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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/positive-moviegoing).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 119, the Positive Moviegoing episode of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

And we are so lucky because we have our very first guest, the sort of guest who set the template for a guest on Scriptnotes would be like. Aline Brosh McKenna is here in the studio.

**Craig:** Woo!

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** Woot-woot-woot!

**John:** How are you, Aline?

**Aline:** I’m doing well. I’m doing very well. I’m happy to be here.

**John:** Now it’s almost Thanksgiving. Do you have big Thanksgiving plans for you and your family?

**Aline:** We don’t. I don’t cook. We go out to dinner.

**John:** How very nice.

**Aline:** It’s great. I really love it.

**Craig:** [Long Island accent] “I don’t cook.”

**Aline:** No, it’s too much for me to do.

**Craig:** “We go out to dinner.” Where can you even go?

**Aline:** [Long Island accent] You got to set up the order.

**Craig:** Where do you?

**Aline:** We go to a lovely place in the mountains near Malibu where they cook game and you eat game.

**Craig:** Oh, you don’t do the normal Jewish thing of just Chinese food? [laughs]

**John:** I thought that was only Christmas?

**Aline:** No, that’s Christmas. Christmas is Chinese food and a movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** What are you doing, Craig?

**Craig:** We have some friends coming over and another lovely half-Jewish, half-super not Jewish family in La Cañada. And we are going to have an excellent Thanksgiving. We’re going to be making all of our own food. I’m cooking multiple desserts and side dishes. And the, actually, you should know this guy, John. I mean, you don’t know him, but you should meet him. He’s great. His name is Josh and he does lighting design for operas and musical theater. He’s worked down at La Jolla and up at Santa Barbara Opera House and Minnesota. And he’s a cool guy.

So, anyway, we’re having a combined Thanksgiving and —

**Aline:** I love that Craig, who lost a titanic amount of weight, is the expert pie and cake maker.

**Craig:** Ain’t that the way it goes?

**John:** I, too, am having a bunch of people over for Thanksgiving. I’ll be making pies. I’ll be making the turkey. It’s the one day a year that I sort of go back to the full Martha Stewart mode. My former assistant Dana Fox and I, she and I every day would watch Martha Stewart Living, back when it was the filmed show, not that horrible live before an audience thing. Back when it was the true Martha Stewart. We would watch it. And that’s the day that my inner Martha Stewart comes out and I cook hard.

**Craig:** Mmm. I know. I love cooking hard. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Today, on the podcast, we are going to be talking about a lot of topics. Aline brought two. I brought one. Craig brought one. But first we have to talk about the Live holiday show. We are recording this on the Wednesday that the tickets went on sale and I think we’re kind of sold out. We’re not fully sold out, but a lot of people are coming, which is great.

The live show is December 19. It is at the LA Film School. It is a benefit for the Writers Guild Foundation. There’s a few tickets that have been held back. So there’s a chance that even if we are completely sold out on paper we will be releasing some more tickets. So, do follow us on Twitter and we may announce that there’s still some more tickets left.

But out lineup for the show is incredible, including Aline Brosh McKenna.

**Craig:** McKenna!

**John:** Derek Haas.

**Craig:** Haas!

**John:** Kelly Marcel.

**Craig:** Marcel!

**John:** Richard Kelly.

**Craig:** Richard Kelly!

**John:** Rawson Thurber.

**Craig:** Thurber!

**John:** Franklin Leonard and Lindsay Doran.

**Craig:** Leonard and Doran! Leonard and Doran, I think, was a great boxing match. Wasn’t that — ?

**John:** Yes, it’s a classic —

**Craig:** Was it Doran? Well, it was Durán, but anyway, I’d like to see the two of them fight. Money is on Doran.

**John:** I think the fight is going to be epic. So, that will be a fun show.

But, today on the show we’re going to talk about four topics. Aline suggested we talk about outline failure and why it’s important to befriend other writers.

I want to talk about this article about going broke in your 50s.

**Aline:** Oh, you sent it to me. I should have read it. I didn’t read it. You’ll tell me what it is.

**Craig:** We’ll summarize.

**John:** We’ll fill you in on the details.

**Craig:** “I don’t cook. I don’t read.”

**Aline:** [Long Island accent] I order. I order.

**Craig:** “I order.”

**John:** And Craig wanted to talk about positive moviegoing, which I’m not even sure what it means, so Craig start us out. What is positive moviegoing?

**Craig:** Well, it’s this thing I’ve been thinking about lately because this is the time of year when all the so-called “good” movies come out. And a lot of them are actually good movies. But I noticed that there’s — I think it’s just we live in a time of snarkiness and suspicion and nobody seems to want to like anything. People a lot of times go into theaters with their arms crossed, especially in Los Angeles. We’re all in the business. And I think people go to movies and they’re already — they’re demanding to hate them. And they’re prejudging them. And you could do it for — you name any movie and I could just sort of come up with some pretext for hating it.

And so what I really have been trying to do is when I go to movie to go wanting to love it. And accepting everything about it for at least 20 minutes. So, I don’t care what happens in the first twenty minutes. I am on board. I will accept it and I will attempt to enjoy it as best I can. I will give myself to the movie.

And then at some point, okay, you know, listen, sometimes you just don’t like movies. Sometimes they disappoint. Sometimes they anger you because you hate them so much. And that’s okay. I’m not denying that that can happen. But I’ve really been trying to just give myself over to movies.

So, I went and I saw The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. And I went in, just gave myself to the movie. And I loved it. And I think I would have loved it anyway, but I think it helped that I wasn’t judging. I just decided nobody else goes to movies to judge. Why do we go to movies to judge? Can’t we just enjoy them?

Anyway, that’s my thing, positive moviegoing.

**John:** So, what you’re describing is almost like — I can picture the body language of it. It’s like you’re sitting down in your seat. You’re not crossing your arms in front of you saying like, “Okay, impress me.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You’re saying, “I’m here. I’m eager to be entertained. I will follow you wherever you go. And take me on a journey.” That’s the message you’re trying to send to this movie.

**Craig:** That’s right. Sort of like meeting somebody at a party and they start to tell you a story. You’re standing there. So be nice. Listen to it. Give it a shot, you know. I just get so depressed when I see people ripping movies apart before they even see them.

**Aline:** Yeah, I agree. I think it’s easy to hate things and to bag on things. I think it’s just, it makes people feel fashionable and intellectual. And it’s harder — it takes more effort to go out there and say, “You know what? Even if it wasn’t perfect, even if things aren’t prefect, sometimes things that you love are the imperfect perfect thing.” But going in there with an attitude of like, “I’m going to enjoy this. I paid my money to enjoy this, not to find something that I can sit down with my friends later and pick to shreds?’

**Craig:** Yeah. And it will happen that we will encounter movies that infuriate us. And we will pick them to shreds. And we will pick them to shreds. And if you’ve earned that experience, so you’ve earned it. But there is something to be said for letting yourself be entertained and not attempt to make yourself feel better by pushing a movie away.

And frankly even the feeling that, okay, it’s not perfect. Yeah! [laughs] How often does that happen? You know?

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, movies win Oscars and people go, “Oh my god, that piece of crap won an Oscar.” Perfection is irrelevant, you know.

I almost think, okay, mistakes aren’t really mistakes. It’s just, you know, no more than I got from here to there on a road and it was a really enjoyable journey and there was a pothole. It’s just part of it.

**Aline:** And I also think it’s very Christmas-y.

**John:** It’s very Christmas-y.

Now, on some level are we talking about expectation? Because I find that a lot of times the movies that I enjoy most were the ones where my expectations were not set too high going into them. And that’s why I love to see a movie during its opening weekend before everyone has sort of told me what I’m supposed to think and feel about it.

Because when I come into a theater with a set of expectations, nothing can surprise me. And I’m sort of preconditioned to think this is how I’m supposed to feel about this particular entertainment.

**Aline:** Yeah. I miss the days of just going to see a movie and knowing nothing about it.

**Craig:** Right!

**Aline:** My parents would drive us to the Paramus Park, we used to call it the Millionplex. It had 14 theaters. And they would just drop us off there and we would see the 7:30, whatever it was, and just be happy. That’s how I saw Pee-wee’s Big Adventure which, you know, pleasantly surprised us. We laughed. Fell out of our chairs laughing.

We also saw Yor, The Hunter From the Future that way.

**Craig:** Yeah. Good one.

**Aline:** And just you don’t have that surprise anymore. You’ve been so inundated with media before you go to see a movie now, that I miss the days of just thinking like, “I just want to see a movie. Let’s see what’s out there.” I miss that.

**John:** Yeah, I remember seeing 9 to 5 that way. So, I was a kid dropped off at the theater and the theater we were supposed to go to — they dropped us off at the wrong movie, essentially. So, we saw 9 to 5. I was far too young to see 9 to 5, which is the best way to see 9 to 5, because they’re smoking pot, and having sex, and all these things.

**Aline:** Stringing people up.

**John:** I also remember in college going to see, we ended up seeing The Handmaid’s Tale because the other movie we wanted to see was completely sold out. We had no idea what the movie was. And that’s so incredibly rewarding when you sit in, the only information you have is what the filmmakers are giving you frame-by-frame as the story unfolds.

You had that experience of positive moviegoing because you weren’t preconceived with what we were supposed to feel. There was no expectation about what to —

**Aline:** And you haven’t checked a review aggregator that’s giving you 60 opinions before you even set foot there.

**Craig:** Yeah, or your Twitter feed, or comedians teeing up. Or whatever, anything. Or even articles that are insisting that it’s the most important thing of all time.

It’s funny. 9 to 5 was the first movie I think I saw, I was dropped off to see on my own. I remember it was like a weird triple date, like a weird triple fifth-grade date. What were our parents thinking? But, you know, I really make an effort now when I sit in the movie theater before the movie starts to blank my mind completely. I just say, go ahead movie, ride all over me and let’s see where this goes.

**John:** Some of my favorite experiences are actually like when you see the three trailers, or the four trailers, and then like the real movie starts and you’ve forgotten what the movie was that you’re supposed to — you have to check the ticket to see what movie is this. Oh right, it’s the Muppets! But it is very exciting.

Now, let’s talk for a second as filmmakers, as screenwriters, is there anything we can do in those opening pages or in the opening minutes of a movie to get people in the positive moviegoing experience. What is that like from our side as writers to hopefully foster that good spirit?

**Craig:** Well, I do have one thing that lately I’ve been tending to do, and that is write a credit sequence. It became out of fashion. All movies — well, originally movies used to have these opening credit sequences that includes even the credits that we now call end credits, you know, where there are logos and rosters of people. But then the standard opening credit sequences, that became out of fashion. And for a long time all the credits went in the back of the movie. So, you just started the movie.

I really like credit sequences. I like opening credit sequences. The opening credits for Mitty are beautiful. And I think that that helps kind of get everybody situated and in the mood. So, I’ve been doing that lately.

**John:** I will also write credit sequences in movies where I feel it’s appropriate. More than anything I try to make sure that the reader and therefore the viewer feels confident. Like, trust me, this is going to be a ride that you will enjoy taking with me. You’re going to feel rewarded and smart on this journey. We know what we’re doing. Everything is going to be okay.

And I mean that shows up in sort of your word selection on those first pages, but also just making sure no one is confused in a bad way in those first pages. Making sure that there is — if it’s a funny movie, you need to have something funny happen really quickly, so everyone sort of gets what the world of your movie is.

**Aline:** My husband has a thing where we’ll go to see a movie, and sometimes movies take forever just to get going, and he’ll turn to me at some point and say, “When does the movie start,” 20 minutes into the movie. Because sometimes it just seems like, especially because we do know what movies we’re going to see, it does seem like if you’re taking 15 minutes to get us acquainted with what we’ve seen on the poster, that makes me a little itchy.

And I think our attention span for that has probably changed a bunch, too. But I think it’s great to see if you can get to the heart of the matter so the audience knows what movie they are seeing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I think that’s a great segue to a talk that you proposed, which is outline failure, because what we’re really talking is the structure of the story and when things are happening. And structure is really when stuff happens. So, talk to me about outline failure and what you mean by outlines failing.

**Aline:** Well, you guys I know have talked about outlining a lot on the show, and it’s always very interesting, and it’s something that people will always ask on panels and such is about outlining. And I think we all outline in different ways. But I think — I don’t really know any writers who don’t outline at all, or few.

And some outline after the fact. Some write a draft and then outline. But what I think is interesting is I do do outlines. I try not to do written outlines, submit written outlines, because I find that people get bogged down in the details of a written outline. But I do spoken — I will pitch an outline and I will pitch an outline to everybody. And before I start writing I tend to try and pitch an outline to as many people as I can, the producer, the studio, anybody who will listen to the outline so that I can tell it like I’m telling a story.

And often when you’re telling it you realize, oh, that’s not good, or that’s boring, or this patch needs to go here or there, or that doesn’t make sense.

But what never ceases to amaze me is, you know, it’s one of those phenomena when you’re writing which is you want to try and break it down into math. And you want to break it down into cards. And we all want to feel like we have control over it. And it never ceases to amaze me that you’ll outline something, you’ll go see six people and pitch to them, you’ll put it on cards, you’ll sit down and start writing, and it’s usually page 65 is where it happens, where you start looking at your outline and you’re thinking, “This is crazy. Like why did everyone let me do this? Why didn’t everyone know that this is riddled with flaws and the character has just changed on a dime for no reason.”

I’ve always contended that 70 to 90 are the rocky shoals, the rapids, where your movie either comes together and moves out into the next plane, or you start to realize that you’ve got some inherent flaws. But what is really fascinating is you can’t really tell until you write it. And as long as I’ve been doing this, I have found some outlines I’m going through, congratulating myself, and just thinking, “Wow, I really planned this out.” And some I’m thinking like, “Oh, I don’t know.”

But, at some point you always get to a point of thinking like, “Who are these people who I work with who allowed me to think that these were good ideas?” You actually get angry. And I don’t really know, I don’t know what the cure for this is besides writing through there. And I think it’s funny, because I just moved, and it’s kind of a similar process. You think, you know, we’re going to put the couch there. We’re going to put this ottoman here, we’re going to put this here. And then you show up and you put it there and you’re like, “This is hideous. This is ten times too large. Why did anyone think this was going to fit here?”

And I guess it just shows planning is — it’s just plans. And so you really do feel like you go into a war, you top off your canteen, you take as many weapons as you can, and then you get there and the enemy has gone on the run and gone into the bush. They had flying robots you didn’t know about. And all of a sudden you have to change your game plan. That’s one of those things that kind of separates the way I write now from the way I did in the beginning which was in the beginning I would really get very disheartened and think, “Why has this happened? What is the critical flaw in my process?”

And now I just accept, you know, okay, we’re experiencing some problem with the hydraulics in the outline. And need to make adjustments on the fly. And sometimes that process of trying to figure out why your outline has crumbled beneath you, often those are the critical — that’s the critical passage where you find out what your movie is really about, because 70 to 90 is where you’re sort of on the upslope to figuring out what problem is this person really solving. What problem is this character really solving? And you may have the wrong problem. And you may have the wrong thematic. And sort of that’s where you figure it out.

So, I’ve learned somewhat to try not to beat myself up about it, but for those out there who are staring out their outline, ripping their hair out, it happens.

**John:** I’m outlining something right now, and I do find that as I go through previous episodes of trying to outline these movies I will have so many beats figured out so precisely in that sort of first half of the movie, and then there’s a stage in which I’m just sort of like waving my hands and saying, “And then we get to this last thing.” And it’s that hand-waving section that you’re like, there’s really no connective tissue that’s getting me from that point to that point. And if characters are having to make these big jump transitions that don’t really make sense — you find characters who are doing things because I need them to do that, not because it’s the natural thing for them to do.

**Aline:** That’s a really good point. And I think Craig has talked about this, too. When you pitch a movie, let’s say you pitch for 15 minutes, you probably spend nine minutes on the first 35 pages. And one of the other rookie mistakes I would make is you end up, the first part of your script is like a finely scrimshawed piece of bone that you have added all these details to. And then when you get to 50 it’s like, “Yeah, and then some stuff happens, and then some other stuff happens.” And that’s endemic to the storytelling most of the time is spent on the setup.

**Craig:** Well, this is why I outline actually. I don’t outline for the beginning of the movie, or the first half of the movie, because you’re right — I think we have an innate sense of the world we want to build and the person we want to put in it. And what the problem is. And that big wrecking ball that comes through the wall that changes everything.

I outline specifically to avoid the hand-waving section. Really, I will spend most of my outlining energy on page 60 to page 90 because I won’t start if I don’t know how the movie ends. I can’t start if I don’t know how the movie begins. But, that are right in there, that’s where you’re absolutely right, Aline. That is where all the gunk, the sub-textual character gunk starts to burble out. And the character as we understood them is breaking down dramatically and violently and then being put back together again by themselves.

It’s a scary area in every movie. And if you do it well it’s the best part of every movie. So, that’s why I outline.

Now, that said, of course — you know, we write a screenplay and then somebody has to go make it a movie. Well, that experience of turning a screenplay into a movie is a bit like the experience of turning an outline into a screenplay. And somewhere along the way the experience of doing it starts to change how you feel about it and what you understand about it. You have to remain flexible. And you can’t afford to let your outline become your boss.

The fact that other people don’t see these pitfalls and can’t warn you about them is not shocking is it? I mean, if you didn’t see it, what were the odds they were going to see it?

**Aline:** So, let me ask you a question — oh, sorry.

**John:** What Aline describes though in that process of pitching things, that is the natural way you pitch things. And you pitch very much like the setups of everything, and then you sort of rush through the other things. And that’s just the natural way you pitch things. So, that’s what you’ve been doing as you’ve been describing these projects to people is that stuff. And it’s natural to sort of rush over to the other things. But the mistake we often make for ourselves is not realizing like, “Oh, you know, I did rush over all those things. I really haven’t figured out what some of those moments are.”

And so while there’s technically an outline for what those beats are that happen here, they’re not nearly as fleshed out and nearly as focused as the rest of it is.

Also, I think what you said at the start that’s really key is that sometimes the only way to know how to write something is to write something is to write it. And it’s like you’re trying to write the screenplay before you’ve written it, and it can only be a rough approximation of the journey you’re going to take. It’s like you have this map that’s showing you how to get from point A to point B, but you really don’t know where all the mountains and all the hills are and where the rivers are that you’re going to have to get yourself around.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So, you have to allow yourself the luxury of saying, “This is not what I thought it was. Given where I am at, what is the most interesting way to get to the places that I need to get to next?”

**Craig:** Yeah. And, you know, to me an outline is really good for a couple of things. It helps you organize your work, which matters, because you’re not going to get done otherwise. And the other thing that it does is keep you from being absurdly self-indulgent. We all have a tendency to be absurdly self-indulgent. We’ll just wander on. And when people say, “Well, I don’t really write my scripts. My characters write them for me.” Shut up! You write them. Don’t blame it on your characters when you’ve just spent 40 pages blithering.

That’s you blithering. And outlines help keep us —

**Aline:** Well, one thing, sorry.

**Craig:** Go ahead.

**Aline:** You guys don’t interrupt each other. I’ve noticed that.

**John:** We’ve gotten much better about being able to do that not interrupting thing. But, no, go.

**Aline:** Now you have two-thirds Jew, so.

**Craig:** So much Jew. We’re at peak Jew.

**Aline:** One thing that I’ve learned to do to avoid the scrimshaw, the first act scrimshaw, and I know Craig doesn’t do this, but after I have the outline I will write the whole script very quickly. And I will write like an 85, 90-page draft as quickly as I humanly can, to test. And what I’ll do is hop into scenes and I’ll see how I feel hopping into those scenes. And that’s the best way for me to test the outline is to hop into scenes and think, “Oh, there’s nothing happening here. No one is speaking in here. Oh, I’ve walked into a room and everyone is silent.”

So, I go really fast and I test the whole outline by building a very kind of provisional popsicle version of the script. And then I go back and I add my sheet rock and my paint and my ottomans. I do it that way. I build it in layers. And I know some people don’t do that. Some people build it good all the way through. But for me, to test the outline, I have to get all the way through the story.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve always wanted to do what James Cameron would do with the scriptments, which essentially is a very long outline that’s basically all the scenes but without the dialogue. I’ve always wanted to be able to be the person who did that. But the dialogue is by far the most fun thing to write, so therefore I always want to write that. I feel like I don’t really know the characters until I hear them talking to each other.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**Aline:** I don’t know if the story is going to work until I know if the characters will talk. And that’s what I think, for me, is the difference between an outline and a screenplay. You know, you think this is going to be a good scene, and then you get into the scene and you realize, like this has happened to me where I had an outline where there were two characters who were in opposition to each other for a good amount of the story. And that stuff was easy to write because they had a lot of conflict and countervailing points of view. And then there got to a point where I had them align their interest, and man, every time that happened that was like stabbing the inflatable.

I would just get to those scenes where they were supposed to both be pursuing something, and you know, the air, you just audibly hear the air go out of the movie because these characters didn’t have any interpersonal conflict. So, I ended up reconfiguring the outlines so that their interest continued to be at odds until 105 or something, so that I would maintain that conflict. But in the outline phase it seemed like, “Why not? They team up, they become a team here. That makes sense.” And I really didn’t know until I got into those scenes and they could not speak to each other. They had nothing to say. They were saying like, “This looks good. Yeah. This looks good.”

**Craig:** That sounds like great work.

**Aline:** Great scene.

**John:** There’s nothing less dramatic than agreement.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Just like, “Sure. That’s great.” They might as well be sitting back, reading the paper together.

