they are Elves or have the ability to see in darkness, but you guys don’t. People would generally have a light spell cast on something, so they have a coin or something is shedding light. Here you guys have torches, and you have to deal with the torches. You as an Archer can’t hold a torch and shoot an arrow. It’s been really interesting to see from that perspective how a lack of magic is impacting you guys.

**Craig:** Light management is fun. I like that. It’s a little scary. You can’t be as stealthy as you want to be. That was one of the things about a traditional campaign that you have to deal with as a DM is that probably everybody’s gonna be able to see in the dark and light no longer becomes a thing. The only time it becomes a thing is, okay, so typical dark vision, you can see 60 feet ahead of you. Sometimes you run into, like, Drow. They can see 120. Now you got a situation. That’s interesting. But making us deal with simple things like not being able to see, especially when we’ve now encountered some creatures that can see in the dark, very interesting.

**John:** So fun. As we said in the setup, it is interesting to apply constraints to things, because we’re all very experienced D&D players. To make something feel fresh, you need to put on some new rules, new challenges to people. Rather than adding stuff, sometimes subtracting stuff is a way to make something more interesting. Do I want to play only this no-magic way forever? Absolutely not. But I think it’s been interesting for this round to try that and see how it all works.

It’s also been challenging to – on the DM level, I’m enforcing that you guys don’t have spells or magic stuff. As I’m picking adversaries, a lot of times what’s baked into these scenarios, they are Spellcasters too. I have to find, okay, what is the equivalent of that spellcasting ability for those characters. In some cases I’ve given them grenades that can duplicate an effect, but in other cases I’ve given them things taken from the Battle Master feats or Battle Master-

**Craig:** Maneuvers?

**John:** … maneuvers, yes, or monk-y kind of things.

**Craig:** You mean monkish?

**John:** Yeah, or monk abilities, because that would be the equivalent in this world for the third level spell they would otherwise be able to cast.

**Craig:** You’re dealing with people who have been playing for a long, long time. We all know what we’re doing. We all know the rules pretty well. Some of us know the rules pretty well, and then others do not, but that’s fine. The point is we’ve been playing for a long time.

I was in one brief campaign that another guy was running with some of the Joe Manganiello crew. The restraint on that one was every character had to be a Wizard. It was the opposite of this. It was an all-Wizard party, which meant that at least when we were starting out, it was like sending children out into the world. We were like, “I can make a light come on. Also, if you touch me, I die.” But by the time you get to Level 3-

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** It’s pretty serious, but if anybody gets close to you-

**John:** You’re still fragile.

**Craig:** You’re pretty fragile. Now, that party, you get an all-Wizard party at Level 18, now everyone’s dead.

**John:** Good lord.

**Craig:** We win. You lose.

**John:** The rules of time and space have changed now.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** We’ll continue with our campaign and with the podcast in the next couple weeks.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Craig, good to chat with you as always.

**Craig:** Thanks, John. Thanks, Drew.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

**Drew:** Bye.

Links:

* Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections: [PLANET B](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Planet-B-Three-Pages-Christopher-James.pdf) by Christopher James, [THE LONG HAUL](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/The-Long-Haul-by-Becca-Hurd-Three-Pages.pdf) by Becca Hurd, and [THE RIGHT TO PARTY](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/The-Right-To-Party-3-Pages.pdf) by Lucas McCutchen
* [Submit your script for our Three Page Challenge!](https://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [David Zucker’s 15 Rules of Comedy](https://creativecreativity.com/2017/07/30/david-zuckers-15-rules-of-comedy/)
* [Space Cadet (2024)](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21469794/)
* [Movie Magic Scheduling](https://www.ep.com/movie-magic-scheduling/)
* [Scenechronize](https://www.ep.com/scenechronize/)
* [PIX](https://pix.online/)
* [Qtake](https://qtakehd.com/)
* [BOX](https://www.box.com/home)
* [Frame.io](https://frame.io/)
* [Evercast](https://www.evercast.us/)
* [Scripto](https://www.scripto.live/)
* [Fuzzlecheck](https://www.fuzzlecheck.de/)
* [Ripley](https://www.netflix.com/title/81678765) on Netflix
* [Watchmen – “This Extraordinary Being”](https://www.hbo.com/watchmen/season-1/6-this-extraordinary-being)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Eric Pearson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Drew Marquardt](https://www.drewmarquardt.com/) with help from [Jonathan Wigdortz](https://www.wiggy.rocks/). It is edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/646standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/halfway-there).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 534 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we’re looking at midpoints, that murky middle of the movie, where writers and audience both ask where are we, where are we going, and how soon will we get there.

First we have a ton of follow-up from listeners about previous topics, and new questions that will no doubt prompt more follow-up. Craig, we will never escape. Caught in a loop of provoking and responding.

**Craig:** Good. I think that that’s a good sign. You’re right, the more we talk, the more follow-up and, I wouldn’t call it push-back, but people have interesting things to say. People respond and react because they are … I don’t know if I’m going to go so far as to say they’re all in a parasocial relationship with us, John, but they are in a parasocial conversation with us.

**John:** That’s absolutely true. I like that you’re working that parasocial, keeping it up. I don’t know, at graduation, did anyone launch a beach ball at your high school graduation, and the beach ball bounced over the top of it?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I feel like that’s what you’re doing with the word parasocial. You’re just keeping it up in the air a little bit longer.

**Craig:** Keeping it in the air and trying to just stay connected to the Millennials, even though the Millennials are now, I must say, old. That’s how old we are in Generation X. We think the young people are who Generation Z thinks of as the old people. Hey Megana, did you know that, that you’re old now?

**Megana Rao:** I identify with Gen Z.

**Craig:** You can do that if you want. You can identify however you want, but factually …

**Megana:** I’m old, I get it.

**Craig:** Do you? Because I don’t think you do yet. You’re going to get it. It’s actually super freeing, Megana. You should really embrace this. It’s amazing.

**Megana:** I spend most of my day complaining about neck pain, so I get it. I’m there.

**Craig:** Yeah, but when you get a little bit older, that will be totally justified. You won’t feel weak about it. You’ll be like, “Yeah, like all of us, my neck hurts.”

**John:** My gift for Megana this … As we’ve established on the show, I’m not a good gift-giver, but I did give Megana a blanket thing to keep her warm. It feels like a gift you give not to a young person, but to an older person.

**Craig:** Young people don’t want wraps to stay warm. That’s absolutely true.

**Megana:** Yeah. My cold bones.

**Craig:** You’re going to be the best old lady. Fun.

**Megana:** I already am.

**John:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk about NFTs, because I always want to talk about NFTs.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** In particular, these three really great articles that really shine spotlight on what is so dumb about NFTs.

**Craig:** So dumb.

**John:** We’ll get into a little bit of that. We’re going to put it in the Bonus Segment so when people come after me, they’re going to have to actually pay for the Bonus Segment to hear about it first. Actually, we’ll profit from-

**Craig:** You should sell it as an NFT. That whole segment should be an NFT. Just for fun.

**John:** Going to be great.

**Craig:** Just to get meta.

**John:** First, Craig, we have to establish the Chekhov’s gun on this podcast, because about 100 episodes ago we started talking about COVID. It was actually in a Bonus Segment talking about COVID. Chekhov’s gun finally went off this last week for us on the show.

**Craig:** Boom, right in my face. Yes. I had COVID, or really COVID had me. I test constantly, because I am in a production. I tested positive for COVID, and my symptoms were nothing. I have to just take a moment to salute the scientists and researchers and everyone, honestly everyone who worked to create the Moderna vaccine, which is the only one I’ve taken, but I’m sure that everybody at Pfizer deserves the same, and all the other places that have worked so hard to do this, because I’m not going to bother with the anti-vax people. Basically eff off. For the rest of us who are normal and smart and understand facts, this is miraculous. It’s just an incredible thing. This was a disease that was indiscriminately killing people. Now it mostly discriminately kills people. If you are vaccinated, and particularly boosted, especially with Omicron, which I suspect is what I had, as it is incredibly-

**John:** 99% of all COVID in North America is that.

**Craig:** It really was a nothing. It was a big nothing. I’ve had mosquito bites that were more vexatious than this bout of COVID, if I can call it a bout. I just followed the rules, isolated, which was for me not a big deal, because I like staying inside. I really do. That was fine.

