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

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

**Susannah Grant:** I’m Susannah Grant.

**John:** And this is Episode 168 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

We are live at the Austin Film Festival and, Susannah, I cannot believe you and I have done 168 episodes.

**Susannah:** 168. It’s been such a long road together.

**John:** It’s been kind of amazing. Like, what were your favorite episodes that we did?

**Susannah:** [laughs] You know, there was one guy who came once, I think his name was Craig, he was really kind of nice. I liked having him —

**John:** Yeah, he was belligerent.

**Susannah:** Unpleasant, but in a nice way.

**John:** I mean, I think my favorite episode was Episode 34 with Aaron Sorkin where he went on that long rant about robots.

**Susannah:** Right. That was great.

**John:** It was so odd, but he really had a passionate defense for why robots should be ruling society. Then the last year we had a live show and it was Callie Khouri and Vince Gilligan. They got into that rap battle.

**Susannah:** Right.

**John:** I had never heard —

**Susannah:** That was a good one, too.

**John:** I’ve never heard such profanity from Callie Khouri.

**Susannah:** Really?

**John:** Yeah, well, yeah.

**Susannah:** You need to talk to her a little more.

**John:** All right. She can throw down. She can throw down and she can drop a beat. And that was the crucial thing I learned. This episode of Scriptnotes, this live show, probably won’t have as much profanity because we are in a church.

**Susannah:** Yeah. So watch yourself.

**John:** Yeah. It’s odd. We’ll paint the scene for people who are listening at home. There’s literally stained glass all around us.

**Susannah:** Beautiful stained glass.

**John:** It’s really, really pretty. It feels kind of inappropriate for our podcast, but I think we’re going to make this one PG-13. There will be no F-bombs dropped in this sanctuary, I hope.

**Susannah:** Really? Okay. I can do that.

**John:** All right. Now, usually Craig Mazin would be here. And the official reason for why Craig is not here is that he is at a friend’s wedding, and so therefore could not come to the Austin Film Festival. The official reason is not necessarily the most interesting reason. So, I thought one thing we might do is let’s draw a card and pick a different reason for why he’s gone.

So, this is a thing we’re experimenting, we call it Writer Emergency. And it’s when you sort of get stuck on an idea.

**Susannah:** You’ve come up with a bad solution like he’s not there because he’s at a wedding. And you know that’s way too boring, so you have to come up with instead he’s the victim of a zombie attack.

**John:** Yes.

**Susannah:** Much better.

**John:** It’s a much better thing. So, someone who eats Craig Mazin, and eats Craig Mazin’s brain, is that a more powerful zombie? It’s an angrier zombie.

**Susannah:** [laughs] Angrier zombie for sure. I think the zombie army is stronger with Craig Mazin’s brain.

**John:** I’m going to pick on. I just want to say Craig Mazin is not here because…stop talking is the one I got. So, that would be a good lesson for us, and also perhaps why he couldn’t be here is because he’s been struck mute by some strange reason.

We are going to bring up our first guest who is Richard Kelly who has been a frequent guest on the podcast. Richard Kelly, come up here. Richard Kelly, writer and director of films such as Donnie Darko, The Box, Southland Tales. Today on the show I really want to talk about the experience of being a writer and a director. When do you stop writing and when do you sort of put on your director hat as you’re approaching a project?

**Richard Kelly:** I’ve found that the writing process never stops. That it’s endless. Literally it’s in your head forever. I’m still rewriting movies that I directed years and years ago. I’m still editing them in my mind, you know. So, there’s what’s happening in your mind, and then there’s the limitations of the real world and as you get older and as you mature as an artist, hopefully you’re good at setting parameters for when you need to be finished with something and when you need to transition into the next phase and move on.

So, what I’ve found, in the past I would not have enough discipline, I think, in terms of editing the screenplay and getting it to a point where it’s more or less locked. And the actors can do a little improvisation. There are going to be some surprises on set that are going to be wonderful surprises, we hope, but in the past I would just keep adding stuff.

I would be caught up in the moment on set and you’re only there for a limited number of hours. And you have all of these wonderful tools at your disposal. And sometimes I would get caught up in the moment and I would just keep adding more material and adding new scenes. And, you know, that’s fine, but then it becomes a real headache in the editing room because you end up with just way too much material.

And then maybe that time might have been better spent really focusing on what’s essential. So, as you get older as an artist you hope to become more efficient and be able to compartmentalize things, I guess. So, compartmentalizing the writing and then compartmentalizing the directing.

**John:** Susannah, you’ve written and directed. Is that your experience that you keep trying to write even though you’re in your directing mode, or do you break off?

**Susannah:** I think there’s an interesting tension in what you’re talking about because that spontaneity can sometimes yield the best piece of work in the whole piece. I don’t know, I find that kind of exciting. Like it could be a colossal waste of time, and it could be the thing that puts it over the edge, which is kind of interesting, you know. You feel like you’ve gotten better at knowing which it is?

**Richard:** Yeah. And I also, having ended up with like a three-hour rough cut that I want to open up a vein thinking about how to cut an hour out. It’s so hard. And sometimes my movies end up, they’re like algebra theorems sometimes in terms of like a science fiction logic and they’re really hard to sometimes deconstruct because without one component the whole thing doesn’t make sense. So, I don’t know. It’s trying to make room for those surprises, and make room for improvisation, but at the same time just try to always improve my level of discipline in terms of making sure that I’m focused on keeping everything in the correct timeframe. And that I’m not going to just end up with a lot of superfluous material.

But at the same time, you do want those surprises. You do want them, but this is also — excited to hear Cary talk, because when you’re dealing with something like television, boy is there time to play in television. Boy, is there just an extended canvas where you can have the shoe leather and you can have the quiet moments or the deleted scenes in movies end up becoming some of the best scenes in television, you know, because you have the time, the breathing room I guess.

**John:** Susannah, you’re just out of the editing room from shooting this TV pilot. So, are you able to sort of look at the stuff as a writer, or are you looking at this as the producer has to make the show going forward? What is that like for you?

**Susannah:** Because you go into it knowing you’re going to be shepherding it, you know, you’re going to be the authority on it all the way through. It felt like all of a piece, the work all felt like it was feeding into each other. But I ended up with exactly what you’re talking about. I ended up with a feature-length pilot initially and it took a lot to get it down into shape.

I think it’s partly because you’re looking ahead at what could be a pilot and it could be seven years. So, you’re thinking I’m going to have the time to play this stuff out. And that’s a real luxury. So, you’ve got the long view from the get go with television, you know.

**John:** In the moment as you’re shooting a scene, whether you’re the director or you’re the writer who is on the set, you’re watching the thing, I find the thing I have to keep reminding myself is what is the scene actually about. Because it’s so easy to get caught up in the mechanics of how you’re filming something. There’s that one little thing that’s annoying you that’s so easy to forget this is why this scene is in the story at all. And sometimes it’s a function of a writer, whether you’re the writer-director, or just the writer who happens to be on set, is the person who can remind everyone that this scene is important because of the thing that happened before and the thing that happens after.

Because when you’re just on the day shooting a scene it’s so easy to forget why that scene matters and why it exists. What the storytelling purpose is in that moment.

**Susannah:** I have a friend who is a writer-director and before she shoots anything she takes every scene, puts it on a little note card, punches a hole in it, and she puts them all on a little ring and attaches it to her hip. And on it she writes “the point of this scene is,” because as soon as you’re in it there are so many other factors and something can really excite you and she always has that and then she just rips it off when she’s done with the scene.

And I think it’s a really smart thing to do.

**Richard:** Well it’s also good to always remember what comes before and what comes after. I actually, I usually do a big diagram of the movie. I’m all about drawing diagrams. And a lot of it is the timeline of the movie and the characters and the sort of tension flow. It’s good to show the actors that and to have this diagram for the actors because you often have to shoot things out of chronology.

And so this is what happened to your character yesterday. This is what’s going to happen to your character tomorrow. So that you can keep them anchored in the timeline. And if you can have actually a visual reference, whether it’s something like she described — note cards on a belt, or a diagram of some kind — even if the actors can have some sort of visual access to the macro world of the movie and where they exist within that timeline. It can be really helpful. I mean, even going back. I remember working with Jake on Darko. That character goes through a really intense journey. And we had to shoot a lot of it out of sequence and do block shooting for the dinner table stuff, because we just had no time.

And so it was really important that I could just remind him. It’s like, you just saw the bunny rabbit, or you’re about to meet Grandma Death, you know. You’re about to have a schizoid attack. It was a lot to balance, but chronology and I have a friend who is always reminding me, and I do this in my scripts, to remind your audience what the chronology of your story is.

If your story takes place over a month, a week, a day, make sure that your audience understands the timeframe of when the story is taking place. That’s important.

**John:** I think one of the challenges we all face as we are going into production on our projects is the experience of reading a script is like the experience of watching a movie. Things move forward in time and it’s all very natural. You start here, you end up there. The experience of production classically is not that at all. And so you’re shooting things completely out of sequence. And so what you’re describing in terms of being able to talk with an actor about like this is what just happened, this is where you’re going to, you’re trying to give them a map for sort of this is what the journey is. Here is where we’re at on this journey, even though we’re sort of skipping around how we’re actually filming it.

And it’s a hard thing to appreciate until you’re there on the set and it’s two in the morning and they don’t understand sort of why this moment needs to be this moment. It’s a challenging thing.

You brought up TV. And we actually have two directors here who are fantastic TV directors. So, I want to ask those kind of questions. Let’s get them up here and send you back.

**Richard:** Excellent.

**John:** I want to invite up Cary Fukunaga from True Detective. Director of True Detective. Writer and director of Sin Nombre. Jane Eyre, which I just loved. So, thank you very much. This is such a weird space, because I know when we sit down we’re sort of hard to see, and so we’ll just stand. I also want to welcome up Peter Gould from Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul. Peter Gould.

All right. Bigger canvases. Longer stories. Things that don’t have to fit into small boxes. And yet they’re shorter, they’re episodes, and there are constraints on how long a thing can be. As you’re approaching a Breaking Bad episode, you know what’s happened in the series before then, but you haven’t necessarily even seen that thing being shot. So, you have a sense of where things are going, but you have to prepare this thing that isn’t quite a moment yet. Can you talk us through prepping an episode of Breaking Bad and sort of when you come on board, whether it’s something you write, or something you’re just directing. What is the process for getting an episode together.

**Peter Gould:** Well, for me the process centers on the writer’s room. And it centers on a group of writers, some producers, writer-producers sitting around a table and asking that question: what just happened? What will be the result of that? And we often will have things that we want to have happen. We have goals. We have brainstorms. We have crazy ideas of things that we’d like to do, but ultimately we have to earn them. And so we want to be true to what’s just happened as much as we can.

So, in some ways, having the previous episodes or having the pilot is a lot like you’re little deck of cards. It’s like you have writing prompts that are embedded in the work you’ve already done. And you have writing prompts embedded in the things you know about your cast. And then when you start watching dailies you see things that work or don’t work. And those also become kind of writing prompts in their own weird way.

So, for us, and just the approach that we used, it’s very much about figuring out the story. It’s what Richard was talking about, too, is trying to figure out, trying to pre-visualize the episode as much as we can. And so sometimes we’ll ask ourselves, if we get stuck, it’s like what’s the first shot in this scene? What’s the transition between these two? Is this a new costume?

We try to think — and John, you and I met at USC and I was your teacher at USC. And it was all about making movies that weren’t necessarily dialogue centered, which a lot of people had a hard time getting their heads around. And for us, and the approach I like, is to really think about the story and to think about how little you can do.

As Susannah was talking about pilots, and I think the challenge with a pilot in a weird way for the audience, it only has one goal in my mind which is to get them to watch the next episode.

**Susannah:** Right. Come back.

**Peter:** Come back to the next episode. But on the other hand, there are a lot of impulses that people have. Let’s do everything. Let’s show the entire scope of what we’re intending to do, all in one 47-minute episode.

**Susannah:** Let’s take every character on a journey.

**Peter:** Yes.

**Susannah:** And get them to an endpoint.

**Peter:** Yes, go big moment, big moment. I’ve heard the phrase, thank god we never hear it with the folks that we’re working with, but I’ve heard the phrase “keep turning cards over.” Keep turning cards over. Keep making. Keep switching it up. And I think that’s actually antithetical to good storytelling to my mind. And that didn’t answer your question at all.

**John:** No, but it was a very good start to it.

**Peter:** It works out.

**John:** I want to switch over to Cary because you had the pilot-less experience. And so talk to us about True Detective and sort of your coming into the project and this wasn’t going to be made in a normal way.

**Cary Fukunaga:** Yeah. I was listening to Peter’s experience and I couldn’t even imagine what that would be like actually to have to — I would feel insecure just talking to the actors about how they accomplished some scene in a previous episode because there’s that communication, the one-on-one dialogue between a director and an actor. And, of course, in a longer running series the actors essentially know their parts. But there is a director there still for a reason.

So, like what if you’re saying something completely of, you know.

**John:** But it happens.

**Peter:** You wouldn’t do that. You would never say something off!

**Cary:** Never. No.

**Peter:** But also you have to have the freedom to, well, obviously this is my belief: you have to have the freedom to make an idiot of yourself at all times. So, but you had the experience of directing, was it 10 hours, eight-hour movie?

**Cary:** Eight hours.

**Peter:** How did you even — I just have to ask — I just came off of shooting one episode of television which kicked my ass by the way. I can’t even imagine how you would even prep. Is it just because you have enormous prep while you’re shooting? How did it work?

**Cary:** Basically what happened is the last three episodes weren’t quite ready yet to prep. And even if they were, you could really only prep about five hours ahead of time before people lose their capacity to retain all that information. And whether that be index cards with the intention of the scene written on it, or graphs, everyone sort of had their personal system to try to order the information. And since we’re dealing with a crime story, clues and character clues as well are essential, I mean, in terms of logically adding up.

And maybe it helped having one director in that sense that we didn’t have to educate four to eight other directors on exactly what was going on. It was just sort of one chain of communication. But then you had an overload of responsibility. And what ended up happening by the last half of the shoot is that we were scouting for locations for the last episodes before and after shooting, having production meetings at lunch. I would go home to the edit after those location scouts, after shooting, and then edit for a couple hours because we had to turn in episodes before we were done shooting. So, I was getting like four to five hours sleep a night, and then moving on to the same thing next day.

**Susannah:** So you had no break in production?

**Cary:** We had our “hiatus days.” Weren’t breaks. They were just getting caught up on —

**Susannah:** But you weren’t shooting for a couple days?

**Cary:** We only had about I’d say three or four hiatus days the whole time.

**Susannah:** Good lord.

**Peter:** Can I ask a geeky question? Did you cross-board? Did you shoot each episode complete? And then move onto the next one? Or were you at the same location shooting several different episodes?

**Cary:** We pitched the series to the networks as we’re going to shoot this like a feature. We’re going to shoot this like a long form story, so we’re going to cross-board locations. What that means, you know, producers like to hear that because that means they can shoot out an actor within a week or two, or shoot out a location and then you’re not kind of holding these places over the course of five/six months of shooting.

And I think everyone quickly realized that’s really impossible. So, I think this next season is not going to be shot that way. They’ll probably do it in blocks, like one or two episode blocks. Stop. Regroup. Go again. Which is the normal sort of humane way of doing it for all involved.

**John:** Well, it’s an opportunity for course correction, though, too. Because I feel like that must be one of the real challenges. When you’re making a show in a more traditional schedule, like Breaking Bad, if something is not working, you can see like well that’s not working, so we need to — could you? I mean, if you sense that like, wow, this character is not doing the thing we wanted to do, how quickly could you fix that? Or is that naÔve of me to think?

**Peter:** I’m trying to think of a situation where we had that.

**John:** Well, everything was perfect the first time. That’s the luxury.

**Cary:** Tell us about what didn’t work in Breaking Bad.

**Peter:** You know, it was a comet, lightning bolts. We were very lucky. But, you know, you do — sometimes you do. I mean, sometimes there’s an actor who is not available. Or somebody is not, or a location changes, or something. And then you have to do some frantic rethinking. But that’s the worst. Fortunately the producers, the physical producers, really protected us from having to do that an awful lot.

**Susannah:** Did you guys have the entire season mapped out before anyone went off to script?

**Peter:** No. I wish.

**Susannah:** No, right.

**Peter:** I wish. No, no, we were always — it’s television. The treadmill of — and on Better Call Saul, which is in some ways is more like True Detective in one sense is that we didn’t have a pilot. We shot the pilot and literally the day we wrapped the pilot we were shooting episode two. And Vince and I would talk and say, you know, if we had really thought about it, maybe we would have taken a little break there and cut the first episode so at least the other directors would have had something to look at.

And as it was they mostly had just us wind-bagging at them in a long meeting. Then they would go and make something wonderful.

**John:** I had friends who did a show for Netflix and the model for it was kind of clever in that they got a 13-episode order. But they shot the first episode and then they had three weeks off deliberately so they could cut it and if something wasn’t working right they could course correct.

**Peter:** Do this.

**John:** Do this. It’s a good idea.

**Cary:** Does that just mean firing people, or?

**John:** Yes. They would recast some people. If things weren’t working- and in some ways it allowed them to be bolder, because they didn’t have to make safe choices. They could make a bold choice and if a bold choice didn’t work there was a chance to fix it.

Another option I’ve seen is another 13-episdoe order, they shot the fourth episode first. And then they went back and shot the first episode figuring that they would understand the show better by the time it came back to shoot the first episode.

**Susannah:** What show was that?

**John:** It was one of David Goyer’s things. Da Vinci’s Demons I think did it.

**Susannah:** That’s interesting.

**John:** Which was an interesting choice, again, where that fourth episode, maybe some things aren’t going to work quite perfectly, but you’re going to know your show better by the time you’re actually shooting your pilot, or shooting the first episode that’s going to air theoretically. So, choices.

**Cary:** I would say if I were an actor or even from the director perspective, I would much rather start chronologically somewhere from the beginning, if the fourth episode was jumping back to some prior moment. Because I do think for the actors, even for like Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in True Detective, I was really pushing to have the interrogations as far back as possible. We were going to shoot them last, but we sort of needed them to start constructing episodes and make sure they were working.

But, there were so many things they were going to go through over five or six months of shooting that in the bubble that is production, which sometimes time moves at a completely different rate, and one month can seem like an entire year. The experiences you have do affect your performance on all parts. And I was still learning about how I wanted to shoot the show by the fourth week of shooting. So, I’d much rather start at the beginning, I guess. But I see, it’s an interesting experiment.

**John:** So, talk to us about writing these episodes, you were deeply involved in the creation of things. What is your conversations and with crew about intention. I find it fascinating to listen to how directors talk to people about what a scene is about. What kinds of words do you use to describe — after cut, what do you say to an actor? What’s your extinct for getting the thing to the next level? You, first, Cary.

**Peter:** You go.

**Cary:** Me first. I mean, it’s pretty intimidating the first time you’re working with like a Fassbender or a Judi Dench, you know, like what do I say to someone who has worked with the best directors in the last 50 to 60 years. Incredibly, you still find something to say. If you know what you want out of the scene, usually these great actors are delivering it. But there’s minor adjustments you can give them. Or even they want to hear something. They might prompt you for a question.

But typically I think with some of these sort of high caliber talent it’s all kind of conversations that took place ahead of time. And it’s even conversations that are worked out while we were blocking and rehearsing. So, once we’re shooting, I just kind of give them the space to recorrect themselves. They know what they want to get to and they know when they’re not quite getting there. So, we’ll just go again until I’ve got everything I want and they’ve got everything they need, unless obviously it’s not always that ideal obviously. But, you’re being pressed for time, but as much as we can get in that period of time.

**Peter:** I sometimes make them go first. How do you feel about that? And then sometimes, I’m not an experienced director, but as a writer-producer on the set, sometimes you end with a little huddle with the director and with the actor, and especially when I’m not the director I try to say the least possible directly to the actor. It’s just more respectful and it’s more useful, I think, for the director to do the directing.

But, you know, I’ll say to the director, isn’t there a little — usually, it’s interesting, because people, especially in television are so used to a headlong rush. They want to get through the moment so quickly. They’re used to scenes. And you’re working with feature folks, and maybe it’s a different deal. But in television, there seems to be this drum beat of going faster and faster. Oh, we don’t want to bore the audience.

So, frequently the work for me is saying isn’t there another moment there? Have we gotten everything out of that? And the actors will sometimes be — actually I had Robert Forster tell me, “You’re the only director I’ve ever had who told me to go slower.”

