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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/is-15-the-new-30).

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, Episode 97, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. How are you, Craig?

**Craig:** Good. I’m liking the sound of that 97.

**John:** It’s a lot of episodes.

**Craig:** It’s a ton.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** One of our best episodes was the one we just did last week, the live one.

**John:** Yeah, it was a lot of fun. So, we had a big crowd at the WGF and that was a good, fun time; got to see our people as we did our live Three Page Challenges. Once again, thank you to our brave volunteers for that.

**Craig:** Yeah. They were terrific. They took their medicine. And, you know, there was something to recommend about all of those. I have to give Stuart credit — I mean, I hate to do it…

**John:** Mm-hmm. Tough.

**Craig:** I know. I just don’t like over-praising. Or praising. [laughs] But, Stuart did a very good job of picking out three Three Page Challenges that were — none of which were bad. They were all good and just had interesting issues to address.

**John:** And it was only after Stuart sent us those samples that he realized, like oh my gosh, I picked only women. And so at first I emailed back saying pick one guy or male writing team so we have some diversity. But then you emailed back like, yeah, screw that.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, who cares. I love — you know me, I’m very consistent. I ignore all that stuff. So, if we happen to get three women, good. And it was good, yes.

**John:** Hooray. So, that was our previous live podcast episode. Coming up on July 25 we have our next live episode, which is our 100th episode, which is very exciting. Tickets went on sale for it this past week. And they sold out super, super quick.

**Craig:** How fast did they actually go?

**John:** Within three minutes after I tweeted that they were sold out.

**Craig:** Dude, we’re Bon Jovi.

**John:** We are Bon Jovi. So, while that’s exciting, it’s also frustrating for people who didn’t get a chance to come who wanted to come. And so I feel awful about that situation. We’re trying to find out a way to release some more tickets so we can get some more people coming to our show.

If not, we’re also looking at ways to maybe live stream it or do other things, so people who cannot physically be with us can be with us emotionally as we celebrate 100 episodes of this podcast.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s a pretty remarkable thing, I have to say. I am grateful. I am legitimately grateful, as somebody who has a tiny, tiny Grinch-like dark, sooty marble for a heart. I am very grateful for people and their interest in our little podcast and what we talk about.

And a bit overwhelmed, frankly, by the interest in all of it. So, to everybody that jumped on that and bought tickets like we were, I don’t know, Nirvana in 1991, all I can say is thank you. And hopefully we’ll put on a good show for you.

**John:** Originally I was concerned that someone had like just bought 100 tickets all at once and has had a master plan to scalp them or something, but we got the word back today that the most any one person bought was six tickets. So, it’s not like there was some great cabal doing things.

So, it looks like highly motivated individuals bought those tickets, which is a great thing. We look forward to seeing a lot of people there and at future events. But today let’s talk about three topics that are of interest to screenwriters. Those would be the question of have first acts gotten shorter, and if so, why and what does that actually mean.

Second topic, the WGA released its annual report that shows that numbers are actually up significantly for writers, but only in TV.

And, finally, we’ll talk about the fight over the title The Butler. And what it means for a screenwriter who wants a certain title, but also what it means for the film industry and antitrust suits and famous lawyers.

**Craig:** And famous lawyers. So, quite a bit on our plate. I guess we should start with our first act.

**John:** Yes. So, this is actually motivated by my friend Rawson who sent an email asking, “Is it just me or is everybody asking for everything that used to happen in the first 30 pages to happen much faster?” Basically, the first act has to be much, much faster and shorter than it used to be. And he came up with a provocative title that very much feels like a Sex and the City question: Is 15 the new 30?

**Craig:** Yeah. I loved it when you forwarded me this from Rawson. I thought it was such a great observation, because it’s one of those things that I hadn’t really crystallized in my mind until I saw him write it out like that. I think it’s absolutely true that this is a pressure, a creative pressure, that’s been coming down increasingly lately to compress down first acts. I felt it in a huge way when I was writing Identity Thief. There was a lot of pressure on me to shorten that first act. I feel it all the time.

I went to go see World War Z…

**John:** I was going to bring up World War Z.

**Craig:** Yeah, and I really like that movie. That first act, I think, is a minute. [laughs] I think it’s a minute. There’s a scene where Brad Pitt wakes up with his family. They have a very kind of cereal-advertisement morning. They get in the car. And then zombies.

**John:** Yeah. So, we should define our terms, which is a good thing to do when we’re discussing whether something has changed is to talk about what it is we’re actually talking about. Let’s talk about what a first act is supposed to be, or what the function of a first act is in a screenplay.

And it’s one of those terms that’s kind of invented, but it’s a useful thing that we do talk about a lot in the Hollywood industry. So, classically in a play, an act is a very clear division, like the curtain comes down, or like this is where we’re stopping the show to move onto another thing. Obviously movies don’t do that. And so when we talk about a first act we’ve usually been talking about something that happens about 30 minutes in. And there are certain characteristics of what’s happened to this story at this point that indicates you’re at the end of the first act and you’re now moving into the second act.

And so sort of a laundry list to add to the kind of things I’m saying, generally you’ve reached a new place. Or, if you haven’t really gotten to a new place, you’ve reached a new direction. And your character is taking charge of the situation, or at least has a clearer idea of what his goals and motivations are. It’s to tell you what is specific about this story and what does this character need to achieve in order to get through to win this story.

What is your protagonist trying to accomplish? The game has changed in some significant way at this first act marker.

What else would you say is indicative of a first act?

**Craig:** Well, I guess a very simple way of thinking about it is that in the first act, not at the end of the first act, somewhere in the first act something happens to change the hero’s normal world/normal life, and at the end of the first act the hero has begun their journey to make things right again.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And for me, at least, I find that this first act is the most important act of a movie. It’s the most interesting act, for me. We’re creating a world. We’re building a world in the first act. We’re creating a person. We’re then introducing a problem. And then we’re pushing that person right to the edge of the nest and finally flicking them out.

And that first act has — it seems — has been squeezed and squeezed.

**John:** Let’s talk about some classic movies, movies that people are going to recognize what the first act is in that movie. Classic example is Wizard of Oz. Wizard of Oz, the line is “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** She’s literally moved from one place to another place. She is now in Oz and everything is different.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is when they reach the factory. That first act is getting them to the factory. The second act starts when they’re in the factory. So, everything you know about Charlie Bucket, and in my version of the movie, everything you know about Willy Wonka, there is setup that’s getting you there, so when you reach that second act you are, hopefully, ready to be on this journey.

**Craig:** Sure. Star Wars, I think probably when Luke realizes that his aunt and uncle have been burnt to death and there’s nothing left for him in this planet anymore and he decides to leave.

**John:** Yes. Little Miss Sunshine is when they hit the road to California.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They’ve gotten in the bus.

**Craig:** Yeah. The easiest ones are road trip movies. When they hit the road, the second act has begun.

**John:** Back to the Future, he gets stuck in 1955.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s about the right place. Comedies can sometimes be tougher, especially when you’re not going to a new place. I was looking up some, like Mean Girls, and what people thought was the act break in Mean Girls. And some people will differ on where they think the act break would be.

Mean Girls was when she finally decides, you know what, I’m not, I’m going to — she turns on the mean girls. So, she’s not going to try to become one of the mean girls, she’s going to bring them down. And that starts a different arc, where up to that point she’s been trying to assimilate. And at a certain point she says like, “I’m not going to try to assimilate. I’m going to bring them down.”

**Craig:** Yeah. At some point the meat of the adventure begins, whether the adventure is a legitimate adventure, or a character exploration. And sometimes in a high concept it’s when the high concept kicks in. So, in Groundhog Day when he wakes up that first time and it’s the same day again, that’s the end of the first act.

**John:** That’s a very classic first act shift. It’s also kind of those moments where what would be in the trailer that establishes what the premise of the movie is, that’s often been the first act break.

**Craig:** Yes, yes.

**John:** Not always, but often.

**Craig:** The stuff that comes before James Brown goes, “Ow! I feel good.” [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. Now, let’s go back to World War Z, because World War Z was one of the first things that popped into my mind because I just saw this last week. And there are no spoilers for us to say that very, very early on in the movie there are zombies running through the streets.

**Craig:** That’s not the end of the first act, per se.

**John:** No. And my question is you could argue that it feels like the end of the first act because like the world has profoundly changed. You could also say that was sort of the inciting incident.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** That is the moment where everything has started to happen. And then you could call the end of the first act when they get to the ship that they’re sort of landing on.

**Craig:** It’s funny — I actually think the end of the first act is when he leaves to go to Korea. So, he begins his adventure and leaves them behind. And there’s that moment where he says, “I’m leaving, you’re staying, and I am beginning an adventure,” the purpose of which is not only to save the world but to return and fix things.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Still, it happens in such a compressed manner. And for that movie, I have to say, no quarrels. There wasn’t, and we never really do movie reviews here — I really liked World War Z. Some people complained a little bit that the characters were thin and I think, yes, absolutely, they were very, very thin. It was like Hero and Hero’s wife. But, that’s not where I… — I did not lack from enjoyment simply because the characters were thin. It was a little bit like watching a bible story or something, you know.

**John:** Yeah. What I found so fascinating about sort of how it chose to do it is it didn’t do really any of the work that we expect to see in the setup of a movie, like the setup of who these characters are.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I mean, it was just the very broadest strokes on like, “This is a family. They seem to be doing pretty well.” And suddenly then we’re off to the races. And they tried to fill in some more stuff along the way, just sort of incidental conversations about what he used to do, what this was. But, in some ways it was surprising that it wasn’t filling in more of those details, because that’s what kind of kept you alive and alert for, because you kept listening for anything that would tell you who these people are or what is sort of unique or special.

**Craig:** Well, and one of the things about World War Z that is interesting is that the character ultimately doesn’t change. And because the character doesn’t change, we’re not dealing with a movie where there’s a traditional thematic arc. When you do have a traditional thematic arc and a character is going through some sort of internal combustion to end the movie in a philosophical place that is perfectly oppositional from where he or she began, you need that first act.

In comedy in particular I feel you need it, because comedy isn’t about a thousand zombies piling on top of each other like ants to get over a wall. Comedy is about the human condition. And so we need that first act desperately to meet somebody, establish who they are, establish what they believe. Kind of soak them in it for awhile.

**John:** Before the main plot engine really kicks in.

**Craig:** That’s right. And it’s okay for something to happen on page 10 that throws their world out of stasis. But it’s not okay for them to immediately then just jump into adventure. There needs to be a period of resistance and a period of contextualizing what happens and what this means for me. And then we begin the adventure.

