Search Results for: characters

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-contract-between-writers-and-readers).

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

**Craig Mazin:** I am Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 132 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So, Craig, as we’re recording this on a Friday afternoon there are still tickets left for the great Nerdist Writers Panel/Scriptnotes crossover episode, which is taping live on April 13. And I don’t know how I feel about this.

**Craig:** Mm. I mean, I’m a little shocked.

**John:** Yeah. Because usually we sell out incredibly quickly. So, I don’t want to put all the blame on Ben Blacker and the Nerdist Writers Panel people, because it’s possibly that they’re just slower on the uptake. Or maybe because April is actually a ways away — there’s not the urgency.

**Craig:** But, I mean, we are the Jon Bon Jovi of the podcast world. And when Jon Bon Jovi doesn’t immediately sell out he throws a tantrum. I will throw a tantrum.

**John:** You don’t want to see Craig hulk out.

**Craig:** I will go crazy. I will go nuts.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a cross between Bruce Banner and Jon Bon Jovi…

**Craig:** And Patti Lupone.

**John:** Throwing a tantrum. And it’s just —

**Craig:** It’s Patti Lupone.

**John:** It’s Patti Lupone.

**Craig:** When she — have you ever heard that audio of Patti Lupone singing and then she’s interrupted by the sound of a cell phone ringing in the audience? And she goes bonkers?

**John:** Yeah. There’s another Patti Lupone story where she believes that someone is taking her photo and it’s actually the photographer who is supposed to be taking the photo.

**Craig:** Gorgeous.

**John:** There’s basically a lot of Patti Lupone stories it comes down to it.

**Craig:** This one is great. I guess it’s the second podcast in a row where I’m talking about celebrities going nuts on audio. And she just goes, “How dare you! Who do you think you are?” And what’s so great about Patti Lupone, among other things, is that even when she’s yelling who do you think you are, it’s in great voice. It’s just a wonderful belted full-chested wonderful tone. “Who do you think you are?”

**John:** I love it.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, anyway, that’s what I’m going to do. If people don’t buy these tickets I’m going to go full Lupone. Boy!

**John:** Yeah, but see, Craig, people are going to be wanting you to go full Lupone because it just seems so incredibly amusing that they may actually delay just so they can read the stories of Craig going full Lupone.

**Craig:** Can I just say again —

**John:** Well, actually maybe we’ll find some way to antagonize you there at the actual event.

**Craig:** I hope so!

**John:** Therefore everyone will get to see it. Oh, I think we should invite back some of our favorite guests, favorite recent guests, like people who have come from a company to visit.

**Craig:** Oh right! [laughs], so I can go full Lupone.

**John:** That could be great. A live version of that.

**Craig:** John. If people didn’t know and you just said, “Listen to a bunch of our podcasts and then tell us which one of us is gay,” [laughs], how many votes — I think I actually — I think I would win. I would get 70% gay.

**John:** You might.

**Craig:** I mean, just Patti Lupone. The Patti Lupone reference alone. Wow. I got to rethink stuff.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a lot.

**Craig:** I’m this close to going…

**John:** I think you’re perfectly happy in your life and your wife and all that stuff is good.

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh wow!

**John:** Today on the show —

**Craig:** Wow. That’s mean. [laughs]

**John:** The contract formed between writers and audiences. Basically sort of what is the deal you are making with the reader as the person sits down to read the script and ultimately when the audience is going to sit down to watch the film.

And we’re going to talk about three Three Page Challenges. Brand new Three Page Challenges, which I’m very excited about.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** And we’re going to start off with a question. So, should we just start?

**Craig:** Yeah, why don’t we just roll right in.

**John:** First question. Sleepless in Los Angeles writes, “So, I’m a fairly new writer who was hired to do a studio rewrite, which I recently delivered on. It was the usual route. Producers first, then to the studio. My reps have seemed beyond gobsmacked the producers didn’t have any notes for me to do at the producer’s pass before it went to the studio. It’s now been with the studio for almost two months. I haven’t been paid for delivery. And when I inquire about this the general thinking is that the studio is going to want to have a meeting, give notes, and since I didn’t do a producer’s pass they’ll more than likely want me to do some extra (free) work before the delivery check.

“Sorry for the preamble. Here’s the question. Is this how it works? And if not, what can I do about it? The whole don’t rock the boat, this is how it is thing that my reps are laying on me seems absolutely crazy as well as unhelpful.

“I know free work and late payments are in issue with the WGA, so I’d like to be part of the solution, not part of the problem here. But what is the solution? Dig my heels in? Play the diva? Start burning bridges? Hardly seems like a good option at this stage in my career.

“I’m assuming more established writers like you guys aren’t put through this process, but I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that you’ll have some advice. Any and all bits of advice are welcome. I’m feeling pretty powerless.”

Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m a bit puzzled by your agents. I’m as puzzled by your agents as you are, I suppose, question-asker.

**John:** I’m angry at a lot of people in this situation actually.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m angry at almost everybody other than Sleepless, and I’m actually a little bit angry with angry with him or her as well.

**Craig:** Well, I understand. This is a mess. But it’s a mess that doesn’t even need to happen. We work in a business where messes occur every day. So, you try and avoid the ones that don’t have to happen. This one just makes no sense. It’s really simple. The script was turned into the person that’s listen in your contract. That’s it. Invoice. Period. The end. No discussion. Just invoice.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** There’s really no explanation — asking to be paid for the work you’ve done is not rocking the boat. What agency is this? I mean, that’s embarrassing.

**John:** It’s really embarrassing. This is late payment. This is what we talk about when we’re talking about late payment which is essentially you’ve turned in the work and they have not cut you a check.

Now, you haven’t asked for the check. Or, maybe your agency hasn’t actually invoiced, but they should have invoiced because you turned in the work. You did the work. The agency also wants to get paid as well. So, there’s no reason why this hasn’t been invoiced. So, I think your first step is to talk to your agency and say like, “Have you invoiced for this work?”

If the answer is no, I think you need to have a serious conversation with your agency about why not. Why have you not sort of asked for the money that I’m owed for this thing? And really listen to their answer. And if their answer is sort of Namby Pamby, “we don’t want to rock the boat,” well, it’s sort of their job to rock the boat. It’s their job to get you paid, for starters.

Second off, if there’s any problem with — any more heel-dragging about getting paid, the WGA has a late payments desk. You can call them and say, “I’m delivered this thing. I’m supposed to be paid.” And they can start harassing on your behalf. You’re not, ugh, this is maddening.

And also the setup for this in the preamble, this is a studio rewrite. So, this wasn’t like, you know, a pitch that they sort of barely bought and things were still sort of getting sorted out, or there were contracts. This was a project that you probably had to compete with other people on to get. You got it. You delivered it. Be done with this.

**Craig:** Yeah. To give people context, there are legal hoops that we have to jump through to get paid. It didn’t used to be that way, but then there was this big WGA arbitration about free rewriting and all the rest of it. And what came back to us was this: in our contracts there is a person called the delivery agent. They oftentimes are somebody that’s very highly placed at the studio and it’s always a studio executive.

Until you deliver the script to them, you haven’t delivered it. So, you could write five drafts for the producer and everybody assumes — what you’re really doing is just working on your first draft. And that creates plenty of opportunity for abuse. In this case, you’ve actually jumped through all the hurdles, the people that needed to get the script for you to be paid got it. That’s it.

Now, we’re living in, what, some new lunatic era where jumping through all the hoops doesn’t qualify as jumping through all the hoops anymore? I mean, it’s ridiculous. They have to pay you. They’re legally obligated to pay you. It’s done. It’s done.

**John:** I have a hunch that Sleepless’ producers delivered the script to the junior executive who was not actually the person listed on the contract. And so therefore the technical person you’re supposed to deliver to hasn’t gotten the script or there’s been some sort of delay. Or, we’ll pretend that they have not gotten the script. Whatever.

You can deliver it to the executive directly yourself. Your agency can make sure that the executive got the script. This is not your fault. It’s only Sleepless’ fault to the degree that like two months is a long time. And for them to like not be even acknowledging they owe you money is crazy. Because essentially here’s what’s happened is whatever studio this is, they have taken a loan from you as the writer. They’re taking it as basically a zero interest loan, even though they’re supposed to be paying interest. They’re taking a zero interest loan from a broke writer when they’re making $60 billion. That’s crazy.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. This is also a circumstance where we’ll tell you all that really matters under this is the quality of the script.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** If you’ve written a script that nobody likes, none of this matters. They’re going to eventually pay you, but there’s no amount of good boy behavior that’s going to mitigate that. Similarly, if you’ve written a good script that everybody likes, then demanding to be paid now isn’t going to ding you at all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If anything, they’re going t be happy to pay you and frightened and upset that they’ve upset you because they want to keep you on the project.

So, with that in mind, you’re not powerless. You are powerful. You’re just behaving in a powerless way out of fear, which I understand, and a desire to try and control the outcome. The only thing that’s going to control the outcome is the quality of the script.

Today, pick up the phone, call your agent, and say — and your lawyer, if the agent won’t do it, and say, “Submit this script to the executive. It’s been two months. Get me paid. And that’s that. And if they like it, I’m excited to keep working. And if they don’t, well I guess we’re all moving on.

**John:** So, let’s talk about the buried subject here as well which is the free pass. So, essentially “my reps were gobsmacked that I wasn’t asked to do a producer’s pass.” The producer’s pass means —

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** You have finished the script, you gave it to your producers, the producers read the script, loved some things, had questions about some things, and therefore went back to you and told you to do more, asked you to do more work.

That is troubling but actually fairly common. And it’s up to you as a writer to decide to what degree are you going to take some of these producer’s notes and incorporate them. That’s great. But, the studio doesn’t get that free work. It shouldn’t be getting that free work.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** The deal is that when it gets to the studio that is you delivering the draft. Now, you may choose to do little tiny things, that could be your choice, but you shouldn’t be waiting around writing draft after draft in hopes that at some point they’ll just say, “Oh, this is the real draft and now we will pay you.” That’s crazy time. And that’s, unfortunately, all too common. And by putting up with it for this period of time, or honestly like just sitting around waiting for them to ask you for free work is incredibly self-defeating.

**Craig:** It’s bizarre. Yeah, that the agents are gobsmacked that their client wasn’t abused. “Huh? That’s weird. Well, what can we do to get you abused? I know, let’s do nothing.” It’s so strange. I would be very angry at my agents right now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Very, very, very angry. And, you know, my big advice about agents.

**John:** To fire your agent.

**Craig:** Fire your agent. Yeah. Fire your agent. [laughs]

**John:** Here’s the good news. Sleepless got this assignment. And probably did an okay job.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I mean, likely there’s nothing wrong with the script itself. It’s likely the reason why the next step hasn’t happened has nothing to do with the actual script you turned in. It’s because it became a much lower priority at the studio. And everything else became a higher priority and they just haven’t focused on it. Well, that’s not your fault.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s just the nature of what’s actually happened. If it’s two months ago then it’s entirely possible that the holidays came and then there was new stuff after the holidays and they’ve kind of forgotten about you. But they shouldn’t forget to pay you. And maybe asking to get paid will remind somebody like, “Oh, that’s right, this thing exists and we need to do something with it.”

**Craig:** This is something that I’ve been talking a lot about. When I go as part of the WGA Screenwriter Rights Committee group and I go with Billy Ray and Damon Lindelof and we visit the heads of studios. What I try and impart to them is, look, if you’re paying a writer a million dollars, let’s all agree that this is a very lovely affair in which people are being well taken care of. And there’s no need to stand on ceremony.

But if you’re paying somebody anywhere near scale or, you know, $100,000 or $200,000 for what will amount to a year’s work, here’s the reality of the money they actually get in their pocket. Here’s the reality of how that money comes to them. Here’s the reality of how much work they’re having to do for that. Please don’t treat them like this.

And this sounds like this may be, that our question-asker is early on in his or her career, so I’m going to guess this isn’t a million dollar situation.

**John:** Exactly. And by delaying this payment two months now, they’re making it much more difficult for this person to actually make a living as a screenwriter.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, this person probably I’m assuming this person got scale or somewhere near scale for what this assignment is. It’s actually not a lot of money.

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** And I worry that we’re overall by trying to sort of nickel and dime these moments and stretch out this process, we are going to make it essentially impossible for a person to have a living wage as the entry level screenwriter. It’s going to have to be sort of your part time job. And like this person is going to have to have a job somewhere else that actually has regular paychecks because he or she can’t count on getting paid by the studio when they actually deliver their work.

**Craig:** That’s right. And then the studios will get what they paid for, which are temps. And the other thing I’ve said to a number of studio heads is why would anyone that is very, very smart and has the potential to earn a lot of money many different ways opt for this very difficult career if they’re going to be mistreated in this way, in a way that is profound and much worse than when you and I started. They just won’t do it. They’ll just do something else. They’ll become lawyers. I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah. They’ll become lawyers or they’ll write for television which is, I think, part of the reason why you see a generation of writers who at first I think were sort of splitting their time between features and television, but ultimately like television at least pays regularly.

There’s a lot of problems in television. There are problems of exclusivity and options and there’s structural problems in television, too. But, you’re more likely to get paid. This writer wouldn’t be waiting for a long time to get a check from ABC Studios.

**Craig:** That’s right. They’ll have a job. They can plan their lives. I mean, we’re talking about young writers who are generally in their twenties. These are people starting their lives and trying to create a career path. And we’re starving the farm system. We’re beating up the rookies. It’s just really bad management. Bad management and bizarrely bad management because, frankly, if you’re paying somebody $100,000 for a rewrite and you’ve given them $50,000 of that for commencement, the $50,000 for the delivery is cushion change at a major studio. It’s irrelevant. Just give it. Pay it.

**John:** Pay it.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, look, first call — agents. And draw a picture of balls for them, scan it, and email it. And then just say, “Remember what these look like?” Jerks.

**John:** Yes. Jerks. If you don’t have a scanner you can just take a photo with your iPhone and just send them that. Just text them a photo of balls and then they’ll have some balls.

**Craig:** [laughs] You should make an app for that.

**John:** Ha-ha. That would be very good.

So, Craig, I should have actually had a discussion with you, but I’ve turned down employment on our behalf.

**Craig:** Oh?

**John:** So, in these last two weeks I was hosting the Film Independent Director’s Close-Up Series. And so I got to do a Q&A with Alfonso Cuarón, and I got to do a Q&A with Julie Delpy, Bob Nelson, and Scott Neustadter talking about their movies.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** And I love doing Q&As. I love moderating things. And so before the second one a guy from a TV network said like, “Hey, have you ever considered just doing this on a TV show, a sit down TV show. Like maybe you and Craig could do like a Scriptnotes thing with like cameras.” And I said, no. I was really flattered for the offer, but I didn’t really see myself doing that. I didn’t see myself doing a television show.