**Cary:** There’s like certain rules they say, like when you’re in film school you’re not supposed to say, you’re not supposed to give a line reading to an actor. You’re not supposed to say like faster or slower. But incredibly quite often that’s all you need to say. Like can you just do that a little bit slower, or faster often, because you’re like stuck in the edit with someone taking an incredibly long time to walk around a corner.

**Peter:** Yes!

**Susannah:** I heard an interview with Paul Newman at one point talking about that faster direction and he said whenever somebody says to me faster, I translate that in my head to fill the moment. If he’s asking me to go faster I’m not filling the moment. So he would then do a take in which he would fill every moment and find ones he hadn’t been filling. And he said inevitably somebody says cut, print. And you ask the script supervisor how long it was and it was longer.

So, you know —

**Peter:** That’s beautiful.

**Susannah:** Yes. It’s a really great story to hold on to.

**Peter:** And it’s something you notice when you’re cutting. When you’re cutting, the performance that is more specific is easier to cut. And you can watch with a wonderful, like a Bryan Cranston, or a Bob Odenkirk, there are just these natural places to cut. You can get the scissors in, you can see when things are resolved. You can see when the ideas cross their faces. And we’re so reliant on these guys.

**John:** Peter, you were talking about that you made television and he was making movies. And you’re both making shows that are broadcast on boxes, and yet do you perceive Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul as television?

**Peter:** No. I see them as movies. I mean, we talk about it as being one thing, but it’s not — it’s interesting because there’s the sense that people have that if you didn’t work it out at the beginning, if you didn’t have the whole thing worked out from soup to nuts, the moment you started, that somehow it’s less legitimate.

And the truth is that I think all writing to some extent is an active improvisation. I mean, no matter what you’re improvising. So, it’s a question of when are you improvising. Does that make any sense? I’m not answering your question. I’m just going around it.

**Cary:** You were asking earlier about the writing hat and the directing hat and that’s all about preparation really. And Richard had said that you never quite take it off which is true, but then you also start feeling at a certain point like you’re neglecting other responsibilities. You’re noodling with the screenplay. And I found, I just did a film, we spoke about outside, Beasts of No Nation in Africa, and we had all kinds of complications heading in to production and then within production.

And I was having to write because actors were in jail or something. And I had to rewrite their roles, or parts in the script, and hoping that it all added up and not really sure till we got to editing that it did. So, the fluidity between the directing hat, the writing hat, and then having to make executive decisions was all happening at once. Ideally though you’re able to prep as much as you can ahead of time and then you can just focus on the creative aspect. But I guess that’s what makes film exciting, too, is all the problems.

**Peter:** Is it okay if I ask a question?

**John:** Ask a question.

**Peter:** Could you talk about your directing, specifically what kind preparation you do as a director? When you have a script and you’re working by yourself, what is your approach? What kinds of things are you doing with the script? What kinds of preparation do you do?

**Cary:** Gosh. I always start off with an outline, first off. It’s sort on the hero’s journey. And that’s my index card in a way because then I know my steps that are there and the scenes that are sometimes combos of things and sometimes individual scenes that mean something, or getting the character to a place.

Then once I’ve written the screenplay to switch into directing aspect, mainly I actually it’s in casting. And that’s not only casting the actors, it’s casting the heads of department who are going to help me bring this to screen. And that’s, you know, when you talk about reordering stuff, and stopping to reconfigure, it’s essential when you find weak links to get rid of them. Because you’re working as hard you can to get it done. And when you know there’s always one person or a couple people that are slowing down the process, and it’s an unfortunate thing.

It’s not always their fault. Sometimes it’s chemistry. Sometimes they’re just not right for the material. But, getting rid of those people so that everyone is sort of in line is one of the most brutal lessons you have to learn, I think, being a director. Otherwise, you know, the creative aspect of it, that inspiration, that spark, we’ve all had it since we’re children. Every human has. So, I guess it’s kind of learning to be discerning and harder.

**John:** Peter, can you talk about your preparation for an episode? So, whether it’s an episode you wrote yourself or someone else’s episode that you now need to go off and shoot, what is it like when you get the script and you have to figure out — what is your prep for that? So, obviously you’re going to meet with, there will be a first AD and you’re going to scout locations, but what is your actual work with the script to figure out how you’re going to do it?

**Peter:** Well, you know, we had the advantage that we have spent on any episode at least two weeks, sometimes as long as a couple of months breaking the episode in the writer’s room. and so we’ve talked through every single scene in great detail, annoying detail, navel-gazing detail.

**John:** Can you just describe the writer’s room? So is this all up on a whiteboard? Or how does Breaking Bad work?

**Peter:** Breaking worked and Better Call Saul works, really it’s based on a system I think that Vince Gilligan learned from Chris Carter on X-Files, which is it’s a very rigid, apparently rigid system where we end up with 3×5 cards on a corkboard. And I think it’s insane.

**John:** Is there a color code?

**Peter:** There’s no color code. They’re very neatly written. They’re somewhat comic booky descriptions of each scene and sometimes even a scrap of dialogue. Sometimes there will be little pencil notes in there. And there’s a certain amount of space you have for each act. We work, we think about acts and teasers. And because —

**John:** Because you actually had —

**Peter:** We shot the show for commercials. The show had commercials, which was very intimidating to me before I started because I had never, I think only once had I ever worked on a project that had commercial breaks, because most of my work before that had been cable movies.

But what I learned was that almost any well structured story, there are moments where you just wonder what the hell is going to happen next. Hey, that’s a good act break. So, it’s not as insane — it’s not as difficult or as ridiculous as it sounds. Although I will say I think once you get — is your show on ABC, Susannah?

**Susannah:** Yeah.

**Peter:** And how many act breaks do you have?

**Susannah:** Oh, it’s five acts. No teaser though.

**Peter:** No teaser. Oh, so we have a teaser and four acts. So, it’s —

**John:** Let’s talk through what that means, because I think some people might not know sort of what the terminology is.

**Susannah:** It means you break four times for commercials.

**Cary:** What’s the teaser mean? Like what are the wants of a teaser?

**Susannah:** Well, Breaking Bad a really great, like that little piece in the beginning that’s just intriguing enough to make you go, what?

**Cary:** Like a cold start?

**Susannah:** Yeah, yeah.

**Peter:** And then there would be the titles.

**Susannah:** Right. It’s the pre-title thing.

**Peter:** In the first couple of seasons there would be no commercial, and then hey, there was a commercial there. So, we had to pay the rent.

We had the advantage of talking it through in detail. And also, you know, there’s also the familiarity of knowing the DP, production designer, costume designer, because we’re working with those folks constantly, even when we’re in Burbank or Toluca Lake as we are now, there’s a constant interaction. We’re looking at every costume. We’re looking at props. We’ll look at ten different frying pans for every scene.

And the directors will be also. There’s a familiarity with the people you’re working with which is great. But, personally, my preparation, I just sweat over the script a lot. I keep wondering if it’s right. I keep going over it and finding little things that I want to change. And then I’m fascinated by trying to keep things as visual as possible. And I’ll do thumbnail sketches. There are sequences that I’ve actually worked with storyboard artists on which I love to do. If I had more time I’d do even more of that.

But you’re really racing the clock in television because you essentially have seven days, as a director you have essentially seven days of prep with the script and then eight days of shooting. And where the weekends fall become very, very important to you. You really hope that you get an episode where you shoot Friday and then you have the weekend.

**Susannah:** Two weekends.

**Peter:** You have the weekend to recover and kind of plan out some more. So, that’s — and casting, of course. But in a television series you have this stable of regulars and usually in some episodes you’ll have one or two roles that are very, very important. In fact, I just finished an episode where we — and I don’t want to give anything away — but the casting of this one character became so — who was not in that much of the series became so pivotal that that was my great anxiety. I was bugging — every time I was on the phone with our casting people and I said we need to see more people for this. When are we going to start seeing this guy?

And then, of course, we saw the guy and he was incredible.

**John:** On your shows, did you have the chance to do table reads where you could read the whole script with your actors? Cary, did you get that?

**Cary:** Yeah, we didn’t always have the whole cast there because we were doing it in New Orleans and some of the cast were having to travel. So, we had the local actors come in and read multiple parts. But for everyone that was sort of around and can be featured, we brought them in and we did a table reading of the first four scripts, right at the beginning, and then we did a reading — I can’t remember if we did the last four, or broke it up two more times.

**Susannah:** You did all four together?

**Cary:** Yeah.

**Susannah:** Oh, nice.

**Cary:** It was a long morning.

**John:** Talk to us, did things change based on that reading? Because especially when you have these two powerful actors and —

**Cary:** I can say yes. One particular role definitely changed after that reading.

**Susannah:** Because the casting was wrong or — ?

**Cary:** Yeah. The casting was wrong and HBO felt out of that reading that they’d seen enough to make a change.

**John:** So HBO is watching this, so it’s both for your benefit, but also so they can see what the show, a preview of what the show is, right?

**Cary:** Yeah. Script readings are funny.

**Susannah:** Everyone is auditioning all over again.

**Cary:** It’s auditioning, but sometimes tone is strange in a script reading. And it tends to lean towards the comedic and that could be really misleading. I’m always in favor of people seeing as little as possible until we’ve got a cut of something. I wasn’t even in favor of the casting choice. This isn’t a change, but it was okay. It worked out in the end.

**John:** So, for Better Call Saul, you had a table reading before the pilot? Do you do it for every episode? What happens on that show?

**Peter:** It’s just not logistically possible for us to do a table read for every episode because everybody’s shooting and they’re exhausted. And the guest cast often flies in like moments before their costume fitting. It’s just in time manufacturing. We will do the table read at the beginning, and you know, it’s interesting because I don’t feel — I hate to say it — I think it’s always fun and it’s a great crystallizing moment for everybody to get together and say, hey, yeah, there’s a show here and this is an interesting story.

But I have to say I don’t think I’ve ever learned — this is a terrible thing to say — I don’t think I’ve ever learned an awful lot from it.

**Susannah:** Really? I feel very differently. I feel like I, you know, I’ll hear a table read of something I’ve written and think how could I not have seen how false that rings. It’s a real bullshit detector for me because, you know, I know that I can do that. It shows me my flaws before you’re having to stand up, stop the whole crew for 15 minutes while you figure out to make it real, as opposed to fake.

So, I find them really helpful as a writer.

**John:** I find the most helpful thing about a table read is it’s evidence that the actors have read the whole script at least once, because otherwise they will honestly just read their part.

**Susannah:** No, but you know what, if they’re only living that part of it, sometimes that’s fine. If as the character you’re now aware of all that other stuff going on?

**John:** But there are some actors who will make sort of selfish choices because they don’t understand the world in which they’re living in.

**Susannah:** Oh, right, the tone and the demands of the piece.

**John:** So it gives them one chance for them to be able to see sort of what the whole thing is.

**Susannah:** It’s not all about them.

**John:** But your point about something being — there’s times where I’ve been forcing a lot, I’ve been faking something. It just isn’t there. And it’s so much better to have that realization or that conversation with the actor around a table than like with the whole crew watching.

**Susannah:** It’s a much cheaper place to fix it.

**Cary:** It’s too bad they don’t have like better voices for the Final Draft talk feature.

**Susannah:** Right. That would be really good.

**Cary:** Ways as like Terry Crews, you know, [unintelligible] turn left or right. And be like, Terry Crews like, “Interior Bus Station.”

**Susannah:** That’s actually a great idea for Final Draft.

**John:** I think there’s an app to be made with just Terry Crews doing that.

**Susannah:** They should cast that, man. You should be able to cast your Final Draft read, you know.

**Cary:** The Final Draft guys are around here somewhere. I’m going to pull them aside.

**Peter:** I think maybe Highland needs that feature.

**John:** Yeah, we’ll do it in Highland and Weekend Read. It will have a little read aloud feature. It will be good. It’ll be fun.

We actually, our next guests are here because they’re going to do a reading. So, maybe we should wrap this up and bring them up. But, guys, thank you so much for this and we’re going to have questions at the end, so stick around because we’re going to answer some more questions at the end, okay?

**Cary:** Okay. Thank you very much.

**John:** Thank you very much. Our next guests are here because they’re doing a reading tomorrow afternoon, I believe. So I want to welcome up Dan Sterling and Mike Birbiglia. Come on up. So, Dan Sterling here is a writer-producer-director. He did projects including the Sarah Silverman Program. I’ll make things up and tell us which ones are lies, okay? You did, let’s see, The Office?

**Dan Sterling:** True.

**John:** You did Breaking Bad.

**Dan:** That is a — that’s true.

**John:** You did Breaking Bad?

**Dan:** No, no. I just wanted to see if I could get a reaction. No, no.

**John:** But you’re here because you have a feature that you actually wrote that he is going to be reading it. Is that correct?

**Dan:** Yeah, that is true. And this is Susannah Grant.

**John:** Susannah Grant.

**Dan:** This is very exciting.

**John:** And this is Mike Birbiglia who has actually been on the show before. Yeah, we’ll introduce you anyway. So, Mike Birbiglia is a writer-producer-director-comedian-actor. Actor, that’s true. Can I say that you’re in that next season of that show?

**Mike Birbiglia:** Yeah. Orange is the New Black.

**John:** He’s in Orange is the New Black, next season. Fault in our Stars. Lots of things. But also —

**Mike:** I’m an avid listener to the show.

**John:** Yeah, he’s an avid listener.

**Mike:** And I wanted to say, and of course we won’t keep this in the final cut of it, but the show without Craig is phenomenal. I mean —

**John:** He’s essentially been —

**Susannah:** You’re advocating a permanent change?

**John:** The anchor that’s been dragging the show down this whole time.

**Mike:** And I just feel like today’s episode really lacks an antagonist.

**Susannah:** That’s rarely a good dramatic choice.

**John:** It’s all happy smiley.

**Mike:** And also I wanted to ask the gentleman who wrote and directed True Detective whether he enjoys the True Detective Season Two memes. They’re all over the internet all the time, or speculation about who is the cast of season two. Also, I want to urge Scriptnotes listeners to create a John and Craig True Detective Season Two.

**John:** We would be pretty amazing.

**Mike:** Does that already exist?

**John:** I’ve seen one of them.

**Susannah:** Really?

**John:** Where they pasted us together. Yeah. Because really good cop/bad cop. You know, there’s a lot of stuff going on between us. It would be fantastic.

**Mike:** Does he think it’s funny? Do you think those are funny?

**Cary:** Me?

**Mike:** All right, he doesn’t think they’re funny, even though he’s saying he does. I can see it in his face. But it’s all loving.

**John:** It’s all loving and it’s all good. So, you are a writer-director yourself, and you often have to direct yourself in a movie.

**Mike:** True. Yeah.

**John:** Is that good or bad? Are you a good director to yourself?

**Mike:** I’d like to think so. So much of what I believe in as an actor has to do with relaxation and just existing and living in a moment. And not doing acty-acting. And so I feel like if I were doing something in an extreme genre, or something that required a lot of acting heavy lifting, I don’t know how I would do that. But like I directed Sleepwalk With Me. And some other shorts and things. It’s not that hard because the type of acting I enjoy is sort of like just throw it away.

**Susannah:** Do you watch your takes on playback? Between?

**Mike:** I do, but only when I’m about to move on.

**Susannah:** Just to make sure?

**Mike:** Yeah. After five or six takes. Just like let’s just make sure we have one that looks good enough and then we’ll move on.

**Susannah:** How often do you go back after watching playback?

**Mike:** I’d say like one in three. Yeah.

**John:** So, something like Sleepwalk With Me, or even My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, those are based on things you’ve done a lot. So, you have the rare case of being able to — you performed these ideas before. You’ve been able to practice them in ways that writers normally don’t get a chance to practice their ideas.

**Mike:** Yeah. And also, and this speaks to sort of why I’m here with Dan this weekend, we’re doing a reading of his script called Flarsky, which is such a funny script. And one of the reasons I was interested in coming to do the reading, I love the process of work-shopping stuff through readings. And I feel the way that you were saying earlier. So, I’ve been having readings at my house all summer of a screenplay that I’m working on to direct my next film. And I always find I just — I’m hitting myself during the whole thing. Just going, oh my god, that rings so untrue. I can’t believe I even wrote that on paper.

And then I fix it. So, I was glad to be sort of an instrument for Dan’s reading.

**Susannah:** You can also hear the other thing, which is how did I not open that next door? You know, how did I not walk in that next room? There’s an obvious next step for this. And how didn’t I see it? I find them incredibly useful.

**Dan:** Although writers that are here today are so mature and disciplined, because I just dread table readings because I don’t want to have to change anything. I’m quite satisfied with all the things that I wrote and they’re all so precious. And I’ve always resented table readings. They were always super important, but I dreaded them.

**Susannah:** Do you love them after you hear them, too? Do you stay in love during the whole process? Or do you turn on yourself?

**Dan:** Well, I go through a process of denial where I assume that it was the performance that the actors are reading it cold and that they didn’t… — But, you know, basically whatever happens, every piece of criticism and notes from an executive or whoever that I’ve ever gotten just always makes me go and do what I think turns out to be something better. I just don’t want to. I’m lazy.

**Mike:** I also want to say because I know like I’m a listener to this podcast and I know a lot of the listeners are people who write and want to create things or do create things. And I think having readings like with your friends is one of the most cost-effective things you can do because they’re super fun. You order pizza. You hang out. You read a thing. And then you socialize afterwards and you learn. And it’s free.

And one thing about making movies is it’s so expensive. It’s like bleeding money. It’s literally like you got shot with a machine gun and you’re just bleeding thousands of dollars a minute. And you can’t even believe how much money it costs to make a movie.

And so having readings I think is a phenomenal thing.

**John:** So, you don’t like readings, and yet you came to Austin, Texas to have a reading of this script. So, tell us what this script is. That might be a useful setup.

**Dan:** I mean, I could not actually be more excited about this reading. It’s a hugely flattering thing to have a bunch of people come and read your thing for no money and probably at their own expense getting here.

Yeah, I wrote this, I’ve been a television writer and showrunner for a bunch of years, and then a few years ago I wrote this spec script, because I wanted to start to transition into movies. And so I wrote this script, and then Seth Rogan sort of picked it up and that began our relationship and we’ve since made another movie together that’s coming out in Christmas.

**John:** That’s The Interview, correct?

**Dan:** That’s The Interview with Seth Rogan and James Franco. It’s crazy. They go to North Korea and try to kill Kim Jong Un. I won’t tell you how it ends. But, yes, so —

**John:** Does it end in North Korea going to war with us? That’s the meme.

**Susannah:** I think it ends in some diplomatic challenges. [laughs]

**Dan:** Yeah, too much. I guess I hope not, though. I always just want my work to make an impact of some kind. Nuclear war seems like it would be very memorable. I would go down in the canon, which is super important.

**John:** That’s true. I mean, who’s going to remember anything else we do, but they’ll remember a war because millions of people will die.

**Dan:** In theory, yes.

**John:** If nothing else, you killed millions of people. That’s really the accomplishment.

**Mike:** You will be so remembered if that happens. People will be like what idiot thought it was a good idea —

**John:** Poking the bear.

**Dan:** I hope so. It’s possible that, you know, the screenwriter, how many people remember. Maybe they’ll just credit Seth to that.

**John:** [laughs] That’s true.

**Dan:** I’ve been saying that if death threats really start coming in and they only go to Seth and not to me, I’m going to feel very left out.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a danger. Tell us about Flarsky. So, what is the inspiration behind Flarsky? What is this movie that you’re trying to get going?

**Dan:** Well, so I just wanted to write something that was sort of partly personal and partly political, because that’s sort of what I’m attracted to. And it’s a screenplay about this very down and out newspaper opinion columnist who’s writing for like the equivalent of the LA Weekly or something and has maybe got some drinking and pill habits and stuff.

And he is encouraged by his insanely optimistic friend to pursue the most powerful and glamorous woman on the planet, the married Secretary of State, who would be a youngish, beautiful woman, and who is married to a senator. And when I was starting to write I was just trying to — for some reason I was thinking about, this is going to sound very pretentious, but I was thinking about Candide. Because I just always love this idea of like there’s this guy who grew up with a philosopher who told him every day these very positive things and all this for the best and the best of all possible worlds.

And then the rest of the book is nothing but rape. And they go out into the world and see that, no, everybody is being raped and enslaved and chopped into pieces. And so I wanted to have this sort of conversation between two best friends, one how is very pessimistic and one who is optimistic. And then in the movie the friend encourages the pessimistic friend to go and pursue the most glamorous, powerful woman on earth.

**John:** So, Mike, to get ready for this role you had to start drinking and pill-popping and really inhabit the character, right?