**John:** Craig, let’s talk about how you run a show that’s in production while you’re doing that. Let’s be a little practical here, because you actually had tools at your disposal which a couple years ago you wouldn’t have had.

**Craig:** The primary tool that we use now for remote viewing is called QTAKE. QTAKE is tied into the video playback system. On a set, all the cameras are sending a signal to the video playback system, the video playback operator. Ours is named Amanda. She is wonderful. Manages the signal from all the cameras, and also has the functionality to broadcast that signal via WiFi or network to stream it to whatever the QTAKE, that is the brand that does this, the QTAKE server, which then sends it right back out to anyone who has the username and password and has been invited, and I can watch. I can watch on my monitor at home or on a laptop or even on a phone if I wanted to, although I don’t, all three cameras. I can select one camera to zero in on if I’m really interested in A camera or B camera. I can of course hear everything. In this way, I was able to do pretty much the job I would’ve done there.

The part that makes it harder is, when you’re present you can be there for the parts that don’t include the camera, blocking rehearsals and things like that. It’s more efficient. Right now Liza Johnson is directing this episode. She’s fantastic. Liza and I were able to just text each other. Jack Lesko is there as well, so maybe we’ll text with Jack and then I can call them on a phone if I want to go over a specific thing. We absolutely managed it, no real problem. It was nice. It was nice to be able to do that and not have to put pants on.

**John:** Perfect. I’m glad it worked out. That system you’re describing reminds me of conversations I had with Dana Fox about her season of her show, which is shooting up in Canada, which she could not be there, because it’s the lockdown. Phil and Matt also came on to talk to us about the systems they were using when they had to shoot the first season of their show without being present on their set. It’s not ideal, but it’s possible now, which I think is fantastic. You were able to be safe and keep your crew safe by staying home.

**Craig:** It’s a strange thing to be like the eye in the sky. Obviously you want to be there. No major issues. It was a terrific week, honestly, of shooting. It was some really cool stuff. I’m excited for folks who have not experienced the story The Last of Us to see what we shot this week. I know that the people who have seen it will appreciate it a lot, and people who haven’t seen I think will also really, really enjoy it. It was a good one.

**John:** This past week, Craig, I got to do something that I know you enjoy almost as much as playing D&D, which is to tell writers to fire their representatives, to fire their agents.

**Craig:** Of course, that’s the rule.

**John:** That’s the rule. I was talking with an upper mid-level writer, so a guy who’d staffed on TV shows, had a good career going, but had about a year break where he just could not get staffed on a show and was having a hard time getting stuff set up. As I was having this phone call with him, he was doing all the right things. He was writing new stuff. He was finding new ways to generate his own material. He was getting stuff in development, but just couldn’t get a thing to land.

I asked him, “I think it’s probably your agents. I think there’s a real problem here.” He was already going to probably fire his agents. When you do, and you’re going to go to the next place, talk to the people you’ve been dealing with and ask them what they think of your reps. He did, and everyone hated his reps. That was actually part of the problem. Now he is staffed on a new show that he loves. He’s a co-AP. I was just very excited for that advice to pay off and for him to have done the work to actually say, “My reps were not helping me. They were actually hurting me,” which I don’t think we talk about enough on the show.

**Craig:** I think we have said in the past that a bad agent is worse than no agent. They can do harm. When you have a bad agent, but you don’t know they’re bad, you are trusting that someone is taking care of something, and they’re not. There is a natural thing that can happen I think for some writers with their agents, where over time you can be taken for granted. You’re the person that they have, so they don’t have to worry about you. They’re worrying about signing the new person, or they’re worrying about getting the next thing for the person that makes more money than you do. When you have a new agent, it’s new, and romance is in the air, and everyone’s trying hard. The new agent has never gotten you a job before. They really want to get you a job. That’s embarrassing if they don’t.

I don’t think you should ever feel like it’s a massive, major career thing to fire your agent. It’s really not. It’s not. Getting a great agent is a massive career thing for you. Getting the right agent, that’s the big career change. Firing a mediocre or bad one is meh. As long as you have a new port to steer into, you should be fine.

**John:** Agreed. Also this last week, there was a tweet by Bo-Yeon Kim. She’s reading Bong Joon-Ho’s Mother script and marveling how different Korean formatting is from the US. We’ve talked a lot about script formatting on the show and had a special episode about it. It’s fascinating looking at this. Craig, as you open up this tweet, you’re seeing two pages, probably essentially the first two pages of the script. What do you see when you look at these pages?

**Craig:** It’s in Korean, so even if we spoke Korean, but didn’t read Korean text, we would still not know what’s going on. It looks really similar. It’s not wildly different. When they number their scenes, they put the number there, and it’s a very short scene header. Incredibly short. Then there’s a bunch of action, which doesn’t look too far off from ours. The character and dialog blocks are combined. Instead of a character, and then underneath, dialog, they do, in the dialog, what we would call the dialog block, character colon, I’m assuming, dialog, including a parenthetical. Occasionally there are two exclamation points, which may have a meaning in Korean that is different than one. I do not know.

**John:** We shared this with Bo Shim, who works with you, who verified, yes, this is just a thing you would see in a Korean script. I think it looks beautiful. It looks like our Western format, just in Korean. A lot of white space. A lot of white space on the right-hand edge. They look beautiful. It’s fun to see stuff that you can’t read, so you’re just appreciating it as the form of it. I was surprised it was actually as recognizable as a script.

**Craig:** I’m not super surprised, because the modern film business was invented here in the United States. The modern screenplay format was invented here in the United States. It does stand to reason that other nations, as they begin their own industries, will probably look to the very successful original one as at least inspiration, if nothing else. This script format, for all of our gripes, has functioned extraordinarily well for over a century, so makes sense.

**John:** Makes sense. That’s a perfect segue into an email we got from Richard. Megana, do you want to share this Richard email about Casablanca and early screenplays?

**Megana:** Richard wrote in, “Like you two, I enjoy giving back and sharing as I try to be the teacher I never had. Honest, Craig, all film schools aren’t the same, as I’ve actually taught in the John August Room in the Writing Department at USC. Plus, I would never advise my students not to use we see in their action lines.

I’m writing in regards to Episode 531 that dropped January 4th. In it you discuss the history of screenwriting and screenplay format and mention that Casablanca was one of the first scripts to use a format that’s close to what scripts look like today. Actually, that format had been in use in Hollywood for much longer, at least a decade. As a movie lover and film nerd, I’ve read quite a bit about writers of the Golden Age, and have read their screenplays. Those screenwriters, such as Samson Raphaelson and Oscar winners Robert Riskin, Ben Hecht, and Frances Marion, all wrote in a style we’d recognize today. I recommend checking out classic screenplays at the WGA Library. There’s also a terrific book, Six Screenplays by Robert Riskin, for an example of how the Capra Touch started on the page.”

**John:** I love when someone writes in to say, “Actually,” but then actually provides the details. Yes, there were scripts like this before Casablanca. I just didn’t know about them.

**Craig:** I didn’t even know what Casablanca looked like. I didn’t even know what that script looked like. Thank you, Richard. Yes, all film schools aren’t the same. Certainly NYU and USC are the ones that people aspire to the most. In theory, if there’s going to be good film school experiences, it will likely happen at one of those two places, or certainly at least in the John August Room. I can’t imagine anything untoward happens in the John August Room, the worst room at the strip club.

**John:** Don’t get champagne in the John August Room.

**Craig:** No one ever goes into the John August Room in the strip club. That’s always a good idea to check out classic screenplays if you’re interested in how things have evolved over time. Robert Riskin’s certainly one of our greats. I note that Richard put Capra Touch in quotes, no doubt because he is implying, as I will state overtly, that directors have been credited with things that screenwriters have been doing for decades. The Capra Touch is the thing where Frank Capra shot the script that Robert Riskin wrote. That’s the Capra Touch.