I enjoy doing our podcast, which we have control over. So, I hope I didn’t speak out of turn and I didn’t ruin your dreams of hosting a show on a minor cable channel.

**Craig:** No, no, you preserved my dream of keeping my face away from people.

Look the one thing I’m super comfortable with and happy about is that neither you or I, neither you nor I are doing this for fame. [laughs]

**John:** Neither — neither… — Oh yeah, you are right. I was going to say neither you nor me, but you actually were using it as the subject of the sentence.

**Craig:** Yes, correct.

**John:** I almost corrected you and now I feel embarrassed.

**Craig:** Good. This is the sort of — boy, this would be great TV.

**John:** Yeah. This is [laughs].

**Craig:** Neither you nor I are in this for fame. And neither you nor I need this to be anything more than it is. I think that’s part of the charm of our little podcast is that we get to have a conversation once a week and it’s simple, and it’s easy, except for Stuart. And, yeah, you know, because here’s what happens: television just, you know, then television is about, inevitably, oh, it’s that thing where they make the end of year lists of the best screenwriters and most of them are actors because that’s what people are interested in. And suddenly, you know, nobody wants a guest that’s not famous or something. I don’t know.

**John:** And as I was doing some introspection on sort of why I was saying no, I realized that as much as I enjoy sort of moderating these panels, I don’t kind of want to be a panel moderator. I want to be the guy who is like being asked the questions on the panels. I sort of want to be the filmmaker who gets asked questions sometimes, too. And I don’t want to be just the guy who asks questions.

So, in getting to host this last session with Julie Delpy, and Scott, and Bob Nelson, one of the things I wanted to talk about was the nature of the contract you make between you as the writer, the filmmaker, and the reader/audience about what kind of film this is. Because I thought all three of those films were incredibly smart about saying this is what our movie is and this is how our movie is going to work.

And right from the start they felt very confident in what the edges of the movie could be and sort of what journey you were going to take.

So, you look at Nebraska, right from the very start you see this is the nature of the world. It’s essentially funny but it’s not like hilariously funny. And you know that it’s essentially going to be the story about a father and a son.

You look at The Spectacular Now and you see that this is going to be a love story of a boy and a girl. It’s going to do high school movie type things but not do them in a high school movie kind of way.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or you look at Before Midnight, Julie Delpy’s film, and it’s going to be a lengthy exploration of — or long conversations about the future of a relationship.

And so in all of these movies quite early on you establish the kinds of things that can happen in the world and the kinds of things that can’t. You’re not going to have aliens or terrorists invade. Someone is not going to suddenly die. Someone is not going to pull out a gun. It’s not those kinds of movies.

And so I want to talk about the contract you form with a reader, with an audience, and sort of how we establish that on the page.

**Craig:** Well, when we talk about, this is why I’m glad that when we do our Three Page Challenges, even though we’ve never requested or insisted that they be the first three pages, those often are the best three pages to send because those are the pages that are establishing the contract. And when we talk about that we mean the rules of the movie and we mean the tone of the movie I think more than anything. Those two things. Rules and tone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s why people tend to go along with the first ten minutes of any movie. I don’t care what it is. Every — I’ve been in god knows how many test screenings of comedies that I’ve worked on and when the movies get to the place where they’re working all the way through, people laugh all the way through.

But early on, typically your first test screening, what you’ll see is the first five to ten minutes just absolutely kill, people are laughing all the way through it. And then trouble. Because the audience psychologically comes in, sits down, and says I’m going to roughly give you five to ten minutes to teach me what this movie, how this movie works. And I’m with you on it. But then, if anything should stray from what you’ve taught me, I’m going to start to get annoyed. I’m going to get confused. Because there’s an inconsistency — I want you to take me by the hand and lead me out of your world and into yours.

So, like the first day of school, everything is new, I assume any discomfort of disorientation is my fault. But by the second day or the fifth day or the 20th day, if it changes again at school, this school is weird.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, that to me is so much a part of that contract is understanding that you have a limited amount of time to scramble the audience’s mind as you wish, but then that time ends and you have to stick with what you’ve done.

**John:** I would sort of phrase the contract this way. As the writer I’m asking you, the reader, to give me an hour and a half of your time. And I’m asking for all of your attention reading this script. And I will take you on a journey. And you will be rewarded for your careful attention to this script that you’re about to read and I’ll get you to a good place.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to get you to a happy ending, but I will establish questions in your mind and those questions that I establish in your mine I will address and answer down the road. I may surprise you sometimes, but they’ll be surprises that you’ll be delighted about because they fit and they feel correct within the universe of our movie.

The same thing happens as you go from the page to the actual film. And sometimes when films falter, when you read a great script and you watch the movie it’s like, “Ah! That didn’t quite work,” is something changed in the nature of filming it that that same contract was not established. There was a lack of — the audience lost faith. The audience lost confidence in how the story was going to be told.

Sometimes it’s like those initial images. That’s why as we go through cuts of films and as we even work on our first couple pages, we’ll change those a lot because you’re trying to establish what the expectation is for the audience. And example I have is Charlie’s Angels, the first Charlie’s Angels, which was notoriously a really challenging shoot. Other writers came in. Every day was sort of a scramble. There were really good moments, but as we you put the first cut together and we’re seeing what it was, it didn’t feel — it didn’t land.

And so one of the things I was able to do was go in with McG and with the editors and we built an opening title sequence that sort of showed this is the nature of the world. This is how we’re going to move from place to place. This is who the girls are. This is what it feels like. This is what Charlie’s Angels feels like.

And as long as we were consistent there everything stuck together. But if that opening title sequence hadn’t worked we wouldn’t be in the right place.

**Craig:** It’s interesting that you mention title sequence because I got into a little bit of a debate over at Done Deal Pro, which I occasionally stop into. It’s like my three times a year stop in.

And somebody was asking a question about writing, it was a simple formatting question really. When you write a credit sequence at the beginning of your movie, how do de-notate it. And for me it’s as simple as begin credits and then when you’re done with that part, end credits.

Somewhat predictably a few less than fully informed individuals said, “That’s not your job. Your job isn’t to talk about credit sequences. Your job is just to write the movie. That’s the director’s job. That’s somebody else’s job. Nobody cares what you think about the credits.” And I totally disagreed.

Because to me while it is not — certainly a valid choice to not write a credit sequence and perhaps more often than not I don’t — it’s just as valid a choice to do it. And, in fact, for this very reason that a good credit sequence, which must be written as a credit sequence — it’s hard to covert a non-credit sequence into a credit sequence — a good credit sequence does precisely what you’re talking about: teaching the audience how this movie works. And by credit sequence I don’t mean just the titles. I mean to say action and movie occurring while titles are going across it.

That’s one way. It’s far from the only way, but one important tool that we have in our bag to help instruct the audience.

**John:** Some of the best title sequences are just showing you imagery that indicates what the universe of the movie is. And so a long time ago I wrote an adaptation of Tarzan. And the adaptation I did for Warner Bros. was modern day Africa. And so there’s some old sort of mythic Africa in it, but there’s also sort of modern day Africa. And the juxtaposition of those two was really important.

So, the title sequence I wrote for it made it really clear that we’re in present day but there’s all this sort of relic Africanized is still an important part of it. And it was teaching you how to watch the movie. It was teaching you what the movie was going to feel like and foreshadowing some of the things that were going to happen ahead. Even the Spider-Man movies, which are just imagery and noise and rock-n-roll, that’s also telling you what the movie is going to feel like.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The David Fincher sequences for Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, none of the stuff that you see there is specifically referenced later on in the movie, but it feels dirty sex in a way that is important for you to understand as you start to watch the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. James Bond sequences also do this. There’s the prologue, which won’t have credits, the cold open as it were. And then when they go to their very famous traditional credit sequence, you will start to get glimpses of things. And I call these overtures. Just as in old Broadway you would get a good overture at length where you’d get little snippets of all the songs and all the melodies and then the show would begin. Sometimes a credit sequence can do that as well.

But this contract and the negotiation where the audience gives you this grace period where you’re allowed to basically build a world for them does require enormous attention. And it’s why I said a number of times I will spend twice as long on the first ten pages as I do on the last ten pages. The first ten are enormously important because they are teaching you so much.

I mean, the script that I just finished up for Universal is a very — it’s got a very high concept that is adapted from a graphic novel. And it involves a hero who has a certain mental illness. And how his mental illness manifests is cinematically disorienting.

And so much of the first pages is about how to reveal this and then once you reveal it how to do so in a way that lets the audience feel comfortable with it as it plays out over the course of the rest of the script. You’re building that contract so that they don’t feel that you switched the rules around.

See, why — constantly, you’ll hear this all the time, very common studio note: what are the rules, what are the rules? Well, why is it so important that we stick to the rules? What’s that about? In some movies it’s not that important. Some movies you’re not dealing with a traditional narrative and violating rules is part of the fun. But, for a traditional narrative the reason that we get so worried about breaking the rules is because when you do the audience, whether consciously or subconsciously, calculates that you’ve done so because it was convenient for you.

And if it’s convenient for you then it’s no longer that impressive, is it? It’s a little bit like you want a guy to fall into a vat of whipped cream. Well, you can get him up the ladder in an interesting way, or you can just have him say, “Huh, this ladder doesn’t look that study. I think I should test it out.” Well, you’re just cheating. You know? And that’s what you’ve got to watch out for.

**John:** Yes. There’s a longer talk I do sometimes on expectation. And it’s really that same idea which is that an audience approaches a film with expectation. So, if you have a western, the audience comes in with e expectations of a western. And that’s largely very helpful, because you get a lot of things for free. You don’t have to explain how horses work or how gunfights work or how a lot of that kind of stuff works.

If you’re going to change some things about how the Old West is, that’s awesome, but you have to do that pretty early on so we understand that, okay, it’s everything we know about western but change these variables in this movie.

If you were to try to change those variables quite late in the movie, we would be flustered, the same way like a vampire movie. In a vampire movie we have expectations about what happens in vampire movies. We know enough about vampires so you don’t have to explain everything to us. But if you are Twilight and the vampires can be out in the daylight and they’re radiant and beautiful, you have to establish that quite early on because if you were to save that for three-quarters of the way through the movie we’d be going, “What? That’s not vampires. You’re just making stuff up.”

**Craig:** You’re just making stuff up. [Crosstalk] Yup.

**John:** Exactly. You would have lost confidence in the filmmaker. You’ve lost confidence in the screenwriter whose script you’re hopefully going to finish.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because the natural psychological consequence of that feeling that they’re making stuff up is that, well, I guess what I see next is just something that they’re going to make up. I don’t feel — because in my world things aren’t just made up. There are actions and consequences and they’re knitted together logically.

So, again, you are allowed to bring somebody to a completely different planet that they don’t understand, but once you’ve given them enough time to understand — and you don’t get that much — you can’t violate their natural human sense that the universe is ordered to some extent.

**John:** So, what I should stress is this does not preclude surprise. And surprise is still wonderful and amazing. And if your movie is firing on all cylinders, some surprises are great, and good, and you should look for them.

A mild spoiler here for Spectacular Now, so if you haven’t seen Spectacular Now, close your ears for about 30 seconds while I talk about this one little moment. So, in Spectacular Now the hero of the story is a drinker, he’s a drunk, and he is driving all the time. So, we have this expectation like he is going to crash. He’s going to crash and the girl is going to get hurt and it’s going to be terrible.

What actually happens in the film is he pulls off to the side of the road, they have a fight, she gets out of the car and gets hit by another car. Something that was not his fault — he wasn’t sitting at the wheel. And so we, as an audience, are taken by tremendous surprise like, oh my god, I didn’t see that happening. I can’t believe that just happened. But it’s in the universe of possibility for a movie. It’s a genuine surprise but it’s not breaking the rules of our world.

And they could do it only because we had invested so much in the reality of these characters. If they had tried to do that quite early in the story it wouldn’t have had an impact.

**Craig:** That’s right. This is not only do you not want to shy away from surprise and subversion. You want to move towards it. You’re constantly looking for those things.

And what you’ve just described there is the difference between improbably and illogical. Improbable is okay. Illogical, not so much. And improbable is okay, particularly if the audience understood that they got fooled. Because they will understand that they were in your control. They want to know that the person telling the movie is in control of the story and not just lashing out at stuff to happen because it would be convenient for it to happen, that that was a careful choice.

Similarly, there are movies with twists that recontextualize the entire world of the movie and turn all the rules that you thought you understood upside down. That’s also great. As long as when you do it the movie retroactively makes sense in the re-contextualization.

**John:** Yeah. I would also stress the movies that are going to pull the rug out from under you and re-contextualize everything, it only works if you are along for the ride in the first version of it. So, if you’re watching The Sixth Sense and you are with it from all the way through and you’re completely accepting it on its own surface level, then the twist and surprise is meaningful and helpful. But, if you bailed on the journey before then you’re just going to be annoyed by the twist.

**Craig:** Well, it’s interesting. One of my favorite films is Fight Club. And the first time I saw Fight Club I was a little annoyed. I was annoyed. Fight Club is an example of a movie where it’s, for me, it was difficult to enjoy it the first time through because I did not understand the twist. And then the second time I watched it it was awesome. But I couldn’t get to that second time without experiencing the first time.

But, now we’re talking about a high degree of difficulty here. [laughs]

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And, look, you know, like The Sixth Sense is a movie that I actually did enjoy all the way through and the twist was great and it was extra, you know. But it’s always a risk. When you do a big twist movie there’s always a risk that people are going to be just too confused and too detached from what’s going on to connect with it that first time through.

**John:** Yup. Well, let’s talk about how movies start right now, because we’re going to look at some Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Oh yeah!

**John:** I thought we would start with Blake Armstrong if we could.

**Craig:** We can.

**John:** So, Blake Armstrong, by the way, so Stuart picked this script randomly, but Blake Armstrong is actually a person who works on Chicago Fire/Chicago PD. He works on the Chicago shows that Derek Haas does.

**Craig:** He works on —

**John:** He’s a gaffer.

**Craig:** I think he’s a gaffer or grip. He’s a crew person who works for the Chicago Empire. And what that means is he spends a lot of nights freezing in sub-zero temperatures while actors are being warmed in their tents.

**John:** Before we get into the script, we should really talk about Derek Haas’s Chicago Empire. Because I know the next spinoff is, I think, Chicago Municipal Services, which is basically the people who like fix traffic lights and stuff like that. There really seems to be no limit to what they’re able to do in Chicago.

**Craig:** Chicago Board of Ed. Yeah, Chicago Sanitation.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Chicago DMV.

**John:** Yeah. They were going to go for Chicago Parks & Rec, but they thought that would be too confusing with the NBC show called Parks & Rec.

