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

**Disclaimer**

**John August:** Today’s podcast contains explicit language. Also, there’s a Q&A at the end of the episode. We’re going to split that off as a second episode that will air a few days later. So, enjoy.

**Announcer:** In a world overrun with franchises, in a time of inexhaustible umbrage, one man must stand alone with another guy because it’s kind of a teamwork thing. To bring you the Scriptnotes Summer Superhero Spectacular.

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin. Oh, thank you.

**John:** Thank you. And this is The Scriptnotes Summer Superhero Spectacular.

**Craig:** Yes. I had no idea that that was going to happen.

**John:** This is all a surprise to Craig.

**Craig:** Everything is a constant surprise to me. I had no idea that was going to happen. I didn’t know how many chairs were going to be up here. I’m totally unprepared.

Oh, no, wait, I’m prepared today.

**John:** You printed out your Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Woo! Printed out my Three Page Challenges. I have questions.

**John:** That’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah. I hope those people showed up.

**John:** I think they did. We hope they showed up.

**Craig:** You don’t mind if I check my email?

**John:** Yeah. Check your phone. That’s good. We’re just doing a podcast here. It’s fine.

**Craig:** Oh. Hi!

**John:** Hello! So, we should explain to people listening at home that we are here at the Writers Guild Theater at an event sponsored by the Writers Guild Foundation. Let’s thank the Writers Guild Foundation for having us all here tonight.

So, Craig and I are up on stage by ourselves at this moment. We’re going to have some fantastic people up on stage to talk about superheroes, to talk about the pages that people sent in.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s a big time show.

**John:** It’s a live Three Page Challenge. It’s going to be a very big show.

Craig, tonight we’re talking about superheroes, but really most scripts have heroes of some kind. What makes a superhero different?

**Craig:** Well, superheroes — I’m just giving you the answer I think.

**John:** Sure. There’s no wrong answers, except that there are.

**Craig:** There are. [laughs] Superheroes are humans usually, but occasionally human-like aliens —

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Who wear costumes, and because they’re heroes not villains, they fight crime. And they are either — I know this because I played the Marvel role playing game, not that I was a dork or anything —

**John:** No, no. It’s well established. It’s canon that he was not a dork.

**Craig:** They’re either mutants. Or they’re altered humans. Or they’re aliens. Or they’re just obsessive, like Batman for instance, who is just mentally ill.

**John:** Yeah. He’s kind of crazy.

**Craig:** Right. That would be my definition.

**John:** So, your definition is a person who is, a hero who is more than just an ordinary person in a very special — there’s something about them that is special.

**Craig:** Like super.

**John:** Super. Super is a crucial part of it.

**Craig:** So, they’re a hero that’s super.

**John:** Okay, so more than an ordinary hero?

**Craig:** Super.

**John:** All right. Well established. But where did superheroes come from? Like if we go back through time how do we figure out where superheroes came from. We talked about archetypes on the last episode. So, what is the superhero archetype?

**Craig:** Well, we were talking about mythology the other day and I think that mythology is, you know, gods in the old days — like now God is just a concept or whatever Oprah says God is, or so on and so forth. But in the old days gods would actually — there were many of them and they would show up and talk to you and meddle in your affairs and help you out and give you advice.

And so those were probably the first templates, but there were also if you want to be really specific there were certain humans like Achilles or Hercules that were humans that were champions. Goliath. And the idea of a champion I think is probably where the superhero came.

**John:** Yeah. So, it’s a human but they’re more than just human. They’re touched —

**Craig:** They’re super.

**John:** Well, yes, they’re super. We’ve established that. But they’re touched by something god-like. So, if you talk about the Greek heroes, you talk about Hercules, he is literally like a half — he’s a demigod, he’s a half god.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, superheroes have been around for quite a time, they just haven’t always worn capes. They used to wear —

**Craig:** Thongs.

**John:** Sandals. Togas. Which brings us to our first guest because she’s actually writing one of those superheroes. Andrea Berloff is writing Conan —

**Craig:** Andrea Berloff.

**John:** Andrea Berloff, come up here.

**Craig:** Berloff. Here, I’ll move down.

**John:** Sit here.

**Craig:** Put you there. You can go there.

**Andrea Berloff:** Is this like between two ferns, it’s between two writers?

**Craig:** Andrea Berloff! Andrea Berloff.

**Andrea:** Hi.

**Craig:** You know what I’ve always wanted to say to you?

**Andrea:** No what?

**Craig:** Andrea Berloff, straight outta Compton. Crazy motherfucker named Berloff!

**Andrea:** Crazy motherfucker named Berloff. [laughs]

**John:** Andre Berloff, what is the deal with Conan? When someone says like, “Hey, do you want to write the Conan movie” and you’re like — ?

**Andrea:** Yeah!

**John:** Yeah.

**Andrea:** Hell yeah.

**John:** So tell us about that character. What is it about that character that makes you want to write him?

**Andrea:** You know, he’s just a guy who’s angry, he’s so angry, and so am I.

**John:** He’s a barbarian, in fact.

**Andrea:** He’s a barbarian and so am I. And I get to just be angry every day and get my foot — no, I’m kidding. But not really. He is who every little person wants to be. He wants to be the guy — he is the guy who is writing wrong, who is kicking ass, and who just doesn’t want to have a conversation about it. He’s just going to get the job done.

**John:** So, when you go in to talk about the Conan movie, first off, are you saying “Cone-in” or “Cone-an?”

**Andrea:** I say “Cone-an.”

**Craig:** Oh, it’s “Cone-an.” “Cone-in” is —

**Andrea:** “Cone-in” is O’Brien.

**John:** He hosts a talk show.

**Craig:** He’s that albino on TV. This is —

**John:** Yeah. He’s the one who sort of got screwed out of a late night talk show. Yeah.

**Craig:** Conan is Stuart’s real dad. Conan.

**John:** Oh, Conan.

**Craig:** Where is Stuart?

**John:** No, no, we’re going to establish Stuart later on.

**Craig:** Oh, okay, because I’ve got something to say about Stuart later.

**John:** All right. We’ve got a lot to say about Stuart. We have a Three Page Challenge here and Stuart is integral to the Three Page Challenge.

So, you go in to talk about doing a Conan movie, what are you saying? What is the thing that gets you that job in that room? What are you talking about?

**Andrea:** God if I know. I think, look, I think when you take on one of these iconic characters there is so much that you have to consider. You have to number one come up with a new story because it can’t just be, “Oh, I liked episode 47 from the 1978 series.” It’s got to be something exciting that’s both going to satisfy the fans and bring in tons of new people who don’t really know anything about this character. And why should I be watching this character.

So, I think for me it’s keying into the few sort of iconic things that the fans love, but then also bring in a lot of special sauce to it. And for me that’s really digging down deep in the character. And I don’t want to approach a superhero character any differently than I would approach any other character. They’ve got to have motivation and all the great elements that people who have MFAs know how to talk about better than I do. [laughs]

**John:** Well let’s talk about what are the iconic things that people expect in the Conan movie from your perspective. What are the things — if you don’t match this list then you’re not a Conan movie?

**Andrea:** It’s funny. I had things that I thought were iconic Conan things and then as I’ve been working on the project I get sort of feedback where I’m like people go, “He’s got to be punching a horse.”

**Craig:** He’s got to punch a horse. That was what I was going to say. You have to punch a horse.

**Andrea:** And a camel. Got to punch a —

**Craig:** Is he punching a horse?

**Andrea:** I can neither confirm nor deny about horse punching. However —

**Craig:** He should punch like an elephant. Like make it bigger.

**John:** How about a zebra? A zebra? Any other ideas or suggestions for animals he could punch?

**Craig:** You don’t punch a zebra. That’s horrible.

**Andrea:** A kitty cat. What if Conan — ?

**Craig:** No, no, you punch the horse.

**Andrea:** The horse. Right. So, my point is I feel like there are iconic things such as, you know —

**Craig:** Punching the horse.

**Andrea:** Punching a horse. Maybe spinning a wheel. That doesn’t mean that things are going to end up in the movie. I make no promises.

**Craig:** You mean that thing where he’s pushing the wheel like, “Argh.” Yeah, you got to push that wheel.

**Andrea:** Right. I make no promises however. But, you know, there are sort of these iconic moments, but more than that it’s a guy who just cannot stand people telling him what to do when he doesn’t —

**Craig:** Well, that’s the thing. Conan is an interesting character because, I mean, my memory of those movies and even reading some of the comics and stuff like that is that he’s not an angst-ridden character because Conan is set in a prehistoric time where there’s no angst. You know what I mean? Like Batman is super angsty. And we’re going to talk to David Goyer in a bit and Captain America gets really angsty about politics.

Conan doesn’t care about politics. Conan doesn’t vote, you know what I mean?

**Andrea:** No. No. There’s a right and a wrong and you do what’s right —

**Craig:** Conan really is just like that horse, like the camel spit at me, I’m punching the camel.

**Andrea:** Is in my way.

**Craig:** Right. So, what’s the — is it helpful in a way to kind of have a character whose motivations are simplified down to that sharp point of I want this, I’m angry at that?

**Andrea:** Yes.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**Andrea:** Yes. Anything to not have to come up with more stuff and be creative I will take. [laughs] You know, it’s really great to have, you know, when he reaches a fork in the road you know which fork he’s going to take. He’s going to take the fork that is the proper fork to take. There’s no like, “I don’t know, maybe I should take…” No.

**Craig:** There’s no angst.

**Andrea:** There’s no angst.

**Craig:** Conan’s not Jewish.

**Andrea:** Craig —

**Craig:** How did they pick you for this? I don’t understand. It’s so interesting. I’ve known you for such a long time. I know —

**Andrea:** I don’t know what your vision is of me, but I am a tough woman.

**Craig:** I just imagine you like Yenta from Fiddler on the Roof, just like, “What? Conan, what, Conan?”

**John:** Now, Craig, we established that she came in with special sauce.

**Craig:** Oh, she had special sauce.

**John:** So, talk about special sauce. Talk about like going into that room to talk about like this is why we make this Conan movie versus all of the other Conan movies. Are you talking about the main context of other superhero movies or what are you talking about?

**Andrea:** Yes, but again, you don’t want to just be derivative of everything else. You don’t want to point to everybody else’s successful superhero movie and say, “It’s got some of this and it’s got some of that.” For me it went back to, again, the character. Here’s why this character is special.

And I’ve been writing this for Arnold Schwarzenegger who is the embodiment of that role, so it’s not this abstract, you know, “It’s got to be a handsome guy who’s really strong.” No, it’s Arnold, and so you have to be able to write to Arnold and use his skills. And so I think it’s —

**John:** That can be incredibly helpful. As writers, to have a limitation like that, like it has to be this person. It’s like all those other choices just melt away because like those other choices don’t make sense with Arnold Schwarzenegger. These are the things that make sense.

**Andrea:** And, you know, there are limitations. He’s not a 20-year-old guy, so you’ve got to write for Arnold. The story has to be created around Arnold, so that has a whole —

**Craig:** But the idea of the aging hero.

**Andrea:** I love it. That’s what excited me.

**Craig:** It always works. I don’t know how you would do this movie today but, you know, like Chuck Bronson movies, he was just an old guy. He was like, I think, I guess his revenge genre, I mean, he was already in his 50s. He was small. [laughs]

**John:** But he was angry.

**Craig:** He was angry.

**John:** Anger is a thing that doesn’t diminish with age. Anger can actually harden.

**Andrea:** But it was also the era in which those movies were successful. People were angry. Feel disenfranchised.

**Craig:** They wanted that guy. Yeah, they wanted like Bernie Goetz. But, there is something about the Conan mythos that also speaks to a very primal, simple, masculine fantasy. And I’m kind of curious how you approached that. And I don’t like asking questions like “as a woman” because it’s all like as writers, so forget woman/man. But how do you approach the concept of masculinity when you’re writing a character like Conan and your writing in a tradition where you know the Frazetta paintings of the boobies and everything. Is that something you go for?

**Andrea:** Who doesn’t like boobies?

**Craig:** Well I love them. But do you go for that?

**Andrea:** Well, I don’t know that I’m going for boobies. I don’t know that that’s my goal. But —

**Craig:** Have you tried it?

**Andrea:** But…I thought there’s so many ways I can answer that and none of them are really funny in the end.

**Craig:** We don’t need funny, just interesting.

**Andrea:** Just true.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Andrea:** You know, I don’t like to approach it… — Look, I tend to write male-driven movies anyway. That’s just where I’m most comfortable. And I always say I like to write male-driven movies because I understand women too well. And just as you said, the superheroes that are more complicated in terms of, you know, oh, should I do this, should I do that — I’m not into that. And I find that women characters, and I’m not disparaging women, I love women —

**Craig:** Me too.

**Andrea:** Do that. Women, you know, women process things a lot more. There’s an article in the New York Times today that a new study came out that showed that women take a longer time to make a decision because they want more facts. And men are very comfortable making the decision without all the facts.

**Craig:** Totally.

**Andrea:** Which I found really interesting. I was like, of course.

**John:** Conan. Yeah.

**Andrea:** I don’t know that we needed or an article.

**Craig:** Yeah, sometimes you just, I’m like I decided to punch the camel in the face.

**Andrea:** Right. And when you’re a writer it’s really nice to have that black and white stuff when in real life life is not so black and white and not so easy. So, for me I kind of love the more hyper masculine, if you want to call it that quality I can go. I love it. It’s fun.

**John:** This seems like a great time to bring up other writers who are working on this image of masculinity in a black and white world and the complications of that. Can we bring up Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.

**Craig:** Let’s do it.

**John:** Who write Captain America.

**Craig:** Let’s. Let’s bring them up. I’ll just keep moving people down. Hey, nice to meet you.

**John:** Thank you, sir. So, we’ve been talking about a barbarian. Is it safe to call Captain America a boy scout?

**Christopher Markus:** Hmm, I mean we rebel against it, but it’s the easy —

**John:** So, rebel, rebel, tell us. Tell us how you describe Captain America, because you’ve done two of these now. So, talk to us about —

**Christopher:** He’s the 90-pound man. Regardless of his body size, he’s a 90-pound boy who has been thwarted for a very long time. Well, about 23 years prior to his injection. And that he’s never had a chance to develop his insides, I don’t think. He’s a very nice boy. But he did not grow up as a handsome well built man. That makes a jerk. You know?

That’s a recipe —

**John:** Stephen McFeely, how do you feel about that?

**Christopher:** No, that’s a recipe for the bad guy in Revenge of the Nerds who, you know, wants to win the big ski race.

**Craig:** Did you say ski race?

**Christopher:** Ski race.

**Craig:** That wasn’t in Revenge of the Nerds.

**Christopher:** Maybe it was a yacht race?

**Craig:** No. But there was like an —

**John:** There have to be snow and mountains for a ski race. All right.

**Christopher:** It was a movie with a ski race. I’ve seen it.

**John:** So, you did the pitching, right, and he sort of just did the actual writing? [laughs] Stephen McFeely —

**Christopher:** I’m done here.

**John:** Stephen McFeely, talk to us about Captain.

**Stephen McFeely:** No, but the key to Captain, Chris is kind of right, that he was a hero before he was a hero. I mean, he was a hero before he was a hero. And he just needed his body to catch up to the spirit inside him. And it’s kind of…

— One of the things we figured out on Winter Soldier, the second movie, is that because of that tendency to think of him as a boy scout, the best way to get everyone on his side is to make him the underdog. And the easiest way to make him the underdog was to make the entire world corrupt that he lived in.

So, if you haven’t seen the movie, the idea is that everyone he knows and works with is a liar and is corrupt.

**Craig:** Kind of like screenwriting.

I want to ask you guys a question about politics. You know, screenwriting, I made that joke about Andrea Berloff being a crazy motherfucker straight outta Compton because she was one of the writers of Straight Outta Compton, the NWA story, which is as surprising as the idea that she’s writing Conan in a sense. [laughs]

Because, you know, Yenta. Fiddler on the roof.

**Andrea:** [laughs] Is there a point? Or you’re just going to make fun of me?

**Craig:** There’s a point.

**John:** He’s basically just going to nag on you for a long time before he gets to the question.

**Andrea:** And…?

**Craig:** I’m not just making fun of you. I’m making fun of you purposefully. You’ve thrown me off my complicated —

**Stephen:** Politics.

**Craig:** Yes, politics. So, the hip hop was, it happened and everybody thought —

**Christopher:** It’s just hip hop. It’s not “the hip hop.” I just wanted…

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is it Captains America or is there just one?

**John:** is it Captain American?

**Christopher:** It’s the United States Man.

**Craig:** So, the hip hop started and people thought, okay, well this is cool but it’ll stop soon. And it didn’t stop. And the superhero genre in a way, the revival of the superhero genre has sort of reminded me of that because it came back with… — I mean, the Burton Batman kind of kicked off something for a while, but it wasn’t so great. And then I think Nolan came along and suddenly kaboom, everything went crazy. And it’s sort of here permanently.

And one of the things that’s happened with the superhero genre, because I do think it’s here to stay in some sort of permanent fashion, is that it has become, it seems to me, the predominant genre for screenwriters to talk about politics in America which seems kind of nuts. But it’s true. I think it’s true. And particularly with Captain America. How could it not be? It’s called Captain America, right?

So, my question for you guys is at what point as you’re now going through this and you’re writing the third one do you feel like, okay, this is actually something that we should be continuing with and going forward with, or is there any point in that genre where you feel like, “Um, can we now just do a Captain America movie that’s not about America?”

Do you know what I mean? Like do you feel jammed by that in any way?

**Christopher:** No, I could see like 12 movies in, because they clearly have in the comics occasionally, I think, just recently — it’s been a really long time on the Winter Soldier story and dredging up his past. And they brought a new writer on who sent him into another dimension with like dinosaurs. And it apparently works great, because he works — I don’t know how he explains his outfit in dinosaur world, like why are you wearing that?

**Craig:** To the dinosaurs you have to explain?

**Christopher:** Dinosaurs are not American.

**Craig:** Great point. Great point.

**Christopher:** But I think — we certainly don’t think of the politics first. It’s inevitable in the job he has and the clothes he wears and the friends he has that the politics will arise. But if we think of the politics first, the movie is going to suck.

**Stephen:** I mean, we’ve been down the polemic road before. We did the Chronicles of Narnia movies, and if you start with an agenda or a point of view.

**Christopher:** But it’s just a lion.

**Stephen:** It’s just a lion. You’re sunk. And so we start with character. Character, character, character. And in Cap’s case politics, particularly for the second movie, is the water in which he swims. And for the first movie we had to address why a guy would choose to have an American Flag outfit. That’s one of the reasons why we had to do a period movie because it made no sense for a guy to come out and go, “My first idea is put on a flag.”