**Aline:** “We should get the bad guy.”

**Craig:** “We should. Let’s do it.”

**Aline:** “Good. Let’s do it.” [laughs]

**Craig:** “Let’s do it. You want lunch?” Yeah, I want lunch” “Let’s have lunch first and then we’ll do…”

By the way, I do these —

**Aline:** “Pizza?”

**Craig:** I am the scriptment guy. I write scriptments. Because I love writing dialogue, so again, I feel like if I know exactly what the circumstance is, and I feel comfortable in it, then I get to have the fun of writing dialogue towards something that I think is correct. You know —

**Aline:** That’s the other great thing when you’re writing comedy, about comedy, is the test of your outline is whether people start saying funny things. If they’re not saying funny things, something is wrong with your scene.

**Craig:** Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong!

**Aline:** Mm-hmm!

**Craig:** Flying robots. I’ve been counting all of your metaphors. We’ve got furniture, flying robots, hydraulics.

**John:** Scrimshaw.

**Craig:** Scrimshaw.

**Aline:** That’s a big one.

**Craig:** Bone. Layers of construction.

**Aline:** Inflatable.

**Craig:** Inflatable. But my favorite is flying robot.

**John:** So, this project I’m working on right now, because I’m working on a spec, and Aline, you just finished a spec. I’m actually at the stage where I’ve written some scenes and I’ve paused for a second because I’ve realized like, oh no, there’s going to be trouble ahead.

Where I fundamentally — I have some mission creep happening, where the story was getting bigger than it should sort of — than it wants to get. When Richard Kelly was on the show last week, he talked about that with his movies, Donnie Darko, and you could definitely see mission creep happening in those things.

I’m trying to make something lean and it just keeps getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger. So, I’m trying to sort of whittle back at the outline stage right now.

So, for the thing that you wrote for a spec, did you pitch to a bunch of people first and describe it, or was this an entirely internally-generated process? Did you outline on paper first?

**Aline:** Well, what I’ve done is I’ve written something that I want to direct. And it’s pretty specific to me. And so it was something that I mulled for a really long time. And there was a lot of freedom in not, you know, because I don’t often write just for myself. So, there was a lot of freedom in not having to be accountable to — making the process whatever I wanted the process to be.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Aline:** So, I probably outlined it a little bit more loosely. But I did find a producer to work with after I had sort of an idea of what it was and what the basic structure was. Because I worked with a director once who said, we were having a meeting and he said, “You know, I think with my mouth open,” meaning he knows what he thinks as he’s saying it. And I’m very much like that. And so for me I needed and I like to have collaborators that I can talk to.

So, I found a producer who would work with me on spec, because I need to do that process of telling a story. But that said, it was really great to be able to just make adjustments, attack, and move however I wanted to without feeling like I was accountable to — as accountable to an outline. It’s good.

**John:** Let’s segue to our next topic, which you brought up also, which is why it’s important to be friends with writers. Because my recollection, and my early days in Hollywood, I was friends with a bunch of people who were starting out in Hollywood but they weren’t necessarily writers. I went through a graduate film program, so everyone was trying to become a producer, a film executive. Some people became writers, but I didn’t necessarily seek out other writers. What is your history going —

**Aline:** Well, I feel really strongly about that. I mean, and I think that people sometimes misunderstand what the idea is. The idea is not to be friends with writers who are going to network for you, or who are cool, or who are writing, or who are employed. That’s not really the critical thing. The critical thing is to have friends who do what you do and are engaged in the same kind of work that you are.

And I have, you know, a couple of my writer friends are from the very, very, very beginning of our career before we had any success or barely any work, and we don’t have work places in the way that, you know, my husband works at a mutual fund. He has a workplace. He has coworkers. We just, we don’t have that. Even when we do for a specific project, they’re just for that specific project.

My ongoing workplace, my Cheers, my group of people that I check in with are my other writer friends that I talk to on the phone periodically, or have lunch with. And we’re kind of —

**John:** Aline, you talk on the phone?

**Aline:** I talk on the phone.

**Craig:** Who talks on the phone?

**Aline:** I do.

**John:** Wow.

**Aline:** And so we can check in on what we’re doing and say, “Hey, I was working on that. What do you think of this? Is this a good idea? What do you think of this person?” That network is invaluable. And you will grow with these people.

So, it’s less important to seek out people who you think are going to connect you with a job and more important to seek out people whose process you find productive. And Gatins refers to it as lab partners, you know, finding a lab partner who does their homework and has a neat notebook is important. And then —

**John:** I don’t think Gatins has a neat notebook. I think Gatins’ notebook is one of those folders that he’s like sort of half colored in as he fell asleep.

**Aline:** But it’s so —

**Craig:** Gatins’ notebook is like — it’s like a folder that you open up and it looks like it’s full of stuff, and you open it up and there’s nothing in there.

**Aline:** But it’s brilliant. It’s so brilliant.

**Craig:** It’s all in his head.

**Aline:** And it’s like a workbook where he didn’t do any of the math, but around the margins are those amazing drawings and thoughts. He’s a good example. He’s a great lab partner.

And also something another friend of mine said, which is easier said than done, we were talking about having your friends read stuff. And I said, “Who do you go to for that?” And he said, “It’s very simple. Send it to someone who roots for you.”

**Craig:** Perfect. He’s exactly right.

**Aline:** And I don’t know. It was like something I hadn’t really thought of in quite that way, because I think we all have friends that we love, but maybe we have other friends who we think root a little harder.

**Craig:** You mean to say, “Maybe some of them are rooting against us.” That’s what you mean to say. Which I think is real, by the way.

Listen, it’s human. It bums me out, but I sometimes sense it. Same thing about the positive moviegoing, you know.

**Aline:** I have the opposite of that which is I really like everyone around me to be really successful because I think it makes me look better.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly.

**Aline:** And it gives me more names to drop. But, sometimes it’s even on a specific project. Sometimes you can have a friend who is really supportive but they don’t like an idea that you have. Like I remember when I was — there was a friend that I had that I pitched him a few things I was working on, and one of them he just thought was a terrible idea. And so that’s not somebody who I would ever go to and say, “Do you want to read this?”

So, it’s just find somebody who really wants to see you do well, or find someone who really roots for that specific project, because that’s positive moviegoing. You want to share your work and share your career with people who are going in with the best possible intentions.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Aline:** And we generate enough of our own schadenfreude towards ourselves in this process. You don’t really need it from other people. But finding people who can be your — and I have lots of friends who are producers, and executives, and agents, but your writer friends — and actors too — but your writer friends understand your struggles and your travails and they can really be there for you. And, you know, I think if you look around you can find people to kind of link arms with. And you will all come up together.

**John:** My friend, Andrew Lippa, who did the music for Big Fish, he has this group of composers, lyricist and composers, and they get together once a month and they have to show the work that they’ve been working on. So, as a group they have to perform the thing and like they talk about it, which just seems amazing. And there are obviously screenwriter groups that can do the same kind of thing, but it’s different to show your written pages versus actually performing something. And there’s a trust element that kicks in.

You were talking about you might have directors, or producers, or other people who can read your stuff, agents, but all of them have some vested interest in maybe how they’re going to associate with this project. The great thing about another writer is the writer is just the writer. Like they’re not trying to take your project. They’re not trying to do anything.

While there’s still sometimes that, it’s not even schadenfreude, but that realization of there’s only so many musical chairs and that sometimes you’re competing for the same spots, in general we can be very supportive of each other because we’re not trying to do the same thing. We’re all working on our own projects.

**Aline:** Yeah, and it’s interesting, because I know you guys have talked about this too, but the three of us all met at different phases in our careers and —

**John:** We should talk about how you and I met, because that’s a strange version of how you and I met. So, let me try my recollection of it, because I’m really kind of curious to hear your version of it.

So, Aline and I met on the phone because I was coming in to rewrite a project that she had written as a spec, correct?

**Aline:** No, I wrote it on assignment for New Line. And then John rewrote it and he cold called me and said, “I want to make sure it’s okay with you that I’m rewriting this.” And I said, sure. And then John did a draft of it, never to be heard from again that thing.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** John, you killed her movie.

**Aline:** [laughs]

**John:** I probably killed her movie. So, the backstory —

**Aline:** But that was definitely, John was like, you know, they were bringing in the big guns and I got pushed down the stairs. And John was the first person — I think might have been the first person ever to call me and do the gracious thing.

And I remember, I was outside on my deck and I remember he said, “Is it okay with you if I do this?”

**John:** And I remember you also saying like, “Well, somebody is going to do it, and I’d rather you do it than somebody else,” which is honestly the reality of most of the situations. The answer is not going to that they’re going to go back to you, the original writer.

**Aline:** Right.

**John:** If they’re looking for another writer, they’re going to hire another writer, so you want the writer who actually has the ability to make the movie be good and not ruin the movie.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** So, those are the situations you want to have. That was a strange project because the reason why I was able to get a hold of you is because we both had John Gatins as a friend. And so I called Gatins to get your number and said like, “Is it going to be cool if I call?”

**Aline:** Oh, that’s nice.

**John:** And so it was this movie that you wrote that I really liked. It was just a really good idea. And suddenly Dustin Hoffman was attached, and so I went to this lunch — this crazy lunch — with Dustin Hoffman. And suddenly like, well, this is a movie, and then it just…disappeared.

**Aline:** Yeah, it got complicated in that way. Those things do. But, we — you meet at different. Wait, so we already knew each other, and I knew Craig already when the strike happened. But the strike was really the thing where writers really connected in a different way. And I think it was sort of the convergence of the strike plus the internet. And all of a sudden people really got to know each other in a way that I had not experienced previously in my career where, you know, people really know each other now in a different way than they ever had before.

And I really think it’s for the good. And I always find it funny when you’re talking to an agent, or an executive, or a producer and you say, “Oh yeah, I talked to so-and-so about that project. Oh, yeah, she did a draft on that. So-and-so is directing it.” And they’re like, “How do you know that?” And it’s because, I think, we know each other more now than we did.

**Craig:** We know more than they know sometimes. We know so much more than they think we know. We talk to each other… — You know, I have a lot of writer friends. I like writers and it’s been a wonderful thing for me for the last, I don’t know, six or seven years to get this coterie of writers around me that I admire and that I trust and that I can learn from.

And we share and talk about everything. And I think we do so in a way that is informed by our experience of being safe with each other. That over time we haven’t screwed each other over. That the narrative that we just kind of feed off of each other and compete with each other and undercut each other is essentially bullshit. And that, in fact, we are supportive of each other because the pain that we feel is the most salient thing about the job we do.

So, when we see somebody else feeling it, naturally we just want to help them. I have found — there have been a couple people here and there, but for the most part I have found screenwriters to be incredibly generous and incredibly empathetic, and sweet and encouraging, to me at least.

**Aline:** I’ll tell you a good story. I had, on this spec that I was working on, I wanted to give it to somebody who didn’t know me and didn’t know the situation and didn’t know anything about it that I could give to, who I really respected. So, I gave it to a writer who I really, really respect but don’t know super well. I mean, I maybe hung out with him a dozen, no, half a dozen times. And I sent him the script and then I didn’t hear from him for awhile which is always the thing where you’re like, “Oh god, he hates it and he can’t figure out how to tell me.”

And then I get an email from him that says, “Look, my dad was sick, he was in the hospital. And so I’m just about to read the script.” And I was like, oh no. And then a couple days go by and I get a set of notes, seven pages of notes —

**John:** Wow.

**Aline:** That are the most amazing thoughtful, heartfelt —

**Craig:** You’re welcome. You’re welcome.

**Aline:** [laughs] Well thought out. Just, you know, including like, “Page 26, you could be doing this. Page 43, you could be doing this.” And written in this way that was like, you know, sometimes you get notes from people and it’s like they’re fighting what the movie is. And this was just a writer understanding like, “Oh, this is what she’s trying to do. You are trying to do this. Let me help you. You’re trying to get to such and such a place in five hours. Let me give you the best directions on how to get there.”

And I was so moved when I got that notes document that I was in my office that I like — tears sprang to my eyes. I know how hard it is as a writer to turn your attention from your own imagination and delve into another person’s script. And that he would do seven pages of these incredible notes really blew me away. And it’s professional camaraderie. And, man, the more of that you can find the better. And it doesn’t have to be somebody famous or — it can be, you now, if you’re 23 years old, it can be somebody else that you know who wants to do this, who will read your stuff and put their heart into it.

**John:** Well, it’s also back to the issue of as writers we want movies to be better. And so when I’m advising on projects at Sundance or other places, everyone’s like, “Oh, that’s a tremendous amount of your time that you’re spending.” It’s like, yes, but it’s a chance to make kind of movies better. It’s a way to sort of see what a person is attempting to try to do and help them get to that place that they’re trying to get to.

And so seven pages of notes is above and beyond the call. That’s terrific. But really only a writer could do that. Because only a writer could understand what you were trying to do and provide specific ways that you could sort of get to that place.

**Craig:** You know, I would also say that only a writer can convince you that you’re any good.

**Aline:** Right. That’s interesting.

**Craig:** I had a very nice experience. You know, I started writing a novel a couple of years ago. And, honestly, I wrote two chapters and then stopped, mostly just out of fear that it wasn’t going to be any good and that I wasn’t any good. And I’m no good. And, blah, blah, bah, rotten tomatoes.

**John:** Dennis Palumbo?

**Craig:** No, it’s not Dennis Palumbo. It’s actually, I gave it to Kelly Marcel because she asked to see it. And she’s a really good writer. And she loved it. And, you know, I have to believe that. I can’t — it’s not the same thing…

When we give screenplays, or we give our work to people that are employing us, they’re just as overly optimistic as we are. Everybody is rooting, rooting, rooting. But you always wonder.

Or you give it to somebody, you know, some producer, or agents, or coverage. Well, who’s doing coverage? I don’t know who they are. But if a writer reads something of yours and says, “This is good,” then you need to believe it. And we can’t get that from anybody else.

**John:** Yeah. You want that response of, “I’m so happy for you and also a little bit jealous.” That’s the best feeling you can get as a writer is when another writer says, “This is great and I wish I had written it.”

**Craig:** You know what’s so funny? That’s exactly what she said?

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** She said, I actually think she used the words, “I’m a bit jealous.” And then, see, but now I have this other task master that’s making me write this book, which is terrific, you know, terrific, because we also need that. We need somebody, we need a lab partner.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** We need a lab partner.

**John:** And as we wrap up this segment on the importance of writers being friends, we also need to credit Aline because during the strike, I agree that the 2008 strike was a big game-changer in terms of especially feature writers knowing who each other are. You organized these events that would happen during the strike, or like these drink events where we would all get together and sort of mingle. And it was my first chance of actually getting to know faces with names of some of these people.

During the strike you were assigned to different studios where you were supposed to be doing picketing. And because I am the palest person on earth, I would picket at Paramount Studios from 5:30am till 8:30am. So, it would be dark and I wouldn’t get sunburned. And I loved that group of people I was hanging out with. But everyone else was at different studios.

And so the events that you organized, and there were three or four of them, were terrifically helpful because just suddenly all these names that I’d seen in the trades are suddenly in front of you and you’re talking about and a lot of what we were talking about was the strike, but you’re also talking about the work, and you’re talking about how to make things better.

**Aline:** But it came at a critical point. People were really, you know, if you try to do those mixers sometimes it’s hard to get people to go. But people were really wanting to be with other writers then and talk about what’s going on, and what are we going to do, and nobody was working.

And so that really, and you were able to organize them over the internet really quickly, send out an e-vite to hundreds of people. And so there were a lot of people who I knew their names but had never met them. And we all kind of really got to know each other during that experience. And it was a really tough… — And people had really varying opinions was the other thing. And a thing that always amazed me was people were really all over the map about what they believed about this, but by and large people were able to, the camaraderie of being screenwriters kind of overcame people’s different point of views.

**John:** I would say there were different point of views on the strike and sort of what we should be doing on the strike and how long it should go and what we should be fighting for. But a common point of focus in terms of like what our profession is, and sort of what our job is and what our craft is, and so by focusing on the feature writers who are usually completely in isolation, bring thing together, it was a way for us to identify ourselves as a group. Because usually we’re not a group the way that TV writers are often in rooms together and sort of know each other.

**Aline:** Right.

**John:** It was a way for us to actually know who these people were.

**Craig:** We also, there’s a certain kind of way that screenwriters interact with each other that is unique. And I love it. And it is a very talky, chatty, low tech, low fancy environment, almost always. We don’t do it the way other people do it. There are few screenwriters I know that sort of love to glam it up and throw parties at nightclubs and stuff like that, but for the most part it seems to me we’re at our happiest when we’re talking somewhere where we can hear each other. And that’s fun.

It’s a nice, real way to be in Los Angeles, a town where just around the corner there’s some place that has convinced you is important and you have to go inside. And if you can’t get inside, and who do you know inside, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, and there we are with our jeans and our sweaters and our cigars and our wine and we just — we’re able to be real with each other.

**Aline:** And I will tackle people. I mean, it’s funny, because I won’t do this with any other, you know, I won’t do this with actors, or directors really, but if I see a writer whose work I admire, I mean, I did a panel with Peter Morgan in 2006 and I was so excited he was going to be there. And the video of me is like, you know, a running back approaching, of me literally taking guys and grabbing them by the nape of the neck and chucking them out of the way to get to Pete. I was so excited to meet him.

And I got to him and I was like, “Oh my god, I just came to this thing so I could meet you.” And that moment someone said, “Let me take your picture.” And there’s a picture like 30 seconds after Pete and I meet, and I look like I’m standing next to Santa Claus. I’m so excited to be meeting Peter.

**Craig:** Well that’s, I mean, John, who was my Peter Morgan in Austin?

**John:** Oh, it was Breaking Bad, it was Vince Gilligan.

**Aline:** Vince.

**Craig:** Vince Gilligan. I mean —

**Aline:** That thing, when you meet somebody whose work you so admire.

**Craig:** It’s everything. It’s everything.

**Aline:** It’s so amazing. And I will tackle people. And Kelly Marcel just moved to town —

**Craig:** Did you tackle Kelly Marcel?

**Aline:** I tackled her at the Mr. Banks thing. And she’s new to town so she doesn’t know a lot of writers. And I was like, oh, there’s people for you to meet.

**John:** There’s a mixer in your future.

**Aline:** Right. Yeah. And she went to Austin which is a really good way and, you know, one thing I would say is go to an event like Austin. If you’re somebody who is starting out, and again, we just did not have stuff like this when we were starting out and I would have been there tackling people. But, you know, go to these events where there is going to be other aspiring people and you will find people that you connect to, that you can pitch your movies to, that you can talk about what they’re working on.

You don’t have to be connecting to the fancy people. You can be connecting to people who are exactly in the same stage that you’re in.

**John:** Yes. Everyone grows up together. So there’s lateral things where you’re reading their script, and if you love their script, keep reading their scripts, and keep helping them out, and they will reciprocate. And you will find your people, but you have to sort of look for your people because it’s not you’re a professional football player where you’re just going to be around professional football players.

**Aline:** That’s right.

**John:** You are always going to be isolation unless you choose to make yourself not in isolation.

**Craig:** And don’t be judgy. Don’t be judgy. Don’t think that your friends have to be the fanciest writers in the world, or the most successful writers in the world. Don’t let that get in the way. You — when you fall in love with another writer, you’re falling in love with a kindred spirit and a fellow mind who understands you, who can help you and you can help you and you can help them.

There is no better feeling — the only better feeling than being helped is helping. How is that for Christmas?

**John:** So, our last thing I want to talk about today is an article that Nima had sent me, but I actually people linking to it, too.

**Craig:** Here comes the downer!

**John:** It’s a downer, but there’s a bright side at the end of it, too, kind of, or a brighter side.

**Craig:** Little bit.

**John:** Little bit. So, this is a site called priceonomics. It’s about David Raether who is a WGA writer who was a writer on Roseanne. And so he started Roseanne when he was already in his 40s or 50s, so he’d moved from the coast and got a job writing on Roseanne. And wrote on Roseanne for several years and was doing pretty well. He moved up through the ranks of Roseanne.

During the time he was writing for Roseanne he had a wife and eight kids. And eight kids is a lot of kids.

**Aline:** Mm.

**John:** And at a certain point his marriage was starting to fall apart, so after Roseanne he took a two-year hiatus and sort of got his marriage back together and got his family situations settled. Moved to a more affordable school district so the kids could stay in that. And then started to go back to writing and to go back to try to find a television job and had a very difficult time finding a television job, which is a common thing you hear all the time which is that gap that happens between, you know, when you’re a writer in your 50s it’s harder and harder to be employed, especially if you weren’t the top showrunner person. It gets harder and harder for that middleclass person.

So, David Raether had, you know, a $500,000 nest egg, which sounds like a lot of money, but that very quickly disappeared. He ended up losing his home. In the article he talks about sort of the process by which the sheriffs come and sort of evict you from your home. And his marriage fell apart. His kids ended up moving in with other families. He ended up homeless in a van. And sort of like what it is to hit the bottom there.

And not bottom that we’re used to. We’re used to like drugs and alcohol, or some other sort of internal crazy that pushed you to the bottom. This was just like the floor just fell out from underneath him. And so the article continues on with sort of how he started working again and sort of getting jobs off Craigslist and ghostwriting things for people who couldn’t write stuff. And eventually sort of building his way up so he’s in a more stable place right now.