**Mike:** Yeah. I grew out my beard. That was it. And then I’ve just been drinking quite a bit, yeah.

**Susannah:** Austin is good for that, right?

**John:** It’s a good town for that. So, in doing this reading here, is this for kicks and giggles? Is it for you to learn more about it? Is it to build momentum for making this into a movie? What are the outcomes of doing a reading like this?

**Dan:** Well, I’ll report back to you on the outcomes if anything does come out. But I’m doing it because they asked.

**Mike:** The Black List, right?

**Dan:** Yes. This script got on the Black List. The Black List invited me to do it. And I’ve just never done anything like this because this is a reading to some extent to entertain. I mean, I’ve done table reads for television and stuff like that where there’s just a few executives. But this is actually totally sort of new ground for me. I mean, we’re going into our first rehearsal in a couple of hours, so I don’t know what to expect. But I did see a Black List reading a couple of weeks ago and it was really fun. I mean, it was a comedy and it was really well paced. And also the Black List told me that doing this — a lot of people who have done these Black List readings — these scripts have gone on to be made.

So, that was appealing. In this case, the script, it has maybe some attached cast, so it’s got producers and stuff and we’re sort of trying to figure out a director. So, I don’t even know whether this reading, other than to help me see where it’s working or where it’s not, I don’t know what other outcomes beyond that except my ego.

**Mike:** I was promised that the film would be made and that I would be the star.

**John:** [laughs] That’s good. There’s also, pizza was promised to you. And that’s a crucial thing, too.

**Mike:** A lot of things were promised and now I’m learning that it’s meaningless.

**Dan:** There is a real pizza thing in Mike Birbiglia’s work I’m noticing. I mean, one of this great quotes, or at least I think is about falling in love is like eating pizza flavored ice cream. It’s too much joy to process.

**John:** Fantastic. Because we have an audience here, I want to open it up for some audience questions. And so it can be questions for the people who are up here, the people who were up here before. It can be about television. It can be anything.

The only thing I would ask is it actually be a question. And so let’s just —

**Susannah:** I’m going to demonstrate. This is a question. Mike, much of your work has been work that you’ve done in another form. Do you have a hard time breathing new life into it when you turn it into a movie? How does that happen?

**Mike:** That’s a good question.

**Susannah:** Like that.

**Mike:** Oh, it was a question. Yeah, it is hard. It’s challenging. I mean, Sleepwalk With Me, it was a book, and it was a one-person show that I developed over about seven or eight years. And so it had grooves to it, where it had things where I’m like I know this will work. I know this will work. I know this gets a laugh. I know this has some kind of pathos or relate-ability to it.

And then you move to cinema and cinema is an entirely visual medium. And so it was very, very challenging. Actually, it was so challenging that right now the script I’m writing that I was just saying I’m doing reading of it in my house is completely from scratch because I wanted to build it from pictures this time.

**Susannah:** Because I would imagine chasing, I mean, it’s always hard to chase a laugh you got the night before, right? So, to do that after seven years must be really hard?

**Mike:** Yeah. And I have to say like one of the reasons I started writing these one-man shows was because I was a screenwriting major in school and then I got out of school and realized that screenwriting is a profession you can apply for. Isn’t that a wild realization? Like you can study it and then you’re like, oh, I guess there isn’t a job.

**John:** No.

**Mike:** And then I was doing standup comedy, I was pursuing that —

**Susannah:** Right, because that’s an easier —

**Mike:** That’s a job. And people do it. And I was working the door at a comedy club, and that’s a job too. And so then I moved to New York City. My writing professor actually said, from college, actually gave me advice. He goes you should just put on a one-man play because it doesn’t cost anything. It’s just you and two or more people in the audience.

**John:** Low thresholds.

**Mike:** Yeah. That’s the rule of theater is there has to be more people in the audience than on stage. And it’s a glass of water and a stool. And you know how to write a play and I taught you how to write a play. And so go do it.

And that’s how I started writing Sleepwalk With Me. And then from there I did My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend. And from there I made Sleepwalk With Me, the movie.

But it’s funny because I listen to the podcast a lot. It’s very encouraging. But one thing that I feel like people, it’s hard to grasp sometimes is that for someone like me, I wanted to make a movie when I was 19 and I wanted to direct a feature when I was 19. I directed my first feature when I was 32. And I think that’s totally fine. I’m comfortable with that. But, yes, it’s good for people to know that that’s sort of marathon duration of how long things take.

**John:** All right. Some questions. I see a first hand was right there. Sir?

The question is how do you know that you’ve found a third act? How do you know you’ve found an ending to your story that is satisfying? Susannah, in writing your features, when do you feel like this is the ending? Do you know your ending before you’ve gotten there, or is it only the process that’s taken you to that point?

**Susannah:** I kind of know the destination. I hope I don’t know the specifics. I mean, I have kind of this rule of thumb with any scenes. I don’t think it’s done until I’ve written something other than what I went in to write, until I’ve surprised myself in it. And then like how do you know when it’s — I mean, it’s never really good enough, right? But then maybe it is. I don’t know.

You just kind of, it vibrates right or wrong within side you. I don’t think there’s a formula.

**John:** Peter, talk to us about it. You got to end the whole series. So, what is it like leading up to that thing and how early on in the process did you sense like this is where we’re going to end this show with these characters? This is how we’re going to get to that moment? Was there an ah-ha moment in the writer’s room where it all came together? Talk us through that, please.

**Peter:** Wow, I’ll try to remember it, because it’s all kind of a blur to be honest with you. It was a lot of pressure. You know what it is? I think the big thing is just to explore every freaking thing you can possibly think of. And that’s one thing — if there’s any method to doing this, it was just to try to think, okay, what if Walt is in… — Well, first of all, we have things that we’ve set on the show which we know that Walt’s got cancer. We know he’s going to have a giant machine gun. And we know he’s going to probably use the damn machine gun. And who is he going to use it on? That was a big question.

So, we really, I mean, it’s almost like just by talking the different possibilities through, eventually one just starts emerging and things start connecting to it. And you start seeing that that’s, okay, that character is, that’s going to help resolve that character’s storyline. And that’s going to — it all starts snapping together, but it doesn’t start snapping together until you’ve talked through everything you can possibly think of.

And so we had versions where Jessie was in prison and Walt came with a giant, the machine gun, and he blew away all these prison guards. And it went on and on and on. Just any bizarre idea you can think of was at least given serious — I think maybe that’s the trick is to give honest consideration to pretty much anything that occurs to you, no matter how freakish.

But then at a certain point it starts narrowing down and then you start feeling your way through it. But, you know, it’s also it’s easy for me to say because ultimately on Breaking Bad we were all talking through it, but it was ultimately Vince’s choice. And we knew that Vince was going to write and direct that last episode. And so we knew he was going to use the machine gun, so.

**John:** Chekhov’s gun.

**Peter:** Yes.

**John:** Another question? Her question is how do you become confident, which is kind of a valid question. Because I’ve been incredibly non-confident, especially as I was starting. And maybe we could sort of talk through those early awkward meetings. Because I remember my first water bottle tour of Los Angeles where you go and you have the general meetings. And it’s so incredibly awkward. And you feel like the imposter syndrome, where you feel like I don’t belong in this room and people are going to figure out that I have no idea what I’m doing.

That never went away for me. I don’t know if other people have that same experience. Dan Sterling, are you confident?

**Dan:** Well, you know, Thursdays at 4pm I have this standing appointment with a woman with a degree in psychology and I sit and I talk to her. And, I mean, I’m getting closer. Only because I’m having some success, but you know, I mean, I had my first show-running job, and it was completely absurd. I was like, I tricked them. I don’t belong here at all. And there’s nothing to do but sort of rely on that very cliché but true thing of, god help me for saying it, fake it till you make it.

And I think faking confidence is super important in a lot of areas in life and I’m probably doing it as I speak, but —

**Mike:** Yeah. I totally agree with Dan. I recommend this. If you haven’t listened to it, this Charlie Kauffman speech, is it BFI? The British Film Institute? And he just says this thing that I think most writers relate to which is that all you have to give to writing is yourself. And that’s — I mean, I’m paraphrasing it in sort of a terrible way, but he very eloquently says it. And that he doesn’t call himself a writer. He calls himself a person who has written some things and is going to try to write some more things.

**Susannah:** Yeah. I have this moment when I finish every script. I always look at it and think, god, who cares? And then you realize, well, everybody cares. Everybody cares about each other, basically, so just put yourself there. Don’t worry about it. Ignore that question. I mean, everybody has that feeling of like who cares about me and what I think, you know?

**John:** So, my first experience with you, Cary, was at the Sundance Labs and you were talking about Sin Nombre and how you had gone and done all this research. You were riding on trains with people. And I remember thinking like, wow, that kid is really, really brave. But that sort of carries through in the other stuff you’ve done. You’ve made sort of brave choices. Back then when you were making your first movie, did you have confidence? Were you faking it? Talk us though — these people want to make their first movie. What did it feel like and when did you feel like I belong to be behind this camera making this movie?

**Cary:** I’m going to have to agree with everyone else here that ignore that question because no one ever 100 percent feels confident in what they’re doing. And fixed income they do, they’re definitely lying. Or if they say they do, they’re definitely lying. And if they are really confident in what they’re doing, they’re probably not doing anything that deserving of confidence.

So, I think with Sin Nombre what happened was it was a bit by bit process moving into that story. I started off with a short film based on a real event that happened in Victoria, Texas, where a trailer filled with immigrants was abandoned and many of them died. And in doing research for that story I learned about the trains.

So, when I went down ultimately to do research in Mexico on the trains and travel with immigrants, at a certain point you start to accumulate experience. And then with the people you meet you start to feel a sense of responsibility then to tell that story, so maybe you can replace that confidence with a need to tell a story now that you feel the most equipped to tell it.

And definitely when I was making it, you know, with my crew members and educating them on the aspects of the journey that I knew about and, you know, as my production designer started to fill his room with references and pictures of what the gang areas would look like, or immigrant areas would look like, I felt pretty confident that I knew most of the nitty gritty details.

And maybe it just comes with doing the work as well. You know, it’s confident enough.

**John:** One more question. Who has a hand — we’re going to take over here. Gentleman?

**Male Voice:** The question is for Peter. You said that Breaking Bad feels like one big movie, but was it, or felt more cinematic. Was it each season felt like a movie, or the whole thing?

**Peter:** What do you think?

**Male Voice:** Each season?

**Peter:** You know, I think that’s absolutely legitimate. I always hoped — I remember early on talking to Bryan and saying, it was season two, I didn’t know what I was talking about. I said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we have a story and there’s going to be a row of DVDs and it’s going to be a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And it’s going to come to a conclusion.”

And Bryan was absolutely convinced that that was going to happen. And he was right. So, to me, it’s one story, but what makes it that. To me, cinematic, it’s visual. That’s really — that’s the thing that makes it most cinematic to me is just that it’s visual. And I’m standing here next to some incredibly visual filmmakers. So, I’m a little intimidated by that. But that’s really — that was the thing that appealed to me about the approach that we used on Breaking Bad is that we tried to tell the story using pictures.

And if it feels cinematic, I think ultimately that would be why.

**John:** Great. I want to thank our amazing guests for coming up here. This has been great. Thank you very, very much. Susannah, thank you very much for co-hosting this with me.

**Susannah:** Thank you for having me. I’m sorry I wasn’t as cranky as Craig.

**John:** You were awesome. So, a thing that Craig and I would normally do at the end of the episode is a One Cool Thing. And so do you have a One Cool Thing ready for us.

**Susannah:** I have a One Cool Thing and I’m not alone in this. But if anyone here does not have Birdman on your list, put it on your list. I loved it.

**John:** So, what is it about Birdman that is so great? This is the Michael Keaton movie. IÒ·rritu.

**Susannah:** It is, well, first of all I love the idea of it which is what does it take to regain your authentic self once you’ve sold it away. And how close to death do you need to come to find it back. Which, to me, is a great question to play around with. And then it’s everybody working at so the top of their game. Everyone involved in the movie is just firing off at such a high level. And you go to it and think, yeah, there are a million things wrong with the movie business right now, but if I can pay $12 and see this, there are also some things working right.

**John:** That’s fantastic. My One Cool Thing is Serial podcast, which probably a bunch of people here are listening to. It’s really good. And so it’s that kind of thing where like everyone says it’s really good and you’re like, uh, but no, it’s really, really good.

And the best part about it is you’re not that far behind. And so you can actually just download all the episodes and stick them in your queue. And I listened to half of it on the flight here to Austin. So, I highly recommend it. I love it. And as a person who makes a podcast, it’s so fascinating to see what the art form can become, because it really does feel like its own new thing. The same way that Breaking Bad is telling a story over all these episodes and it’s cinematic, it’s sort of cinematic podcasts, which is such a n unusual thing.

And so the fact that it’s happening live in front of us is kind of exciting to see.

On the topic of live and in front of us, I’m The Transitioner, so I have to always transition from one thing to the next. This has been great to have you guys here with us. I want to thank the Austin Film Festival. Let’s give them some applause here. You can find us at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. We’re also on iTunes, so you can click subscribe there and listen to this.

And, thank you guys so much for coming. Thanks.

Links:

* The [Austin Film Festival](http://www.austinfilmfestival.com/)
* Susannah Grant [on IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0335666/), and Scriptnotes episodes [144](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-summer-superhero-spectacular) and [145](http://johnaugust.com/2014/qa-from-the-superhero-spectacular)
* John’s picture of [St. David’s Episcopal Church](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/526058899796148224)
* Help is on the way at [writeremergency.com](http://www.writeremergency.com/)
* Richard Kelly [on IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0446819/), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/JRichardKelly), and Scriptnotes [118](http://johnaugust.com/2013/time-travel-with-richard-kelly), [123](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-holiday-spectacular) and [124](http://johnaugust.com/2013/qa-from-the-holiday-spectacular)
* Cary Fukunaga [on IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1560977/)
* Peter Gould [on IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0332467/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/petergould)
* Dan Sterling [on IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1003839/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/dansterl)
* Mike Birbiglia’s [site](http://birbigs.com/), and [on IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1898126/), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/birbigs) and Scriptnotes episode [121](http://johnaugust.com/2013/my-girlfriends-boyfriends-screenwriter)
* Charlie Kaufman’s [BAFTA speech](http://guru.bafta.org/charlie-kaufman-screenwriters-lecture), and Scriptnotes episode [18](http://johnaugust.com/2012/zen-and-the-angst-of-kaufman)
* [Birdman](http://www.foxsearchlight.com/birdman/) is in theaters now
* [Serial](http://serialpodcast.org/) is a new podcast from the creators of This American Life
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Peter Rinaldi ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-tentpoles-of-2019).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 167 Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, huge news on my side. I am finally buying a new computer.

**Craig:** Oh, thank god. So, are you going to get the 5k iMac?

**John:** I’m going to get the 5k iMac.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** And so I’ve been looking at the same monitor for the last eight years.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Had this monitor for eight years, which is a very long time. And I’ve had different computers that have been driving it, but I’ve always been really far behind because I I’ve always thought like, oh well, there’s going to be the computer that’s just right for it.

So, usually I get castoffs from Ryan Nelson who is a designer who needs a much better computer because he’s doing stuff that needs a good computer.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But finally I’ll have a good computer.

**Craig:** So, have you been like on a MacBook and a Cinema Display?

**John:** Yeah, I’ve been on an old MacBook Pro and then a Cinema Display. I have a 30-inch Cinema Display which there is just the one year they made that.

**Craig:** That’s big. Yeah, it’s huge.

**John:** It’s huge, but it’s nice. It’s not especially sharp anymore.

**Craig:** Right. Plus I don’t think it was Thunderbolt and all that stuff.

**John:** No, none of that.

**Craig:** I assume that you updated to Yosemite.

**John:** I did.

**Craig:** As did I. And I’m so far very pleased. But the one thing I noticed is that, so I have the most recent MacBook Pro, and a fairly recent 27-inch Cinema Display, so it is Thunderbolt and all the rest. But it’s not Retina or —

**John:** And you notice it.

**Craig:** Okay, I do notice it. It’s a huge difference.

**John:** Yeah. So the fonts in Yosemite are Helvetica Neue and it looks really good on Retina and looks really not so great on things that aren’t Retina. So, I said that I updated to Yosemite, but I’ve only been using Yosemite in the betas on my 11-inch MacBook Air. And that has a sharp enough screen that it looks pretty good.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, not so much here. Which is okay, because I split my time between — usually when I’m on the Cinema Display it’s because I’m writing and Fade In looks very nice on it, although I have noticed that when I export to PDF, and I don’t know if it’s just a function of the way Courier Prime is or all fonts are, but now when I export in PDF on the Cinema Display the printed Courier Prime just doesn’t look very good. It’s like jaggy.

**John:** Well that’s not good.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It should look great. And so —

**Craig:** I know. It’s Yosemite.

**John:** It’s that constant challenge. Trying to balance the representation of what the computer knows the thing looks like to itself and how it’s portraying it on the screen are very difficult things. And that’s why these 5k displays have very custom circuitry to hopefully make things look as good as they possibly can.

**Craig:** Well, the bummer for me is I don’t want to get an iMac. I like being completely mobile. So, what I guess I’m waiting for now and I presume is inevitable is a 5k Cinema Display.

**John:** Yes. And those will happen. The challenge is that the actual bandwidth required to get from your computer to that display is huge. And so even Thunderbolt 2 by itself won’t be able to power that.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** It will have to be a Thunderbolt 3, which doesn’t exist. So, it could be a little while to wait. I’m sorry.

**Craig:** But is 5k equivalent to Retina, or better than Retina?

**John:** They’re calling that Retina. Retina is really just I think a term of art for anything that has dots so small that you could not possibly see them.

**Craig:** Right. And so I don’t even know what the Retina resolution is, but —

**John:** It’s sharper than what you’ve got.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s sharper than what I’ve got on the Cinema Display. But everything looks fantastic on the MacBook Pro screen, which is Retina Display. And by and large I think design wise this is pretty great. I love it.

**John:** Yeah. The MacBooks are fantastic, but I love having a big screen, so I’m looking forward to having this and having a nice sharp display.

**Craig:** Well, congrats.

**John:** Thank you very much. It is my Tesla. So, I’m excited to finally get it.

**Craig:** You know, I am getting the —

**John:** Yes, everyone on the podcast knows that you’re getting the new Tesla. Because you have to be able to accelerate to, what was it, zero to 60 in three seconds or something?

**Craig:** 3.2 seconds.

**John:** That’s just absurd.

**Craig:** That’s super car speed. It’s got 691 horsepower. And I just like the idea that I have that many horses. I’m like a horse magnet.

**John:** I love that we talk about things in horsepower.

**Craig:** Well, of course we do.

**John:** Of course we do.

**Craig:** Everything should be in terms of horsepower. Like computers we shouldn’t talk about gigahertz or processing or clock speed. We should just talk about how many clerks the computer is duplicating. Like, the clerks from Brazil with the little visors.

**John:** That’s what you need.

**Craig:** Like my current MacBook Pro is four billion clerks.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s good. Today on the podcast we are going to be talking about superhero scheduling and the 31 superhero movies that slated for this next decade, which is absurd. Not even decade, like seven years.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** We’re going to talk about this great article about copyright. We are going to talk about developing a pitch. And we’re going to look at three —

**Craig:** Developers, developers, developers. [laughs]

**John:** Oh, god, you’re going to make me never use the word developer again, Craig.

**Craig:** Developers. Developers. Developers.

**John:** Let’s look at synonyms. So, figuring out a pitch. Perfecting it. I don’t know.

**Craig:** Rowing.

**John:** If our listeners have suggestions for words they can use other than develop, so that Craig never does that again —

**Craig:** Developers, developers, developers.

**John:** And we’ll be looking at three Three Page Challenges from our listeners.

**Craig:** Do you ever listen, this is going to shock you, but I did listen to a podcast once.

**John:** Oh my gosh. I’m standing up, but still I’m sitting down.

**Craig:** I think it’s called Comedy Bang Bang. It’s the Auckerman, Scott Auckerman, is that right? And they have this ongoing thing, like years ago whenever they started it, whenever somebody would say my — they had a whole thing about how Borat goes “My wife” and now it’s their thing. Whenever somebody is on their show and they happen to mention the phrase “My wife,” one or more of them will just quietly go, “My wife.” And somebody made a super cut of all the times it happened and it’s one of those things like The Simpsons rake gag that just gets funnier and funnier because it never stops.

And I think maybe developers is our “My wife.”

**John:** “My wife.” Either that or it’s “Uh-huh.” My tacit thing. It’s interesting, this last week I was at Singleton and we were talking about podcasts. A lot of people there make podcasts. And we were talking about some people have these long monologues. And it’s that choice of whether you say the Uh-huhs or you just leave it out and just let the person monologue for like five minutes.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** And I’ve always done the Uh-huhs because it just makes it clear that I’m actually paying attention and listening.