**Craig:** I kind of love that guy, actually.

**Stephen:** He lives in a compound in Utah.

**Craig:** Yeah, cool guy.

**John:** So, I have a question for you guys. You guys write the Captain America movies which is fantastic. Congratulations on them. But there’s also this other movie that came in the middle called Avengers, which your character had a big role in. And so what does it feel like or what is the process by which like, “Okay, now we’re going to make your movie and all that stuff happened and you have to acknowledge it happened, but don’t acknowledge it too much.”

**Stephen:** Right. It’s like he’s cheating on you.

**John:** Tell us what that process is because it’s so different than any other process out there.

**Stephen:** It’s weird. We’re part of a larger machine that has a number of drivers up there, individual pods. You know, we read the scripts first, early, or as early as we’re allowed. And so we know it’s almost always Joss, like what has he done and where has he left him.

And invariably because you only call the Avengers together when you have a really big problem and the characters all meld together, but they’re not necessarily big arcs for each individual character. So, like we know where Cap ends up in Avengers 1 and then now Avengers 2. And it’s perfectly reasonable and we can use him going forward in Cap 3. And he hasn’t done anything that violates anything we’ve done.

**Christopher:** But it worked great actually on Winter Soldier because it stuck him into shield, which was exactly where it turned out was the most fertile for the character. Had The Avengers not happened and they just thawed him out, we would have had to probably deal with all the stuff we didn’t really want to deal with. Skirts are so short. What are these microwaves? It kind of allowed us to jump all the crap.

**John:** So, you guys are dealing with a character who exists in a world of many other heroes and it’s complicated and there are other things going on.

Our next guest is also dealing with that. Let’s bring up David Goyer. David Goyer, writer of Batman, and Superman, and lots of other characters. Constantine. Thank you, sir.

**Craig:** Just take a moment to look at David Goyer’s awesome Jewish Yakuza arms. Look at them. Look at them. Oh, yeah!

**John:** For listeners at home, they are covered in tattoos from the wrist on up. So, you can wear a shirt that buttons down and no one will know that you have a tremendous number of tattoos on your arm.

**David Goyer:** Well, that’s the deal with the, I mean, these aren’t Yakuza tattoos, but with Japanese sleeves you can wear a longs-sleeve shirt and be presentable to your grandmother.

**John:** Very nice. So, these guys have had to deal with a Marvel universe that is complicated and ongoing. You are in the middle of an increasingly complicated DC universe. Is it exciting, or terrifying, or both? What does it feel like to be in the middle of that process?

****David:**** Both. It was nice to do four movies that didn’t have that headache, you know. It’s complicated. And they very eloquently… — I’m limited in what I can talk about because none of the kind of combined —

**Craig:** Just tell us how it ends.

**David:** Yeah. None of the combined stuff has come out yet.

**John:** So, does Batman beat up Superman? Does he have kryptonite? Tell us all the secrets.

**Craig:** Just tell us who wins.

**David:** My situation is a little different because The Dark Knight films were their own universe completely. And I mean it changed the kind of perception amongst Warner Brothers in terms of how those films would be made. And I’m not the first person to comment on it. It’s kind of interesting, like when we were growing up — I presume you guys are somewhat the same age as I am — the Marvel comic books were slightly more realistically than the DC comic books.

And it’s weird that they, like in terms of the movie world until the Winter Soldier, they kind of flipped. It’s just a weird thing that happened.

**Craig:** That’s right. Well, it’s that character. I mean, I’m not a huge DC fan, but Batman is my favorite character. So, I’ve always gravitated towards — I mean, I’m a big X-Men, I loved the X-Men when I was a kid especially, but Batman I always thought was the coolest character because he’s actually just psychotic. He’s mentally ill. He’s not an altered human. He’s not an alien.

**John:** Well, but that was a deliberate choice. Because the classic character isn’t mentally ill. It was a very deliberate shift to make that, yeah.

**Craig:** No, for sure. I mean, Batman, like early Batman was just ridiculous. I mean, Vincent Price was the egg head. It was nonsense. And we would run around on the playground, [hums Batman theme], and that was silly Batman. But obviously everything changed with Frank Miller.

**David:** Yeah. Frank was, I think, the first one to really say this guy is fucking nuts. Can we swear?

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, fuck yeah.

**John:** Apparently it’s going to be one of those dirty podcasts. So, yeah, there will be a little E in iTunes.

**Craig:** I mean, I called her motherfucker like three times.

**David:** I’m sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

But, anyway, I was just taking back to the… — Because of The Dark Knight films, those were separate but right or wrong Warner Brothers then sort of decided, well, we’re going to do these films but they’re going to be more grounded. And so that kind of led into Man of Steel and what not. But I don’t have quite the headache that these guys have had to deal with.

**Craig:** Well, that coordination of the Marvel pieces is really — it’s remarkable actually how well it works because all of us who have worked in Hollywood have watched —

**David:** But it also works because Marvel has true autonomy.

**Craig:** Well, that’s right. But, if you think about it the people that run any studio, at some level there’s autonomy there. Somebody has autonomy there. Somebody has autonomy, right? I have to give Marvel credit for balancing all those pieces.

**David:** Huge credit. Huge credit. And almost flawlessly matched together.

**Craig:** Almost flawlessly. I mean, I haven’t seen the flaw yet. But I have an interesting question for you, because so you were there at the birth of this new era. So, you and Chris Nolan and, it was just the two of you on the first movie?

**David:** The first one was just the two of us.

**Craig:** Just the two of you.

**David:** And Jonah came in on the second one.

**Craig:** Right. And you guys really began this thing. I give you guys full credit for that. There is this phenomenon now where you compress the amount of time required to remake something.

**David:** To reboot, yeah.

**Craig:** So, I don’t how many Spider-Mans we’re up to. I think we’re on the 19th Spider-Man of the last four months.

**David:** No, the windows are getting shorter and shorter. It used to be that it was like, okay, there needs to be, I mean, ten years in between reboots.

**Craig:** Yeah, or something, right? I mean, so like you had Keaton as Batman in like, what, ’85 or ’86?

**David:** Yeah, between the last Schumacher Batman and Batman Begins, I believe it was eight years.

**Craig:** That was a really good one, that last Schumacher one. That one was good.

[Audience laughs]

**Craig:** What?

**David:** That was eight years.

**Craig:** “Everybody freeze!” Good line. Because he was cold.

**John:** Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger. You can use that again. You can make a recall on that. He’s done.

**David:** Was that the one that also had inline skating?

**Craig:** Yes.

**David:** So? That was cool.

**Craig:** Yes it was.

**John:** I sort of have a question for the whole panel, though.

**Craig:** Wait, hold on, he’s got to answer this question first. He’s got to answer this question.

**John:** Ask your question first so he can answer it.

**Craig:** What is the — I did ask it already.

**David:** Wait, what was the question? What’s the acceptable amount of time before you can reboot?

**Craig:** No. How do you deal with the fact that you’re remaking a character you just made? Right? There’s a new guy playing this part.

**David:** Oh, I guess that I’m one of the few people that have to do that. That was weird.

**Craig:** It’s weird, right? It’s not like, they did this with Bond.

**David:** I’ll tell you the one reason why it wasn’t as weird for me. Because I’ve actually written DC comic books. Like, I actually wrote Justice Society for four years with Jeff Johns. And so one of the things that they do in comic books all the time is reboot shit. And Crisis on Infinite Earths was like the first time they really rebooted the universe.

**Craig:** It was cool. I liked that.

**David:** But now they just in comic books seem to reboot Marvel every few years. And so in writing comic books I’d seen creators, whether it be people like John Byrne or Neal Adams or these people that do different interpretations of the same hero.

**Craig:** So it’s kind of that move?

**David:** Yeah. It wasn’t that weird to me. So, it wasn’t that weird to me to say, “Okay, this is a completely different take.” Like, if Batman Begins was a sort of fusion of Frank Miller and the kind of Denny O’Neil, Neal Adams’ Batman, it’s like the new Batman was — I’m just making this up, I’m not saying this is what it is.

**Craig:** Because you would get sued, of course.

**David:** Yes. But was like the Jim Lee Batman. Do you know what I mean? It was like a different take.

**Craig:** I do know what you mean. I get it. I get it.

**David:** Batman as done by Neil Gaiman is going to be a very different vibe than Batman —

**Craig:** That would be pretty cool.

**David:** Well, you know, Gaiman did do Batman.

**Craig:** Oh, he did?

**David:** Yeah. But I’m just saying, if there’s that — and I’m sorry. This is super geek. If I know I’m going into a movie running the Jack Kirby Batman versus the Neil Gaiman Batman, it’s going to be a completely —

**Craig:** You should put both those in the same movie and then we compress this down even more. Like now there are three Batmans and —

**David:** Grant Morrison would write that.

**Craig:** Okay. Very cool.

**David:** Like from different universes.

**Stephen:** I have no idea what you’re talking about.

**Craig:** What did you have for lunch?

**John:** So on the topic of reboots, and we have six writers up here, we’re going to reboot some franchises. So, I have six cards here and I’m going to hand them out. And you’re going to draw a card and you’re going to reboot a franchise. So, pick anyone you want. Anyone you want.

**Andrea:** Can we trade if we don’t like our franchise?

**Craig:** You know I’m chaotic. I’m chaotic.

**David:** Chaotic neutral.

**Craig:** No, not neutral.

**Andrea:** Was this planned?

**Craig:** No, chaotic evil.

**John:** This event was planned. Yes. We actually sold tickets. People bought tickets.

**David:** This isn’t a reboot. This hasn’t been done before.

**Craig:** So that’s a boot.

**John:** So, that’s good. It’s a boot. You’re going to boot.

So, randomly people got cards. You’re going to read this. And so I think what we need to do is we need to figure out what is the modern version of this. What is the movie version of the character that you got? And also probably who is the villain or the antagonist, depending on you have? Who are they facing off against in the movie version that you’re doing?

Can you go first? So, read your person and tell us about it.

**Stephen:** I have Spider-Man.

**Craig:** Oh, thank god.

**John:** Congratulations, Stephen McFeely.

**Stephen:** Can I just mail this in?

**John:** You can book Spider-Man. That’s awesome. So, tell us, what’s your Spider-Man about?

**Stephen:** Holy crap. I’d have to know the first thing about Spider-Man.

**Craig:** There’s been 14 Spider-Men.

**Stephen:** Half-spider, half-man.

**John:** He’s half-spider, half-man. Tell us what he’s going to do.

**Stephen:** And go! Oh my god. Oh, geez.

**John:** You’ve got a writing partner.

**Christopher:** This is how it works.

**Stephen:** Also like Captain America was a weakling before his powers.

**John:** True, absolutely.

**Stephen:** Didn’t grow up a stud.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Stephen:** But, I mean, I just don’t want to do that.

**Craig:** Use spider.

**Andrea:** He’s already done it.

**John:** So, reboot it. So reboot it.

**Stephen:** Alternate Spider-Man.

**Christopher:** But what is that? He’s Miles Morales, right?

**Stephen:** First of all, I would absolutely make him Latino, or African-American, or something.

**Christopher:** A chick.

**John:** Yeah.

**Andrea:** How about Spider-Girl?

**Stephen:** And then explore that. I mean, and see if you can’t, you know, the phrase I use a lot, make the water you swim in, you know, that kind of thing.

**John:** Oh, the water he swims in? I like that.

**Stephen:** Yeah, you know, well, so that the idea that he is —

**Craig:** Do spiders swim?

**Stephen:** Yeah.

**John:** On top of water, yeah.

**Stephen:** But, I mean, I’ve seen the, I mean, I just don’t — I’ve seen the high school kid who gets bit by a spider. So, yeah, fine. But like give me the different version.

**Craig:** Oh, like maybe like an old person gets bitten?

**Stephen:** Well, but seriously, Miles Morales would do it for me. That would be interesting.

**John:** What if it was like, you know, he was like the old, like he’s been Spider-Man for, like he’s 80 years old and he’s been Spider-Man the whole time.

**Stephen:** Oh, this is the Frank Miller Spider-Man.

**Christopher:** The Unforgiven, Unforgiven Spider-Man.

**John:** Unforgiven Spider-Man.

**Craig:** Unforgiven Spider-Man would be awesome.

**Stephen:** Yeah. And the venom is killing him, you know, so there’s a ticking clock.

**Christopher:** Took a long time to die.

**Stephen:** Yeah.

**Christopher:** He’s basically dying of old age.

**Stephen:** He never gave up his Symbiote.

**Christopher:** The spider is bitten by a high school kid.

**Craig:** The poison —

**Christopher:** And the spider gradually develops the powers of a high school kid.

**John:** Seth Rogan. Seth Rogan eats a spider. Yeah. They share a symbiotic relationship. It’s sort of like Fire Storm kind of thing? Yeah, it’s going to be good.

**Craig:** I like it.

**John:** Christopher Markus, who did you draw?

**Christopher:** I oddly drew the Hulk.

**John:** The Hulk. So he exists in your world.

**Christopher:** He exists in my world.

**John:** Yeah, so have you written anything for Hulk?

**Christopher:** I have never written any — I’ve never touched the Hulk. I swear. [laughs] I would have Edward Norton, he exposes himself to gamma rays. He gets turned into Mark Ruffalo. And then he has to fight Eric Bana. And whoever wins wins.

**John:** That’s not at all a good movie. Let’s help him out here.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s pretty bad.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, Hulk is tough because Hulk is sort of Conan in some ways. He’s just …smash.

**Andrea:** Smash.

**Craig:** What about like a Flowers for Algernon kind of Hulk thing.

**Christopher:** That’s the whole problem.

Andrea. He has a gentle little mouse friend?

**Craig:** Like Hulk gets smart and stupid.

**Christopher:** The whole problem with The Hulk is that he, you know, everyone else becomes smarter and more interesting when they become a superhero. He becomes mentally deficient and —

**Craig:** Right.

**Andrea:** But why is he so angry?

**David:** Well, Hulk traditionally was Jekyll and Hyde.

**Christopher:** So it’s more like you expect him to sort of like crap his pants. It’s just, The Hulk. Maybe that’s what I do. He’s not angry, he’s just sort of incontinent and fat.

**Craig:** You’re not getting this job at all.

**Christopher:** He’s like, Hulk let himself go. He’s at a home. You know, he has to take the short bus. And then he makes a friend. And it’s over.

**Andrea:** Sounds great.

**John:** A thing that occurs to me —

**Christopher:** A bomb like all the other Hulk movies.

**John:** It occurs to me as we’re talking about reboots is that you have to sort of honor expectations for the character. You have to mostly do what you expect it to do. And you sort of change one thing in the world. And so Superman and The Dark Knight, he’s like a do-gooder, but he’s actually like a tool of the government and in a way that was really fascinating.

So, you take the world and you just change the one thing in it. So, what if he doesn’t become stupid?

**Christopher:** That’s true. But they’ve done that in the comics where —

**Craig:** I like smart Hulk. Smart Hulk was cool.

**David:** Peter David Hulk.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**Christopher:** It’s difficult.

**John:** It’s like Ocean’s 11 but with Hulk.

**Christopher:** Well, it’s a little hard to slip into a casino unnoticed. “Hi. I’m Mr. Jones. I’m just checking into my room.”

**John:** One of my very first jobs, I was working as an assistant for these two producers and they were trying to do She-Hulk. And She-Hulk is like the most fascinating messed up creature because she’s Hulk the whole time. She never changes out of it, which I think is kind of great. She’s just big and green.

**Stephen:** But she’s smart, right?

**John:** She’s smart. She’s normal. She’s like a lawyer.

**Christopher:** She has the worst, most demeaning character name possible.

**Craig:** It is honestly —

**Christopher:** You’re just the female version of the —

**Craig:** She-Hulk, the real name for She-Hulk was Slut Hulk. That was the whole point was like, “Let’s just make a green chick with enormous boobs,” and she’s Hulk strong but not Hulk massive, so like Hulk’s muscle tone —

**John:** Well, she does Pilates. She gets the strength without the —

**Craig:** Yeah, she’s real lean, stringy, and just hot.

**David:** She’s still pretty chunky. I mean, she was like Chyna from the WWE.

**Craig:** No, she wasn’t like — you put her against an R. Crumb girl and the R. Crumb girl has got bigger booty. No. She-Hulk was —

**Christopher:** What was it about we’re just not women or men, we’re just writers.

**Craig:** No, the She-Hulk, the whole point of She-Hulk was just to appeal sexistly to 10-year-old boys. It worked on me.

**Andrea:** As opposed to the other superhero comic books through all eternity.

**Christopher:** Boys were already sort of aroused by The Hulk but they were feeling weird about it.

**David:** Well, that’s where I’m going.

**Christopher:** Let’s give them a female one. It will take some of the pressure off this adolescent.

**David:** I have a theory about She-Hulk, which was created by a man, right? And at the time in particular I think 95% of comic book readers were men and certainly almost all of the comic book writers were men. So, The Hulk was this classic male power fantasy. It’s like most of the people reading comic books were these people like me who were just these little kids who were getting the shit beaten out of them every day, and they’re like what if I became a giant and could clap my hands and create a sonic boom? And so then they created She-Hulk, right, who was still smart. So it was like I think She-Hulk is the chick that you could fuck if you were Hulk. You know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** Right. No.

**David:** No, I’m just saying She-Hulk was the extension of the male power fantasy. So, it’s like if I’m going to be this geek that becomes The Hulk, then let’s create a giant green porn star that only The Hulk could fuck.

**Craig:** Yeah…or me.

**David:** If you were pretending you were The Hulk. Do you see what I’m saying?

**Craig:** What if I’m not The Hulk? Can I still?

**John:** No. No.

**David:** Then you would get destroyed. Your hips would break when you had sex.

**John:** Stuart Friedel’s whole family is here, including his grandparents, so thank you so much Friedel family for joining us.

**David:** Sorry.

**John:** We’re going to move onto our next person.

**David:** You said we could swear.

**John:** We can, yes. But we don’t need to go into like the long pornographic history of The Hulk.

Our next character? I got Storm from X-Men. And so Storm, so Storm is a really interesting character and I’m not quite sure what to do with her.

I do think that you keep her in Africa and I think you maybe start her young and you maybe do a period. So, it’s sort of like, you know, you can do something about either it’s — it could be about slavery. It could be about injustice now in Africa. But keeping it a young character. And honestly restraining her power down into like a Carrie level could be actually really fascinating.

So, you have this young woman who has incredibly control over the elements, but really can’t control her own thing could be cool. I don’t know. What else could we do with Storm?