**John:** So, a good example of that would be The Heat, which I don’t know if you’ve seen The Heat yet.

**Craig:** I haven’t seen it yet. I’m very excited to.

**John:** So, I thought it was fantastic. Melissa is fantastic and she’s obviously a friend of both of ours. But The Heat is very much — has a very classic first in act in that you meet the Sandra Bullock character, you meet the Melissa McCarthy character, separately. They cross paths probably about 15 pages into it.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Hate each other. Despise each other.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** At each other’s throats. And then probably around page 30 or so they have to partner together in order to get the plot of the movie to resolve. They both had their interests for why they’re going into it. And it’s very clear that we’re going to be watching this movie to see how their relationship develops over the course of this movie.

**Craig:** And you need the, if they meet each other… — So, okay, the way you just described it is sort of a perfect reason why you don’t want 15 to be the new 30. You need 15 pages to introduce two people and show them as they are separately, so that we understand what their strengths and limitations are, separately.

Then we need some time where they are together where we establish that they do not get along and why. And ideally it’s tied to their strengths and their weaknesses. Once we’ve done that groundwork, it’s perfectly fine at that point to kick the apple cart over and force them to head out into the field, whereby they will do the work of the plot as well as their own relationship. But we need those 30 pages.

And I’ve got to tell you, I mean, I don’t understand why there’s this big rush, rush, rush to shorten the first act. I think audiences love first acts.

**John:** So, my theory on why we feel this development pressure for shorter first acts is the people who’ve been reading the script have been reading the script for like six years.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, they know what the movie is and they know what’s going to happen. And they’re eager for what’s going to happen to happen. And so as they read the script or as they see early cuts of the movie they’re like, “Just get to it already. Just get to it.”

And that pressure is the pressure of someone who does not have fresh eyes, who is not seeing this for the first time. They’re seeing it as a person who knows every frame of the movie or every word that’s going to happen. And they’re eager to get to the thing much, much quicker.

**Craig:** I agree. And in comedy the pressure comes down often in this way: the big funny things that happen in comedies, the big set pieces, the sequences, typically are second act stuff. You’re first act doesn’t have a lot of big crazy sequences. And so naturally there’s this feeling of, “Uh, we need to get people laughing — faster, faster to the joke stuff. Go, go, go!”

And it’s a mistake because what we know on the other side of the thing, the making of the movie thing, is that it’s the setup that makes all that stuff work. And, look, nobody wants to sit there and watch an hour of setup. But there’s nothing wrong with 25 minutes of setup.

**John:** Now, devil’s advocate here. I think sometimes I’ve been reading scripts where I’m in this first act and it’s like, okay, I’ve got it. I got it. I got it. You’re just giving me the same thing again and again.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, in no way are we arguing for repetition, for boring scenes, or things that feel like they’re, you know, they’re lovely bits of set dressing that’s keeping us from getting to our real story. So, I think the challenge is still on the writer to make sure that at every moment you’re flipping the page because we’re deeply engaged and want to know what’s going to happen next.

And even if that what happens next is not the thing that kicks us into the second act, we want to be curious and fascinated about what’s going to happen next with this character. What this character is going to do so that as the story progresses we are deeply invested in them.

So, it’s in no way an opportunity for those three page scenes where characters talk about their lives and backstory, because that’s just awful.

**Craig:** Yeah. Frankly the opposite; I always think of the first ten pages in particular as very precious real estate where you have to pack in a lot. You want to make it vibrant, and informational, and interesting, and dramatic. Everything that you do in that first act has to have a purpose and that purpose must pay off. The bud must blossom at some point in the script, or it shouldn’t be there.

And, listen: it may be that your story doesn’t need a traditional 30 page first act. And that’s fine. But if you feel like it does, do it. I do it. I mean, the script I’m writing right now, the first act ends I think on page 31. And I’m okay with that. [laughs] We’ll see what the studio thinks.

**John:** Now, one of the common characteristics of the break between the first act and the second act is the characters reach a new place. But I would caution people from thinking that, “Oh, that means that in my thriller I can’t have them get to the cabin in the woods until page 30.” That’s not what that means.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You may get to the cabin in the woods on page five. But, the nature of the relationship between the characters are what the characters are facing would make that big change at the end of the first act, which would be some time down the road. So, we get to know who the characters are, what they’re expecting, what the tensions are above them, what the normal life is for them before everything goes crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. Normal life is so important. I’m a huge believer in the concept of normal life and establishing what that means for characters, even if they’re lives are circumstantially not very normal. Okay, so you have a character whose job is to be a stunt person. So, what’s their normal day? Hurling out of a fifth story window on fire and crashing into a thing full of glass. Well, that’s their normal life. Show it.

But then something is going to happen to make that even less normal later down the line. Still, you need to always show what’s normal before you show what changes.

**John:** So, what are some actionable things that a writer can do to push back against this 15 is the new 30 idea?

**Craig:** Well, I can only tell you what I do, and basically it’s to make the case. I just keep making the case. And I don’t always win. One thing that I know is that there were scenes that were put in, for instance in Identity Thief there were a couple of scenes that were requested of me in the first act that I didn’t think needed to be there. And there was one scene that was taken out that I definitely think needed to be there and it ended up hurting later.

And I can always now go back and say, “Well, let us remember the lessons of this.” But, the truth of the matter is there is no magic shield. There will be times as a professional screenwriter where you can’t keep people from making a mistake. Even if you fall on your sword, somebody else will come along and write that mistake for them.

So, but I try. I just try and make the case as patiently as I can. I find that this is where directors help, making an alliance with a director helps. Directors want to make sure that their audience gets what’s going on, gets the logic, doesn’t feel rushed through, because one side effect of rushing through a first act is that you simply care less.

What about you?

**John:** I will bring it up. I will try to argue for why those scenes need to be there, why that moment needs to be there, why we need to understand who this person is in that moment. That said, I tend to be a person who does move very quickly. And I get stuff started very quickly. And so Go is a movie that is essentially three first acts. The Nines is a movie that is essentially three first acts. That’s a way that I feel comfortable writing. But even if you look at those, both those movies are sort of like three short films sort of stacked next to each other.

They do have that kind of classic development where you understand what the normal life is, you understand this is the choice the character has made that has kicked us into this next section where everything is different, and this is the resolution of what’s going to happen because of the choices that they made. And so even though they move much more briskly, I’m doing the things that need to be done in those times.

And if I were to try to do that first setup that was so quick for just the little section one of Go, and make that carry us over through the whole rage of the movie, it wouldn’t work. The fact is, in Go I’m able to stop the movie, set up these three new people at a new time, and let them run in their own story.

So, I tend to want to have things go quickly. But I still get those notes sometimes. With Preacher I kept getting the notes, “We need to get to the Saint of Killers faster.” And it’s like, well, then we’re not going to know who any of these people are. And that’s going to be a very frustrating thing.

**Craig:** A question that I often ask when I hear somebody say, “We need to get to blah-blah-blah faster,” the question I will have in response is, “Why?” And sometimes simply asking why will put them on their heels a little bit, because the truth is they don’t know why. They’ve just been told somewhere in the factory that faster is better.

I’m okay with going faster if you can tell me why. It’s simple.

**John:** Yeah. Our next topic, the WGA, the Writers Guild of America, each year has to file its annual report which shows not only what its finances are but sort of what the status is of writers for film and television and a few other people who get lumped into the Writers Guild. How much they’ve made. Who got employment? What was going on in the Writers Guild this year.

And so I think we’ve talked about this; each time it has come up on the podcast, sort of where the numbers are and where the numbers are moving towards. This would have been a very smart time for me to actually have the report in front of me.

**Craig:** I have it in front of me.

**John:** So why don’t you, Craig, give us the overview of sort of what has changed from this year from the previous year?

**Craig:** Sure. Well, first off, a little preamble: the Guild seems to be in fine fiscal health. In fact, it ended the year with a surplus, a $4.5 million operating surplus, which of course in my mind means, hey, why don’t you reduce our dues a little bit. But, that’s never going to happen. [laughs]

So, let’s talk about what changed.

**John:** I did notice that the strike fund seemed to be quite healthy.

**Craig:** Yeah, the strike fund is just fine. [laughs] Everything is fine. Honestly, the whole thing about dues is a discussion for a later date.

But, okay, so the overall picture when we talk about writers who have been hired and how much money we’ve made, interesting from this year to last year, a little bit fewer. A little bit fewer writers were hired, down by 1%. But the amount that they earned was up by 4%, which is actually a decent jump relative to last year and the year before. But when you break it out into TV and film, two totally different pictures emerge.

**John:** Yeah. So, television has increased by a nice clip, which is great. There are more writers employed in television than at any point in the last six years.

**Craig:** Yes. Television writers, the amount that were employed is up 2.3%, and that’s on top of year, after year, after year of increases in the amount that have been employed. And, also, their earnings are up and they’re up a whopping 10%. That’s a big jump. And consider this: if you look at year, to year, to year, to year, percent change versus prior year, starting in 2008 because everything is sort of based off of 2007 here as a sort of five-year review, up 1.4%. This is earnings, up 1.4%. Up 13.8%, up 7.6%, up 7%, up 10%.

TV is crushing it. In 2007, TV writers earned $456 million. In 2012, they earned $667 million. Wow.

So, surely that kind of success has carried over to features, right? [laughs]. No. Wah. Everybody get your trombones out. Make the sad note. Here we go.

How many writers have reported earnings? We’re down 6.7% from last year in feature film. And earnings, the amount of earned, money actually that we’ve pulled in, down 6%.

Here’s the worst part of all of this: if you look compare us to 2007, where television, there are more writers compared to 2007, and we’re way up by like 50% in terms of how much TV writers have earned. Opposite situation in screen. In screen from 2007 to now, 25% fewer writers employed as screenwriters. And earnings down 35%.

So, in 2007 there were 2,041 writers who reported earnings in screen. Last year, 1,537. Incredible. In 2007, $527 million in total earnings in screen. Last year, $343 million. Yikes.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a bloodbath, but honestly it feels consistent with what I know from people who are actually working is that many of my… — Those TV writers didn’t just magically appear. A lot of those people are feature film writers who are now working in television. And that’s completely consistent with the people I know, is that so many people who were feature writers have now moved to television. Or they took a TV show on the side, but are still trying to do feature work, but they’re not doing the feature work, they’re just doing television.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s the reality of the people who are making money right now is people who are writing on TV shows. And god bless that there are TV shows. You can’t imagine how awful this would be if those jobs didn’t exist in television, if we weren’t making more television than at any point in history.

**Craig:** It would be horrifying out there. When you look at in terms of residuals…

**John:** Yeah, we should stop and clarify for a second. So, earnings for this report, earnings means money that you’re actually making in that year for the work that you were doing in that year.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And because it is earnings in that year, the previous year’s numbers actually change a bit because things get reported after the fact. And so even the numbers that are coming in for this year, they’re not really final numbers. They’ll shift a bit based on people who report earnings that came in late in 2012.