But it’s really, I think, a useful thing for us to talk about, especially going into the spirit of Thanksgiving, which is to be not only thankful for the things we have in front of us, but also to be mindful that when things get bad it’s maybe not quite as bad as it seems. That even this guy will say that as bad as things got, once you recognize that you can be homeless and you’ll be okay out of it, he’s like much less fearful about sort of the things that can happen.

So, a couple things I think we can talk about with this article is, first off, that gap year, what he describes as the gap years, that time when you’re no longer sort of employable, but your pension hasn’t kicked in. Because this is a guy who has a WGA pension. So, when he turns 65 he’s got that pension and he’ll be fine. But the problem is he’s not 65 yet.

**Aline:** Can’t you take it earlier?

**Craig:** Yeah, a little bit earlier, but at some point they start hitting you with a lot of penalties and things.

**Aline:** Okay.

**John:** I think you essentially lose it if you start drawing down too early.

**Craig:** There’s a specific minimum age you need to hit, but it’s a really bad idea to dip into it.

**Aline:** Oh, I see. Got it.

**John:** In the beginning of your career, in the middle of your career, as you start to recognize that you’re sort of at the tail end of your career, what are sort of the financial decisions you make? Because I see a lot of people who sell a spec and think like, “I have a million dollars. I’m a millionaire. I’m going to start living like a millionaire.” And don’t seem to recognize, no, you’re not a millionaire. There’s no such thing as a millionaire, really, and you need to buy a more sensible car.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, let me, [laughs], let me do what I do. Just for a moment. I promise I won’t be too mean. There’s a lesson that I drew from this that I have internalized anyway. Which is, you ain’t your job. You’re you. Your job doesn’t make you qualified. Your job doesn’t make you deserving or entitled of anything.

I want to point out something interesting about this guy, and I don’t mean this in the spirit of kicking somebody when they’re down. I’m very happy that he’s pulled himself out of this circumstance. But, he was not in the entertainment business. He was not a television writer. He was not a screenwriter. He had paid none of the dues that people pay for many years in this town to earn those jobs.

He was a casual friend of Tom Arnold’s. And he decided to write a spec script for Roseanne, once it was a hit, and send it to Tom Arnold. And Tom Arnold, who is apparently a very gracious man and likes his friends, said, “Awesome. I’m getting you a job and you’re going to work here.” And when I read that all I could think was, oh, how the people in the room at Roseanne must have felt about that. Like who is this? Are you kidding me?

My point is not to say that he doesn’t deserve to be in that room. He may very well have been the best writer in that room. My point is that just because you have a job as a writer doesn’t mean that you have now broken through some magical thing where you’re a professional writer for life. You’re not. You’re a professional writer right now. And it can go away for me, for you, for any of us, for any number of reasons.

So, you have to protect and save against that. You certainly can’t be so proud and so delusional to think that you can disappear from the one single job you’ve had as a writer, you can disappear for two years and then come back and everybody would just want to give you a job. Even if the market were great, nobody other than Tom Arnold has ever hired you to write before. It just seems so delusional to me.

Please, important lesson here. When you get your big break, it’s not a break. There’s no breaks. You’re going to have to re-break, and re-break, and re-break. It never ends. It never ends.

The other thing is I feel like the story is missing information. I really do.

**John:** It’s apparently a shortened version of like the book. So there’s actually a much more elaborate book that sort of talks through everything that happened. So, what information did you want to know, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, I feel like when you are a married person with a wife and eight kids and a job, and then your life is dismantled to the extent that you are separated from your wife, separated from your children, some of whom go to live in another country and you end up in a minivan, that there are additional circumstance beyond, “Huh, can’t find a gig.”

Whether it is substance abuse, or mental health issues, it seems to me like we’re missing some information here, because things just seemed to happen in this story and I’m not quite sure why. And there are also a lot of things that are available for people that he doesn’t seem to be taking advantage of. So, I don’t know. I was just a little suspicious about the whole thing. And a little concerned when I read it. there was a whiff of flimflam about it.

I may just be a terrible person.

**Aline:** “A whiff of flimflam.”

**John:** Oh, it’s a very good whiff, though. Well, let’s talk about sort of the, I don’t know, the safety net of it all, because one of the challenges of being a screenwriter is that your income is inherently unstable. And so you cannot predict how much money you’re going to earn the next year, which is a challenging thing.

Now, Aline, your husband has a normal job. And so is that comforting in any way, where like there’s a steady income regardless?

**Aline:** Yeah, well he doesn’t just have a normal job. He works for a mutual fund, so he’s very conservative. So, we plan very conservatively. But, you know, there are two things that when I can see them in a writer I get a little uncomfortable. One is writers who really love to write. When you run into people who just love to write, and just I love it, I look forward to it, it’s so enjoyable. That always sends up red flags for me.

My people are the ones who are like, “Ugh, it was hard.” You know, of course you have moments where it’s wonderful, but it’s work. It’s really hard work. And I think people who don’t complain about writing concern me. And then also people who just if you have that attitude of like, “I got one gig. I’m set,” it’s not that, man. It’s getting — everybody has to go out and get a job —

**Craig:** Look at the Jews fighting the Christmas spirit. We just can’t deal with it.

**Aline:** You’ve got to go get a job. A couple times a year, you’ve got to go back out there. No one is set. So, sometimes you do meet people who get some kind of foot hold, some kind of toe hold, and they seem to feel like they’ve made it through some sort of pearly gates, and it’s just not like that. It’s a hustle.

And I really look at it in a lot of ways as being an entrepreneur. And when you’re an entrepreneur, you know you’re going to have good times and not so good times. And you better take — here’s another metaphor for your — you better take your acorns and put them in your tree trunk.

**Craig:** And your flying robot.

**Aline:** And your flying robot. You better take that flying robot and get it some acorns, because this —

**Craig:** When did you become Dan Rather? I don’t understand what happened?

**Aline:** It’s a very cyclical business. And I just think you’ve got to keep your head down and do your work, but you’re not owed anything. There’s so many people who want to do this. So, I say all of this having not read the article because I did not do my homework.

**John:** When I first got paid, my first scale assignment, which was for How to Eat Fried Worms, and then the second thing was A Wrinkle in Time, I would have a spreadsheet. And on that spreadsheet I would track how much money I had and then I would month by month figure out this is what my rent costs. This is what I pay for these different things. And I would sort of watch the money trickle down. So, I could plan ahead, I could see ahead eight months to see like how much money I would actually have.

And that’s a very sobering exercise that’s so useful, because I could see like I cannot be buying anything beyond the bare essentials I need to live, because otherwise I could just run out of money.

**Aline:** I’m just picturing John in his 20s, which everybody else like lying around on dirty sofas, and John somewhere looking at his spreadsheet.

**Craig:** With like that little visor? [laughs]

**Aline:** [laughs] Yeah. And the armband.

**Craig:** With glasses. Right, the armband. And that adding machine that you have to go Ka-chunk to.

**Aline:** Sleeves rolled up. His friends are all like, “John will buy us the beer guys, seriously.”

**John:** I did not buy a bed the first two years I lived in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Two? I think my first bed was my fifth year.

**John:** Yeah, so that’s the thing. We’re basically saying don’t buy a bed. And don’t put your money underneath.

**Craig:** Don’t buy anything. Don’t buy anything!

**Aline:** My friend, Jeff, always had this thing which is your evolution as an adult is how far your bed gets off the floor.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s absolutely true. It’s true.

**Aline:** You basically start off sleeping on the floor. And then you get a futon, which is like five inches from the floor. And then you get a futon frame.

**John:** A frame. Nice. Classy.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**Aline:** Which is 11 inches off the ground. And then at some point you buy a bed frame, but it’s not upholstered or anything. It’s just one of those —

**Craig:** It’s that metal thing.

**Aline:** It’s that metal thing with the feet.

**Craig:** That they give away. Yeah.

**Aline:** And the next thing is you actually get a mattress into a bed. But you’ve got to be — really think like an entrepreneur. And just to go on a side topic for a second, I know you guys have talked with bewilderment many times about why there aren’t more women who do this. And it is easier to understand with directing because the raising of children is not very compatible with being on movie sets. But I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why there aren’t more female screenwriters and I think it’s this aspect of being an entrepreneur.

You are really running a small business which is you. And you have to put yourself out there every day and wear your sandwich board of like, “I’m interesting. You’re going to listen to me.” And I think that women are attracted to things where they can demonstrate excellence in a somewhat prescribed fashion. That’s why women are killing men in colleges and graduate schools.

But screenwriting is not like that. Screenwriting is a lot like you’re starting a business of making flavored pistachios.

**Craig:** Here we go. Ice cream. Here we go.

**Aline:** [laughs] Flavored pistachios, I don’t even know where that came from.

**Craig:** Flavored pistachios.

**John:** Well, I can see the movements. I thought you were going to go for some Etsy kind of thing. I thought you were going for some crochet —

**Aline:** Or like, yeah, macrame, squirrel hats. I went back to squirrels.

**Craig:** Macrame squirrel hats. And you girls with your flavored pistachios.

**Aline:** [laughs] But you got to go out there and like be an entrepreneur and save your money and really put yourself out there. And I think that it’s not a thing that we encourage women to do from childhood is to really say like, “I’m interesting…”

**John:** Well, I wonder if culturally we have a different expectation about men in their 20s, it’s expected that you are broke, and you are sleeping on couches, and that your life is a disaster, but you’re doing all that stuff and so eventually you’re going to break through. And we perceive a woman who is doing that as being a failure. Because that’s not a viable way for her to proceed.

We are more worried for that woman than we are worried for the equivalent man in the 20s who is living that sort of marginal lifestyle. Is that true?

**Aline:** I don’t know if it’s that. I really think it’s about when you’re coming up as a writer, like I remember I ran into a friend from high school and I had just started being a writer, and I had maybe sold one thing.

And we were at a party and somebody said to me, “What do you do?” And I said, “I’m a writer.” And he looked at me and he said, “Do you really tell people that?”

**Craig:** [laughs] Cool guy.

**Aline:** And I thought, you know, I really — it takes a leap of faith and a confidence in yourself to say, yeah, I’m a writer, I have something to say. Because essentially what you do as a writer is you say, “Listen to me. That’s the very first thing you do.”

**Craig:** Well, that’s, and I wonder if this is something in terms of the gender thing that women are trained by the world around them, if not by their parents, to not aggressively go after what they want because they themselves have an inherent desirability. That they are instructed to essentially play hard to get and to let things come to them.

**Aline:** I don’t know. Maybe in a — I really think it’s an adjustment on that which is to go out there and say what you have to do at the beginning of your career which is I have nothing to prove to you that what I have to say is valuable except this: what I believe, my voice, my sensibility, my humor, my intelligence. And it’s just as good as anyone else’s. Probably better than someone else’s. You’re going to listen to me. I’m going to sit in a rom. I’m going to command your attention for 20 minutes.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** I’m going to go outside the box. There’s no format for this. You know, it’s a very unscripted kind of unplanned thing.

And what I want to say to women who are listening, and I was talking at a thing at UCSB and what I didn’t know, what I didn’t understand, when I started I thought you had to know people and you had to network, and you had to do all these things which I was really — how was I going to do that? My parents were first generation immigrants. They don’t know anybody. There was no uncle I could call. There was none of that.

**Craig:** “Aline. I don’t know anybody who can help you.”

**Aline:** Right So, I had to really take that. And what I didn’t know is you’ve got to have the goods, be good at what you do, serve that apprenticeship of becoming good at what you do, but you also have to say, “My point of view is valuable. Listen to me. I have something to say.”

And I do find young women, younger women, they just do it. They just, you know, I’m working with this young comedian. She makes these YouTube videos on her own. She pays for them on her own. She’s a great DP and she writes songs and she just does it.

And I think that it really is changing and that young women have now unmitigated access to media. They don’t have to audition for anyone. They can just write their blog, or do their video, or put it out there.

**Craig:** Sisters are doing it for themselves.

**Aline:** They really are. But what I would say is if you’re trying to get into Hollywood screenwriting, which is a more Mandarin, closed system, you have to bet on yourself. And part of betting on yourself is saving money.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Aline:** It is. Because every penny you save is money you can spend giving yourself time to write that great script. And that’s why I was really cheap when I started was just, you know, I know that if I get paid, if I can hold onto this check, if I can stretch this check as long as I can, that’s more time that I can spend working.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Aline:** And if you get your first check and you blow it, you’re going to have to go and get that job which is going to be distracting and exhausting.

**John:** I hear you.

So, let us get to our final thing tonight which is our One Cool Things. So, who wants to start? Craig, do you want to start?

**Craig:** Yes. Because mine is incredibly short. Scroobius Pip. My One Cool Thing is Scroobius Pip. Look ’em up on YouTube. Awesome.

**Aline:** Okay. Wow.

**Craig:** Scroobius Pip.

**Aline:** Wow. Never heard of that.

**Craig:** Look ’em up.

**John:** Actually, I do know what this is because you had linked this on Twitter and Kelly Marcel had pointed it to you. And it is perhaps the angriest song I’ve ever seen.

**Craig:** Ever! It is this song called You Will See Me. It’s the angriest song I think that has ever been written.

**John:** So, what’s great about the song is the first half is so inspiring and it’s like, “Yeah, yeah!,” and then it just goes too far in that way that’s just wonderful.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** Most despotic people were probably like really great and driven and you wanted them to succeed until they went just way too far.

**Aline:** Oh, that sounds great.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s sort of like, you know, I Will Survive turns into I Will Kill All of You. Everyone I see is going to die.

It’s remarkable. And it’s so smart. It’s so smart. It really does make You Oughta Know look like a love poem.

**Aline:** Oh, I can’t wait.

**John:** So, we’ll put a link to that in the show notes. My One Cool Thing is a book by Keith Houston called Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. I’m reading it right now. It’s great.

And so it talks about a lot of things like, you know, the paragraph symbol, like where did that come from? And like the crosshairs, and daggers, and asterisks, and all those little strange things. Well, who made that stuff up? And there’s actually a history behind all of those things.

Sometimes the word is made up, but an example is like we think about the paragraph symbol as like, oh, it’s like a P, it’s like a special P. But it’s actually not a P at all. It just sort of ended up looking kind of like that. And actually it’s a crossed C with another line beside it. it’s all different than sort of how you would think.

**Aline:** Between this and the spreadsheet, you’re really not James —

**Craig:** Sexy!

**Aline:** Yeah, I was going to say.

**Craig:** Sexy!

**John:** As a type nerd, I was very excited that this book —

**Aline:** Or just a nerd.

**Craig:** Actually, I did think of you. And I’ll try and find the link to this, because it was such a you thing. I can’t believe I didn’t send it to you. I read an article. For a long time people have been struggling to try to denote irony in text.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And, I don’t know, maybe you saw this article where there was a guy hundreds of years ago who invented an irony mark.

**John:** And that is covered in this book.

**Craig:** Oh, it is?

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** And it just never caught on. Nobody wanted it.

**John:** Nobody wanted it. There’s also a whole chapter on the interrobang, which is the question mark and exclamation point at the same time.

**Craig:** Oh, interrobang.

**John:** Which ultimately is just not that necessary? You put the two things together, we got it.

**Aline:** In emails.

**John:** Emails. Yeah.

**Aline:** Have you guys talked about treadmill desks?

**John:** No, so let’s talk about treadmill desks.

**Aline:** Oh, okay, well that would definitely be One Cool Thing. So, I had a GeekDesk, which I think I got the nod from you on, the GeekDesk, which is you can adjust the height. So, I was writing standing up for awhile. And that was sort of okay, but you get into a lot of slouchy, uncomfortable positions when you’re standing.

And so my friends, Susannah Grant, took the leap. She had also bought the GeekDesk at my recommendation, so we both had those. And then she took the leap and got the TreadDesk which goes under the GeekDesk. And then you’re walking and you’re writing.

And it’s really embarrassing and stupid to look at, but what I really like about it is that I’m a kind of gregarious, like to be busy person, and so a writing for me, a long day of writing, I will eventually feel like — ooh, analogy — I will eventually feel like a raccoon with its foot in the trap.

**Craig:** What?!

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** We got to have somebody, please somebody out there illustrate every single one of these that she’s done in this episode.

**Aline:** Oh, that’s good. So, I would feel so trapped by the end of the day. And there’s something about being on the treadmill where you feel like even if I’m — on those days where you feel like I’m not crushing it, at least you feel like I went for a walk today. I did something reasonably healthy. So, I’ve enjoyed it.

And then I emailed Susannah the other day and said, “I’ve taken it to a terrible place,” which is I’ve taken it to dancing.

**John:** You’re dancing on your treadmill desk?

**Aline:** A little bit. So, I think this is going to lead to traction.

**John:** Yeah. It’s could be dangerous. So, your treadmill desk, essentially you’re using your normal standing desk, but then there’s a very flat treadmill that goes underneath it.

**Aline:** Right. They make this thing now. And it’s TreadDesk. You can find it if you Google TreadDesk, you can find it. Because that was the thing. I couldn’t find one that didn’t have the big —

**Craig:** But you can’t write like that?

**Aline:** I do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** You go very slowly.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a nightmare.

**Aline:** Yeah, you go slowly. And you know what it’s really particularly good for? It’s not great for fine point editing, proofing, where you want to really find, but what it’s really good for is after you’ve gone through a script and you’ve written a bunch of notes to yourself and you’ve written a lot of notes in the margin, that’s what it’s really great for, when you’re implementing stuff that you’ve written by hand. It’s really — like if I have something due, there was a week where I had something due on a Friday and I walked 18 miles that week.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** That’s a good week. I do the same thing with my iPad and the normal treadmill, iPad with the keyboard. And so I can do things like first passes on blog posts. Just doing triage on emails. It’s great for that kind of stuff.

Then when you actually sit down to really focus, then you’re really in writing mode, which is good, too. So, it’s a change in state.

**Craig:** I just like to walk around, outside, and enjoy God’s splendor.

**John:** Yeah, we don’t believe you at all, Craig Mazin. We know you far too well.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** You have more to say?

**Aline:** What?

**Craig:** Nah. [laughs]

**John:** All right. If you would like to send a question about vocabulary choices or analogies for Aline Brosh McKenna can make for us, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** That Aline.

**Aline:** I covered a lot of animals today.

**Craig:** Yeah, Aline. Like two squirrels fighting over a flavored pistachio raccoon.

**John:** What I really want is a Christmas Tree. I know you’re Jewish, but I really want a Christmas Tree with all these ornaments of the metaphors you used.

**Craig:** And Aline Tree. That would be cool.

**Aline:** I love it.

**John:** Aline, are you on Twitter?

**Aline:** No.

**John:** No. Aline is not on Twitter. But I’m on Twitter, @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

Our podcast that you’re listening to right now is available on iTunes. And so if you’re listening to this on iTunes and have not left a comment, it’s great if you do that because that helps people find the show. So, you can subscribe there.

We enjoyed having Aline Brosh McKenna on our show today.

**Craig:** As always.

**John:** Aline, thank you so much for coming by.

**Aline:** You’re most welcome.

**John:** And we will get to see you again on December 19th.

**Aline:** Woot-woot! Oh yeah!

**Craig:** Woo!

**Aline:** And that’s when we’re going to have our drink and a half.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes! We will have a drink and a half. And, no, I’m not drinking that foul eggnog.

**Aline:** We’ll see.

**John:** So, I’m not really clear based on this new facility we went to, I’m not clear that there’s going to be a bar bar. But if nothing else we’ll have a flask.

**Aline:** I’ve got a purse.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** And I’ve got a purse.

**Aline:** All right, guys. Thank you.

**John:** Thank you guys. Happy Thanksgiving.

**Craig:** Happy Thanksgiving.

LINKS:

* [Aline Brosh McKenna](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0112459/) on IMDb, and her [first](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-black-list-and-a-stack-of-scenes), [second](http://johnaugust.com/2013/how-screenwriters-find-their-voice), [third](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-100th-episode), and [third-and-a-half](http://johnaugust.com/2013/101-qa-from-the-live-show) appearances on Scriptnotes
* The [Scriptnotes Holiday Show](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-holiday/) is sold out, but follow [@johnaugust](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) and [@clmazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) to be the first to know if more tickets are released
* [John Gatins](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0309691/) on IMDb
* [What It’s Like to Fail](http://priceonomics.com/what-its-like-to-fail/) on priceonomics
* [Scroobius Pip](http://scroobiuspip.co.uk/) and [You Will See Me](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OS4W3OCESY)
* [Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393064425/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Keith Houston
* [Irony punctuation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation) on Wikipedia
* The [TreadDesk](http://asoft11239.accrisoft.com/treaddesk/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Kris Gotthelf

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/time-travel-with-richard-kelly).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 118 of Scriptnotes, the Time Travel episode of a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Craig, what is your favorite kind of episode of Scriptnotes?

**Craig:** It’s funny, we haven’t done one in awhile. I really like the Q&As because it allows me to be even more passive than I normally am about this podcast.

**John:** You can be as underprepared as possible.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** I will just read you questions and you can think of a response as I ask you the question.

**Craig:** Right. Like a little baby bird with his mouth open and regurgitated worms just drop in.

**John:** Well, my favorite type of episode is usually the ones where we have a guest on. So, ones like the Lindsay Doran episode or the Dennis Palumbo episode, or episodes like today where we have a special guest who is with us here in the “studio.” And that is Richard Kelly. He’s the director of Donnie Darko, the writer-director of Donnie Darko and Southland Tales and The Box. So, he will be joining us in a few minutes to talk about all things that we want to talk about…

**Craig:** Great. Richard Kelly.

**John:** …such as first movies, science-fiction movies, lots of stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But first we have to talk about my other favorite kind of episode which is the ones where we have a live audience. We have one of those coming up, December 19, and as promised there is now information about tickets. Tickets are going on sale tomorrow, the day after this podcast airs. Tickets are on sale November 20 at exactly 10am they promised us.