**Christopher:** She has very positive power, you know, if you’re in a drought-stricken country.

**John:** Yeah. Well, she’s also sort of a god. We talked about in the origin story, she was worshipped as a god in some of the books.

**Craig:** I mean, we could have used her today, honestly. This was brutal.

**John:** Yeah. We’re calling out for a storm.

**Andrea:** I’d like to give her a nice stable relationship.

**John:** Ooh, I like that. Who does Storm date?

**Andrea:** Who does Storm date? Maybe Hulk? Maybe she’s the one who needs to stabilize Hulk. But, I mean, she’s a little stormy, right, she’s a little — and so is Hulk. And maybe together they can calm down.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** See, I was right about her, right? That’s very Yenta. She’s doing it.

**John:** The romantic comedy version of Storm and the fella could be really fascinating, too. I don’t know who the villain is in that story, but it could be the —

**Craig:** Divorce.

**John:** Divorce. Divorce is the villain. Yeah.

Andrea Berloff, who did you draw?

**Andrea:** I mean, it’s like ridiculous. I got Wonder Woman.

**John:** Oh, how did you get Wonder Woman?

**Andrea:** I don’t know. That’s why I asked you if it was planted.

**John:** I’m sorry. It wasn’t planned at all. So, Wonder Woman?

**Andrea:** So, Wonder Woman…I feel like there’s a few ways this could go. She’s Amazonian, right? She’s got to be upset about the degradation of the rain forests, I would say.

**John:** Now it’s sort of — it’s sort of more Greek Isles, but that’s fine.

**Andrea:** I know, but, right. So, I first thought maybe she’s going to fight like, you know, some deforestation sort of… — That said, maybe her —

**Stephen:** Fight some loggers.

**Andrea:** Fight some loggers. [laughs]

**Stephen:** But you need a super power.

**Andrea:** In my version I would like to be able to pass the Bechdel test, so I would have her maybe — like there’s an Amazonian mama that she has to report to and she has a lot of sisters. And together as a band they fight evil. And then she’s left alone in the modern world, and she doesn’t belong there, and she has to get back to the women that she belongs with. And, I don’t know where that’s going.

**Craig:** That sounds pretty good.

**Stephen:** I don’t know why — you could just do a whole movie in — what’ s the name of the place?

**John:** Themyscira?

**David:** In the past?

**Craig:** The Amazonian Island, Shangri La?

**Stephen:** The Amazon ladies.

**Andrea:** I don’t know. What’s it called?

**John:** I’ve said it like three times. Themyscira.

**Stephen:** “It’s only my damn podcast.”

**Andrea:** I can’t even hear you anymore, John.

**Stephen:** Honestly, I just heard the word and I’m like, I don’t know what he just said.

**Andrea:** Yeah, that can’t be correct. What is he saying?

**Craig:** Is that a restaurant?

**John:** The island is good — it’s one of those — they made the DC animated movies and in the Wonder Woman one the animated one is pretty good.

**David:** Why are you gesturing to me?

**John:** Because you’re a DC person. Because you have her in your movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, you did it.

**Andrea:** Is it Atlantis?

**David:** I’ve also done Blade though.

**John:** You have done Blade. That’s true.

**Craig:** I love Blade.

**John:** Blade is good. He’s a vampire.

**Christopher:** And Nick Fury.

**John:** Yeah.

**David:** I don’t take credit for that one.

**John:** David Goyer, who did you draw?

**David:** Martian Manhunter.

**John:** Ooh, you have the challenging one.

**Craig:** Overpowered. Overpowered.

**David:** How many people in the audience have heard of Martian Manhunter.

**John:** This is a good audience.

**Craig:** He knows he’s overpowered.

**David:** How many people that raised their hands have ever been laid?:

**John:** 100% of the audience.

**David:** Oof, well he hasn’t been rebooted, but he’s a mainstay in the Justice League.

**Stephen:** Is he going to be rebooted?

**David:** I’m not saying shit.

**Stephen:** Is he going to be booted?

**David:** Well, he can’t be fucking called the Martian Manhunter because that’s goofy. He can be called Manhunter.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** They have those.

**Stephen:** I rented that movie.

**David:** Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the whole thing, the whole deal with Martian Manhunter is he’s an alien living amongst us.

**John:** Is there another one of those in the DC universe?

**David:** Well, he came out in the ’50s and he had basically all the powers of Superman.

**Craig:** Overpowered.

**David:** Except he didn’t like fire.

**Craig:** Right. Oh god.

**David:** And he could read your mind. So, here’s the best part: he comes down to earth and decides, unlike Super man who already exists in the world now, that he’s just going to be a homicide detective and pretend to be a human homicide guy.

**Stephen:** But he’s green.

**David:** Yeah. But, no, he can change his shape. Instead of using super powers and mind-reading and like, oh, I could figure out if the president is lying or whatever, he just decides to disguise himself as a human homicide detective. Dare to dream.

**Craig:** That’s pretty dismal.

**David:** I don’t know. I would say — I wouldn’t call him Manhunter. I would set up a Day After Tomorrow and we discovered one of those Earth-like planets, you know, with Kepler or something like that. And you know how they’re talking about Scientific American like DNA faxing, where they can basically break down DNA and fax that information? So, maybe like —

**Craig:** Yeah. We send it there to that planet?

**David:** Well, no, we get the DNA code from that planet and then grow them in a Petri dish here.

**Craig:** We grow a dude here to solve our crimes.

**David:** No, but he’s like in Area 51 or something. And we’re just —

**Craig:** Just sitting there doing word searches and stuff?

**David:** Yeah, doing biopsies on him. And then he gets out and he’s really angry.

**Craig:** He’s pissed.

**David:** And then he fucks She-Hulk. He’s green! And he’s super-powered.

**Stephen:** That’s right. Because green people can only date green people.

**Christopher:** Goddamnit. I thought we’d come further.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s one area where we’re just not ready. Appropriately I got Lex Luther.

**John:** Ooh!

**Craig:** So, Lex Luther, who’s not obviously a superhero, unless you’re me and then he is, I think if you were to do a Lex Luther movie the temptation would be to sort of, “Oh, I’m going to feel bad for Lex Luther and I’m going to make Superman a dick and all that.”

I don’t want to do that. I love that Lex Luther is bad. I think that’s the best part of him. But also the bald thing, it’s so iconic, you do want something more — yes, I’m like the hairiest I’ve ever felt in my life up here by the way.

**Andrea:** Look at this stage. Look at this stage.

**Christopher:** How are your treatments going?

**Craig:** I mean, I feel like, wow. Shampoo has been working. No, I think that Lex Luther, young Lex Luther is bald because… — You guys know the story of like Phineas Gage? Have you ever heard that story, Phineas Gage? So, love that story. If you haven’t heard, there’s a guy in the 1800s, he was working on a railroad and basically there was a mishap and there was an explosion and a steel rod went here and out through his head and he survived. But it blew through his limbic system and this guy, Phineas Gage, who was by all accounts a really nice family man turned into a total asshole.

He was just a drunk and he was mean and violent. And he stayed that way for many, many years until he died. So, I like the idea of maybe this kid who gets a tumor or something, or is injured, and it blows out the part of your brain that basically gives you any kind of moral conscience and turns into like a perfect sociopath.

But he’s brilliant.

**David:** So, he’s a studio executive?

**Craig:** Right. So, you now have unleashed something that is truly terrifying, because even Lex Luther in all the Superman movies, he’s still a human. There’s something there. The fact, if you’re motivated by like money, for instance, that means you’re a human being. This guy is a monster.

**Stephen:** That’s cool.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s do that. Let’s make that — that’s so much better than what the fuck with your Hulk. He was shitting. He was just sitting there.

**Christopher:** It’s Lars von Trier’s Hulk.

**John:** [laughs] So I would like to thank our amazing panelists to talk about superheroes. Thank you guys so very much.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Andrea:** Thank you. Thank you . Thank you.

**John:** Get off our stage. All right. So, now is the time where we get to the Three Page Challenge. So, I want a show of hands in the audience — who here has read all of the entries to the Three Page Challenge?

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Wow. You people are almost as good as Stuart Friedel who has to read them every week.

Now, who here in the audience has a Three Page Challenge that they submitted that was one of those up there?

Oh my god. Thank you very much. Let’s have a round of applause to everyone who like sent in a script. That’s amazing.

**Craig:** Well done. Well done.

**John:** On the topic of Stuart Friedel, I think it’s important that we actually have Stuart — yeah, if we can have the actors playing Stuart Friedel stand up. The actors playing Stuart Friedel, where are you? There they are. There they are. Stuart Friedel, everyone.

**Craig:** Stuart Two. Stuart Friedel.

**John:** Stuart One and Stuart Two. Thank you very much.

**Craig:** So, you know, I met Stuart’s dad. Stuart’s dad, where are you man?

**John:** He’s over here.

**Craig:** Hey, Stuart’s dad! So, Stuart’s dad is so great. He comes up to me and he goes, “I just want to thank you so much for what you’ve done for Stuart.”

And I’m like, “Oh, that’s, you know, John, he does it, man. He’s done…”

He goes, “No, really thank you for what you’ve done. It’s just so nice what you’ve done for Stuart.”

And he kept saying that like Stuart is a drug addict or disabled in some serious way. You know, like you took him in when everyone else was like throwing their hands up, like we can’t handle this kid.

**John:** Yeah. I hired him away from a dangerous life at the Disney Channel. It was all like crack and hookers.

Tonight we have three Three Page Challenge entries which is always fun when we do them on the show. But we have the actual writers here, which is amazing as well. Plus, we have perhaps the most superlative person we could ever have to come up here and be a judge with us. Susannah Grant everybody.

**Craig:** Susannah Grant.

**John:** Hello. Here, you sit by me.

**Susannah Grant:** I’m not checking my email. I have them on here.

**John:** Oh, look at her, she’s got them on the iPad. So, let’s start with a superhero themed script. Let’s bring Bucky Knaebel up here to talk about The Clock Strikes Three!!! Bucky, come up here.

**Craig:** Hey Bucky.

**John:** Bucky, tell us about The Clock Strikes Three!!! So, usually we would do a synopsis, but tell us what — if someone is listening here and doesn’t have the script in front of them, what would they have read?

**Bucky Knaebel:** So, The Clock Strikes Three!!! starts off with three superheroes sitting in a diner, just BSing about their past exploits and all of the sudden a super villain, “super villain,” jumps in and sends them back into time. And they’re left back in the ’70s to try and figure out a way back home.

**John:** Fantastic. Is this a whole script, or did you just write these three pages for this —

**Bucky:** Whole script. It’s a short film that I plan on filming at some point, maybe. It depends on what you guys say.

**John:** No pressure whatsoever.

**Craig:** Well, let’s crush some dreams tonight. Let’s save somebody some credit card debt.

**John:** [laughs] Craig Mazin, start us off.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, you know, I think you’ve got a very promising concept here. I did a movie a long time ago called The Specials, 14 years ago, that was very much about superheroes sitting around in a diner talking. And so I think that that’s fertile territory and now more than ever.

But I’m going to — there’s like a couple little things here that I’m going to sort of not bother with. I’m going to talk about the big thing. And the big thing, I think, for any comedy, but particularly a comedy like this that’s a high concept and sort of broad comedy I think is that you have to ground the comedy in a world that’s real, or make the world crazy and make the job mundane, right?

So, in Anchorman the world is insane, but they’re doing a mundane job. Here they are something that is insane, essentially, and the world around them doesn’t seem quite right either. They’re not interacting in a way that feels grounded to their situation.

This is also a case of going too fast. You have a superhero, so here’s one concept: a team of superheroes that are kind of bored and sit around diners and don’t take their villains very seriously and kind of quippy. You have another concept: modern day superheroes go back in time to the classic era, or what I would call the classic era of ’70s superheroes. Those are two totally different concepts. And they’re happening literally within two pages of each other, so it’s very confusing.

I’m also a little concerned that it won’t be as funny as you want because to me if I send like David’s Batman going back in time and hanging out with like the jazzy cool cats of the ’70s with their skintight moose-knuckle bikini pants, that’s funny. Like, “What are you people doing?” And they’re like, “Hey, it’s cool man.” That’s funny.

But these quippy guys going back in time just seems like — I’m looking for what to hold onto and play the comedy off of. So, I’m going to leave it to these guys to sort of get into other things, but I wanted to lay that out there because I think that tonally it’s not going to work unless you figure out how to find that contrast.

**Bucky:** Right. Makes sense.

**John:** Susannah Grant?

**Susannah:** So, of those two options, which one are you going for?

**Bucky:** Well, in the story they don’t encounter any heroes in the past whatsoever. They actually just kind of solve their problems by inaction.

**Susannah:** [laughs] Okay. So, I’m going to talk about something that is valid for any movie, superheroes, non-superheroes, and that’s character motivation. It’s a really basic thing. You have a character I assume is the villain of the piece, the guy who walks in and sends them, creates the problem, sends them back to the ’70s. And this is sort of the going too fast thing. He’s only given two lines.

**Bucky:** Right.

**Susannah:** And I don’t know how — there’s a hint of resentment because they kind of belittle him, but for that character to make that big a choice that we’re going to watch an entire movie about the problem he creates, I need to be intrigued by him. I need to lean in and say, “Ooh, he’s mad,” and why is he mad? Take time.

It does feel rushed. And I know everybody is always saying about writing — economy, economy, economy — you’ve got to be fast. I personally think you’ve got to be long before you can be fast. You’ve got to take the time to find out what you’re saying and really like dig into who this guy is. And that might take five pages. And then you say, “Oh, that’s who he is. I found it on the fifth page.” And you get rid of the first four. But you’ve really got to take the time to sink in to who this villain is, why he’s doing what he’s doing, and why I should care about him.

**Bucky:** Right.

**John:** To me, I was reading this thinking like if this was the third episode of a series about these guys, that would be awesome.

**Bucky:** The clock actually shows up in the second, so he’s established.

**John:** So, he’s established. Do you perceive this as being part of a longer franchise?

**Bucky:** Like, a web series.

**John:** I think in those ways it could actually work. If we already knew who those characters were when they were sitting in the diner, then the guy could just walk in and we can start the whole plot. But as I was reading this just cold I didn’t know what is the relationship between these three people, like Pecos Pete sort of seems annoyed by this person, so why are they all at the diner together. I was having all of these questions. I was wondering what the world was like and it was harder for me to sort of — and suddenly there’s a plot happening. And now we’re in the past. And I didn’t know what the world was like before we went to the past.

**Craig:** This is the third episode of something.

**Bucky:** Ideally. Like written as a web series.

**Craig:** Okay. That would have changed everything.

**Susannah:** Forget what I said.

**John:** Make it really clever on those things.

**Craig:** Needed to know that, yeah.

**John:** But let’s talk some of the words on the page, because you do some things which work great and some things which don’t work so great.

Right at the very start, “We are outside looking in at what one might say is an exact replica of Hopper’s Nighthawks. Instead of Bogart-esque type characters, we see three superheroes at the counter.”

I love “we are,” I love “we see,” but we didn’t need them at all here.

**Bucky:** Okay.

**John:** Just tell us what’s there and we’re good and we’re going. And because this was the first time I was experiencing any of these characters, I really wanted more time spent on who those people are. Like tell me really what kind of people they are, not just what they’re wearing, but sort of who they are and sort of what their deal is. And it’s probably — when you shotgun three characters at us at once we have a hard time knowing how to sort them out.

Other stuff about what we saw on the page?

**Susannah:** Yeah, you know, what can be easier is if you give them something specific, to be working out, or arguing about. You have hints where you want their characters to be, but you haven’t given yourself the tools to really make something, make a meal of the scene with these guys. If they’re actually arguing about something specific, or trying to get something specific done. You’ll just have a lot more opportunity, a lot more tools there to show who these guys are.

And then the other question I had is I wasn’t clear if, I guess what you were saying, their relationship. Nighthawks is very specific and it’s lonely and middle of the night and melancholy. And then I didn’t feel how that was relating to the story you were telling. So, I just would say think really carefully about the environment you’re creating and make sure the choices you make are really specific to that.

**Craig:** Let’s capitalize our characters when we meet them. It just helps us to know that they’re there. I think regaling, maybe I’m wrong, but “is regaling his tale to two obviously,” I think it’s just regaling to obviously bored superheroes. I think that’s how that works.

Commander Alpha is blathering on and he’s boasting. And these other two are bored, Pecos Pete and Mauve Moth are bored. When two other people are bored I don’t need them to say things to indicate that they’re bored. I think actually there’s an opportunity for the two of them to be doing something else entirely because they’re just not paying attention to him. And they occasionally look up and nod, but maybe they’re in the middle of something. Are they into each other? Is one of them just trying to get somebody’s attention and not — I mean, there’s something interesting about a superhero that can’t flag a waiter down.

You know, there are opportunities for you to kind of —

**Bucky:** Make it funny.

**Craig:** Layer things in. Because this stuff is, you know, like one of the things that David Zucker taught me when I started doing spoof movies with him is that this stuff is wonderful because it allows you to do jokes. But the jokes have nothing to do with what the people are saying. That’s just talking that fills space. So, use that.

**John:** If she’s checking her email while he’s going on with this whole story then that’s something we can relate to, like, “Oh, this person won’t shut up.”

An example at the bottom of page one, The Clock bursts in and he goes, “Sup’ bitches. It’s time for your beatdown!”

And right now Pecos Pete says, “Oh no, are you here to slow down time? You realize that all that does is stretch out the span of us whooping on you.”

That second phrase is actually really good, but I wondered if that first phrase is delivered to the other superheroes at the bar. So, he’s going to slow down time. He’s going to slow down time. Maybe it’s like I’ve seen him before, he’s going to slow down time.

You realize — there’s a chance to actually get a real joke, sort of break that into two jokes and really let that land.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that character, one thing about that is I don’t know if he’s real or not. You know, when somebody like that shows up, because I’m still learning the rules of the show or the movie or whatever it is. Like, you know, in one of the Batmans, I think it was in the second one, there’s a Batman but then it turns out it’s not really Batman. It’s a guy that’s pretending to be Batman. He’s pathetic. This guy seems like that, like what are you doing? Where did you get that? What’s wrong with you?

**Bucky:** Well, you know, heroes are somewhat pathetic I think.

**Craig:** Well, that’s fine, too. But you have to help me get there. Because what I know walking in and what you’re using frankly for comedy is that heroes aren’t pathetic. So, I need to be taught now how this works so when this guy shows up we need to be taught that he’s an actual villain. Like, dude, we beat you up last week. We beat you up last night. He should have a black eye. You know what I mean? What is wrong with you? This isn’t even about — what is this about? You like getting beaten up, don’t you? I mean, like, something — we need to get a sense that he’s actually legitimately real or else we’re like what’s going on here?