**Craig:** Eh, you know what? I think they’ll do it anyway. [laughs]

**John:** They’ll do it. They we’re going to do a hospital show called Chicago Hope, but it turns out there already was a Chicago hospital show called Chicago Hope.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** At some point they’ll reach a barrier, but it’s sort of like, you know, the limits of what they’re going to — the limit is pretty high, so there’s only a certain number of hours in the day, but people will watch whatever shows they want to set in Chicago apparently.

**Craig:** The one show, Chicago Chicago, which is going to be —

**John:** Perfect. It’s about the Chicago production — the city of Chicago putting on a show of Chicago, the musical. And it’s sort of a behind the scenes thing. It’s going to be great. It’s like Smash, but in Chicago.

**Craig:** Yup. They also have Chicago Smash.

**John:** That’s going to get confusing. I think they just crossed the line there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let me recap Blake’s script here. So, these are three pages by Blake Armstrong. We don’t know the title of this script, so we’ll just say Blake’s script.

We open on a glossy white spaceship leaving a planet. There’s chunks of busted ships and debris surrounding it. In the captain’s quarters we meet Specialist Kat Powell. She’s in her late 20s. She’s naked under the sheets.

The captain is Ben Drake, mid-30s. We see him in the bathroom with a ring box. He’s going back and forth about — back and forth dialogue about should they quit, should they get out of this game.

Ben is trying to work up the nerve to ask her to marry him, that’s what seems to be happening. Kat gets paged by the doctor, Rachel Galvin, to go the med bay. She’s gone before Ben has a chance to ask her.

In the bridge, Drake gets an urgent message from mission command where Director Ayers tells him that the mission is over. Ceres can be tera-formed faster than they thought, so they need him there now to lay claim. He’s got 20 days. And that’s what’s happened at the end of our three pages.

Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, I like the opening here. I thought we had a good opening. I like this contrast. We begin with an image we’ve seen a number of times in movies, a spaceship in space, but I did like that the spaceship was moving past a lot of junk. So, there was a nice view — a little more realistic view of what space looks like, which is full of all this junk. Obviously we’re in the future because there’s lots of ships out there, including this one.

And obviously I always get excited, Patti Lupone aside, about seeing a naked woman lying on a bed. That was great. Quick — we’ve got some typos in here. For instance, “Glimpses of her skin peak out.” You want P-E-E-K, not P-E-A-K. But, I enjoyed the contrast of —

**John:** If it was a boob, maybe one of the boobs is sort of — I just talked over you. If it was a boob I would say the boob could be like a peak, a mountain peak, peak out.

**Craig:** I don’t know how to say this without sounding weird. Boobs don’t really work, [laughs], they tend to not go upwards. You know, when you’re lying on your back…

**John:** Well, if they’re fake boobs. And maybe that’s really what he’s going for her.

**Craig:** Really fake. Like those hard —

**John:** Really fake.

**Craig:** Like bolted on. Yeah.

**John:** Nice hard Pamela Anderson boobs.

**Craig:** Right. Like, yeah, god, poor Pam. Anyway, but I enjoyed —

**John:** I think that’s really what Blake was going for.

**Craig:** Yeah, probably. But I enjoyed the contrast of junkie space to this presumably beautiful woman lying naked in a bed. It was an interesting contrast. And I also like the way that we got into this conversation with her and her lover who is off-screen. It’s sort of a mid-conversation thing. “Let’s quit.” We’re not really sure what they’re trying to quit. But that’s always good. I always like little bits of mystery here.

When we catch up with this guy who’s in this connected bathroom, he’s looking at this ring in this box that clearly is an engagement ring. Couple of things. One, I’m just going to put aside the fact that even in the future people are still spending two month’s salary on rings at some intergalactic Robins Brothers. But more importantly, this just goes on too long.

This is one of those things where the audience gets it immediately. You see a man privately looking at a ring and not quite sure what to do. We know everything. So, we don’t necessarily want to have him open it, close it, open it, close it. We’re just going to get annoyed, I think.

And, frankly, what’s easily — perhaps more interesting way to go about this is to have him talking back with her. He seems occupied, preoccupied, or nervous. And then at the very end reveal that there is this ring on the counter. And then he’s about to pick it up when she’s called away. It’s just one of those things you want to hold back, I think.

She gets called away by — it’s, by the way, I-T-‘-S, it’s the crew doctor, Rachel Galvin who is on a filter saying, “Paging Specialist Kat Powell. I need you at the med bay, now.”

Eh, we don’t want to talk like that. Nobody talks like that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It doesn’t seem — unless Rachel is also a robot, that’s not — I think if we just heard, you know, “Kat, I need you at Med Bay now,” that would enough.

**John:** It’s always dangerous when someone calls out with like their job title. I never kind of believe it.

**Craig:** Exactly. It felt very forced. Similarly, I didn’t — I don’t think it’s satisfying when you have a man with a ring and he’s considering whether or not to propose and make a commitment to this woman, and it’s interrupted because she has to get up, put her pants on, and leave. I would much rather see him make that choice. I think it’s just more powerful. I don’t want to take my choices away from these guys.

Let’s talk about what we’re teaching people about our movies. So, what did I learn from this moment that she walks out and as it says here on the pages, “Like a whirlwind, she’s gone and he’s missed his chance.” Well, the movie has taught me that this is the kind of movie where somebody can be stopped from proposing to somebody because somebody else is putting their pants on and walking out a door.

**John:** She didn’t go that far, I don’t think. They’re on a ship.

**Craig:** They’re on a ship. And you could just as easily say, “Wait, hold on.” [laughs] So, I don’t want to lose the choice.

We now go into the bridge and we have some syntax errors here. “Two walls displays instruments, meters, data, etc. taper into a V…” There’s typos and missing words here. Similarly, “The screens fade to black and white text blinks across them.” Something is missing there as well.

These pages have, for me, I have a very low threshold for this kind of character cheating where you describe a character, we meet them for the first time, and you tell us about how their personality works even though there’s no evidence for it. I know that you have a little bit more of a tolerance for it, but there’s a lot of it in here. Everybody is getting it at this point.

Drake, for instance, I presume our hero: “He’s really easy going for a guy in charge. He can’t help it that he sees the crew as friends, not subordinates.” I mean, I’d love to see that instead of having you announce it. And then he gets a message, “Urgent message from corporate mission command.” No, that’s pretty cheesy I think. It doesn’t feel like this movie is lived in. It feels like that is just a — that feels very contrived to me. He says, “Answer call,” and then we have his boss who very brusquely begins, “Mission’s over, Drake.”

And Drake says, “But — ,” when I think probably the appropriate response to that would be, “What?” Or nothing. And then he says a bunch of stuff here and then he says a bunch of stuff that’s science fiction-y stuff.

So, I think there was good contrast in the beginning. I’m intrigued by the promise of the mystery of this romance between these two. I generally advice people to clean their pages up before they send them to us so there’s not a lot of errors. A little concerned about some of the on-the-nose stuff. What did you think?

**John:** I share almost all of your concerns and your praises. So, a few things right from the start. In terms of the typos, obviously, the pages that blank sent through had a blank title page on them with like “Name of Project, Name of First Writer,” like basically the Final Draft title page thing but not filled in.

Again, that’s just like open the PDF before you send anything to somebody and make sure it’s actually what you want to send. Because basically he forgot to take the tick box off for include title page. And so it’s just one of those things where it made me from the very start realize like he never actually opened this PDF or else he would have gotten rid of that first page.

Getting into it, I agree with you. I like the contrast between space and then we’re in a sexual situation. But that space shot, I was missing, I had no — by the end of these three pages I didn’t have a sense of, am I on the Starship Enterprise or am I on the Millennium Falcon? I have no sense of the scale of the ship that I’m on. We’re talking about a crew but I’m not seeing anybody else. I’m just seeing these two people. And then when we get to the bridge, I didn’t know if he was alone on the bridge or if there were other people on the bridge, too.

When he described the V of screens it sort of focused on his chair. It’s like, oh, maybe it’s like a one-person command thing. Maybe it’s more like Serenity, like the Joss Whedon show. All of these are good, I just don’t know what universe I’m in in terms of the ship. And clearly the ship is very, very important.

I, too, really like the idea of going from space to a bed. Can be good, but like a girl in bed and talking to a guy who is out of the room, if you’re going to get to a sexual situation I would love to have them be in bed and just let that be the moment. Because if it’s about the relationship, I’d love to see them together. Not just like talking in different rooms.

The wedding ring to me just feels like the tropiest, tropiest, trope.

**Craig:** It’s pretty tropey.

**John:** Yeah. And it’s like, so a guy looking at a wedding ring, trying to decide whether to propose, it just feels — we just know what that is too much and too well. And it doesn’t feel interesting.

I actually like Blake’s description of sort of who these people are. I think they are going to be interesting characters. I just wasn’t seeing them do anything that would tell me that. So, like, facts not in evidence. It’s there on the page, but they’re not actually doing anything that would let me know that this is who these people are. Their dialogue isn’t telling me that. They’re not taking actions that let me see sort of who they are. I just see them being kind of annoyed to being called out to do their jobs. And that’s not giving me a lot of confidence.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s interesting that this is following our discussion about the contract. Because your point about the nature of the ship is dead on. Typically when you do enter a new environment, one that’s not natural to our world, you want to give the audience, you want to give them a tour. The opening of Serenity, in fact, does this brilliantly. You know, a good tracking shot where one guy is moving through the ship and doing stuff. You start to learn — you see faces of people. You learn the scale of the ship. It is junkie, is it smooth, is it high tech, is it low tech? Size? And also the way that these people interact with each other. All that stuff comes out. You want to build, I think, for a science fiction movie, these pages feel a little bit more like maybe they would happen on page five and that pages one through four would be a little more of an exciting — we’re inside a freaking spaceship and here’s what it’s like.

**John:** So, I point us back to the start of Alien. If you look at how Alien begins, it doesn’t start with an alien. It starts with a bunch of people waking up and just establishing normal life on the ship. And these characters believe that they’re in a movie called Space Truckers. They have no sense that they’re in a movie called Aliens. And they’re just going through their normal life. They’re going through the normal stuff that sort of happens.

And we get little snippets of conversation. But we get a sense of who the people are in the world, what’s going on, and that it’s a very working class ship. And I’d love to see better evidence of sort of what kind of ship we’re on right from the start here. Because right now I don’t have a sense of like are there three people on the ship? Are there 300 people on the ship?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I don’t really have a good sense. And when we get to the later section, like the mission is over, like they were on a mission? I don’t know what their mission was. So, that mission is over — I’m confused not in a good way. So, I was excited to see that there’s a place that they’re going to be going to and by the end of page three a good thing I will say here is I did have a sense of what to expect next.

As we talk about a contract between the writer and the reader, the bottom of page three, like you’re going to go to this planet and start tera-forming, or get there and stake your claim. Ah, okay, so that is a thing to look for. And so I should be looking for them going to this planet and I will be basing my expectations around this journey to this planet or being at that planet.

**Craig:** Yeah. Absolutely. And in the discussion between our woman and our man, whether you have them separated or together, that is also an opportunity, I think, to get a little bit more character and conflict out of it. It was a little — there are times in movies where you can have a kind of a lazier conversation. But this wouldn’t be one of them. I think in the beginning you want to really try and pack a lot of dramatic information in. I don’t mean spell out a bunch of exposition. I mean, even if it’s looks, or somebody is slightly thrown off by something the other person says, you just want to get a sense of — a little bit more of an emotional sense rather than a circumstantial sense of the conflict between these people.

**John:** Yeah. Remember, you’ve got to hook us. And so I just feel like you have a beautiful woman in bed. I think you can do a better job hooking us in there and making us really invest in the nature of these two people.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. What shall we do we next? Do you want to do Hearts and Minds or Brood?

**Craig:** Well, Brood is kind of fun. Can I summarize Brood?

**John:** Summarize Brood for us.

**Craig:** Brood is by Sandra Lee Slotboom.

**John:** What a great name, by the way. I’m not sure I believe it, but it’s a great name.

**Craig:** I absolutely believe it. You don’t fake that. You don’t fake Slotboom.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Slotboom. Fantastic name. Brood by Sandra Lee Slotboom.

Okay, so, we open in the woods at night. There’s a primitive log cabin hidden sort of in the forest and inside we hear a grunting and then a slap and then the wail of an infant, obviously newly born. A man, a bearded middle aged man, emerges. He’s dressed in 19th Century garb, so we’re at some point in the 1800s. And he walks out with a candle lantern. He has blood up to his elbows and he’s carrying a swaddled baby.

Inside a young woman is screaming, “No, Papa, come back. Not our baby.” He carries this newborn into the woods. He digs a hole. He puts the baby in the hole. Shovels dirt on the baby until the crying stops. Oof. And then he lifts the lantern above his head and we see that, in fact, he is in a vast cemetery littered with hundreds of unmarked graves.

Okay, so that’s our cold open. Now, we’re in the Ozark forest. It’s modern times. And a young couple, Lisa and Aaron, are hiking together with their dog. She has to go pee. She wanders off behind a shrub. A twig snaps somewhere behind her. Her dog growls.

We now cut to the inside of an upscale kitchen and a woman named Sloane Robertson is bathing her infant, Christopher, in the sink. And she’s cooing to him, but then she opens up the hot water tap and this scalding water comes out and she drowns her baby. And then the baby — apparently not dead — reaches up with arms, grabs her around the throat. She wakes up. It was a nightmare. She’s there with her husband, Michael, in the middle of the night and there is an infant, in fact, very alive in another room crying. Michael says he’ll take care of it.

And before he goes to leave the room he says to her, “You can do anything, Sloane. You always have. It’s who you are.” She cries. And she cries.

Sandra Lee Slotboom! Baby killer.

**John:** So, I loved the opening image.

**Craig:** [whispers] Baby killer.

Baby Killer is not a better title, by the way. Brood is a good title.

**John:** Brood is a good title. So, I loved this opening image. I loved the opening little moment. The guy burying a baby. Horrifying. That’s great.

I liked the second opening. Not quite as much, but that’s fine. Hikers in the woods. A twig snaps. By the time I got to the third opening of the movie, which was this fake out — it was a nightmare. I drowned my baby — I lost some faith in this movie. And so as an example of, I thought actually the writing line by line was pretty good. But we had three openings in three pages. And I started to get a little bit unsure of the journey that I was going to be going on.

Because am I going on — I could take a cold open that takes place in the past. Great. I’m totally down and good for it. But when we get to the Ozarks and we’re hiking, okay, great. So, we’re in this world now. Oh, a twig snaps, the dog growls, oh, it’s that kind of thing. It’s that kind of movie? Great. I’m totally good.

But when we cut to the upscale kitchen I’m like I cannot make that leap to make those two pieces connect. And I started to — I didn’t have enough time with those hikers to know what degree I’m supposed to be investing in them. And then that jump to another present day thing was just bizarre to me. And to be jumping to a present day thing that’s actually in a dream felt really strange to me.