**Craig:** That’s right. The residuals is the money that we earn on the reuse on that stuff that we write. And that is less of a snapshot of how the employment situation is and more of a snapshot of what the marketplace is like in terms of consumers, and what they’re buying, and what they’re consuming.

So, even though screenwriters have been decimated in terms of the numbers of us who are employed at all and how much we make when we are employed, residuals seems to be holding pretty steadily actually in screen. And they are up. In fact, they’re up in both. They’re up about 6% in television and 5.3% in screen. Television, you know, there’s more residuals there, which is not surprising, because there’s just so many more television shows.

What I thought was interesting as television generated $200 million in residuals. The Guild, and this is very Guildy of them — this is where sometimes they make me nuts because they get a little editorial in these things — the highlight of reuse of programs in new media, where the rental services such as Netflix and Hulu Plus drove significant growth from $4.21 million to $11.26 million in 2012. And that is impressive if you look at it just as, okay, $4.2 million to $11.26 million. Not so impressive when you look at it as $11.26 million out of $200 million.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And the reason that they’re banging that drum and making such a big deal about that is because they don’t want anyone to think for a second that we had that new media strike purposelessly.

**John:** Yeah. So, that number was up. My question for you is: when you’re buying something off of DirecTV, like you’re buying a show off DirecTV, or you’re buying something off of iTunes, that’s not included in this new media. That’s included in home video, correct?

**Craig:** No, I think that they’re calling “new media rental services,” I would imagine, would cover renting on iTunes, sure. Yeah.

**John:** Okay. But purchasing on iTunes might be…?

**Craig:** That’s different. Yeah, purchasing seems to be… — I mean, I guess, it’s hard to tell, frankly, because they may be lumping all new media into this, because where they say “where the rental services such as drove significant growth,” well that means, okay, so — but driving significant growth doesn’t mean you’re solely responsible for that growth. And certainly Netflix and Hulu are “such as” not “only.”

**John:** Yes. So, let’s talk sort of bigger picture here. If you are a feature film writer, you are likely making less money than you were before.

**Craig:** Yeah. Maybe.

**John:** A prototypical individual screenwriter was probably making less money than they were before, either by not being employed, or by making less per draft. And that seems to be consistent with at least the writers I’m talking with.

The fact that residuals are holding steady is good news if you’ve been employed for awhile because then you actually have some movies that have a life after theatrical.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, that may help tide you over. What is hard to gain any reassurance from looking at these reports is that there’s any end in sight for sort of what is going to happen to the feature film writer.

**Craig:** Well, there’s a little bit of an end in sight. I mean, first of all, let’s point out that your prototypical screenwriter probably doesn’t exist, that what’s happened is we’re looking at a mean average of two very different poles on a graph. It seems that the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer when it comes to screen. That’s at least a little bit of what our surveys and some of our anecdotes tell us.

So, the bell curve has become, you know, sort of a two-hump camel. But, there’s a little bit — a little bit — of hope. And where that little tiny bit of hope comes in is in home video, because home video is the area that collapsed under screen. That was the area, that was the marketplace, that was really propping screen up and thus propping up employment, and budgets, and the amount of movies that were made.

And when it collapsed it collapsed spectacularly. So, when you look at theatrical film videos from home video, in 2007 — sorry, let’s take 2008, because that was the high mark — in 2008, $47 million roughly in home video residuals.

**John:** So, that indicates a very healthy home video market because we’re talking a fraction of a percent equals…

**Craig:** That’s right. So, as the theory went, writers get a nickel for each DVD sold. So, all those nickels for DVDs added up to $47 million in 2008. In 2011, it was down to $30 million. That’s a huge drop in just three years. It’s just precipitous. That’s what has changed this business more than anything.

However, a little tiny bit of hope: in 2008, home video actually went up 1%. And you would think that going up 1% wouldn’t be cause for celebration, but after year-on-year declines of big, big jumps in percentage, you know, from $47 million all the way down to $30 million, holding steady is a big deal.

So, if you look at 2012 to 2007, home video on the whole dropped 30%. And remember what I said our earnings dropped? 35%. I mean, and 25% fewer writers. That’s the number, to me, that is the leading indicator here is home video. And if we can hold home video I think maybe we have a chance of just holding things where they are right now and maybe not having them get worse.

**John:** So, let me restate your thesis in a way, make sure we’re talking about the same thing. So, with the decline in home video, studios have been spending less money on writers for theatrical films because they’re feeling the pinch and they’re feeling we’re not going to be able to make our money out of things, therefore they’re spending less in development?

**Craig:** Yeah. I think basically they’re saying as home video declines the amount of films we make will also decline, and therefore the amount of screenwriters we employ will decline, and the budgets of many of those projects will also decline.

**John:** And those numbers are borne out by the actual numbers of theatrical films the major studios have made over these past few years has genuinely declined. And so with fewer films, there’s fewer writers. And subsequently there’s also fewer films in development because they’re expecting to make fewer down the road.

**Craig:** That’s right. And basically they’ve declined by about a third. So, the magic number for screenwriters is a third. Things are a third down. They’re roughly a third down in terms of how many of us are hired, roughly a third down on how much money they spend on us, roughly a third down on how many movies they make, and roughly a third down on what home video is generating.

**John:** Now, what we said before in terms of my experience is that a lot of feature writers have moved over to television and that it’s really they’re television writers now. I think those two numbers are also closely coupled because a lot of the reason why I think our theatrical home video is down is because television is up.

People have a certain number of hours in the day. I think the fact that we’re living in maybe a golden age of television and we have better television than we’ve ever had before is making someone choose to watch Homeland rather than rent that DVD, or watch that DVD, or buy that DVD at Target for that movie. And I think those are more closely related than you might at first glance notice.

**Craig:** That may be true. We know that it’s not a zero sum game, that new markets can be created. Before VHS, there simply wasn’t movie viewing at home. And then suddenly everyone was watching movies at home and it became a thing.

Also, let’s recall that the purchasing or renting of movies does not equate on a one-to-one with the watching of them. That’s how Blockbuster made its fortune. People buy movies they don’t watch. [laughs] They rent movies they don’t watch. And so the fact that they don’t have as many hours in the day doesn’t necessarily stop them from buying these things.

It is our hope that things have stabilized and maybe even if we can be greedy enough for a second to be hopeful, really hopeful, that they’ve not only stabilized but that the base of home video can now support growth in new media. And new media right now just simply doesn’t generate that much money for screenwriters. Last year it generated $5 million. Home video generated $30 million.

So, for people that sit there and insist that no one buys DVDs anymore, and that the world is all about iTunes, all I can say is, no, not yet, but hopefully soon. Hopefully soon.

**John:** So, with that, let’s go to our third topic of today which is The Butler. So, the backstory on this, there’s a lawsuit that’s occurring between Warner Bros. and the Weinstein Company. The Weinstein Company directed by Lee Daniels called, that they want to call The Butler, which is about a butler, I think it’s about a butler in Obama’s White House who has been a butler for a tremendously long time — an African American butler.

**Craig:** I think it’s based on a true story.

**John:** Based on a true story. And so this butler who has been serving the presidents for all of these years is now serving an African American president and sort of what that change is. And that’s Lee Daniels’ film.

So, the Weinstein Company wants the title, The Butler, and Warner is saying, no, because Warner controls copyright on a 1969, sorry, 1916…

**Craig:** Not copyright.

**John:** Well, actually they do own copyright, but copyright is not the issue here. They control the title, The Butler, because they have a 1916 silent film called The Butler.

**Craig:** The very popular 1916 film, The Butler.

**John:** Which apparently has not been shown theatrically in nearly a century. It’s not even like a big, giant movie.

**Craig:** No, nothing from 1916 is a big, giant movie. This is absolutely a sharp stick in Harvey’s eye. There’s no question about that. There’s no value in the silent film, The Butler. Here’s what’s going on… — I mean, look, I don’t know why the sharp stick is in the eye. Hollywood is a tough place.

**John:** Let’s back up because I had actually blogged about this years ago, because people would write in this question, like, “I have this title that I want to use, but there’s another movie from years ago with that title. Will I be able to use it?” And the answer is generally, “Probably.”

And people think you can copyright a title. You can’t copyright a title. Copyrights exist to protect literary works and other works, but like longer works. You can’t copyright a pure idea. And you can’t copyright a title.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, and if you have any questions, IMDb some common phrase and you will see there are hundred movies called Dead of Night, for example. That happens a lot.

You can trademark certain things, but not movie titles. So, you can trademark Transformers, because it was a toy line.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so there are some things which are protected because they’re trademarks. But there are very few things that are protected because of their trademark.

Rather, the system that we have set up is run by the MPAA and all the major studios are partners in this. And they have what’s called the Title Bureau. And when you are going into production on a movie you can register your title with the Title Bureau so that no one else could take that title.

But then there are negotiations if your title is considered to be too close to someone else’s title. And every time you submit your title, the other studios can say, “Uh-uh,” and raise their hands and say, “No, we do not accept that because of X, Y, or Z.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I had to go through this on The Nines. When we registered our title we had complaints from this movie 9. We had a complaint from The Whole Nine Yards. A lot of people raised complaints and one-by-one they sort of gave up their complaints and everything was cool and we were able to keep the title, The Nines. It happens all the time.

**Craig:** All the time. Yeah.

**John:** That’s why it is so remarkable that this happened in this case where they would not yield.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, my very first movie that I wrote with Greg Erb was called Space Cadet. And Lucas blocked it because he said he had a movie in development called Space Cadet, which he never made, obviously. So, we had to change it.

Here’s the deal with this title registration thing: everybody that’s involved in it does so voluntarily. If you’re a member of the MPAA, it’s a requirement of being a member of the MPAA, but there are actually very few studios that are true members of the MPAA, the big ones are. The little ones, like the Weinstein Company, for instance, they may not be official members of the MPAA, but they become members of the Title Registration Bureau. And by doing so they voluntarily agree to be bound by that bureau.

They say, “I am going to sign something that says that from now on I am subject to your arbitration if there’s a dispute over title.” Now, why would anyone do that? They do it because they want protection for their titles.

So, if I’m the Weinstein Company and I make, say, Pulp Fiction, I don’t want Warner Bros. to be able to put out a movie called Pulp Fiction five years later. And if you’re not part of the Title Registry Bureau, you can. So, it’s all about preservation and protecting yourself. In exchange for protection of your titles, you submit to the bureau so that other people’s titles can also be protected. In this case, it seems like the normal horse trading that goes on, the normal gentlemanly, senatorial back and forth has been pushed aside.

Typically, studios will horse trade with each other. If you file for a title, and Warner Bros. says, “Well, the thing is we have that 1916 silent movie called The Butler,” if it were Disney, Disney would call up and say, “Guys, come on. We could do that all day long to you, too. We’ve got a thousand movies in our library. Do you want us doing that next year to you? We’ll do it.”