**Bucky:** Okay.

**John:** I would leave this at I was really curious to see episode one of this. Because I feel like you actually, in your head you know who those three characters are and you know what their relationship is. There is a reason why those three people are together — that first episode where we’re seeing why they’re together and sort of what that deal is. And sort of like The Tick or those universes could be great and this just felt like it was too soon for me to get a complicated plot change. It’s too early for us to go back into the past when I didn’t know what the present really felt like.

Bucky Knaebel. So, I should say, Craig, you don’t realize this but Bucky actually asked a question on the show many years — how long, a year ago?

**Bucky:** Roughly, yes, a year ago.

**John:** So, he was the person who asked about sort of like I’m moving to Los Angeles with my family. Where should I live? And we actually had a long conversation on the show about where he should live.

**Craig:** Where did you end up?

**Susannah:** Where do you live?

**Craig:** Straight outta Compton!

**Bucky:** It was a total help, too.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**Bucky:** We live in the Valley now.

**Craig:** In the Valley?

**Bucky:** yeah.

**Craig:** Somewhere out there. Yeah, don’t get specific. We’ve got some weirdos out here.

**John:** You’ve got a whole audience of people who may want to steal your stuff.

**Craig:** They will find you.

**Bucky:** So, thank you for that. Thank you for this.

**John:** Thank you very much for sending in these pages.

**Bucky:** Please, thank you so much.

**Susannah:** Thanks a lot.

**John:** Awesome. Bucky Knaebel.

**Craig:** Good luck.

**Bucky:** Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** My pleasure. Stick with it. Stick with it. All right.

**John:** All right. Our next Three Page Challenge comes from Michelle Burleson with Kimchi Rhinestone.

Michelle, where are you? I see Michelle. Hooray!

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** So, some backstory. I had Stuart email everybody who was, well, all the winners, but everyone who submitted to say, like just make sure they’re actually coming.

**Michelle Burleson:** Very nice to meet you.

**John:** And, Michelle, you emailed from like the side of a road. You like pulled off at a car — come on, grab your microphone. Where were you driving from?

**Michelle:** Santa Cruz.

**John:** Santa Cruz, all right. So, same state. Yeah, it’s not too far.

**Michelle:** Somewhat. Different country, same state.

**John:** All right. Thank you for coming.

**Michelle:** Thank you for having me. Be gentle.

**Susannah:** Oh, yeah, absolutely.

**Michelle:** I’m just a girl.

**Craig:** Absolutely not.

**Michelle:** I’ll go She-Hulk on you.

**John:** Ah! She’s already wearing green.

**Craig:** This is all I ever wanted.

**John:** Your script is called Kimchi Rhinestone. So, Kimchi I know is Korean.

**Michelle:** Yes.

**John:** Rhinestone, I think of sort of like cowboy something. So, I’m reading that as a thing, so it’s going to be something-something about that. As your script starts, talk us through the three pages that people are going to be reading if they were reading this at home.

**Michelle:** Okay. She’s actually a character I created at the Second City and just decided to take her a little further. But she’s being abandoned, and this happens a lot. A GI impregnated a Korean girl, so that’s taboo. So, the mother is abandoning her at the Amerasian orphanage, which does exist, and abandons her in her father’s guitar case.

Then we go to, she’s busking on the street, she’s out of the orphanage. And their — the Halfies — I call them Halfies, because I’m one.

**Craig:** Yeah, you can get away with that.

**Susannah:** We won’t be calling them Halfies.

**Michelle:** Yeah. They’re citizens of no country. I’m not an orphan, but they’re citizens of no country. So, she’s busking. She thinks, you know, if I get to America everything will be better and she has this thing on her head about if I can just get to America. And then it goes to this American Idol type country show called America’s Honky Tonk Angel.

**John:** And that’s the end of our three pages is in the middle of this I’m going to rip open the envelope and we cut to commercial.

So, as I started to read this, I was sort of in three different worlds and I had a hard time grasping sort of what to expect to happen next. And that was the challenge I was facing. And I probably would have read page four and five and six, but I was really like, I felt the gears kind of grinding. It was hard for me to grasp what was really going to happen here. Because you say Honky Tonk Angel, I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what to even expect in my head.

And so I sort of think it’s country, but I was sort of confused. How did you guys approach these three pages as you were reading them? Susannah?

**Susannah:** I just wanted so much more breath in this. I was interested in everything you told me, but just now, just your saying that she has a dream that she’s going to go to America — put that in. Even the woman dropping her at the orphanage in the beginning, I was just like well where is she going, and who opens the door? There’s room to breathe in this.

And it doesn’t have to be long. Just give us a bunch of tiny little details that really tell us where we are and what we’re dealing with. And the same thing when she — you cut to her right on the street, right? But I was like, wait, where is she living? Is she living alone? Is she living with someone? Is this guitar case the guitar case?

And you have room for that. I said it before, but this idea that you need to be efficient seems to sometimes rob people of the — giving themselves the room to be really specific and flesh it out. Because I really want to know what’s happened to her, and what she wants, how she’s going about getting it and what the obstacles are.

You know, a kid dropped at an orphanage. But I just want to know everything. Everything around her.

**Michelle:** Okay.

**Susannah:** And I think you have tons of room to do it. Like what you did in three pages I think could take ten, you know, or eight. You have a lot more room and you need to tell me more so I’ll care.

**Michelle:** Okay. Thank you.

**Craig:** You said you build this character at Second City?

**Michelle:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, this is not a comedy though?

**Michelle:** No, the first draft was just a bunch of my sketches I kind of just all threw together.

**Craig:** Right, but from these pages I take it this is —

**Michelle:** She’s matured a bit.

**Craig:** It’s sort of an inspirational underdog story. Okay. So, I completely agree with Susannah and I don’t know what’s going on where people are hitting the gas so hard. Do we see her mother again?

**Michelle:** No.

**Craig:** One theory is we never see the mother. And that there is a… — This is why I like thinking about credit sequences in movies like this, too. That you begin with somebody coming across a guitar case in front of an orphanage, like the people that work at the orphanage just see a guitar case there and like, “What the hell?”

And then the guitar case goes donk, and they open it up and there’s a baby in there. And then you see images of what’s happening — because the other thing is the time that passes is not time you can afford to ignore. You need to educate people what it means to be Amerasian in Seoul in the ’70s and ’80s. They need to know.

So, that’s a big part of this. And it also — I need to know how she learned guitar. I need to see the moment when she picks it up for the first time. It’s the only possession, the guitar she has isn’t the guitar, because there was no guitar, right? Or there was a guitar? I can’t remember.

**Michelle:** There was a guitar. She kind of set it — the mother set it out and replaced her with it.

**Craig:** Okay. Got it. So, you see a closed guitar case and a guitar. That’s a cool opening image. Why is a guitar out of a guitar case. And then you open the guitar case and see a baby in there. That’s the only thing she owns in her life. And I want to see a little seven-year-old kid sitting there with the guitar and just going poink, poink, and then I want to see her at 13 going, [guitar sounds], right, and listening to music. I want to see something happening there. That’s what your story is about, you know?

So that by the time, oh, and then I definitely — here is what I definitely do not want to see.

**Susannah:** I know what you’re going to say.

**Craig:** On page three I do not want to see her so good, like boom and there she is, she’s awesome. No. I want to see her suffering, right? She’s literally out there for two seconds playing one song that by the way is too lyrically on the nose.

**Susannah:** Right.

**John:** Yeah. We all wrote on the nose, I think.

**Susannah:** But aside from that, it’s a wasted opportunity because we know this already. She’s singing about what we know. If you ever sing about something we don’t know, then you’re broadening our understanding of her.

**Craig:** I want to see that, look, the movie is about people that try and become professional artists. Follow a formula, which you can choose to follow or not, but I feel like you kind of want to here. And there’s that scene where they are being pelted. Nobody is listening to them. Nobody likes them. They are poor and they are hungry. And they’re being kicked around. And you’re suffering with them and they’re about to give up and then something happens.

And that something that happens is page 10 at the earliest, I think. It feels more like 15, or 20, and then suddenly your world explodes because that’s kind of the narrative that we have in our hearts, right? So, it’s all just racing here far too fast, because you have an interesting story to tell.

We will be always more interested in the human than we are in the circumstances. So, I would also just — my last little bit of advice, you’re inventing a show that doesn’t exist.

**Michelle:** Correct.

**Craig:** And does not exist because nobody would watch that show. Right? So, my suggestion is to think about basically being true to people’s experience. There are talent shows now where anybody can go on. Any kind — even if you’re not a musician. You’re a dancer, whatever, like America’s Got Talent or something like that. But that becomes even harder. Now you’re going up against the best of everything. And you’re just this kid from Seoul with no parents, but you’ve got soul, you know.

I mean, it’s cool, right? So, I would just say slow it down, tell the human story, let those beats happen as they need to. And you know what they are. You’ve seen the movies. And stay true to what you think people will go, “Oh yeah, that feels like my experience.” Because you’ve got so much potential here, you know.

**John:** There are some moments I really loved. So, we were talking about the America’s Honky Tonk Angel stage. At two and half pages in we cut to this stage and we’re just seeing that this guy doing the open. But I want to read a little bit aloud because I liked some of what you did here. “A center stage spotlight shines on two barely legal BLONDE SOUTHERN BELLES. They cross fingers. Hold hands. Fidget. Left foot. Right foot. Please God, please.”

Really nicely done. I know exactly what that is. I know what that feels like. You put us in the perspective of those characters. Really nicely done.

“Every mini rip into the envelope an eternity. Sweet torture. The Emcee flashes a salesman smile.” I know exactly what that is. But if that moment were happening and then as we pull back we see that we’re actually in Seoul and that’s happening on like a satellite TV screen —

**Michelle:** Mind reader.

**John:** I suspected we weren’t really in Tennessee at that point. That could be a really great moment. But right now it’s happening on page three and there’s like, well, I know exactly what’s going to happen in your movie. What we’re saying is the gas was just hit way too hard, way too fast.

**Michelle:** Gotcha.

**John:** And that may be part of the problem with what we do, Craig, honestly. I think sometimes this Three Page Challenge makes people feel like, “Well, we’ve got to cram so much into three pages.”

**Craig:** Yeah, no. No, no, no, no, no.

**John:** We just want to see really great writing. We want to be intrigued about the three pages. We don’t need to know what everything is.

**Susannah:** It’s just a tease. It’s a seduction. Think of the beginning of The Godfather. I mean, the beginnings of great movies just have you going, “What?!” I don’t know anything; I want to know everything.

**Craig:** Right. There’s mystery involved. And you create the spaces that you want to create. Emotions need space. And it’s interesting because John’s right. Look, you can write. There’s no question. This moment is really well written. But you’ve created all that space for these two characters that won’t be important on a show that isn’t connected to the thing I care about. And you haven’t created enough space for what it means to be a hungry kid with no parents and no identity. Right?

But you know that. I know you have that, clearly. So, that’s what I want you to do. I want you to just go and kick that ass.

**Michelle:** Thank you. I appreciate that.

**Craig:** My pleasure.

**Susannah:** There’s one other point I’d make which is that you’re writing a character who is trying to do something really, really hard in life. And there’s always a reason somebody is trying to do something really hard in life, so keep that in mind. That you need to know that and you need to communicate that somehow.

**Michelle:** Thank you very much.

**John:** Michelle, thank you so much for coming.

**Michelle:** Thank you. I appreciate it.

**Craig:** Good work. Good job. Good work. All right.

**John:** Our final script of the night, so people could vote on this. This is the first time in the Three Page Challenge where we posted all the three page entries. And how many people voted on their favorites in this audience. Show of hands who votes? Oh, actually a lot of people voted.

**Craig:** That’s a good amount of voting.

**John:** Great. Thank you for voting. Some people voted a lot. And, our winning entry got 32% of the vote. So, let’s meet the man who wrote that script.

**Craig:** And voted a lot for himself?

**John:** Perhaps. Mr. Paul Yoshida, come on down.

**Craig:** Come on down.

**John:** Paul, thank you very much for being here. Your script is called Zombie With a Gun.

**Paul Yoshida:** I did vote for myself a lot.

**John:** That’s fine. It’s absolutely fine.

**Paul:** Sorry everybody.

**John:** We totally didn’t really kind of block in any sort of meaningful way. Like you could get it around it. I was curious what was going to happen. How many times do you think you voted for yourself?

**Paul:** I don’t even want to say.

**John:** We’ll let Ryan and Nima run some numbers and figure that out. But, congratulations, and we enjoyed your script.

**Paul:** Thanks.

**John:** So, Zombie With a Gun, what’s Zombie With a Gun about?

**Paul:** Well, the three pages, it opens with this scumbag named Lou. He’s doing blow with a hooker in a motel. And they’re doing their thing. And then this mysterious guy shows up banging on the door. He has a hood on. You can’t see who he is. And then they kind of dismiss him as some crazy guy. And then the hooded guy gets back in his car and then just drives the car through the wall and then confronts Lou, the scumbag, and it turns out that the guy with the hood on is actually a zombie who has come back from life to kill the gangsters who killed him and his family.

**John:** Great. And this a script, is it all written, or just these three pages?

**Paul:** Yeah. It’s on the Black List website in case anyone is interested.

**John:** Nice. Franklin Leonard of the Black List is here tonight.

**Craig:** Hey Franklin, can he vote for himself on the Black List?

**Paul:** I already tried. It doesn’t work.

**Craig:** I like it, by the way. That’s a real Jersey move. I like that.

**John:** So, Paul, when we were up here talking before about superhero movies is that idea of one thing changed. And this very much felt like a one thing changed. It felt like the movie that Billy Bob Thornton could be in, except that like there’s a zombie. And you told us from the start that there is going to be a zombie because it’s called Zombie With a Gun. And I thought that was actually kind of cool.

It’s a genre movie. It’s actually sort of two genre movies simultaneously and sort of seems to honor both of those expectations of what those genre movies are. Susannah?

**Susannah:** Yeah. I love that, too. I think that’s a great idea. My biggest thought is that you’ve just got to get a little more specific with Lou, or a little more — just pull him out of, I mean, the blow and the Asian, it feels familiar. And Lou can be a great character. And he can be fucking whores, and he can be doing all the blow, but give me something about him that shows me that he’s a unique person on the planet. A unique tattoo. Maybe there’s something particular about his hooker that tells us what he’s into. You know, something. Just something that makes you say, “Oh, you’re not just run of the mill scumbag. You’re that scumbag.”

And then I’ll lean in, you know. I’ll want to know.

**John:** On the second line of actual action, “The owner of the truck, a scum-bag with “WHITE POWER” tattooed on his neck, INHALES a line of coke off a hand-mirror.” So, you said scumbag, and honestly then you titled the whole thing for us. I’m never going to think that this could be the hero of the story because you said he’s a scumbag. So, if you backed off that and found some little interesting details we might think like, oh, maybe he’s a good guy somewhere down the road.

**Craig:** Yeah, White Power. I get it.

**Susannah:** You know, a lot of people who have goodness in them can end up in a motel room with a hooker doing blow off a mirror.

**John:** If we thought it was Louie, then yes.

**Susannah:** Something landed him there. Something interesting landed him there.

**Craig:** I mean, Lou is not going to survive much longer, is he?

**Paul:** No. This is actually a flash forward. So, he kills him.

**Craig:** He kills him right?

**Paul:** Yeah. He’s one of the henchmen kind of.

**Craig:** It’s funny that you said, John, that you called out scumbag because I wrote don’t chew my food for me. I know how to put two and two together. If you say white power, and coke, and a whore…scumbag. I get it. I know.

**Susannah:** I’ll do the math.

**Craig:** You don’t need to tell me scumbag.

**John:** We’ve seen one or two movies.

**Paul:** I knew you would know.

**Craig:** But Susannah is right that every character has — this character is in the movie because he’s going to lead you to this very cool reveal. And the last thing that you want to do when you have a cool reveal back here is then just jab weakly setting up this big obvious thing. I want to be, like Lou should be cool enough where I could have a whole Rosencrantz and Guildenstern movie with Lou. Every character should be unique. You never want to go just Central Casting Thug, because this guy is doing really Central Casting Thug stuff.

I had one thought for you about the ending of the three pages. Oh, first of all, just little logic things. When a car crashes a motel room, you don’t have time to dive behind a bed for cover. The car is going fast.

**Paul:** Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.

**Craig:** The car would have to be like [sound of car chugging slowly]. And then dive, right? So, it just misses them basically, you know? But, you have this really cool reveal that this guy with the hood shows him this picture and he goes, “I didn’t murder nobody.” “Yeah, you did, Lou.” And then he pulls his thing and it’s him in the picture, right?

**Paul:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But I was looking, and maybe it’s on the next page, but I was looking for that line where the guy is like, “Who are you?” Like he’s like, “You murdered Sean Walker.” “Who are you?” “I’m Sean Walker.”

**John:** Is that the next line?

**Paul:** Well, no, he’s more like in shock of like, “Oh, you’re dead.”

**Craig:** You want that. I mean, the whole person is basically like —

**Paul:** Right.

**John:** Craig, would you do an exercise with me?

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** I think it could help if we read it aloud. If we read just the dialogue aloud?

**Craig:** Okay. Can I be the hooker?

**Susannah:** I want to be the hooker!

**Craig:** Oh, Susannah wants to be the hooker.

**Susannah:** No one ever asks me to be the hooker.

**Craig:** Well, one of us can be Lou, one of us can be the hooker, and one of us can be Man in Hood.

**John:** I’ll be Man in Hood.

**Craig:** Okay. I’ll be Lou.

**John:** And…

**Craig:** I will get physical, by the way.

**Susannah:** Oh, it’s one.

**John:** Begin.

**Susannah:** Oh, we’re just reading lines?

**John:** Just lines.

Savannah: You save me some?

**Craig:** This is comin’ out of your pay, you know…

**Susannah:** …Prick.

**Craig:** Alright, let’s fuck.

**Susannah:** Loud pounding. Who’s that?

**Craig:** Fuckin’ Christ…

**Susannah:** Is it the cops?

**Craig:** Wrong room, asshole! Now, where were we?

**Susannah:** Yeah! Yeah! Right there! [grunts.] Oh, Don’t stop! Don’t — !

**John:** The car smashes through the wall.

**Susannah:** P-please, don’t hurt me!

**John:** Leave.

**Craig:** What the fuck is this?

**John:** You pigs murdered them. Shot ’em dead in their home.

**Craig:** Bullshit. I didn’t murder nobody.

**John:** Yeah, you did, Lou…

Scene. So, you won’t get the finale on the podcast.