How about you, Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah. Look, the first — the prologue — is awesome. That’s the kind of scene that people will read it, put the script down, and say, “Come in here. You’ve got to read this.” Great opening. Terrifying. Ballsy. And it also had — not only did it have this terrible image of a man burying his incest baby alive. I presume it’s his incest baby.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** But then there’s a kicker on top of it that this has happened hundreds of times, which is just like what’s going on here. It’s really dramatic. It’s really well described. The only mistake I think that occurs, frankly, in that prologue is the young woman inside her dialogue is too on-the-nose. I would have just preferred, “Papa, no!” I think we can actually start to let our gears move on our own to figure that stuff out. People screaming and in pain are never quite this expository.

But, wonderful opening. And like you, I’m now great with, okay, I’m in the Ozark forest. I presume this is — we’ve jumped ahead in time, but maybe the same place. Wasn’t thrilled with this dialogue between Lisa and Aaron. It was very cutesy. It felt fakey to me.

And then —

**John:** Oh, she said — the dialogue here, for people who don’t have these pages in front of them, Lisa is like, “Mr. Kovachavich?”

And he says, “Yes, Mrs. Kovachavich?”

“I have to pee.”

“God, I love it when you talk dirty.”

And, it’s only okay. And it’s the first things these people are going to say. They could say anything. They should say something better than that.

**Craig:** Yeah. It doesn’t work. They don’t seem like actual people. This isn’t a conversation that two people have. She goes to pee and he for some reason says to her, as she’s wandering off, “Lisa, stay close.” I don’t know why. They’re just hiking and it’s not like — they’re in a trail. It seemed like a… — If we’re in a horror movie, you know, people are supposed to be a little less cautious than the average person.

There’s an uncomfortable expository moment here. Once again, we have the trope diamond, from trope jewelers. As she’s peeing she holds out her left hand to admire her diamond wedding band glinting off her finger, which I just felt was — we just had the two of them tell each other that they’re married. And now she’s looking at how they’re married. I get it. They’re married. And, frankly, I’m not sure how any of that matters now.

Her dog growls. Something is in the tree behind her. Okay. Fine. Then we cut. This cut is unacceptable. It is absolutely unacceptable. And you will rarely hear either John or I be this firm about something. You cannot cut away now into this dream sequence. We will not know where the hell we are. We won’t know why you’ve cut away from that scene at that moment. It makes no sense. You’ve drawn our attention to something and now you’ve pulled it away bizarrely.

That said, terrifying dream. Gorgeously written. It’s like I feel like there’s two different people writing this. Because the horror moments are really well put together. And this, again, you have this terrible baby and I was really shocked. I thought, by the way, I didn’t realize it was a dream until the very end. I actually thought she was killing her baby. And then this baby has eyes like black marbles.

Ooh, good, it’s creepy, creepy, creepy. Okay, it was a nightmare. Fine. We see this frequently. That’s okay.

Then, we have this moment now with her and her husband. It’s the middle of the night, so now I’m really confused. Now we jumped ahead to night from day. And he says the following. “Sloane?” She’s listening to the baby. The baby is crying. “I’ll take care of it, darling. Go back to sleep.” No. I’ve been there a number of times with both of my kids. We don’t call each other darling at that moment.

And then, before he leave he says, “You can do anything, Sloane. You always have. It’s who you are.” What?

**John:** Yeah. I have no idea. I assume that was something to do with like maybe she has postpartum depression or something. He’s basically saying it’s going to be okay, we’re going to work through this, it’ll be okay. But, that’s not what he said. He said this thing about you can do anything. You always have.

And it’s like, what?

**Craig:** No one ever says that. Ever. Ever, ever, ever. You would say that maybe on page 100 if you’re Mr. Miyagi and it’s the big moment before the fight. But certainly not now. If you’re portraying a woman with postpartum depression I would think that just a helpless look from her husband and maybe he just gives her a squeeze, but she turns away, and he kind of gives up we would understand. But this was a fascinating — these were among the most fascinating pages I’ve read in all the time we’ve been doing this because it was such a Tale of Two Cities. Two really, really frightening, well written scenes. And then two clunky scenes. And the order was just kooky. Kooky McCuckoo.

**John:** I had a theory that I’m not sure is accurate or not accurate. But perhaps these were longer scenes and then she compressed them down so she could fit more into three pages. Because I feel like I could imagine the longer version of that Ozark thing actually making sense and actually building to something in a way that was useful or meaningful and that we’re ultimately going to find out that the hiker girl who dies or whatever is somehow related to these people. There’s something going on here that makes this all meaningful.

And maybe Sandra Lee Slotboom compressed these down to sort of try to get more in. But it wasn’t a compression that was helpful at all. It was just jarring. And I would read the next page, and maybe the page after, but I got — I have a lot of concerns because I don’t know whose movie I’m watching at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that in a moment where a woman in a horror movie, putatively a horror movie, wanders off the trail to pee. And there’s a snapping twig behind her and her dog is growling. We need to see something happen. Even if it’s here turning, seeing something, and screaming, and then we cut, we need to know that something happens.

**John:** Yeah. Even if you were to do something crazy like recontextualize what that was, and then you realize like, oh, that’s actually a scene that’s happening on a monitor. This is actually a soundstage or something else, you could move to other stuff, but you have to address that thing that just happened or else we’re going to be going, “Huh? Did that happen? Did the reels get mixed up?” It doesn’t feel connected.

**Craig:** Exactly. What we’ve been presented is a scene that absolutely has no story purpose. None. It has given us no information. It’s given us information about characters, but no information about story whatsoever. And, yet, there’s story elements in it. So, it’s beyond confusing.

But, look, that said, those are fixable. What’s not fixable is an inability to write, and I think that Slotboom — BOOM — wrote a great cold open. Is onto a very chilling, very frightening topic that I’ve never really seen before. It’s risky as hell. And this is one of those areas where some people will just put the script down. They’ll make it halfway down page one and go, “Oh my god. I can’t watch a movie where babies are being buried alive.” But, I’ve been waiting my whole life for that.

So, I think that she can write. And she can do this. And she seems very comfortable writing in horror moments. Not so comfortable writing dialogue. Not so comfortable writing moments that aren’t horror. So, those are some areas to work on.

**John:** I think she has a great title. I think that title fits very well with that opening image.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Because what I got from that title and that opening image is like, okay, these undead babies are going to come back and seek vengeance. And they could be like an undead baby ghost movie. I love it.

**Craig:** No question. Yeah. And I’ve always wanted to see babies kick ass.

**John:** Yeah. Our third script is called Hearts and Mind by James Stubenrauch. And I’ll summarize this.

We start with a male voice asking, “So, you wanna go save the world?” And then what’s labeled as a flashback we are at an army recruiting office where Bree Foster, 19, is talking to a military recruiter. The recruiter changes tactics. Maybe she doesn’t want to go save the world but rather get a paid job. Seems more like it.

As they’re talking, Bree is watching this homeless man though the window. She ultimately grabs the recruiter’s cigarette’s and gives them to the homeless man who asks her if she’s joining the military to run away. She says, “It can’t be worse than here.”

We cut to the present time, or 2011, where a snow-like ash is falling. There’s explosions. We are in Kabul, Afghanistan. We move through streets and alleys to a blown up apartment building. We see Humvees, US soldiers, and Bree is among them. She’s in a medic’s uniform. She’s scared to death but hiding it. She’s very much a rookie in this world.

And that’s the end of our three pages.

**Craig:** Hey, James. James, guess what? You’re a pretty good writer. I think you did a really good job here. I have some comments and some thoughts for you. Most of them occur on page two.

But, let me tell you what I really liked. You built me a character. And you built me a character without cheating. Here’s what I see: “Bree Foster (19): a woman with nothing to lose.” Okay, that’s cheating. Except —

**John:** That’s cheating.

**Craig:** Except it’s not. It’s almost not cheating because she’s sitting in an Army recruitment office. And if you’re sitting in an Army recruiting office my guess is probably, you know, something interesting has happened to you, particularly if you are a 19 year old girl with “long dyed black hair. Black on black thrift store clothes, a homemade nose piercing… something both hard and innocent about her.”

You’re built an interesting — I can see her. And there’s no substitute for suddenly being able to see somebody. Not only can I see her. I’m starting to think of actresses. That’s a human being that you described and I love that.

And this guy is talking and she’s not paying attention. Instead she’s looking outside through the window and we see this Midwestern main street and this old homeless man reaching for a cigarette pack in the gutter. And she’s watching this guy, while this recruiter rambles on with all this nonsense about serving your country and being all you can be, we’re watching this homeless person finally, finally get the cigarette pack only to find out that it’s empty inside.

And I don’t think you can really teach stuff like this. People just have an understanding that you can create a small moment that is instructive in a metaphoric way and without being — slam you over the head. And I really liked it. I thought it was nice. It was calmly, quietly poetic.

My issues with what’s going on page one and two really have more to do with the cocky recruiter, because he goes off the rails pretty quickly. He’s just too broad. And, again, let’s talk about it as we’ve discussed — we’re world building here and we’re setting a tone and instructing the audience. He’s too “funny.” He is a recruiter. He may be cocky. He may have a patter. But at some point it gets off the rails.

He says to her, “Married? No? Awesome. What about babies?” Babies is a weird one. I would think children would be a better word there. She tightens up at this and he says, “Babies? Yes? No? It’s not a trick question. Yay or nay on rug-rats?” That’s quippy. It’s not real. That’s not how anybody in that position would talk. Not only is it not how anybody in that position would talk. It’s cutting against his job which is to get her to sign on the line that is dotted, right? It’s just bad salesmanship.

She says, “No.”

“Even better. You’re ready to be all you can be,” which is, again, it’s too — he’s getting too jokey. “Now the most important question.” He holds up two brochures — Soldier and Medic. “Wanna give shots, or get shot at.”

No. No, no, no military recruiter is going to tell you you’re getting shot at. [laughs] And give you a choice about it. It makes absolutely no sense.

So, that character I really think needs to be brought into the world that Bree’s character is in, and the homeless character is in. It’s fine to have him droning on. It’s fine to have him be canned and to be following the copy of a Department of Defense mandated script. It’s not okay to have him go that awry.

I love that she steals his cigarettes. And I love that she gives them to this homeless guy. And where I really got excited — although I wasn’t happy that he burns the cigarette down in one drag and tosses it into the gutter, because that’s not how smoking works, unless it’s a cartoon.

But where I was really happy was at the rest of page three, when we jumped ahead to present time. I thought, James, that you did a beautiful job of painting a picture here. Where a lot of people would have just said, “Chaos. We’re inside a building. It’s blown up. There are people…” You, you gave us a transition. You brought us in with sound. You brought us in with image of ash, which was quite beautiful. You had some terrific descriptions in here.

“We follow the ash toward its source — TRACKING through narrow, filthy ALLEYS. No signs of life. Only ghosts tonight.” I love that.

“A BLOWN-UP APARTMENT COMPLEX. Its insides disemboweled into a BLAST CRATER.” Great. So, I could see all of this. You are telling me a story. You are guiding me. I was watching a movie. And that is why I think you can write.

So, I would fix that cocky recruiter character, but very encouraged by this. What did you think, John?

**John:** I agree that once we get to Kabul, that scene setting, that painting of the world is really terrific. I had more problems with these first two pages than you did in that I didn’t get to see anything that Bree did. Basically all I got was a description of what she’s wearing and then this really annoying guy was talking the whole time. And I didn’t really get to see her. I got to see — the first two pages were basically being driven by a cocky recruiter we’ll hopefully never see again and a nameless homeless man. And that wasn’t a rewarding way for us to start.

Even if you have a character who is essentially passive, let’s see her be doing something even in her passivity. So, rather than being talked at by this recruiter, she’s like trying to fill out this form. Get us further into this process because I didn’t believe — like you, I didn’t believe that this guy was real. I didn’t believe that this was really her signing up.

It can be just about the paperwork. But let her speak something in here because she’s going to be our main character. So, let her try to explain herself at least to some degree to this guy. And if it’s even about a very small thing, like “When do I get my first paycheck? How does this all work?” We can understand her perspective on this more than what we’re getting from right here, which is basically canned spiel from a guy who I don’t want to see again.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that what I would suggest — I get the idea that Bree is a little dead inside here. And I’m okay with that tone. If the more grounded, realer recruiter said, “Now, do you have questions? I’m sure you have questions about salary.”

And she said, “No.”

“All right, well, do you have any questions at all?”

“No.”

Then I would know something about her. So, there are ways to show passivity in an active way. I did think that —

**John:** I would also say —

**Craig:** Yeah. I was going to say I thought that her thing with the cigarettes was — she was doing something during the scene. So, I give her a little more credit there than I think you are. But I agree that we need a little bit — I think fixing that guy is going to fix her.

**John:** Yeah. I think she has to drive the scene, though, ultimately. Even if there’s another guy who is asking the questions, we have to believe that she is essentially in charge of the scene. I would love to see her try to be giving an answer but really she’s paying more attention to the homeless guy up the street. And like that, I think, is an interesting dynamic where we see her start to talk or start to form an answer, but she’s really more paying attention to what that guy is doing.

I agree that the homeless man doing the pack of cigarettes stuff is interesting. It’s a good visual image that helps establish our world. And ultimately when she makes a choice to go out and see him, it’s great. But I didn’t really believe the moment of her grabbing the cigarettes and sort of walking out the door. I was like, well, did she leave the recruiter’s office not doing it, signing up? I more wanted to see her sign on the dotted line and then as he’s filing the paper, whatever, then she takes the pack of cigarettes. Some completion on an action, because right now I didn’t necessarily really believe that she had joined the military.

**Craig:** I agree with that. I think that’s right. The part of this that isn’t working is essentially the nuts and bolts part, which is her signing up for the military. But, the mood of somebody that’s a little dead inside, answering questions and doing something that is an enormously radical thing for somebody to do and a big life choice for somebody, and yet doing it in a way that seems distracted and sort of dead inside and misplaced focus. That’s all great. You just have to take care of the nuts and bolts end of it a little bit better.

But that said, I thought, again, that James understands how to write a movie. And that is a very encouraging thing to see from three pages.

**John:** I would agree.

**Craig:** Yeah. Great.

**John:** So, again, thank you to all of the people who submitted pages this week and every week to the Three Page Challenge. If you would like to follow along with these examples, or any of the other ones, for every podcast we do a Three Page Challenge in the show notes we’ll have links to the PDFs for those three pages, so you can follow along.

If you would like to submit your own three pages, it’s at johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out, and there’s little rules there about sort of how you send stuff in and what you should put in your email and what you should not put in your email.

And we’ve been getting a lot of them. So, Stuart goes through the pile and sorts them out and finds some really good ones for us to look at. And, again, thank you to Blake, and James, and Sandra Lee for sending them through to us this week.