“Nah, I don’t want you doing that to me. Let’s just agree to fight over real substantive ones.” That’s what the system is really there for.

In this case, Warner Bros., that’s why I said sharp stick in the eye, this is just vindictive. They’re just being vindictive. I don’t know why. Not my business. However, I think that Harvey is going to have a tough time here.

**John:** Yes. So, it is important to note that this was an arbitration, so it’s not a court case — it wasn’t a court case in this situation. But, now lawyers have been brought in. David Boies, who is a very famous attorney, was part of the team that filed the Prop 8, so I know David Boies, and he’s lovely, and great, and smart. So, he is filing these letters against Warner Bros. and against the arbitration people, the MPAA, saying, “Uh-uh, not cool. And, we’re going to keep pressing this.”

Basically, first off, by the time this podcast airs this may all be resolved, so we should talk in a more general sense, but he was arguing that the damages that Warner was claiming, so essentially Warner was going to make Weinstein Company pay a fee if they didn’t stop calling the movie The Butler, even in these promotional things up to this point.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which is, again, I’m sure part of that contract that was signed.

**Craig:** No doubt.

**John:** Boies makes an interesting case, though, is that on some level does having a title really mean that you’re permanently protected in all cases forever because you have that tile. And to what degree could they claim that anything called The Butler, or having the title Butler in it is going to be protected by Warner Bros. It’s going to be like off limits for all the people for all time.

Should there be some distinction between a movie that’s actually in the public consciousness, you know, like Pulp Fiction, versus this obscure title from a long time ago. Because, otherwise people could essentially just title squat and never let a title go, become available.

**Craig:** And they do. I mean, look, where he is going to run into trouble are the following areas. One, the Weinstein Company voluntarily entered into an agreement to be part of this Title Registry Bureau. They did so, and accrued benefits from being a member of that bureau. So, their titles have been protected by the bureau. And in becoming members they’ve voluntarily agreed to follow the rules that say basically whatever this arbitration decides, that’s it. I mean, binding arbitration is a real thing. Thank god it’s a real thing or else the courts would be even more crowded than they are.

The notion that you don’t have to belong to the Title Registry Bureau, you do it so that your title is protected, too. So, I mean, theoretically somebody could call it The Butler if they wanted. They’d just have to now open up all their other titles to people grabbing them.

**John:** I have a question about sort of the — antitrust got brought up. And antitrust is not going to really kick in on this case because it’s of Weinstein’s and Warner’s and all that situation, but it does strike me as this is an agreement between all the studios to protect titles in a way that a court could look at and say, “This is not cool. This is a way of stifling individual speech, corporate speech, through this collusion of powerful entities.”

**Craig:** Yeah, they could. And if he makes that argument I would be surprised, because the last thing the Weinstein Company wants is to start dismantling the very valuable quasi trust protections that the business has created for itself.

Look, I’m not a lawyer. I’m certainly not an antitrust lawyer. I’m not sure that this is antitrust because it’s voluntary. You don’t have to belong to this to be able to release movies.

However, where they could run into trouble is I think you need to belong to it if you want an MPAA rating.

**John:** Which is a big deal…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** …because without that you can’t get theatrical distribution in many markets.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And everything else becomes much more complicated. For a long time you couldn’t get on iTunes without an MPAA rating.

**Craig:** Right, exactly. Now, that I’m not sure is the case. So, I’ll have to do a little research there. But if that is the case, then I would see, well, yeah, now you’re sort of bundling a “optional service” with a not-so-optional service, because you really can’t put your movie in theaters or on iTunes if it’s not rated.

But then again, you could…

**John:** You could argue the antitrust thing about the whole MPAA.

**Craig:** Correct. That’s my point.

**John:** The entire entity. The ratings system is easily, has as many problems with…

**Craig:** More. More.

**John:** …with antitrust.

**Craig:** And I guess that’s my point, is that the ratings system has somehow survived this kind of thing. And I believe it has. There’s no chance that the title registry bureau won’t. So, anyway, I think this is — David Boies is collecting some money while Harvey gets really, really angry. [laughs] But I don’t know how they win this one.

It’s offensive…

**John:** On some level, have they won already just by getting the popular attention on the title fight?

**Craig:** I don’t think anybody cares.

**John:** I think maybe the fact that it’s getting some minor New York attention, it probably feels good for Harvey, about this movie that I would never have heard of if it weren’t for this. He will have to change the title. Everyone will know what the new title is, because they’ll lose the suit. Or, it will be Lee Daniels Presents The Butler. And there will be some way that they’ll phrase out of it.

**Craig:** No, they won’t be able to get that either. I mean, look, underneath all of this I suspect, frankly, it’s just a flat out extortion scheme that Harvey didn’t want to go along with. There have been a billion cases where basically people who are squatting on titles have gotten bought off.

I mean, I know one producer, I will not say his name, who kind of blew me away with his grossness and told me a story that he basically made lists of things that sounded like provocative titles and then went and registered them with the Title Registry Bureau.

And I think you have to sort of show that there is some minor effort towards development. And the idea was if somebody does actually develop a film with that title they have to come to him and pay him. And he said he wants to get paid like $500,000.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** It’s so gross.

**John:** That’s gross.

Charlie’s Angels, the second Charlie’s Angels movie was called Charlie’s Angels: Forever, but that didn’t test well when they just were testing titles. And so Sony I think either had a list of other titles of things they owned or controlled, or just things they thought were cool titles. And so Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle was the one that tested the best and that became the title of the movie.

**Craig:** Full Throttle.

**John:** Full Throttle.

**Craig:** Full.

**John:** There is a motorcycle sequence in it so it kind of matters, makes some sense, but it’s just…it was tenuous.

**Craig:** Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle is sort of the movie version of Extreme for Doritos. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but it seems good. [laughs] It’s Charlie’s Angels: Max.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Forever actually made more sense in that there were tremendous things in the script that were actually about sort of legacy and things going on…

**Craig:** Oh, John, no, no, no.

**John:** But no one cares about the deep thematic resonance…

**Craig:** Yeah, your themes of eternity and immortality were pushed aside because the Throttle, you see, needed to be full.

**John:** There was a Cirque du Soleil sequence in Charlie’s Angels for awhile that was never shot, but which would have been amazing, because you kind of want the Angels to fly, and then they could have actually flown.

**Craig:** That would have been cool. Why’d they cut that?

**John:** Yeah. Pretty. Because…

**Craig:** Oh, wait, I know, Half Throttle?

**John:** Half Throttle. All the Vegas stuff went away. And so it was at a Vegas, it was a heaven-themed Vegas casino.

**Craig:** Perfect.

**John:** It was good. And they also used to slide down the outside of the pyramid…

**Craig:** The Luxor, I was going to say. That’s the only casino you can slide down. Well, you know, years later yours truly was there watching a man parachute out of a helicopter. Flyover. It was close enough.

**John:** Fantastic. So, I wasn’t sure that in Hangover III that any of that was actually real. So, there was some help — there was some parachuting that was…?

**Craig:** It was real. The guy jumped out of a helicopter and parachuted over the strip. And actually did for real parachute over the Bellagio fountains.

**John:** I’m certain the insurance on that was crazy.

**Craig:** I don’t know. [laughs]

**John:** Not your responsibility. I love the big like not my problems.

**Craig:** Not my problem! I will say that the guy, the coordinator who handled that unit was awesome. Like, I just want to make a movie about that guy. And he does all the movies, I guess, and he’s just an amazing helicopter stunt pilot/parachute dude. What a life?!

**John:** It’s a great life.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s a great life until something goes wrong and you’re done.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** But it’s a great life while you’re doing it.

**Craig:** While you’re doing it.

**John:** Yeah.

Craig, it’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Oh god. Do yours. [laughs]

**John:** I’ll do mine first. Mine was, I think, also sent to me by Rawson Thurber who gets the MVP award for like helping support the podcast this week. He sent this thing called The Hero’s Journey by Glove and Boots. And it’s these puppets who are talking about Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth, the hero’s journey, and sort of like what it actually means in movies.

And so the movie that they’re actually sort of talking through is Happy Gilmore, which seems like a real stretch for it, but they have a plausible case. And I thought it was a really good introduction to sort of like what the Joseph Campbell Monomyth is and sort of what we talk about when we mean they call it the adventure and these are the kinds of characters who you see in this thing.

What I don’t think it does an especially good job at is the reality checking of not every great movie has the Joseph Campbell arch and Monomyth in it. And many movies that are terrible actually try to hit all those things and it doesn’t really work. So, it’s not a formula that guarantees that you will have a good movie, but it’s an interesting pattern you can see in many movies that you love, and it’s an interesting way of thinking about sort of what is a classic hero’s journey in film.

So, I would recommend that and it’s funny and goofy. And it reminded me of Wonder Showzen, which was a great show. For all I know it could be some of the same people doing it. But it was a good, fun thing. It was a little YouTube video worth your six minutes.

**Craig:** I’ll check that out. I do have a Cool Thing. I’ve been holding this one back for awhile, because again, I hate praising — myself or anyone. But I have a friend named Ken White. He’s a lawyer. He’s a defense attorney actually here in Southern California. I give him a lot of crap about defending criminals and all the rest, although somebody has to do it, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ken is one of them, maybe the principal author, of a multi-author blog called Popehat. Popehat. Popehat.com.

And what I love about Ken is he’s — I mean, politically he and I are very similar. Just sort of strong libertarian streaks, no party allegiance, not afraid to point our fingers at anyone and go, pfft, like that. And he is an excellent writer. He’s an excellent writer and very good at explaining legal things. And there was one saga that he followed, I don’t if you were familiar with the Prenda Law case.

**John:** I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** So, there’s this whole thing about these copyright trolls, where these companies will buy up copyrights that are essentially worthless and then go after people who are maybe pirating them or maybe not, and just extorting settlement fees out of them.

And there was this company, Prenda, that basically, they were a law firm. And what they did was they…

**John:** By the way, Prenda is such a made up name.

**Craig:** Isn’t it amazing, right? Prenda.

So, Prenda is a law firm. And this law firm decided, “Look at all the money we can make. What we’re going to do is we’re going to basically start a shell company, as lawyers we’re going to start a shell company that will represent,” this is already a no-no. “That shell company will buy up a bunch of useless copyright for porn. Old copyright porn, okay. And then we’re going to go and basically find some ding-a-ling somewhere that downloaded four minutes of that porn, or not, send them a threatening letter and say basically you need to settle with us.”

And it was an amazing scam, because who wants to actually go to court over their porn downloading? Except one guy did. And oh my god did Prenda Law get their asses handed to them. And Ken just covered it beautifully and wrote about it in such a great, clear, instructional way, with plenty of doses of anger. And all the things you could want from a wonderful internet nerd. He is a great guy. And so I recommend that you all check out Popehat.com.