**John:** What we talk about with a modern screenplay is that sense of there are scene headers and you move into scene description that’s actually very full, very full compared to what you find in a play, that the dialog is important, but it’s not the only thing you’re seeing in this. When people read plays and they read screenplays, they’re like, “Oh, there actually is a big difference here.” That difference is how full the scene description is, how important it is that we are moving from location to location, just because film is a different medium than a play. You’re not just in one space and you’re not going to have these 20-minute scenes in general in film. You’re going to be moving from place to place. You have to have a vocabulary for what that looks like on the page.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** All right, let’s get back to more follow-up here. Matt wrote in about QR codes. He says, “While listening to John and Craig’s discussion of updating the screenplay format, I was reminded of this tweet I saw earlier in the week about a writer who included a QR code in their script. How do you guys feel about the inclusion of a QR code that links you out to additional material?” I guess like songs or images. “I only fear that the reader would go into their phone, would disrupt the flow of the read, and potentially end it with distractions from the phone entirely.” Craig, a QR code in your script?

**Craig:** That is an odd-looking thing. My concern wouldn’t be that the QR code would disrupt their flow of the read. If it led to something really cool, then I think it’s fine. It only takes a second or two to grab your camera, see it, click on the link, and look. My problem about the inclusion of a QR code is that the QR code itself aesthetically is such a downer and it’s ugly. It’s just this big ugly blob on the page. I would so much rather that there was something where people could read and just simply tap on something and understood that it would take them to a little image, then they could tap it away. It’s ugly, ugly thing.

**John:** Here’s where we need to introduce Megana’s innovation, because she’s working on a musical and she’s including the songs in the script. Megana, talk to us about how you’re doing that.

**Megana:** I just included them as a link, which is something that’s very easy to do in Highland. I reference these songs that are on YouTube, because the song’s told in the same style, and so it’s like, click here if you want to listen. Then it just takes you to Safari and opens the link in YouTube.

**John:** I think what’s smart about this is it’s recognizing that most people are not going to be reading this screenplay printed out, the way that screenplays used to be. They’re going to read it as a pdf, and pdfs can include links. Just make that clickable and it’s a good stopgap. It doesn’t give you all the way what Craig wants, where it’s actually embedded within the document itself, but it’s pretty good.

**Craig:** That sounds like a perfectly good solution. I think that that’s a really smart way to go.

**John:** Craig, you use Fade In. Does Fade In allow you to put active links in your documents?

**Craig:** It does. Fade In, actually at my urging, there’s quite a few things that you can do in Fade In that are really cool. You can embed alts, which is a really interesting thing. You can create links. Because I’m working on something that’s proprietary, I don’t do that, but yes, Fade In does have the ability to do that.

**John:** Here would be my argument for maybe a QR code is, we always talk about the title page and then you can stick a dedication page or a first page before the actual screenplay starts. That might be a page where you could say, if you would like to see images related to this, or this thing, click here or scan this. I could understand why you might want to do that, because that way if someone is looking at the script in a way that didn’t have the clickable link, that QR code would be a way for them to get to it. I wouldn’t put a QR code in the middle of a script page.

**Craig:** It’d be a bummer.

**John:** That’d be bad. Hattie wrote in to say that, “I find Celtx is great for editing between multiple people. I use Celtx Educator, as I’m studying for a master’s in screenwriting. You can share your script with anyone who has Celtx and an email address, and those people can edit the doc.” We’re talking there about shared screenwriting experiences. I still have an old Celtx T-shirt from a zillion years ago, because I never throw out T-shirts. I never really dug Celtx. It was just web-based, and I found it kind of janky. The advantage of a web-based ting is it’s very easy to do that multiple user thing. If it’s working for you, great. Craig and I know nobody who actually uses Celtx in a professional way.

**Craig:** I have not heard the word Celtx in, I don’t know, a decade. WriterDuet I think does a very good job of this. There is a free version of WriterDuet, so definitely take a look at that. Celtx, it’s like Movie Magic Screenwriter.

**John:** This last week I had a run-in with Movie Magic Screenwriter.

**Craig:** A run-in?

**John:** I did have a run-in. I had a dark encounter with it. This last week when I posted the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory script, that was an old FDR, Final Draft, old format, that is able to reformat and put it on a proper pdf, so it’s up there in the John August Library. I had these other scripts that I was like, crap, these are so old. They’re Movie Magic Screenwriter things, because you used to ping-pong them back and forth between Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter. There’s not an app to open these. I didn’t have Screenwriter. It wasn’t even clear that the build of Screenwriter, which works on a Monterey system, because you can open these old files. I was involving nerd friends to help me crack these things open.

What was so embarrassing is that there’s a Barbarella script that I was trying to open up, was that I spent maybe three hours wrestling with this file, only to realize that it actually was a Final Draft file, that if I just actually added dot FDR, it would just open, because you remember back before OS X that files did not have extensions on them, so you had no idea what that file was. I just assumed it was a Movie Magic file, and actually it was a Final Draft file.

**Craig:** I remember when OS X came out that there was this hullabaloo about the fact that these file extensions meant that Mac was turning into Windows, and no, it was turning into Unix is what it was turning into. There were always file extensions. They just didn’t show them to you.

**John:** All that meta data was buried into the file system.

**Craig:** You have the option now of automatically seeing file extensions or not, depending on the kinds of files. I tend to want to see the file extensions myself.

**John:** I do too. Here’s an example. It’s that if I have Barbarella first draft dot fdr versus dot pdf. It’s good to see, oh, the one that ends in dot pdf is the pdf. That’s just good to see, if I see it in a list view. I could see the icon would be different, but that’s not the point. You just want to see in the list which one is the pdf.

**Megana:** When you click in to look at your files, it would give you that information, even if it wasn’t …

**Craig:** You can always Command I, but I don’t want to Command I.

**John:** I don’t want to Command I.

**Craig:** Command I means something’s gone really wrong, as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Megana, I hope you have some stamina in you, because this is a long email, but I think it’s actually pretty good. This is the one from Jules.

**Megana:** Jules says, “I enjoyed listening to your discussion in Episode 532: Mistakes of Yes, about the importance of suffering and seeking meaningful work, rather than signifiers or supposed hallmarks of success in the path towards happiness. Your conversation made me think about a statement written by Albert Camus, ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ When we think about mythology, Sisyphus epitomizes infinite, unrelenting torture, pushing a boulder up a hill, only to have to repeat it again once he gets to the top. Camus in this essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, posits that life is inherently absurd and filled with bizarre routines and habits. We could be distressed or discouraged by how little anything really means or not want to live as a result, but Camus says we must revolt and not let that get us down. Sisyphus is constantly completing a task that challenges him greatly, and he achieves it, all while knowing that it will not get him anywhere, but he can find meaning and purpose and joy in the struggle. He could be happy.

“Sure, life can suck sometimes, even if you aren’t Sisyphus, but we can choose what we focus on as motivation. For any of us with ambitions, that applies that any striving to achieve comes at the expense of our happiness. I think the solution is to learn to love the struggle, no matter how successful you supposedly are, or even if by all accounts you’ve achieved nothing. No one can stop you from struggling and striving. If you truly embrace and enjoy the struggle and process of creating a script, a story, a book, a podcast, etc, I think that may be the best path towards happiness for those of us cursed with ambitious goals. If you can love writing when it’s the worst, then writing can make you happy.”

**Craig:** Yes. Amen, Jules.

**John:** Yeah. It struck me because this was also the week that, I’m going to butcher his name, so I apologize in advance, Thich Nhat Hanh, who was a Buddhist monk who died this past week, but who often wrote about the struggle and being present in it, and not putting off to later to be happy, but being present in it. That’s what I think Jules is writing here, is that it’s about understanding that the work you’re doing is not about the end goal, but about the actual work itself.

**Craig:** Yes, and that the struggle, and pointless struggle, is not a problem, because it’s all you’re going to get. I’ve always identified with the existentialists, but probably more Camus than Sartre. Sartre was such a downer, because Nausea. Camus, The Plague had a huge impact on me when I read it as a young man. Boy, if you want to read a book that drives home what we’re dealing with now, read The Plague again. What is the point? Especially if you’re a doctor and you’re working so hard, and there is an inefficient or stupid government and there are people who are moronic, and there is a disease that is destroying innocent and evil alike, and all you can do is stem the tide slightly until you just inevitably fail and also everyone dies anyway. Now what?

The answer is that’s where the human experience is. That’s the point. The point is the experience. The more we can disconnect ourselves from some notion that there is an answer to all of this, that there’s a right way, and that you’ve done it and you’ve achieved something, and therefore you have arrived at the end goal of all this, then the better off we’ll be, because none of that’s real, none of that’s true.