**Craig:** Slotboom!

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

**Craig:** Yeah I do. Do you want to hear it?

**John:** Go for it. I want to hear it so much.

**Craig:** So, I feel like I only have three categories of One Cool Things and one of them is medical stuff. Very interesting invention that is currently being tested out and is on the verge of being manufactured. It’s called the XStat syringe. And it’s an example of how modern thinking is changing the way we approach problems. It just seems like such a modern solution to a thing.

Bullet wounds. Incredibly common wound to deal with, not only on the battlefield but also any municipal hospital in a city is dealing with bullet wounds all the time in trauma. And the immediate problem with bullet wounds is bleeding. And basically the way you’re taught when you’re dealing with first response to a bullet wound, and a bleeder as they often are, is to basically shove a bunch of gauze into it, which is what they were doing in the 1800s. Shove gauze in there. The gauze gets quickly soaked. The blood keeps coming out. And then you also have to pull all the gauze out, which can be very painful. Shoving the gauze in is very painful. It doesn’t really do what it’s supposed to do.

So, this is so brilliant, this company called RevMedx has come up with what looks like basically a syringe. It’s a plastic syringe shaped a bit like — it’s kind of like basically a tampon. It’s like a big tampon applicator. And it’s got a silicon tip at one end and a plunger at the other and it’s filled with tiny compressed cotton balls.

And they look like, you know like Smarties, the candy Smarties? Like little — did you get those in Colorado?

**John:** Yeah. I know — yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah. Smarties. So, they look like little pills, like little aspirin pills, but they’re just compressed sponges. And so you stick this plunger into the open bullet wound and you push in these little tiny sponges which fill the space and then the blood essentially makes them expand and they seal the wound up, almost instantly, which is pretty remarkable.

There’s some issues with it. You’ve got to pull all those things out later. But by that point theoretically somebody will be stabilized and anesthetized and so forth.

But, it’s just one of those things where you look at it and you’re like, oh yeah, I guess —

**John:** Yeah. We could do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like I guess we just sort of gave up on bullet wounds for awhile, like for 300 years, and now we realize maybe it would be a good thing to kind of fix that. Because the other option is tourniqueting which causes all sorts of problems. It’s a last resort. You can damage a lot of healthy tissue with a tourniquet. And tourniquets are incredibly painful.

So, hopefully this ends up being cleared by the FDA. The syringes themselves are $100 each, which is a huge deal, because that means that they will be available not just for first world use but all world use. And hopefully they save some lives…of good people.

**John:** That would be great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** When you said syringe I assumed it was going to be something like an epoxy, like an epoxy polymer that you would squeeze in that would actually seal the thing. But, that’s maybe chemically not wise to stick epoxy into people’s open wounds.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t want that in the bloodstream. That’s probably a bad idea.

**John:** They do — they use super glue though for cuts and that does work.

**Craig:** Yeah. They have some surgical adhesives and things like that, but an open wound where you’re injecting it pretty deep in and sometimes even into an organ, epoxy also hardens and then it’s a — yeah, that would be a problem.

**John:** As always, we like to give a lot of medical advice in our podcast because we are experts on so many topics.

**Craig:** I am.

**John:** You are. Craig is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is just a simple game that you will download on your iPhone and waste a lot of time with, because it’s great, called Threes! Have you played Threes! yet, Craig?

**Craig:** No!

**John:** Threes! is really good. It’s really straightforward and simple. And it goes to your basic need to sort of neaten and straighten things.

**Craig:** Oh, no, I have that need.

**John:** So, essentially you’re given a grid of numbers and you are trying to add up — merge these numbers and you’ll have a tile with a three and a tile with a three. You merge them, they become a six. And you’re trying to build up to bigger and bigger numbers. But, of course, there’s limited space on the board, so you’d have to plan strategically for how you’re going to combine these numbers and therefore not fill the grid. And the game is over when you fill the grid.

It’s just a very well thought out game with terrific little mechanics. It’s just smart enough. It’s just cute enough. It’s a good game to play and a terrific time-waster for playing for 30 seconds or for six minutes, but a really good game.

**Craig:** I just bought it.

**John:** On the App Store right now.

**Craig:** I just bought it.

**John:** Done!

**Craig:** I bought it while you were talking.

**John:** That’s how good it is.

So, our show is now complete. If you would like to know more about the topics we talked about, Craig’s medical syringes, my game, any of the Three Page Challenges, you can find the Show Notes at johnaugust.com/podcast.

You can subscribe to us on iTunes. We are there. Look for Scriptnotes. And you can leave us a comment while you’re subscribing there.

If you’re on iTunes you can also find the Scriptnotes app which is for sale. Not for sale there — it’s free there. You can download the app to your phone or other iOS device. Through that app you can access all the back episodes, which is fun and good for you to do.

Weekend Read, the app I make for reading screenplays on your iPhone is also there, so you can download that for free.

We will be back next week with more things to talk about. And if you have questions for Craig, he’s @clmazin on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Longer questions like the one we got about late payments go to ask@johnaugust.com.

And that’s our show.

**Craig:** Slotboom!

**John:** Done. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* Get your tickets now for the [Scriptnotes/Nerdist Live Crossover episode](https://www.nerdmeltla.com/tickets2/index.php?event_id=791/) on April 13th at Nerdmelt, with proceeds benefiting [826LA](https://826la.org/)
* Patti Lupone [interrupted](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WruzPfJ9Rys)
* Film Independent’s [Directors Close-Up series](http://www.filmindependent.org/event/directors-close-up-2014/#.UwuxjkJdVxo)
* [Chicago Fire](http://www.nbc.com/chicago-fire) and [Chicago P.D.](http://www.nbc.com/chicago-pd)
* Three Pages by [Blake Armstrong](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/BlakeArmstrong.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Sandra Lee Slotboom](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/SandraLeeSlotboom.pdf)
* Three Pages by [James Stubenrauch](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JamesStubenrauch.pdf)
* [How to submit your Three Pages](http://johnaugust.com/threepage), and [Stuart’s post on lessons learned from the early batches](http://johnaugust.com/2012/learning-from-the-three-page-challenge)
* The [XStat syringe](http://www.revmedx.com/#!xstat-dressing/c2500) by RevMedx
* [Threes!](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/threes!/id779157948?mt=8) on the App Store
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Betty Spinks

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

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

**Craig Mazin:** Argh! Ah! My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, Episode 130, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, last week there was some controversy and both you and I got sucked into it. So, I feel like maybe we should just start off with this and just get a clean slate here. Okay?

**Craig:** Fine.

**John:** So, this happened on February 3. Justin Marks, who is a screenwriter and colleague of both of ours — a friend actually — he tweeted something. He tweeted this: Screenwriters, use two spaces after a period, unless you’re writing scripts in Times New Roman which means you’re not a screenwriter.

So, Craig, I ask you, do you use one space or two spaces after a period?

**Craig:** One space.

**John:** Yeah. And so I feel like I am complicit in this controversy that has happened because Justin actually cited that I had said two spaces after a period, which is in fact true.

**Craig:** But what year was that? [laughs]

**John:** That was in 2005.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, in 2005 I made a blog post about how to change, basically saying that mono space fonts like Courier traditionally use two spaces after a period. Everything else — everything else — should be one space after the period.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But mono space faces use two spaces after the period. Even back in 2005 I said it’s not a must, I’m just saying it’s a thing that you can do.

Now, if a person were really carefully observing of my behavior they would notice that if you look through the script library at johnaugust.com at a certain point I actually switched to a single space after the period. And even you and I on the podcast have discussed it. I looked it up and in 2012 on episode 65 we actually talked about the fact that I was sort of leaning more towards using a single space.

But the truth is I have to sort of come out and say this: like most American screenwriters my feelings have evolved and I have become a single-spacer.

**Craig:** Mine too. I learned how to type in high school on a Brother electric typewriter. It wasn’t even the kind of electric typewriter that stored any of the words. It was just more of a clack-clack electric typewriter.

**John:** Did it have a little tiny display before you hit the thing, or just straight to paper?

**Craig:** No, nothing. Straight to paper. It was a disaster and also, therefore, a great way to learn how to type because it really forced you to learn properly.

And in 1985 I was taught two spaces. It took me awhile to get out of the two space habit because I am a touch typer, but I did. And there is absolutely no call for it. Most screenplays I read are one space. It seems very weird now to see something with two spaces. It’s old school. It’s unnecessary. I think it look worse. And Justin Marks is just wrong. He’s wrong!

**John:** [laughs] I won’t go so far as to say that Justin Marks is wrong. Or, actually, no, I’ll say he’s wrong in the sense that to be declaratory that it should be a certain way is wrong.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If he chooses to still use the two spaces, the world is not going to come crashing to an end. But, I would encourage you if you are not set one way or the other way to just use the single space, because for everything you’re doing in your life a single space will go great. It will look fine in Courier.

And here’s what actually pushed me over the edge is when we were working on Courier Prime, the type face of Courier that looks better than sort of normal Courier, we sort of put the punctuation in a place that looked really good with a single space after it.

**Craig:** Good. Good.

**John:** So, I would just encourage you to try single space and you probably won’t ever go back. And it’s sort of like when you stop smoking, I suspect, that you’ll suddenly notice other people smoking a lot. You will start to notice double spaces that annoy you to some degree.

**Craig:** You never smoked.

**John:** I never smoked. But you did.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t know what you’re talking about. [laughs]

**John:** If people go back to the early episodes of Scriptnotes you can hear Craig smoking while we are recording the show.

**Craig:** Well, I never smoked cigarettes while we were —

**John:** Oh, you did your little e-cigarettes.

**Craig:** My e-cigarettes. Yes. But that’s not smoking either.

**John:** So, one last tip, if you make your change midway through a script or if you’re going back to an old script that you’ve double spaced, the simple solution, of course, is to do a find/replace. Just do Find “period-space-space” and just swap it out for “period-space.” Run that through a couple times. You’ll get rid of all the double spacing and you’ll be happy.

**Craig:** You will, in fact, be happy.

I think it’s better looking, and you’re right, two spaces isn’t going to end the world, but certainly you can’t go on record with something as outrageous as the suggestion that two spaces is preferable and one space is verboten. Not true.

**John:** Not true. It reminds me of Animal Farm. If you remember that the animals, when they took over, they said like two legs bad, four legs good. And then, of course, they end up manipulate itself so that two legs were better because the pigs started walking on their back feet.

So, I’m just basically saying, “Justin Marks don’t be a pig.” Or, maybe I’m the pig in the example. It really wasn’t a well thought out example.

**Craig:** No. This was McKenna-like in its clumsy analogy with nature.

**John:** [laughs] I’m a squirrel in a rocket ship headed towards thieves.

Today on the show we obviously have to talk some Final Draft follow up.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because that was just a thing that happened.

**Craig:** That’s what everybody thought you were talking about when you said we got sucked into a controversy.

**John:** So, we want to talk about that. I want to talk about writing in public spaces, because it’s something I’ve had to do a lot this week. I want to talk about keeping your hero in the driver seat of your story. I had sent you this link to this blog post, this sort of regular column by Heather Havrilesky which I thought was just great because it was really talking about being in the driver’s seat but in real life.

We have a question that I haven’t even sent you yet but I’ll just read it and you’ll have a great answer for it.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We have people suing Tom Cruise for a billion dollars.

**Craig:** This is a big show.

**John:** It’s a big show. I want to talk about this thing called Time Tailor which I didn’t even tell you about but you will be annoyed when I tell you what it is.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** And so it’s a big show. We’ve got a lot to do here.

**Craig:** Big show.

Well, I guess we should start with Final Draft. We had an interview last week, or we welcomed as our guests on the show two gentlemen from Final Draft, one of whom was and is in fact the CEO of Final Draft.

**John:** That was Marc Madnick.

**Craig:** Marc Madnick.

**John:** And then Joe Jarvis who’s the Final Draft Chief, sort of, he’s the person who is the product manager of Final Draft and I think does more of the technical stuff.

**Craig:** How would you say — I’ve been looking around at Reddit and Twitter.

**John:** I haven’t actually seen you on Reddit but I heard through Stuart that you have actually been engaging with people on Reddit which is really dangerous, Craig.

**Craig:** It is? I mean, it’s in Reddit Screenwriting, not in Reddit, I don’t know, [laughs], whatever else Reddit.

**John:** Well, Reddit is nothing but timely threads. No, maybe it’s good. Maybe it’s good you’re engaging.

**Craig:** I mean, I’ve only posted a few things. Everyone has been very polite. What’s the feedback that you’ve sensed from the interview that we did?

**John:** People have written to say that it was incredibly uncomfortable to listen to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which it was uncomfortable to be in that room. So, I’d like to sort of paint the scene and sort of what happened when we did that. We were sitting around a folding table in our little office set with like two towels on the table to sort of muffle some sound. And I was manning the board, poorly, for the four microphones, which we’d just gotten the four microphones up and working.

As it turned out me and Joe Jarvis, we didn’t really need microphones because we weren’t going to be doing very much talking.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** It was mostly going to be Marc and Craig and I knew that it was mostly going to be mostly Marc and Craig which is why I sort of sensed that my role would be the let’s make sure no one flips the table over. That was my function to sort of calm things down.

And I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to challenge him on certain things that I thought were not entirely accurate because things were actually already pretty tense in that room.

**Craig:** They were a bit tense. But they were…I guess I would say they were civil-tense. In other words, everything was about Final Draft and about the product and how they conduct their business. I don’t think that Mr. Madnick did himself many favors, frankly.

You know, anyone can do what they want when they come on a show like our show and talk about what they have to talk about. I was really surprised, honestly surprised. I expected that he… — If it were me I would have come on the show and say, “Look, let me just be humble about this. Let me listen to your complaints and let me address them in that spirit,” because no company does everything right and certainly Final Draft hasn’t done everything right, and then kind of work back to a place of, “But here’s how we’re trying to get better.”

Not really the case. He was pretty defensive, I thought.

**John:** He was sort of more the Ballmer mode, the Microsoft Ballmer Chief, the “I know this is the right thing” kind of mode, versus the responsive way. Evernote, which is a product I use, the CEO or the president or whatever it was sort of very recently said like, “Listen, we know that our syncing and a lot of our services have slowed down a lot. We’re not satisfied and this is what we’re doing to fix it.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That wasn’t what I heard from him. I didn’t hear that he was responding to things. He was more sort of just defending what had happened.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you know a lot of the feedback that I saw on the interwebs following the posting of our show commented on his reliance on a couple of talking points, one of which was they had 40 employees, which I’m not sure is particularly relevant.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** One of which was —

**John:** Well, I would like to parse one second for 40 employees, because does 40 employees mean that you’re a giant or you’re small? Because I think to almost everybody listening were like, “Wow, you have 40 employees?” That felt so much bigger. And to him it’s like, “We’re a small company. We’ve got 40 employees.” And so it was a weird disconnect in terms of what I think — he didn’t seem to have a very good sense of who the listenership of the show was.