**John:** Fantastic. So, links to Popehat.com and this Hero’s Journey clip on YouTube and all the things we were talking about on today’s podcast you can find at johnaugust.com/podcast.

If you have a question for us, if it’s longer you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. And Stuart sort of sorts through those and helps find the good questions out of those batches. But if you have a small thing you want to say to Craig or to me, Craig is @clmazin on Twitter. I am @johnaugust on Twitter.

We have a Facebook page that we never actually mention, but people sometimes come there and like us.

**Craig:** They do?

**John:** We do have a Facebook page.

**Craig:** Huh. I’m plugged in as always.

**John:** Yeah. If you are listening to this in iTunes and want to give us a rating, that would be fantastic. We’d love that. It helps other people find our show. If you are not listening to us on iTunes, it would be great if you subscribed, because that way we would sort of know how many people are out there listening to our show.

And I think that’s it.

**Craig:** I think we should get Bon Jovi to sing us out.

**John:** That would be fantastic.

**Craig:** We’re the Bon Jovi of screenwriting podcasts.

**John:** Yes. So, actually we have like two minutes here so I’m going to just launch into this right now. Because one of the things I want to be doing after this 100 episode madness has cleared is originally when I was doing the outros for these shows I would like find some goofy thing on YouTube that seemed to be about what we were talking about. And I would use that audio as the outro, which was fun, but I didn’t actually clear any of those clips.

And so in backups we’ve clipped that out because like, eh, I would hate for some weirdo, some Prenda Law person to come after for me using that.

**Craig:** Prenda.

**John:** So, what I’ve started doing is just took our [hums theme] theme and just built that into different little arrangements in GarageBand, which was fun and goofy for me to do. But, I would love some of our listeners to do the same kind of thing, and to give us an outro that uses [hums theme], and build something cool out of it.

So, if listeners would like to do that, the same address I gave to you before, ask@johnaugust.com, is the perfect place to do that. And just send us a link to something you’ve made.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** We’ll have more details up at some point with — it’s not a competition, it’s just an exhibition of…

**Craig:** It’s a competition. I’ll be judging. [laughs]

**John:** Craig will be silently judging what people are doing.

**Craig:** Silently judging.

**John:** But I really mean just if you have an interesting sound or a free couple hours on a Saturday and want to do something, I have a hunch that we have some very talented listeners who are not just writers, but who can also do musical kind of things.

**Craig:** Yeah, man.

**John:** So, if anyone would like to do a little outro, to be less than 30 seconds. It should be accessible to us in some way as a mp3 file so we can clip it onto the end of this. And if we do use your thing we will give you a link and a shout out in the show.

**Craig:** Nice! Man, this podcast is getting good. It took us 97 episodes. I feel like we’re just about there to good.

**John:** We’re in a pretty good place. I think in the Behind the Podcast we’re almost at a place where “and then drugs came into the picture.”

**Craig:** Oh, exactly, like, “Everything was going great, and then…” This is it, oh, listen to that. The drugs [sirens blare in background]…they’re coming for me. Drugs.

Well, listen, the drugs will be kicking in. That’s the title of this podcast. [laughs] And then the drugs kicked in.

**John:** All right, Craig, have yourself a great week.

**Craig:** You, too, man. Bye.

**John:** I’ll talk to you next time.

LINKS:

* The live [100th episode](http://www.oscars.org/events-exhibitions/events/2013/07/script-notes.html) is sold out!
* WGA’s [2013 Annual Financial Report](http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/who_we_are/annual_reports/annualreport13.pdf)
* [John’s 2011 blog post](http://johnaugust.com/2011/you-cant-copyright-titles) on copyrighting movie titles
* [You got served: Weinstein fighting for ‘The Butler’ title](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/goldstandard/la-et-mn-butler-name-change-20130703,0,6660171.story) from the LA Times
* [The Hero’s Journey](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZxs_jGN7Pg&feature=player_embedded) by Glove and Boots
* [Popehat.com](http://www.popehat.com/) and their [posts on Prenda Law](http://www.popehat.com/tag/prenda-law/)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/three-page-challenge-live-edition).

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes; it’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters, including the ones right here in this audience.

[Applause!]

**Craig:** Ah, god, they are both the greatest and worst audience ever.

**John:** They are a fantastic audience.

We’ve got a full house here at the Writers Guild Foundation Craft Day 2013. Thank you guys all so much for coming. We are in the Writers Guild Theater which is not at the Writers Guild, so about half the people here probably drove to the wrong place and then came to the right place. And that’s great; you’re in the right place because today we are going to be talking about…Craig, what are we going to talk about today?

**Craig:** Well, today we thought we would do one of our Three Page Challenge episodes, but we kind of have a nice thing today. This is a first for us, and it’s a little scary, as scary as it is for the people who send in these pages and have us analyze them and critique them. Today it’s a little scary for us because we have the screenwriters of those pages here today.

We have to look them in the eye, which is not going to temper what I say at all. But, still, it’s a great thing. And so that seems like a fun way to go through this. We have three different Three Page Challenges. And then I think, maybe, if we have some time…

**John:** We’ll have some questions at the end.

**Craig:** From you guys.

**John:** From you guys, here, live in the audience.

**Craig:** No, we have questions for you.

**John:** Yeah, we’re going to just pick random people and ask you questions. So, be thinking about questions you may want to ask me and Craig or the writers of the pages that are up here, or things that you see in the pages that you want to have more clarity on.

Just to give a little backstory here: We’ve been doing the Three Page Challenge since almost the beginning of the podcast. And this came from something you used to do on Done Deal Pro where you’d say like, okay, somebody can send in four pages and I’ll tell you whether your four pages are good. You can sort of tell within the first couple pages if a person knows what they’re doing on the page.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s levels that we can look for. The reason I started doing it on Done Deal Pro is because a lot of people were, frankly, I’m always motivated by a certain sense of evil, as you know, and a lot of people speak as if they know what they’re talking about.

And it makes me a little crazy. And so some people were being very harsh on other writers and I kind of was like — “You know what? You show me; show me in four pages. I think I can give you a sense in four pages.”

And some of these people wrote — most of them wrote fairly mediocre stuff to not-good. Some of them wrote four pages where I could literally say, “You should stop doing this.” You know, it’s like on those singing shows, sometimes people come in and they’re like [hums terribly] and they’re like, “Just everybody agrees — stop.”

But, you know, then there are some people that really did some great stuff. One guy in particular wrote four pages that I liked so much I asked to read the whole script. And I liked the script so much that I sent it to a manager. He has a manager now and he’s working.

**John:** Yeah. The instinct behind doing it on the podcast was we try to talk about screenwriting, and it’s very hard to talk about screenwriting without having something in front of you to talk about. So, you guys have been so generous to send in pages, so thank you to everyone who has sent in pages. If we’re not getting to your pages today, you can go to johnaugust.com/threepage — it’s all spelled out — and there are instructions for how you can send in your pages.

And Stuart, who is there in the corner. Stuart, raise your hand.

**Craig:** Stuart! Stand up, Stuart. Stand up!

**John:** People don’t believe Stuart is real.

**Craig:** That’s him! That’s what he looks like!

**John:** That’s Stuart.

**Craig:** That’s the guy we hired to play Stuart.

**John:** Exactly. The real Stuart looks nothing like that guy who just stood up.

**Craig:** Real-Stuart is an entity.

**John:** Yes. But Stuart reads through all of them and sort of — I will say, “Stuart, send us three samples of things we can read.” And so I don’t look at any of them until Stuart sends them. So, Stuart is the quality control on that. And Stuart picked some great ones for us today, so let’s get started on the ones that were sent in that we took a look at.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So, Stuart picked these for us. So, don’t blame us if we didn’t pick your pages. Blame the guy who pretends to be Stuart.

**Craig:** There’s a lot of deflection on Stuart.

**John:** Our first three page sample is from, it’s called Enjoy the Show, and Allie and Liz Sayle wrote it.

**Craig:** Where are you Allie and Liz?

**John:** Where are you guys?

**Craig:** Hey!

**John:** Come on up.

**Craig:** Are you guys related? Good. Because the same last name — it just would have been weird.

**John:** Can we get microphones for these guys? All right, while we’re getting microphones we’re going to talk about what we saw on these pages and then we’ll ask you more about them.

So, Enjoy the Show. I will do the summary for people who are not — who don’t have the pages in front of them; like if you’re driving your car you wouldn’t know what we’re talking about, so I’m going to give you the quick summary. Our scene starts in a movie theater arcade. We meet a guy who is at a claw machine and his name is Andrew. And he’s trying to get a Fozzie Bear out of it. And we’re going to learn that he’s trying to get this Fozzie Bear because there’s this girl he kind of has a crush on that he wants to give this Fozzie Bear to.

He’s gone through all his quarters and he finally ends up succeeding and getting the Fozzie Bear. There’s also intercut a woman driving very fast on the freeway. Her name is Brody. When we come back to the arcade, to the movie theater arcade, we see Andrew who has the bear. We see Kellen, a friend of his, and it’s Kellen’s girlfriend that he’s trying to hand off the bear to. And that is what we’ve gotten to at the end of these three pages.

**Craig:** Right. You know, not bad. Not bad. I’m going to go through… — The stuff that I thought that came through that I liked the most was the — an interesting expression of a guy who is going through unrequited love. That’s a pretty familiar circumstance and I thought it was shown in a somewhat unfamiliar way. He singled in on Fozzie Bear like that’s what is going to do it is Fozzie Bear.

I like the idea that he has kind of fetishized this one thing. What was missing for me though was the notion of why Fozzie Bear, frankly. I mean, he’s discarded all these other things. If you look at the first bit here, what’s happening is he’s pounding through all of these quarters and he’s got all these animals on the ground and there’s one animal left, I think, correct? Fozzie Bear.

We don’t know if he’s trying to get — at this point I just assume he’s just, he’s autistic and needs to clean out the claw machine. You know what I mean? And you do have to always think about what the audience knows versus what you know. So, if you want us to know that it’s because he needs the Fozzie Bear, my suggestion is maybe that he starts by getting an animal, pulls it out, and then just hands it to a kid, or tosses it to a kid and is moving to that one. And we see he’s trying to get that one. Instead of getting Fozzie Bear he keeps getting the wrong one. You know what I mean?

So, some way that we can get that the Fozzie Bear is the one. When he’s talking to the Tween with Attitude, this was a nice way, I thought, of getting out the essential details. His best friend has a girl; he’s in love with that girl; he’s kind of hiding that he’s in love with that girl. I love this last line, “I’ll be your girlfriend. If you want to make her jealous.” That was really cute.