**Craig:** Okay. And who’s selling the tickets?

**John:** It is through the Writers Guild Foundation.

**Craig:** And how much are the tickets? How much do they cost?

**John:** They’re $10 each, Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Ten dollars. Anyone can afford that.

**John:** Anyone can afford ten dollars. So, it will be a live show in the Writers Guild Theater. There will be seats and chairs. And there will be a reception beforehand. Eggnog is promised. I haven’t gotten really clarity on whether there’s alcohol involved in the eggnog reception or not.

**Craig:** Gross.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Everything about eggnog is disgusting. The name is disgusting. Both the word egg as part of a drink and then nog, which isn’t a word, and then two short syllable words ending in hard Gs, eggnog. And then what it is. Blech.

**John:** Yeah, it’s really the pumpkin spice of milk drinks. But, still, it’s going to be a good fun night. There will be you and me and special guests. Many of our previous guests will be coming to the show, but we’ll have new people who you’ve never seen before on stage with us and we will be announcing those names and I think people will be very excited by who those names are.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** So, the actual live show is Thursday, December 19, Writers Guild Theater. Tickets go on sale tomorrow. From experience doing our 100th episode live show, they went really, really quickly. So, we’re trying to make sure they actually go up exactly at 10am so people can get tickets and not be left out. But if you would like to come to the show, come see us then.

You and I will both tweet the URL for people to sign in and buy tickets that morning as well.

**Craig:** Great. And just to reassure me and everybody listening, we still don’t make money off this podcast, correct?

**John:** No, it’s completely a money-losing proposition.

**Craig:** Fantastic. That’s the key. If we can just stay in the red.

**John:** Yes. We will make no money off this event. The Writers Guild Foundation, which is a very good charitable organization, will make a little bit of money hopefully.

**Craig:** Oh great. Okay, well then that’s even better.

**John:** Craig, you had some housekeeping, too, today.

**Craig:** Yes. Very briefly. I took your advice from I think it was last week’s One Cool Thing and I downloaded Knock to Unlock and I’ve been using it. And I really like it a lot, but for the Knock to Unlock people if they’re listening: I don’t know if you’ve noticed this — sometimes it’s a little laggy.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And so I wait, and I wait, and I wait, and I think, “Ah! I could have entered my password by now.” And then I knock on it and it doesn’t work or it registers one knock. Sometimes it works perfectly and sometimes it just doesn’t work. So, I want them to fix it, because I want it to work constantly and quickly.

**John:** Craig, I agree with you. My experience with Knock to Unlock has been sort of like on the iPhone 5S, when it works perfectly it’s really kind of magic, and when it doesn’t work it’s a little bit frustrating.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** What I have found with Knock to Unlock is when you’re on the lock screen, there’s that little circling blue light that goes around your face, your little profile picture.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** When it’s solid, it tends to work exactly right. When it’s still circling it’s not connecting up to your phone the right way and —

**Craig:** Takes too long. Takes too long! Make go faster.

**John:** Make go faster. So, this was Craig Mazin venting about a product rather to an audience of thousands rather than to the actual people who make the product.

**Craig:** Right. Well, I feel like I can enlist all of you out there to assault these people and to make their thing that is very cheap and awesome even better for me, because I’m impatient.

**John:** Yeah. Craig often, like this was actually my One Cool Thing. But one of the things I really respect about you is that you’ll often pick a One Cool Thing that you’ve never even tried out. You have no idea if it actually works.

**Craig:** Right. I’m adventuresome.

**John:** You are adventuresome.

**Craig:** I like to put a question mark at the end of One Cool Thing?

**John:** [laughs] Well, in the spirit of adventure, let’s go to our first and only guest today on the show, Mr. Richard Kelly.

**Craig:** Richard Kelly!

**John:** So, if we had an audience, this is where they’d be applauding.

**Richard Kelly:** Hello guys.

**John:** Now, Richard, I was trying to remember when I first met you and I’m pretty sure it was actually at the test screening, not even a real test screening, an informal screening for your film, Donnie Darko, at Flower Films.

**Richard:** It was at Flower Films. And it was in their private little screening room at their Sunset Boulevard tower offices back in probably the year 2000.

**John:** Yeah. 2000. It would be late 2000, because it was before Sundance.

**Richard:** It was before Sundance. We were on the brink of submitting to Sundance and it was one of the first screenings that we did. And it was Nancy Juvonen, and Sean McKittrick, and a few other select friends. And you were one of the very first people to see the film. I remember. And you were very helpful, I think, in your suggestions and it was a really, really amazing experience because I was just like at the very beginning of my career really.

**John:** So, at this point you had graduated from USC. And it was USC for grad school or was that undergrad for you? I forget what your history is.

**Richard:** I was undergrad. I was an undergrad production major at the School of Cinema and Television, it’s now called the School of Cinematic Arts and has a bunch of new fancy palatial digital buildings, but when I was there at the end of the ’90s graduating it was still relatively archaic.

**John:** It looked like a dentist office really. It looked like a decent dentist office somewhere in the Valley.

**Richard:** Absolutely. And there was the George Lucas Bridge where everyone used to kind of eat their Carl’s Jr. and sort of trade tips and wait for light stands and camera equipment.

**John:** So, you were a production major if I recall correctly.

**Richard:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So, you’re a production major from USC and you wrote this script while you were still at USC, or had you already finished by that point?

**Richard:** No, I didn’t write the script until right after I graduated. I was sort of in mortal of fear of writing a screenplay all throughout the undergrad experience because I was so focused on learning how to use a camera and stage direction and lighting and all of the technique required of being a director. I was so focused on that — screenwriting was something that was in the back of my mind and it was just very terrifying to me, because I wrote a lot growing up but it was more essays, and short fiction, and short bursts of inspiration. But the idea of doing something long form was just really intimidating, and I’m the kind of person who doesn’t really try to engage in any activity that I don’t think I’m going to be good at.

So, I was just, I was terrified. And so I kind of stored it all up.

**Craig:** But then you got over this fear and wrote a script that is — it’s interesting to hear you say that this is almost the first screenplay you wrote because it’s very well structured. I mean, it must be very well structured because of the content and the kind of story you’re telling.

But there’s a rigor to the structure. It’s a very experienced kind of structure. I wonder, did you realize that you were kind of melding… — It’s funny, I rewatched Donnie Darko the other day and I thought there’s so much about it that’s non-traditional. And yet there’s so much about it that actually is traditional. They’re sort of stuck together in this fascinating thing.

Were you aware that this was going on when you were writing it?

**Richard:** I think was subconsciously aware of it. It was me storing up probably 23 years of experience, of watching and digesting stories and I believe a lot of it really came from, of all places, my high school English teachers who really sort of just pushed narrative structure into me. I mean, they really educated me in terms of that process. And I took maybe one screenwriting class at USC, but my focus was so much more on production that I actually kind of derived it from my high school education, which might sound unusual, but that’s where it kind of came from.

And you see that embedded in the themes of the story —

**Craig:** Sure.

**Richard:** You know, Drew Barrymore playing this idealistic high school teacher and the sort of — it’s a very adolescent script in terms of its innocence and its formative approach when it comes to the themes are very much a teenager’s bleeding heart so to speak.

**Craig:** Right.

**Richard:** So it was me kind of expunging my 23 years of adolescence onto the page really.

**John:** So, you’ve written this script. This is before the Black List. This is back in the day of like printed scripts that were sent around. What was the process from you finish this script to it ends up at Flower Films and you’re going to start production. What was that journey like?

**Richard:** Well, I had partnered up with my friend, and he still is my producing partner, Sean McKittrick, at our company, Darko Entertainment. But at the time he was working as an assistant at New Line Cinema. And he helped me with my graduate film and produced my graduate film. And he was working on a desk for an executive named Lynn Harris at New Line Cinema.

And I sent it to Sean. I’m like, “What do you think? I finished the script.” And he read it and he called me and said, “I need to read it a second time. It’s a little too long.” It was like 147 pages or something. “And it needs a few tweaks, but I think there’s really something here. And I really think you’re onto something.”

And then he called me back after having read it the second time and he was even more confident that I was onto something. He’s like, “Let’s trim 10 or 15 pages out and then I’m going to send it to my friend, David Ruddy, who works at CAA.” And that’s obviously the big talent agency.

And so he sent it to David and David was working as an assistant to Beth Swofford who still to this day is a huge agent at CAA. And he read it and called Sean and said, “I want to meet this guy.”

So, he took us out to drinks and Dave made sure that I wasn’t an axe murderer, or something equally deviant.

**Craig:** Which you are, I mean.

**Richard:** You saw what I did in Austin.

**Craig:** Instantly I detected. I don’t know how he missed the fact that you are absolutely a deviant axe murderer. But go ahead. Go ahead with the story about the least observant man in the world.

**Richard:** [laughs] Yeah, so he was like, “Okay, I’m going to give this script to Beth,” and then Beth read it and brought it up in a CAA staff meeting. And she gave it to three other agents, including my current agent to this day, John Campisi, and all of a sudden I was getting a call from a group of four people at CAA who called me in this sort of group conference call and said, “We love your script and we want you to come in and meet.”

And, again, I was 23 years old and living with a few friends in the South Bay making $6.5 an hour serving cappuccinos at a post production house in Hollywood. I was making cheese and cracker plates for Mark Romanek, and Madonna, and Jonas Åkerlund, and Puff Daddy. I was barely getting by and I had this film degree. So, all of a sudden to be getting a call from CAA was like a fairytale scenario.

**Craig:** Right.

**Richard:** So, I rolled in there and they wanted to sign me. And then I informed them of the unfortunate news that I was going to direct the film, and I would never let anyone else direct it. And you could see the sort of polite smiles and nods of the head. It was not going to be an easy course.

**John:** So, at this point they’ve read your Donnie Darko script. Have they read anything else?

**Richard:** No. No. That was the only thing I had.

**Craig:** That was all they could read.

**John:** And did you have a reel? Did you have anything to show them that you could direct?

**Richard:** I had my grad film, which was this really ridiculous, campy science-fiction thing that I showed them and they were like, “Oh, let’s not show that to anyone.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Richard:** Just because it was just so different and so campy and so — more of like just a visual exercise. And they were kind of like, “Let’s not bring that up.” And I’m like, okay, because I’m always the kind of person who sees myself as having like many different channels in terms of switching beyond into many different genres. And I’m not a person who believes in categorization or putting people into boxes. But that’s what this town is all about is keeping you in a box or keeping you in a category. So, they’re like, “Let’s put that aside”

Everyone read the script. They sent it out to all the big production companies. And I was all of a sudden meeting all of these famous producers. Just amazing people. I got to meet Paula Weinstein and Betty Thomas and Mark Johnson. And just this long list of amazing legendary producers. I got to meet Ben Stiller on the set of Mystery Men. And everyone loved my script. And everyone was saying all these wonderful things. But, after six months of meetings it was sort of like, “This is an amazing writing sample. We think it’s probably an unproduceable film, but we would love for you to maybe write something else for us.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Richard:** “And if you really want to direct it, we respect that, but you’re barely 24 years old. You look like you’re 17 and good luck with that.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Richard:** “But we just, you know, come write something else for us. ”

**John:** Let me pause your story for one second, because this is a very common thread of what I’ve heard about sort of first stories, and sort of my first story, too. Everyone always thinks like some incredibly powerful person reads it. It’s slipped over the door and someone reads this thing and says, “Ah-ha! This is the thing.” But it was really your friend who you knew from before who was working a job at sort of your same level, was working at a desk somewhere who read it and sort of said, this is really good.

And he profited by — not profited literally — but by recognizing your talent he could take it to somebody and say like, “I think this is really good. Please pay attention to this.” So, it was somebody at your same level. It wasn’t just some giant person who read it and said, “Yes, this is the real thing.” It was a ramp up. You didn’t hit 100 miles per hour right at the first day.

**Richard:** Yes, and it was a strategic ramping, because Sean was a very well liked producer at New Line at the time and he had a very smart boss. And he was, you know, obviously talking to the right assistants and kind of networking with the right assistants. And to this day you even see what Frank Leonard has done with the Black List. It’s all just sort of galvanizing from the desks of the mailroom and even places like that where people find the great material and sort of pass it upwards in exchange for being a part of this sort of trade system of information, and credit, and representation.

It’s a system that still exists in a different way today.

**John:** Now, these six months that you were taking meetings with places, you were taking these sort of general meetings. They liked your script and they want you to write something else. Were you working at this point or were you still like making coffee at production houses?

**Richard:** I was sort of still serving coffee and then I was hired by Phoenix Pictures to adapt the children’s novel Holes, which was my first big writing job. Which I completely, [laughs], jumped the shark, so to speak. I went and just changed so much of the novel into kind of like a dystopian, post-apocalyptic Stephen King thing.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Richard:** And just kept the core essentials of the novel.

**Craig:** That’s what I would have done. I would have done the same thing.

**Richard:** I was just convinced that this is what would be the great version of the movie and that they would see what I wanted to do —

**Craig:** So great.

**Richard:** They probably read it and I got that call like, “Are you insane?” What are you thinking? This is not what we wanted.”

**Craig:** Yeah, but you read Donnie Darko and then you hired me to write Holes. Are you insane?

**Richard:** Well, but I was very naïve. And I was convinced that I could convince them that this was the cooler version of the movie. And they were just like, “No, we want to make a PG-rated pretty faithful adaptation of this best-selling book. We have Andrew Davis directing. You’re insane. Please sign this contract. We’re not going to pay you anymore money. We respect you. We like you. But we’re moving on in a different direction.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Richard:** And I was heartbroken. But then I got the call, you know, we were kind of under the impression that Donnie Darko as a script was just sort of this great writing sample and it was sort of dead as a potential movie due to my stubborn refusal to let anyone else direct it.

**John:** Now, at this point had you — you said you were going to be directing this, but had you come up with the budget? Had you come up with the schedule? Had you come up with a production plan for how you could do it?

**Richard:** We had actually taken a meeting with Paramount Classics at the time. And they were making movies very, very inexpensively, like the under $2 million kind of budget range. And we had talked about trying to do it for like $1.5 million to $2 million, but given the ambition of the story, you know, we have time portals and big set pieces, and school assemblies, and a jet engine smashing through a house. It was very ambitious. People were saying we needed $10 million. And we honestly — with the different kind of producers and line producers we had talked to throughout the process. And Sean McKittrick was sort of coming in with a number about $4.5 million that we thought was the bare bones to really achieve the vision.

That to do it for less than that would really be so much of a compromise. You know, sometimes there’s that threshold where you realize it’s better to just hold off and put the movie back on — put the script back on the shelf as opposed to making it at a budget where you are going to compromise what’s really essentially to the story.

**Craig:** Right.

**Richard:** And we didn’t want to monkey with it in that way. And then all of a sudden the script had been sort of digested by the entire town that people were still talking about it, like, “What’s going on with that? Will he sell it? Will he finally just let someone else take it over?” And there was a lot of discussion — “Why do you need it to be set in 1988? Just set it in present day and make it more of a horror film.” And all these kind of things, you know. “Get rid of the Asian girl. You don’t need her.”

And all these kinds of things that are sort of these voices sort of beating me down a little bit. But then we got word that Jason Schwartzman had read the script and really loved it and was interested in meeting.

And I went and met with him and he attached himself to play Donnie. And all of a sudden the script had all this new legitimacy and that I was legitimized by Jason’s attachment.

**John:** So, with one actor who at that point was A-list-ish —

**Richard:** He was coming off of Rushmore.

**Craig:** He was kind of hot. He was hot.

**John:** He was hot at the moment, so therefore there was an extra element that made it seem producible.

**Craig:** Right, like Jason Schwartzman now makes you the new Wes Anderson.

**Richard:** Well, it was this wonderful thing. And then we got word from my agent that Nancy Juvonen had read the script. Nancy who is Drew Barrymore’s producing partner at Flower Films. And she wanted to meet with me. So, I was like, wow, this is great. And Sean and I went to the set of Charlie’s Angels at LA Center Studios in Downtown LA.

**Craig:** Back to John August.

**John:** Where we were shooting it.

**Richard:** And I might have actually, maybe I met you.

**John:** We may have crossed paths there with trailers and all that stuff.

**Richard:** I walked up to Drew’s trailer and lo and behold there was Cameron Diaz right outside of Drew’s trailer. And they were goofing around. I was briefly introduced to her and obviously our paths would converge later in life. But went into Drew’s trailer and Nancy was there and we had this wonderful discussion. And Drew was still finishing the script and paging through it. And I was like, listen, we would love for you to play the English teacher, Mrs. Pomeroy.

And she’s like, “I would love for my company to produce this with you and we could partner on this project.” And I said absolutely. It was really a very quick marriage, so to speak. And then with Drew Barrymore and Jason Schwartzman, we got an offer from a company called Pandora, a European finance company at the American Film Market. I think in November of 1999 they made an offer for $4.5 million. And Drew was the kind of galvanizing foreign sales actor to get us to that number.

**John:** Absolutely. Drew was a very marketable star at that point.

**Richard:** Yes.

**John:** People wanted to make a movie, so a small movie with Drew Barrymore at AFM — pretty easy sell.

**Richard:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** So, with this package sort of put together, so Jason Schwartzman, Drew Barrymore, you to direct, how long did it then take to actually start rolling cameras?

**Richard:** Well, we were able to kind of get the financing closed, I think, going into the beginning of 2000. And all of a sudden Jason had a scheduling conflict with another movie and was going to have to back out at the last minute. And we were gearing towards a summer production start because Drew had a window, a one-week window, right before she was going to do a Penny Marshall film called Riding in Cars with Boys.

So, we had that one-week with Drew to get our act together or we were going to lose her, or we weren’t going to get the movie made. And when Jason had to back out it was this horrifying weekend where, oh no, is Drew going to back out as well? And is this all going to collapse? Is this going to undermine my credibility or something? And it was — Jason was very apologetic and it was just an unfortunate circumstance.

And Drew left this wonderful message on my answering machine. This is back in the day — in the year 2000 when we still had answering machines. And she left me this long wonderful message saying, “We’re going to figure this out. We’re going to find another great actor. I’m in this for you, and the script, and I believe in you.” And she was really wonderful.

And so we started meeting with some different actors to play Donnie, and I went to Drew’s office and met with this kid named Jake Gyllenhaal, who was 19 years old, and had done October Sky, and was kind of at Columbia, segueing out of Columbia after two years, and was going to get back into acting. And I basically gave him the part on the spot.

**John:** Great. Jake Gyllenhaal very much feels like the movie star version of you. I mean, did you notice that when you cast him?

**Richard:** I never thought of it that way, but then as we were shooting the film on our breakneck 28-day schedule, Jake confided in me about halfway through, he was like, “You know I’m kind of mimicking you. You know that, right?” And I was like, oh, okay, I don’t know how I feel about that, but I guess it’s working.

**Craig:** What part of him was mimicking you? Because he has different moves in the movie.

**Richard:** I don’t know. I think — I may be too detached from myself or too much time has passed, but I don’t know. I think there’s a lot of —

**Craig:** I think I know.

**John:** I know exactly what it is, too. Craig, you can say it first, and then I’ll say what I think it is.

**Craig:** All right. So, you know when I say something to you, Richard Kelly, I’ll say, “Ah, Richard Kelly, look how handsome you are.” And then you kind of look down and you’re like, huh, and you get that little goofy look. It’s the same look that Jake does every time he slips into his fugue state and starts talking to Frank. That funky little grin and that semi-sinister look in his eyes — I’m telling you, that’s it man, right there.

**John:** I was going to say the same thing about the eye contact thing, because it’s a thing I also noticed from all the photos in Austin is that you never quite look in the lens of the camera. And so you’re always like a little bit off to the edge of it, which I feel very much is a Donnie Darko thing. So, I can see that being a… — It’s fine, it works.

**Richard:** Yeah, it’s not intentional. It’s just maybe —

**John:** I also think the relationship between a director and the actor, especially a writer-director and an actor, can be that kind of thing. Like Ryan Reynolds basically plays me in the middle section of The Nines. And it was fine. He owned up to it and I said this is fine. And the cast and crew recognized he was doing it. It was appropriate for that.

**Richard:** Yeah, I mean, it all kind of goes back to you say that your high school education or even prior to your high school education sometimes it really informs a greater part of your life, for better or for worse, and it was like my seventh grade English teacher, Mr. Jordan, who taught us Watership Down, the book that Drew Barrymore teaches in the film. And his whole mantra was “write what you know.”

It sounds very simple, and it sounds like a cliché, but it’s really the personal stuff that ends up bleeding through when you’re writing. When you work with an actor they can kind of detect the truth from the author and they can sort of — it bleeds through into the performance somehow in everything.

**Craig:** Right.

**Richard:** So, sometimes it’s a virtue of the actor’s detective work.

**Craig:** Well, it’s interesting also that when you talk about writing what you know, you’re very smartly talking about writing what you know emotionally. You don’t know what it’s like to have an airplane engine drop on you while you’re sleeping, or to go through a time portal, or to talk to a rabbit that is, in fact, the time image of a boy you kill. It’s — spoiler, sorry. It’s our emotional lives that when we talk about writing what we know, that’s what we’re talking about.