**Paul:** That was amazing. That was hot.

**John:** Part of the exercise there, no criticism of your performance.

**Susannah:** Oh, it was brilliant. I know that.

**John:** Yeah, we all acknowledge that Susannah Grant is who you should cast as Asian Hooker in your films. But I kind of thought that every line the Asian Hooker said was a little not awesome. And she was just saying things that Asian hookers kind of say in this movie. And maybe she should say other things. Or maybe not say anything. Because if you took off all her lines, you could —

**Susannah:** Maybe she’s a really weird hooker. I want to see a really weirdo hooker.

**John:** That also makes it more interesting for Lou if like there’s something interesting about her.

**Craig:** I mean, in general right it goes back to this whole Central Casting thing. You’re a hooker. You’re banging some dude for coke in a shitty motel and there’s a knock on the door. You don’t care. You don’t care about anything, right? You’re a hooker. You’re just like la, la, la, and he’s like, “Ugh, what?” And bonk, bonk, bonk.

**Susannah:** And you also don’t care if they stop or not.

**Craig:** Yeah, you don’t care. Nobody cares.

**John:** They don’t care if it’s good.

**Susannah:** I also want to talk about the knock on the door, which is the guy who drives the car through the door, I mean, through the wall is not usually the same guy who knocks. And if you want to show us the guy is coming, just show us he’s coming. Just go outside the motel, see the car pull up.

**Paul:** Yeah, that’s cool.

**Susannah:** See the hooded guy get out. And they have no idea. Because the knocking and then driving, I don’t know what he’s — he’s polite, and then he’s —

**John:** I thought he was doing it to make sure that he really was in the room. So, he’s hearing a voice.

**Susannah:** Oh, okay.

**John:** And so there may be a way to acknowledge that he knocks on the door to make sure he heard the voice, and then he walked off.

**Craig:** Yeah, but then at that point I’m wondering why drive the car through there? Why not just kick the door open. You have a gun.

**Susannah:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, what you could do, for instance, is you’ve got Lou and this woman and then the Trans-Am pulls into the lot and then you see like that sad old guy that’s working behind the desk. And the door goes jingle-jingle. And the guy looks up.

The next thing that we see after another little bit of Lou is that car going through the door. We’ll know, okay, he got the name from the guy.

**Paul:** Oh, yeah, that’s cool.

**Craig:** You know, something like that.

**John:** Cool. Thank you, Paul, so much for submitting.

**Craig:** Good job.

**Paul:** Yeah, I’m a super big fan.

**John:** Thank you very much.

**Craig:** Nice work.

**John:** And that’s it. Susannah Grant, thank you very much.

**Craig:** Thank you, Susannah. Great job.

**John:** Craig, this was a long show. We needed to really warn the affiliates that we were running a little bit long. But this was really, really fun.

**Craig:** No, it was great. Yeah, hopefully we didn’t preempt whatever comes after us on the network.

**John:** Yeah, there’s hopefully not another thing happening. We need to think Aline Brosh McKenna for sponsoring our cocktail party, which was lovely. We need to thank Christopher Kartje and the Writers Guild Foundation for putting this event on. That was amazing.

**Craig:** Yes. Fantastic job as always.

**John:** And Matthew Chilelli edits all these episodes. He also did the intro music, which was a surprise to Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah, like everything is a surprise to me.

**John:** Yeah, so it was a surprise for Craig. And I especially want to thank everybody who submitted those pages.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Because everyone is brave for doing them, but thank you again for putting your work out there in the world. It’s amazing.

**Craig:** Thank you guys. And thank all of you guys for listening and all of your very kind words in supporting us. We promise we’ll keep doing this long after you lose interest, I assure you.

**John:** And one last thanks to Milt and Rich, our sound and our lights, and everybody else who made this all work.

**Craig:** Thanks folks back there.

**John:** And thank you guys so much for coming.

**Craig:** Thanks for coming.

Links:

* [The Writers Guild Foundation](http://wgfoundation.org)
* [Andrea Berloff](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0075696/) on IMDb, and [Deadline’s Conan announcement](http://www.deadline.com/2013/10/legend-of-conan-lands-andrea-berloff-to-script-arnold-schwarzenegger-epic-reprise/)
* [Christopher Markus](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1321655/) & [Stephen McFeely](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1321656/) on IMDb, and [their interview on LA Times Hero Complex](http://herocomplex.latimes.com/movies/captain-america-winter-soldier-writers-revel-in-marvel-universe/#/0)
* [David Goyer](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0333060/) on IMDb, and [his BAFTA Screenwriters Lecture](http://www.bafta.org/film/features/david-s-goyer-delivers-his-bafta-screenwriters-lecture,3931,BA.html)
* [David Goyer’s arms](http://cdn.wegotthiscovered.com/wp-content/uploads/13049.jpg)
* [Spider-Man](http://marvel.wikia.com/Spider-Man), [Hulk](http://marvel.wikia.com/Hulk), [Martian Manhunter](http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Martian_Manhunter), [Wonder Woman](http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Wonder_Woman), [Lex Luthor](http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Lex_Luthor) and [Storm](http://marvel.wikia.com/Ororo_Munroe_(Earth-616))
* [Susannah Grant](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0335666/) on IMDb, and a [feature on her from Salon](http://www.salon.com/2000/04/13/grant/)
* The three [Three Page Challenge entries](http://johnaugust.com/umbrage), and [all 57 that were submitted](http://johnaugust.com/threepagelive)
* [Intro/Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

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

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 143 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Claire, why Claire? What is the reason behind Claire Schaeffer?

**Craig:** Claire Schaeffer is a senior, a 12th grader, at Flintridge Prep here in La Cañada and she is a devoted fan of our show apparently. My son, I believe did a musical with her and she’s a fan of the show and so I promised Jack that I would give her a little shout-out.

**John:** Well, that’s very, very nice. I worried that there had been news in your life that I had missed out on. Huge life decisions had happened in between our weeks of normal recording the show.

**Craig:** You know that if I wanted to be a women, I would have just simply hurdled into surgery. I don’t…

**John:** Craig Mazin doesn’t stop and think. He just goes right for it. He finds the best surgeon and if that’s too expensive then he finds the second best surgeon and that’s the one he uses.

**Craig:** Sometimes the second best is the worst one. You know that whole theory of the most overpriced bottle of wine on a menu is the second most expensive one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because nobody wants to buy the most expensive one so they buy the second most expensive one. Everyone knows that so they jack the price of that one up.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Many restaurants will actually deliberately stick an incredibly overpriced bottle on there so they can keep moving the second most expensive one.

**Craig:** It’s a real-estate agent trick. They’ll take you to a house that they know is wildly overpriced just to completely throw you off so that when you see one that’s normally priced you think you’re getting a deal.

**John:** That’s so good.

**Craig:** It’s a world of lies out there basically. [laughs] It’s just lies. We’re surrounded.

**John:** [laughs] The screenwriting advice here is that if your script is a little bit long, make sure that people are reading really, really long scripts right in front of yours and then your 130-page script will seem like, oh, that’s reasonable.

**Craig:** Breath of fresh air.

**John:** Yes. It’s benchmark setting.

This is going to be one of those shows, Craig, that is almost completely random. You and I both have many tabs opened in our browser because there are so many little thing to talk about.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And we’re going to try to get through all of them today. We’re going to talk about the first screenwriting book ever from 1912. We will talk about tropes and archetypes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We will talk about Barry Levinson and his unhappy credit arbitration situation.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We’ll answer a question about managers. We’ll talk about film critics who are watching screeners rather than a big movie on a big screen. They’re watching a little movie on a little screen. We’re going to talk about keeping secrets from your readers, how you keep something on the page that’s different than what people might see on the screen.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** We’ll talk about what happens to a Broadway show after it leaves Broadway which is the situation we’re in now with Big Fish which is really interesting and so different from anything in film or television. And, finally, we will do some more One Cool Things from the archives. We will look at which One Cool Things are still cool and which ones we’ve completely forgotten about.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** This is that show, that show with so much. And in all those things that didn’t even include the things we’re doing follow up on. So there’s still more.

**Craig:** All right. Let’s hydrate here. This is going to be rough.

**John:** While Craig is hydrating I will say that voting is open now for the Live Three Page Challenge. If you’re listening to this on Tuesday when the episode comes out, you can vote on Tuesday or Wednesday until noon for your favorite of the 57 entries for the Three Page Challenge, so they’re all at johnaguust.com/threepagelive, all spelled out, all one word. And you can see all those entries from different people. You can read them all and you can vote for up to three of your favorites. And one, two, or three of those will be discussed on the live show Thursday along with our special guest panelist judge, Susannah Grant.

**Craig:** Spectacular. Are there still tickets available for this event?

**John:** You know, it’s completely unclear. I watched the website this morning. We’re recording this on a Friday and it still showed the ability to purchase tickets, so if you’re listening to this on Tuesday and you’ve not otherwise seen me tweet that it is sold out, I’d say come, because they’ll be able — we’ll find a seat for you. So come to the show. It’s at the Writers Guild Theatre in Beverly Hills.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Yay. One of the interesting things about having all of these 57 samples all showing up at once is that they were just sitting in a folder on my desktop. And I thought, you know what, I wonder what screenwriting software people are using to write these different entries. And so I looked at all the metadata and figured it out. So, Craig, what percentage of these entrants would you guess were written in a Final Draft?

**Craig:** I have to say a number that’s going to bum me out, but I’m going to say 90%.

**John:** Ooh, it’s quite a bit lower than that.

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**John:** It’s about 54%.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s spectacular news.

**John:** So that 54% is when you add together Final Draft 8, Final Draft 9, and Final Draft 7. And so I kept them separated in little charts. There’s going to be a link to the chart in the show notes.

Essentially, Final Draft 8 was by far the most common thing; 18 out of the 57 entries were written in Final Draft 8. But a wide range of other software showed up there. So Fade In showed up there.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Strong. Slugline was there.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Screenwriter, Celtx, Highland, even some ones were written like TextEdit or Word were there too.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it was interesting that people were trying different things.

**Craig:** Well, that is. I have to say that number is exciting to me. I want to see that. I mean, listen, I’m sure the people at Final Draft are like, “Oh, my god, is this guy really doing this again to us.” But, you know, there’s no reason that Final Draft should have even 50%. Final Draft should have 5%. It is simply not the best available option out there. I don’t believe it is the best available option. But it is the most expensive available option. So that to me that should intersect around 5% of people that just bought it once a long time ago and don’t feel giving up.

**John:** I would say that, you know, 58 scripts is a very small sample size but it was an interesting sample size because I feel like the people who are going to be applying or answering in to the Three Page Challenge are going to be aspiring screenwriters. And aspiring screenwriters are people who probably bought screenwriting software recently or services in the case of things like WriterDuet or Celtx. So they’re honestly sort of in that next wave and if that next wave is not fully embracing Final Draft, that’s a change for that application.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** I can also say in sort of anecdotally because I sell one of the apps that actually is there, we do keep track of the rankings of the different apps in the App Store. So all the screenwriting apps that are sold through the Mac App Store we can look and see where they’re ranked in the productivity category. And actually we have applications that chart sort of how we do. And the last couple of weeks things have actually changed and so for the first time Highland is sometimes surpassing Final Draft in number of units sold.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Which is great. We are priced a lot less than Final Draft, so our actual total gross is a lot less but it’s nice that people are using it.

**Craig:** I think that’s great. I am happy to see competition doing what it’s supposed to do.

**John:** Yes, creating an ecosystem is a lovely thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We have a follow up from Matt Selman who is a writer who is an executive producer of The Simpsons.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And he wrote in to say, “Hi, guys, Scriptnotes’ listener Matt Selman here. I was enjoying your bit on Alloy and fan fiction and vampires. It’s a couple episodes back. And I just had to chime in about a Simpsons episode we did on just that topic, sort of. I produced a show called The Book Job in which Lisa is disillusioned again to find that her favorite Tween kids books are just product pumped out by an Alloy-like publishing house. Then a lot of crazy Oceans 11-type stuff happens. It’s actually a show about the challenges of authorial creation, business versus originality, the perils of procrastination, and an attempt at justifying/invalidating the joys of group writing which is the majority of what I do when I’m not writing emails to you instead or finishing a script.

“Maybe your listeners would get a kick out of watching it or at least it merits a link in the show notes. Sorry, it’s only on iTunes for The Simpsons Season 23 or they can pirate it.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] He wrote that and I didn’t add the whole, “Or you can pirate it” thing.

**Craig:** Oh Matt. First of all, Matt I believe is the showrunner of The Simpsons. He’s a spectacularly good guy. He’s a smart guy. And he is — I’ve come to know some Simpsons writers over the years, Jay Kogen who’s sort of all the way back from the beginning but guys along the way like Daniel Gould and so on and so forth and Matt is, he just fits that, the guys who work on The Simpsons are just smart guys.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re not funny and great writers who also happen to be smart. It’s all connected, you know. There is a culture of intelligence there and Matt is a terrific dude. He really is, just picture a nervous man. That’s Matt. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** What does a nervous man look like? Sort of thin, like kind of kooky hair, looks nervous.

**John:** So I first met Matt Selman because we were shopping for a new house and we were going to open houses on a Sunday which is usually when open houses are happening. And we were in one of these and there’s a guy who sort of recognized me and you could sort of tell when someone recognizes you because they make an eye contact and they make an eye contact again. And it’s like they’re like trying to make sure/confirm if they really did recognize you.

And so he came over and introduced himself and he said, “Oh, hey, I’m the guy who wrote that Simpsons episode that was based on Go or not based on Go but that sort of like used Go in it.” And it’s the episode called Trilogy of Error and it’s an episode where time keeps repeating on itself and sort of like how Pulp Fiction works and how Go works, and there’s actually one whole plot line which is very much taken from Go. And that was my first introduction to him was that he had written the episode that was sort of inspired by Go.

**Craig:** Yeah, he’s just a good guy. I’m not sure where, I think I might have met him at a roundtable or something somewhere along the way, but I’ve just always loved him and he was very nice to invite me to a table reading that they did of an episode a couple of years ago. And that was just really fun to watch the cast do it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was just fascinating. It’s just very cool. What an amazing institution to be a part of and a good guy, Matt Selman. So thanks for writing in, Matt. We’ll put a link in there. We don’t want people to pirate your show.

**John:** No. They should buy it for real.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What you said about roundtables is actually very applicable because my next bit of follow up was at the live show we did at Nerdmelt where we did the crossover episode with the Nerdist Writers Panel, I talked a little bit about that I was going to go in on this panel. I was actually leading this sort of roundtable on a rewrite for a script and I was excited but also a little bit nervous about sort of how it was going to go and it was this week.

And it went really well, I think. And so I just wanted to talk through a little bit what that process was like because it was the first time I had ever kind of done one of these things.

I’d been in sessions that were much more like a little punch up where it’s just like what’s the new funny joke we can do here. This was after our first draft, and the writer was in the room, thank god, because I wouldn’t have really wanted to do it if the original writer weren’t there to keep going on to the next thing.

But the discussion, there’s a total of five writers in the room, was really about what are the possibilities of the next things we could do and really looking at what sort of what are the functions of each of the characters, how can this all work together. And so the day it was structured where I suggested that we actually just read the whole script allowed to begin with. And that’s sort of tedious. That burns like two hours. But I thought it was really important because otherwise there’s this chance that you’re all kind of reading a different script.

You’re all sort of reading the scripts you read a week ago or three drafts ago. It’s hard to focus on what specifically the movie is in front of you unless you actually sort of like read the movie that’s in front of you. So we all divvied up parts. We read the whole thing aloud, including all the scene description which is the worst part of the table read.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I was really glad we did it because for one thing it gave that writer a chance to really hear his work all together out there like and sort of celebrate like this is what was there and like the stuff that was really good was really, really good. And in some ways, I think, that can help us sort of move past it and sort of look at it like that was that and what are the opportunities we have sort of kept on going here.

The stuff that felt long reading was probably needed to be addressed and the stuff that was really, really good, well, what was special about what was really, really good and how can we use those characters, those situations to best effect. So it ended up being a pretty good situation.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s cool. I’ve never done that in, I mean, I’ve been to roundtables where there was a cast read through prior to it but in a lot of times if it’s early in the process there is no cast. And I’ve never done that. I’ve never done a reading. Usually we just start talking about the script and reactions and things, but, you know, I always feel like the — in the end those are difficult days for a writer to go through because you have everybody kind of coming out at it with all of their different opinions and feelings and you have to figure out how to parse out what makes sense and speaks to you truly and what just may be somebody’s opinion.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And that’s tough sometimes.

**John:** What I think is interesting about a roundtable that’s really driven by writers is that everyone who’s been at that table has had to implement these kind of changes. And so every time we talk about a possibility, we’re talking about it in a way of like figuring out like how do you actually write that, how do you actually get that thing to manifest; rather than sort of pie in the sky dreams, it’s like, what’s actually doable.

It’s like talking about building a building with people who build buildings. And so you really understand what is possible there. The challenge for me as like the leader of this group was to make sure that it didn’t all become like a volleying back and forth with the original writer who was there because there’s a natural instinct of trying to address your suggestion to the person who’s going to write next. And I try to make sure to try to stay a conversation among all of us, not just the guy who is going to go off and do the next pass.

**Craig:** Yeah, there is one thing about those roundtables that I don’t like and I try and guard against. And that is this strange thing where writers have almost, some writers have internalized a kind of very bland note style.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Where suddenly they’re talking to a fellow writer like the world’s worst producer giving them these very obvious notes and pushing it towards formula. And I’m always careful when I’m in these things to never talk about things that I think are going to grind the edges off of a piece or to take away that which is unique.

If anything sticks out in a fascinating way but it seems like it’s not integrated, then maybe I’ll just say that. I’ll just say, how do we, this is a moment. This is the kind of thing that’s special about this movie. Don’t round that edge off, but let’s talk about maybe how to have it not feel like it’s unmoored from the rest of the movie. But I sometimes get dismayed listening to my fellow writers because it just feels like they’ve suddenly become the world’s worst director of development.

**John:** Yeah. It was interesting, I was happy to see this studio in this case, the writer I think initiated the idea of doing this panel. I was glad that the studio stepped up and did it because had they done another draft or two more drafts, I think there would have been some burn in and some burn out honestly on what was happening in the script.

And rather by doing it now, when it was still, it was formed but it was still fresh, it was, I think, much easier to look at the different ways we could go and to sort of chart a course because we hadn’t spent so much time trying to implement notes that were maybe the wrong notes. So I’m hopeful that it’s going to be a cool movie and it was a really good process, so I just wanted to — I’ll never actually say what the movie was or who the writers were, but they were actually fantastic. And so I was, I really enjoyed that process.