But in there I’d also love to know why Fozzie Bear. [laughs] Like, you know, just some indication of why this has become so important to him. Otherwise he’s just going to seem a bit bizarre.

The intercut to me does not work here.

**John:** The intercut to the freeway?

**Craig:** That’s right. The cutaway to the freeway. It didn’t work for me for two reasons. One, we just did an episode about transitions. There’s no transition to this. So, there’s no throw really from where we are to there.

**John:** Craig, you’re wrong. There is actually a throw. So, if you look at the bottom. Actually, I liked the…

**Craig:** “Grips the joystick?”

**John:** Joystick to gearshift.

**Craig:** That doesn’t work. It’s too matchy-matchy to me. It’s too much of a trick. I was looking for a little bit more of some reason to be on the road. And I guess since I never got a reason to be on the road, the transition didn’t work for me going in. I mean, I saw the joystick thing and on the way back coming out of it, again, there’s no transition really back.

The biggest issue with cutting away there is that nothing happens. We see a woman and she’s driving fast. And she drives fast for a while, by the way. It’s very well described, but maybe too much so. So, I guess my question is: Is that something we need or could you even start the movie with her? If she’s going to be showing up in a second, start with this crazy woman on a road, and then cut to the quarters and stuff so that it’s there.

Anyway, it was a strange interruption for me. And then lastly I want to talk about when the girl arrives. So, Zia is the girl. That’s the girl that he wants to give the bear to. And we have Kellen walk in, and that’s the first person you want us to see, which means it’s the first person the movie is concentrating on. And I wanted the movie to be concentrating on her. I mean, I’ve been hearing about her. He’s been doing all this for her. I want to see her walk in. And then I want to make a moment of it.

We talk a little bit about how to expand or contract moments so that they are of different value. And for this character I think her entrance should be of the greatest value, so that should expand a little bit. Let me see her. Show me him looking at her. Show me what that does. Show me a moment where it’s just the two of them. They don’t have to be talking; they could be across the room. But it’s just the two and then this guy comes in, you know. And that disrupts things. And the Fozzie Bear goes behind him. And then there’s chit chat. And then he tosses the bear.

Those were my general… — But, you know, you guys can write. I mean, that’s the good news. It was really well laid out. It was well written. It’s just finding those choices in there for me.

**John:** I want to know who is who and some backstory on this. So, which one of you is Liz and which is Ally.

**Liz Sayle:** I’m Liz.

**Allie Sayle:** I’m Allie.

**John:** And are you in fact sisters?

**Liz/Allie:** Yes.

**John:** Great. It was a simple guess, but you never know. Maybe you just ended up having the same last name and that was how it works.

**Craig:** Or, or…

**John:** Or they could be married.

**Craig:** DOMA.

**John:** DOMA.

**Craig:** DOMA.

**John:** My husband and I have the same last name, people think we’re brothers.

Now, tell us about this script. Is this the first script you guys wrote together?

**Liz/Allie:** No.

**John:** Okay. So, what’s the motivation behind writing this script.

**Liz:** Well, the script is actually about, so the woman in the car is coming to the theater and sort of takes the movie theater hostage. And so we were just in a movie theater and we were like this is a really good place to rob someone. [laughs]

**Craig:** A theater like this one?

**Liz:** Yeah, exactly. It’s like no one would ever catch you. Or, they’re not prepared for it. So, now every time we go to a movie theater — that was like a couple years ago — we’re like every time you’re there you’re like, “Oh, I need to do this, I need to do this.” And so we just sort of need to write this story so we can go to the movie theater without thinking about how to take it over.

**John:** By the way, movie theaters are a great place to — I don’t want to say you should go rob a movie theater — but they are like sort of great for heists because they have a lot of cash on the weekends. There is interesting stuff to do in a movie theater. So, I applaud your instinct behind committing violence in a movie theater on paper rather than in actual life.

Did Craig interpret things correctly in sort of what he was saying? Is Zia a more important character than Kellen? Tell us?

**Allie:** Yeah. I think so. I think what we were thinking is Zia is obviously the girl that he likes. And so by having Kellen come in and do the interaction, showing sort of what’s in between there, but I don’t think you get enough of her, like you were saying.

**Craig:** Yeah. I would keep that interaction. That interaction played very natural and very real. I don’t need to know what “One forty eighty-five” means. I like not knowing what people are talking about and it seems realistic to me. It was just about sort of showcasing her. Reward us for our interest in her is basically what it is.

**John:** Let’s get a little more specific on the page. A few things that stuck out for me that were things to look at. Your first sentence of real description, “Fade In on a metal claw…inside Plexiglas.” Got that. “It drops nothing down a metal chute.”

Now, “It drops nothing down a metal chute,” on the third time reading through it you get what it’s actually saying that there’s nothing in the claw to drop, but I had to read that twice or three times to really get what that is. And the first sentence shouldn’t be that. So, find another way just to convey that idea that it’s an empty claw dropping that has nothing in it to drop as it gets to the end.

The super says “Thousand Oaks, CA 2010.” Why 2010?

**Craig:** I picked up on that, too.

**John:** Is there a reason why it needs to be 2010?

**Allie:** I think we wanted to sort of do the action in it to sort of make you think that it was a real, like something that actually happened. And we just thought that setting it in a very specific time…

**Craig:** Oh, I see.

**Allie:** …that that might sort of make it seem more realistic.

**John:** So, maybe if you got even more specific then we would know that it was more like a real event. So, if you said like “April 22, 2010,” then we would know that there’s a specific reason why we’re there. Because right now I read it as 2010 and I’m thinking like was that a zip code that you didn’t like finish. I didn’t really read it as a year.

Andrew, who is our main character through this first section, he doesn’t get his own cool line of description. You say, “Safe. Doesn’t get a lot of sunlight,” but if this is our main character I think you can throw us an extra line of something more specific about him. Because “doesn’t get a lot of sunlight” could just be like Craig’s kid.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That doesn’t tell us a whole lot.

**Craig:** He’s really white. We were just talking about it. My wife is white and he’s white, white, white, white.

**John:** Andrew is listed as being 19 years old, but the action I see him doing makes him feel a little bit younger. I felt like I watching a high school kid and not a 19-year-old kid. And so just be mindful of that. And if it’s important that he be 19 years old, that’s awesome, but I felt like he could have been younger for the kind of stuff that we saw happen just in these first couple pages.

Near the bottom of your first page, we go to “INT. ARCADE — LATER.” You can do that. So, you changed time. Same place, changed your time. Another way you could do that is just to say “LATER” as a slug line. And that way we don’t have to think, “Am I in a new place?” No, you’re in the same place, you’ve just moved to a later time. Either way works.

I wonder if you could cut the first two lines of Andrew talking to himself. Right now it’s:

That could be the first line of his dialogue, because we get what he’s doing from just that line. So, if you want to cut those first two I think you would be in a good place.

**Craig:** You know, now that you mention that, I actually bracketed that. I’m not sure you need any of that. We’ve seen that before. And I feel like I would much rather have him explain this strange obsession with Fozzie Bear to those other kids, because it’s so specific. It’s not I want to give her a thing, because you could replace Fozzie Bear with, oh, you like Hello Kitty there, you know what I mean?

It’s why-that-one. I’d much rather him explain it to her and just cut these sort of play acting dialogue here which we have seen a lot.

**John:** Yeah. And honestly if you were to cut all that out, if you started with Tween with Attitude’s first line, “Does she have a boyfriend?” If we’ve seen the claw going for these toys and the first line of dialogue is, “Does she have a boyfriend,” that’s really clarified what it is he’s attempting to do.

I agree on sort of like the transition coming back from the car was troubling. And I wonder if ultimately you’re going to be happier keeping all of Andrew’s stuff together and not cutting away to that woman, because nothing actually happens with that woman. So, if we were to follow Andrew’s storyline through in terms of like everything with the bear and trying to get the bear and like his frustration there, that might be the best time and then get to this woman who’s going to be arriving at the theater.

I understand your instinct for trying to show that something is coming, but we’ve sort of barely got stuff started before we jumped away to something else.

And you said you were fine with “One forty eight-five. Beat that.” What does that mean? What is it supposed to me? A score?

**Allie:** We don’t know. [laughs]

**John:** You don’t know? Okay, that’s fine.

**Liz:** She doesn’t know. It’s like a high score in a video game, or something like that.

**Allie:** We just wanted something to quickly establish that these guys are close, they’re good friends, and they’re a little bit competitive.

**John:** Great. And even like something he can point to or gesture, just so it doesn’t… — Because, again, it’s one of those things where if I read it three times and try to make sense of it and I can’t make sense of it, I might stop reading. And anything you can do to keep me from stop reading is your friend in the first three pages.

So, tell us, is the script all the way written or is it still in progress?

**Allie:** The first draft is.

**John:** The first draft. And what ends up happening at the end. Tell us the journey of where these characters get to.

**Liz:** You’re looking at me like you want me to do that.

**Allie:** I mean…[laughs]

**Craig:** Have you read it?

**Allie:** I have. I have. At the end, I mean, we end up blowing up the theater.

**John:** Good. There’s like a teenage Die Hard in a movie theater.

**Allie:** Sort of, yeah.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, awesome. Then done. Done and done.

**Craig:** Does he get the girl?

**Allie:** Yes.

**Craig:** All right, good.

**John:** Anymore questions for our sisters?

**Craig:** No, no, not at all. Keep at it. Keep at it, guys.

**John:** You guys are awesome. Thank you so much for sending your pages.

**Craig:** Thank you Allie and Liz.

**John:** Thank you guys.

**Craig:** Nice work. Thanks. Good job.

**John:** All right, our next pages come from Kate Gragg. Where’s Kate? Hi Kate. Come here and have a seat.

**Kate Gragg:** Thank you.

**John:** Cheers for Kate. A very brave Kate.

**Craig:** Hi Kate.

**John:** So, let’s talk to you before we start going into your pages. Tell us — do you want to describe what happens in these three pages?

**Kate:** It’s the opening to a TV pilot that I wrote. A woman, Hattie, she’s in a sort of tourist gift shop/car rental place. And she’s having trouble renting a car because all of her credit cards have been canceled because she’s been declared dead. And so she hitches a ride on a church tour bus that’s going to one of those mega churches. And then cowboys show up and it’s basically a stage coach robbery.

**John:** Thank you. We should always have the real people do it because you do so much better a job of summarizing things than Craig and I ever do.

**Craig:** Do you have like a job? Maybe we could just bring you in for Three Page Challenges and you could just…

**Kate:** I would love that.

**John:** That would be fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah. We don’t pay any money or anything.

**John:** So, Kate, is this whole script written, or is it just the first three pages?

**Kate:** It’s written. And I’m going to do the rewriting class at the LA Extension.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Great. Cool. So, I really enjoyed some elements in your pages here and let me talk about some stuff that worked really well for me.