**Craig:** Have you ever spoken with somebody that does this, they’ll keep saying, “Right, right, right, right,” as you talk?

**John:** So many development executives do that.

**Craig:** Right, right, right. Right.

**John:** Right. I’m checking in with you, yup, I’m with you, I’m with you.

**Craig:** Right. Right. Right. Yeah, and they don’t know they’re doing it. I can tell they don’t know they’re doing it. It’s the weird — and it’s the most annoying thing.

**John:** It’s almost the Tom Cruise like constant eye contact thing, where it’s just like, oh, you’re freaking me out. You’re just too present in this situation.

**Craig:** You’re too present. Exactly. I need you to ignore me just a little bit.

**John:** Just back off just a little bit and then I’m good.

**Craig:** Let your mind wander.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Follow up. This week, and really our next episode, is the Austin Film Festival. So, there’s two things which Scriptnotes listeners may want to participate in. First off, we’re doing a Three Page Challenge, and these entries will all be the second rounders from the Austin Film Festival Screenwriting Competition.

Craig will not be there, but I will be there with Franklin Leonard of the Black List, and Ilyse McKimmie from Sundance Labs. So, they will be up on stage with me. And I picked them because I think they’re going to be great, because they’re reading a lot of scripts and they’re sort of gatekeepers to their respective domains. And I want to talk with them about sort of what they see as they start reading scripts and what their experience is like. And so I think that will be a fun time.

**Craig:** I think that’s great. And, you know, now that you mention it, and I’m so sorry I’m missing it, but for the next time we do something like this together with the Three Page Challenge, we should really think about getting, routinely getting an executive or producer up there, because it is so useful to hear that perspective from them.

**John:** It should be fun, so I’m looking forward to that. That will be Friday at 9am if you’re coming to the Austin Film Festival. It’s an early session.

**Craig:** Early, yes. People will be hung over for that.

**John:** They will be. I will not be.

**Craig:** Yeah you will.

**John:** And then we’re doing Scriptnotes Live on Saturday at 12:30pm. Susannah Grant will be my co-host.

**Craig:** So great.

**John:** I’m excited about that.

**Craig:** So great.

**John:** And our theme is all about writer-directors. And weirdly like everyone on stage I think will be a writer-director. So, I’ve written-directed, so has Susannah. We’ll have Richard Kelly. We’ll have Peter Gould from Breaking Bad.

**Craig:** Very cool.

**John:** And Cary Fukunaga, just announced.

**Craig:** I mean, how did you? You’re just rubbing my face in it now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Can you please tell Mr. Cary Fukunaga how much of a fan I am?

**John:** He’s a genius. And I actually met him at the Sundance Labs, with Ilyse McKimmie, many years ago when he was doing Sin Nombre. And I didn’t work with him there, but he was clearly one of those, oh, you’re a super talented person. And I’m so happy when my predictions prove correct.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. And Peter Gould really is, sometimes TV directors don’t get their due. And he certainly deserves because obviously he was a writer on what I believe is the greatest television show in history, but also a director of that show as well. And you can’t go wrong with Richard Kelly. Please, for those of you at Austin, go see this, if only to look into the unfathomable bottomless cruel eyes of Richard Kelly. Stare into the abyss of Richard Kelly and tell me if it does not stare back into you.

**John:** Indeed. There will also be special guests that I’m not allowed to announce, but I think you will enjoy some of these other people who are going to come to the show. So, please come to that. That’s 12:30 on Saturday at the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** That’s great. That’s a must do. I don’t care what else is going on. If you’re going to Austin and you’re going to be there, and I’m so sorry I won’t be there this time. This time only. I’ll be back next year. But Saturday at 12:30. If you don’t go to this, you’re just dumb.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Stupid.

**John:** So, a little protocol. If you see me at the Austin Film Festival, it is totally fine to say, “Oh, hello, hi.” But know that I may be running from one place to another, so if I am brief with you it’s only generally because I’m trying to move from one facility to another facility and things are sort of spread all out.

But if you do see me, and you see me in a moment where I have some time, I will have on my person this thing called Writer Emergency which is a website you can go to. It’s this thing we’ve been working on for four years. And I actually have a physical thing I can show you. So, if you would like to see it, I will show you this small pack of suggestions that I will be carrying with me. Because we’re sort of beta testing them, so I need to show it to actual writers.

So, if you see me at Austin, I will have it on my person.

**Craig:** I was quite sure that you were going to say if you see me, feel free to talk to me, but do not touch.

**John:** Yeah. Do not touch. Do not touch me. Just maintain a safe distance.

**Craig:** Do not touch John August.

**John:** If you’re wearing a Scriptnotes t-shirt, I will probably notice that. So, that’s a thing you might do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My trainer today was wearing a Scriptnotes t-shirt. It was the first time I’d seen one in the wild, and I’ve got to say it looked really good. Now, as we’re recording this, Craig, you just said that you have not actually physically gotten yours because you live out in the hinterlands, but everyone else, if by the end of this next week you have not gotten your thing, something is wrong and it’s probably Stuart’s fault. So, you should probably email orders@johnaugust.com and let Stuart figure this out.

**Craig:** Now I’m hoping I don’t get it because I want Stuart to suffer.

**John:** I think we did a really good job shipping everything out. We’ve gotten much better at it. But as we were shipping them out we realized, wow, there is one Highland t-shirt, like one person ordered a small Highland t-shirt, and we were out of small Highland t-shirts. And we realized like after we’d already gone to the post office we put someone who had ordered XXL and we sent them a small.

**Craig:** Ooh, no!

**John:** So, fortunately our wonderful listeners, he emailed us and so we were able to get that t-shirt back and give it to the right person.

**Craig:** Oh good. Good. Good. Good. Because, wearing a too-big t-shirt is perfectly, but a too-small t-shirt.

**John:** That would just not be good. No.

**Craig:** It’s no good. It’s no good. It shows all the soft squishy parts.

**John:** Yeah. Unless you’re wearing Spanx, which is something we learned about from Aline.

**Craig:** Man Spanx.

**John:** Man Spanx. People who may need Man Spanx are all of the actors who are going to be in all the superhero movies that have now been set for the next seven years.

**Craig:** Are you starring in Transition Man? [laughs]

**John:** Oh, I’m Transition Man. That I locked down. But this last week just got crazy. So, I want to just take a minute and talk through all of the superhero movies that are currently on the slate, and then we can talk about the reality here and sort of what’s going to happen.

So, I’m pulling from a list that was at News-a-Rama, but I think these are all sort of officially announced things. For 2015, here are the superhero movies:

May 1 is Avengers: Age of Ultron.

July 17 is Ant-Man.

August 7, the new Fantastic Four that Simon Kinberg is producing. And Simon was a great guest this last week at the WGA.

So, that’s three for 2015.

For 2016 we have Deadpool on February 12.

We have Batman vs. Superman: Dawn Of Justice, on March 25.

May 6 we have Captain America 3, which is reportedly Civil War, which is kind of going to be great.

May 27, X-Men: Apocalypse, also Simon Kinberg.

July 8 is an Untitled Marvel film unofficially widely believed to be Doctor Strange.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** August 5 is Suicide Squad, which is a Warner’s project and DC project.

November 11, Sinister Six, from Sony, which I think is Drew Goddard if I’m correct. I hope I’m not wrong.

So, that was, I’m counting up here as we do this, that was seven movies for 2016. Seven superhero movies.

**Craig:** Seven superhero movies in 2016.

**John:** But, 2017, not to be outdone.

**Craig:** Surely there won’t be anymore.

**John:** Oh, there are a few more.

**Craig:** Oh!

**John:** March 3 of 2017, the Untitled Wolverine sequel.

May 5 is an Untitled Marvel Film.

June 23 is the Wonder Woman movie.

July 14 is the Fantastic Four 2.

July 28 is Guardians —

**Craig:** Wait, they already know they’re doing a 2?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They don’t even care if number one does well. They’re like, screw it, we’re doing 2. I love it.

John. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 on July 28.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** November 3, another Untitled Marvel film.

**Craig:** They should just keep that title. It’s good.

**John:** Yeah, I think it’s pretty good. Just say like the Marvel Movie.

**Craig:** It’s just Marvel. Just show up.

**John:** Marvel. Show up.

November 17, Justice League, Part 1.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Which I think is potentially the expansion upon whatever happens in the Batman vs. Superman.

There are two unspecified in 2017. One is a Sony female Spider-Man spin-off. And also a Sony Venom: Carnage Spider-Man spin-off.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So, I’m going to quickly count this. 10. I’m counting ten for 2017.

**Craig:** Great. Yeah. More.

**John:** Ten superhero movies, not too much.

**Craig:** More.

**John:** Yeah. Then, 2018: March 23 of 2018, The Flash.

**Craig:** Hold on a second. This can’t — 2018, they’re just guessing.

**John:** Oh, it’s going to get better than this. Just wait.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So, The Flash, March 23.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** May 4 is an untitled Marvel film.

July 6 is an untitled Marvel film.

July 13 is an untitled Fox Mystery Marvel film.

**Craig:** Uh…all right.

**John:** So, I think, I’m talking that to be —

**Craig:** Like an X-Men sort of thing?

**John:** Yeah, something that is in the canon of the stuff that Fox owns would be part of it.

**Craig:** Right. Which will be the X-Men vs. Fantastic Four.

**John:** Oh, that would be great.

**Craig:** It’s inevitable.

**John:** Yeah, they have to.

**Craig:** Yeah. Ugh.

**John:** July 27 is Aquaman.

**Craig:** Oh, finally.

**John:** Jason Momoa.

**Craig:** Oh, oh, I thought it was what’s his face? [laughs] I thought it was the guy from Entourage. Okay.

**John:** No. [laughs] Yeah, it’s James Cameron finally got around to making the Aquaman film.

**Craig:** Finally got around to making, okay.

**John:** November 2, an untitled Marvel film. I think they’re cheating. I think you’ve got to pick some titles. But, all right.

Unspecified date for the Amazing Spider-Man 3.

**Craig:** Oh good. Is that a reboot of the last Amazing Spider-Man? Oh, no, there’s only been two. Okay.

**John:** So, I take all the Sony things with like a huge grain of salt, because who knows what they’re actually going to do because the Spider-Man franchise is in transition. But do I believe that they will make some movies? I certainly do.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So, back to a little bit of reason, there’s only seven movies, superhero movies, slated for 2018 right now.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** This is 2014 though still we’re in right now?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Okay. 2019, this is why I wanted to do the list. April 5: Shazam. So, I’m so excited that they’re going to do Shazam in 2019 because back in 2007 when I wrote the Shazam movie, I remember having to scramble because Warners was like on my ass about delivering because they wanted to get in production and do budgets. So, I’m just really glad that I sort of canceled a vacation back in 2007, so 12 years later —

**Craig:** Well, they had to get ready for 2019.

**John:** So, this is supposed to have the Rock, Dwayne Johnson, as Black Adam, which is perfect casting and was also perfect casting 12 years ago when we started this process.

**Craig:** Now, let me ask you something. Is this still your script?

**John:** It’s still my chain of existence. It’s still the continuous development on the same project.

**Craig:** But they’re not, in other words, they haven’t just been sitting with your script for 12 years? [laughs]

**John:** No, I think other people have clearly come on and done this. And this was Pete Segal when I was doing this, who is clearly not going to be directing this now. But it is just bizarre.

**Craig:** That’s insane. Wow.

**John:** May 3 is another untitled Marvel film.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** June 14, Justice League, Part 2.

**Craig:** Yeah, because, you know.

**John:** Because.

**Craig:** Because.

**John:** 2020 is Cyborg.

**Craig:** Oh, good, 2020. Are we even alive?

**John:** It’s really a strong prediction of like what will the world be like in 2020. That is six years from now.

**Craig:** I mean, we all know that phones will be implanted in our ears.

**John:** So, April 3 is Cyborg.

**Craig:** Oh good, Cyborg. Everyone has been begging for that.

**John:** Yeah. And then June 19 is Green Lantern.

**Craig:** Worked well the first time, let’s do it again. [laughs]

**John:** It did! You know what? I think part of the lesson of Green Lantern is that you just jam a movie into existence, it’s going to work.

**Craig:** So, listen.

**John:** 31 movies! 31 movies stretching in to 2020.

**Craig:** First of all, this list is highly suspect once you get past 2017. What happens is the real estate during the prime movie months of essentially March through July, really March through June is truly the big months now, because summer has sort of shifted up, it’s so treacherous to release a big movie because you’re always worried that you’re going to go up against two other huge movies. So, people start squatting on these dates. A lot of this is just nonsense. It’s nonsense posturing, and squatting, and some of these movies will move.

So, for instance, when Marvel says, look, on May 4, which is a huge weekend, in 2018 we’re putting a movie out. What they’re really saying is everybody be worried about us, but maybe they will, maybe they won’t. You never know.

A couple of things come to mind when I hear this crazy long list. One, you know, movie studios are businesses and they’re giving people what they want. People keep going to these movies, so why not? And a lot of them are good.

But, two, and this is really the big one, this is the Marvelization of Hollywood and I’m not sure that other people really are doing it right. Marvel is doing it right. And Marvel has a massive catalog. Massive. The Marvel universe has always been famous for having thousands of characters that are all interrelated in this huge soap opera universe. It’s very Game of Thrones in that way.

So much so that they can even, for instance, Nicole Perlman as we had on our show, picks an obscure comic out of a pile and lo and behold it’s now Guardians of the Galaxy and it’s a franchise.

DC never really had that depth. You can see them trying, because they’re colliding Batman and Superman the way that Avengers collided Iron Man with Hulk and so on and so forth. So, they’re trying, and I get that. And they should, frankly, Marvel should roll out things Dr. Strange and so on. I’m sure they’ll do very well.

Where we start to get to the Justice League I begin to worry because I’m not sure that DC really does have the depth there character wise, interesting character wise. Frankly, even Marvel was struggling a little bit. I mean, no offense to Jeremy Renner or Joss Whedon, who did as good as they could do with Hawkeye, but he’s just — he shoots arrows. [laughs] It’s not really, I mean Olympians do that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, it’s starting to get a little thin out there. Certainly by the time we get to Aquaman, your eyes should be rolling a little bit. Shazam, I don’t, I remember —

**John:** Shazam I think, I mean, I will defend Shazam because I wrote Shazam. Shazam is actually a great idea for a movie, because it’s big with super powers.

**Craig:** Right. The little boy can say Shazam and he becomes awesome.

**John:** Absolutely. So, it has the potential for both big superhero movie and sort of comedy. It has the ability to sort of — that wish fulfillment comedy aspect of it. But this is going to end in tears.

**Craig:** I mean, the problem is you and I remember Shazam because there was a television show when we were kids. It was, do you remember, it was paired with Isis.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Not the beheading ISIS, but the —

**John:** It was the Shazam/Isis Power Hour. And I remember as a person who was excited to see Isis, there were only like three episodes of Isis, so it was almost always Shazam.

**Craig:** I know. And I loved Isis, too. My sister and I were —

**John:** It’s the power of the pyramid. Come on.

**Craig:** It’s the power of the pyramid. And I thought she was hot. I really liked Shazam and Isis. I liked Isis more. But I don’t think Shazam is particularly — and look, it doesn’t have the cool factor that Guardians of the Galaxy had because the whole idea was that they were kind of bad ass misfits, which is always fun. So, I’m just wondering if that property is going to appeal to a 17-year-old male.

**John:** I should step back and make clear that I don’t that Shazam is actually the problem. I think Shazam independent of all this stuff could be a huge success because I think it could actually do that crossover kind of — you can take seven year olds to it and make it feel like a good family movie, but I think the overall — you were worried about that thinness of the character slates. I just think the real problem here is the thickness.

I think you are painting, there’s just too many superheroes trying to jockey for attention. And people will get sick of it.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, they haven’t yet. They haven’t yet. So, and some of these things we know will do great. I mean, we know that Batman vs. Superman will be a huge movie. I would like to see that. That sounds like fun.

Captain America is sort of on its, perfectly well on its own steam. It’s a good series. I like that they’re calling it maybe Civil War because hopefully the villain this time will be dysentery.

**John:** You know that the actual premise is essentially Captain America vs. Tony Stark.

**Craig:** Oh, I thought it was going to be more just like, oh, gang green set in and we’re running short on black powder.

**John:** Oh, see that would be really good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A little north, a little south.

**Craig:** Right. Oh, oh, we need to amputate. Here, drink this bathtub hooch while I saw your leg off. [laughs] That I would go see.

**John:** Now, Craig, indulge me in a thought experiment because let’s take, let’s step aside and like not look at this as superhero movies, but let’s just say there’s some other genre that was tremendously successful. And so let’s say westerns are the tremendous success, but westerns are really, really expensive.

My worry is that by sinking all of our time and energy into making these incredibly expensive westerns, we are going to be screwed when westerns stop working. Also, we’re limited in our ability to make other kinds of movies, or other kinds of big movies because we’re spending all of our capital making these giant westerns.

**Craig:** I will give you a rosier point of view on it. Most of this stuff is a guaranteed hit. Yes, at some point the bubble will burst, but when the bubble bursts and the sixth Spider-Man movie fails to turn a profit, that’s okay. It will be absorbed by the five that came before it. And the same for all of the Marvel films and all of the — I mean, good, another Wolverine. Thank god, right?

So, the truth is these are the safest bets Hollywood has. And, yes, they cost a lot, but they also know that they’re going to generate enormous profits because they have so far. And they have to the extent that when it finally ends they’ll be okay anyway.

And, I would argue that the profits that these movies generate are essentially what is funding every other movie they make, whether those movies are big or small. These are the things that allow them to take a little tiny bit of risk here and there. It’s not like what they used to take, but without these, I’m not sure they would be in the movie business at all. That’s the scary part.

**John:** So, they’re not actually as guaranteed though. If you look at the ones that have not worked, there are some notable things you can single out. Green Lantern did not work. This last Spider-Man did not work to the degree that they needed it to work in order for it to propel the franchise forward. So, you can’t say that they’re a lock. And, you know, I’m so glad that Guardians of the Galaxy turned out so well, but as you look at that movie, a 20% worse version of Guardians of the Galaxy would have been a disaster. It was one of those things that had to be executed perfectly.

**Craig:** That’s true. And I’m not saying that they bat a thousand. I guess what I’m saying is that if Green Lantern fails, that’s a failed movie. If Green Lantern succeeds, it’s five hits. And so, for instance, Fantastic Four, the first Fantastic Four movie just didn’t really click.

So, what are they doing? They go back to the drawing board and they’re like, no, no, no, we can make this work and we’re going to put Kinberg on it. It’s going to be a different kind of vibe. And my guess is it will work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re learning how to make these better. And there are two twin pillars of superhero success. No, three. Three triple pillars of superhero success.

There’s what Bryan Singer actually deserves a ton of credit, I think —

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** For kicking this thing off with X-Men. And to me those were the first superhero movies that got out of pure cheese mode and really went great. Obviously you’ve got to give Nolan a ton of credit.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Nolan, however, they’ve tried to Nolan other movies. Doesn’t work as well because Batman is perfect for Nolan. Batman is unique. Really no one else is like him tonally. And then you’ve got to look at what Whedon in collaboration with Kevin Feige at Marvel has done. Right?

So, they’re all learning from each other.

**John:** I would say Whedon is fantastic, but I would say the arc of Iron Man into The Avengers is already sort of well, you know, you make The Avengers because you actually already made Iron Man.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, Kevin Feige deserves — Kevin Feige may be the greatest movie business genius in the last, well frankly since I’ve been working in the business.

**John:** I would give the Pixar folks a bit of that, too.

**Craig:** Pixar folks are creative geniuses who are business successful because they’re so brilliant creatively. Kevin Feige doesn’t write and he doesn’t direct.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** He’s like, you know, you have to go all the way back to like, I don’t know, Thalberg, and guys like that to find these really powerful, very smart guys that actually made like a good creator-like impact on the movie business. He may be our generation’s, I don’t know, whatever you want to call it, Zanuck or Thalberg. One of those guys.

**John:** Yeah. Okay.

**Craig:** Look, I’m not a huge superhero movie fan the way that a lot of other people are, but I pick and choose ones I like. Business wise I think this actually generates money for them to make other kinds of movies. They do make other kinds of movies. Without them I worry that movie studios just start to stop down to more of a Disney-like existence of two or three movies a year.

**John:** So, let’s take a look at the range of studios here and sort of who’s not making them and who might be able to prosper by just doing something else. So, Sony is trying to do things in the Spider-Man universe. And so female Spider-Man, Venom, that kind of stuff. Sinister Six is theirs.