**Craig:** Awesome. Yeah, I love doing those things. I think they’re fun days.

**John:** Cool. So let’s move to our new stuff.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So the first thing is, and I can’t find a link of who sent this to me but thank you whoever sent it to me, I think tweeted this link to perhaps the first screenwriting book ever written. It is a 1912 book by Herbert Case Hoagland called How To Write A Photo Play. And I thought it was just great. And so there’s a blog post on it, so we’ll link to both the original text which is on archive.org but also my blog post about it. It was just so cool. I’ll read a little snippet from it. “To write a photo play requires no skill as a writer.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “But it does require a quote constructionist. It requires the ability to grasp an idea and graft, please using the botanical sense, a series of causes on the front of it and a series of consequences on the other end. An idea so graft it will surely bear fruit; and to learn the art of this mental horticulture is necessary. First, to understand in a general way how motion pictures are made and what is done in the studio, in the field, and in the factory. Let us learn something of these things and begin at the beginning, in the office of the scenario editor.”

What I loved about this paragraph was that it just, first off, it’s just like, “You don’t have to have any skill as a writer” is just fantastic. And also the term scenario editor. What’s so great about Hoagland’s book is that, so he was a scenario editor I’m gathering based on certain introductory pages of the book. They were just in a completely different system. And so when they’re talking about a scenario, they’re not really quite talking about a screenplay. It’s really just a series of shots that is going to tell a story. And because they don’t have dialogue, because they don’t have a lot of normal film conventions, it’s just different.

And, you know, so they say, like, you could write a scenario in 10 minutes but more likely you’ll spend a week thinking about it. And so it really is just a very different world and yet so many of the same kinds of things apply about simple things like screen geography or a sequence of events.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I just thought it was great.

**Craig:** Well, Herbert Case Hoagland reminds me of, I’m trying to remember the name, I think it was something Pritchard, the man who’s written the poetry textbook in Dead Poets Society. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Who, you know, has his chart of how to evaluate poetry. You can see here at the very beginning of Hollywood moviemaking the very well-intentioned desire to help creative people work in a very structured format. We’ve said it many times, screenwriting stands apart from all other artistic pursuits as something that requires artistic skill and creativity and yet is not meant to be actually appreciated by anyone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not meant to be read. It’s meant to be transformed into a movie. It’s a very specific thing. And so naturally everybody is trying to come up with ways to help you do that. However, we also see here the birth of a terrible, [laughs], and apparently long-standing tradition of reductionist thinking when it comes to screenwriting and the overabundance of rules and caveats and “it’s really simple, press A, pull tab B.”

This is the thing that screenwriters have struggled with forever and god knows how many questions we get that are of a “should I pull tab A or when,” you know, these questions of ” is the midpoint break that comes before the second and a half act pinch point necessary for the downward motion of the reversal?” And you just sit there going, oh, my god, just tell a story. Tell a story.

**John:** There’s a moment in the book where it talks about sort of scene geography and it all has to do with hats. And so, basically, like, if a man puts on his hat and takes his coat, the next shot needs to be of him like arriving in a different house, because otherwise if he puts on his hat and coat and he’s still walking in the house, we’re like, well, why is he walking in a house. He should have left the house.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And that’s absurd and yet at that time you have to think about sort of what these movies were like at this point, that probably was actually good advice to some degree because we just weren’t sophisticated enough to sort of understand how these things could work. It was all just shot by shot by shot by shot.

I also love that in the sense of like things never change. Here’s his warning about submitting your work to different places. He says, “Don’t send biblical stories to a manufacturer who makes the specialty of Western stuff. Study the needs of the firms producing pictures and direct your scenarios accordingly. On another page, the class of a story might be sought by the different studios it has touched up. And ambitious writers cannot do better than to subscribe to the Moving Picture World or some other trade paper and carefully study the comments on the films that appear week by week.

**Craig:** Yeah. Oh, so there is the beginning of chase the market. [laughs]

**John:** Basically it’s like, read the trades, chase the market, but he’s also saying, know your buyer which is absolutely true.

**Craig:** Sure. I mean, sure. No, of course, and at that time, in an era where there was even less information than was available to us when we were pre-Internet, it’s true.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There were companies that just concentrated on one kind of picture and to send them a screenplay for a different kind would be pointless. But even so, you know, it’s just classic. It’s just because every stupid thing that people are currently trying to charge you money for,[laughs], it turns out that Herbert Case Hoagland wrote those stupid things already in 1912.

**John:** Yeah, and 1912 was really fascinating because like that’s really genuinely the very, very beginning of anything we want to consider a motion picture industry. I think Birth of a Nation is 1914 if I’m right. So it’s really, things are just beginning here. You’re moving out of the sort of the Nickelodeon time into the kind of full-length movie and that there was already this kind of book I think is just fascinating.

**Craig:** Yeah, like right there in the beginning there was somebody telling screenwriters what to do. [laughs] It’s just genius.

**John:** And it strikes me that a lot of times when you’re at the beginning of something, you know, you’re still kind of figuring out the rules of things, you’re figuring out sort of what stuff is like. And so, I could imagine like the early like how to make a webpage books would have almost exactly the same kind of things that seem really obvious or weird about like, you know —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Don’t use blinking text and it’s like, well, you should never say that but of course you had to say that at that time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And this, Hoagland had no idea what movies were going to become, and yet weirdly he sort of anticipated what aspiring screenwriters would be like and the questions they would ask.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, the truth is what he did here is actually very impressive considering that it is 1912. What is sort of sad to me is that there are people in 2014 who are basically saying this stuff, the same stuff that is 102 years old.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But pretending that it’s interesting or insightful or worth spending money on. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just sad, sad.

**John:** As we close out here, I also want to, you know, point people towards archive.org because — so archive.org is the Internet archive. And basically, they take snapshots of websites over a period of time, so a lot of times if you go to a website and you can’t find, and you’re curious like what that website was like four years ago you can enter that same URL in archive.org and find what that was like. But they also have these other great sort of treasure trove of just old materials and things that have fallen out of copyright. And so I bless them for putting stuff like this up online where people can dig at it because it’s just great.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure.

**John:** Next up is a less happy topic, Barry Levinson and his arbitration with the Writers Guild of America. We don’t know of course all the details on this but we know that this is about the Philip Roth novel The Humbling. And Barry Levinson wanted to share screenwriting credit with Buck Henry and Michal Zebede or Michael Zebede. I don’t know how he pronounces it. And there was an arbitration. Barry Levinson did not like the outcome of that arbitration and left the guild or went fi-core in the guild. But just basically, Craig, how do you define fi-core?

**Craig:** Well, financial core is a state of what you would call a financial core non-member. You are no longer technically a member of the union. You can’t vote on collective bargaining agreements. You can’t vote in elections. However, if you’re working in a close shop state like California, you’re still subject to the collective bargaining agreement, which is why “quitting the union,” and going fi-core kind of isn’t worth it because in the end here’s what happens: you still have to pay dues. Your dues are reduced by the amount of expense that the guild puts out towards things that are unrelated to collective bargaining which isn’t much. So instead of paying what you and I pay, you’d maybe pay 93% of that rate.

**John:** But, Craig, then you wouldn’t get Written By magazine.

**Craig:** Ah, you don’t get Written By magazine which is a huge, yeah, that would be a huge bummer obviously, [laughs], for those of you wondering with what you should line your cat box.

**John:** I guess you could still buy it at the newsstand. So there’s some…

**Craig:** Yes, you could buy it at the newsstand. And there’s a big call for that. But the really ironic part of this is that if you go financial core you are still subject to credit arbitrations.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This doesn’t get you out of credit arbitrations. It’s kind of crazy. I’m not really sure how — I understand if you are incredibly frustrated that you would want to take action or do something. The problem is when it comes to this there is in fact nothing you can do.

**John:** Yeah. So George Clooney I believe on Leathernecks left the guild or went fi-core in the same way.

**Craig:** That’s the rumor.

**John:** Out of frustration.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s the frustration, but I don’t if that’s, I wouldn’t know the details in that situation either. And I bring, I sort of mention this because people asked me on Twitter about the whole situation and the arbitration. The only thing I would add to it is that having been through arbitrations and sat on arbitration panels basically been one of the people who’s deciding credit, I can almost guarantee that Levinson himself has never served as an arbiter because I think if he had he would have been really, really frustrated but he wouldn’t have gone fi-core.

Because having been an arbiter I can tell you it’s really, really hard and yet everyone I’ve ever encountered in an arbitration has worked really hard to do a great fair job. The arbiters don’t know the names of the people involved in the thing. You’re only reading writer A, writer B, writer C, writer D and things that might appear incredibly obvious to Levinson are not obvious to the arbiter because the arbiter is just looking at the words on the page. And that is a real difference.

I’ve been through arbitrations where I’ve sought credit and lost and been really, really frustrated and wished I could convince other people of the logic of like why the decision was wrong. And yet, having been an arbiter myself, I recognize that that’s just the way it goes.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, when you look at the situation here, it’s important to understand that we’re hearing one side of the story.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And if you do arbitrations, one thing that becomes very evident is that writers are delusional about their — not always delusional but frequently delusional about the nature of their contribution to a script. Because as an arbiter you get the scripts but you also get the writer’s statements. And many times I’ve done an arbitration where I’ve had three different writers, each of whom are stating very clearly that they deserve sole credit and it’s obvious. And you just shake your head.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you read the scripts and realize, wow, two of these people are nuts. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** One of them is correct. So we’re hearing one side of this. And here’s what he’s saying. He’s saying that he didn’t get credit and what he’s angry about is that he asked to see the arbiter’s statements which is our right if you’re contemplating a policy review board. You can see the arbiter’s statements. And when he looked at those arbiter statements, he didn’t like what he saw particularly in one of them that denied him credit.

He thought that this person had written a “muddled critique that made no sense. It was just way too messy and inaccurate and I asked the board to have this person read the stuff again because I couldn’t see how this was a qualified judgment and they said no.” Well, you know, Barry Levinson’s opinion of the quality of that statement is not necessarily something upon which one can turn a system of jurisprudence.

I will say this, here are some things I don’t know. I don’t know, first of all, I don’t which guild administered this. The Writers Guild West tends to administer most of these things but in cases where a number of the writers are Writers Guild East members, the East may run it. I know that the West staff is really good about reviewing the arbiter statements and making sure that they comport with our rules.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** We don’t have a guarantee that an individual arbiter is going to be a genius.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** The staff does try and not call writers who they think are just bad at it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, they don’t want that either because they don’t want this. They don’t want a story like this. There were some comments on Deadline that were predictably way, way wrong, just factually incorrect. Some people seem to think that directors faced some sort of 75% threshold in order to get credit. Now, directors are essentially treated like everyone else, especially now, we did change a few rules, so there’s no — they would be looked at the same way everybody would be looked at in the situation like this. It’s an adaptation. Everybody has to hit 33%. 33% was Barry Levinson’s threshold which obviously is a guideline because there’s no such thing as a percentage like you’d actually figure out.

And two of three arbiters thought that he didn’t. Some people thought that the arbiters should be allowed to talk with each other and that it’s not fair that they don’t. They do talk to each other —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In a case like this, again, that was a change that we instituted. So if it’s not a unanimous decision, they talk. They have a teleconference in which anonymity is maintained and they discuss it. And if they can’t — if at that point they are still not unanimous but two of the three agree on something then that’s that.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** He doesn’t like this decision. I get it. He thinks one of these arbiters was a knucklehead. He might be right. I don’t know. All I do know is that he’s gone financial core and that changes truly nothing, not even for him. I wish that he had thought to do what I did when I got a credit decision that I thought was terrible. I decided to run for the board. I decided to form a committee. I decided to change the rules. I did change the rules. I decided to do it again. I did do it again.

I actually did the work. Oh, and I served as an arbiter. And Barry Levinson apparently has decided that in his union, if he doesn’t immediately get what he wants or what he perceives as fair, the only recourse is to quit. And, frankly, I just find that to be babyish.

If you’re on a boat and you see a leak in the boat and everyone is telling you it’s not leaking, fix the leak anyway. Convince them. Don’t just jump off the boat and swim away. It’s stupid. It just doesn’t do anything.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I get frustrated sometimes with this attitude of like, “Oh, my union did this to me.” There is no union. There is just a bunch of people. That’s it. We’re all in this together or we’re not, you know.

**John:** Yeah. People do bring up the idea of like a director has different qualifications for it. And so, what I want to stress is that this is an adaptation, this is the rules are set up in a way that the director only has to hit 33% just like any other writer. What is different about a director in an arbitration situation is the director, correct me if I’m wrong, Craig, it’s an automatic arbitration situation.

**Craig:** That’s right. Yeah.

**John:** So, because he is a director or a producer on the film, it has to go to arbitration. There’s no sort of just like everyone just shakes hands and agrees on it. It has to be arbitrated.

**Craig:** Yeah, that was another thing a few people got wrong on the Deadline comments. There is no situation here where the writers could have all agreed amongst themselves. And that rule has been there since the very beginning and it’s a good rule and no one has ever really convincingly challenged its value. And the idea being if you have one writer who has the ability to hire and fire other writers, then it makes sense that you would want to just essentially require an arbitration to avoid situations where a powerful director who holds somebody’s economic life in their hands saying, “I think we should all agree that I should be credited here.”

**John:** Yeah, you don’t want that at all.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But in other cases where no one is production executive or a director on the project, you can actually all as writers talk and there’ve been many cases where I have talked with the other writers and we’ve figured it out ourselves and has not had to go to arbitration. And in many ways, that’s the best scenario where you actually just figure it out and people end up feeling happier about it because of it.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s exactly right. And even in situations where there is no automatic arbitration or there is an arbitration where there are five writers and four of them agree and one doesn’t, you can also write joint statements.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or statements in support of each other. There is no reason that this is necessarily as combative as people think. What ends up happening in these situations is everybody comes out of the woodwork and starts screaming about how this system is imperfect and they are absolutely correct. It is imperfect. The thing that I hear most from people who have gone through this and with which I completely agree is that we would be better off if we weren’t serving as arbiters for each other or at least or at least solely comprising the arbiters.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We would be better off if there were some independent voices in there who were the kind of people that are routinely called as dramaturgical and literary experts in plagiarism cases or infringement cases in courts of law to help make these decisions because, frankly, knowing how to write a script is not the same Venn oval as knowing how to analyze components of literary contributions. It’s just a totally different skill. And, frankly, the other problem with our system is we’re busy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And with fewer and fewer screenwriters working, the idea that, you know, you’d want your jury pool to mostly be made up of people that are writing screenplays and active screenwriters and we’re busy and sometimes these arbitrations come in and they’re asking you to read eight drafts and a novel.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s just — it’s a burden. They’re desperate, constantly searching for people to do these things. It’s rough.

**John:** I got two calls this last week about arbitrations.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I couldn’t. I’m too busy.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s also partly because it’s TV time. And so because the TV shows are being picked up and announced, those credits are having to be figured out.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s not a fun thing to do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** All right, to our next thing. Several people wrote in with this kind of cool animated chart called the Periodic Table of Storytelling, or at least I thought it was cool. So basically it takes a bunch of tropes and ideas that exist in storytelling, various forms, largely cinema but also sort of general storytelling and kind of rearrange them into a chart that looks like a periodic table.

And the general categories which would be sort of the, you know, the columns on this chart are things about structure, settings, story modifiers, plot devices, heroes, character modifiers, archetypes, villains, meta tropes, production and fandom and audience reactions. We’ll put a link to it in the show notes because it’s a fun timewaster for awhile.

Two of the things I really enjoyed on this chart were Flanderization, and Flanderization is defined as, this is obviously Ned Flanders, but it’s when you take characters that are kind of normal and then over time you exaggerate qualities in him so much that he doesn’t resemble a normal person at all anymore. So in the case of Flanders, he was just like sort of the nice neighbor next door. And then they made him a little Christian, then a lot Christian, and then he ended up being sort of super-crazy Christian. And that’s just the arc that that character sort of took over time.

The other thing I liked was what they call the anthropic principle which in general the anthropic principle is that we are perfectly suited for the earth because if we weren’t perfectly suited for the earth we wouldn’t be here. Story-wise, the story equivalent of that is what we really call the “buy” is that like if it weren’t for this thing there wouldn’t even be a movie. So you’re willing to take as a given one or two things about the nature of this world because if it weren’t for these one or two things there wouldn’t be a story.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a cool chart. I mean, it’s very thorough.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s got a ton of stuff in it. I, from the point of view of somebody that tries to write things, I never really — these things I just find more amusing. It’s really, they are what they seem to be more than anything is a fan’s compendium of stuff they’ve noticed. But I don’t, I wouldn’t see any value here to somebody that was actually trying to write something.

It’s just more of a — it just feels like a very, [laughs,] I say Aspergers all the time. And I don’t want people to think like Aspergers is bad. Aspergers is awesome actually. I mean, people with Aspergers basically save our lives and, you know, figure out every bit of technology in our lives. But this is a little Aspergersy to me in a way that’s maybe not that useful.

**John:** Well, what I find useful is there are certain things on here that I will throw out in sort of casual conversation and then I will recognize that people don’t actually know what I’m talking about. So Chekhov’s Gun is an example of that and there’s a good entry on Chekhov’s Gun. And actually I should say that all the entries actually link back to TV Tropes which is a great way to waste about six hours of time just going through TV Tropes. Like Chekhov’s Gun which is a classic example of like if you establish a gun on the wall early in the story that gun has to go off or else everyone is going to be frustrated.

I think those are important things for writers to know and having a shorthand like Chekhov’s Gun is a good way of talking about like why something isn’t working right or why setting an expectation that is not fully met.

**Craig:** Oh, for sure. Yeah, look, Chekhov’s Gun was described by Chekhov.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So there are things that are literary notions that have been given to us by great writers and I always think those are useful and we should know those things. But here, I think it may be a little bit lost in some other stuff. I mean, I got a little suspicious when the, you know, now they start combining these periodic story elements into molecules that are, you know, movies or episodes of things and the examples are Star Wars, Mass Effect, Dilbert, Avatar: The Last Airbender, My Little Pony, Here Come the Bronies, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann which I assume is something anime, Firefly, Death Note, Wall-E and Ghostbusters. That’s some hardcore cheese doodle stain nerdism there. And I love almost all of those things. Not the Bronies stuff, but I love almost all that stuff. I just feel like this is a bit too , it’s a bit too dorky for me I have to say. And I love chemistry. I love the actual periodic table. I love writing. This actually drifted into just too dorky for me. I apologize.