I think a lot of people misunderstand the advice and they write very boring scripts about their actual day. I just hope people don’t do that. [laughs] Don’t do that.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s most crucial that you’re able to write in a way that’s emotionally true to how you would feel in that circumstance. And so you feel that it’s… — You’re writing yourself in these characters so that they’re responding in ways that you would respond to these situations — these absurd situations — that you sort of are creating for these characters.

Now, so fast forward through production. It was 28 days, I think?

**Richard:** It was 28 days in the late summer of 2000. Shot in and around the greater Los Angeles area, Long Beach, Burbank, out in the Calabasas Ranch area and then the San Angelo, across the mountains. It was just sort of approximating a Virginia idyllic suburban town in the greater Los Angeles area by virtue of composite.

**John:** Great. And why did you choose Los Angeles? It was for ease of actors mostly?

**Richard:** It was a combination of ease of actors. And there was a commercial strike happening, I believe, in the summer of 2000 which made a lot of crew available to work at low rates. And during the summer when everyone’s kids are out of school, a lot of people in the below the line world, they want to stay in town. They want to shoot in Los Angeles.

And if they’re taking a pay cut to be with their kids, as opposed to going to Vancouver or Toronto where a lot of the runaway production was happening, we were able to get a big crew for cheap. And it made sense to do it in LA as opposed to going off to Toronto which a lot of people were doing at the time.

**Craig:** I have a question about that’s I guess about how at the origin of this, at the beginning of Donnie Darko, you’re writing a movie, and when we write a movie normally the movie is designed to be the sum total of what we’re presenting to the audience artistically. What’s interesting about Donnie Darko, among other things, is that it was ahead of its time not only when it came out. I think it’s actually currently still ahead of its time in this aspect. That the movie isn’t the total picture.

You wrote a book that appears in a movie that is almost required, really, to complete the experience of the movie. Was that something that you did intentionally, or did you write the movie and then say, “You know, there’s this other part of this. There’s a website and a book and an additional amount of experience that’s required to augment the experience of watching the movie.”

**Richard:** There’s this expression called “scope creep” which is my dad is a scientist and worked at NASA for many years. It’s when the scope of a project continues to creep outward. And you don’t realize it’s happening. That’s my issue with all of my projects. They’re always becoming bigger and longer than can be contained within the sort of two-hour format.

And the book that is written by Roberta Sparrow, Grandma Death, in the story is called The Philosophy of Time Travel. And Donnie as a character is reading it and obsessing over it. And as a writer, and as the sort of avatar for Donnie, or vice versa, I was wanting to know what was in that book. And I was obsessed with completing it. And I had kind of rough draft sketches of it coming into my head as I was directing the film. And then as we were editing the film I went and wrote out all the specific chapter titles and some of the essential pages from The Philosophy of Time Travel.

And as we were trying to edit the film down it was clear that that kind of stuff wasn’t going to ever make it into a film, a version of the film that would run lower than two hours. So, it was something that I said, “Let’s put it on the website. Let’s have it be a tangential piece of information.”

I’ve kind of really gravitated towards that kind of thing in all of my films because it’s an overflow of information, but it’s also I guess they call it transmedia is what the word for it is now. And so it became sort of a transmedia thing with this elaborate website that we built with this company in London. And it did become more kind of essential information and I kind of worked it into the director’s cut of the film years later.

But, again, it’s scope creep.

**Craig:** But it’s interesting to me because in order — I didn’t quite understand, and this is going to lead into another question, I didn’t quite understand if there was a certainty to the movie until I read that additional material and then I thought to myself, okay, there is a certainty to this. There is an answer to this movie in a sense. Not complete. No movie gives you a complete answer, but there is at least a guided solution to what you’re seeing and what was intended here.

But you seem to be saying that you didn’t even quite have that solution yourself until you were in post-production, which is fascinating to me, because it’s almost like you built a very interesting puzzle box, but you didn’t quite know how to solve it yourself until the very end.

**Richard:** Well, I think the solving process or the completion process really does go through the editing. The writing process continues through editing. And even when you do reshoots. We did do one additional reshoot. It’s not a reshoot, because that implies that you —

**Craig:** Screwed up a scene.

**Richard:** You screwed up and you redid it. It was an additional — it was one additional day of photography we did after the Sundance premiere of the film which was James Duval waking up at the end as part of all the characters waking up from the tangent universe and from the dream experience that they had. Whether it was a communal dream or an actual alternate universe is left up to the gods to explain, because no one can ever answer that question.

But, the studio that bought the film six months after its sort of disastrous Sundance premiere was like, “We really wish there was a shot of Frank alive waking up at the end so the audience understands that he’s still alive and he was part of that experience.” And I’m like, oh wow, I wish I could have shot that.

So, we actually went to a little stage in Burbank and set up a little set and got the cameras and we shot James Duval waking up with those drawings on the easel…

**Craig:** Right. And touching his eye…

**Richard:** Touching his eye.

**Craig:** Which was a great little moment.

Well, let me ask you this question. What happened at Sundance? [laughs] What happened there? How did it make you feel? And how do you feel about it now?

**Richard:** You know, everything happens for a reason. And that was the journey that this film was meant to take. But, it was a situation where at Sundance 2001 we had this huge amount of hype going into the festival. A $4.5 million budget was relatively large for a Sundance film at that time, even for now it’s a very healthy budget. And the film looked like it cost a lot more than that.

And we had big movie stars. And it had time portals. And it had all of these sort of components where you read the summary in the Sundance program and you’re like, “What in the hell is this?” There was just this big curiosity factor. And we were also the first film officially in Sundance competition history to have digital effects.

**Craig:** Ah, interesting.

**Richard:** And so immediately that was a little bit of a, you know —

**Craig:** Oh, so you guys were like sellouts all of a sudden.

**John:** Yeah.

**Richard:** [laughs] It was a very huge showing at the first Eccles screening and everyone was there. All of the buyers. Everyone, you know. Harvey Weinstein was there wearing a Donnie Darko hat.

**Craig:** Oh, god! Harvey! What the hell?

**Richard:** Well, you know, it was overwhelming. And when the credits rolled at the end it was just — there were applause from plenty of people who loved it, but a whole lot more people who were just freaked out, and disturbed, and —

**Craig:** Who were just, WTF? [laughs]

**Richard:** Yeah. It was just like, did that guy just kill himself? Did your hero just commit suicide?

**Craig:** Right.

**Richard:** And then it ends, you know. “Whoa! I don’t know how comfortable I am with this.” It was a shell-shocked reaction and it was not a movie that made people feel good as they left at the Eccles Theater. So, immediately all the buyers sort of backed away very quickly. And it was kind of like we had the Ebola Virus. At that time movies would sell very quickly or they wouldn’t.

**Craig:** Right.

**Richard:** Now, just everyone knows that sometimes it takes a month, two months to sell, and it’s okay because the market has changed. But that was the time where everyone pounced or they dropkicked the movie out into the mountains. So, we got dropkicked.

**Craig:** You got dropkicked into the mountains. I mean, obviously the story ends well. There is an interesting, I don’t know if there is a lesson to be taken from experiences like that, because I think every experience is different. But I wonder do you walk around with a little bit more confidence knowing that the last time people kicked you into the mountain they were wrong. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I can’t tell.

**Richard:** Well, you know, listen. I take everything with a grain of salt. And I look at any struggle or mountain that had to be overcome as just a part of the process and kind of a learning experience. And I just try to take all the knowledge and absorb it and continue to just understand that everything is a process and to be really strategic and to try to just hone my filmmaking in a manner that things get easier.

I remember I asked Tony Scott when we were working on Domino, I was like, “Tony, does it get easier with each film?”

And he was like, “Oh, no. Rich, it gets harder.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Richard:** And it was sad to hear that, but he said it with a grin. He said it with a grin of a man who absolutely loves to make films, more than life itself. But he was kind of just conceding that it can get more difficult. And, I don’t know —

**Craig:** And it did get more difficult for you in a sense.

**Richard:** Well, I mean, listen, there are always new challenges, but I think a lot of it is you sometimes can design your own difficulty without realizing it. Or, you can manifest it. And I think it’s learning how not to do that and it’s learning how to just sort of figure out how to make concessions or collaborations or judgment calls that will just help make the process easier, but still get what you want.

**John:** I look at your career and I look at Rian Johnson’s career, because you are both writer-directors who try to make their own films and try to do their own things. And each one is really challenging, and difficult, and has very specific worlds built around sort of how it all sort of fits together.

One of the things Rian has done though is he’s gone off and directed TV, which is the chance to practice that craft of directing independently of having to have the onus of a movie. Has that been interesting to you? Have you considered doing television? To do your own show or someone else’s show?

**Richard:** I’ve kind of, you know, I’ve kind of flirted a little bit with the idea of television here and there. And it’s something that I absolutely want to do at some point. But I’ve been so consumed, particularly in the past three years with writing feature screenplays. I’ve just been on a writing binge for about three years now.

**Craig:** For yourself or…?

**Richard:** For myself. For myself. For purely selfish purposes. [laughs] But in a way that I’ve just been trying to actually refine my craft and write a lot of different scripts in various different genres, places where people wouldn’t think I’d be able to, I’ve gone there. People want to, again, always put you in a box or a category, so I’ve spent the past three years writing a whole bunch of different kinds of films that no one would expect from me.

And I think with television it’s more of like you can create your own show, or you can come in and direct a pilot, or you can come in and direct an episode the way Rian did brilliantly with Breaking Bad, which is we all know now one of the great shows in the history of the medium. And I think Rian is smart, and savvy, and talented enough to have kind of figured that out early on and was able to go in and really do some wonderful work.

And I admire him for doing it. And I’m envious of him for getting to work in that series because it’s so amazing. So, as for me in television, I think I just want to get one more feature under my belt and then kind of see how the timing works out and whether — you know, how I can kind of really make a mark in television in a meaningful way where I don’t feel like I’m just sort of directing traffic or just getting a paycheck.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Richard:** I want to do it for the right reasons. And I want to really be — I’m one of those people, I don’t know how to fake something. I’m really idealistic and probably to a fault in a lot of ways where I just want to make sure I have authorship of it.

But, again, sometimes you don’t have to have complete authorship of something for it to be fulfilling. You can really come in and be a partner, or be a —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Let’s talk about the places you could work right now. Because it seems like all, my recollection, all three of your films have been for different places and for sort of newer places. So, this first place was Pandora who put up the money for Donnie Darko. Who did Southland Tales?

**Richard:** Southland Tales was a combination of about eight different equity sources. Universal International was the foreign investor, along with Wild Bunch who had France. And I’ve worked with them also on The Box, my next film. And then Sony bought the film for domestic rights. And then Samuel Goldwyn distributed in a partnership with Sony. So, it was a —

**John:** Yeah. They have sort of this weird relationship between them.

**Richard:** Yeah. It was like a Trivial Pursuit pie piece of eight different — so, I think there were lots of people involved with Southland Tales because it was such a complex, elaborate film. A $17.5 million budget film. So, that was a big Frankenstein conglomeration of people. And then The Box was a company called Media Rights Capital.

**John:** Which is also equity.

**Richard:** Which is also equity.

**Craig:** Right. They’re associated with William Morris Endeavor.

**Richard:** Yes. And they partnered with Radar Pictures, owned and operated by Ted Field. And those two entities partnered with Warner Bros. Pictures who took domestic on the film. So, it was essentially an equity-funded film with domestic distribution in place before we started shooting.

So, it was kind of a studio film in a lot of ways, but most studio films today have equity from an outside source. It’s more of a distribution P&A deal. But then they’re giving notes on the script and they’re approving the wardrobe and the hair for the actors. And micromanaging as they’re prone to do. But that’s the reality of the business and you’ve got to do it.

**Craig:** Well, don’t you think that there is a certain, if you’re investing money in a Richard Kelly movie, at some point I assume they all look at each other and say, “Well, we could attempt to do the thing we normally do, but it’s not going to work because Richard Kelly.”

**Richard:** Well, you know, the one thing that I’m proud of with all my movies is I put the money on the screen. There is always a production value that surpasses the budget in terms of what people think it costs and what it really costs. So, I always put the money on the screen. But I also end up shooting tons of scenes that don’t make it into the movie. And I always end up with like 45 minutes of deleted scenes.

And it becomes really difficult to cut the movie down to under two hours. And that’s one of the things that I’ve learned, particularly in the writing process, and I’m going through it right now on a project where I’m just like I’m not going to have any deleted scenes. I’m literally going to have —

**Craig:** Well, good for you. That’s a very good goal to have.

**Richard:** Yeah. I’m going to have nothing in the script that isn’t absolutely necessary and it’s scope creep.

**John:** It is scope creep.

**Craig:** It is scope creep.

**John:** We’ve talked about Gravity a lot on the podcast recently. Craig, did you finally see Gravity?

**Craig:** Uh, what?

**John:** [laughs] Craig still has not seen Gravity.

**Craig:** I saw Walter Mitty.

**John:** Well, very good. I’m proud of you.

**Craig:** Can we talk about that? [laughs] I saw that.

**John:** You cannot talk about that. We can talk about Gravity for one second because Walter Mitty, I suspect, probably has some scope creep, but Gravity has no scope creep. That is a very lean movie. And it’s one of the things I think is actually interesting about making movies for the big screen versus making a TV series. Because I look at these situations where you have — you’ve built this entire world, this entire universe. You clearly could have built a whole series of Donnie Darko and sort of what that universe is.

And Donnie Darko might also have been fantastic as a series, or as a limited series, or that kind of thing. Or the way American Horror Story is, those limited series where it makes that run through.

**Craig:** Definitely true for Southland Tales, for sure.

**John:** Oh my god, Southland Tales feel like it’s —

**Craig:** It feels like it’s a series that got sort of compressed down.

**Richard:** Yeah. Yeah. I mean, ultimately I still want to do an animated prequel to Southland Tales and a final kind of cut of it that would be the size of like a limited run miniseries, you know. But, you’re right, because I was doing transmedia with graphic novel prequels and my mind was overflowing in the scope creep sense of feature film evolving into transmedia. And again, we’re now in this sort of new world of the internet, Netflix limited run series that sort of are bridging between film and television in a lot of ways.

**John:** But to me it just sounds like J.J. Abrams in terms of ambition but you don’t have Bad Robot behind you. You don’t have 100 really talented elves to do all the other stuff that could do that thing. And so in order to up your sort of productivity if you want to do those kind of things, maybe you need more elves?

**Richard:** Yeah, yeah, I think everyone could use more elves. I think if anything I’ve been the elf storing away all the Christmas gifts for the past three years and just really getting a lot of material ready so that my hope is that starting next year that I’m kind of back behind the camera and I’ll have a pipeline where I can be working consistently at different budget levels, whether it’s a feature film that costs well under $10 million, or a feature film that costs well over $10 million and in different degrees. That hopefully there’s a way to just continue working with a consistency because, you know, it is a situation where I feel like I’m a director first and foremost and a writer in the secondary position.

But I’ve been doing so much writing over the past three years that I finally feel like, okay, I’m starting to finally feel like a real screenwriter. And now I’m kind of really ready to go enter the second act of my directing career I guess. And I’m always just trying to get better and not be complacent.

**Craig:** You have an interesting challenge because on the one hand I think it’s great that you’ve made the reduction of scope creep a goal. And I love that you’re saying my goal is to not direct a deleted scene. That should be every director’s goal. I completely agree.

On the other hand, what makes you unique and what is part of what is attractive about your work to your fans is the scope creep. It’s a funny thing. How do you become a better Richard Kelly but still be Richard Kelly?

**Richard:** Well, I think it is, you know —

**Craig:** Did I just freak you out? I just freaked you out, didn’t I?

**Richard:** A little bit. [laughs] Because I’m going through that right now. I honestly am. But I believe that there’s a way to get it all within a framework of the two-hour timeline and still have the complexity and the density — sometimes people are afraid of the word density because it can read as something that’s cumbersome or medicinal or hard to get through or impenetrable, which are adjectives often used to describe my work.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Richard:** [laughs] But when I say density I like to think of films where you can watch them over, and over, and over again and see new ideas, and see new themes, and laugh at different nuances. And I’m just trying to make sure to hold onto that, but to make sure that it’s — I’m not just going to have a 2 hour 45 minute cut of the film, you know.

**John:** It’s interesting what you say about density because a thing I’ve noticed in some films is that you recognize that characters have relationships before that scene started, which is great. But sometimes they’re referencing things that are not germane to the scene and therefore it’s pulling you out of the scene that you’re currently in. And it’s a thing I try to always be mindful of is the audience only has the information about what they’re seeing in front of them.

So, you want them to believe these characters have relationships and they existed before they walked on screen. You can’t have them be so fascinated or distracted by what those things could be that they’re not paying attention to what’s happening there right in front of them.

You start to lose the audience’s confidence in your ability to tell a story. And it’s such a tough balance. And I think TV gets away with it more because you just have more time and more hours. And you can have that extra scene to establish how Tyrion got into that situation.

**Richard:** I was going to say the wonderful thing about a lot of TV is you look at a brilliant episode of Mad Men, or Breaking Bad, or some of our greatest shows and you think some of the best scenes might have ended up being deleted scenes in movies, you know.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** No question.

**Richard:** Because there’s the time to breathe and to see the character doing something that might seem incidental or not really necessary to the main through line of the story but it’s very fascinating stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah, David Benioff and Dan Weiss ran into a big problem on their first season of Game of Thrones because they had never done television before and they were short. They just didn’t have enough episode. A lot of the episodes were running short. And HBO basically said you kind of need to give us at least 50 some minutes here. You can’t give us a 42-minute episode.

So, they went back and just added scenes. They were pre-deleted scenes. [laughs] They weren’t even scenes that they felt were necessary to begin with. Now they’re adding them in to just fill time. And some of them are the best scenes in the series. They actually learned a great lesson from that. In television sometimes these quite moments where these characters — you can afford them in television. And we can’t necessarily in film.

And so I think it’s a great thing that you’re addressing it. And I guess for folks who are listening there is a great lesson for all of us that you go and you make a movie like Donnie Darko and it’s a cultural touchstone and the thought of changing even a frame of it would make many, many people of that generation shriek, of a certain generation shriek.

But the person who created it continues this kind of endless self-evaluation and this self-recreation, which I think is amazing.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Did I freak you out again, Richard? Are you all right?

**Richard:** I’m constantly freaked out, you know, by life. So, you know.

**John:** Craig, you didn’t learn that at Austin Film Festival? He’s always a little bit nervous. And it’s often because you’re telling Leigh Whannell to like figure out ways to kill Richard.

**Craig:** Well.

**John:** That was a long [crosstalk].

**Craig:** Killing Richard Kelly is, for whatever reason, it’s just more entertaining to consider than killing, I don’t know, other people.

**Richard:** [laughs]

**Craig:** It’s more of a challenge. I feel like he would fight back really hard.

**Richard:** I hope none of the listeners of this podcast decide to follow through.

**Craig:** Yeah, don’t kill Richard Kelly. By the way, don’t kill him if for no other reason than he’s mine to kill.

**John:** Ha!

**Craig:** My quarry.

**John:** Now, Richard, a thing we do on our shows every week is a One Cool Thing and I should have warned you about this ahead of time. So, you can think about it while we do things. You actually mentioned one of them at the Black List party. You sent me an email about it which could potentially be a great One Cool Thing. Do you remember what that was?

**Richard:** Oh god, what was the email?

**John:** That science foundation thing?

**Richard:** Oh, yes, yes.

**John:** So, when we get around maybe that can be your One Cool Thing. Craig, do you want to start? Should I start?

**Craig:** Well, you have a big one. I think you should go last. Mine is really easy. Someone tweeted this to me and I jumped on it and then people continued to tweet it to me as if I didn’t know, which is kind of exciting. It means that I’m a certain kind of person that likes a certain kind of thing and everyone is figuring it out.

It’s this thing called Coin and it doesn’t exist yet. This company is a startup company and they’re taking preorders, but it’s just one of those things like the Nest where I went, oh cool — if that works it would be great. So, we all have a bunch of credit cards and debit cards in our wallet, and I don’t like having lots of things in my wallet. I’m constantly going through and getting rid of stuff.

So, they came up with this thing called Coin. It’s the size of a credit card but it is electronic. It syncs up with your phone over Bluetooth, secure Bluetooth, and you essentially scan your cards into your phone with one of those little scanny things that they send you. And then take a picture of your credit cards. And then it pipes all that information and syncs it into the one coin card. And then there’s like a little touch thing on the back of it that lets you select which card you want to use at any given point. And it has all of your cards on one card.

I don’t even have that many cards and I got so excited about this. So, anyway. That’s my One Cool Thing. Doesn’t yet exist. As you point out, most of my One Cool Things are things I haven’t actually experienced, but I want to.

**John:** We will put a link to that in the show notes along with the video that Adam Lisagor did showing it. It’s a very clever idea. Essentially, it looks like a credit card but it can change out its stripe. You just push a little button and it changes what the stripe is. And so when you run it through whatever little machine it will show up as a different card.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s a very clever idea.

**Richard:** Interesting, yes.

**Craig:** Yes, Richard Kelly. Now, what is your One Cool Thing?

**Richard:** My One Cool Thing is something called the Science and Entertainment Exchange.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**Richard:** The Science and Entertainment Exchange is a organization that puts on a monthly symposium for screenwriters and producers and anyone who is interested in really, really cutting edge scientific discourse. And a symposium of probably an audience of about 100 people that are in attendance with a very elaborate audio visual presentation. And at least three to four very high level scientific guests there to discuss an issue and as it might relate to your storytelling.