I think our culture, particularly American culture, is so goal-oriented. Everyone’s walking around feeling rather bad about it all, because what is the goal? Is the goal to be Jeff Bezos? You couldn’t pay me to be Jeff Bezos. You couldn’t pay me what Jeff Bezos owns to be Jeff Bezos. I don’t need, what, I’d say about $14 billion, probably 80 billion. I don’t know what it is.

**John:** It’s a lot of money.

**Craig:** I don’t need any of that. Honestly, the guy, I look at him and I just think, I don’t understand you at all. At all. I don’t know what you’re doing. I know what his ex-wife is doing. She’s doing good. I don’t know what he’s doing and I don’t know why and I don’t care. People show us who we’re supposed to be, and I don’t want to be that person. I’m stuck in my meat suit. I’ll just try and do this as best I can. I think that was a great thing to write in about, Jules.

**John:** The thing I want to distinguish between though is there’s suffering and things being difficult and needless suffering, or suffering that’s pointless. I do find people who are torturing themselves for no good reason. If it’s torture for you to write and you cannot enjoy writing and you don’t enjoy the end results of writing, I think it’s okay to stop writing. I think one of the things we try to be honest about in this podcast is there’s people who it’s just not going to be their thing. I see people who struggle to do it for no good reason. There’s no joy that they find in it. If you don’t find any joy, maybe look for something else that you can find joy in the actual process of doing, because that’s going to be more rewarding for you in the long term.

I just worry sometimes that people misunderstand. It’s like, enjoy the suffering, and they’re like, “Oh, then I have to suffer. There’s some reason why I need to beat myself up.” That’s not what this is saying.

**Craig:** I think we got into the notion of satisfaction, as opposed to happiness. I brought up Professor Scott Galloway and this thing about not following your passion, but rather finding your passion inside of the thing you’re really good at, that’s what makes you passionate about it. If you feel a sense of obligation, you’ve made a promise to someone that you’re going to be a great writer, or you’re supposed to be a great writer, and you’re not enjoy it at all, then no, you are not doing what you want in any way, shape, or form. That’s not even real struggle. That’s just a general sense of pointless obligation. If there is no sense of satisfaction in what you’re doing, then yes, absolutely, move on to another thing. You will not find something truly existentially purposeful to do, because there is no such thing. You will find something, I think, that is satisfying to do. Look for that.

**John:** Agreed. On the last episode we asked our listeners to write in their suggestions for read-aloud software, so software that could read a screenplay aloud and do a good job with the screenplay format, opposed to other things. We have a couple suggestions. People mentioned an iOS app called Tableread, which I’ve played with and I didn’t love, but it may be useful to some people. VoiceDream was an often suggested app. It does a pretty good job. It doesn’t know what a screenplay is necessarily, but it does a pretty good job of reading things aloud. Obviously most of the Mac and PC software programs can do some version of reading stuff allowed. On Windows and on Mac, you can find ways for your screenwriting software to read what’s on the screen aloud to you.

The most classic things that are designed specifically for people who are blind or have vision issues are JAWS and ZoomText. JAWS is having challenges with the current version of Final Draft, which is why Ryan Knighton and other folks are looking for better solutions for screenwriting software for blind users. These are all things that are out there that are helpful for people.

I think it’s always worth remembering that when you create things that are accessible for people who have specific issues, generally it ends up helping everybody, because just the same way that closed captioning was specifically designed for people who couldn’t hear, and it being tremendously useful for everybody around, especially when you just have a TV that didn’t have the sound turned on. I think as we look for solutions that are good for specific audiences, they tend to generalize out. Let’s just keep looking for ways to read scripts aloud and also make the work we do more accessible for everyone.

**Craig:** I did hear from Guy Goldstein, who is the founder and CEO of WriterDuet, which I mentioned just a few minutes ago. They have a new app called ReadThrough. It’s free, or there’s a free version. I watched their little demo videos. Rather impressive sounding. Another thing to throw on there. It is free. At the very least, if you are interested in text-to-voice, check out ReadThrough for free and maybe write in and let us know what you think.

**John:** Great. Megana, do you want to take Nicholas’s follow-up here?

**Megana:** Nicholas wrote in and said, “I really enjoyed the script breakdown this week of the select scenes from awards contenders. I had a question as I was going through them myself. Do you think the script is manipulated after the film is completed in order to ‘match’ the final product more perfectly? The reason I ask is because back when Borat’s subsequent movie film came out, the script was released as best adapted screenplay, and the dialog matched up perfectly, despite it being an improvised film that was made without a script and with real people. What’s up with that?”

**Craig:** What’s up with that?

**John:** What’s up with that?

**Craig:** What’s up with that? I wonder, do you think that just happens magically, or maybe there are-

**John:** It’s a magic thing.

**Craig:** Maybe there are people that work really, really hard to do that.

**John:** We could tell you that we actually know people whose job it is to match the final official script with the film as it is released. Generally when you’re getting those FYC scripts, someone has gone through that process and made all the dialog match up and stuff, taken out the scenes that got cut and that kind of stuff. I think Borat would be the most extreme example of that, where they basically had to write a screenplay that could encapsulate all these things. There was a script for Borat before it was filmed, but there was so much improvised stuff in the middle of it that they were writing that stuff after it had been actually filmed.

I do think that the For Your Consideration scripts are useful to read, because you’re seeeing what the author intent was, but you should always be mindful that you’re seeing the highlight reel, you’re seeing the perfected version of it. You’re not seeing the stuff that’s changed along the way. That’s why it’s also great if you can get early scripts of things and then compare them to the final shooting script to really see what drifted and what changed. I know reading Cameron’s original script for Aliens and then seeing the final film, you really can see, oh, this is how it shifted and expanded and changed to get to where we got to. When we did Big Fish, the Big Fish For Your Consideration script was actually the script that we went out with, we started production with. Not a lot had changed, but there were scenes that were different and things like that. I liked that. I think it’s always great to see small changes between what was on the page versus what was filmed.

**Craig:** Same with when we had to send in the scripts for Chernobyl. It was the same way, just sent the scripts. They were pretty close. They were very close. They were extraordinarily close. In fact, there was a couple of moments here or there where I was like, “Oh, that’s really, really cool,” and I don’t think I put them into the script. When the soldiers are walking along and we hear that eerie Russian tune, Black Raven, that was an improvised moment by that actor, who was Russian and had remembered that song. He just sang it and Johann recorded it, and then he put it over that little moment of those guys walking. I don’t think that’s in the script, because it wasn’t in the script. I agree with you. That’s interesting to see what’s new and created and what’s not.

**John:** Yes, those scripts tend to be a little bit optimized, but even looking back at the Sorkin script, that had weird page breaks. I think that really was the script they shot, because there’s no reason why they’d leave the A and B pages. They would’ve just taken that stuff out. If you see stuff that looks like leftover things from production, if you see stars in the margins, that’s more likely to be the script that was in production.

**Craig:** A and B pages, weird page breaks, and omitteds are a sign that you’re looking at an authentic, unadulterated production script.

**John:** Last week we talked about we see and we hear. Phil wrote in to say that, “John and Craig were right. The we see rule is number 15 on this list from Screenwriters University.” Let’s look through here, Craig, because that was 15, so that’s got to be a few other rules that really are-

**Craig:** Let’s see if they got anything right. First of all, sorry, I got to know, what is Script University? What is this?

**John:** We should look and see what they are. They have testimonials. We Have Questions. Click on We Have Questions.

**Craig:** Yeah, we have questions.

**John:** First question is, what is your refund policy?

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** Oh boy.

**Craig:** What is this? It’s an online screenwriting university featuring affordable instruction from well-known film industry professionals. Basically you pay for it. It is what it is. Let’s take a look at those rules.

**John:** This is just all-

**Craig:** It’s all bad.

**John:** It’s all umbrage bait.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Here’s the thing. It’s not worth going through.

**Craig:** Aw. Come on.

**John:** Slug line versus scene header. Craig, what do you call the thing that starts with INT or EXT? What do you call that?

**Craig:** I call it both, slug line and scene header.

**John:** It’s a murky, middle ground thing. A slug line can also be the thing that doesn’t have that, that is breaking up inside stuff within a scene that’s like, “Over at the corner,” and that kind of thing. Slug line, scene header, sure, they’re both the same thing. This has a lot of rules about what you can put in a scene header and what you can’t put in a scene header. I think you figure that out in context, don’t need all these rules.