**John:** Well, let’s step away from that chart to another chart because I was up in Seattle this last weekend. And Seattle by the way is awesome. So if you live in Seattle, congratulations. You live in an awesome town. So at the Experience Music Project, EMP, the big museum, they have great music exhibits but they also have like a lot of other really cool stuff there and two of the ones we went through were archetypes of fantasy and then there’s also a sci-fi, horror section. These are all sort of down in the basement and they are fantastic.

In the archetypes of fantasy, they had very nice, both animated on screen but also sort of as you walk through displays set up talking about the different sort of archetypes of fantasy you see in everything from Game of Thrones to Harry Potter to The Wizard of Oz, like sort of all these kind of things.

And I’ll include a link to a photo I took sort of that shows a chart of how many, 20 different archetypes they have, from the night to the shadow, to the unlikely hero, to the hero’s muse. And when you look at it just as little charts it’s like, well, yes, okay, that’s a thing. But what’s so smart about the exhibit is they actually then took a look at like who are those kind of characters in actual stories.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it makes it real for people when they see like, oh, okay, that character is — like Robin Hood is that type, but also Han Solo is that type. And the sense of the commonalities we see across our sort of mythic stories. In some ways it may be a little bit more useful for the person who is writing a movie to really think about these characters and the kinds of roles they could play.

Again, not in a prescriptive way, like you have to have the barbarian face off with the trickster, but a way of thinking about what functions are your characters serving in your story.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, there’s lots of good stuff there out in the world that delves into this topic of commonalities between stories and narrative. I mean, narrative is just a — all narrative is is a symptom of being human. So, naturally there should be these archetypal things because there’s stuff in all of us that’s archetypal. You have fear, and bravery, and honor, and justice, and all these things that then emerge in the forms of people, flat characters, or complicated characters.

You should read those things. Look, everyone will tell you you’ve got to read Joseph Campbell, you’ve got to read Joseph Campbell, and I always think, well, yeah, that’s great. You should. I mean, watch The Hero with a Thousand Faces, but — the thing he did with Moyer. But, read the myths. You know, when I was a kid I went through a phase where I just did nothing but read Greek myth.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was awesome. You read those myths and you start getting pure undiluted narrative because that’s what that stuff is.

**John:** Yeah. I went through a very hardcore mythology phase, actually probably a couple of phases. There was one in sort of early elementary school. It hit again later, and then sort of got into my Bulfinch’s Mythology in sort of late junior high/high school. And what’s fascinating about when you actually go back and really look at the myths is like there’s so much overlap and so many, like, you know, it’s almost like fandom or sort of like competing versions of how things fit together, like Demeter, and Ceres, and Persephone, and the underworld. It’s different kind of every time. And so there’s so many versions of what that story is. There’s no one completely archetypal true version of like what that thing is.

And in some ways seeing the multiple telling of it and how they different they all were sort of gives you permission as a storyteller to really think about what are the other ways I can tell this kind of story. And what is common between all of these versions of what is so different between all of these versions.

**Craig:** The New Testament is —

**John:** Oh, of course.

**Craig:** Is basically that. It’s Rashomon.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just that everybody agrees that Jesus was awesome. But Bulfinch’s Mythology is — that’s a book that should be on every writer’s bookshelf. Every writer should read Bulfinch’s Mythology.

**John:** At Barnes & Noble a couple weeks ago I bought myself, they have these really nicely bound special bound versions of The Great Tales of Mythology. It’s not a Bulfinch’s, but it’s a good mythology reader. And then the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which I’d never actually read through Grimm’s Fairy Tales and basically never fall in love because you’re going to die is essentially what you sort of learn.

**Craig:** They’re grim.

**John:** They are in fact grim. What’s also so fascinating about Grimm’s Fairy Tales I discovered is that almost, at least half of them in the first few sentences there will be like some throwaway random thing about his father was a bull, blah, blah, blah. And it just keeps going on. Or like there will be a curse that’s set up that’s never actually paid off. It’s really weird to sort of notice which of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales have sort of survived into modern culture and which ones are just like, “I’ve never heard of that one before and I can see why.”

**Craig:** [laughs] It didn’t work out. The Brothers Grimm collected these stories, basically German peasant stories. And I had a roommate in college, not Ted Cruz, but my friend Eric Leech whose mother was German and she had given him at one point a book, a German book of those old stories and along with these illustrations. And children were constantly being injured on purpose or as a result of their misbehavior.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** They would lose their fingers and blood would spurt out. The stores, I mean, Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm were in a race to harm as many children as possible. [laughs] It’s horrible.

**John:** What I also found so fascinating about the Grimm’s Tales is that so rarely do you actually see — in Grimm’s Tales it’s actually kind of rare for its protagonist to take an action that saves him or herself.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** More likely it’s that somebody takes pity on them and then marries them. Or someone else basically rescues them in so many of the stories in a way that’s a little disappointing.

**Craig:** Well, they are there to serve a social construction that was, I guess, important at the time, or necessary to survival. But how many of those old stories involved stepmothers? Stepmothers were this enormous problem apparent, [laughs], that just asshole stepmothers.

**John:** I was looking in the introductory pages of this book, whatever the scholar was who was setting stuff up. He explains that stepmothers are actually sort of a bad translation of what the real concept is here. So, sometimes it was really just bad mothers, or second mothers, or stepmothers, or just other women who were around. But because in English we just have the word “stepmother,” we always take it to mean the woman who came in after mom died. And that’s not necessarily always what it was supposed to be in the Grimm’s stories.

**Craig:** Ah-ha!

**John:** Ah-ha! The same way that I think French has different words for like a cousin on your mom’s side and a cousin on your dad’s side. I may be making that up, but like different cultures describe relationships differently. And so we have the word stepmother, but there’s actually more subtle ways to talk about some of these things in other languages.

**Craig:** Well, look, as long as some kid gets his nose chopped off by a woodsman’s ax then I’m satisfied.

**John:** I am satisfied as well.

So, this last week, maybe it was two weeks ago, there was a New York Times piece called Memos to Hollywood. And the conceit behind it, which is not actually at all true, but the conceit behind it would be that A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis and other critics at the New York Times were writing emails to different people and they were just going to print what the emails were.

Well, one of them I found really fascinating because it actually touched on something that I never really considered. Or, I guess I considered it in the back of my head but never thought this could be real problem. So, I’m going to read one from Manohla Dargis. It’s directed to two directors. She writes:

“Do you know that, increasingly, your labor of love — the movie you spent months and probably years of your life on — is being reviewed by critics who are watching it on their computers? For years, the cost of striking and shipping film prints as well as renting theaters for press screenings led cash-strapped companies to simply supply DVDs to reviewers. Some reviewers have been happy to comply, and of course, the blurring between the big- and small-screen viewing, and the closing of theatrical windows, hasn’t helped. After all, if a movie is being released in theaters and on demand the same day, why bother watching it on the big screen ó or so the bottom-line thinking goes.

“These days, though, some companies don’t even bother to send critics DVDs: They’re only supplying Internet links that often have the reviewer’s name watermarked on the crummy-looking image, and even come with distracting time codes. So that moody shot that you and your director of photography anguished over for hours and hours? It may look beautiful, but there are critics who will never know, which certainly encourages them to pay more attention to the plot than the visuals. Viewers who bypass the theatrical experience and prefer watching movies on their televisions and tablets may not mind. Some directors, especially those whose talking heads and two shots look better on small screens, also won’t care; others just want their work seen however, wherever. But I bet there are directors who would freak if they knew how some critics were watching their movies.”

And, yeah, I think they really would. I’ve seen some of those sites, like I remember for Star Trek when we did — I did a panel at the Academy and we had a clip from the second Star Trek movie. And so they sent me a link that had like my name burned into it so I could just watch it ahead of time. If I had watched the whole movie that way I would not have liked it the same way I liked it when I saw it in the theater.

**Craig:** Yeah, if you are trying — if you care enough to send a movie to film critic I guess you care enough about their review, then you should send them a nice looking thing. That said, no one actually cares what they think. [laughs] The directors do, but the studios don’t.

When she says “cash-strapped companies are simply supplying DVDs to reviewers,” they’re not cash-strapped. They don’t care Manohla, they don’t care what you think. They don’t care what A.O. Scott thinks. They don’t care what any reviewer thinks whatsoever. They know perfectly well that when they have a movie that they think critics need to discover and love in order to get people to go, trust me, you’ll get a nice print. You’ll get a nice print. You’ll get a nice copy of it somehow or another. They’ll care.

But if it’s Star Trek, I mean, they couldn’t give a damn what you think. And, you know, these memos John —

**John:** Oh, I’m going to disagree with you strongly there. I guarantee you J.J. Abrams would not —

**Craig:** No, J.J. Abrams does. I’m not talking about J.J. Abrams. I agree, the directors would freak out. I’m talking about the people that are actually sending them, which is the studio, the bean counters, and the distribution and marketing and publicity departments. They don’t care. They don’t care.

**John:** I think that’s why this memo is directed towards directors. I think the fact is that a director might not even know that this is happening —

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And this is pointing out that you really, in many cases you really don’t want that to happen. Now, I think there’s also some logic to some cases it doesn’t really matter. And there are movies that are coming out on TV at the same time and for those people maybe it’s fine to just provide the link because it may be the difference between getting your review and not getting your review at all. You probably want a review for a small indie film, something like, you know —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Short Term 12. That’s the movie that you want to make sure it gets reviewed. You send a link, you’ll do whatever just to get them to watch the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, and look, she points out — it’s a bit dismissive about movies that are talking heads, so apparently talking heads are bad unless I suppose it’s My Dinner with Andre in which it’s great. Look, you know, I read this — I read the whole thing. I read this whole thing. And I just kept laughing the whole time. It’s like two people that truly have no idea that nobody gave a damn what they think, going at length in America’s “paper of record” about how people should be listening to them. And they’re writing these memos to people that just don’t care.

We don’t care. I mean, listen, directors should want anyone, not just critics, anyone to see a nice version of their movie. Of course. And, you know, I don’t know — I know that these people go on these junkets. I’d rather frankly have a reviewer, if it were up to me, watch the movie on their own than watch it in a room with all of these other critics and their weird herd-like junkets as they convince each other that something is good or bad.

But nobody really cares. I mean, these people are writing these memos about superhero movies like anyone cares. [laughs] And then they’re writing letters to their fellow movie critics complaining about them. This is such a critic’s thing. Let’s just talk about stuff we don’t understand and complain about it. They literally don’t know what they’re talking about, John.

**John:** I was surprised you took so much umbrage here. Really. Genuinely. Because I was going to save that thing they read about the superhero movies for our superhero show. But, obviously now we can’t do that, so I’ll have to find another way to make you angry.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s just…these people…they write:

To: Television

Cc: Movies

Subject: Get over yourselves

And then this nonsense about movie and television and how one, oh, “Current conventional wisdom holds that television has entered a golden age while movies are in a period of decline. Those are dubious notions…”

Nobody cares. Shut up. Just watch the television you like. And watch the movies you like. And stop talking about this nonsense. Nobody cares. These people, my god, is there any naval too small for them to not gaze at?

Thank you.

**John:** [laughs] Next, a question from Twitter. Bobby Bearly wrote in, and I don’t have his actual tweet so I’m just going to summarize what his tweet asked, which is, “How do you keep secrets from your readers in a script,” which is a question we haven’t really talked about on the show.

And so I think what Bobby’s referring to is there will be sometimes where there’s going to be a reveal in a movie, but the reveal in the movie isn’t going to make the same kind of sense on the page. And sometimes it will be about who a character really is, what somebody looks like, and that it’s really the same person the whole time through.

And so how do you do that in terms of what are the words on the page to show that you’re keeping a secret there. And are you in some way violating the trust of the reader by not being upfront about what was happening there?

**Craig:** Well, we’re supposed to violate trust to some extent. The existence of a movie is already the violation of a trust because you are portraying events to somebody as if they are happening in real time, or happening linearly, when in fact you who are presenting these things know exactly how this ends.

The entire thing is a betrayal of trust.

When it comes to secrets, tricks, gimmicks, twists, reveals, there are two things to keep in mind. The first is you cannot get away with the following statement: I know my movie seems really boring for 50 pages, but then when the big secret happens it will all make sense and be cool.

No. We were just bored for 50 minutes. You cannot use twist or revelation as an excuse for everything prior to that twist or revelation being boring. In fact, the reason that good twists and good reveals are so exciting is because they shock an audience who has been enjoying what they’ve been watching without it.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, The Sixth Sense, or Fight Club, very famous and somewhat recent examples of movies that have big twists, are remarkably enjoyable on their own terms prior to that twist.

**John:** Exactly. So, I think both Fight Club and Sixth Sense though bring up interesting issues about what you actually put on the page, because in both those cases — especially Sixth Sense — you want to make it clear that Bruce Willis is not actually touching anybody else.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And portraying that on the page can be really crucial and yet you don’t want to tip it too far. And so it’s one of those things where like with a camera you would do it a certain way. With just words on the page it’s sort of harder to show what the nature of that —

**Craig:** It’s tricky.

**John:** That physical geography is. The other case which comes up quite often is — and I guess this is Fight Club to some degree — but where you’re going to see like a shadowy figure and then ultimately down the road you’re going to reveal who that person really is. It’s the degree to which a screenplay is a plan for shooting a movie. Well, that character was in these scenes all this time and we shouldn’t see him. And so usually you develop some sort of terminology for what that thing is, what that character is, like the man with the gray coat. And then eventually you will reveal the man in the gray coat is actually this person, this other character who we’ve been seeing the whole time through. Like, Susan is the man in the gray coat. There’s going to be that reveal later on.

On screen we’re going to see that. On the page, sometimes that’s actually a little harder to catch. And so that’s one of those cases where if you’ve been conservative and not bolded or underlined things, this is the time to break out and actually bold or underline something so the reader is caught up with where a viewer would be, so they really can sense like, “Oh my god, they’re actually the same person.”

**Craig:** Yeah. You want to, as you’re going through we’ll call your — there’s the pre-twist and then there’s the moment of the twist. Your pre-twist stuff you have to make sure that when the reader goes backwards, and they often will — they’ll get to the twist and they’ll go, “What? Hold on a second.” Then they’ll go back because they think they’ve caught you in a mistake.

You want to have covered your tracks well. So, in Fight Club there’s a scene where the main character is acting as an interloper in an argument between Tyler Durden and Tyler Durden’s girlfriend. And then Tyler Durden is at the bottom of the stairs in a basement and she’s in the kitchen and, in fact, if you go back and look at how that scene plays out and how it would be written you would go, “Oh my god, oh, my god, it actually works with that.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you want to be careful about all of that stuff. The moment of the twist when you write the twist and you make the reveal you use the page. Give yourself page space. Let it really sink in. Make a deal of it. Use white space.

If you feel like putting nothing on that page except the reveal, do that. The page will show the emphasis. And use that space creatively, otherwise it’ll just be another action description. People will just literally go, “Oh, well I guess it’s as important as the fact that somebody walked into the room with his hat.”

**John:** Ah-ha! All right. We have a question from David Dunne who writes, “Part one, I don’t currently have an agent but my so-so manager of a few years has given me notes on a few different scripts and they sucked.” I assume the notes sucked, not the script sucks.

“He offered vague generalities, better this, bigger that, not feeling this/that, and virtually nothing constructive. I like this but take it further. Dig deeper here. This character is interesting but flat.

“So how much of his inability to give useful notes weigh in my decision to drop or keep him? If he were an all-star maybe I would overlook the shortcoming. We’re talking just so-so here.

“A related part of the question. A good friend sold a cable network show that’s going and he wants me on his staff. Should I drop the manager before joining, or if I keep him should he get a fee? How do you handle this in the most professional way?”

**Craig:** [sighs] Well, let’s run down the facts. Your manager is, as you call him or her, so-so.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All we have to judge is the behavior you’ve given us which is that his notes are bad, at which point my argument would be they’re not so-so, they’re bad. But either way it doesn’t sound like you’re getting anything out of this relationship. How important is it to have a manager who gives you good notes? It’s as important to you as it is. If you want a manager to get you work and you don’t care what they think about your script then it doesn’t matter. If you’re looking for somebody to help you grow and get better, then it does. And it sounds like that’s what you’re looking for.

You have somebody that’s offering you a job. And you don’t like your manager and you think they give you bad notes and this manager didn’t get you this job. My advice would of course be to fire the manager. [laughs] He’s done nothing.

**John:** When Craig Mazin wakes up in the morning he sits up, he says, “Fire your manager.” It’s your first instinct for everything, right?

**Craig:** I mean, normally, yeah. A lot of times people ask a question, like the prior question was about how to handle a secret in a screenplay. And my answer, my instinctive answer is, “Fire your manager.” But I control that.

**John:** [laughs] You do. But your second answer I thought was better in that case.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, I want to go back and stick up for the manager just a tiny bit, but then ultimately I’m with you. Managers can serve two functions. There can be managers who are really good at helping you get your writing to the best state and they can sort of serve as a proxy for like what a producer might think. They could be reading every draft. They can sort of help you get your stuff in the best shape.

And there are some managers who do that who are really good. Not a lot of them, but there are some of them, and that can be useful.

A manager can also help you get work. And that sounds more like what you were using this manager for, hopefully, but in this case the manager didn’t get you work. It sounds like you weren’t working. It sounds like this friend is going to hire you on a show independent of what the manager did. So, I would also fire your manager. And then wait a few weeks and then sign on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah. No brainer to me. I mean, he even says he’s not a super star. My guess is this is a marginal — there are so many of these people on the margins of Hollywood who, if you think about it, they’re posing as experts in the thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They are not. So, it’s a bit like you’ walking around with a festering wound and you like in a town where the way you know someone is a doctor is that they call themselves doctor. And these people call themselves managers. That word means nothing. It means that they can afford letterhead.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And we don’t even know if they can afford letterhead. That may just be credit card debt.

**John:** Yeah. It’s all emails now anyway.

**Craig:** Well, there you go.

**John:** So, yes, we think you should fire your manager in the part one of the question. And then in the part two of your question, if you’re going to get this job staffed on a TV show, congratulations. Once you’re on board there that might be a great time to look for an agent because agents love people who work and who get hired to work. And if you are working on a TV show then you are by definition a working writer. And that might be a very good way for you to get started with an actual agent.

**Craig:** Correctamundo.

**John:** Our next topic in our big, multi-tab episode, I want to talk about Big Fish and sort of what happens to a Broadway after Broadway.

So, Big Fish closed right at the end of the year and in the time since then we’ve had the cast album come out. But we’ve also started to announce that there’s actually a bunch of stagings of Big Fish happening this next year. I think there are 20 announced so far. The biggest one for Southern California, Long Beach actually bought out all of our costumes and props and things like that.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** And so they’re doing a big production here.