**John:** So, what are some recent examples?

**Richard:** Some recent examples, there was one held at the DGA Theater on bioethics. And it was this wonderful discussion of bioethics with four prominent scientists and John Spaihts who is a screenwriter who wrote Prometheus and the upcoming Passengers was the moderator of the event. And it was just a discussion of different bioethical issues facing our world, whether it’s organ donation or stem cell research or something to do with — there’s a huge flu outbreak and there’s only ten respirators left in the hospital. And when it comes down the last respirator there’s a 14-year-old girl and a 63-year-old man.

**Craig:** Girl!

**Richard:** You have to give it to one of them.

**Craig:** Girl. Give it to the girl!

**Richard:** What is more ethical? And then they have everyone text message their answer up to the big screen, like who should get the respirator. And then they put another wrinkle into it. They say, “Well, the little girl has this terminal disease and the man has created, the 65-year-old man has created some of the most seminal works of fiction in the world and has a Nobel Prize for literature.”

**Craig:** Nah, give it to the girl.

**John:** His best days are behind him.

**Craig:** She’s the girl, I mean, give it to the girl.

**Richard:** They keep adjusting the ethical dilemma and everyone re-text messages their answer. And you see how the data is changing and where people are in terms of their perception. You know, that’s only the beginning, but it’s just this really fascinating discussion. And then a month later there was an FBI agent there to host a symposium on psychopaths and the science of psychopathy. And she was like a modern day Clarice Starling. She’s like the real deal. And she was giving you all the — this audio/visual presentation about serial killers and their profile and their disposition and their behavioral habits and the way that they blend into the world.

And it’s this really disturbing and fascinating discussion of psychopaths. It’s just really great use of science and how to implement science into your work with these amazing people that you probably wouldn’t get to meet in this kind of environment in everyday life.

**Craig:** That is cool. I would have enjoyed being at a seminar on psychopaths and watch — I would like to watch you, Richard Kelly, watching the lady talk about psychopaths.

**John:** Well, Craig, you would find it very helpful because like, oh man, they’re onto me for these reasons so therefore I’m going to have to change up my game completely.

**Craig:** No, psychopaths never worry about being caught because they’re — not that I would know, but Richard Kelly —

**John:** Oh, that’s right.

**Craig:** Richard Kelly and I can have a side discussion about what it means to be a total sociopath.

**Richard:** They have a lack of empathy.

**Craig:** Yes. A total lack.

**Richard:** That’s the big thing. It’s very disturbing.

**John:** Yes, it can be quite disturbing. So, my One Cool Thing is actually an app. It’s an app called Hotel Tonight which is an iPhone app and it’s incredibly useful if you find yourself in a city without a hotel room. So, essentially at noon every day across the nation — noon locally every day across the nation, it goes online and you can find cheaper hotel rooms for whatever city you’re in.

And so last weekend I found myself in New York City and I needed a room. And so I went to it. It was actually very smart, and good, and easy to use. It’s much faster than going through Expedia and everything else.

**Craig:** What’s it called again?

**John:** Hotel Tonight.

**Craig:** Hotel Tonight. I usually use Grindr when I need a room in New York.

**Richard:** [laughs]

**John:** That’s another effective way to find it. But then you have to share a bed, or a couch, or something.

**Craig:** Eh.

**John:** And you never know.

**Craig:** It’s cheap.

**John:** There could be needles or other drugs involved.

**Craig:** There usually are.

**John:** A little party and play for you.

So, Hotel Tonight was the app. And so the reason why I found myself in New York is sort of the bigger story. Last week on Thursday I got the call from the producers saying, “We thought we could go through the spring with Big Fish, and we’re only going to be able to go to December 29. And so we need to tell the cast because we want to tell the cast before the cast finds out from somebody else.”

And so I had to sort of fly secretly to New York so to not warn anybody that this was happening. So, I had to get there, get in early at night, use the Hotel Tonight to get the room.

And so I showed up at the Neil Simon Theater and it was actually really happy to see everybody there because it was our Sunday matinee, so it’s 3pm. So, I show up there a little bit early. I deliberately wore all black so I could sit back with the orchestra. And so I got to see the whole show with the orchestra. And I got to sort of hug everybody and be happy and be so excited to sort of join the whole cast.

And just be the cheerful like “I’m just here to support you guys” kind of look because I didn’t want anyone to be tipped off before going out on stage that there was bad news coming.

So, what happens, this is, you know, I didn’t want to miss this because it was the end of this part of the journey, but it was also… — I don’t know. I think as a writer you — at a certain point you start to accumulate experiences. And I didn’t want to not know what this felt like and just to sort of not know what it felt like for this thing to have an end date to it.

So, at the end of the matinee, current comes down, we keep everybody on stage and the producers break the news. And it was surprise, and heartbreak, and shock because we’ve been selling out all the shows and there was a standing ovation every night. So, it was from their perspective like well how could this possibly happen.

And you don’t go into full explanations there. I won’t go into full explanations on the podcast. But essentially we knew how much money we were making week by week in November. And that was enough for us to be turning a small profit. But, in February, the numbers will naturally go down because —

**Craig:** It’s a dead zone.

**John:** Broadway is very — it’s a dead zone. Broadway is very seasonal. So, we knew that we’d be about 30% lower than that in February. And at 30% lower than that we wouldn’t be profitable. We wouldn’t be able to keep the show running in February.

And so because of that, the theater does the same math and they say, “You’re not going to be able to hold onto the theater come February. We want you out sooner.” So, it becomes this whole negotiation about when do you leave the theater, how it’s all going to happen.

This was a chance to make our money through the holidays, make as much for everybody as we can make it, and sort of know when we’re ending.

So, my function with seeing everybody on stage was to sort of say, “You’re awesome. We’re incredibly thankful to have this group with us to make the first version of Big Fish.” There will be more versions of Big Fish. And coming out of this process we will be able to license the show and we’ll have future productions of it because we had this first Broadway production.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Also, I could remind people that this wasn’t the end. It was the middle. And it’s that weird thing where we still have seven weeks left. And so people can still come see the show. And we will probably sell a lot more tickets because the end is —

**Craig:** Right. There’s a limited supply now of shows.

**John:** But the whole experience of this part of it reminds me of as we talked about the show on the podcast, it’s a little bit like film in that you’re always working on one thing. There’s one project you’re working on. And every night you’re working on making this one thing, unlike TV where you’re doing different episodes.

But it’s like TV in the sense that it’s just a continual process. And your ticket sales are sort of like ratings in a way. And so if your ratings fall below a certain level the network, or in this case the theater, kind of cancels you.

But it’s also like a business. It’s like that little startup. And this process of closing down is much more like a startup, like a tech startup that sort of run out of money and that you have to, you know, you’re relying on your weekly cash flow in order to pay for your marketing or pay for all of these things. And at a certain place the numbers just won’t work out. And they won’t work out for every show. Like every show will close. The Book of Mormon will probably close at some point in 30 years…

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Because the numbers won’t work out. And so everything has an end. It also reminded me of sort of this sense of expectation in that one of the things that I think is so smart about what we’re doing in TV right now are those limited series where you know there’s ten episodes. And if there’s another block of ten episodes, great. But it’s designed to be ten episodes long.

And if we had come into Big Fish saying like, “We’re going to run for 12 weeks through December 29,” that would have been awesome. But it’s that sense of the sort of moving goal lines, like you never know when you’re really going to end, that you sort of — you can always kind of pull failure out of success.

**Craig:** Well, you know —

**John:** Things in my head.

**Craig:** I have to say, I mean, obviously I was upset when I heard the news. And upset for both the people in the show, and poor Ryan the Giant. He seemed to take it very hard. And everybody that was involved in the show seemed to really love being a part of it. And obviously meeting Andrew and, of course, following your story. I mean, it was heartbreaking in a sense.

But, you did it. I mean, you mounted a Broadway musical. It ran. You got some terrific reviews. The audience was in tears and they were applauding. And it happened. And the fact that there is a certain amount of external success that needs to occur financially in order to make it happen for a long amount of time is rough and this is life.

But, I just want to thank you for kind of taking us along on the journey with you because we’ve been doing this now for awhile. And I’m starting to realize that we’re chronicling our lives on this thing to some extent.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And, you know, I’ve certainly had my dark night of the soul when every critic in America punched me in the mouth, again, last February. And so I know that this is hard, and it’s emotional, and it’s difficult because we unfortunately must repeatedly open ourselves up to pain every time we open ourselves up to care about what we do.

But, the pain will subside and the achievement is permanent, which I think is wonderful.

**John:** And it’s one of the reasons why it was great to have Richard here on the episode this week is that Donnie Darko is a film that went through those sort of highs and lows, where you had the experience of everyone loving your script, and then the challenge of actually trying to get it made. And then the elation of getting it made. And then the challenge of the first reaction at Sundance and not knowing how it was going to be perceived years later.

Things never really end. They never really stop. And Donnie Darko is a thing that that keeps going.

Go was a movie that I loved, my very first movie that we had so much excitement and enthusiasm but it hugely underperformed. And yet I’m so grateful that it’s a thing I got to do.

And so that’s one of the sort of general lessons to take about all the work we do is you were able to make something. You were able to create something that exists in the world because of your efforts. And that’s something not a lot of people can say.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And so it’s a luxury of what we get to do.

**Richard:** Absolutely. In the end, also you mentioned time travel at the beginning. The lesson is that time destroys everything, but time also heals everything.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**Richard:** I don’t know what the message of that is.

**Craig:** Geez, you just blew my freaking mind, Richard Kelly!

**Richard:** Destruction is a form of creation.

**John:** I agree with you there.

**Richard:** [laughs]

**John:** Wow, this guy is deep —

**Craig:** God, Richard Kelly.

**John:** It got deep in the middle, too.

**Craig:** Look how Richard Kelly can do stuff. He’s so amazing. I feel like he needs to go. [laughs] I just have to take care of this on the side.

**John:** Richard, thank you so much for being our guest on the episode.

**Richard:** Thanks for having me.

**Craig:** Richard Kelly, you’re the best man. Thank you so much for doing this.

**Richard:** All right. Thank you, Craig. Thank you, John.

**John:** If you want to write a question or talk to me or Craig, on Twitter I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Richard, what are you on Twitter?

**Richard:** I am @jrichardkelly.

**John:** So, people can tweet you if they have questions about things?

**Richard:** Absolutely.

**John:** If you have longer questions for me or Craig, the best address is ask@johnaugust.com. That is where we will gather up questions so we can do Craig’s favorite kind of episode, the one he doesn’t have to prepare for at all, which is the question-and-answer episodes.

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** A reminder to everybody to set your alarm so you wake by 10am tomorrow to buy tickets for the live show in Los Angeles if you are planning on coming to that. And thank you guys all so much listening.

**Craig:** Thanks Richard Kelly. Thanks John. Bye.

**John:** Thanks. Bye.

LINKS:

* [Tickets are on sale tomorrow morning](https://www.wgfoundation.org/writing-seminars/) for the December 19th Scriptnotes Live Holiday Show
* Richard Kelly [on IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0446819/), [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Kelly_(director)) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/JRichardKelly)
* [Donnie Darko](http://archive.hi-res.net/donniedarko/), and [on Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZBFRTY/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [The Donnie Darko Book](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0571221246/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Scope creep](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_creep) on Wikipedia
* [Coin](https://onlycoin.com/) for all your cards
* [The Science and Entertainment Exchange](http://www.scienceandentertainmentexchange.org)
* [Hotel Tonight](http://www.hoteltonight.com/)
* [Big Fish](http://www.bigfishthemusical.com/) is on Broadway through December 29th
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Matthew Chilelli

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 117, the Not Just Dialogue edition of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, how are you?

Craig: I’m good. I’m real good.

John: You’re less depressed than last week?

Craig: Yeah. The depression has faded. Anxiety and depression have given way to a new day of hope. A New Hope. That’s a good idea. That’s a great name for a movie.

John: That’s a great title for an episode of a long-running series.

Craig: Right. But I wouldn’t want to start it with number one, that’s boring. I would want to start this at number four.

John: Yes.

Craig: Eddie Izzard has this bit like kids have learned to count 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 9, 10.

John: [laughs] Yes, it is madness.

I’m overall good. Today I crossed a breaking point with pumpkin spice. And it just needs to stop. We need to stop trying to make pumpkin spice a thing.

Craig: Oh, I thought that they were one of the erstwhile members of the Spice Girls that you were pissed off at.

John: Oh yeah, Pumpkin Spice? No, she got booted out of the band really early on.

Craig: [affect British accent] What, I can’t play with you? What?

John: Partly it’s because I’m in Los Angeles and it’s actually pretty warm here today. But when you go into a place and they’re trying to push pumpkin spice on you it’s like, no, it’s 80 degrees. Stop with the pumpkin spice. I don’t want pumpkin spice. I don’t want Christmas Tree lots. I’m just not in a fall mood at all.

Craig: Wow, this is about the most white people problem, white person problem in history. What’s with all the pumpkins? Hey, guys…guys…I like pumpkin spice. Because I’m Jewish, I’ve always had Christmas envy. So, I’m obsessed with Christmas. I love Christmas. And even the vacations now that I take with my family are very Christmas-y vacations. So, last year we were in Quebec City, which is this incredibly Christmas-y place. [laughs]

And then now we’re going to go to Vienna because it’s like Christmas Town.

John: It is like Christmas Town.

Craig: So, I want everything to be mulled and pumpkin spiced and nutmegged. And I want everything to be red and green. And I don’t care. I don’t care. In fact, I want more pumpkin. You know, my beef is not enough pumpkin spice.

John: All right. We’re going to duel over this.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

John: Because dueling is going to come back I sense in a big way.

Craig: When people offer you pumpkin spice do you get all in their face? Do you get angry? Angry John?

John: I usually smack it out of their hands. That’s basically what I do.

Craig: Like what’s wrong with that guy? Who’s this guy that doesn’t like pumpkin spice? It’s November!

John: Yeah. It doesn’t feel like November. It doesn’t feel like Christmas at all.

Craig: I know. Well, Los Angeles is the worst in that regard.

John: Today on the show I need to give you props because you actually set the entire agenda for today’s podcast. I said, Craig, I have no idea what we’re going to talk about because we were trying to have this guest and the guest will be rescheduled for another time.

Craig: Right.

John: So, I said, I don’t really know what we’re going to talk about. And you suggested three things which I think are great things. And so I’m throwing them under a general umbrella of movies are not just dialogue and a screenwriter’s job is not just writing the dialogues. And it’s everything that happens in a movie. And so I thought we could talk about that in a general sense.

Craig: Great.

John: Particularly sound, which you brought up, which I think is crucial.

Craig: Yeah.

John: You suggested we talk about naming characters, which is important, and we should dig into that a bit.

And then finally a really good topic of when it just doesn’t come out right and what a screenwriter should do when his or her movie is not what was envisioned and what happens next.

Craig: That sounds good the way you just said it, although I do feel like I’ve just been set up for terrible failure.

John: I think it’s going to be just lovely and good. I think it’s going to be a great show.

Craig: All right. Well, let me just try and do something with this pit of anxiety in my stomach and I’ll do my best.

John: So, first off, you can concentrate on getting ready for it because we have some housekeeping.

Craig: Great.

John: First off, t-shirts. So, t-shirts are being preordered right now, so if you would like a t-shirt that says Scriptnotes that’s black that’s really cool. You can go to store.johnaugust.com and order your t-shirt. Like the last time we did t-shirts, basically people will order the t-shirts, then we’ll print exactly the order that we have, and then we’ll mail them out.

So, the deadline for ordering your t-shirt is this Friday. So, come to store.johnaugust.com and order your t-shirt if you would like one.

Craig: Good. Good. I have a little housekeeping, too. Do you have more?

John: I do. I have two more things.

Craig: Oh, well then I’ll know when to start. [laughs]

John: Second thing is I’m doing a talkback for Big Fish on November 23.

Craig: Oh yeah!

John: That’s a Saturday. So, if you are coming to that show on Saturday, November 23, you need to email ask@johnaugust.com so we can actually have a headcount because it matters whether we’re going to do it in one space or another space based on how many people I have coming to this thing. So, if you would like to come see me and some other people behind Big Fish talk about the show that you’ve just seen, email ask@johnaugust.com and let us know that that’s happening.

Craig: Great.

John: And, finally, this is kind of the big one, so, we are maybe a live show.

Craig: Hmm…

John: Are you aware of this, Craig?

Craig: I am aware of it. And it’s funny because now that I think about it, when we do the live show, which you will shortly describe, I think there should be some sort of pumpkin spice beverage. It’s a very holiday season.

John: It’s a holiday-themed show. That does not mean that we have to have pumpkin spice, though. There’s other things we can do to celebrate the holidays.

Craig: Scrooge.

John: But, not final, not locked down, but you might want to mark your calendar for Thursday December 19 in Los Angeles. We’re planning on doing a live show. A venue will be announced soon.

Craig: Great.

John: As will ticket information. But just mark your calendars for that. I’m excited to be back in Los Angeles doing this thing that we do.

Craig: It will be fun. Los Angeles shows are great. That’s obviously where a large amount of our listeners are. Although, lately we’ve been getting tweets from Serbia, from England, it’s been great.

I have a little bit of housekeeping, too. Not that we’re politicians, but I feel oddly required to disclose this. At one point, my One Cool Thing was WinesTilSoldOut.com, which I really like.

John: Yes.

Craig: And I got the loveliest email from a woman who works there. She said she heard the podcast and she was so happy. And said, “A lot of people don’t realize this, but we’re actually a very small family-owned business. It’s just our family that does this.” And they were very — and they don’t really advertise or anything, and they were very, very, well, they were just delighted. And as a result, they’re sending me a free bottle of wine.

John: Ooh.

Craig: And I would feel guilty if I didn’t mention that.

John: Yeah, you need to disclose that.

Craig: Yeah, that basically now my One Cool Thing, now I’m starting to think, oh, my One Cool Thing should just generate swag.

John: [laughs] Oh, swag.

Craig: Swag!

John: Swag.

Let’s get to our show today. And so I really like this topic of sound, but I think it’s important to discuss in the bigger umbrella of so many people think about what a screenwriter’s job is as just being the guy who writes the dialogue.

Craig: Right.

John: And so it’s just those things that he characters are saying. I had this bit of a run in with Jessica Alba, like who I never actually physically met, where she had said something very dismissive about like good actors never read the script, or never follow the script. I’m like, well that’s a stupid thing to say, Jessica Alba.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And what I thought was so stupid about that comment was it also implied that the script is just the dialogue and dismisses the fact that like, oh, the whole reason that you’re in this scene is because of the script. The whole reason your character exists is because of the script. So, I thought we would have a little discussion about everything else that goes on the page in order to make a movie and sound is a great way to start with that.

Craig: Yeah. Screenwriting is world building. We are doing everything. And sometimes when I talk to people who really don’t understand what a screenwriter does. I mean, of course there are people out there who don’t even know that screenwriters do the dialogue. They think the actors improv everything.

But a lot of times they are unaware that we essentially write everything. We are accountable to create a setting and describe what you are seeing and hearing in all aspects. We’re required to do it.

For me, sound is a really interesting one. And I’ve been concentrating on it more and more as I write now because as we progress through time and technology begins to disrupt the world around us and the way people interact with entertainment, one thing that has persisted somewhat counter-intuitively is one of the oldest ways to experience entertainment and that is to drive, park, walk into a big building, and watch a movie with a bunch of other people. And even though theaters are changing and now you see a lot of theaters where you get to book your seat, and it’s a big comfy chair, and they bring you food and stuff, and they’re really working on the 3D and all the rest of it, the experience still holds attraction for people.

One thing that sets movies, motion pictures, apart from television, watching movies on your iPad or on TV but going to see a movie in a theater is that you’re hearing the movie as well. And I don’t care what kind of deal you have in your house you don’t have that kind of deal. Movies sound better in theaters than anywhere else.

And so I think it’s important for us to think about that as we’re writing, because that’s part of what the attraction is now for people. It’s a huge part of the experience.

John: Well, experience is really the key word here. You have to be thinking about as a writer what is it going to feel like to be in that space watching the movie with an audience, with a great picture, with great sound, and what are the possibilities you have if you were that audience member and feeling it right there in that space.

And so there’s subtleties to sound that can be really crucial and great. The subtle scrapes, the rasps, the thunder cracking in the distance. These are great things and they belong on the page where they are appropriate. Now, you can’t choke your pages with every possible sound effect. And most scenes aren’t really going to talk about the sounds. You have to be very judicious about the moments you are going to sort of — every word on a script page is precious material, so you don’t want to waste those words on things that aren’t important. But sound can be very important. And every time you are thinking about that scene, you have to ask yourself what — is there anything about the sound of the scene that’s going to be unique and special and important?

If you’re setting something in an environment where just giving us the setting will probably tell us what it sounds like, that’s fine. But if there’s something special about it, let us know.

So, if you’re at an airport, if you’re just generally going through a busy terminal, telling us “busy terminal” will probably give us that sense of like the Walla-Walla-Walla and all that stuff that’s happening. And there’s going to be background PA announcements. Great. Don’t waste our time telling us about that.

But if you are on the tarmac and people are loading in bags and that’s where your action takes place, it’s incredibly important to remind us how loud that is and how it feels, and what that experience is like. And that has to happen on the page or else it’s not going to happen in the reader’s mind.