**Craig:** I agree, particularly when one co-host of the show has his own software company that puts out very good apps and I believe you have three employees.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** The proprietor of Final Draft I believe has one employee, himself. I think WriterDuet is two guys. This is sort of the way things are going. So, I think you’re right. There was a disconnect there. And there’s a question of how many of those 40… — Well, part of the problem is then you start saying, “Well what are those 40 people doing?” And I think it’s probably true that the minority of them are actually coding software. And then, of course, what that means is many of them are doing other things like promotion, and marketing, and other stuff.

So, that talking point was repeated a lot. I’m not sure if it helped him, or his case. The other thing that people picked up on was that both gentlemen were essentially saying we’re old software and we’ve been out of date for a really long time, so you just have to — that’s why it took us a really long time to issue this fairly expensive upgrade that accomplished things that should have been accomplished awhile ago.

I’m not sure that’s a great defense either.

**John:** I would agree. And so Kent Tessman recently wrote a blog post talking about sort of his experience as a software developer listening to this episode and sort of working through sort of point by point. And so do you want to walk through what Kent wrote about it, because I think that might be a useful start.

**Craig:** Yeah, so he makes some really good points here. And in the moment it was kind of hard, you know, I had to sort of battle to get in there. Marc is certainly an impressive talker, you know. I mean, I think I’m an — impressive meaning volume. So, you know, we couldn’t get into anything, nor could we rebut point by point. But, also, I’m not a software developer and Kent is, and so he had some interesting comments to make about the things that the Final Draft folks were saying.

First, Retina. So, we brought up the point that Final Draft 8 was not Retina-compatible, nor did they release a Retina-compatible patch. You had to wait I think it was the four years. Was it four years?

**John:** It wasn’t four years. It was essentially 14 or 18 months after the Retina —

**Craig:** Between 8 and 9?

**John:** Yeah, but no, essentially Retina became available and it was 18 months later that they actually supported it.

**Craig:** So a year and a half.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it was considered a feature of their $100 upgrade. And his point was, hey, you can’t say that Apple somehow shocked you in a way that nobody else was shocked. Every software developer is in the same boat, particularly guys that are smaller than the 40 employee shop. And what he did was he said all he did was just go into a thing called Quartz Debug and there’s a Graphics Tools folder and he turned on the “Simulate high DPI text demagnification” and, voila, he was able to… — He said he went over to Best Buy, downloaded the Fade In demo on a Retina MacBook that was there on display and it looked great.

So, why couldn’t they have done that? Well, the problem he says is not that they were somehow surprised by Retina. The problem is that they’re using not just old code but nearly ancient code.

**John:** Yes. He’s saying they’re specifically using QuickDraw techniques which were really from ancient Macintoshes to sort of do all the screen rendering. And specifically Kent is saying that likely in order to — every build they were doing, every time they opened up X code to actually build Final Draft they were getting these warnings saying, like, “You’re using things we don’t let you use anymore, you should switch to newer libraries.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And they didn’t and they couldn’t because everything else was dependent upon it.

**Craig:** Yes. So, QuickDraw goes back to the ’80s. And I’m a Mac-head, so I remember QuickDraw being a thing that they were promoting in the ’80s. But I also remember that when Mac OS X rolled out around 2000, 2001, that one of the things that they were really proud of was this Quartz technology and how — it’s the thing that allows print to look better, everything, the graphics/guts of the system software had been upgraded. And this is really — this has been around for a long time.

And one thing that’s puzzling, but more frustrating than puzzling is that Final Draft sat there knowing full well for decades that they were using deprecated software and they didn’t do anything about it. And they didn’t do anything about it because they didn’t have to. And that’s just poor planning. I’m sorry, it’s poor planning.

So, then for them to say, “Oh my god, we suddenly had to rewrite everything.” Well, you didn’t suddenly have to rewrite everything. You only suddenly had to do it when finally it seemed clear that you could no longer drive your Edsel down the freeway.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, that was an interesting point. He also makes the point that for Windows users this upgrade is even less valuable than the upgrade for the Mac people because they don’t even get the Retina stuff, or the full screen. He also points out that Unicode, which is something that they’re talking about jumping on the bandwagon with, this newfangled Unicode is something that has been available for 25 plus years.

**John:** Yes. So, let’s talk about what Unicode is. So, Unicode is a way of representing character sets, so languages, the glyphs of languages, letters that go beyond sort of a standard small roman subset of characters. And it becomes incredibly important for international support. So, if you’re going to be writing scripts in other languages, Unicode is what you need to be able to use in order to render those letters or characters in some cases on the screen. And they still don’t have it.

And it’s one of those things that essentially you get free in Macintosh right now. Like if you write any sort of text editing program that’s not a thing that you have to sort of carefully wrestle with and bake in. It comes free. The challenge is that everything you’ve done up until this point hasn’t used it. And so for Final Draft they have to sort of just do everything differently because it’s not the way they’ve been doing it. And yet it’s not that hard. And it was frustrating for me to hear Marc Madnick to hear sort of how their international users and all this stuff and how they’re doing all this stuff around the world.

And it’s like, well, how are people using your app? Are they only writing scripts in English? Because with Unicode support it’s going to be much more challenging for a writer in Greek to be using your app.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s really no excuse. The only excuse is, well, it’s not our focus. Our focus is to market our software, to market our competitions, and to make our deal with Writers Guild, and advertise. But to not feature something that’s over a quarter century old, which in computer terms means is 14 million years old is mind-boggling.

**John:** And to be fair, Unicode could be 25 years old. It doesn’t mean that everything was Unicode 25 years ago. But like the standard has been out there and now it’s standard. It’s actually genuinely standard.

**Craig:** It is genuinely standard and it has been standard for awhile. Kent makes the point that Carbon and Cocoa were meant to sort of work simultaneously but that moving to Cocoa isn’t something that people just recently decided is something they ought to do. It’s something that basically they’ve been aware they had to do, they should do, for what, ten years? I mean, that sounds —

**John:** That sounds about right. It’s essentially like the doctor says at some point you’re going to need to have this surgery. And, yeah, yeah, but I’m not going to do it this year. I’m going to wait another year. And so like you’re wearing down your joints and suddenly, “Doctor, I can’t move.” Well, yeah, you needed to have this surgery ten years ago. You needed to go and do this and now this is the repercussions of this.

**Craig:** Right. So, suddenly you can’t make the easy fix to have Retina. I don’t know if this is what impacted their application of Unicode, although I doubt it since Unicode pre-dates Cocoa. I doubt it.

And lastly, I’ll just pull up this point. You should read his — he has a very thoughtful piece here — but the last thing he mentions is Fountain. And there’s an exchange that occurs where Joe says, you know, “Fountain is not something that we support but it’s something that we could easily do.” And I said, “So then do it.” [laughs]

You know? And this is something where Kent says, “Fountain is something that they could implement in an afternoon.”

**John:** Easily.

**Craig:** And why aren’t they? And answer certainly can’t be lack of manpower. And I doubt it’s lack of interest. I think they’re not doing it because they are internally, I believe, it’s my opinion, see a defensive position in the proprietary nature of their code, or their format rather, their file format. They don’t want it to be easily translatable between other software programs. But, too bad, it is. And “we have a proprietary format” — that’s a mountain that so many companies have died on. Why would you want to be another one?

**John:** Yeah. I think that really comes down to my central frustration of their defense of sort of what they do. And it comes down to early on in the exchange Marc Madnick says, “We’re the only company that does pagination right.” And that statement really reveals sort of how he perceives his company. Because he built Final Draft because he got frustrated with sort of how hard it was to do his screenwriting, but he had this vision that a page is a page is a page, and it’s a minute per page, and I think he genuinely believes — and I think the company genuinely believes — that one page of screenplay is one minute of screen time. Not just a rule of thumb. I think it’s like a fundamentalism.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think they genuinely deeply in their bones believe that that’s how it is and that therefore maintaining that one page — maintaining that page on the Mac being a page on the iPad being a page on the PC, you know, no matter which platform you’re opening on that file will still open exactly the same way — is the fundamental thing that they think they do right and do better than anyone else can. And they believe that their one way of doing it is the precise right way.

Now, like any sort of fundamentalism there are really easy ways you can sort of poke that belief which is, well, if that’s true then why are you letting people set like tight or loose spacing?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Why are you letting people touch the margins at all? So, it gives lie to the idea that this rule of thumb is anything more than just the Crassus rule of thumb. And, of course, we are writers. We recognize that if I write “Atlanta burns” that’s not —

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s not a minute.

**John:** That’s four minutes of screen time in one sentence. So, but I genuinely think he believes that. And so I can understand from his perspective that pagination is the most important thing. And understanding that he believes that pagination is the most important thing, Fountain is an incredibly frustrating thing for them to deal with because pagination is fixed. Pagination is sort of how things are going to be when they’re printed on paper. And I think Final Draft is still fundamentally concerned about getting stuff onto paper.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so while they’ve been able to generate PDFs, they really still think about printing stuff out and they want stuff to print in the exact same page breaks and everything like that to be the same.

But, file formats and sort of the editable file formats are not fundamentally fixed that way. They’re fluid. And so FDX, which is the format that they use, is an XML format and doesn’t have any sense inherently of where the page breaks are. I know this for a fact because we deal with FDX all the time. And the only way that Final Draft is getting their page breaks to be the same way every time is by some really kludgy methods.

And so they sort of brute force it to fit onto a certain page and then if they have to do it on a PC that’s why they have Courier Final Draft which is a sort of made up font they have that is different on the PC, works differently on the PC than it does on the Mac so that all the words will end in the same place basically.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So it’s this really kludgy way of doing it. So, both Fountain and Courier Prime are big annoyances to them because it means the one thing they think they’re really good at isn’t important anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah, it struck me — it’s so funny when he said that this was their thing, that this was what set them apart and this was their obsession as a company. I was shocked because it’s not mine.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And I’m a screenwriter. This is supposed to be for me. Yeah, sure, I want a document that I’m writing on my Mac to have the same page breaks if somebody else opens that same document with the same software on their PC. Absolutely. And in that case Final Draft accomplishes that and so does Fade In.

They’ve extended that fetish to their app for iOS. Now, interestingly their app for iOS, another thing Kent points out is that they initially released it as Final Draft Reader. It was read-only, not write, and cost $20. And it was buggy. And then later they dropped the price from $19.99 to zero for Reader and then created the Read-Write app which I guess has a fee connected to it. Which isn’t great business practice to basically charge $20 to your early adopters and then go, “Eh, now it’s free.”

But either way I certainly don’t need my iPad to have precise pagination like that. And I was wrong. In the thing I said, oh, the iPad app for Fade In does that. It doesn’t have any pagination. You just read it. Because, as Kent said, you can tell who’s not a screenwriter on set? It’s the guy with the iPad. Either way, for me pagination is not this holy grail of things. That’s so ’90s to me.

**John:** It is. And I think it reinforces that obsession that you see in sort of beginning screenwriting books, too, which is that like this thing needs to happen by this page.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that obsession about that kind of thing — that’s not actually writing. And that’s the thing that I think I felt more than anything else is that they fundamentally believe this as a way to write a script. They believe this as a way to paginate a script. And I think they’ve sort of forgotten about the actual writing process. So, I did a video awhile back about why I like writing in Fountain. And one of the things I really stressed is that because you’re not thinking about like where the margins are you can actually just sort of focus on what the words are.

And I don’t think Final Draft has focused on the words for really quite a long time.

**Craig:** I agree. And this, I guess, I know they’re listening. This is my big advice.

**John:** I’m not sure they’re listening, but I think they’re going to read the transcript after it’s transcribed.

**Craig:** Fair enough. My big advice is to not — whatever resources you’re expending on developing your software, first of all I would increase them and maybe decrease some of the other stuff, Yeah, I guess I’m saying spend a little more on R&D. Sorry. I understand you’re not in business to go out of business — we heard that a lot. I don’t think spending more on R&D will push you out of business. I’m guessing you guys are in a low margin business, particularly because you’ve been charging premium prices for legacy software for well over a decade, nearly two decades now.

But I would say design. Concentrate on design and features and have less of an obsession over pagination. Pagination doesn’t matter. When you go into production the first AD and the line producer sit down with the screenplay and they start to break it down. And they break it down by content. They don’t care.

That’s why — they always catch you anyway, first of all. If you ever try and fiddle with kerning, or line spacing, or margins. They’re going to catch you anyway. And they read it and they’re experienced. They know how the words will translate into days and they start carving things up by day. And that is entirely about content. It is not about pagination.

That is a weird, weird hill to die on.

**John:** I agree. The last thing, you mentioned it briefly while they were there, but I think it’s worth everyone sort of taking a look at and I’ll put a link up to it, too. You mentioned QuarkXPress, which I thought was such a great example of a software that was completely disrupted by a newcomer. And I think they could be QuarkXPress. And they could essentially become marginalized by someone else just doing their thing better. And so in the case of QuarkXPress it was Adobe who came in with InDesign. It’s like, oh wow, it does all the stuff we need to do and it was just better.

And it wasn’t better at the start, but ultimately it was better and it got disrupted. And I just feel like it was fascinating to be conducting a roundtable interview thing with a company that I don’t think really understood that their whole world was being disrupted.

**Craig:** I agree. I don’t think they get it. I think part of the problem frankly is, and I’m happy to say this to Marc, and he’s invited us to go visit them. I think he’s the wrong CEO for this company.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** He’s not the guy that wrote the software. That’s Ben Cahan. So, he’s not the technical guy. And he’s not a screenwriter. And I wouldn’t expect him to be. So, then what is he? I think what he is is a very, very good promoter. A very good marketer. But that’s not enough anymore. And particularly because the CEO isn’t connected to the technological underpinnings of the product he’s selling, when he’s talking about it you can tell — first of all, how does he even keep his own guys accountable?

**John:** I don’t know. I mean, there’s a thing in software developing called “Dog Fooding” which is basically you have to eat your own dog food. And because I sense that most of them were not screenwriters, I don’t think they were using Final Draft to write screenplays and therefore had no sense of what that was. But refresh my memory. I don’t think they were actively involved in the screenwriting, sorry, in the software development world either because they’re just not making choices everyone else would have made five years ago.

**Craig:** Right. I think that’s right. And I think if what he has been promoting from the top down is pagination, pagination, pagination above all, well no wonder things like, I don’t know, like the fact that their dual dialogue system is ridiculous and clumsy, or the general design of the program looks ugly, or the amount of time it takes in between updates. All that stuff falls away.

The fact that they don’t have a proper way for two people in two separate places to collaborate at the same time on a shared document, that should be — that’s what they should obsess over, to the exclusion of everything else. That’s all —

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** That would — if they solved that, and legitimately solved it, I would think that they could survive.