**Craig:** Slug lines have no times of day. Did you know that? Because I put that in all the time. I put in afternoon, morning, mid-afternoon, evening. I put in all of it. It says, “Writers do it all the time.” You say, “Yes, we do. Before a script gets shot, someone has to change it to day/night.” No. I do that, and they don’t change it to day/night. Idiots. Script University, idiots. “Don’t put years, detailed locations in the slug line.” I do that all the time. Idiots. What is wrong with these people? Why would they dare do this?

**John:** “Dialog never follows a slug line, not ever. Action always separates the two.”

**Craig:** It’s rare, but I’ve done it.

**John:** It’s rare, but it’s done. Here’s why you do it, because if you’re ping-ponging back and forth between places, then there’s a reason why we’re shooting in a new place, then you could do it. It’s not a not ever. It’s rare.

**Craig:** “Don’t use cut to.” Normally I don’t, but sometimes I do.

**John:** Sometimes it’s really helpful.

**Craig:** Because I want to. “Don’t use we see or have strange reveals.” Screw you. Screw you, Script University? Script University, oh Lord. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. What is this nonsense?

**John:** Someone actually just put this page up to annoy us. That’s really what it is.

**Craig:** “On sound effects.” Whatever. I hate this. I couldn’t hate this more. Script University, shut it down. Shut it down. You’re bad. You’re bad and you should be ashamed of this. It’s stupid.

**John:** Craig is requesting his refund.

**Craig:** I hate it. What is wrong with these fricking people? What is wrong with them?

**John:** Hey Megana, help us out of this tailspin here. What did John write in here?

**Craig:** Yeah, help us out.

**Megana:** John says, “After I wrote my first script in 1999, I went starry-eyed and fresh-faced to the internet for help, and boy oh boy, there were a lot of those ‘never write we see because whoever’s reading it will literally throw your script across the room and furthermore it means you’re a terrible writer’ kind of people. There’s an attitude so many aspiring writers have of, you’re not allowed to write like a professional until you are a professional, but in my experience when you’re dealing with professionals, they don’t care at all about any of those things. I’ve never had a TV writer, showrunner, producer, or rep who have mentioned any of those things ever, and I do them all the time, and I’m still aspiring. Write for the job you want, not the job you have.”

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** We don’t care, and we never cared. I never cared. I never cared about whether or not I should say we see, ever in my life. I had never heard of anyone caring about it until the internet came along to explain to me that I was doing it wrong. Where? How? Why?

**Megana:** I just don’t understand who all these people are who are throwing scripts across the room.

**Craig:** Script throwers.

**Megana:** They just have to pick that back up.

**Craig:** Do you know how fast you’d get fired if you throw a script across the room and then one year later they’re like, “That script just won an Oscar.” You’d be like, “Oh, but it said we see.” “Okay, let me eject you from our life.” That’s crazy. One last thing.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** One last thing that I think people need to hear. You need to hear this, people, because there’s a lot of Script Universities out there, but there are even more people on the internet doling out advice, for whatever reason. I guess it makes them feel good. People love to deal out advice as if they have achieved something worthy of advice dealing. I see this on Twitter constantly. People that I literally have never heard of, and no one’s ever heard of, and have accomplished almost nothing, almost nothing of note in our business, are cross-legged, floating in air, like an elevated yogi, delivering the wisdom of the ages to us. They don’t know anything. Who are they? Don’t listen to any of them. You don’t even have to listen to us. If you’re going to listen to somebody, you should pretty much start with us. We at least know what we’re doing. We’ve done this before.

**John:** We do know what we’re doing.

**Craig:** Come on.

**John:** Craig, I think we’ve reached the midpoint, but also you said that perfectly, because exactly what you described there was in a midpoint tweet that actually prompted this whole conversation. We’ll link to this actual tweet. It’s not actually that important. Adeep tweeted, “For newer writers, these can happen at the hashtag #midpoint. A false victory/defeat, a story reversal, new tactics, full commitment to the journey, the stakes are raised, discovery of new key info, a major ordeal, main character switches from reaction to action, the story’s most significant emotional moment.”

If they’re talking about the midpoint, I’m sure we’ve talked about the midpoint on the podcast before, but I don’t think the midpoint is as much of a thing as this tweet might make us believe that it’s a thing, because I understand the end of a first act, I understand the change that goes at the end of the first act. I understand the worst of a worst for a third act. The midpoint is not really a thing to me. In most of the scripts that I’ve written, I couldn’t point and say, “That’s the midpoint.” It’s not a thing that I’m writing towards or even necessarily mindful of as I’m putting together a script. Are you?

**Craig:** No. I don’t agree with any of this. How about that? Or rather, I agree with all of it. This is like, “For newer chefs, the following can happen while you’re cooking: food can get hot, food can get cold, things can boil, stuff can congeal, dough happens.” All of these things can happen. Yes. Congrats. What does any of it mean? This is what I talk about when I did the how do you write a movie. So much of this stuff is from the point of view of, it already happened, let me look back at it, not it has to happen, how do I write it.

**John:** Yeah, because there’s so many movies I can think of I would have a hard time pointing to the midpoint. Here’s a movie that has a midpoint. Gone Girl. I know what the midpoint is, because we have a dramatic shift of POV in the story. That’s the midpoint of the movie. I got that.

**Craig:** There’s a wonderful midpoint in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, where they have an intermission. It’s wonderful. I talk a little bit about the midpoint in that episode, whatever it was. It doesn’t have to happen in the middle. It’s rather I think what people often point at. It’s just that at times the character begins to question how they’ve been living and start wondering maybe if they ought to change. That is a very subtle thing. It can be a line. It can be a word. It can be a look. It can be a moment. Or it doesn’t have to happen at all. That’s the thing. It doesn’t have to happen at all.

**John:** I would say main character’s journey, somewhere around a midpoint would be there’s no going back, or we’ve crossed so far that there’s no way to get back to the earlier point, which is a little bit different than having your village burn down at the end of the first act. We’ve gotten to a place, only way out is forward. Sure, but that’s not going to be for all characters and all stories.

**Craig:** No. Some of the things, like main character switches from reaction to action, if your main character’s been reactive for the first half of your movie, oy vey. “Story’s most significant emotional moment.” If the story’s most significant emotional moment happens in the middle of the movie, can we walk out after that point, because what are we waiting for? Story reversal, new tactics, all of that should’ve been happening anyway already.

**John:** This week I dusted off an old stage musical that I’d been working on 10 years ago and then took out and updated. I’m really, really happy with it. It has two acts, because it’s a stage musical. I absolutely love the midpoint. I really love the act breaks in stage musicals, because they have a very specific form in terms of closing up some things and asking really big questions that you’re going to be discussing during the intermission, and you’ve obviously been drinking your drink, and you come back in the second act with new energy. There really is truly a midpoint that’s so important in a stage musical. That just is not a thing that happens in most movies, in most normal screenplays.

**Craig:** Maybe, if I may, let’s just stop talking about the midpoint. Let’s stop talking about the midpoint the way we should honestly stop talking about first acts, second acts, third acts. Really? Everything’s integrated. Generally speaking, also, just stop making lists on Twitter. Stop. Stop making lists on Twitter.

**John:** I get it. I probably won’t give up first act and second act breaks, just because they are useful in terms of thinking how it starts and how it ends, because every movie has a beginning, every movie has an ending, so you’re talking about how does all the beginning work, how does all the ending work. You’re going to have those things, but what the middle of it is going to be, eh.

**Craig:** It’s really interesting how liberating working in the hour-long drama format is when it comes to that stuff. Now the substantive difference between one hour of drama and 90 minutes of drama is, drum roll please, 30 minutes, but for some reason those extra 30 minutes require us to have this intense structural conversation about what happens in the middle and what happens at the end of the first act and what happens at the pinch point leading to the first act and what happens halfway through the third act. When you’re writing for 60 pages instead of 90 pages, none of that is discussed, ever. Ever. There is no first, second, third act discussed in an hour-long drama. At least I don’t discuss it. Maybe other people do. Maybe commercial break folks do, but I don’t.

**John:** They do. I would say in one-hour procedurals, they really will talk about this kind of stuff, but that’s not what you’re doing.