I liked that it was sort of cross-genres. And so we see these cowboys who we assume are just people talking and stuff on the side of the road, and then it becomes this robbery. So, we’re excited that it’s a robbery and it’s going to a strange place. And so I would have kept reading after these three pages because it’s just so bizarre that this is happening; that this church bus is being robbed.

There are some stuff which got in the way, so let me talk you through some of those things. We first meet Hattie and she is in this car rental shop. She’s trying to rent a car. I didn’t get a good sense of who she was at this moment. And so let’s look at our first line of description:

“HATTIE CONWAY, 26” — I think you need a comma after the 26 — “fidgets with a bucking bronco figurine on a rack of Texas-themed souvenirs, keeping one eye on the CLERK behind the counter as he nods along to a phone call.”

The stuff with the clerk and the nodding along, I totally get that. Fidgets doesn’t feel like quite the right verb. Fidgets is something to me that you do to yourself and it’s not something you do to an object.

**Craig:** Fiddles.

**John:** Fiddles. I think fiddles is a Craig Mazin suggestion that we’ll take.

I didn’t buy the guy saying, “The estate is still in probate.” It felt like too much of a reach. It doesn’t feel like the kind of thing that would actually be said to somebody on the phone. So, I like the fact that, “They say you’re dead.” That’s a great idea.

I would also look at the end of this scene, this first little scene:

“Hattie turns towards the window, ignoring him, scanning for options.”

Now, that “scanning for options is meant to lead us outside so we can see like what she’s seeing from her point of view on the bus, but because you gave us another line afterwards, “I got probation too. Were you down at County?” I forgot that we were looking outside, and so that transition didn’t really work for me. So, if the last line of the first scene was “scanning for options,” and then we cut to the outside, then I’d like, okay, that’s her point of view and she’s seeing what’s out there.

I didn’t necessarily buy her grabbing the t-shirts and trying to get onto that bus. I like that idea that she’s going to try to get on that bus, but what you gave us were those little two half scenes and then suddenly she’s on the bus. And I would love to see more about Hattie and learn more about Hattie by seeing how she talks her way onto that bus, because that is a moment where a character can actually do something rather than just the movie jumping ahead.

And so then once we get to the conversation with the pirate and his buddy and all this action, I was with you, and I was curious about what was going to happen next. I wasn’t sure of quite what tone of movie we were in. It felt like one of those sort of exaggerated Coen Brothers early comedies, but I was curious what it was going to be. Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s the part that I really appreciate here is the tone. I think that there’s the promise of something good here. There really is.

First of all, the notion of a girl who is on the run because she’s dead and the backstory there, I’m sure, is interesting. Joining up with a bunch of cowboy-riding dudes, who I imagine are, well, skinny and fair-faced and chubby and baby-faced, all right, maybe not, but maybe there’s some romance in there somewhere. But, the notion of an outlaw that’s kind of a weird horseback outlaw on the blacktops of Texas — that’s fun. I like that. There’s an interesting vibe to that.

The heat of it, like my favorite line in here is the introduction of Pirate and Buddy, “Staring down a stretch of two-lane backtop, baking in the relentless Texas sun,” and I start to feel like I’m in Thelma & Louise. It’s visual and I really like that.

And because you are finding an interesting tone, you now have to be really careful about introducing anything in there that starts to deflate it. And the things that can deflate tone — and jokes are tough, because a good joke will make tone work, and a bad joke will just deflate it.

So, let’s talk about this very first scene. I agree, by the way, with everything John said. But in a bigger way, I think you have to rethink how you’re revealing this information. This is a big piece of information. “You’re dead,” right, and I think the way you’re doing it is the least interesting way. You know, there’s a guy nodding and then, “They say you’re dead.” Wah. There it is. Blah. You know what I mean?

This is off the top of my head but we’re just on a clerk and he’s got a credit card and he’s like, “Well, yeah, I mean, she owes me a certain amount of money here. I’m trying to settle a bill. Or she owed me money,” whatever the language is. We’re trying to basically create a distraction and misdirection. “And when did she die? About how long ago? Of what, now? I see. All right. Well thank you very much. I should cut this card up, right, because she’s dead. Okay. Miss, here’s your card.”

You know, like just to reveal — some more interesting way of revealing that there is a woman who’s supposed to be dead who is not dead. “Can’t arrest the dead!” isn’t a bad line, except we’ve said “dead” a lot. So, maybe in that area think of the rhythm and maybe, “Can’t arrest a corpse,” something else. Something to just change up that rhythm or that feeling.

The exchange between Pirate and Buddy is — unfortunately Tarantino has kind of ruined this for us all. We don’t get to do it anymore, really. If anything sounds like, “What do they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Holland?” then you come up with another way. And, frankly, I always feel like when we first meet two characters there is an opportunity to learn so much about the differences between the two of them. And maybe even if there is conflict, hopefully, that emerges between those two, plant the seeds of it now. It doesn’t have to be overly dramatic; it could be over a small thing.

It could be two guys arguing over who gets the last piece of gum. But in one way or another there is something — give us a little more meat than just jokes, because it got a little jokey. Similarly, “I got probation too. Were you down at Country?” Too jokey. Right?

“(reading off a notepad) ‘The estate is still in probate.'” That’s not this guy, right?

So, try and find that tone. Really liked her on the bus. Love the image of these people singing. It’s very visual. I like the way you write so visually. And the heist itself was done really well. I mean, for you guys looking on the page, lots of white space. We’re not being jammed with details that we don’t need. “BUS and TRUCK speeding down the road.” I love shit like that.

“Galloping HORSES. BUS and TRUCK speeding down the road.” So many scripts we read about, you know, the bus — you hear the gears winding and the tires and the sky and a bird goes, “Wah.” “Bus and truck speeding down the road.”

“You know what this is. Open up.” Maybe we could do a little bit better there without getting jokey or violating tone. And then, “Hattie has never been more awake in her life.” Eh, I don’t know that. [laughs] You know? My guess is she has probably had some interesting things happen to her, but I think this may be, “Hattie perks up.”

This is one of those moments where I like to sort of take a look at a character and say, “Everybody shrinks back in fear, except Hattie, who sits forward.” Do you know what I mean? To like say, “Oh, she’s different.”

But, there’s a lot of good promise here and I like the way you’re writing it. So, guard your tone. Defend your tone.

**John:** I would also keep Hattie front and center. Because what I notice through this first section is she is responding to other people but you don’t see her taking initiative. And that’s why seeing her take some initiative in the car rental place is important, but even more so how she gets herself on the bus and what she’s like on the bus — don’t let your hero be a passenger, literally, at the start of your story because then we’re not there with her.

And so then you can maybe earn a line like, “Hattie has never been more awake in her life.” Or at least we’ll know who she is when you give us that kind of line.

So, tell us what happens ultimately in your script.

**Kate:** Hattie ends up going back to the very small southern Texas town where she’s from. And she hasn’t been back in a long time. And she, through the course of the story, discovers that her mother who vanished in mysterious circumstances when she was a kid actually ran this secret outlaw ghost town that those cowboys are from. And they want her to be their new leader.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** That sounds weird, and I’m into weird.

**John:** Yeah. It sounds really cool. And so does she know these guys at the start of the story?

**Kate:** No, but they recognize her because she looks a lot like her mom. She didn’t know any of this existed.

**John:** So, once they’re on the bus, they’re going to recognize her as being special and unique. That’s great, and that tells us that she’s a character worth watching.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just be careful about — coincidences can happen. I mean, Dickens built a wonderful career in coincidences. But, when two people are moving towards each other, and it’s coincidental, that can be a problem for the audience. When one person finds somebody who’s moving — you know, somebody is running away, she’s running away. When you tell me that, now I don’t want her to want to be interested in these guys. I want her to be, “Holy shit, I’ve got to get away from these guys.” And they find her and then they’re like, “Oh, look who that looks like.”

You know what I mean? In other words, you don’t want people moving towards each other and going, “Oh, and also we belong together.”

**John:** In a movie you get essentially one coincidence, and that coincidence should usually be the premise of your film. Like that is sort of the Passover Principle. This is why tonight is unlike all other nights, is that this is why we’re watching this movie here and now. And this could be exactly that premise coincidence where like they happen to rob the bus that she’s on and that brings her back into the fold.

But if you can find ways to have your hero create that circumstance, you’re almost always better off. So, if something she did ends up bringing her to that place, then it doesn’t count as a coincidence. It doesn’t count against you as a coincidence.

**Kate:** Great.

**John:** Thank you so much.

**Craig:** Great job, Louisa. I mean, not Louisa. Kate. I was jumping ahead. Kate, right?

**Kate:** Yes.

**Craig:** Sorry, I was jumping into the next person.

**Kate:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Good job, Kate. Good job.

**John:** All right. Our final batch of three pages comes from Louisa Makaron and you’re going to forgive me when I mispronounce your name.

**Louisa Makaron:** It’s Ma-karon.

**John:** Louise Makaron. That’s actually much simpler.

**Craig:** Uh, you spelled it wrong.

**Louisa:** I know. Someone spelled it wrong along the way.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s an airport that spells it right.

**Louisa:** Yeah. I’m from Vegas actually where that airport lives.

**Craig:** You should just change it.

**Louisa:** I think I will.

**Craig:** Just change it.

**Louisa:** People think I’m Irish. I don’t know. I’m not Irish.

**Craig:** What are you?

**Louisa:** I’m Italian. It’s not indicated there.

**Craig:** No, there’s no vowel at the end. You should change it.

**Louisa:** I’m gonna. It’s happening.

**Craig:** Yeah, it makes sense.

**John:** Louisa, what was your decision process for sending in these three pages? When did you decide, You know what? I’m going to bite the bullet and send it in.”

**Louisa:** Well, yeah, motivated by terror mostly. Just like, just do it. I sat there with my finger over the Send button for probably ten minutes.

**John:** And you did it.

**Louisa:** Just send it, you know. Well, just like, it’s good. It’s good.

**John:** And so when you arrived here at the theater you saw that your pages. How were you feeling?

**Louisa:** More terror.

**John:** More terror?

**Louisa:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Right now? Terror right now in this moment?

**Louisa:** A little bit, yeah.

**John:** After us watch us talk to the first two entries, how are you feeling now?

**Louisa:** The same terror, I guess. I feel okay.

**John:** Okay. You should feel okay. You should feel pretty good.

**Craig:** You don’t really have levels of terror. You just have one steady…

**John:** Steady state.

**Louisa:** It’s pretty much constant. Yeah.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Louisa:** It’s how I live.

**Craig:** She has a static terror.

**John:** Yeah. It’s like you’re living in a police state where there’s always sort of unrest inside your head.

Louisa, talk to us about the pages you sent through and give us the quick description of what happens in these first three pages.