**John:** Yeah, I agree.

**Craig:** But, you know, hey, look, he thinks that we’re nuts. Look, right now they’re like, “Eh, we own 95% of the market. Bring it on.” I remember that —

**John:** We’ll see if in two years, in five years, if they’re 95% of the market. We’ll see.

**Craig:** Well, I remember when the iPhone came out Ballmer said, “Right now Windows supports 60% of the phones that are being sold,” or something, and “Apple sold nothing.” Well, let’s see where they are in 18 months. Well, there they are.

**John:** There they are.

**Craig:** There they are.

**John:** Moving on.

**Craig:** Moving on!

**John:** Next thing. I want to talk about writing in public spaces. So, this last week we’ve had WGA contract negotiation, and while I can’t talk about the substance of what’s happened in the rooms there I can say that like you described it is sort of like jury duty in that there’s a lot of downtime. And so there’s a lot of time where I’m just sitting in rooms with a bunch of other writers. And it’s very tempting to just like trade war stories. Like Carl Gottlieb is right across the table from me.

But I’ve been actually just working. I’ve actually put in my headphones and started working. So, I want to talk a little bit about writing in public spaces because I didn’t grow up writing in coffee shops. Did you? Did you write in public spaces or did you always go someplace quiet?

**Craig:** No. No. I always just found a little, even when I had — I was sharing a tiny apartment with my then girlfriend now wife. I would just find a little corner.

**John:** So, I think we are sort of the exceptions to the rule. Most — my belief is that many aspiring screenwriters have found themselves out in public spaces and that’s where they feel naturally sort of drawn towards writing.

So, I’ve been one of those people increasingly I would say over the time, partly because of Big Fish. I’ve just been in New York so much. And that process of sticking in your headphones, staring at your screen, and just being someplace else.

What I’ve found — I mostly like it. And what’s so interesting about the process is that whether you’re alone in your office or you are in a public space, ultimately you put yourself wherever those characters are. And so you put yourself in the scene of where those people are.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that can be a really great thing. The challenge for me I find is I have to find exactly the right music or other sort of noise to drown out everyone else around me talking. I have to remind myself not to try to jump right into writing the scene but to sort of give myself some notes about what it is.

So, I find myself writing fragments of things. Like not even really an outline of a scene, but these are things that happen. This is ways to start. And just really sort of visualizing the different ways the scene can sort of get started and get going.

It’s really been kind of a great week. I’ve gotten much more down this week than I would have predicted because I’ve just sort of been forced to be outside of my normal environment where I have all of the distractions of my big computer. I’m just at this one table surrounded by other people. And Susannah Grant is right behind me and she’s just pounding away. So, it’s been a great week for me.

**Craig:** I think that’s the part, occasionally if I feel jammed up not creatively but jammed up motivationally I will occasionally take a road trip down the street. And I’ll sit outside the cigar shop and work or I’ll go over to the Coffee Bean. For that reason. You are now accountable to everybody that’s around you.

First of all, I love that everybody thinks I’m just some guy, [laughs], that’s wasting his whatever meager money he has chasing a stupid dream of being a screenwriter. I actually like that. It reminds me of what it was like when I was 21 and starting out. And I like the fact that I have to write. I can’t just sit there and stare at the screen. I’ll look like an idiot.

And porn is totally out of the question.

**John:** Absolutely. Public space. You can’t get away with any of that stuff.

**Craig:** Can’t get away with porn at the Coffee Been. Well, some people might be able to.

**John:** But you can’t get away with a game either. If you’re just sitting at the coffee shop and you’re playing a stupid game then you’re clearly not doing work.

**Craig:** By being in a public space you put yourself — you begin to play the role of professional screenwriter or screenwriter.

**John:** I think that that’s a crucial thing. There used to be a place and I think it’s closed now but it was called The Office.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And it was just a place that basically rented workstations and you’d just go like you were going to the office. And literally it was a place for screenwriters or other writers could go and work and be in a public work environment. It just changes your perspective in terms of, like, I am in work mode. I’m not in home mode. And that can be an incredibly useful thing.

So, I was already sort of in work mode because I couldn’t wear jeans and a hoodie to the negotiations, so it was forcing me more into that zone.

**Craig:** Yeah. Any tactic that gets you to write more and write better is a worthy tactic short of hurting yourself or others.

**John:** Or addiction.

**Craig:** I include addiction as hurting yourself.

**John:** That’s true. That’s a fair thing.

So, one of the things I was working on this week, I had the revelation — which I’ve had the same revelation 15 times, but every time I have it it’s like, oh, that’s right, I forgot this thing that I remembered from before. I was really having a hard time getting the scene short enough. And I recognized that I had a minor character who was doing a lot of talking and sort of setting up the story and I remembered like, oh that’s right, you’re a minor character I don’t care about at all. You should not be driving this scene at all.

And once I sort of demoted him and said like, no, you’re not allowed to say many things because you’re not the hero of the story, the whole scene changed. So, in general I just want to — it was reminded to me and I’m reminded that we had talked about on the podcast is to keep your hero in the driver seat of the scene. And occasionally you will encounter scenes where like the hero is not in charge of the scene. But almost always the hero needs to be taking the focus of what’s happening on screen at a given moment.

**Craig:** No question. Obviously we’ve come to this story because we’re interested in how the hero is going to develop, and change, and deal with his enemies, deal with the world around her, whatever it is. But let’s also point out most of the time your hero, if your movie gets made, is your movie star. And don’t you want to see the movie… — The word we would always use, I remember when I started working on movies with David Zucker. He would always caution against giving good jokes to day players.

Day players are actors that are there for a day. So, you have a scene where somebody walks into, Harrison Ford walks into a Starbucks and asks for coffee and the woman behind the counter has a couple of lines with him. That’s a day player. Well, don’t give the good stuff to the day players. Generally speaking your movie star will be better and even if they’re not people want to watch the movie star anyway.

**John:** It reminds me a little bit of — so, this last weekend we had a second session of this D&D game that we’re playing, Dungeon World, and one of the rules of Dungeon World, one of the reminders of Dungeon World is make characters take the action. The Game Master doesn’t take the action, the characters take the action. And sometimes that’s really challenging when you’re facing like a monster or something. It’s like I feel like I want to roll an attack role for the monster, but I’m not supposed to.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I’m supposed to let you guys as the players, the heroes, do the work and if your attack fails then I hit you. But if your attack succeeds then you’re the winner. And it’s a very good reminder that the heroes, you guys, are supposed to be the ones who are in charge of the narrative and in charge of the story.

That doesn’t mean that everything should go your hero’s way. Not at all. It just means that they should be the ones who you are following. What they’re trying to do should be the focus of the scene, not them being rebuffed or what the other character is trying to do.

**Craig:** And here’s an example that comes to mind of how you can do this — sorry, I’m fighting a little cold over here.

**John:** Both of us.

**Craig:** How you can do this even when you’re in a scene where your character, your hero, isn’t saying anything. Two other people are having a conversation or one other person is imparting information, opining, philosophizing, but you want your hero to drive it.

Scene that comes to mind: in The Godfather Michael decides he’s going to go and kill Sollozzo in the Italian restaurant. And he goes into the bathroom, finds the gun that’s been stashed for him. Comes back. Sits down.

For the next probably 40 seconds or so Sollozzo rambles, rambles on in Italian about why Michael should make a deal, why this, why that, and the entire time he’s talking we’re on Michael’s face and he’s thinking to himself. Do I do this? Should I do this? Am I capable of doing this? I’m going to do this. And then he does it.

**John:** If he didn’t have the gun that scene would be a completely different scene. It wouldn’t be his scene.

**Craig:** Correct. And I like that there are always ways to contextualize stuff through your hero. There are a lot of scenes where your hero is wandering into a room and they know less than everybody around them. Great. Don’t just shower the guy with information because then the information givers are the ones driving the scene. Let him piece it together. Let him uncover it. Let him be distracted by something that’s important to him.

We’ll still get the information filtered through. But very good reminder from you, John August, to all of our listeners, to keep your hero in the driver’s seat.

**John:** This is a good segue to a piece of advice that I read on The Awl this last week which I thought was actually terrific.

So, a woman named Heather Havrilesky writes a column called Ask Polly. And it seems like very standard sort of like relationship advice questions except they’re really long questions. Because usually when you think about relationship advice questions it’s the Dear Abby length where it’s two paragraphs, it’s really brief, and then the person responds. It’s very common sense. It’s all very boilerplate.

What I love about the internet is that there’s no reason why the question has to be short. And so this woman writes in with a question that’s just endless, or a situation that’s endless. It’s not even really a question. It’s just like this is the situation I’ve gotten myself into. Please help.

And this one was particularly great. So, the one I’m going to link to in the show notes is called “I Moved To A New City To Be With An Emotional Vampire.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which is a good headline. But essentially this young woman describes the situation where she got into this long distance relationship with a guy who is fantastic. He was going to move to her. She ended up moving to his city. He still hadn’t broken up with his current girlfriend but eventually did, but then there was this other girl who was always still around. And it was sort of strange.

Every time she tried to confront him then it made her feel bad about things. And so she details it. And as you’re going through you’re like, “Oh my god, how can you not see what you’ve done? How can you not see what has happened to you?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And why I bring this up is she is no longer in charge of her own narrative. She has taken herself out of the story of her life. She’s given this other guy — he has the important story and she’s like a bit player in his life rather than being the hero of her own life.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** And so I thought Heather’s advice was fantastic essentially about, first of all, you’ve got to get away and you’ve got to fix yourself, but it’s useful I think to screenwriters for two reasons. First off to recognize that there’s real life people who make just terrible choices like this. And so she as a character is kind of fascinating — maddening but fascinating. But also if you were to write from one of your character’s perspective, if they were to write into an advice columnist what would they write? And what would the advice be given to them?

I thought it was just a great example of sort of how people and characters can lose control of their story.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this particular story was rough to read. The woman who answered said, “Go back and read what you just wrote.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “And then you tell me how crazy does that sound.” Delusion is — I mean, now we’re just sadly exploiting this woman’s pain for fodder, but delusion and delusional behavior is a fascinating character trait and it is one of those things that does add very realistic texture to characters.

The trick is to make the delusion connected to something that we understand. And that usually is an emotion. True delusion, like schizophrenic delusion is boring, but delusional behavior and thinking that comes about as a result of fear, self-loathing, these things — we understand fear. We understand self-loathing. So, we can start to understand the delusion.

There is a way to understand how this woman got herself into that mess. That’s the fun of the screenwriter is putting your character in a mess that’s fascinating, and relatable and believable and then watching them wriggle out of it.

**John:** Yeah. I feel like the woman in this article who wrote in this letter, she would be a challenging character to have at the center of a feature, but she’d actually be a great character to be in like a one-hour drama.

If this character was going through this situation in a one-hour drama and like it wasn’t just her story but it was sort of her and the people around her, it would be fascinating because you can see why she made each of the individual choices, and yet having made that choice she is deeper and deeper and deeper to the point where she’s essentially like an addict who keeps going back for another hit of this thing.

And everyone around her must see what she’s done and she’s driven away everyone else who was a friend or could sort of help her out of this situation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I would say, again, because she’s lost control of her narrative she’s not really the hero of a movie, but I thought she’s a great character within a bigger context.

**Craig:** I think you’re totally right about that. One of the things about delusional behavior like this is when you do read it as one long story from beginning to end the weight of the insanity and the bad choices overwhelm your connection with the person who made them. But if you watch them happen one by one then you’re with somebody as they just slowly sink into quicksand.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And that’s understandable.

**John:** It is very much understandable. On the topic of delusional behavior, let’s talk about the $1 billion lawsuit that was recently filed against Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible 3.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And so these happen all the time. And so whenever one of these things happen you and I both get tweets saying like somebody is suing about this and they stole his idea. It’s like, well first off, that’s just crazy town. No one stole his idea. And then when you actually read — we’ll put a link in the show notes, too.

**Craig:** It’s a good one. It’s a good one.

**John:** This complaint. Like he’s clearly representing himself and basically he saw the movie and he’s like, “Well that’s just like this script that I sent to William Morris eight years ago and therefore it was lifted from me.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, it’s delusional behavior. And so when you actually read through his, the plaintiff’s — what he’s arguing — it’s like, well, you have no understanding of sort of what copyright law. And I don’t want to slam on him, because I think he’s probably not entirely there.

**Craig:** All there.

**John:** The fact that no one is willing to even represent him or take his case means that there’s not a there there.

**Craig:** Generally speaking that, yeah, pro se litigants aren’t your strongest litigants. [laughs] Yeah.

**John:** But the delusional behavior, it’s real to him. And that’s, I think, one of the interesting things about him as a character is to him this really is a real thing that was stolen him. And he, at the center of his whole inner narrative, this is a wrong that was done to him. This movie that had come out that he finally watched on video it’s like, “Well, wait, that’s my movie.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Someone stole my idea for my movie even though it’s called Mission Impossible 3 and it’s basically the third element of a franchise.

**Craig:** The thing that jumped out for me from his complaint was that he seemed to feel that producing proof that he had written what he wrote was enough. Generally speaking in a complaint you need to actually show how the defendant has infringed on your unique expression and fixed form. He doesn’t even bother with that. He just shows that he envelopes and things.

By the way, I’ve read other complaints that did list alleged examples of infraction and I wasn’t really swayed by those either, or infringement I should say.

But, you know, here’s what goes on. I talk about this a lot of times when I’m talking to writers about the credit process. Sometimes the arbitration system, the Writers Guild credit arbitration system, just blows it. Sometimes they get it wrong.

I would say a good chunk of the time when writers are infuriated by the result the arbiters have gotten it right and that what’s going on this: I write a screenplay, I live it. I see it in my head. It is not only connected to the effort that I put in, but it is vivid to me. I have felt it.

So, that’s my entry into this. And so then somebody hands me another thing and I read it and I go, “Eh, this is just words. I’m just reading this.” There’s nothing else behind it but the reading. And so, yeah, I see all of these things that are connected to my incredibly vivid thing. But they’re not. They just seem that way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We are tricked by the complete asynchronous nature of our experience of what we’ve written and what we read or watch. I can come up with 20 movies that have scenes that are very similar to the scenes that you’ve seen in Mission Impossible, whichever the one he’s complaining about, because it’s an action movie with a secret agent in it.

**John:** Yeah. I often call it silent evidence. The sense that you’re seeing these two things and you see them like, well these two things are similar so therefore they must be related. One is the cause of the other.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But you’re disregarding all of the other things that are similar to those two things which would indicate like, oh, it’s actually just a very common idea.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so let’s take Pitch Perfect. Let’s take a movie where it’s about a singing competition or a girl joins a singing competition in college. And so let’s say I wrote a script about a girl who joins a singing competition in college and then I see Pitch Perfect. I’m like, “They stole my idea.” Well, if I’m only looking at those two examples I would say like, well, that feels kind of true. The best defense against that to me would be if someone presented 12 other scripts that were written at the same time that were about singing competitions at college.