**Craig:** At this point I think it’s become the standard in our business, a streaming style or cable style, one-hour-long, uninterrupted drama. No one ever talks about any of that, ever. They just talk about the totality of the story you tell. I think that’s a nice thing. I think that all of this crap that gets pumped out there into the world is pumped out there generally by people who are trying to charge you money for something. They’re after something. I really do. In the end you scratch slightly, and underneath is a chart showing you how much money it costs per these services offered. It bums me out, because it’s unnecessary.

**John:** We’ve been addressing some follow-up and addressing previous things from our listeners. Let’s bring in some new stuff so we can keep the cycle going.

**Craig:** Yeah, new stuff.

**John:** Let’s start with a question about omitted scenes. Megana.

**Megana:** JP asks, “At which point in a script’s life do scenes start getting marked as omitted? Is it only after it’s entered production when scenes have been numbered? Is it when conforming the script to the final product? Otherwise, why leave a bread crumb trail saying, hey, there used to be a scene here, but now there isn’t, instead of just cutting all evidence of the bastard scene and letting the story flow?”

**John:** What a great question. I love a question that actually has an answer.

**Craig:** Yeah, this one is answerable.

**John:** Here’s the answer, is that once you have a production script that has numbers in it, if you need that omitted there, just make it clear to everybody else that there was a scene here, that scene no longer exists, let’s not talk about that scene, because that scene is not there and we’re not going to shoot it. It’s gone. It’s erased. We still have some evidence in the script that we really did cut this out, we’re not forgetting to shoot it.

**Craig:** JP, you’re absolutely right. It only enters into play once production’s begun and once scenes have been numbered and a white script has been issued. The white draft is the first draft. The pages are locked. The scene numbers are locked. At that point forward, if you do delete a scene, yes, you have to say omitted. Maybe the biggest reason is because if you don’t, then at some point, a thousand people are going to email you saying, “Wait, what happened to scene 83? Because it goes from 82 to 84.” You have to say, “It was there.” Because people show up after that happens. It’s not like everybody that works on the movie or the show was there when that white draft was issued. It’s a smart thing to do.

One nice thing also, I assume they have this in Final Draft, they certainly do in Fade In, and I bet you have it in Highland, if you omit a scene, there is a special thing to say Omit Scene, which turns it into an omitted but keeps everything. If you have to un-omit it, or if you just want to peek and see what was in there, it’s easy to do.

**John:** We have a whole format for doing that, which is basically commenting it out, which is helpful. Now a thing also about omitting scenes, and also sometimes the meat of what happened in that scene is still there. The story point is there, but the scene has changed so much. There’s a different location. There’s different characters in it. There could be a discussion about, are we just going to change the scene or are we going to omit that scene and put a new A scene in there to replace it? That’s a discussion writers and directors and first ADs might have. Craig, where do you come down on that? If the scene changes so radically that it’s really a different scene, will you keep the scene number for it, or will you omit it, put a new scene in there?

**Craig:** I just talk about it with the first AD, script supervisor. Because scene numbers are really there for everyone else, I just will do whatever they ask me to do in that regard. I’ll ask them, “Would you want this to be a new scene or do you want me to just change it around inside of the scene?” It seems like the general rule of thumb is if we’re changing a location, absolutely it’s a different scene. If we’re staying in the same location, but we’re changing a bunch of things, or the location is sort of the same, but not the same, then I just ask them, “What do you want me to do with it?” Then they tell me.

This happens all day long, by the way, when we’re shooting and it comes to lettering up. When you’re shooting a scene, every new angle and size gets a letter. You’re shooting scene 12, okay, the first shot is shot 12-A, and so on and so forth. Sometimes if you change a lens, but you keep things exactly where they are, and the lens doesn’t change dramatically, the camera system folks will come by and ask the script supervisor, “Are we lettering up or are we just calling this take 6?” Then the script supervisor will make that call. It’s all about, just generally speaking, what’s going to help everybody else down the line.

**John:** While we’re speaking about letting up, on your show, if let’s say there was a scene 19 and a scene 20, and there’s a new scene being entered between the two of those, is that new scene A-19?

**Craig:** No, it’s 19-A.

**John:** That’s a difference of opinion between different productions, because 19-A makes a lot of sense. The problem with 19-A is it gets confusing then on the slate. It’s like, “This is scene 19-A, take A.”

**Craig:** We just call it 19 Apple Apple.

**John:** Apple Apple.

**Craig:** That generally isn’t a problem for us. They do it differently in England. I think it’s the other way. I can’t quite remember theirs. There are different methods for that sort of thing. I don’t tend to have a lot of those, to be honest with you. I don’t.

**John:** Because Craig writes everything perfectly the first time and it just happens.

**Craig:** Yeah, or at least I get my scenes generally. I have some A scenes, I have some B scenes, but there’s not that many. Honestly, because I am in control of the flow of the screenplay, when you’re getting into production on movies and 15 different writers are coming in because Frank Capra needs 15 writers to give him the Frank Capra Touch, then yeah, you can get a big ole mess. It can get really weird. There are things like what happens when you’re putting a scene between 19 and 19-A? Then that does become 19-A or whatever the hell, I don’t know what they call it, or 19-a-A I think is what it would be. They start using lowercase versus capital. You can customize all that. The only real thing that I think is important to pay attention to is to not use I or O, as those look like one and zero.

**John:** Exactly. In the memo that I put out for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, if you want to look on the pages for that, I actually call that out in the memo, because it’s a natural question for why we’re doing it, is that’s why we’re omitting those things. Another thing you should keep in mind is that it’s not unheard of to put out a new white script. If a lot has changed between the production draft and the draft we thought we were going to production with, and then a bunch of stuff changes, a production might choose to say, “This is the new white draft, basically. Throw out your current script. This is the new script and this is what we’re using for the numbers.”

**Craig:** What we don’t want is every single page to be not a full page and 5,000 colors and we’re into salmon 8 and whatever it is. Yes, at some point, if it’s changed super dramatically, everybody just … There’s a point of no return. The point of no return really is when people get married to scene numbers. Crews and production teams really do talk about scene numbers constantly. I have to remind people all the time, I don’t know any scene numbers. I don’t remember any of those. I’m like, “Can you just tell me what that is? Because I don’t know what that is.” That’s the danger point is the scene numbers.

**John:** I have found my experience, especially on more complicated productions, some story stuff does get messed up when things go through multiple rounds. It’s not just bad writing happening, but when there have been so many revisions and so many colors stacked up on top of each other that a scene is being split between four different pages of different things and it’s just not clear, it’s hard to really focus on what is the point of the scene and what is actually happening in the scene, because it’s split across so many pages. That is a real thing that happens, because of production drafts and I think sometimes just bad choices from other people. I’ve been in circumstances where trying to do arbitration on a project that we were looking at the final shooting script, and you couldn’t even parse what the scene was, because it was divided between so many different things. That really is a challenge.

**Craig:** There’s a little trick that you can use sometimes. When it gets really bad with a scene, you can just say, “Okay, I’m just going to cut all the stuff from page 20-A, page 20-A-a, page 20-B, and just re-paste it into page 20 and just get a nice 20 and 20-A, and get rid of the other ones.”

**John:** Absolutely. Especially back in a time when we were putting out physical pages to production, you will have made some decisions about what’s going to make the most sense for a person reading this thing. It’d be better off to delete some pages and combine some stuff. Often it is just so people can actually see this is a scene, rather than a couple different paragraphs on a couple different pages.

**Craig:** Yah.

**John:** Yah. Let’s end on a question that you and I will actually love to discuss. This is Lydia’s question.

**Megana:** Lydia from New York writes, “My almost-10-year-old son has a great immersive imagination. I would love to introduce him to Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t know how I never had any friends who played it growing up, but I’m thinking it would be amazing for us to do it together. Where do I start?”

**John:** Oh Lydia, you are just the best mom.

**Craig:** Best mom.

**John:** That’s mom of the year. Best mom.

**Craig:** Best mom.

**John:** It’s awesome that your son has a great imagination. He would probably dig D&D. I’ll put links in the show notes for ways to get started playing D&D with your kids, because there’s good starter adventures that build upon each other and get their feet wet, without overwhelming them with too many stuff about the character sheet all at once. I’d also say keep your sessions short, keep them fun and involved, but not overwhelming. Try to find some kids his age who could play with him also, because you as a mom is fantastic, but it’s more fun when the kids are playing with their own age.