Craig: Absolutely. Sound, well one fun way to use it is for transitions and we’ve talked about transitions before and the use of sound as opposed to — I think we’ve become very good at detecting visual transitions. They are the oldest kind of transitions in motion picture filmmaking — dissolves, wipes, fades, and so on. And also the trick transitions, a light bulb that’s the sun

We become cynical about it. it’s a funny thing. We always think of watching movies and not listening to them, but we naturally over time become cynical about things we see because we’ve seen them before. Hearing is closer to smell, I think, neurologically in the sense that we don’t become jaded to the sounds. The sounds are actually very disruptive and they actually, I think, connect emotionally with us more quickly than visual information does.

Visual information is processed in the back of your head. Sound is processed in a whole bunch of different places. But, we know for instance that there are people who stutter who can sing, but they can’t speak without disruption. There are stroke patients who can’t speak at all, but they can sing what they want to say. There’s something going on in the brain that is fundamental here. And I like to think of sound as more of a mainline heroine than the visual.

So, also, I think there’s an opportunity now for us to play around with it, for instance, we’re talking about an airport. Well, we all know that we have a choice there as we’re building the world of the airport to just describe it as general Walla-Walla, or just the hustle and bustle of the airport. And in the reader’s mind they’re like, okay, I’ve got that.

But if you can use sound to help define your character and their focus of attention and thus the perspective of the scene. What is the character looking at? Does the rest of that sound fade away and all he can hear is the tap-tap-tap of somebody sitting across from him or the sound of a distant alarm because he’s panicked. You can use all of this to get right into the deeper parts of the brain.

So, as we go through our scene building and we get out of the kind of first blush world of what are people saying and who are they saying it to, and get into the world of the visual and the aural — a-u-r-a-l, don’t put the audio second. I actually think we should put it first. Sound to me is the thing that’s the most exciting in filmmaking in the finishing process because that’s when you suddenly — it’s the sound that makes it seem like a movie.

John: Yes. Anyone who’s experienced a bad indie movie, you can tell a lot of times how much money was spent on the movie by how good the sound is.

Craig: Right.

John: And whatever the picture quality, it’s the sound quality that is actually what tells you how professionally finished this movie was.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So, I want to step back to a thing you said earlier about sort of subjectivity versus objectively of sound. Because you’re describing in terms of like are we just hearing all the Walla-Walla of the busy airport, or are we focused in on what a character is doing? That’s essentially the same kind of choice as you would make visually with lens selection. Are you looking at the whole world? Are you wide? Are you objective?

Craig: Right.

John: Or, are you zoomed in really tight on what is happening right in this one very moment? So, either what this character is seeing, are we hearing the sound of what that character is seeing? Or just you’re experiencing the world as a character experiences the world. And those are very different choices. And you’re not always going to make those — declare what your intention is on the page. Most times you’re going to sort of set a tone for what the movie kind of feels like and stick with that tone.

Either the movie is going to be very subjective and it’s going to very much feel like it’s from the character’s POV, even if we’re seeing the character, or it’s going to feel like it’s wide and open and it’s the whole world that you’re experiencing at once. You’re experiencing it like the camera is another character in that space and you’re watching it with them.

Craig: Right.

John: But those are fundamental choices and to not think about that is to give up a choice and you don’t want to do that.

Craig: It’s giving up not only a choice. It’s giving up what often is your best choice, your most effective choice. And it’s hard for us. I think everybody understands that the nature of a screenplay is to try and visualize something. We’re told constantly from the beginning of our time as screenwriters to write visually. No one every says write soundily. [laughs] You know, we don’t even know what the word is, really. Aurally, I guess.

John: Yeah, it would be aurally, but that’s confusing.

Craig: Auditorily. But we often — we naturally — naturally we will say “close on,” “reveal,” “angle on.” We do this all the time in screenplays. We need to give as much service to what things sound like. As you point out, when it is salient and informative, as always, when we talk about these things we talk about intention. And what can provide, what can help you provide your intention to the audience in a way that is interesting, unexpected, exciting.

And so lately I’ve just really been playing around with sound. I mean, the script I’m writing right now, sound is actually a plot point. It matters. And that was an intentional choice, too. An that’s what started me thinking about this, because I realized it’s the kind of thing that makes you want to see the movie in a theater. And I want the theater experience to be special for people.

You don’t want to go down a road where you just… — Look, I mean, I’ve written movies where frankly you could just watch them on an iPad and it’s fine. But lately I’ve been thinking to myself it’s probably a bad idea. [laughs] I mean, not that I want to change creatively the heart of whatever it is that I’m doing just to sucker people into a big room, but if I can give them more in that big room, that’s a nice thing to do. And an effective thing to do.

John: Let’s step outside for a second and talk about how sound actually exists, how sound is created in films. Because I think someone who hasn’t been through the process of actually making a movie probably doesn’t have a sense of like how artificial sound really is in films.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So, on the set while you’re filming a movie there is a sound recordist. And that sound recordist, you can often see the person who is at the board, and there’s another person with a boom who is at the pole that’s holding the microphone down above the actors heads. That’s a very classic way you record sound in films. Sometimes it could be more than one boom. Sometimes the actors will have lavalier mics that will also be recording things.

Craig: Right.

John: But that’s only recoding really the dialogue. Everything else that you are seeing and hearing — not seeing, but hearing in a film was created after the fact basically.

Craig: That’s right.

John: That’s all post-production audio. And until you’ve actually been through that process and seen how incredibly elaborate it is and how seriously those folks take their job, you don’t have appreciation for how completely constructed it is. It’s as if, yo know, really basically it’s like you are shooting green screens the whole time where from an audio perspective those actors talking, that’s the only thing you’ve filmed and everything else around them had to be created after the fact.

Craig: In fact, it has to be that way because we want to be able to hear the dialogue cleanly and combine it with other sound as we so desire. As the director views the cut and listens to the mix, he or she needs to be able to change the sound as they wish. The one thing you can’t do is change the sound if it’s married on a track to dialogue. So, in fact, by requirement sets and movie scenes are designed to be as quiet and unsoundy as possible.

So, all you get is the dialogue. But, what I find interesting is that if you create space for a specific sound in the script, it will change the way the scene is shot. And it will — I worked with a DP once who would always refer to clues. He would say, “You know, there are all these clues in the script.” [laughs] And it’s true. You’re leaving clues for everybody so that they know how to put it all together in a way so that six months later, or eight months later, or a year later when you’re in your final mix, there are clues.

And they have the script there. The script does not go away. I am so pleased when I walk into a mix session and I see guys at this big, big board and they have the screenplay open in front of them.

John: Yeah.

Craig: They’re looking for clues. So, why don’t you put some in there for them. That’s basically the idea.

John: So, what these sound folks are doing is there’s sort of two parts to the process for sound. First is they’re editing sound, and so they are finding the sounds that would make sense in the scenes. And they will often have multiple choices for what those sounds could be. And there are things that you would not believe they could have multiple options for, but they will. Which is like a hand touching a door knob. And so when you’re in a sound — they will edit all those in so that they’ll all line up perfectly. And then you as the director will listen to all the choices for this is what it sounds like when his hand touches the door knob.

Craig: Right.

John: So, it’s a sound, they could had a library of sounds for doing this. They may have recorded that in Foley. But you will listen to that and you will go insane listening to all the choices for what it sounds like when that hand touches the door knob. And they will have the option for, well, does his wedding ring touch the door knob metal as it turns. They will have all those options.

And they are taking that so seriously because it helps create the reality of the film. Now, the challenge for the writer is how do you portray those kind of choices/decisions when they’re important on script, the page. And there are lots of choices.

Sometimes you are going to onomatopoeia. You are finding that made up word or that just perfect word that captures the sense of what that sounds like. The sizzle, the buzz, the crackle, the way you want that thing to sounds. What does it sound like as a box is being dragged across a gritty floor? Well, that’s probably a very specific thing and you may need to find the right verb to help sell what that sounds like.

But when you pick the right word for it, suddenly we hear it in our heads the right way.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And you’re trying to do that for the reader. Ultimately, a year later, some sound editor will be trying to find the right sound to portray that feeling to the audience member.

Craig: Yeah. I tend to be guided in this way. When I — let’s say for instance your example of a box being dragged across a gritty floor. I know that if I write, “Jim drags the box across the gritty floor,” that the professionals will know what that means. And they will offer, they will automatically put it in. And, really, for things like that, it’s almost a passive process with the director.

The way this works, for those of you who haven’t sat through a sound session for a movie, the folks that are combining all the audio elements, which are dialogue, music — dialogue, score, music that’s within the scene, sound effects. They play it back. And they play it back. You know, we talk about reels, so they play back a 16-minute chunk, say. And as they’re playing it there’s a footage counter on a big display underneath the screen. And the director, or the producer, or whoever is in the session makes notes.

When they hear something that’s off, that they don’t like, or that they want to change, or they want to make louder, or softer, they make a note of what the footage number was and what it was. When they’re done with that reel everybody goes through and talks about it and the sound mixers take notes.

So, you might say, “You know what, when it was being dragged across the floor, is there something a little grittier, a littler dirtier, and maybe not quite so loud? That almost sounded like glass instead of grit.” And they’ll go, okay, yeah, we’ll work on that.

Now, for me, when I’m writing, the areas where I want to really call stuff out is when it’s not the norm.

John: Yes. Exactly.

Craig: And to me it’s the not norm that is also very exciting for people. I mean, there’s this wonderful moment in The Sopranos where an assassination occurs at a table. And you don’t hear the bullet. You hear the sound of the high pitched noise that you get in your ear when you’ve been deafened because a gun just went off next to your head. It’s very impressionistic. And then, so in that case it needed to be called out. That suddenly all sound goes away except for this distant high pitched tininess kind of whine.

That’s the kind of stuff that I think is great to think about as you’re writing so that you can surprise people so it’s not just another gun going off.

John: I want to go back to this example of a box being dragged across a gritty floor, because what I want to stress is that as a screenwriter you probably wouldn’t highlight that as a sound effect if it was happening in front of the camera. So, if everyone in the scene is seeing this box being dragged across, it’s probably not worth the words to throw at it to describe that that sound sounds like.

Where it does become very important is if someone is trying to move it silently so no one else hears it, and that scraping sound, that gritty sound is really important. And that becomes an important story point is the noise that was made.

Or, if that’s happening just off stage, so we’re not seeing it, but we or the characters are hearing it, it’s incredibly important that you’re describing that sound and describing from the subjective point of view of the character on screen what they’re hearing.

Craig: Right.

John: That can create suspense, tension — what is that sound? And that’s where you end up spending 15 minutes trying to find the right word to describe what that sound sounds like.

Craig: Right. And the important thing, as you point out, is that we’re thinking about it, so it’s this other dimension of storytelling that sometimes we neglect and I do think it’s so important that we not neglect it because in the end there are people that can do amazing things. The ability to control sound in a movie far surpasses the ability to control anything else — performance, lighting, set design, everything is all subject to circumstance. The roll of the dice of the day. Sound can be absolutely perfected and they have so much ready to go. And then if they don’t they can design something just for your movie that people haven’t heard before.

I mean, the famous story of the guys who went out and tried to figure out what the blaster noise would be for Star Trek and they ended up whacking a bar against a high tension steel cable and marry that with a couple other things. And it became that noise. They invented a sound.

John: That was Star Wars, though. Not Star Trek.

Craig: Oh, I’m sorry. Did I say Star Trek? I meant Star Wars. Yes, Star Wars.

Star Trek, the sounds in Star Trek, too, though. I mean, if I say to you, “Transporter, start,” no transporter, Star Trek, you hear it. [laughs] You hear that — it’s like music but it’s sound, it’s a shimmer. These things are invented and they will last in your minds the way that music lyrics will last in your minds.

The sound of the space — the Martian vehicles, the tripods in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds are so distinct. That weird alien ship porn noise — I can hear it right now in my head.

I can’t see anything else really and I can’t see the thing. I could not draw it for you as well as I could make the sound for you.

So, let’s just collectively really think about that, when it’s appropriate, and when it can help us. It’s a good thing to do.

John: Here’s an exercise that we talked about when I was on the panel in Austin for Alien. So, I was a panel where we deconstructed Alien. And we were showing the opening startup sequence to Alien, basically where the ship wakes up. And what I stressed to keep in mind is that if you had no sound, if you were watching this in an airplane with no sound, you would still know what was happening because visually it tells you the ship is waking up and that the people are waking up. And you can watch that first sequence and it makes complete sense with no sound whatsoever.

So, you don’t hear people talking, it makes complete sense. The same thing can hold true for the audio in that situation where if you turn off the picture and just listen to the sound, you are hearing the ship waking up and it’s very, very clear.

Craig: Yes.

John: The music and sound are telling you that this thing is coming to life and it’s very smart.

So, what I would stress for writers to do is whatever scene you’re working on right now, you’re sort of looping it in your head, probably. You see the whole thing. Turn off the sound and see it all visually and make sure it all makes sense visually to you. And then do another pass where like you turn off the picture and just think about what everything sounds like.

And most scenes, there’s probably not going to be anything special that you’re going to want to highlight sound wise, but there might be. And it may not occur to you that there could be something interesting sound wise to highlight unless you try that that experiment.

Craig: Yes. And it’s a chance for you to impart information in a way that’s much more satisfying, and immediate, and true to the audience than somebody talking about it. So, if we’re in a ship and it looks a bit junky and we hear kind of a clunky rattle from somewhere in its depths, and the sound of a leaky pipe, we learn something about this ship and those sounds are wonderful. And they really do put you somewhere. More than seen.

John: Yeah, it’s a very primal thing. I think what you’re talking about, your memory of War of the Worlds, is I think because it actually keys into some sort of lizard brain thing about sort of our assumptions of what this is. And there’s a danger out there. We’re very keyed into that because we are creatures that spend half of our life in darkness and always had to sort of listen for predators out there. So, we do key into those things in a very special way.

Craig: Yeah, it’s why people listen to poetry set to music but don’t read poetry. I mean, some of it’s not poetry. [laughs] But they don’t even read bad poetry. They will listen to bad poetry.

John: They will listen to this podcast and not read the transcript.

Craig: [laughs] Exactly.

John: Great. Let’s move onto our next topic which is naming characters which is, I think, a great topic to have because that’s one of the things I spend so much time on in the initial part of figuring out a script is figuring out exactly the right names for not just my main characters, but sort of everyone in the world so that I know who these people are before I get started. And I have a very hard time writing a character if I haven’t picked his or her name.

Craig: It’s so funny, so do I. And it is a very torturous process. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of having to change the name because somebody comes to you in the process and says, “We can’t clear this name.” I mean, there are all these rules about clearing names. It’s a weird thing.

If you write a movie and you put a character’s name in, like let’s say Tyler Durden. If there’s only one Tyler Durden in America, you’re screwed. You can’t do it. Because that person could come and say, “This obviously is about me. There’s only one Tyler Durden.” So, you kind of need lots of Tyler Durdens, or no Tyler Durdens in order to use the name.

But if they make you change it…I’m getting anxious even thinking about it, because it’s a disruption. It’s as if your husband had to change his name and you had to call him a different name. It’s traumatic. We connect with the names so closely.

John: Let’s talk about that connection, because the name is generally the first thing we are going to be able to draw assumptions about that character from. And so if a Tiffany is different than a Bertha, and you and I both see different characters for a Tiffany and then for a Bertha.

Craig: Right.

John: And we have our whole bundle of expectations and assumptions that come with those two kinds of names, to tip off sort of socioeconomic background, of kind of looks. We don’t associate hot with Berthas. It can talk to us about their ethnicity, their nationality. It can give us a sense of their age. A Mabel is either very old or is a little baby. But there’s no Mabels who are 30.

Craig: Right. Exactly right. And this is an area where I do see writers dating themselves a bit. It’s always a good thing. The wonderful resources online now to see what the most popular names are, not just now, but they were ten years ago or 20 years ago. And for every country. I’m constantly looking for foreign names to see what popular names are.

And, of course, you can go against the grain and make a point of going against the grain with a name, but there’s some obvious things to not do. Don’t name your characters super boring names because that’s just super boring. There’s no reason for anybody anymore to be Officer Smith.

Smith — even that in and of itself is so ridiculous, it could almost be interesting. It’s more like Harper. It’s a name that’s not like Smith or Jones but it’s just so bland that you don’t care.

John: Harper is one of those weirdly overused things in scripts. I’ve used it. Because it’s not that common of a name really in real life, but I think on paper for whatever reason it’s there all the time, as a first name and a last name.

Craig: And also it gives nothing to anybody who is trying to visualize. If I walk into a room, I need to get a loan, and I sit down across a loan officer and his name is Jim Harper, I guess I’m just looking at a white man between 30 and 60 in a suit who’s just a blah….

John: I’m sort of seeing John Krasinski from The Office, but that’s because his name is Jim Halpert, so it was close to that.

Craig: Right. There’s a blandness to it. And in television I actually think sometimes they need to do that because you’re with them week, after week, after week, and at some point a silly name — sorry, that’s the wrong term. A name that is noticeable, that sticks out, is going to become annoying over time. Sam Malone is a perfectly great television name. It’s a terrible movie name.

John: Yeah. Sam Malone would be like a generic sheriff in movie land.

Craig: Right. It would be a boring sheriff. Now, on the other hand, another thing to not do is to get precious and stupid with your names. Please forgive me, Pacific Rim, but Stacker Pentecost is ridiculous. That is a ridiculous name. It takes me out of the movie. It seems almost like a spoof.

John: Yeah.

Craig: It is such an overdone, hyper-masculinization of a name. It’s got bible thumping weirdness to it. Stacker is nonsense. Pentecost is way too on the nose. It’s just crazy. I mean, Cypher Raige is terrible because it’s just — it’s not a good idea to do that.

John: No one in real life would be named Cypher Raige. If your name were Cypher Raige —

Craig: You would change it!

John: The first thing anyone would say to you is like, “Really? Really that’s your name?”

Craig: So, you’re angry and mysterious?

John: I guess so.

Craig: Let me tell you, if your name is Cypher Raige, the one thing you can’t be is angry and mysterious. At that point you have to be happy and an open book, because then it’s funny. But, those kinds, you don’t want to go down that path. So, you don’t want to go down crazy name path. I tend to try and studiously avoid the on-the-nose names that imply character things. I find them precious.

John: Like the character Precious?

Craig: No, that was great. [laughs] No, but I mean, you know, when somebody is named Small, know, or Loneman.

John: Oh yeah, that’s a dangerous thing.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So, I’m working on this project which if people want to go back to the What’s Next episode, I’m actually going in to have a meeting on that preexisting property thing. And so I had to pick character’s names, because I actually had to sort of — I have to pitch this thing.

And so it was a sudden kind of realization, like I had to really figure out who these characters were because they were going to have to have names. I was going to have to be able to pitch their names. And so I figured out their names, but then I actually spent a good half hour trying to figure out how to spell this woman’s name, because it’s one of those names that could be spelled different ways. And because you’re going to be looking at that on the page, you know, every page she’s going to have dialogue. It has to be the right way to spell her name.

And so even though no one watching the movie would ever see her name spelled, it had to be spelled the right way on the page so that it would be — so you would get the right impression of her every time you saw her give a line of dialogue.

Craig: Right.

John: So, that’s a crucial thing. And honestly figuring out the other guy, once I made a decision about his nationality, that put me in a whole different place in terms of what kinds of names would remind me who he was. Because remember that you’re setting up these characters and somebody could like really skip past one little thing that told you where that person was from, but if the name helps remind you that it is that person, that person is from some place, you’re going to be in a much better place.

And so you might forget that, well, Parks and Recreation, there’s Tom Haverford, is a guy of South Asian heritage, but that’s part of the joke is that he has a really boring white guy name.

Craig: Right.

John: And he’s a sort of South Asian looking guy. In a film, you probably want to make sure that character has a name that would remind you that he is that guy, because if it’s been 30 pages since we’ve seen him last, you’re going to forget that he is anything special because of all those pages in the past.

Craig: Right. And that is a very —

John: So, it would be Sunil or something else that could remind you like, oh, that guy is this guy.

Craig: Yeah. Because we’re only getting one episode of the show. One long episode. And the care that you’re describing, even the spelling of a name, is critical because these things mean things and they impart things. I have a character in the script I’m writing now named Sarah. So, the question is is it Sara, or is it Sarah?

Well, to me Sara is a little younger, it’s a little brighter, it’s a little more bubbly. Sarah is a little more worldly, a little more weathered, a little more adult, a little more serious.

John: Or, a dancer in Big Fish is Sarrah.

Craig: Ah, now that’s —

John: The mermaid.

Craig: And that says exotic, eccentric, artistic, whimsical. These things mean things, you know. They do.

John: Absolutely. That extra R does change a lot of your expectations.

Craig: It tells you about their parents.

John: Yeah, it tells you about their parents, exactly.

Craig: And that tells us about them. And these things can’t just be tossed off as, well, I’m just going to name her Jill.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You know, and he’s going to be Frank. And, for god’s sakes, if you’re character’s name is Frank, please don’t make him frank. It’s like that stuff makes me nuts. But, anyway, I mean, the most important thing is never write Stacker Pentecost. That’s a name that should just — we should never hear that ever.

John: I would say the second most important thing is pick your primary character’s names first. And then do not let anyone else — try to not let anyone else have the first letter of their name be the same as those major characters.

Craig: Absolutely right.