You have Fox with X-Men and Fantastic Four, which love them, grateful for that.

Over at Warners you have this whole DC universe that they’re trying to do.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** At Disney you have the whole Marvel universe of things they’re trying to do. That leaves Universal without a superhero —

**Craig:** Well, but they’re trying. And you know what they’re trying with.

**John:** With the Monsters.

**Craig:** Correct. It’s not the same.

**John:** And maybe that will work that it’s not the same.

**Craig:** Because it’s not the same. And I know that Chris Morgan and Alex Kurtzman are shepherding that. And that’s obviously something that they are well aware they don’t have. And it’s interesting that all the studios essentially are saying how can we Marvelize stuff. How can we Marvelize — let’s just look through our catalog. Find intellectual property with multiple characters in it and then Avengerize it. They’re all doing it right now.

**John:** And then Paramount. So, Paramount has Star Trek. I’m trying to think what else they have that is I that vein?

**Craig:** Well, they had Iron Man but they’ve lost it. Is that the idea?

**John:** Or Dare Devil, right?

**Craig:** Dare Devil I thought was —

**John:** Oh, Iron Man was always Marvel, wasn’t it?

**Craig:** No, Iron Man was Paramount.

**John:** It was Paramount, but I think maybe they still have some distribution rights on it, but it’s back now in Disney’s hand I think.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, they had it and it’s gone. I think Paramount doesn’t have any. They have Transformers. Well, Transformers are kind of theirs.

**John:** Yeah, that’s at DreamWorks/Paramount, right? Or is it Amblin/Paramount? It’s all confusing.

So, yeah, the challenge is, and maybe the opportunity is if you are not in that business, maybe you stay out of that business and find ways to thrive in some other —

**Craig:** Yeah, like you know Lions Gate’s superhero franchise?

**John:** Twilight.

**Craig:** Tyler Perry.

**John:** Oh, that’s true. But they also had Twilight. They also had —

**Craig:** Well, Twilight and Hunger Games are there, but they’re limited. They’re like Harry Potter. They end because the books end. I mean, obviously you can see now that Harry Potter is not ending.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** When you talk about like a character that can renew over and over and you can just making new episodes with that character, Tyler Perry, Madea. Madea is their superhero.

**John:** Madea is the superhero. Speaking of Tyler Perry, did you end up finally seeing Gone Girl?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No, you didn’t.

**Craig:** No. But I’m gonna.

**John:** You’re gonna. You’re gonna sometime. Because then we’ll have a special podcast just about that.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Yay. Anything more on superheroes before we move on to the next topic?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Next topic. Copyright. And so copyright is fundamental to the things that we do. There was a good article this last week by Louis Menand — who knows how he chooses to pronounce his name — but it was in The New Yorker. It was an article called Copywrong. And there will be a link to it in the show notes.

And I thought it was an interesting assessment of where we’re at now and really how we got to this place. And his thesis is that, I’m just taking a thesis from other folks, but is that copyright was established with this idea that you want things to be protected for a short time, but ultimately fall into public usage so that everyone can benefit from them. And that has been changed and altered in a way that is sort of the opposite of that. And so it’s holding stuff to the individual, to the creator of things for such a long time that things never fall into the public use.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, it is an interesting article. I mean, the root of copyright ultimately was to encourage works for the public benefit. The idea being if you could give creators some exclusive right to their work for some period of time, it would be enough of an incentive for them to then do those things so that they could eventually move into the public domain for everyone’s use, a bit like the way that drug companies are allowed to own their drugs for awhile and then it becomes a generic.

What’s happened since then is a collision of two different forces, both of which I don’t think the initial copyright theorists could have foreseen. One was the rise of corporate intellectual property. And the other is the information revolution and the prevalence of cheap, easy, quick piracy.

So, on the one side we have companies that have used their influence over the legislature to extend copyright far beyond what it was initially intended to be, sometimes out of pure greed, a lot of times out of a kind of cultural panic that Mickey Mouse will be in the public domain and that doesn’t seem right. But really ultimately it’s about protecting the pockets of the people who pay for and distribute intellectual property.

And for us, of course, that interest is aligned with ours in a purely selfish way because that’s what puts money in our pockets.

**John:** Yeah, I want to step back to that idea of the public benefit because it is in the public benefit for people to write things, to create things because that is moving culture forward, it is dissemination of ideas. And so the idea behind public benefit in those initial years is really valid, because you want people to be incentivized to make things and share things and publish things so that it can enrich sort of everyone.

And so it’s in people’s public benefit for those creators to be able to charge for things and be paid. That makes sense.

The question becomes how many years after that is it more than public benefit for people to be able to use and share and reuse and do new things with that material. And originally it was like 17 years and it’s now up to 95 years because of the Sonny Bono Copyright Act. And the issue that’s come up, and Howard Rodman from the WGA has actually sent a survey around asking us about things, like have you ever encountered dead books. And by dead books it’s meaning like books that you would love to adapt or love to do something with, but it’s impossible to figure out who actually owns this. Sometimes things are copyrighted, but there’s no actual way to find out who it is.

**Craig:** They’re called orphans.

**John:** You can’t publish it. They’re orphans. And that is a situation that has come about almost uniquely because of these extensions of the copyright term is that normally these things should have easily clearly fallen into public domain and yet they are not.

**Craig:** In fact, the Writers Guild and the Directors Guild have worked together to petition Congress to assign the copyright to orphaned movies to the writers and directors of those movies, which is not the same thing as saying put it in the public domain, but rather, no, no, we should have — keep the copyright, but we should get it. Copyright can last a very long time, particularly when it’s framed as a certain amount of time after the death of the author.

For instance, the movie that I’m writing right now is inspired by the general genre of Agatha Christie’s works. I mean, it’s based on a different book entirely, but the idea is that it’s an Agatha Christie style whodunit. There are only two Agatha Christie books in the public domain, the very first two books she wrote. And they date back to the ’20s, I believe. So, you could see how long copyright lasts.

Now, on the other side of the equation, you have this fact that the vast majority of intellectual property that is downloaded over the internet is pirated. The vast majority.

**John:** Okay. The only thing I’ll push back on that is that pirated in terms of this is a completed work of art and you are downloading the whole thing and using it. The challenge is like when you’re using a snippet of it, something that should be fair use, something that should be I am using this in order to make a statement on it, or to do something with it that is useful new work, it becomes very difficult to know whether that is a legal use or an illegal use.

And companies are, especially now in the age of corporate copyright, companies are extraordinarily aggressive at stomping down on anything they perceive could be an infringement on their copyright. So, it creates this chilling effect that new work is not happening because you are terrified that someone is going to come after you.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll push back on that a little bit. Fair use is really about use. It’s about the duplication or sampling of the republication of. But it’s not about the purchasing of. So, I can make a fair use argument that I’m allowed to put a clip from The Dark Knight on my website.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** But what I can’t make is a fair use argument that I’m allowed to download The Dark Knight for free. We know that, for instance, there are — I mean, god knows, millions of pirated copies of Game of Thrones globally. So, what we have now is a weird storm like collision of a cold front and a hot front of this hyper-extended legal copyright and this hyper-truncation effective copyright.

And we are trapped in between right now. And so the people that follow the laws are being unfairly injured, I think. The people who are creating property are being unfairly injured, I think. Everybody is suffering right now. And I’m not sure what the answer is other than to say this: as somebody that creates intellectual property in conjunction with corporations, I must be on behalf of myself and my family ever mindful of the other sides, I guess I would call it hypocrisy when companies — the distribution companies or the provider companies like Google or Amazon bang the drum of copy fight and intellectual property freedom when really they don’t care about that at all and, in fact, defend their own intellectual property brutally. They just want to make money.

**John:** What this article points out though which I’ve also noticed is that you have tremendous legal teams with vested interest in maintaining the current copyright laws and extending them even further. You don’t have — to the degree you have Silicon Valley who wants to sort of make things free, whatever — but they’re not organized in a way to push for lower, like to rein back the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, to bring it back from 95 years to something much more reasonable.

There is no business model for that and therefore you don’t see the organized fight of lobbying and trying to get some of these copyright laws written a little bit more sanely.

**Craig:** Well, I think the sad thing is that they don’t have to because they know it doesn’t matter. I can go on YouTube right now and watch, you know, big chunks of all sorts of the movies that I’ve written that have just posted on there. Google owns YouTube. They’re distributing the content. They know they’re breaking the law. They don’t care.

**John:** But, Craig, I’m talking about the things that you and I do. So, exactly the situations where I would love to adapt this book, but I cannot adapt this book because it is still under copyright because of craziness. And so things that should have fallen in to popular culture that I should be able to use and adapt and work with are not available. And I think, and we’re talking, also I would say you and I will make the distinction between fair use and sort of piracy, but if you are a Disney company, you will come after both with the same hammer because you have one hammer and it’s an incredibly effective hammer.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, in the end the people that suffer are the wrong people. There’s no reason that you and I, if I wanted to work a little more freely with a novel that was written in 1931, it sucks that I can’t. It also sucks that my residuals are impacted by the fact that people can just go on YouTube, a Google Corporation company, and just watch that stuff illegally uploaded for free.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, once again, John, you and I are getting screwed.

**John:** [laughs] Indeed. I wanted to debate it. I don’t think we’re going to find any meaningful answers. What I would love to see though is — I would love to see the Elon Musk of copyright law who is going in and saying, okay, this is crazy, this cannot continue along these same lines. We have to both protect copyright from piracy, from real piracy during that initial period of profitability on a new work, but then recognize that copyright is designed to protect new work and not to give you a century of profits.

**Craig:** Yeah, well…

**John:** I don’t know that we’re going to find that person.

**Craig:** I’ve got news for you. If we can find the Elon Musk of legislation, there are other things I would like him to work on first.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** We are in dire straits. Dire.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s not zoom out too much. Yes, things are bad.

So, next topic.

**Craig:** Next topic!

**John:** Next topic. So, I’m going to set this up and you will tell me like this is just the classically bad situation. I got sent this thing to look at. It was an adaptation and they’re like, “Can we just get on the phone with your really quick and just sort of talk through it. I know you don’t have a lot of time.” And so I got this thing on like a Wednesday and I’m looking through it and I’m like, oh, it’s sort of sparking and I can sort of see what the movie might be here. And it’s like is there any way we can get on a conference call, like four of us on a conference call, like me and four other people on a conference call on a Friday afternoon at 4pm.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Would you say that’s a good idea or a bad idea?

**Craig:** Well, considering that the Sabbath is right around the corner, John, I don’t think that’s a good idea at all.

**John:** I think in general you don’t want to have a first pitch or kind of meeting on something to be on a conference call with four people you don’t know, especially Friday at 4pm.

**Craig:** You don’t want to be on a conference call. You don’t want to be with four people you don’t know. And Friday at 4pm, everybody is essentially done.

**John:** They are done and they are dead. And so classically a bad idea, but I was traveling, I was going to be traveling so I was like, uh, it’s the only time I can do it. So, I did it. And, remarkably, it went really, really well.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** Which is great. Which is very exciting. And I think maybe partly because expectations are so low at that point, that I could just do it. I think, also, the fact that you and I do this podcast every week, I’ve gotten much better at just sort of like talking on my feet.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I talked through it. So, anyway, that went great. And so now I actually have to go in and pitch the real thing. Because on that first phone call I could just pitch like this is what I’m thinking. I think it’s more like this, I think it’s like this, I think this is the world, this is the universe. And that was sort of kind of easy.

I could sort of do the elevator pitch of it really, really well. So, now I have to go through and figure out the whole pitch of it. And that’s a very different skill set.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** And so I just want to talk a little bit about sort of moving from that “here’s the idea” to “here’s the expectation of what you are going to be delivering when you go in and talk through a pitch.” And I know you just did that pretty recently, too.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I thought we could give some helpful tips for people.

**Craig:** Well, there’s different kinds of pitches. So, the first thing you’ve got to figure out is what’s the kind I’m doing. For most people starting out, they do need to deliver a fairly detailed pitch. The purpose of which is to convince the other person that you know what you’re talking about.

There are times when people don’t really need you to give them the whole movie. They just need the big points. They need the big data for what’s going to kind of happen in the movie plot wise, act breaks, and twists and reveals, and the general idea. Every now and then you get to kind of just talk conceptually, which is always the best thing. But, you know, for instance, in your case you kind of did the conceptual and now it’s like, okay great, at least give us the big data.

So, when I think about putting these things together, I try and — I keep in mind who I’m pitching to.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It’s not a movie audience. It’s not my friends. The people that are listening to this are going to make decisions based on marketing, they’re going to make a decision based on how they feel in the moment and they’re going to make a decision based on how they can conceptualize this movie in the context of other movies that have made money.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, I do try and pitch the concept with an emphasis on the characters which I think plays better in a pitch than “And then, and then, and then,” which gets really boring. I try and pitch with an emphasis on the big moments that I know in their minds they’re already putting in a trailer. And I also try and pitch with any context, so I can say in many ways it’s like this movie except that it’s not because of this.

**John:** Yeah. And that’s classically that thing you hear in sort of the elevator pitch is like, “It’s like Raiders of the Lost Ark, but in Space.” Or, you know, it’s this but it’s that. It’s not exactly this, but it’s these other two things combined.

And this thing I pitched, there are movies that I can sort of do that two things handoff with. And it’s very glib but it’s helpful because it provides a frame. It’s like the kinds of things that would happen in these kinds of movies —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Is useful. And then you end up distinguishing but these are the things that sort of make it unique and different. These are the unique elements that are going to be helpful for marketing, but also sort of make this movie a movie worth making. Like why you’re going to have the kind of response you want from this.

And so for me with this pitch, weirdly I’m going to be pitching quality because it’s a genre that you don’t necessarily associate with quality that often and sort of detailed character work. Hopefully it’s the kind of movie where the expectations about sort of what characters are supposed to be doing in it are incredibly low, but then so to push beyond that will be useful. It’s the kind of movie where the characters hopefully don’t recognize what genre of movie in they are in.

**Craig:** I think that’s always a good idea. I think that when you’re pitching something, you are in that wonderful moment where you are on your first date and you and your date partner can fantasize freely about the life you live.

Later on down the line when you wake up in a doublewide, and you’ve both gained weight, and you’re out of work, you can confront reality. When you’re pitching, it should be ambitious. It doesn’t have to be ambitious — budgetarily it should be creatively ambitious. It should be audacious. You should be willing to say I want this to be great. Because everybody wants it to be great. Nobody wants to, “Well, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to deliver pretty much just what you’d kind of ho-hum about.”

**John:** Yeah. So, it’s that moment to not be cynical at all. Like, I’m going with really the expectation of like, you know what, I think we can make something really, really, really cool here that will be surprising. And the same way like Guardians, again, was surprising in that it was doing things like, wow, I didn’t necessarily anticipate you were going to do that. And this movie succeeded so well in large part because you did these things. That’s a crucial thing.

I often describe the great pitch is really as if you just saw a fantastic movie and you’re trying to convince your best friend that they have to see that movie.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It’s that level of excitement that you’re trying to communicate.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s why it’s also good when you’re doing “It’s like this thing” to say something that’s surprising. When you hear something like, “Well, it’s like Raiders in space,” people go, okay. So, it’s Raiders except that they’re in space.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But if you say something like, “It’s a romantic comedy and it’s Raiders,” you go, well wait, how does that work? “Let me tell you.”

But I can already feel people leaning forward. It’s like, well, how does that work? You want to tweak curiosity. I mean, I always think that the Matrix must have been the best, I mean, I don’t know if they pitched it or spec’d it, but what a great pitch. Like, “Imagine this kind of Blade Runner-y, sci-fi world with this incredible martial arts. Yeah, it’s that, and also it’s not real. It’s Philip Dick. It’s this. It’s that. Now, let me explain how that’s going to fit together.”

And if you can pull off how it fits together, well, that’s what movies are. It’s basically — you know, we always say you put your character in an impossible situation and then you get them out of it. Put your pitch in an impossible situation and then get yourself out of it and you will be rewarded, I think.

**John:** Yeah. So, anyway, that’s going to be happening in these next couple of weeks, so.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I will let people know what the outcome of that was. But it was one of those sort of fun situations I think people don’t — writers of all levels will find themselves in a lot, where you had the sort of initial, you know, oh, that’s a really good idea, come and pitch me the full thing, and stepping from that whole like, oh, I think this is potentially really interesting to here is the whole movie I’m going to try to right is a challenging transition sometimes, because you start to recognize like, oh, that’s actually going to be a lot of work. And so it’s going to be a lot of work for me these next two weeks, but I’m looking forward to it.

**Craig:** It will. But I will say to you that I’ve never, even when they say we would love to hear the movie, they don’t really want to hear the whole movie. So, like everybody at some point starts to — they love listening to the first act. They love hearing how the second act works. And by the time you’re done with that, they just want to know, oh, so like what happens in the end?

**John:** Yeah. And this is an adaptation. So, there is already expectation about like these are some of the kinds of things that are going to happen, so it’s really I can tell them about like this is how I’m going to do this thing. And that is great because it’s both they have the expectation like, oh, he’s going to need to be able to do this thing. Oh, that’s how he’s going to do it.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. They just need to be able to say to the person that runs their life, “No, this guy has got it,” you know, “she knows what she’s doing,” which is why frankly if I had a choice between knowing every single scene of the movie or being able to deliver three moments that they would think, oh my god, those are great trailer moments, I go with those three trailer moments.

**John:** Oh, absolutely. Always.

**Craig:** Because that’s what they’ll end up pitching.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s all it’s going to take.

**John:** Yes. Craig, are we going to do these Three Page Challenges, or are we going to save them for another week?

**Craig:** I see we’ve blabbed a lot today.

**John:** We blabbed a lot this week.

**Craig:** So much blabbing.

**John:** So, should we save these for another week?

**Craig:** I think we should save these for another week.

**John:** I do. Because I don’t want to rush through these because they were interesting things to talk about and I don’t want to sort of slam through them. So, I’m going to save my notes in these and we will get to them another week. So, we apologize to — fortunately we never even mentioned the names of the people, so they will never know that they could have possibly been a part of it.

**Craig:** But they will be. They will be.

**John:** They will be.

**Craig:** Do we need to do any questions and answers? Or should we just —

**John:** I think we’re good. Let’s do our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Great. Oh, should I do mine?

**John:** I can do mine. So, my One Cool Thing is this app that a friend of mine who was at Singleton who I didn’t know was going to be there, but she was there, and she recommended this thing that her daughter loves to play on the iPad. And I checked it out and it really is just great. It’s called Dragonbox. And it is a game for iOS, both on your iPhone and your iPad. And it looks like a simple pattern matching game, where you’re trying to clear these levels by moving these tiles around.

And there’s sort of the board is divided into two halves and so anything you do on one half of the board you have to d the same on the other half. And so it becomes a sort of logic puzzle.

What’s so ingenious about it is it’s actually algebra. And they’ve sort of abstracted it all away. So, you think you’re just moving these colored tiles around, but as you go through levels you sort of realize like, oh, this is actually algebra, the same way you have to balance both sides of the equation.

Then eventually they start to introduce some tiles that sort of look like numbers. And you go through and it’s like, oh, wow, you’re actually doing algebra and you’re actually solving for X but the X is just a Dragonbox.

So, I played through, you know, almost all the levels now and they keep introducing concepts that I would say like, well, they’re never going to be able to deal with things in parenthesis or distribution of stuff. And they have these ingenious metaphors for what that’s like. So, parenthesis are like these bubbles and so it’s everything inside a bubble. And then you can break the bubble and pull the stuff apart, but you have to do it a special way.

It’s really quite ingenious. So, everything up through single variable algebra is actually presented in it, but I think you can actually — a kid could get through all of it and not really know they’re doing algebra, which I think is smart.

**Craig:** I think that’s awesome.

**John:** So, it starts, you know, there’s a version for like five year olds that’s obviously very, very basic. And then there’s the version I’m doing now, my daughter is nine, and she can totally do this. So, Dragonbox.

**Craig:** My daughter is nine. I’m going to start her on it today.

**John:** And weirdly I’ve been playing it like while watching stuff on TV. And it’s kind of fun.

**Craig:** I just sit down and do proper algebra when I’m watching TV.

**John:** Well, that’s always a good choice.

**Craig:** I will say that one thing that’s kind of funny, were you a good math student?

**John:** Yeah, I was good. I wasn’t brilliant, but I was good. I was always honors.

**Craig:** I loved math. I just loved it. But it’s been so long. And my son who is 13, he’s now in algebra and occasionally something will come up and I’ll just think, oh, I’ve just got to — like the other day he was working on some simple trigonometry, tan, cosign, etc.