**Craig:** Including the elephant butts?

**John:** I think they bought the elephant butts.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** I’m not sure on the elephant butts. Those are pretty big, but they bought stuff. So, I hope they have that, too.

So, that’s going to be kind of more like the Broadway version of the show. So, it’s like what you might have seen on the main stage on Broadway. We’re also going to be doing, the only one that Andrew and I are going to be sort of directly involved in is we’re doing a new staging in Boston at the Speakeasy Theater which is a really stripped down sort of 12 chairs, maybe no sets kind of version. We’re both going in and rewriting stuff designed to bring it down to a much smaller cast, a much smaller orchestra, which is actually really exciting. I get a chance to do that, again.

What’s so odd about this process is that I’ve done film and I’ve done television, and in film and television once something is done it’s just kind of done. You might go to a retrospective screening of Go or you’ll be flipping through channels and you’ll see the Big Fish movie on HBO, which is there a lot, but you’re sort of done. And weirdly here you’re not just done because Andrew and I control copyright on Big Fish and so everyone who wants to do a future version of Big Fish comes to me and Andrew and says, “Hey, I want to put on your show,” and we get to say yes or no.

And we sort of made the decision to just say yes a lot, like a lot a lot. And so we’re licensing it to these bigger places like the Speakeasy and in Long Beach, but also there are high schools that are going to be doing it next fall.

**Craig:** That’s great. That’s great.

**John:** There’s religious groups that are doing it. There are churches. And I won’t see most of these productions, but it’s fascinating to think that these things are going to exist sort of independently of me. It’s kind of cool.

**Craig:** That is cool. I really like that you guys are opening it up to high school productions because both of my kids are big — they’re really involved in musical theater and they love it. And you do tend to get the same kind of thing happening in high school productions. And rarely do you get something that’s new, because if it’s new typically the rights holders want to kind of exploit the higher end of it, or they jack up the rates to such that high schools can’t really afford it.

For instance, Jack’s school was going to do Cinderella, which is an old play.

**John:** Yeah, it’s been out so it’s more expensive.

**Craig:** But now suddenly because it was revived they couldn’t afford it. They just couldn’t afford it, so they had to go to Once Upon a Mattress, which is about as overdone a high school production as you can get. I mean, it’s fun. Don’t get me wrong, and they did a great job, but Once Upon a Mattress is right up there with Fiddler on the Roof which my daughter will be in, [laughs], in a couple weeks.

So, it’s nice to see something fresh and new with modern music and interesting themes and storytelling, you know, and hopefully you can get out to some of those churches, John. [laughs]

**John:** I’m very excited. So, Liberty University is actually doing a Big Fish —

**Craig:** Wait, I’m sorry, hold on. You guys, the two of you —

**John:** Us. The two of us.

**Craig:** The two of you licensed your show to Liberty University?

**John:** We did.

**Craig:** I’m against this.

**John:** I didn’t even know that it happened until it happened. But I’m actually kind of excited. I honestly feel like Big Fish is the kind of show like we could probably run in Branson, Missouri for a good long time.

**Craig:** Well, you could. But, I mean, I just have to ask the question — I mean, was there at no point did you guys say, “We’re licensing our production to an institution that is just like off the charts homophobic?”

**John:** Uh, you know, it honestly happened, but like I found out that it was happening after I think the deal had already been signed. So, I’ll give you a little more backstory as to what the actual process is like. So, people can come to me or Andrew but we would ultimately say like, “That’s fantastic that you want to do it. Here’s where you go.” And so it’s a company called TRW who does the licensing for this show and a lot of other shows.

And so they’re ultimately the ones that are doing it. And so in our initial conversations with TRW about the places we were excited to see it, we really strongly — or I, I guess honestly I’ll put this on me — I strongly stressed that I really think the religious community will dig this show and will probably like it a lot. And so I said Utah and the South. And so they took me at my word and we have a staging in Orem, Utah and we have a couple stagings in the South.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So, we have like Abilene Christian University and Liberty University. And then here is the thing: I’m not quite convinced it’s actually Liberty University. It’s the center that is next to their campus, but it may not actually be part of the campus itself. The website is not Liberty University.

**Craig:** Oh, well, those people love gay folks. [laughs] Oh, the people next door to Liberty University.

**John:** Oh, they love them. It’s just the best scenario.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, absolutely.

**John:** But in a weird way I feel — I feel kind of okay with that. It’s hard for me to explain why, but it’s just the show should work for people of , you know, across the board.

**Craig:** Absolutely. There’s no question about that. It’s a very family friendly show and it’s a very kind of wholesome, I mean, the word wholesome comes to mind. It’s about small town America in the ’50s and ’60s, that kind of idyllic time that a lot of socially conservative people yearn for.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So, there’s no question it will work for them. But, you know, hey, look, I guess one way to think about it is that you are quietly putting some gay into Liberty University.

**John:** I think there’s already plenty of gay in Liberty University.

**Craig:** [laughs] I think you’re right!

**John:** So, just to wrap this up, so we’re finished on Broadway and while I would love to still be running on Broadway, it’s also sort of nice to put a little of it behind me on some stuff. We’re not quite done yet. We’re up for some Drama Desk Awards, which is great. I was especially — Kate Baldwin and Norbert Leo Butz who were so fantastic in the show, I was happy to see them get singled out for their great work.

And we’re actually up for best musical on Broadway.com, which is sort of the People’s Choice Awards of Broadway.

**Craig:** Oh, great.

**John:** So, there will be a link in the show notes. If you want to stuff the ballot box for Big Fish I won’t say no. And you can vote for Big Fish as Best Musical if you choose to.

**Craig:** You know, the People’s Choice Awards, that’s the only award I ever get.

**John:** [laughs] You and me, together at last.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** Let’s talk some One Cool Things. So, we’ve been going through, we had two earlier sessions where we talked through old One Cool Things. And we got up to number 80, so should we start?

**Craig:** Yeah, let’s do it.

**John:** So, my number 80 was Unfinished Scripts which was a Twitter feed where it was sort of screenshots of terrible screenplays. And there is also Unfinished Screenplays which is the same idea. I’m not sure which one came first. They’re both kind of funny. I don’t really follow them much anymore, but I see them every once and awhile.

**Craig:** Yeah, mine was EyeWire which was a little web-based game that actually helped neurologists map the brain. I think they were rat brains, but still they’re trying to come up with a good map of that stuff. And I did that for awhile. It was fun. Then I stopped. But I think the idea was that you don’t play that every day. So, I had my time with it.

**John:** My number 81 was StageWrite for the iPad which was actually developed by the associate choreographer on Big Fish. And it is a way of keeping track of everyone on stage and sort of where they’re moving from set to set to set, to scene to scene to scene. And it’s great software for that. So, I don’t need to use it, because I’m not choreographing anything, but I see people using it still.

**Craig:** And mine was Kiva, which is a microloan website where you can essentially loan money to indigent people across the world, mostly in third world countries. And I still do that to this day. I basically have an amount that I just roll. And as people pay me back then I just roll it off to somebody else. And it’s a great thing to do. And I urge everybody to check it out at Kiva, I believe it’s Kiva.org. It’s super easy to do. And it’s a good thing.

**John:** My number 80 was Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger & Kenneth Cukier. It was a book I read. I liked it a lot when I read it. I liked it a fair amount when I read it and there’s been a lot more discussion of Big Data in the time since I remember reading that book. And sort of how much you can zero in on the individual person if you combine enough data sets and how that can be great but also troubling.

**Craig:** And mine was the Tesla Motors Forum, along with the username FlasherZ who is an electrician. And I check in there all the time to get little bits of news and blurbs and stuff. Very useful. Very useful forum.

**John:** Hey, Craig, do you like your car?

**Craig:** It’s not really car, John. It’s everything. [laughs] It’s everything to me. Everything.

**John:** From your helpful forum I needed to point to my helpful forum, this is number 83, this Lifehacker post on using multiple audio inputs and outputs in OSX. And this came up because we had Derek Haas as a guest on the show and needed to be able to connect two microphones to my laptop and it was really confusing to figure out how to do that And god bless the internet that there was a little thing on how to do that.

**Craig:** Someone has thought of everything. Mine was the Animal Specialty Group which is an animal hospital in Glendale that saved the life of my dog who is currently prancing about in the yard as I speak. They are wonderful people. I hope to never have to see them again, but if I do they will be there for me.

**John:** My 84 was tips for singing the National Anthem which if you take nothing else is the lowest note you possibly can sing it should be the third note of the National Anthem. [sings] “Oh, say”…that say should be the lowest note you can possibly sing.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** That way you have the range to be able to go to the top, hopefully.

**Craig:** The word that you should be afraid of is “glare.” And “the rockets’ red glare.” Glare will be the highest. If you don’t start low enough you will never get to glare.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Mine was BioShock Infinite. What a great game. I really enjoyed it. That — it’s funny, it ties back to our little twist conversation. There’s a huge reveal in it and frankly it was very complicated and I didn’t quite understand it at first. I needed to play through the game again really to appreciate it, which actually to me says they didn’t do that great of a job on that. It was almost too rich. You know, whereas the first BioShock when the twist happens everything suddenly kaboom in your head.

And yet also I have to say that the depth that Ken Levine provided through the game is — it’s essentially the most creatively and philosophically ambitious video game I’ve ever played on a console. It was really well done.

**John:** Mine for 85 was Ulysses III. It’s a Macintosh text editor. I like it but it’s not my go-to text editor. I use By Word most days.

**Craig:** Mine was That Mitchell and Webb Look on BBC. Those guys are awesome. I still will occasionally amuse myself by just watching clips of those guys. They’re very, very funny.

**John:** My number 86 was the Internet K-Hole, which was a collection of photographs that this photographer woman has assembled on a website. And you cannot just not look at it. It’s just great. And it’s photos from sort of a punk rock lifestyle over 40 years maybe. It’s fascinating.

**Craig:** Pretty cool. Mine is Slacker Radio. I use it every day in my car, also known as the Everything.

**John:** My 87 was Stag’s Leap, a book of poems by Sharon Olds. I still think about it. It’s actually a great collection of poems mostly about the disintegration of her marriage and just really brilliantly done.

**Craig:** Mine was ITER which is I think a French consortium coming up with a way to provide us with unlimited pollution-free energy. I’m pretty sure they’re still working on it. I’d love to see that happen.

**John:** Yeah, has that happened? That’s great. That’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. I think they are still working on getting some bugs out.

**John:** My number 88 was FilmCraft Screenwriting by Tim Grierson. Tim Grierson did a series of books on screenwriting, on cinematography, and other things. And I’m actually in the book on screenwriting and it was a well put together book. It still sits on my coffee table. I think I’ve read the whole thing. But, I read my little part, so that counts.

**Craig:** That’s good. I had nothing that week.

**John:** [laughs] My number 89 was Scandal Revealed episode 221 from Matt Byrne.

**Craig:** Oh my god, you had so many.

**John:** There were so many. It was a weird episode. I don’t know why — basically all my old assistants are linked to different things.

**Craig:** And I had just a fact really that the LA Times reported that studios donated film set materials to Habitat for Humanity which is very cool. And also this was the first time that Joe Nienalt and Daniel Vang did their American Heart Association thing where they offered to read your script to raise money for research into heart disease.

**John:** Great. Let’s stop there. Man, we got a lot of these.

**Craig:** What do you say —

**John:** We bang out ten a week we’ll get through them all.

**Craig:** This is like — this podcast had everything.

**John:** Lord.

**Craig:** I got upset. We covered like 100 topics. I don’t know if we should continue. [laughs]

**John:** I think we’re basically done. Although I have a One Cool Thing for this week.

**Craig:** Me too. What’s yours?

**John:** My One Cool Thing is, oh, you’re going to love this, Craig. You’re salivating.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** You’re going to love this so much.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** It is the WorkEZ Executive Laptop Stand.

**Craig:** I mean, oh god.

**John:** So, it’s not for me, it’s for Stuart. Because Stuart who works downstairs, he works on a laptop and I see him slouching in his chair. I’m like, Stuart, that’s not good. He’s like, “I know it’s not good.” And so I said Stuart if I get you a stand for your laptop so you can stand up when you want to stand up, would you like that? He’s like, “Sure.”

And so I got it and I bought this one off Amazon. It was really good. He uses it right now.

**Craig:** He’s just shutting you up.

**John:** Well, he’s standing up while he’s shutting me up, so that’s a good thing.

**Craig:** I think you get more work out of Stuart if he’s in pain.

**John:** Ha! Crippled over in agony.

**Craig:** Yes. My, by the way, I’ve been playing Monument Valley a lot. It’s really, really good.

**John:** Isn’t that beautifully done?

**Craig:** It’s gorgeous.

**John:** Actually you can’t kind of play a lot because it’s really short.

**Craig:** Well, so I play a chapter and then I just put it down. So, I’ve spreading it out. But my One Cool Thing this week is a game for iOS, as often is the case, called Sometimes You Die.

**John:** I’ve played Sometimes You Die. I thought it was great.

**Craig:** Really cool. It is very minimalist. The game play is — basically it’s a platform of sort, except sometimes you die. Sometimes you have to die. And when you die your little body, which is just a cursor, it’s just a carrot —

**John:** A square block.

**Craig:** A little square block. Your body is left behind and you can use your past dead bodies to get to where you need to go. But where the game is really kind of fascinating is in the sound of it and the look of it and the text on screen. It’s essentially saying what are you doing, why are you playing this?

And so in that regard it’s very, very cool. I’ve enjoyed it a lot.

**John:** It reminded me a bit of portal, and not in the sense of like the fancy mechanics, but just the sense of kind of it’s talking back to you and it’s sort of — there’s a quality of existential doom to it that was actually quite fun.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I think I played to the end but I’m not even sure if I’ve gotten to the end.

**Craig:** You haven’t because I did a little reading. I played to the end, too, but every time you play thought it you get a little thing. And the idea is that at some point you will have collected a couple of little super powers that allow you to play through the game without dying.

**John:** Ah.

**Craig:** So, I don’t know if I noticed when you played all the way through, now you’re allowed to turn your phone and your little carrot will — gravity will work on your carrot.

**John:** Ah, okay. So, now —

**Craig:** And then there’s another one later when you play through again where you get a pause button. So, there’s all these things that happen and the idea is eventually you can complete the game without dying.

**John:** That is genius. You’ve basically made a new game for me by telling me these secrets.

**Craig:** Voila.

**John:** And that’s our show. So, you can find links to things we talked about in the show notes which are at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. It’s also there where you can find transcripts for previous episodes. Just by the way, Craig, I had a listener who wrote into me on Twitter today who was thanking me for the transcripts because he’s deaf. And because he’s deaf the only way he can experience the podcast is through the transcripts. So, that was just really great that he took the time to write in.

You can listen to all of the back episodes, both on the site, the most recent 20, or the older ones you can find on scriptnotes.net. The ones that are on scriptnotes.net you can also find in the app, both for iOS and for Android. You search your applicable app store for those.

We have occasional bonus content things, so those show up if you’re subscriber to all the back episodes. Subscribing also gives you all back to episode number one when we didn’t know what we were doing.

We have a few of the USB drives left. They are at store.johnaugust.com.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Sam Worseldine.

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** And if you have an outro that you’d like for us to play on the show, send it to us. Send us a link. Put it on SoundCloud and send us a link. We’d love to hear it.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** If you have a question for Craig, you can find him on Twitter. He’s @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Longer questions like the one we answered today you can write to ask@johnaugust.com.

If you are on iTunes just randomly and you want to leave us a comment or leave us a rating, go for it. Knock yourself out. It helps other people find the show. And that’s it.

Craig, next time I see you it will be the live show. I can’t wait.

**Craig:** [creepy voice] Hey, hey John.

**John:** What’s up?

**Craig:** [creepy voice] Next time is going to be live.

**John:** It’s going to be amazing. You can see Craig Mazin do that voice live on stage.

**Craig:** [creepy voice] Yeah. This is Craig. Yeah.

**John:** And he promises to dress the part, too.

**Craig:** [laughs] Always.

**John:** You don’t want to miss that experience.

**Craig:** Nothing is sexier than a 43-year-old man in J. Crew.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** All right. See you there.

**John:** Great. Thanks Craig. Bye.

Links:

* [Voting for the Live Three Page Challenge is open](http://johnaugust.com/threepagelive) until May 14 at noon
* [Get your tickets now](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-summer-superhero-spectacular/) for the Scriptnotes Summer Superhero Spectacular
* John’s blog post on [which apps screenwriters are using](http://johnaugust.com/2014/which-apps-are-screenwriters-using)
* Scriptnotes, Episode 141: [Uncomfortable Ambiguity, or Nobody Wants Me at their Orgy](http://johnaugust.com/2014/uncomfortable-ambiguity-or-nobody-wants-me-at-their-orgy)
* Matt Selman [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Selman)
* The Simpsons, Episode 492: The Book Job, on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_Job) and [Amazon Instant Video](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006B318N8/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* The Simpsons, Episode 266: The Trilogy of Error [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilogy_of_Error)
* John’s blog post on [How to Write a Photoplay](http://johnaugust.com/2014/how-to-write-a-photoplay) and [the book on archive.org](https://archive.org/details/howtowritephotop00hoag)
* Deadline on [Barry Levinson leaving the WGA](http://www.deadline.com/2014/05/barry-levinson-quits-wga-over-sloppy-credit-arbitration-on-screen-version-of-philip-roths-the-humbling/)
* [The Periodic Table of Storytelling](http://designthroughstorytelling.net/periodic/)
* Seattle’s [Experience Music Project Museum](http://www.empmuseum.org/), and [John’s photo of the Archetypes of Fantasy chart](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/archetypes.jpg)
* Joseph Campbell’s [The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Collected Works](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1577315936/?tag=johnaugustcom-20), and his and Bill Moyers’ video series, [The Power of Myth](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A4E8E1O/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Bulfinch’s Mythology](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1440426309/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Memos to Hollywood](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/movies/critics-weigh-in-on-patriarchy-and-the-vanished-film-print.html) from The New York Times
* Big Fish’s [upcoming shows](http://www.theatricalrights.com/big-fish)
* Vote now (for Big Fish!) for the [Broadway.com Audience Choice Awards](http://awards.broadway.com/buzz/2014/5/5/votebway-vote-now-for-the-winners-of-the-2014-broadwaycom-audience-choice-awards)
* All our [One Cool Things](http://johnaugust.com/onecoolthings)
* [WorkEZ Executive Laptop Stand](http://www.uncagedergonomics.com/workez-executive/) and [on Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B9HGHPU/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Sometimes You Die](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sometimes-you-die/id822701037?mt=8) for iOS
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Sam Worseldine ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))