**Craig:** Yes. Sometimes 10-year-old boys who have great immersive imaginations also don’t have a lot of friends. These can go hand in hand. If your son is challenged in that area, if he has some social issues or has just a limited amount of friends, then just know there are a lot of 10-year-old boys just like him who are also limited and don’t have a lot of friends and would love to get to know him. My guess is that there are a lot of really good resources out there for parents. Maybe his school can help. There might be some guidance counselors who can identify some other kids like that, or if there’s some local neighborhood community organizations. You’re in New York, so there’s everything everywhere. Check out some online resources and put out the word. Put out the word on, I’m not on Facebook, but if there’s something like that or if you are on Facebook, to just say, hey, if you’re interested in putting together a group.

There are also some professional dungeon masters out there. They know exactly how to pitch and tone a session to the kids who are playing, and they might be a great way to introduce a group, because they will know everything, and they’re also really good at teaching. That’s part of what they do is teach kids how to play. The goal, Lydia, is for your son and the kids that he enjoys playing with to then not need that guy and to move on and one of them DMs and they do it themselves, which they absolutely can do.

I think it’s really important, Lydia, actually that you don’t play with him. I know. I know. I know you want to. I know you want to, but I think John is absolutely right. I’m just saying, as a former 10-year-old boy, and as somebody who raised a former 10-year-old boy, that there’s something that is irreproducible and magical about four or five 10-year-old boys with great, immersive imaginations doing it themselves, without parental supervision, and being free to explore and enjoy themselves and to find their own identities in that way. It’s really important. You can host it in your apartment or your home. Like I said, there are some really cool people out there that do these things professionally. That’s probably a good place to start poking around and looking.

**John:** I started playing when I was 4th grade, 5th grade. The DM was Diego Rodriguez, who had an older brother who played, and so we had picked up how to play from him. It’s going to be one kid or someone who has a little bit more experience about how it all works who is going to DM, but eventually you’re all going to get into it and get going. I think there’s a natural tension between people who are obsessed with the stats and optimizing the characters’ numbers and the players who are really focusing on role-playing the characters. That’s fine. That’s going to be a natural tension between the two of those. Whatever gets them wanting to sit down at the table is great. Just let them have fun.

**Craig:** Let them have fun. I think it’s a really great thing. Dungeons and Dragons, and role-playing games in general have always been a terrific, I’ll say safe space. Why not? Safe and nurturing space for kids who otherwise don’t have that elsewhere, whether they’re neurodivergent or they’re just a little nerdy or shy. That’s a place where they blossom, and where a bunch of them together can blossom. It’s a beautiful thing.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things. The first is Flee, which is an animated documentary that is up for all the award considerations this year. I watched it yesterday. It’s fantastic. It’s just really, really great. It’s the story of an Afghan refugee who’s trying to get out of Afghanistan as Afghanistan fell, and ends up on this wild expedition to try to get to safety. So well done. The reason why it’s animated is because to protect his anonymity, they animate all of his stuff. There’s live-action stuff in there as well, but he’s always an animated character, which works so well in terms of being able to move back into his childhood. It’s flawlessly done. I strongly recommend everyone check out Flee.

My other One Cool Thing is the Wikipedia history timeline game, Craig, which I sent to you earlier this week. Did you try playing it?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s really good. What it’s doing is it gives you a card at the top of the screen, which is some event in history, so either a famous person’s birth or death, or a company being founded, and you have to drag it into this timeline. It just keeps putting up new things for you to drag into the timeline. At first it’s really easy. Something happened in the modern era or it happened in BC times. Then it gets really tough. It’s basically how long of a streak you can keep going of getting these things right. You can play it endlessly. It’s not like a Wordle where it’s just one thing a day. It could be a giant time suck, but if you like history and organizing things, it will be great for you.

**Craig:** I do like history. I don’t love organizing things.

**John:** I think that question of, did this happen before or after this other thing, it’s not organizing. It’s just putting stuff in order.

**Craig:** This game is a nightmare for the kids who would be like, “Do we have to know dates on the test?”

**John:** Yeah, you have to know dates. You have to know dates-

**Craig:** “Do we have to know dates?”

**John:** … for this to work.

**Craig:** My one cool thing is ancient. It’s a game called Papers Please. Have you played it, John?

**John:** I recognize the title. I’m looking through here now to see what this actually was.

**Craig:** Papers Please. It was the first game by Lucas Pope. Lucas Pope is the guy who also did Return of the Obra Dinn, which I think was a One Cool Thing as well. This was his first game. It’s been around since 2014. At least on iOS it’s been around since 2014. It is the weirdest, most addicting and depressing and interesting game.

The functionality is very simple. You are a border patrol officer for some kind of obvious Eastern Bloc, Soviet era country. Your job is to decide whether or not to let immigrants in. The mechanics are you have some rules and then they give you documents, and then you have to check their documents, make sure that the documents comport with the rules, and then you either reject them or accept them. The rules get more and more complicated as things keep happening. It functions on days. That part is fun and tricky. The more people you process through accurately, the more money you make, which means your family will live, because they keep reporting on, you have this much money for gas and for food and for medicine. Also, interesting things start happening. People start begging to be let in, and they make really good cases, but their papers aren’t right, or there’s some sneaky spy people that want to overthrow the government. It’s all set against this very pixelated, brutalist background. Very simple, very fun to play. Gets really tricky really quickly. Strongly recommend. Works excellently on an iPad.

**John:** It feels like a perfect device for it.

**Craig:** It’s a weird one. I really enjoyed it. It’s old. It’s ancient, in terms of the internet. Papers Please.

**John:** Actually it’s a very good matchup with Flee, which is all about papers and documentation and fake passports.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Perfect. That was our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Actually this week it’s by William Phillipson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes @clmazin. I’m always @johnaugust. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at Scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the ones we’re about to record on NFTs. Craig and Megana, thank you so much for a fun show.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** I am the person who talks about NFTs on this show. I think my first conversation about NFTs was pitching that Disney should absolutely do NFTs, and they have not done NFTs yet.

**Craig:** Good. Has a technology ever had a heel turn quicker than NFTs? They are loathed out there.

**John:** They are generally loathed. This last week Twitter announced people who have NFTs can use those as an avatar profile. They’ll have hexagons around them. Then obviously people writing scripts would block anybody who has a hexagon thing. They’re not well-loved.

**Craig:** No, they’re loathed. There’s a couple of reasons why. The first reason is I think an incredibly reasonable reason, which is that any of these things that require blockchain technology are prone to causing environmental disasters, because an enormous amount of energy can get used up by people who are trying to basically game the system. They want to mine a whole lot of Bitcoin or they want to process a whole whatever fricking NFT crap.

**John:** Ethereum.

**Craig:** China has just banned it all entirely. They just banned all that stuff, because it’s sucking up a mass amount of energy. Russia is about to get involved. Even Russia is like, “I don’t know, this feels janky as hell and also bad for the environment.” The other reason of course that NFTs are loathed is because fundamentally they’re stupid. At this point, what are they buying? They’re buying something that says, “I own a thing that everyone else can appreciate and experience in the exact same way that I, the owner, can.” That’s just stupid.

**John:** I’m going to link to three really good articles that came out in the last couple weeks that were talking about NFTs and bring up these criticisms. What I like about these articles is they point to these are the things that are more promising about them, and these are why the promises are not actually being kept.

One of the things that NFT or crypto proponents will pitch hard is that it’s decentralized, no one can shut it down, no one can stop it. The thing is, it’s actually not as decentralized as you would think it would be. Everything still is funneling through these different small deciders of OpenSea, which would say we’re going to show this piece of art or we’re not going to show this piece of art. It runs into all the libertarian issues of just, what are you going to do about child pornography, what are you going to do about actual criminal behavior that happens on here, what are you going to do about actual theft. When there have been thefts, they’re like, “Oh, we’ll cancel that thing.” Then was it really decentralized? Was there really no authority behind things? It’s trading on people who cannot be held accountable on some levels, but are very accountable on other levels.

**Craig:** All of it is nothing. No one’s even pretending it’s something. Just so I’m clear, if someone sells an NFT of a photo that is online, it’s a digital photo, and I buy that NFT, I now own that digital photo, or I own the file of that digital photo. That digital photo’s out there and everybody can look at it. The thing like that, a piece of art that Booble made, or whatever his name was. Was it Booble?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Boogle?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is that it, Boogle?