And if were shown those other 12 scripts I would say like, “Oh, well, I guess other people had kind of similar ideas. It wasn’t stolen from all of these things. It was idea that was out there.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then I would stop and think like, “Oh, you know what? I guess I did read that article in someplace about singing competitions. Or I guess I was in college and I did go in competitions. I guess there were other people who were in choirs, too.”

And you start to realize, “Oh, you know what? The whole universe does not revolve around me and my ideas.”

**Craig:** Ah-ha. Your ideas are not as unique as you thought. And, frankly, a lot of this stuff that these people are complaining about being stolen isn’t property that can be stolen anyway. For instance, there is — I can’t remember the name — but there was a movie that came out in the wake of the Karate Kid’s success. And it featured the guy who did Tae Bo. Remember Tae Bo?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** So, he’s a fitness trainer and he kind of invested this fusion exercise martial arts thing called Tae Bo.

**John:** I have a hunch that Stuart Friedel, our illustrious editor of the podcast, probably has a whole bunch of like Tae Bo stuff, because that feels like the kind of thing that he’d focus on.

**Craig:** Billy Blanks I think was his name.

**John:** I think you’re right.

**Craig:** And so after the Karate Kid’s success somebody went and made a movie where Billy Blanks played a janitor at a high school, just a humble janitor, and there’s this kid who’s just been — he’s a new arrival to the school and he’s getting beaten up by the bullies in the school.

**John:** Well that’s just terrible.

**Craig:** Yeah. And he’s really into this girl but she’s dating one of the bullies and what is he going to do. And one day when he’s getting beaten up the janitor pops out of the janitor closet, whoops everyone’s ass with Tae Bo, and then says I’ll teach you Tae Bo.

Well, you know, [laughs], you could say, “Well, oh my god, they’ve stolen Karate Kid.” No. They haven’t. And people don’t understand what is protectable and what isn’t. Ideas aren’t protectable. Tropes, character archetypes, these things are not protectable. And Karate Kid didn’t invent that stuff either anyway. It’s the specifics that are protectable. And, frankly, it’s the specifics that are the value. There’s a reason that the Billy Blanks Tae Bo movie wasn’t a big hit.

And there’s a reason that Karate Kid was, because Karate Kid is a better movie. It’s way better, you know.

**John:** Craig, that’s the most controversial stand you’ve taken today.

**Craig:** Thank you. [laughs] So, I just feel like people don’t even understand how this stuff works. Anyway, here’s an example. A couple of women are suing the folks who created New Girl, The New Girl, the sitcom.

**John:** Oh yeah. I remember seeing that lawsuit, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I read the complaint.

**John:** A girl moves in with three guys? That’s a revolutionary idea.

**Craig:** As if that’s something you can even own. But regardless of that, one of the examples that they cite of infringement is they have a character named Cece and in The New Girl there is a character whose initials are C.C. but doesn’t go by C.C. So, it’s like Catherine Cummings. And then they’re like, “Get? C.C. Get it?”

Well, that’s just delusional. Why would somebody who — think about it. The whole premise of a lawsuit is you intentionally stole my stuff. If I’m intentionally stealing your stuff why would I be encoding references to your stuff that are unnecessary to put in, to leave a breadcrumb trail back to my crime? It’s just bizarre.

**John:** So, what caused me anger about this and why I sort of want to address it with the Tom Cruise, but especially now with The New Girl, is that it creates this pall, this shadow over an original expression. So, Mission Impossible 3, fine, it’s a sequel that made a billion dollars. But the idea that Liz Meriwether copied somebody else’s script to create The New Girl is just absurd and I don’t want to say it’s like libelous, but it’s kind of libelous, honestly. Because I know Liz, I know what she did. That was incredibly difficult. She’s an established playwright. She did this thing that was great.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And for someone to say like, “Well, she clearly stole it from me,” it’s like, no. And I feel like the good sound evidence thing could come into pass which basically like let’s pull up all the pilots from the three years surrounding The New Girl that have guys and girls as roommates. And you’re going to see so many similarities in general because it’s guys and girls living in a house together.

**Craig:** How many metric tons of pilot scripts exist prior to whatever those women wrote and whatever Liz wrote where a woman was living with three guys, or a guy was living with three women?

It’s a sitcom. For the love of god, I mean, it’s like —

**John:** It’s Three’s Company.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s Three’s Company! [laughs] You know, it’s like come on! That’s not why people watch that show. People don’t watch that show because —

**John:** It’s execution.

**Craig:** Yes! Thank you. Nobody tunes in because, oh my god, they’re doing it again this week! She’s still living with three guys! Oh my god!

That has nothing to do with the value of the show. It’s so weird to me. That the initials are the same? Just none of that makes any sense to me at all. And, you’re right, it does cast a pall. And frankly it puts studios in this awful position of constantly, constantly having to waste attorney hours knocking away these Looney Tunes lawsuits. Even in The New Girl lawsuit they cite the fact that the studio offered them ten grand to go away.

**John:** Yeah. Because ultimately and frustratingly that’s what they do because I’ve been… — It would cost them more to try to fight it.

**Craig:** It would cost them so much more to try and fight it. When they offer you $10,000 what they’re saying is, “Oh my god, you will never win, because if you turn down our $10,000 we’re willing to spend $5 million because you’re that wrong.”

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Ugh, so annoying.

**John:** The other annoying thing I want to point out this week which I didn’t even spring on you because I didn’t know this even existed until a friend pointed this out and said that this is something that she was facing on a show that she was working on.

So, it’s a thing called Time Tailor. Have ever heard of Time Tailor?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So, it’s a TV thing that will horrify you. So, essentially what it is, it’s a service. And so if you are doing a one-hour drama or a half-hour show, after you’re done, you’re locked, color timed, everything is perfect, you think you’re ready to go to broadcast, the network takes that episode and they give it to this service called Time Tailor.

What Time Tailor does — I’m looking at their website which I’ll put a link to the show notes — “It reduces run times up to 10%, all without deleting scenes or alternating original content virtually undetectable to the viewer. Single pass repurposing makes a clean copy of your program with sophisticated digitizing to scan every single frame, then redundant fields are removed and adjacent fields are blended.”

So, essentially they’re snipping out scenes, or not scenes, they’re snipping out frames and blending frames to make everything tighter, basically to shrink it down so they can fit one extra 30 second spot into a show.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** Sometimes more than that.

**Craig:** Oh, you dicks. You know, I mean —

**John:** And the thing is, you don’t know this, but all the broadcast TV you’ve seen has had that for awhile. And a way that you could test for it is generally the iTunes version of it, if you downloaded that, it’s going to have a different runtime than what was actually broadcast on the air.

**Craig:** Time Tailor. So, in the old days when people would cut film on Moviolas, maybe I’d get this. You know, obviously the two technologies would not exist simultaneously. But now we have non-linear digital editing. We’re all capable of making the edits precisely to the frame we wish. And then you Time Tailor dicks come along.

Listen, man, what can I do? It’s like, this is the part of TV that I know everyone keeps telling me, “Oh, TV, TV…” And I’m like, yeah, yeah, but I have to say there’s some things in movies that I’m still happy I’m in movies.

**John:** So, my friend, I’m not saying, this isn’t like a basic cable kind of thing. She’s writing on a giant top-rated one-hour drama. So, she finished her cut with her director, editor, and then they’re like this going to happen. It’s going to go through this process and it’s going to be not what you turned in.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And that just would drive me crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. Umbrage.

**John:** Umbrage.

**Craig:** Umbrage.

**John:** Time for One Cool Things. Do you have one?

**Craig:** I do!

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** This one came from I think someone on Twitter and I love this. Do you like to cook, John?

**John:** I love to cook.

**Craig:** Okay. Then you’re going to enjoy this.

**John:** Is it an expensive gadget that I will only use once?

**Craig:** It is not, although I have those, like a nice French lemon zester. No. It’s called SuperCook.com.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** SuperCook.com. And what it is is a database site with lots of recipes, which there are many of, however this one is fun because what they offer you is the ability to just type in the ingredients you have. You type in everything you’ve got near you and they spit back a bunch of recipes that use nothing but those ingredients. Very clever.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s very clever. And their database is very extensive, so you can really get specific about what you’ve got.

**John:** Cool. That sounds fun.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is B.J. Novak’s book, brand new book, called One More Thing: Stories and Other Stores. So, B.J. Novak is a writer and performer from The Office. You also see him on The Mindy Project. He’s great and really, really funny.

**Craig:** Saving Mr. Banks.

**John:** Saving Mr. Banks.

**Craig:** Excellent in Saving Mr. Banks.

**John:** He is great in Saving Mr. Banks. Unlike most of these books where it’s essentially like an autobiography with some like lists thrown in and other stuff, it’s just short stories he wrote and they’re really good and really funny. And he’s a terrific writer, so I would highly recommend that.

**Craig:** I met him, I met B.J., at a Saving Mr. Banks event.

**John:** You went to the sing-along that I didn’t get invited to.

**Craig:** To the sing-along. Oh, you weren’t invited to it?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Well, you’ll be invited next time.

**John:** [laughs] For Saving Mr. Banks 2?

**Craig:** Uh-huh. Yeah. For Saving Mrs. Banks.

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** And he was a delight to talk to. And it’s funny, sometimes you meet writer-actors and you walk away and you think, “You’re an actor who does some writing.” Sometimes you meet them and you’re like, “No, no, no, you’re a writer who does some acting.” He’s a writer that does some acting. He’s a good actor, a very good actor, but he’s a writer. He’s got a writer’s soul.

It was very nice talking with him. He’s a very cool guy.

**John:** I’ll do one extra One Cool Thing. I tweeted about this. But he actually was on the Nerdist Podcast this last week, talking about him, about the writer, and actor/performer. They talk a lot about sort of the process of writing jokes versus writing comedy, writing characters. And it’s a great lesson in sort of how that all works. So, we’ll put that up as a little bonus One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** So, a few last bits of news. The Big Fish cast album is out. So, you can download the songs. It’s on iTunes right now. I think by the time this podcast is up the physical CDs will be shipping.

**Craig:** [sings] “Time stops, suddenly I’m….” Am I going to have to pay for this? [hums]

**John:** Yes. Andrew Lippa will get some royalties on that and that will be good.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just from that little snippet.

**John:** That’s good. I think both the CD and the iTunes are excellent. So, the CD gives you a really good booklet, which I had to sort of copy edit a lot, but it’s nice and has pictures and lyrics and all that lovely stuff. So the physical copy is good.

The iTunes version, you get some bonus tracks. You get an extra bonus track of Magic and the Man, This River Between Us, so it’s hard to say. I would really recommend you buy both.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** But anyway that’s out there so we’ll have links to both of those two things in the show notes.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** We also have a few last t-shirts. We don’t have all sizes — for Scriptnotes t-shirts I should say. But if you go to store.johnaugust.com we have a few last Scriptnotes t-shirts, the black ones, in various sizes. So, if you are still waiting on a Scriptnotes t-shirt you are maybe in luck if you’re just the right size.

**Craig:** And what size is that?

**John:** I don’t know. But if you go there it’ll show you what sizes are left.

**Craig:** You just have XXS and XXXL.

**John:** Yeah, we have the extra-large small shirts is really all we have left.

**Craig:** Extra-large small shirts. [laughs] I love that. Are you extra-large small?

**John:** Indeed.

Standard boilerplate stuff here. If you would like to write to me or Craig something short, Twitter is your friend. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. There is a question that somebody wrote in that we didn’t even get to this week, but we’ll get to it next week. So, that’s the place to send those longer questions.

If you are on iTunes buying the Big Fish cast album you could also go over to the Scriptnotes podcast page there and leave us a note because that’s lovely. You can subscribe to our show as well if you’re not subscribed to us right now.

In iTunes you can also find the iOS app that we have for Scriptnotes which lets you download all the back catalog. We have now 129 previous episodes. You can download those old ones and get all the show notes and stuff for them there.

Show notes for this episode and most episodes are at johnaugust.com/podcast. [motorcycle in background]

**Craig:** Motorcycle show up at the very end there.

**John:** That was very good, that motorcycle. Keeping it real.

**Craig:** Keeping it real, yo.

**John:** Craig, thank you again for a nice podcast. It was nice to be back in a normal situation.

**Craig:** Whoa. I want to know what happened in that gap. There was like a really cool gap where I feel like you just went away.

**John:** Did I disappear?

**Craig:** Yeah, you went into a fugue state and then you came back. I love it when you do stuff like that.

**John:** [pause] Like that?

**Craig:** Yeah. That was it. Oh my god. That was great.

**John:** I do it. I have these little silences. I think it might be a small stroke, but it’s all okay.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s an extra-large small stroke.

**John:** Craig, if I see you next week then I see you next week. If not, it’s been a pleasure.

**Craig:** [laughs] I can’t wait to do this alone.

**John:** [laughs] What if it’s always been alone. The whole time through it’s all been a monologue?

**Craig:** Yeah. I believe it.

**John:** All right. Thanks Craig. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Slate](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html) on why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period
* John’s [2005 blog post](http://johnaugust.com/2005/fixing-double-spaces-after-periods) on fixing double-spaces after periods
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 65](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-next-117-pages), in which John and Craig discuss their period-space preferences
* [Courier Prime](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 129: The One with the Guys from Final Draft](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-one-with-the-guys-from-final-draft)
* Kent Tessman’s [Notes on Scriptnotes](http://www.kenttessman.com/2014/02/notes-on-scriptnotes/) blog post
* [How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/quarkxpress-the-demise-of-a-design-desk-darling/)
* Heather Havrilesky’s [Ask Polly: I Moved To A New City To Be With An Emotional Vampire](http://www.theawl.com/2014/01/ask-polly-i-moved-to-a-new-city-to-be-with-an-emotional-vampire) on The Awl
* The AV Club on [Tom Cruise being sued for one billion dollars](http://www.avclub.com/article/tom-cruise-is-being-sued-for-allegedly-stealing-th-107570)
* THR on [The New Girl lawsuit](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/fox-wme-peter-chernin-sued-671788)
* [Time Tailor](http://www.visualdatainc.com/time_tailor.htm)
* [SuperCook.com](http://supercook.com/) tells you recipes to cook with what you have on hand
* [One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0385351836/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by B. J. Novak
* B.J. on the [Nerdist Podcast](https://www.nerdist.com/2014/02/nerdist-podcast-b-j-novak/)
* The Big Fish cast album on [iTunes](https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/big-fish-original-broadway/id816289324?ign-mpt=uo%3D2) and [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H3UKZ6E/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* We have a few shirts left in [The John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Matthew Chilelli