**John:** You will never use that again in your life, unless you’re a scientific.

**Craig:** But here’s what’s so cool. So, I’m like, okay, he needs some help on his homework. I haven’t done that in forever. Give me two minutes. And I sat there and I just flipped through and I’m like, oh, okay, okay. And what doing that now as an adult teaches you is that we’re so much smarter now than we were when we were kids because we know how to read things and understand them.

It’s not fair. Literally I relearned that stuff in two minutes. I was like, oh…

**John:** Reading the actual stuff in the book, you were able to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because we’re used to reading things in books. Like when we were kids we were forced to and it’s just like, oh my god, a book, and I better wait for them to tell me how to do it. Now you can just do it. You can teach yourself anything. We’re geniuses now.

**John:** We are geniuses. All of us.

**Craig:** Compared to when we were 13.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. Well, speaking of geniuses, Transition Man, Lockheed. So, okay, I love fusion. I love nuclear fusion.

**John:** I was hoping you were going to talk about this. So, we’ll see if it’s real. I’m worried it’s not.

**Craig:** Well, a lot of people are worried it’s not. So, fusion reactors are the dream, unlike fission reactors which are all the nuclear reactors that work today, fission reactors work by basically neutrons colliding in to each other and smashing atoms apart, which releases an enormous amount of energy, but has some inherent dangers, see Chernobyl and Fukushima.

**John:** And they always leave horrible stuff at the end.

**Craig:** And they do leave horrible stuff at the end that lasts, that remains horrible, for basically longer than we’ll probably be here on the planet. There’s problems with it.

On the other hand, nuclear power doesn’t release a single bit of carbon into the atmosphere. Has zero impact on global warming and climate change.

**John:** To be fair, you actually have to get the ore somewhere. So, you’re doing some carbon by getting the —

**Craig:** It’s so minimal.

**John:** But much less.

**Craig:** It’s much less. So, it’s vastly preferable to burning coal. So, fusion reaction is entirely different. Fusion reaction is when two light atoms collide together and form — they fuse together to form one big one and in doing so release a lot of energy. What’s interesting about that is that the fuel itself ultimately comes from seawater. So, you don’t need to go mining around.

The fusion reaction has to take place under such specific containment that if there was any kind of failure of the containment the reaction would stop immediately. So, there’s no melting down. There’s no release of dangerous radiation. I think the worst case scenario would be minor radiation within the fence line of the property of the fission reactor.

And also the byproducts in the end while somewhat radioactive, maybe are dissipated within 100 years or so. So, at least they’re not going to be there forever.

Problem with fusion reacting is that it takes an enormous amount of pressure to smash these atoms together and up to date it’s been very hard to get more energy out then it takes to actually smash them together.

**John:** So, we’ve been able to make bombs out of it, but not make a sustainable fusion reaction.

**Craig:** Correct. Sustainable fusion reaction, it’s hard to run at a surplus of energy, which is the whole point. You certainly don’t want to run it at a deficit. They’ve had these large things called tokamak reactors, tokamak fusion reactors, the ITER which was a prior Cool Thing of mine which is the French version they’re working on.

But Lockheed all of a sudden comes out and goes, whoa, whoa, we actually figured out a way to make this really small fusion reactor and because it’s so small it’s going to be way more efficient and we think in ten years we’re going to have a perfectly well-functioning fusion reactor running on seawater that would be the size of a truck that could power a town or something.

**John:** Yeah. So, if — let’s just stipulate — if this could actually happen, that would be incredible. It would be incredible for the future of energy, for the future of American industry, for the future of — it would be incredible.

**Craig:** Yeah. It would be the single greatest industrial impact on human civilization. Period. The end. Because what we would do is eliminate the notion of energy resources. The one thing that we are not running short on on the planet is ocean water and frankly even then the reaction is very efficient.

So, essentially what we would do is we would say, globally, no globally, we have a safe pollution-free, endlessly renewable source of energy that we can put everywhere.

So, oil, done. All of it. Just oil, natural gas, coal, all of it, done.

**John:** There are some things, okay, so to be fair there are some things which fusion power is not great for. It’s not great for flying planes.

**Craig:** I disagree.

**John:** All right. How do you make a nuclear jet? A fusion jet?

**Craig:** Oh, if the Lockheed engine is correct, it would be no bigger than the big gas-powered engines on planes. You would have, absolutely. In fact, planes would be the first thing that would probably go, would be a fusion-powered plane.

Look, we already have fission-powered submarines. They’re dangerous. We have them.

If you have a small fusion reactor, yeah, for sure. You would basically tank up your plane with seawater and off you’d go.

**John:** Well, I mean, Craig, I know that you are looking forward to charging your Tesla off of this. I don’t blame you.

**Craig:** For sure. Now, here’s the downside. They may just be full of crap.

**John:** There’s an incredibly high likelihood that they are.

**Craig:** Right. So, let’s look at the balance sheet of the full of crapness. On the plus side in their favor, it’s Lockheed. It’s not like Ponds and Fleishman going, “Cold fusion,” which was nonsense. This is Lockheed. They’re pretty big and they’ve been around for awhile. And they don’t tend to just make stuff up and lie.

On the downside, there are a lot of scientists saying we don’t even think that’s theoretically possible. And the more concerning thing is that Lockheed is asking for private investment in this project. And as one scientist pointed out, that would sort of be like if the White House wanted a military project, them going to like a small town Savings & Loan.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s weird.

**John:** It’s weird.

**Craig:** Why isn’t Lockheed just funding it themselves? They have billions of dollars? So —

**John:** Yeah. If they started a Kickstarter for it then Craig would be really, really furious.

**Craig:** Oh my god, I would lose my mind.

**John:** Ha-ha.

**Craig:** My mind! But anyway, I hope that it does change the world forever, and ever, and ever.

**John:** I like to have hope. Hope is a nice thing.

**Craig:** I sure do like hoping about these things.

**John:** Well, I hope I will see many of our listeners at the Austin Film Festival next week. That will be our episode for next week. Assuming nothing goes wrong with the audio that will be our episode for next week.

If you would like to tweet something at Craig, maybe wishing him a very happy attendance at his wedding —

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, it’s not my wedding. I mean, I’m already married.

**John:** At the wedding he’s going to.

**Craig:** At the wedding I’m attending. It’s going to be a great wedding.

**John:** He is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. We actually have this new Twitter account set up for a thing we’re working on here called @writeremergency. If you tweet Help to @writeremergency, we will tweet back to you. And we have interns standing by who will write back to you with hopefully helpful suggestions.

**Craig:** [laughs] No.

**John:** [laughs] No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** You should give up. Give up on your dreams. That’s what they’ll say.

**Craig:** Quit now. Quit now. You’ll never make it.

**John:** Never. Never.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If you have longer questions, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also, johnaugust.com is also where you’ll find show notes for the things we talk about. You can sign up for the premium feed. We are so, so close to getting 1,000 subscribers on our premium feed at scriptnotes.net.

**Craig:** Dirty show.

**John:** If we hit that, we’re going to do the dirty show, and man, we have some really good ideas for special guests for the dirty show. That will only be available for the premium subscribers. So, that’s yet another good reason to do the subscription.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** iTunes, just search for Scriptnotes. Thank you, again, to the iTunes Store for highlighting us as one of the best podcasts. That was terrific. And that’s also because people who subscribed left a comment and the iTunes people notice that. So, that’s lovely when you do that.

That is, I think, it for the show.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** Oh, sorry, it’s produced by Stuart Friedel, who is actually not here today, but he does produce the show, so thank you, Stuart. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli who does a masterful job making us sound coherent. And that’s our show. So, thank you. And join us next week.

**Craig:** Have fun in Austin.

**John:** Thanks. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* The new [iMac with 5k Retina display](http://www.apple.com/imac-with-retina/)
* [OSX Yosemite](https://www.apple.com/osx/)
* [Retina displays](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina_Display) on Wikipedia
* [Comedy Bang Bang](http://www.comedybangbang.com/)
* John’s schedule at [the 2014 Austin Film Festival](http://austinfilmfestival2014.sched.org/speaker/john_august.1sssegfs?iframe=no&w=i:0;&sidebar=yes&bg=no#.VDMKbCldVjc)
* Help is on the way at [writeremergency.com](http://www.writeremergency.com/)
* If there is a problem with your shirt order, [reach out to Stuart](mailto:orders@johnaugust.com)
* The [31 scheduled superhero films](http://www.newsarama.com/21815-the-new-full-comic-book-superhero-movie-schedule.html)
* [Copywrong](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/20/crooner-rights-spat) by Louis Menand, from the New Yorker
* [Dragonbox](http://www.dragonboxapp.com/) secretly teaches algebra to your children
* [Does Lockheed Martin really have a breakthrough fusion machine?](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/531836/does-lockheed-martin-really-have-a-breakthrough-fusion-machine/)
* [Tweet “help” to @writeremergency](https://twitter.com/writeremergency) for assistance
* Get premium Scriptnotes access at [scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/) and hear our 1,000th subscriber special
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Jackie Ann ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/toxic-perfection-syndrome).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 165 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Before we get started, I need to warn listeners that my audio in this podcast will be kind of terrible. It’s because of my own fault. I set a setting wrong. So, this is me speaking after the fact with a better microphone connected properly to my Macintosh. So, Matthew Chilelli has done a heroic job trying to make my audio sound better, but it’s a little bit worse than usual. My apologies. And we’ll be back to normal next week.

[Transition tones]

**John:** Craig, how are you?

**Craig:** I’m okay. I’m coming off of a cold, though. I think it went from my kids, to my wife, to me, but yeah, you know that day when you finally feel better? That’s the day you finally feel better.

**John:** Yeah, it’s sort of the 90% day. Where it’s like you’re mostly recovered. There’s still a trace, a little trace of that cold.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right. But not too bad. I might hack a little bit during this.

**John:** That’s fine. Matthew Chilelli will edit it all out. There will be sirens to cover it anyway.

**Craig:** Exactly. I’ll just time it when the sirens come by.

**John:** Nima Yousefi who is our coder for Quote-Unquote Apps who does Highland and all of our stuff, he was out sick all of last week with the flu. And so this is my annual reminder to everyone to get your flu shots, because the flu just is awful. And you shouldn’t get the flu. And you don’t have to get the flu. So just get a $20 flu shot.

Actually, to tell you the truth, our health insurance —

**Craig:** It’s free.

**John:** Free. So, just get your flu shot. The flu sucks.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know, the flu is stupid. Don’t get that. Is he sure it was the flu?

**John:** He’s pretty sure it was the flu. It certainly wasn’t a cold. He was out in a bad way.

**Craig:** Well, it’s probably the flu.

**John:** It’s probably the flu. And a reason to do it this year I think especially is because if you get the flu shot, you know, it’s not Ebola. So, it can be the situation where you’re like, oh, I’m coming down with Ebola. It’s like, no, you probably have the flu. But now you don’t even have to have those mysterious symptoms that you think are Ebola because you won’t get the flu.

**Craig:** It’s not Ebola.

**John:** It’s certainly not Ebola. And you won’t even be the flu if you get the flu shot.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Right. Today we’re going to be talking about Netflix and the Adam Sandler deal. We’re going to be talking about Turkey City Lexicon, which is this great compendium of science fiction terms and it’s also about writer groups. I thought it was just a great article that Craig linked to, so we’ll talk to that.

Toxic Perfection Syndrome, which is a Craig topic as well. And we’re going to talk about the WGA in 2014. Elections just passed and we should look at what the WGA should be doing and focusing on in the next few years. Big show.

**Craig:** It’s a big show. We’re stuffed.

**John:** We’re stuffed. But we have to start with some follow up, and the first bit of follow up is to thank Apple because Apple featured us this last week. They featured Scriptnotes as one of their top podcasts.

**Craig:** Boy, that made a difference. So, I never really look and see, you know, where we are in the podcast ranks, because of course we make no money off of this, so I don’t care. But we were like the number six podcast in the world for a bit there.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s pretty great.

**John:** We were number four at one point when Stuart was checking.

**Craig:** Oh my goodness. That’s awesome. Wow.

**John:** It’s just crazy for a podcast about screenwriting. It’s wonderful.

**Craig:** I didn’t even know there were that many podcasts.

**John:** Exactly. You’ve been on like three and that’s basically it, right?

**Craig:** Yeah, so I thought being number four was the biggest insult ever. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. Craig Mazin’s solipsism knows no boundaries. But it was very nice of them to feature us last week.

**Craig:** Yes, very nice.

**John:** If you are a new listener joining us from last week when we had Nicole Perlman on, stick with us please.

Another podcast you may want to tune into is the Slate Culture Gabfest because that is happening live tomorrow. If you’re listening to this on Tuesday, it is happening tomorrow on Wednesday. That is downtown in Los Angeles at The Belasco Theatre. Doors open 6:30. There is a bar. And there will be drinks. Craig will be drinking.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You’ll be drinking, right?

**Craig:** Pretty heavily I would imagine.

**John:** Yeah, because it’s a podcast. You got to get them before a podcast.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And the show starts at 7:30. So, if you do not have tickets, go to Slate right now and get some tickets. And join us, because it’s going to be really fun. And Natasha Lyonne is actually going to be the other featured guest. For a long time it was just me and Craig, and then when they got Natasha Lyonne, there’s now a giant picture of Natasha Lyonne and we are like — “and John August and Craig Mazin.”

**Craig:** That’s appropriate. That is.

**John:** This last week Slate and Vulture did a piece on The Simpsons. And they had a bunch of famous people talk about their favorite moments from The Simpsons over these gazillion episodes. And so they emailed me weeks ago and so they had written this very good intro, so I wrote a really good answer which was the Homer’s Enemy episode, which is the one with Hank Grimes — Frank Grimes.

**Craig:** Frank Grimes.

**John:** I can’t remember his first name because he’s just Grimes. And so I had written this good answer and I was like when are they going to run it. Well, they finally ran it this last week. We’ll put a link in the show notes. And there’s these much, much, much more famous people than me. So, I got like the bottom answer on it. But it was nice.

**Craig:** They’re asking you for your favorite joke?

**John:** No, favorite episode.

**Craig:** Favorite episode. And you went Grimes.

**John:** And of course, it’s like picking your favorite child. You could say Mr. Plow, come one, there’s so many amazing episodes.

**Craig:** It’s an easy one for me. I think it was the one where Krusty loses his show. And it’s the Krusty Farewell Special. That may be my favorite.

**John:** Yeah. I love The Day the Laughter D ied. I love Lisa’s Valentine.

**Craig:** There’s so many.

**John:** This could be a whole episode about our favorite Simpsons episodes.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. True. True. But what is your favorite single Simpsons joke?

**John:** God, I would say actually, I’m going to bend that as saying favorite song, which is probably Monorail.

**Craig:** Pretty great. I think my favorite Simpsons joke is in the episode where Homer was dressing up as Krusty because Krusty was sort of franchising himself, when Krusty and Homer dressed as Krusty — both appear in the mobster hangout. And one of the mobsters rubs his eyes and says, “I don’t believe it. I’m seeing double. Four Krustys.” [laughs] That’s just —

**John:** It’s so good.

**Craig:** So good. Ooh, I don’t know how they think of that. That’s so good. Four Krustys.

**John:** Continuing our follow up, Austin Film Festival, Craig will not be there because Craig is going to be at a wedding. So, putting friendship above his duty to the podcast, which is completely unrespectable.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** But luckily Susannah Grant has agreed to fill in and take your place.

**Craig:** Well, she’s a much better looking version of me. And she’s smarter.

**John:** She’s kind of a terrific writer.

**Craig:** She’s smarter than I am. She’s more successful than I am. She’s better looking than I am.

**John:** There are a lot of reasons why she’s a better co-host than Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** I mean, she’s nicer than I am. [laughs] Oh, that’s a great get. I love it.

**John:** So, Richard Kelly will be a guest as will Peter Gould from Breaking Bad. Peter Gould who was my film teacher at USC.

**Craig:** Well, spectacular.

**John:** Also, there are some other guests to be announced, so that will be fun. We’re also doing a Three Page Challenge there which will be second rounders from the Austin Film Festival’s Screenwriting Competition. And the panelists on that one will be Franklin Leonard and Ilyse McKimmie, so Franklin Leonard from the Black List, and Ilyse McKimmie from Sundance. So, that is going to be a fun time, too.

**Craig:** Wonderful.

**John:** Craig, we had announced on our previous show that if we got to 1,000 premium subscribers we would do a dirty episode just for subscribers.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** How close do you think we are?

**Craig:** I’m going to say that we picked up 600 people.

**John:** That would be inaccurate. But we are now at 906.

**Craig:** Whoa!

**John:** So within the next week or two I think we will be able to cross over that threshold.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s great.

**John:** So, if you’d like us to cross over that threshold, go to scriptnotes.net and sign up. It’s $1.99 a month. You get all the back episodes. You get the bonus episodes. And you get the dirty episode. But we need to figure out who should be our guest for the dirty episode. So, if you are a premium subscriber, please tweet at me and Craig and tell us who you would like to see as the guest on the dirty show.

**Craig:** On the dirty show.

**John:** Because it’s going to be good.

**Craig:** It’s going to be dirty.

**John:** It’s going to be dirty. Let’s get to today’s business. So, you linked to this article that Adam Sandler has made a deal with Netflix for four movies. Tell us about it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, it’s a pretty big deal, actually. I mean, you know, I’m the guy that’s always going, oh well, look, people are jumping up and down saying this is the new way of doing things in Hollywood and no it isn’t, but this might actually be the new way of doing things.

So, Netflix signed an overall deal with Adam Sandler where they’re going to make four movies and he essentially has, they’re kind of implying has pretty much control over those movies. And he’ll be given an ample budget. And I’m assuming that because, you know, he had a pretty lucrative deal and was making pretty big movies with Sony. And what’s remarkable about this is that Sandler is sort of saying and Netflix are both saying we think that big movies can now be piped directly to an audience and skip the theater experience completely.

And that’s a little earth-shattering I think.

**John:** So, the article you linked to, it was unclear. You think that they’re not going to even just do a token theatrical run? You think they’re only going to go directly to home?

**Craig:** Absolutely. Why would they do it in theaters? I mean, the whole point is to get people to subscribe to Netflix. So, no, I think it’s going to be exclusive on Netflix. And I have to say, you know, I’ve read a couple of articles that predictably said, “Oh, Netflix, what — Adam Sandler is stupid, blah, blah, blah.”

Yeah, you’re stupid. It’s not about what the movies are that you like or don’t like. It’s about Netflix having access probably to better metrics than anybody else in our business. If you think about what — their database of what people watch, where they watch it, how frequently they watch it. My guess is they looked at their numbers and saw that Adam Sandler movies are extraordinarily popular with their subscription base, which I should point out is international.

Adam Sandler’s movies tend to do extraordinarily well overseas, particularly for a comedian. So, I think they ran the numbers and they’re like we can’t miss on this. And it’s also intriguing to me because Adam Sandler movies aren’t really movies that demand a theater viewing. They tend to be more appreciated frankly in their ancillary release after the theater experience when Adam Sandler fans purchase them and watch them over and over, often while they get high. [laughs]

**John:** I was going to say dorm rooms. We were in the same brain space there.

**Craig:** I’ve got no problem with that. Or, or, that’s one kind of Adam Sandler movie. The other kind is a family movie like Grown Ups and Grown Ups 2, which are then watched over and over by kids. And so I actually think this makes an enormous amount of sense. And I suspect that a lot of agents woke up this morning or yesterday when this news came out and said, “Uh, I should probably get this for one of my guys.”

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And the question now is does this become something that we start to see a lot of. And if that happens, then the people that got to start worrying are the movie theaters.

**John:** Yes. So let’s think this all the way through. So, let’s first talk about who else is like an Adam Sandler and it would be another actor or be a filmmaker who makes a consistent kind of thing, because there aren’t a lot of actors I can peg and say there’s an Adam Sandler movie. Adam Sandler is very much identifiable with every movie that he’s in, as opposed to Kevin Costner who is like an actor in movies and sometimes a director.

**Craig:** Yeah, Sandler kind of runs his own little Sandler studio over there.

**John:** Melissa maybe?

**Craig:** Maybe, yeah. I mean, Melissa I think is starting to get that way. I think a guy like Tyler Perry —

**John:** Tyler Perry. Absolutely.

**Craig:** Could easily do something like this and probably should. I think he’d probably end up making more money. I mean, because remember, one of the things that happens when you make a movie is if the idea is I’m going to get paid some money and then get a piece of this movie, your piece of the movie is negatively impacted by anything that costs money.