**John:** Beeple.

**Craig:** Beeple.

**John:** Beeple.

**Craig:** I like Boogle better.

**John:** He was a previous One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Booble, I’m just going to keep calling him Booble, because it’s funny, somebody paid, whatever, $14 trillion for his picture, but I can look at it. It’s the same thing. It’s literally the same thing. I’m looking at the same thing.

**John:** Craig, yes. I think we need to acknowledge that all art has similar kinds of issues there, because I could sell you a painting, I sell you a van Gogh, and you’re like, “Okay, I own the van Gogh,” but you can also own a picture of it.

**Craig:** That’s different. That’s different.

**John:** It is different, but then the question of, how about a photograph, if I sell you an Ansel Adams photograph. There’s a limited number of them. There’s only a limited number because Ansel Adams chose to put a limit on things. Art is always this conflict between artificial scarcity and-

**Craig:** The problem is it becomes instantly different when you’re dealing with digital stuff, because digital stuff is reproducible flawlessly. If there was a technology where I could go into the Louvre, point my ray gun at the Mona Lisa, and have a copy of the Mona Lisa, a physical copy that was exactly the same, down to the atom, then I have another Mona Lisa, without question. That is exactly what’s going on with NFTs, so I don’t get it, and I’m never going to get it, ever. I’m old.

**John:** Can we think about another system that’s been designed to deal with the problem of reproducibility and artistic worth?

**Craig:** Copyright.

**John:** Copyright, yeah. Also this past week, a thing that happened, or it’s two weeks ago, some folks bought a copy of Jodorowsky’s Dune book.

**Craig:** No, these guys. They don’t listen to our show.

**John:** They set up a DAO, which is basically a collective financial organization to purchase this copy of the book. It’s like, okay, you bought it, and then they had these plans for what they were going to do with it, including develop spin-off merchandise and a TV series and stuff like that. Craig, is there any problem with that? I think they could see there being an obstacle there.

**Craig:** There is. There is.

**John:** What’s that?

**Craig:** The problem is that what they purchased was a derivative work. That derivative work was theoretically licensed by the Frank Herbert Estate to create a derivative work of his copyrighted original work, Dune. However, purchasing a book does not give you any underlying rights to anything in that book, much less anything in the books that it was based on. What they have is a book.

**John:** Craig, I have a copy of Harry Potter on my shelf, so I should just be able to make a new series.

**Craig:** JK Rowling, she has one handwritten copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s out there, and I paid a billion dollars for that handwritten copy, which in and of itself would probably be worth something, but now it means we’re going to start now creating our own new stuff based on the handwriting. Oh my god. How? You said that this was an organization of people, so more than one idiot?

**John:** Basically it’s a bunch of people who came together to form this organization called a DAO, which could then go out and make this acquisition. They’re all putting in money basically to buy this thing together, and then they all have a share in it. It’s like a corporation. It’s like the closest equivalent to what a corporation would be in a purely NFT crypto space.

**Craig:** Nobody in that organization had even the slightest understanding of how copyright works? No one?

**John:** Apparently not.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Tell me, John, surely they didn’t spend more than $100,000 on this.

**John:** We can Google this now.

**Craig:** It’s $3 million.

**John:** $3 million.

**Craig:** They spent $3 million.

**John:** Whoever owned that physical copy of it in theory made $3 million, and good on them. We should also point out that Jodorowsky also has copyright on his unique interpretation of that underlying material too. Even if you bought the one copy of the thing that he did, that’s not necessarily granting you the right to reproduce it, just to do any other things to it, so that’s all done.

I was having a good, long conversation with a guy who’s in the crypto NFT space who’s also developing original story material. I was just really curious where he saw the opportunities here and what he thought could happen. What [inaudible 01:08:32] he thinks this is basically just a form of wealth transfer from really rich people to artists and writers. It’s like, oh, okay, on that level I kind of get it. The same way that MoviePass was a wealth transfer from venture capitalists to people who wanted to see movies. That’s basically assuming that it’s going to be failure. It’s assuming that it’s going to be a MoviePass 2.0. That’s all it is.

**Craig:** It’s going to be MoviePass 2.0. What am I missing, John?

**John:** I think what you’re missing is that there is enthusiasm and exuberance from people coming together to do a thing which feels exciting. I saw this when I was doing Kickstarter stuff. It’s like you get people together like, “Let’s make this thing happen.” It’s like, yeah, that’s really cool. The thing about a Kickstarter is at the end you have the thing. You have these really cool books that you and I have, like D&D books that we’ve gotten off Kickstarters, or cool figurines. There’s a thing I wanted that I actually got at the end of it. Here it’s just not clear whether people are enthusiastic about it because they want the thing to exist or because they want to speculate that it’s going to be worthwhile at the end.

**Craig:** I think it’s pure speculation, because how could you possibly be excited about any of this, properly excited? Is there anybody really that is getting a thrill, a tingle down their spine from the availability of an NFT? All those financial things, like whatever, credit default swaps, where somebody has to take time to explain to you how it works, and really what it comes down to is people are just betting money on money to see if money happens in a money way. It’s just math. At that point really the only excitement is purely financial. It’s just purely financial. This is all nuts and weird and empty and soulless. I honestly do hope that the general anger that is fire-hosed at people who announce that they’re now involved in NFTs will work, that people will just go, “Okay, yeah, sorry, I’m not … “

**John:** Here’s my last challenge for people. If you’re going to come to me with a thing saying it’s this great, innovative thing that’s going to be using NFTs or crypto, I want you to tell me why it needs to use NFTs or crypto, because in so many cases I see, oh yeah, it’s exciting to build this community, to do this thing, but couldn’t you do this in a web 2.0 way that doesn’t involve crazy servers in Malta to do this thing? Ultimately, I can’t find those reasons. I just feel like we’ve built out a web that works. We’ve built out copyright law, which is crazy, but works. You’re trying to reinvent something for no good reason other than there’s ways to make weird money on it.

**Craig:** It’s like they said, “We’re going to recreate the tulip market of old Holland,” which as we all know, was a speculative bubble that ended up crashing and destroying people. That’ll happen, but along the way you might be one of the people that makes a lot of money off of these fake tulips, that they’re just saying it kind of. Oh god.

**John:** You were ranting about Jeff Bezos earlier. Jeff Bezos, to his credit, he built a thing. He built a thing that works really well. There’s actually a company that the world is different because of the thing he was able to build. He built something with the money that he was able to raise.

**Craig:** It exists. It employs a whole lot of people. It does a thing. It is an integral part of our economy. It has purpose. We can all debate whether or not it has changed things for the better or worse, and probably has done both, but it is not just a shell game of nonsense. I think people hear NFT and blockchain, and their minds go somewhere. I don’t know what it is. They start to just go, “Yeah, blockchain.” Blockchain’s a great phrase. It sounds great. It’s got the word block and chain.

**John:** Doesn’t it?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Both. You have two Wordle words in one combination. Perfect. Love it.

**Craig:** Block and chain. Five, five, as we say in the puzzle business.

**John:** Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Thank you, Megana.

**Megana:** Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Bo Yeon Kim’s Tweet on Bong Joon-Ho’s [MOTHER Script](https://twitter.com/extspace/status/1482482121335734273?)
* Script University’s [20 Common Sense Script Rules, in No Particular Order](https://www.screenwritersuniversity.com/pages/20-script-rules-1)
* Read Aloud Software Suggestions [Table Read](https://www.tablereadpro.com/), [ZoomText](https://www.zoomtext.com/), [JAWS](https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/software/jaws/), [VoiceDream](https://www.voicedream.com/)
* DnD for kids [Level 1 Geek](https://www.level1geek.com/dnd-for-kids-guide/) and [Being a Dungeon Master for Kids](https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/being-dungeon-master-kids)
* [Flee](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8430054/) animated film
* [Wikipedia Timeline Game](https://kottke.org/22/01/wikipedia-history-timeline-game)
* [Papers, please](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papers,_Please) by Lucas Pope
* NFT Articles [Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3](https://www.oreilly.com/radar/why-its-too-early-to-get-excited-about-web3/) by Tim O’Reilly, [My First Impressions of Web3](https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html) on the Moxie Marlinspike Blog, [Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are](https://blog.mollywhite.net/blockchains-are-not-what-they-say/) by Molly White
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by William Phillipson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/534standard.mp3).