John: So, if you possibly can, no two characters in your script should have the same first letter of their name. If for some reason you need to, the names need to be wildly different so that we will never confuse them as readers, because that just kills you when it’s like “I don’t remember which person this is,” or like these two people are talking and they both have Fs start in their names. Frank and Phil. Even Frank and Phil sometimes your head — one is a PH and one’s an F.

Craig: Yeah, but it’s a “ph” sound.

John: They feel the same. A “ph” sound.

Craig: It starts to make your world small and it starts to make the reader — they don’t even realize that they’re making a judgment that you just aren’t that imaginative and you only know one consonant. You just don’t want to do that.

Do you know why, I mean obviously the name Sandy in Identify Thief was part of what need to happen, he needed a name like that, but do you know why —

John: An ambiguously gendered name.

Craig: Exactly. But do you know why Melissa McCarthy’s name is Diana?

John: I don’t.

Craig: Well, she picked her name, because she didn’t know what her name was. And Melissa and I had this whole thing that when she was growing up she was obsessed with Wonder Woman and wanted to be like Wonder Woman.

John: Aw.

Craig: And so she chose the name Diana. And then it was really difficult to figure out what her actual name was and I spent a lot of time because I thought, okay, just from the look of her, she’s Scotch-Irish, but I didn’t want her name to be flowery. I actually wanted it to be a very truncated sort of glum Midwestern name.

John: Like Meg?

Craig: Yeah. And so I ended up with Dawn Budgie because it just —

John: Dawn is perfect.

Craig: Dawn is just Dawn, and Budgie because —

John: Budgie, you’re close to being that sort of like don’t be what the name is, but because it’s a punch line, it’s a late reveal.

Craig: Yeah. It’s a name about a pretty creature but it’s kind of an ugly word. I wanted it to be a downer. I just wanted her to be able to say, “That’s the worst name I’ve ever heard.” And it is, in fact, one of the worst names I’ve ever heard. But we spend time on these things and so I guess we are collectively encouraging all of you to spend time on them.

John: Absolutely. You should obsess a little too much about character’s names because you’re going to be staring at those character’s names the entire time through.

And, yes, you can make a change midway through the script and rename somebody, but it’s hard —

Craig: It’s traumatic.

John: It’s traumatic.

Craig: It’s traumatic. Now, I have a question for you. When you rewrite a script, what’s your attitude about changing the character names of the screenplay you’re rewriting?

John: I would only do it if there were like a fundamental issue where there was confusability between things, or if there was now a new actor in who just that name does not at all belong with that new actor.

Craig: Right.

John: So, I can’t even think of what an example would be, but a character’s name, there’s an O’Malley, and Will Smith is playing that role, that’s not going to make a lot of sense. And so that might be a possibility for changing names. But I think it’s honestly a little bit shady to sort of be the writer who comes in and just changes character’s names willy-nilly as if you’re really rewriting, as if you’re changing the characters.

Craig: Right. I completely agree. And this sort of goes to a general professional courtesy thing. You hear this from people all the time. When they get rewritten, one of their hugest complains — oh, that’s the worst grammar ever.

John: Yeah. That was terrible.

Craig: One of their significant complaints is that the subsequent writer changed the freaking names and they just did it for no reason, it’s still the same guy, in the same house, in the same job, doing the same stuff. A lot of the dialogue changed. There are a few new scenes. This wasn’t a page one rewrite. It wasn’t a reinvention of the movie. It was largely about dialogue, but they changed the names. What was the point of that?

And my feeling is you should default to not changing the names. You change them if you must, as you described. Obviously in the case of Identify Thief there was a gender switch. Names had to change. But, if you can preserve the names, why not?

John: Yeah. As long as the names aren’t actually hurting you. That’s the situation.

Craig: Right.

John: So, if changing the name opens a whole new opportunity, or for whatever reason this whole thing is now set in like the world of the Russian underground, then yes, you’re going to need to change some names. That’s just like a natural thing to have happen. But, otherwise it does feel kind of like a dick move.

Craig: It’s a dick move. That’s exactly right. So, to our fellow professionals, don’t be dicks.

John: Don’t be dicks. The last point I’d like to make in terms of names and name usage is that characters generally have first names and last names, but not all the time.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Sometimes you use the first name, and sometimes you use their last name, and you need to make a choice and be consistent about whether you’re using first, last, or both for those characters, because that can really help you get through — help your script make sense.

And so with your lead character, obviously that character is going to have a first name and a last name. You will make the choice whether it’s their first name that appears above their dialogue or their last name. But be consistent. And whatever name you pick, that should be the name above all their dialogue. It should be the name you use in all the action lines. Don’t go back and forth, because we will get confused.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And be consistent for that character. Now, it doesn’t mean that every character has to be used by their first name, or their last name. That’s a choice you can make for each character about how you’re going to do it. So, you can have one character who is Sam and another character who is McGarnagle, and if you want to use McGarnagle for all McGarnagle stuff, great. But he’s always McGarnagle and he’s never anything else.

Craig: Yeah. And try and match that up to the way people talk to each other. Not that announcing someone’s name before you say something to them is great practice, but let’s say you’re in a movie where you’ve got a psychologist who is joining a SWAT team to try and get a hostage out of a situation. Well, the psychologist may be Gary and he has a wife and kids, and the first 15 pages is setting up Gary and his life. When he encounters this group of SWAT guys, well they all call each other by their last name, so that’s what they are. They’re last name guys. And they’re last name characters. And it’s not like they can only call him Gary.

They can call him Chang. But Gary, it’s how we meet people and generally how the world interacts with them that can help drive that.

John: What you’re describing is often in films — a character’s personal life is in first names and professional life is in last names. That’s the way that the real world often does work.

Craig: Right. Exactly.

John: One last thing that can be helpful sometimes, this is a thing I learned from Big Fish, is using both first and last names at times can be very, very helpful. So, there’s Don Price and Zacky Price in Big Fish. And there’s also Jenny Hill. Those characters are always both names. And it becomes useful for the Price brothers because it helps you remember, oh, they’re brothers. And that’s incredibly useful for that.

Jenny Hill, we always refer to her as her full name, which just helps you remember who she was as you go through the script. And so it’s fine if you want to choose to use both names for certain characters. That’s okay.

Craig: That’s how I refer to Richard Kelly. I will not say Richard.

John: I won’t say Richard and I won’t say Kelly.

Craig: He’s Richard Kelly. He will always be Richard Kelly.

John: Let us go to our third topic today which is when it doesn’t come out right. Now, last night I got to see our friend Kelly Marcel’s film, Saving Mr. Banks.

Craig: Well, that came out right. [laughs]

John: That came out really, really right. But even whilst we were talking at this after party for the AFI premiere, Kelly, Aline, and I were talking about this very thing which is what — she loves the film. And so in no way am I trying to say that she doesn’t love the film.

But we talked about the inevitability that there are things you wrote a certain way that in the process of becoming a movie are not the same way that you tended to write them, even though they could be shot exactly word for word, it’s not going to be the film that you envisioned in your head. And how do you come to terms with the fact that it’s not exactly what you had envisioned in your head.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

John: And so that is the happy situation where like you have a really movie at the end of it, so luxury problems. But, sometimes it’s not what you saw in your head and it’s not good. So, what do you do?

Craig: Well, step one, don’t panic.

John: Yes.

Craig: Best advice from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Grab your towel, don’t panic. The thing is that you saw the final cut. Oftentimes as screenwriters we’re seeing an early cut. Well, the early cut is like one of our first drafts, and if people around us didn’t panic, don’t we owe them the same courtesy of not panicking?

True, a screenplay can be changed in vast ways far more easily than one can change the edit of a film. And yet a film can be changed through editing in ways that are vaster than we would suspect.

John: Agreed. And the first time screenwriters see their movies made never understand how much it can progress and change.

Craig: It can progress and change mightily. So, the first thing is, don’t panic.

John: Yeah.

Craig: The second thing is to remember — remember when you wrote your first draft and you gave it to people and then they gave you feedback, and then you see where you end up? It’s quite likely that a lot of the people who read that first draft loathed it and panicked momentarily and then said, “Well hold on, we can fix things. The writer is going to do better than this because this is the necessary first step.” The first step is never the final step, except for the case of Alexander and Karaszewski in Ed Wood apparently. [laughs] They were just touched by god. What can you do?

But you don’t panic now either. It’s the same situation. The director needs to find her way to it. They are now in their first draft and they are not seeing some things that you saw because their experience is different than yours.

Even if your turned out experience here is not about seeing the film, it’s even just hearing your script being read. Let’s say you’re in a writing group and everybody reads the script. And you hear it and you think, “Oh no.” Don’t panic. And then start to really think about where and how there’s a disconnect between the intention and what happened. And while you’re thinking about that, also open your mind to the possibility that perhaps something new has occurred that may also be worthy.

Just because it’s not what you intended doesn’t mean it’s bad. Different isn’t wrong. However, wrong is wrong. [laughs]

John: Yes.

Craig: So, then, my question for you, John, is okay you’ve seen this cut and you know that some things are just wrong. As a professional, with a goal in mind, how do you go about getting it unwrongified and rightified?

John: So, my first experience with this process was seeing the first cut of Go. And we were downstairs in the basement of the Thalberg building on the Columbia lot and we saw it. And I excused myself. I went out to the restrooms down there and had like a full on sweaty panic attack, because it was so awful. I was really thinking like maybe we can just never release it, because I knew it would kill my career if it got out, because it was just unspeakably bad.

And so then I went in and tried to have like the smile on my face conversation about like, well, there are some things that worked. And as I started having that conversation I realized like, you know what, there were some things that worked. And I was there for every frame we shot and I know we shot everything. So, the stuff that’s actually working, we just need to get everything else to work as well as basically the Vegas sequence was working in that first cut.

And it’s like, well, that’s going to be really hard. But, you know what? I can work really, really hard. And so then it was a process of, and this is different on every movie, is figuring out how can you as the writer come in and provide the help that can be provided to this process. So, with Go I was able to actually come into the editing room and sort of sit down and we could just do cut, after cut, after cut and then figure out reshoots and do all that stuff we needed to do.

Other movies, I’ve provided the first and most extensive set of notes that sort of talked through these are things that are working so, so well, these are the things that aren’t working so well, this is what I know we have, this is a thing we could try. And on Tim Burton’s movie that’s as much as I’ve been able to do, but it’s been really helpful for me to be able to do that.

Craig, what do you do after that first cut? And one thing I always stress when a screenwriter is going to see their first assembly of a movie is to tell them it’s supposed to be terrible. You will not believe how bad it can be. We love you. It’s going to be okay.

Craig: Well, sometimes it’s not going to be okay. I mean, let’s just also say that occasionally things go so wrong that it’s just going to be bad. It will be better than it is, but it will be bad. But sometimes it’s the total disasters that turn into these big victories. The ones I’m always worried about are the middling ones where you think, well, it’s a C+. I think we can get it to a B. Whoop-de-do. You know?

Well, first of all, before I do anything I have to justify why I’m there to begin with. This part of the process generally, traditionally is reserved for the director, and the producers, and the studio. Traditionally the screenwriter was seen as like a booster tank had been ejected on launch and was no longer required for the mission.

John: Yes.

Craig: That has changed, and I think changed for the better. And I would urge studios, producers, and directors to open the process up to screenwriters because we can help. And those screenwriters who understand, and I would hope that it’s now approaching 100%, who understand that the mission at this point is to improve the film, not to regain the movie that was in our heads when we wrote it, those screenwriters who can do that can be of great help.

Why? Because if you understand how editing works, and I would ask screenwriters who have not spent time in editing rooms to beg their way into them, even if it’s just to sit there quietly to experience it, we are able to offer solutions.

The director is beset by their own doubt and fears. By a lack of perspective they are exhausted. They are being asked to essentially look at this material as if they were just handed it by someone else. They did it. Their experience of the footage is colored by how hard they fought for certain things, how hard the day was to get, what they felt about a certain actor.

People around them will offer perspective. A lot of times the perspective is a passive perspective. “I don’t like that. I do like this.” And those are all opinions and they’re fine.

What a screenwriter with post-production experience can do is say, “Here’s what I think doesn’t work, and here’s how I think we can fix it. And it’s not hard. We’re going to do this and this, take this out, put this here. Let’s add a line of dialogue off screen over here, just to cover this, and it’s going to feel great. Extend this shot so that I’m looking at him while she’s talking. I want to stay — the idea was that I would be with him, so that what she’s saying isn’t as important as how he’s feeling about her saying it.”

Thing like this, that’s the real stuff of editing. And those are the things that make so much difference. Scott Frank was talking to me about editing his movie — he finished it — called A Walk Among the Tombstones. And I’ve seen it and it’s terrific. And Steven Soderbergh came in and was talking with him about the cut. And one of the things that came out of that discussion was cutting less. Just letting the shots go longer, even if the person who was talking wasn’t onscreen, because it fit the mood and the style of the movie better.

And we can do these things for each other. So, for directors who aren’t accustomed to having screenwriters involved in the process, open yourself up to it. And forgive them if they seem a little clingy to something, because we can get over that quickly, and then help deal with the world that is as opposed to the world that we imagined.

John: Well, the screenwriter can come in often as the fresh set of eyes because a lot of times I’ve not seen everything that was shot. So, I’m genuinely naïve to sort of what was happening on the day. I don’t know all the fights. I don’t know all the backstory behind things.

Craig: Right.

John: But I do remember the intention, and so I do remember what the intention was behind that scene. And there was a reason why it was that way. And there may be a good reason why it should be that way, again, and I can help find the way back to that process.

Craig: That’s right.

John: Also, screenwriters, we tend to be really good at sitting on our butts and staring at screens. And that’s a skill that we’ve developed from writing our scripts and it’s not a skill that’s actually natural to many directors. And so we sometimes have the patience to sit and like try the 15 different versions of how this thing could work and do all that experimentation that many directors can’t, because many directors are up on their feet, pacing, and doing 10,000 things at once.

Many directors sort of thrive on controlling chaos around them. And when it’s actually a quiet, still environment they kind of flip out.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

John: So, that’s often a way that screenwriters can be very helpful in the process is looking at what was there and what’s possible.

We’re also sometimes less afraid, well, we’re able to in our heads think about what happens to the story if things move around. And so if we move this scene from here up four scenes earlier to here, we can do the narrative math and ripple through what all that effects. That is very hard for other people to do, just because we’re used to the story as a whole. We know how it all fits together.

We know the consequences but also the opportunities and the possibilities that are there.

Craig: That’s exactly right. And so sometimes the non-writers will offer solutions that are great for the thing in front of you, they just don’t understand what it means for something 40 minutes later. Whereas writers always understand that. We immediately understand that, and so we provide a comprehensive solution, not something that’s going to cause its own problem.

The only other advice I could suggest is to be gentle and nice. Be nice. It’s so hard and it’s hard to get criticism and it’s hard to be told that you did something wrong, or you screwed it up. And I think that everybody is afraid on some level, afraid of the screenwriter. They don’t like it, but I think they are.

John: Yeah.

Craig: They’re afraid of blowing it because this person did this whole thing. And I think that’s part of what’s behind a lot of the bravado, like that crazy Morgan Freeman thing.

John: Yeah.

Craig: But be nice, be gentle, and also recognize that you have a legitimacy in your comments that no one else has. When some producer tells a director, “This scene is not working, cut it,” the director thinks, “Screw you, suit.”

When the writer who wrote that scene says it, you got to think twice. [laughs] And I have no problem saying, “Listen, it’s just not working. You know what? I obviously thought it would work. It’s not working. It’s not because you screwed up. It’s because we made a mistake. WE.”

John: We.

Craig: “So let’s WE cut it.”

John: Exactly.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And let’s WE finish up this episode of Scriptnotes. So, I have a One Cool Thing. Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

Craig: I do.

John: I wonder if ours is going to be the same thing. Mine is this utility that was introduced this week which I thought was crazy and impossible and useful for a very specific thing that happens with me. I’ve been traveling so much and I’ve been working primarily on my MacBook Air, which I love, it’s a great little 13-inch computer and I love it to death.

And I’ve been in public places a lot, so I always keep it locked. And so when the screen goes dark I have to type the password to unlock and I have a long password because I want to protect what’s there. So, it’s a new utility called Knock to Unlock which is crazy, but it actually works.

So, it’s a Mac application that runs in the background. And it’s an iPhone application that also runs in the background. It uses low power Bluetooth to talk between the phone and the computer. So, basically you walk up to your computer, you knock on your phone twice, and it unlocks it.

Craig: Whoa! I’m totally getting that.

John: Yeah. So, it seems impossible. So, you have to have a pretty recent model MacBook Air.

Craig: Well, what about like a MacBook Pro?

John: I’m sure that will be great. So, like my main computer that I’m working off of right now is an older MacBook that doesn’t let me do it, but my MacBook Air, it works great. So, it needs low power Bluetooth and it’s actually proved genuinely useful. So, it’s a utility that seems like magic and I’m only a couple days into it, but so far I really enjoy it.

Craig: Wow. Knock to Unlock. I’m totally getting that. That sounds great. That is, in fact, a cool thing. So, my One Cool Thing this week, obviously not that because that took me by surprise, blew my socks off.

Somebody posted, you know, we get a lot of these things on Twitter now where people say, “Please Retweet this and please Retweet that.” And we can’t Retweet everything. And, frankly, I’m just not a big Retweeter.

John: Yeah.

Craig: But one guy sent me this thing and it was basically about organ donation and a kid who needed an organ. And I don’t know, have I spoken about organ donation before on the podcast? I’m always worried that I’m re-cooling things.

John: I don’t think you have.

Craig: I have always been an enormous proponent of organ donation and also registering for the bone marrow transplant registry, the national marrow donor registry. In my mind, this is frankly a prerequisite for being a good human being. I hate to be super judgmental about this, but I really am. This is one of the few areas in my life where I’m sanctimonious in the truest sense of sanctimony.

John: Well, that and vaccines, but yes.

Craig: Yes. And vaccines. Correct. [laughs] It tends to revolve around medical science. But I think you are essentially you are —

John: We are lock-step in agreement on this one.

Craig: Yes. You are a bad person if you are so greedy and stupid as to think it’s more important to hold onto your organs in death than to save someone else’s life. Nobody likes to think about dying too soon, but then again nobody likes to think about dying pointlessly because they can’t find a heart for you, or for your child.

And so everybody should be an organ donor. Everybody should have the thing on their license that says they’re an organ donor. And I also think everybody should register for the national bone marrow registry service. It’s very, very simple to do.

The idea behind that is people, with a blood cancer, typically like a leukemia, will need to have their marrow replaced, but marrow will be rejected by the body unless it’s a very specific match to your own natural tissue. And it’s very hard to find a match. Sometimes your relatives will not match you. Sometimes somebody else across the world will.

So, what they do is they send you a kit. You can go online and register and we’ll provide the links. And you just do a cheek swab and send it back. And from that cheek swab they now have you in the database. And when somebody needs a bone marrow transplant and there’s not an obvious answer for that, they type them and they do into their database.

And one day my number may come up and I may have to go do this. And it will hurt a little bit. Whoop-de-doo, it will be the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. So, I love knowing that — are you registered?

John: I’m not bone marrow, so I should do that.

Craig: Oh, you’re going to be, after today, absolutely.

John: I’m doing it.

Craig: It is crucial. But it is just as crucial to be willing to donate every single part of your body that is usable should you die and should it be valuable to someone. Please, everything. Let us just reclaim each other. It is an absolute good thing to do.

So, we’ll provide some links for that, but that is my One Human Thing this week.

John: Very good. So, the links we were talking about are with the show notes. So, if you’re listening to this on your iPhone, those links are probably there in the podcast with you right there at the moment. But if not, you can go to johnaugust.com/podcast and find this podcast. There you will find links for most of the things we talked about: Knock to Unlock; the organ donation registries, the California one but also the national clearinghouse for that; the bone marrow registry — we’ll put that in there as well.

We will have information about our live show in December when we know when it is. So, a good idea in general is to follow us on Twitter. I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Those would be the places where we would first announce when tickets are going to be coming out and sort of what’s going to be going on with the live show.

If you are listening to this on a device that connects to iTunes, you can subscribe to us there. That’s awesome. If for some reason you are getting two subscription showing up in your feed, it’s because we had to change the URL address for Scriptnotes about three weeks ago, so subscribe to the new one and then delete the old one and then you won’t get two episodes coming in.

But while you’re in iTunes, leave us a comment, because we love those, and we do read those sometimes. And sometimes we’ll read them aloud. So, leave us a comment, that’s great.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And that is our show.

Craig: I think I did all right.

John: I think you did really, really well, Craig. A round of applause for Craig Mazin.

Craig: Ah…thank you.

John: Some nicely picked topics there.

Craig: Thank you.

John: And, Craig, we will talk again next week.

Craig: Great see you next time. Bye.

John: Thanks.

Links:

• Order your Scriptnotes shirts from The John August Store before Friday
• Get your tickets now for the Big Fish talkback on November 23rd and let us know you’ll be there
• Previous One Cool Thing WinesTilSoldOut did a cool thing for Craig
• John’s 2010 Jessica Alba blog post
• Dolby’s Atmos is one example of why your home theater sound doesn’t compare to the movie theater experience
• Foley on Wikipedia
• Behind the Name breaks down first name popularity by country and year
• Saving Mr. Banks is in theaters this December
• Knock to Unlock lets you unlock your Mac by knocking your iPhone
• Register as an organ donor today
• And register for the Be The Match bone marrow database, too
• Outro by Scriptnotes listener Jonas Bech