Well, what costs a lot of money? Distribution. Marketing. Huge costs for distribution and marketing. Typically larger than the cost of the movie itself.

Well, unless you’re on Netflix, because then —

**John:** But Netflix is going to do tremendous marketing — they’ll have to promote the shit out of it, but then they don’t have to do all the other distribution expenses.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, A, they’re promoting it heavily on their own thing, right? Whereas even though, for instance, Disney owns ABC, Disney has to pay ABC to run ads. And they have to run ads on other channels, too.

Netflix can promote their own stuff on their own system which people are using frequently. And obviously they’re trying to get more of a subscription base. But the distribution costs are essentially zero. And that’s enormous. It’s a huge advantage to them.

So then if you’re an artist, you theoretically would be dealing with a much lower overhead situation where your percentage of the returns would trigger sooner and be against a larger base. So, guys like that run their own show, I mean, for instance Woody Allen, who I suspect is probably way too wedded to film and the cinema experience, but Woody Allen could do this if he wanted to.

**John:** Absolutely. If you have an identifiable brand. If you came in with like people know you and want to come see your things regardless. Kevin Smith maybe could do this.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you have a brand, I could see absolutely Netflix. Now, I think they’ve signaled with this deal it’s not going to be enough to be Kevin Smith. We we’re actually aiming for people that have and can make $100 million regular movie theaters. So, they’re making a big bet here but they’re also signaling to everybody else, hey, you know, come on over. It’s interesting. Really interesting, I have to say.

**John:** So, we could probably find the transcripts from when we talked about Netflix going into television, when it did House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. And that seems like, well, that’s foolish, or at least weird, because we had never really seen Netflix as being a company that was in the television business. And suddenly they were trying to be in the television business, well that’s crazy.

But it ended up being very successful for them. So, I wouldn’t bet against Netflix.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, Netflix is becoming the other HBO. And we know that HBO spends money on things that attract people to their subscription base. I mean, I think that probably what we had commented on was that Netflix wasn’t going to kill network television, and it hasn’t. It hasn’t come close to it. Nor do I think this will kill traditional film distribution.

But, this may be good news for those of us who are screenwriters because as we talked about often one of the things that’s really impacted us negatively is the reduction of feature films that are being made, because there are only so many theaters and only so many studios that make these things. If Netflix is serious about this, they could become a viable new option. I presume that they will make these movies under a WGA deal.

**John:** Yeah, it would feel really strange not to. It would feel strange because the people who write Adam Sandler movies have traditionally been WGA writers. And so for them to start to try to make these movies with people who are not in that stable feels really strange.

**Craig:** It would feel strange. And I’m guessing that Orange is the New Black is a WGA show. I presume as much. So, hopefully that’s the case. That becomes a very enticing thing. Suddenly there’s another studio making movies. But this is a really — it’s an interesting development. I’m — this one, of all the new media is changing the world stories that I’ve read, this one could mean something.

**John:** So, Craig, you write big expensive comedies. You haven’t written an Adam Sandler, but you could write an Adam Sandler comedy. I wrote a Kevin James thing that never got made. If we were to write these movies, what kind of deal would we be taking because, you know, in looking at this there’s potentially no residuals, correct?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There’s no secondary market. The whole market is for that. And are you writers as a made for television, or what’s the contract?

**Craig:** I think there are some residuals. I think if you make something that’s direct to video there is a certain formula for residuals on it, depending on the airings. I think. I would have to look into that.

But, essentially on something like this you would have to negotiate with the people making the movie who have a fixed budget for what percentage of portion of that budget you get. And, again, that’s why it makes sense with Sandler, because Sandler has guys that he writes with. He writes with Tim Herlihy, and he writes… — So, you know, they can sit down and go, okay, well here’s the money we have, this is what I’m taking because I’m Adam Sandler, here’s what we have left. I think we can carve this amount off for you. Okay, that sounds good. Great. Now, we’ll just go.

Because he’s not going to get into a thing where it’s like, well, we’re going to develop for awhile and then we’re going to hire another writer, and another writer. And it just won’t be that, you know.

**John:** Yes. So, my question which was also unclear in any of these articles it they’re going to make these four Adam Sandler movies, but is Adam Sandler free to make other moves at other places?

**Craig:** It appears that he is. Yeah, that’s what I read, that he’s not married to them. I don’t even know if it’s a first look or anything like that. He’s going to make four movies for them. And he’s kind of the perfect choice because he will make four movies for them, no question. I mean, it’s not like he’s ever disappeared for six years. I mean, the guy makes a movie a year, practically, right?

**John:** Yeah, I mean, he makes more than a movie, maybe two.

**Craig:** Maybe more than a movie a year, right.

**John:** And his movies are not complicated to make. I mean, because they are generally high concept comedies with kind of a rotating cast of the same — Rob Schneider probably, wow, I’m going to make more movies for Netflix. The same people are going to be showing up in his movies again and again. They know how to make those movies.

**Craig:** Right. And he has a stable of directors that he works with. There’s a whole machine in place. They are a kind of self-sufficient, they are a group of people, you know, Frank Coraci and all the guys that he works with, that you can kind of go, okay, money in/movie out. We don’t need to build a whole machine there. It’s built.

So, it makes sense for everybody. And my guess is that Netflix looked at some numbers and went we can’t lose. This is a zero miss proposition.

**John:** So, let’s take four Adam Sandler movies out of the business — basically pick one Adam Sandler movie a year out of the box office, it’s not the end of the world. Like, none of these movies are the top grossing movies of the year. But they’re profitable for most people to make them.

**Craig:** Well, maybe, that’s the thing. Some of them are and some of them aren’t. And the reason why is because it costs so much to market and distribute. So, you know, when you have a movie like Grown Ups, absolutely. Hugely profitable. When you have something like maybe That’s My Boy or, is that was it was called? I think it was called That’s My Boy. It just didn’t do that well at the box office. You put those earnings against what it cost to release, it’s a tougher proposition.

And so that’s why this is kind of a win-win for everybody. I’m fascinated to see how this works out. And I have to imagine that we’re going to see more of this.

**John:** So, second is an article that you lined to called Turkey City Lexicon. Where did you find this? Did someone send this to you?

**Craig:** Yeah, it was tweeted to me. And I just loved it. I loved it.

**John:** I loved it, too. So, what we’re looking at is an article from The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. And the blog post, this one is edited by Lewis Shiner. There’s a Bruce Sterling second edition here. But it’s talking through the science fiction writing workshops. And before we get into sort of the terminology of the Lexicon, I thought their description of the writing workshop process was really fascinating.

They described this process where you get the writers together. Everybody has to print out some of their short stories, science fiction short stories, and then you trade them and everybody sits and reads them and marks them up. And in the process of giving notes to people was very much like an AA meeting in a way, where you had to go around in a circle and you’re not allowed to sort of speak back until everybody has spoken their peace about your story.

**Craig:** Right. And it sounds awful.

**John:** Yeah, it does sound — it just sounds awful.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t like it. I understand how it could be very valuable for new writers, particularly new writers who don’t have access to decent criticism. But it sounds frankly like too much. I mean, it’s hard enough to hear one or two people go through a lengthy critique. But to have ten of them do it? It just seems like it would take forever. It’s boring. At some point it’s just too much. You start to shut down. [laughs]

I don’t know, I just didn’t like that part.

**John:** The only thing I could sort of say in its defense is it gets you to think sometimes critically about your own writing because you’re seeing the mistakes other people make.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And as I started out as a screenwriter, reading a bunch of screenplays and reading a bunch of terrible screenplays at times made me recognize the things I never wanted to do. So, this may be an opportunity for people to take a look at writing that’s not the best Ray Bradbury science fiction writing of all time, but is sort of more on their level and see like well these are the mistakes that this person is making. I’m not going to make those mistakes.

**Craig:** Right. And so what they’ve done is they’ve compiled with very cute names some of the mistakes that keep popping up over, and over, and over. And some of these are very specific, I think, to science fiction, but some of them I think we could imagine easily occurring in screenplays.

**John:** Absolutely. And they’re just terrifically well named. I mean, from the very start, the Brenda Starr dialogue. Brenda Starr dialogue referring to the Brenda Starr comic strip which often had these speech bubbles that were sort of floating above the city. And it’s like, but who is that? And so this Brenda Starr dialogue refers to when there’s long passages of dialogue that seem unconnected to a place. It’s like you’re not really establishing a place where this speech is happening.

**Craig:** Yes, and we will see this in screenplays. I call it ticker tape screenwriting where it’s just streams of dialogue and where are they, what do they look like? So, there are things like this. Some of these things, again, they are more connected to novels, but in looking for some of the ones in here that work with our thing.

**John:** I like Gingerbread. So, Gingerbread is their — sort of when you use a really expensive, fancy words and fancy structures to do something just sort of like to distract you from the fact that there’s actually nothing there. And because in fiction you’re actually reading the physical words as the reader, you notice that. But sometimes that even applies to movies where you see like people did something in a really fancy, complicated way when there’s really sort of no reason to do it in a fancy, complicated way.

**Craig:** Right. And they have something called False Humanity, which I think is such a clever term. “An aliment endemic to genre writing,” and I would argue to a lot of screenwriting, “in which soap-opera elements of purported human interest are stuffed into the story willy-nilly, whether or not they advance the plot or contribute to the point of the story.” And I will see that in screenplays where suddenly people are talking about, you know, how they’re suffering from cancer and this has nothing to do with anything that’s going on. It’s just poking me in a button and making me supposedly feel something for them. It’s just irrelevant to anything else.

**John:** Yeah. It’s sort of spray on notion.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Like it’s not actually endemic to the nature of the story or to the scene. It’s almost like someone giving notes like I really want to love that character more. And so you sort of give them some weird backstory that has no bearing on the plot whatsoever. It’s frustrating.

There’s a thing here called Not Simultaneous, which is also kind of Ing Disease, I-N-G disease, which is that sense of, they describe it as “Putting his key in the door, he leapt up the stairs and got his revolver out of the bureau.” And sometimes you will see that in screenplays where you’re trying to combine a bunch of action into one sentence, but that’s not all happening at once. Screenwriting especially is such a present tense situation that those are separate things. Those are actually separate whole locations. And so you can’t just sort of bunch them all together in one sentence.

**Craig:** And then here is Signal from Fred. “A comic form of the ‘Dischism’ in which the author’s subconscious, alarmed by the poor quality of the work, makes unwitting critical comments: ‘This doesn’t make sense.’ ‘This is really boring.’ ‘This sounds like a bad movie.'” And I’ve seen this in screenplays where someone goes, “None of this, this doesn’t make any sense.”

There’s one screenplay I read where two characters are doing something that is physically impossible. And I go, wait a second, that’s not possible. And one of them says, “This doesn’t even make sense, does it?” And the other one says, “Eh, just go with it.”

**John:** Just go with it, that’s the sign.

**Craig:** Signal from Fred. I like it.

**John:** Other terms I loved were Card Tricks in the Dark. So an “Elaborately contrived plot which arrives at (a) the punchline of a private joke no reader will get or (b) the display of some bit of learned trivia relevant only to the author. This stunt may be intensely ingenious, and very gratifying to the author, but it serves no visible fictional purpose.”

And, man, I’ve seen that a lot where you were able to do something really, really clever, but it didn’t actually pertain to the story that I just saw. And Card Tricks in the Dark actually is a great description for that.

**Craig:** It’s so good.

**John:** We’ll see why that’s magic because there’s no lens on this at all.

**Craig:** Yeah, we don’t get it. One of my favorites is: You can’t fire me, I quit. [laughs] That’s an attempt to diffuse the reader’s incredulity with a preemptive strike, as if by anticipating the reader’s objections the author had somehow answered them. “I would have never believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself.”

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah, except that you made him see it yourself and none of us do believe it. And I see that a lot, too. I mean, these are all, like some of these are versions of shining lanterns on things, but a lot of times it’s just — you’re just trying to get away with stuff, you know?

**John:** Yeah, with that last one you sort of picture the cutting to grandpa on the rocking chair on the porch like, “I never would have believed it if I hadn’t…”

**Craig:** Yeah. “It was one of those amazing coincidences that can only take place in real life.” Yeah, well, yes.

**John:** And this is a genuine concern for a lot of movies is Idiot Plot: “A plot which functions only because all the characters involved are idiots. They behave in a way that suits the author’s convenience, rather than through any rational motivation of their own.”

**Craig:** It’s just so true. And this happens all the time. [laughs] Idiot Plot. It’s so great. I mean, it really is —

**John:** Especially in comedies, especially if it’s a high concept where like people have to just go with it to establish that this thing could possibly happen, but I think if we have any recurring theme on this podcast it’s getting back to being honest with what characters in that moment would do. And if you need characters to do something that doesn’t fit your moment, you actually probably need to — you can either change your characters or change the moment. But just forcing them to do something that is not natural for them in the moment is never going to be a good choice.

**Craig:** It’s never a good idea. And then my last one I’ll give out is Funny Hat Characterization. “A character distinguished by a single identifying tag, such as odd headgear, a limp, a lisp, a parrot on his shoulder, etc.” And you do often see this in movies where somebody is just — they’re the one thing.

**John:** They are the one thing. And the one thing characters, I find them actually to be fine if they’re going to show up in one scene.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If that helps you remember them in one scene, or kind of if they’re going to be in two scenes that are long time apart, having that one thing lets you sort of remember them — that can be great. But if they’re going to be along for the ride, you got to find something else that’s going to distinguish them and make them feel like they’re integral to things, because so often that one thing is just weird.

**Craig:** It just becomes grating. I mean, you’re right, if it’s a day player and they’re job is to be the guy pumping gas who says three things, sure. Like a good example is in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles the guy that picks them up in his truck and he’s just sort of like [snort/snoring noise], you know, he does that thing with his nose, that’s a Funny Hat Characterization. But he wasn’t a big part of the movie.

Yeah, if you’re going to actually have somebody in there for awhile, yeah, you got to give us a little more than that.

**John:** An example of it done well for me is in Pitch Perfect. I can’t remember the character’s name, but the girl who sort of whispers under her breath.

**Craig:** Lilly. Right?

**John:** Lilly. Yes. And we talked about her on the show before. And she’s great, but there’s a build to it. It’s a rounding device. It keeps coming back to her doing things and then finally you get these little great bits and moments. It’s sort of her one trait, but it’s funny. And so you like every time that you get one of those little moments with her.

**Craig:** Yes. And you can, I think, get away with — you know, Pitch Perfect is a kissing cousin to Police Academy. The sort of ensemble broad character comedies where you’ve got seven people and each one of them has a specific talent, you know.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, that worked there. But, yeah. Anyway, this is a good list. I really enjoyed reading it. Anytime we pick up these lists of clichés it’s just fun to read. And a decent reminder to us all that people are watching, [laughs], and they know what we’re doing.

**John:** Yes. So, Craig, next topic, you described it as Toxic Perfection Syndrome.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, I was thinking about this lately. And, I could be wrong, but I think that this is something everybody does. Every writer does this, whether they’re professional or aspiring. And the idea of Toxic Perfection Syndrome is you write something and you begin as it’s being completed, perhaps in the time between your submitting it and your receiving feedback, you begin to daydream about this overwhelming positive response.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** In which somebody is going to call you and say, “This is the single greatest screenplay I’ve ever read.” And they are full of unconditional love and approval and it’s just a complete — it’s just “Don’t touch a word of it. It’s perfect. It’s amazing.”

The cousin of that is the Oscar Speech in the Shower Syndrome, where you very tearfully thank the Academy for understanding how brilliant and perfect the screenplay is.

I suspect that this is something that a lot of writers do naturally because it’s an offshoot of the psychological effort required to actually finish a screenplay. You need to believe that what you’re doing is good. And that part of it is fine. As long as we understand it’s not real once you turn it in, because what happens — the toxic part of Toxic Perfection Syndrome is the feeling that you get when you’re suddenly hit in the face with this icy blast that is nothing at all like the daydream.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Nothing at all. And it’s hard enough to accept criticism and to not judge yourself, but to do it when the context was that in fact this was going to be the biggest thing — it was prefect and everyone was going to love it. That’s wrenching. That is soul-wrenching, and that’s where it gets dangerous.

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s talk about that space between you’ve finished a draft and you are getting your first reactions back from people. And I know that feeling so well is that you have been through this marathon to finish this draft. And there were ups and there were downs. There were moments where you doubted yourself. And then you finally, you have this thing finished and you have poured everything you have into it.

But then you look at it and you’re like, wow, this is really good. This is going to be a fantastic thing. And then you start imaging like, well, how are you going to get it to these people, how are you going to get it to these people. It’s like, oh, what if this actor wants to do it, what if both of these actors want to do it. How can we…?

You just start to visualize all the things that are going to happen, but then like what if we do a sequel and then you start going forward, forward, forward, forward. And on some level it’s completely understandable that we as writers do that, because it is our job to imagine things that don’t exist.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so we are imagining a future for this script we’ve written and it’s pretty understandable that given our process of writing the thing, that we would continue the chart of the success way up into the future. We think like, oh, it’s going to continue exponentially on this path into the stratosphere and it will be Titanic. We will be the unstoppable movie of all time.

And on some level that’s, I don’t know, I never want to sort of kill people from daydreaming because I think being a little bit delusional is required for success in almost any industry.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Particularly one that’s all about just making stuff up.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But how — I’m actually really genuinely asking the question — how do we bring ourselves back down to earth in a way so that when we do start to hear that feedback it isn’t just bewildering and shocking and seems like it’s coming from Mars.

**Craig:** Well, I think we do what you and I are doing right now which is essentially acknowledging that this happens. Because if we don’t talk about it, then we might think it’s just us. We won’t recognize that it’s a syndrome.

But you’re absolutely right when you say that we’re prone to this because we invent narratives for a living. That’s what we do. So, naturally we’re going to invent a narrative about our own work. And about ourselves and about our careers and how this is going to be received. And in that narrative we’re going to indulge in all of our dramatic tendencies.

The underdog wins. The bad guys lose. Somebody that doubted you all along is sitting in the audience just chewing their Oscar program, you know. And that’s wonderful. And we should feel to indulge in that because it’s a lovely fantasy, as long as we recognize that it’s a fantasy. That no movie that has ever done beautifully in the world started with a screenplay that somebody said, “This is perfect. Change nothing. You’re the best. Let’s shoot it. It’s perfect. Everything is great. Oscar. Legend for all time.”

It just doesn’t happen that way ever. So, if we can acknowledge that it’s a fantasy, then when we’re confronted by reality it won’t be so shocking.

**John:** Yeah. That makes complete sense, just emotionally and internally I’m trying to figure out how I would talk myself through that process and talk somebody else through that process, because you want somebody simultaneously to be completely passionate and engaged and they have fallen in love. It’s honestly a really good analogy for it is you had somebody wonderful and you are so excited to go out on that first date. Maybe like you met somebody on Match.com and you traded emails. And like, wow, this is going to be perfect — we click so well. Maybe you even talked on the phone.

But then you get into that sort of actual first date and it’s not what you think. And you had built this whole narrative about sort of like who he is and how it’s all going to fit. And then it’s just not that. And then you start to doubt, here’s what I think it is: is that you start to doubt that person, you start to doubt yourself, you start to question how did this narrative even come to be. And you sort of destroy everything rather than sort of acknowledging what was possible there.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And I think that the only solution to that, the only preventative is something that Dennis Palumbo talked about and that’s allowing yourself to indulge in the warmth and comfort of a fantasy without assigning real life meaning to it.

So, if you’ve discovered it’s a fantasy, that doesn’t mean that you’re a delusional idiot who knows nothing. It just means that you’re a human being that indulged in a very comforting fantasy. Similarly, if somebody who you in your mind fantasized would accept you and love you completely is in fact not doing that, but instead is providing conditional affection and criticism, that doesn’t mean they’re no good. They may be the best thing for you.

We just have to allow ourselves to do it but know what we’re doing. Toxic Perfection Syndrome is toxic if you don’t know that you’re fantasizing and you think, in fact, you’re predicting.

**John:** Yeah. I absolutely agree. Now, Craig, have you ever tried the opposite where you assume that it’s going to be terrible and that everything is going to go horribly, horribly wrong? I can’t sort of name the project, but there was one in which I was like well this is going to be just a disaster. This is not going to work well. This is doomed. I’m only doing this because I have to do this.

And weirdly, of course, it works out great. That may just be luck. But in a weird way it was sort of — I think by giving myself an emotional protection I never got my hopes up too high and I was probably a little bit more realistic with sort of what this situation was.

Many of the times rewrites are kind of that case, where I’m going in and I know like I’m not going to get this to an A. I’m going to try to get this to a B, because there’s not a way to get to an A. Emotionally that’s an easier thing for me to deal with.

**Craig:** Yeah. There obviously are some projects where you don’t have as much emotionally invested because you are coming along and helping to sweep up, mop up, finish the game, whatever analogy you wish. I will routinely while writing things think to myself, “Well, this is a disaster. I mean, I do this all the time.” Usually, though, by the time I get to the end I’m happy.

And I’ve tried to play the game of let’s do the bad fantasy, let’s fantasize the loss. But I usually stop because I realize I can’t — I’m not doing it well enough. This doesn’t match what actual bad news feels like. Bad news feels so much worse than this.

**John:** Yeah. Bad news feels like melting through the floor.

**Craig:** It does. It does.

**John:** It’s the worst.

**Craig:** You just feel — you feel like the inside of you is being flushed with something cold and dead.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s really — and that’s how you know, by the way. That’s how you know that you are a real writer. If you feel that terrible feeling, ugh.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a sense of like loss and no one died, but just like all this time that I put into this thing, it’s just like evaporating right before you and you see sort of no end to it.

When I described after seeing the first cut of Go, and I remember praying like maybe we will just never release it because it’s that bad. That’s what it can be. Sometimes it’s just like a phone call you get. It’s like, well, that was just awful.

I was coming into the office yesterday and I saw this look. Stuart had just hung up on the phone and I saw the look on his face. I’m like, oh no, something terrible has happened. And it was. He had just gotten a piece of bad news. And it’s just a physical, visible thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. And we have to acknowledge that. You know, when we get this bad news and we feel this, that it’s not precious to feel these things. It’s totally normal and it’s nasty. Nasty to feel these things. But, in a weird way once you kind of let yourself feel it, it gets a little bit better.

**John:** It does. And the other thing I basically said in Episode 99 with Dennis Palumbo is when you feel yourself getting these really strong emotions, I find it very useful just to turn on the record and see the little red light on the edge of your vision and just actually experience what it feels like. Because you are a writer and you’re going to be writing character’s with strong emotions. So, feel what it feels like to feel this emotion. And what does your body feel like? What does the world feel like? What are the words you would use to describe how you are feeling?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because there’s going to be situations where you’re writing characters feeling this thing and you’ve got to have a memory of what that is like.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Or, alternatively, [sings] “Turn it off like a light switch.”

**John:** Just push it way, way down and never let anybody see it. That’s another really good solution.

**Craig:** Form it into a small tumor.

**John:** Let’s talk about the Oscar Speech in the Shower. I’ve totally been guilty of that.

**Craig:** Every writer has done this.

**John:** Oh, it’s so pernicious. When I’m not fantasizing about like my Oscar speech, and basically the order in which I’ll thank people, and I’ll be classy about it.

**Craig:** Wow. I love it.

**John:** Because you’ve got to be classy. How am I going to get done with my Oscar speech before they start playing the strings.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s tough. It’s really a challenge. And do you do the Soderbergh where you don’t even really acknowledge the film. You’re really trying to give a message to the world about creativity and writing? Or are you thanking your mom? Who are you thanking?

**Craig:** Right? Are you going to do the thank thing? I mean, after all, everyone thanks somebody. I mean, maybe I should do something different. Should I not thank people? I mean, but it’s so funny because the concern about, okay, I got to get this speech done before the time is such a writerly thing. I guarantee you no actor ever thinks about that. Ever.

**John:** No, exactly. They’re thinking is the camera on me? The camera is on me? Great. Everyone is paying attention to me? Awesome.

**Craig:** The actor is like what should my face be like? Should I be like bewildered by all the love? Like should I do the Sally Field bewilderment? Should I do graceful, calm appreciation? Should I act like I’ve been there before, or should I just let all of my emotions pour out?

Meanwhile, we’re like, all right, I need — I have 45 seconds. If I speak at a rate of four words per second…classic.

Yes, we all do it. We all do it. It doesn’t make you dumb to do that.

**John:** Yeah, it’s dumb. And you’re wasting a lot of water because you’re in the shower and the water is running.

**Craig:** But you’re dumb. But you’re not dumb. You’re sweet and human for doing it. And, you know, we are in a drought, it’s true. That is true. You could always reduce the flow of water while you do your Oscar speech —

**John:** Sure. A good time to write an Oscar speech, or fantasize about your Oscar speech might be like when you’re on the treadmill or you’re doing some other exercise that’s just incredibly boring.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Do it while you’re there. Because then at least you’re like you’re burning calories and you’re planning your Oscar acceptance speech.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. But I can’t imagine any screenwriter has avoided this.

**John:** So, when I’m not planning my Oscar speech, the other thing I found myself doing way too much of is figuring out like if Beyoncé were to sing the National Anthem at the Super Bowl, how she should do it?

Because it’s really, the National Anthem as we’ve talked about before, is a challenging song to sing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** My latest theory is that you are asked to do it, so you’re Beyoncé, and you’re asked to do it. So, it’s really advice for one listener if Beyoncé listens to the podcast.

**Craig:** Obvs…

**John:** If you are Beyoncé and you’re going to do it, I think you actually start with America the Beautiful and then from “Sea to shining sea” you hold the Sea into “Oh beautiful.”

So, that first part can be — you can get some big energy out America the Beautiful and then segue that into —

**Craig:** Oh, that’s interesting.

**John:** Star Spangled Banner.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, that could work. I mean, but what if she’s Sasha Fierce? Then it’s a whole different — we got to give her a different vibe.

**John:** But I think that way you could actually get a little Sasha Fierce with like, because America the Beautiful is lovely. Star Spangled Banner is actually kind of militant. It’s kind of fight. And so then she can get a little Sasha Fierce and I think she’s done the “we’re all brothers and sisters together and now it’s time for let’s fight.”

**Craig:** The problem with doing the National Anthem is that Whitney Houston did it the best and it’s over.

**John:** That’s why I think you can’t do the National Anthem like the National Anthem anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s done. She nailed it years ago.

**John:** 100 percent. She just completely — that’s the best you can do.

**Craig:** You can’t do better.

**John:** Nope. Done. While we’re making sure that things are the best they can possibly be, the WGA, Craig. So, what does the WGA need to focus on in 2014?

**Craig:** Yeah, so we’ve got a new board, which is a little bit of meet the new boss/same as the old boss. I mean, mostly incumbents. We picked up a couple of new guys. Jonathan Fernandez, who is terrific. Shawn Ryan, who while he’s new to the board is not new to leadership. He was very active in negotiations for a number of years now.

So, I’m just thinking, well, okay, this is all great. And every time we have an election people talk about the same stuff. Read the book, I’m like here we go.

**John:** Here we go.

**Craig:** Here comes the list of all the things that are going to change suddenly when we elect these people and they never do. Ever. And I’ve started to ask this question in a fatalistic sort of way, but also in a realistic sort of way. What the hell can the WGA actually do different or better than it currently does? Because the answer may be nothing, which is a little bit of a bummer because it doesn’t function brilliantly right now, but I’ve been wracking my brain and, I mean, look, ideally enforcement, but they don’t seem to have the capacity for it. And the nature of our rules are such that they’re difficult to enforce.

**John:** I would say there are two things that I would love the WGA to focus on in this next round. And weirdly they are sort of two internal things and the two things that are so unique to us as an organization as opposed to any other unit. First off, we are the only union that is — we are actually hiring ourselves a lot. And so we’re one of the few unions where this showrunner is hiring these writers, and these writers are working for this showrunner. That’s a unique situation. And I think we have to have a closer look at sort of what that relationship is.

And sometimes the hiring practices that they encounter, both in terms of diversity of representation but also the way we paper team writers. It really comes back to how are we employing ourselves. How are we hiring our fellow writers in television. That feels like something that we need to take a look at.

And it’s not a going to be a comfortable thing to look at because if you are a showrunner, you’d love to have a bunch of teams of writers, but you have to make sure you’re actually treating them well, and you’re treating them fairly.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My second bit is also really about teams. You don’t hire acting teams. You don’t hire directing teams. You can hire directing teams, I guess, but it’s really rare. But you hire writing teams all the time, writing partners all the time. And it’s how you deal with them in features and how you deal with them in television. There needs to be a little bit more parity because right now when you hire a writing team for your show, you pay one salary, but you get two bodies. And how you are able to use those bodies is sometimes challenging. Even two brains, and sometimes you’re not supposed to separate them, but you send one person to set and you keep one person in the room, or send people to different rooms to break stories. That feels crazy. And I don’t think we should be doing that.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, yes. Those are all true things and I hope they change. If I had like an overall complaint, like a very generic, generalized complaint about writers, it’s that when we are en masse we tend to be very brave. And when we are individual we tend to be very cowardly.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** And I don’t like that. And I think you see that where we’ll have showrunners band together and make a big deal of it during strikes, but then individually they just turn a blind eye to all this stuff, which is not cool. Things like paper teaming is just really bad.

**John:** So, for people who don’t know what paper teaming is, paper teaming is: oh, here are these two writers I want to hire; I’m going to tell them that they are now a writing team and we’re going to basically pay one salary to hire two of them.

**Craig:** Right. So, you should be paying two people a full salary. Instead you just said, “Hey, you guys are both going to be working like individuals, but I’m going to call you a team just for the hell of it so I can pay each of you half of what I’m supposed to.” And that’s just wrong and we should be fighting that like crazy. And we should call in every single showrunner we have and just say, “Explain yourself. Explain yourself if you are allowing this to happen on your show.”

**John:** So, it’s not that there needs to be rules against paper teaming and those rules got disbanded, it’s like there were changes in practices and the union was not able to step in and sort of acknowledge that this has changed and it’s not acceptable. This is costing our members.

**Craig:** That’s right. So, what you have is a situation where every year there’s an election and people say, “Here’s what’s wrong with the guild and here’s how we’re going to change it.” And every year I think to myself, forget what you’re going to do to make the union better. How do you stop the erosion? It’s just been a general, slow erosion and I don’t know if it’s just that there’s nothing sexy about saying, “I have no ideas how to make this union better. I just want to keep it as it is right now and not have it be any worse.” Maybe that’s not a very sexy way to win an election.

It’s dispiriting. And I don’t have the answer. I don’t. I don’t know what to say to the WGA to say here’s how you’re going to make a bright new future for writers. I mean, other than digging in, you know, and holding the line here and now. I’d settle for that.

**John:** Yeah. Are there any examples of places where you don’t think they are holding the line?

**Craig:** I think there was an opportunity when they saw that culturally two steps were shifting to one step. There was an opportunity, because it wasn’t a guarantee that there would be two steps. And our contract to maybe shore up two steps for writers who were earning less than a certain amount, which I think would have been a very positive thing.

The paper teaming should have just been jumped on. That should have just been all out legal war on that one. And, frankly, tremendous pressure on the writers who were turning a blind eye to paper teaming.

So, Scott Frank’s very good movie, A Walk Among the Tombstones, is out right now. Have one of the great, I love this tag line from the poster: “People are afraid of all the wrong things.”

The WGA is afraid of all the wrong things. While we were staring into the void and whipping ourselves into a frenzy about what would happen if the network got to air another episode of The Office on your iPad, people were literally losing half of their incomes. We’re afraid of all the wrong things. So, there’s a monomaniacal focus on the companies and these big moves that they do and then just no real attention paid to what’s actually grinding people in the moment on the ground.

**John:** So, I have a counter example that’s really from this last negotiating committee, which was options and exclusivity.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It was a thing that actually did change. That is acknowledging a new reality on the ground with respect of writers on TV shows were being held under option where they couldn’t work on any other shows for a year at a time because the TV season had changed in ways that everything was just upside down.

And so this was one of the few things we really dug our heels in on this last time. And we made some progress. So, I would have loved to have seen that same attention being paid to paper teaming and to these other things, but that’s an example of something that did change.

**Craig:** You’re right. That’s an example of something that changed. And it also indicates the kinds of changes that I think the guild probably — if I’m going to anything sort of hopeful or constructive here, I think the guild should be focusing on what I would call quality of life issues for writers.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** And focusing less on how to combat multinational corporations and internet neutrality and consolidation, vertical integration. Get off of it. We can’t stop any of that. It’s just a waste of time. It’s a huge waste of time. And every day while they’re wasting their time on that nonsense or trying to litigate old battles of old dead things, what they should be doing is addressing quality of life issues for writers because it’s hard enough to get jobs. Then you get them and then suddenly there’s this new world of pain you’re in. That’s what they should be concentrating on.

And that’s a good example of one.

**John:** Yeah. And so I would list the situation for writer teams to be a similar kind of quality of life thing, because it’s made it incredibly difficult for writing teams to even stay together, or just to make a living writing for TV shows.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you just have to be careful to not put a rule in that makes it even harder for them to get a job at all.

**John:** Absolutely. That’s one of those challenging situations where — but the fact is true I think for all union situations, isn’t it Craig though? Where the rule that could ultimately help the writers as a whole could hurt some individuals? And that’s just the nature of trying to do stuff union wide, is that you’re not always going to make the thing that’s best for this individual, but it may be best for the overall class of people trying to do this thing.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. And now what you have to be careful of is let’s say you said, all right, we pay a writer X. And we currently pay the two members of a writing team X divided two. Well, the new rule is we’re actually going to be paying a single writer X, and we’re going to be paying a team 1.5X.

Well, I could easily see people going, let’s just avoid hiring teams. Let’s just hire individual writers instead. The actual hiring wouldn’t change. It’s just that people in teams would suddenly be disadvantaged. And be disadvantaged by the very thing that was supposed to help them.

You know, that’s where you’ve got to be careful. And, look, we could certainly start with the paper teaming. Like that’s just so to me a quality of life issue that’s just got to stop.

**John:** The Directors Guild, who often frustrate me, and people who are genuinely writing teams get frustrated by the Directors Guild because Directors Guild does not want two directors on a project partly because they’re I think nervous of sort of this kind of situation happening, where two people are being forced to sort of share one job and to share one salary.

And so paper teaming doesn’t happen in the director’s chair because the DGA is very, very strongly opposed to it.

**Craig:** Yes. That’s correct. And they don’t like teams for a whole bunch of reasons. Maybe the prime one is that they feel that the single director is the thing that gives them this certain authorial respect. And they’re right. I mean, the singularity of the director does solve a lot of problems for people that are reporting on who made a movie.

But the Directors Guild has, to me, always been better about worrying entirely about quality of life issues for their membership. They are entirely about that. And the guild is not. The guild is entirely about some sort of political stance against corporations. As far as I can tell, that’s their focus.

So, for instance, if you direct a movie under a DGA contract, as I did, you are visited twice on set by a DGA representative who has a pretty involved discussion with you. And make sure that they’re following the rules and ask questions. And then stands and watches for awhile. Nobody come to you in the middle of a production and says, “Let’s go down and see how you’ve been…”

What they do is they call you after it’s over and say, “Hey, how were you treated?” Does it matter how I was treated? You know? Shouldn’t it matter how I’m being treated now? We don’t have that. We don’t do it. We’re just too oriented to a once every three years battle with the AMPTP. We’re too angry at these companies to spend time doing this other stuff. Yup. Yup.

**John:** Yup. Let’s get on to our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Craig, what is yours?

**Craig:** So, John, begun the drone deliveries have.

**John:** Ah, I’m so excited about drones.

**Craig:** I know. So, they’ve been talking, it just seemed like the most ridiculously thing. I didn’t believe it would ever happen, but it’s happening. So, there’d been talk that Amazon was going to try and basically create a drone army of little mini helicopters that would deliver packages to you, because the Holy Grail for Amazon is to skirt around UPS and the US Post Office and FedEx.

Well, DHL, which we’re all familiar with, it’s a big international shipping company, they’ve begun this in a very, very small way. There’s this little island called Juist that’s off of the north shore of Germany. And they’re only accessible by a ferry. And so DHL has created a system of little helicopter drone things that now daily carry packages between the mainland and Juist.

And it’s automated. It’s an automated flight. And it lands in a designated spot where a guy that works for DHL put them all, all the packages on a truck and drives them around and delivers them.

I do think that this makes sense. That we’re actually going to live in a world where there is preserved air space for drone traffic and we’re just going to get stuff delivered to us by drones.

**John:** See, I think that this example where it’s landing in one place, that it’s a hub and spoke system makes a lot of sense. I think the drone coming to the house is going to be problematic. Just, I’m looking at my house, and we have a backyard, but it’s going to just be weird and uncomfortable. And so your two-year-old runs out there and starts attacking the drone. It just — there’s so many variables that I worry that in actual normal residential life it will be problematic.

**Craig:** I think they’re going to figure it out.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** I don’t doubt the future. I just think the future is going to probably look a little different than what this is right now.

**Craig:** I don’t know. But I just like the idea of just streaming done traffic constantly above us, bringing us our stuff.

**John:** So, your drone could deliver my One Cool Thing. So, two or three weeks ago on the show you mentioned that you had a new razor that you love that has 19 blades and is, of course, great.

**Craig:** Swivel Thingy.

**John:** Swivel Thingy. And so sort of follow up to that, that same week I got this thing called Blade Buddy. And I heard about similar kinds of things and this one was well reviewed, so I tried it. It’s a $20 thing you get and it’s basically sort of like how you have a sharpening skill for like a fancy kitchen knife. So, just take the edge and the curl off of a blade, so it’s not like wet stone that’s taking the edge off. This thing is for sharpening normal Gillette kind of razor blades.

And so what you do, it’s this sort of rubberized little stand thing and you brush the blade against it 20 times. Takes like ten seconds. And it just takes the dents off the blade. And so you can use one blade quite a lot longer than you normally could.

**Craig:** And it works on multiple blades, like the kind you use?

**John:** Yes, it works great.

**Craig:** Buy now with one click. And done.

**John:** And done. But here’s the thing: I do find that the new razor blades are really good and they do make shaving delightful and comfortable. But they’re so crazy expensive.

**Craig:** They’re ridiculously expensive.

**John:** You can get, I mean, if you can double the life of one of those blade heads, that’s money very well spent.

**Craig:** Yeah, this sounds awesome.

**John:** So, anyway, you will try it out and maybe next week you’ll let us know how it is.

**Craig:** Great. Done.

**John:** And that’s our show. So, as always our show is produced by Stuart Friedel. Is edited by Matthew Chilelli. If you like the show and want to subscribe to it, just go to iTunes and click subscribe and leave a comment there. But if you’d like to subscribe to the premium feed, which has all the back episodes and bonus content, you go to scriptnotes.net and click on the little banner thing. And it says Premium Stuff. And then you put in your information and then you can listen to us on the apps for the iPhone and for Android.

**Craig:** How much does that cost again?

**John:** $1.99 a month.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s insulting now if you don’t do it. And you know our pledge. What’s our pledge, John?

**John:** We are a money-losing podcast.

**Craig:** We will always be a money-losing podcast.

**John:** We will always be a money-losing podcast.

**Craig:** Don’t you worry.

**John:** If you have a question for Craig Mazin you should tweet at him, @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust on Twitter. Longer questions go to ask@johnaugust.com

johnaugust.com. is also where you’ll find the show notes for today’s episode, so things about the drone helicopters and science fiction lists and Adam Sandler. It’s also a place where you can click to find tickets for the Slate Live Culture Gabfest which is tomorrow. And maybe we’ll even find something about why you should get a flu shot, because you should get a flu shot.

**Craig:** Yeah, get the flu shot.

**John:** Get the flu shot. Come on. That’s our show. Craig, thank you.

**Craig:** Good show. Thank you, John. See you next time.

**John:** See you next time.

Links:

* Get your [flu shot](http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/flushot.htm)!
* [Get tickets now](http://www.slate.com/live/la-culturefest.html) for tomorrow’s live Slate Culture Gabfest with guests John and Craig
* John and others [on their favorite Simpsons episodes and moments](http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/09/29/the_simpsons_daniel_radcliffe_amy_schumer_fred_armisen_and_other_celebrities.html?wpsrc=fol_tw) from Slate
* John’s schedule at [the 2014 Austin Film Festival](http://austinfilmfestival2014.sched.org/speaker/john_august.1sssegfs?iframe=no&w=i:0;&sidebar=yes&bg=no#.VDMKbCldVjc)
* Business Insider on [the Adam Sandler/Netflix deal](http://www.businessinsider.com/why-netflix-did-adam-sandler-deal-2014-10)
* [Turkey City Lexicon](http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer-for-sf-workshops/)
* [Drone delivery has begun](http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/dhl-drone-start-making-deliveries-german-island/)
* [Blade Buddy](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NIPQ0VW/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* Get premium Scriptnotes access at [scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/) and hear our 1,000th subscriber special
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Betty Spinks ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))