**Louisa:** Okay. So, in these three pages we meet Daisy and she’s drawing in a notebook. We see that she’s drawing a how-to manual on how to dodge a bullet, basically. And there’s a knock at the door, or there’s not a knock at the door — there is a sound outside the door and it’s a delivery person, delivery man, and he’s trying to leave a package that’s sort of crudely wrapped and she’s very suspicious of it.

And he gets frustrated with her and he ends up leaving. And she calls the police because she’s very nervous about this package. And then at the end it’s clear that the police know her and she’s called them many times.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** So, the first page, it’s hard to tell where the first page ends on her. But you know, you wrote it.

**Louisa:** I think it ends, “I was looking for the doorbell.” I think that’s where it ends.

**Craig:** Right. So, I really loved this first page. I really did. I liked the way you introduced her. There were details, but not too many details, but the right details that I needed. A fun reveal of what she did, which was really interesting and obviously makes me curious about her and what her deal is. And then the fact that there’s this thud and she’s so weirdly peeking out at this guy and he’s saying, “Umm…I saw you.”

“I’ve got a package for Daisy Morton.” Now, this is where I started getting a bit confused.

**Louisa:** Okay.

**Craig:** This delivery man is like the friendliest delivery man ever, who likes chatting. He’s actually chit-chatty. I’m not a shut-in and delivery men don’t talk to me this much. So, we got into this conversation which I have to tell you was well written. It had a good rhythm and it was interesting. You’re a smart person. I can tell these are smart people talking to each other. The problem is I just don’t know why these two people are talking in this way about this thing.

**Louisa:** Okay.

**Craig:** To me, a delivery man, I get, “I saw you.”

“What were you doing? Leave the package.” Walks away. [laughs] Do you know what I mean? That’s how UPS guys work for me. If he needs a signature, he’s like, “I need a signature.”

“I’m not coming outside.”

“Okay, well, I gotta take the package with me.”

“Don’t take the package.”

Now I understand that there’s a standoff and there’s some reason for them to talk. Create some sort of dramatic compulsion for this conversation to take place.

He was reading a bit like, I was asking Chris O’Dowd from Bridesmaids, like I imagine this incredibly friendly Irish UPS guy who’s like, “Oh, it’s just that ringing the bell is one of the perks of this job, you know.”

**Louisa:** Right, right.

**Craig:** But I don’t think that’s right for this kind of, you know, for what the circumstances are. You haven’t compelled these two people to force to deal with each other, which I think you want to do because that’s what’s uncomfortable for her.

And then also take a look, Daisy, when you are frightened you tend to shorten your sentences. And she’s very short, short, short, short, all right. And then suddenly, “It’s not my birthday and the nearest holiday is National Fanny Pack Day. Not exactly a gift giving holiday. You’re not the usual guy.”

Suddenly, she’s very verbose, right, which doesn’t work because it feels like it’s kind of — again, like I was saying earlier to Kate — it’s like putting a joke in where we don’t need a joke-joke. And then the conversation keeps going. So, it’s almost like a romantic comedy at this point, but why are they still talking to each other?

I did like the ending where she calls about the package. I think the operator, “A very suspicious package was just left on my door and –”

“Daisy, please.” You know, like not, “Daisy? Is this Daisy Morton?”

**Louisa:** Right, right.

**Craig:** They know her. If they know her, they know her.

**John:** Yeah. They would know the number calling.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. I think it would be, “911. Please stop calling us Daisy. What is it Daisy?”

**John:** I’m going to disagree with Craig, which is always one of my favorite things to do on the podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** So, the reason why UPS people don’t ever talk to Craig is because he doesn’t have doe eyes and a cardigan.

**Craig:** That’s not true. At my house…you don’t know how I walk around.

**Louisa:** Constantly in a cardigan.

**John:** I don’t know your life on the other end of Skype there. But I believe that there was — I read this as he’s either flirting or he’s genuinely a bad guy. And that kept me excited and compelled reading through these things.

**Louisa:** Right.

**John:** And so I want to talk about sort of what I was reading and what I felt I could have enjoyed even more. Do you perceive titles going over her opening drawing of this stuff? Or are we just watching her?

**Louisa:** I kind of did. But, you know, it’s not my job…

**John:** It was sort of halfway in between. And so there wasn’t quite enough there that I believe it would mean a title sequence, but there wasn’t enough actually happening that I believe that we’re actually just watching her do all this drawing, finally to be the reveal of she’s actually drawing how to dodge a bullet.

So, I think you need to either make your choice. Either it’s titles or it’s not titles. And if it’s not titles it needs to be a little bit quicker. If it’s not titles, then you can really kind of get much more quickly to she would be doing something in the house and then she sees the guy moving and that sort of starts the whole movie, the whole scene.

I want to talk about point of view and like literally point of view, because we start inside the house and we never really go outside the house. And so the minute she sees him we can sort of go, we can do that POV through the window of seeing that there’s a guy there. And then I would put us at a new place when we’re actually at that door, so we’re inside/outside that door, so we’re really clear of where we are that she hasn’t invited him into the house.

I liked a lot of the conversation between them and sort of who’s the regular guy, I don’t know, ringing the doorbell. That all felt good and I felt Chris O’Dowd, too. I mean, it felt like the right kind of vibe for it.

I agree on National Fanny Pack Day. When you feel it’s reaching for a joke then it’s not going to land quite right. But, it was really nicely done. And I can see this working as the start of this — Daisy’s journey. Is that what the movie is? Is this Daisy’s story from being terrified to stepping out beyond her comfort zone?

**Louisa:** Yeah. Pretty much. Yeah.

**John:** What happens? What happens in the first act that gets her going?

**Louisa:** In the first act, well I haven’t — this is not written, so I have basically like a log line. Through her own carefulness and paranoia she basically ends up getting herself caught up in like a CIA type mission kind of thing. And by the end of the first act we’re in there.

**John:** So just because she’s paranoid doesn’t mean that people aren’t out to get her.

**Louisa:** Right. She sort of ends up being right about a few things.

**Craig:** Self-fulfilling prophecy. Was your intention that the delivery man is flirting with her?

**Louisa:** I mean, no. Not really. I guess not.

**Craig:** Because I didn’t get that.

**Louisa:** He could be.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, this isn’t a story where they fall in love or anything.

**Louisa:** No.

**Craig:** Yeah, so, um…hmm.

**Louisa:** He could be flirting with her.

**John:** He could. So, if you wanted the flirting, it essentially becomes an extra line of dialogue where he notices like her skirt or like her bare legs…

**Louisa:** And a wink.

**John:** The wink, yeah. The little something. He mistakes her fright for coyness. And that sort of gets that going.

**Craig:** Regardless of what you intend here, if they’re not — if this character is gone, never to show up again, this is too much. This is just simply too much. Because we’re involved in their relationship suddenly, you know. And in that sense, that’s okay, we do this all the time. We write too much and then we pare back.

You have to decide what your intention is for this encounter. And if the intention is to show that she is paranoid and frightened of the world outside and is constantly calling 911, make that your focus. Pull out the rest of the underbrush.

**John:** Cool.

**Louisa:** Cool.

**John:** Louisa, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, Louisa.

**John:** And you made it. It’s a pleasure to meet you.

**Louisa:** Thank you.

**Craig:** That wasn’t so bad, was it?

**Louisa:** No, it was all right.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Now, it’s come time in the podcast where we will actually have questions live from the audience. So, I think what’s going to happen is are there volunteers with microphones? This young woman is going to have a microphone. So, if you have a question you will raise your hand and we will send her to you and you will be able to ask your question. Any show of hands of someone who has a question? Gentleman with a black shirt?

**Dave Stone:** Hey guys. Thanks for doing what you do. I really love it. My name is Dave Stone . I’m with Intrigue Films. And I was listening to a podcast where you were playing devil’s advocate about not subscribing to a lot of the structure in screenwriting books and that kind of stuff.

So, I just kind of wanted to ask you, when you guys were kind of starting out and learning, what teachers did you learn from and were there any books that you’re like, hey, this is a good foundational book. Anyways, that’s my question.

**Craig:** Yeah, sure. I think we probably mentioned at one point or another, when I first started out I read two books. I didn’t go to film school like John. I just read two books. I read Syd Field’s Screenwriter’s Workbook, which is not even Syd Field’s Screenplay. It was a very nuts and bolts thing which was good for me just so I could say, “Okay, the first act is roughly this many pages. The second act is roughly this many pages.” But a lot of it just was worthless.

It is, I mean, you know. And then I read Chris Vogler’s book, The Writer’s Journey, which is based on the Campbell stuff. And that’s, you know, also frankly, it’s kind of fortune cookie descriptions of how to do this stuff. The problem with all the books is that they’re post-facto. So, the people that write the books don’t write screenplays. They analyze screenplays.

So, they watch movies and they find commonalities between lots of movies and then they sort of create a paradigm for what’s common about them. And they provide that to you, as if that would help you actually construct it. It doesn’t.

What they are, they’re demolition experts telling you how to build a building. It does not work. The only way that I’ve found to figure out how to build a building as opposed to tear it down is to just build a whole lot of bad buildings. And then when people finally stop suing you, and the roof stops collapsing, then you’re there.

I mean, ultimately I find there is no other way around it. So, go ahead, take a look at the demolition experts. Take a look at what they have to say. Please do not pay anyone to give you advice on your script. I’ve said it a billion times — don’t do it.

But, in the end just know it’s okay after reading those books to not be any further along than you were before you started.

**John:** Yeah, I read Syd Field before I came to film school. Then in film school I was in a class with Laura Ziskin when she taught her first semester film development class. And we just read a bunch of scripts. And you would sort of talk through them.

And I think more than reading any book you should just read a ton of scripts. And really good scripts of the movies you love, or movies that haven’t been shot yet that are really good, and then just like a bunch of really bad scripts which you’ll find all over everywhere.

And you start to recognize patterns. Like these are things that work well in movies. And these are things that work badly in movies. But what Craig says is absolutely true. Being able analyze a script is not the same as being able to write a script. And you actually have to fundamentally do the work and figure out how it is you actually achieve on the page those things you see in the good movies. And how you keep this experience of scene-by-scene and line-by-line, keep the reader engaged.

And that’s a thing that’s very difficult to teach and you just have to sort of see it. So, the way we do these Three Page Challenges, it’s sort about keeping that excitement from scene-to-scene, from page-to-page, and understanding how you get a reader to experience the movie that you see in your head just through the 12-point Courier on the page.

Another question?

**Male Audience Member:** Hi. You reference a lot about how you prefer not have the longer paragraphs where there’s lots to read, you like the white space. How does that work for you if you’re setting up visual gags or something like that in comedies?

It seems to me that I tend to have longer paragraphs than the three lines or five lines or whatever than what I should have based on what I’ve been hearing.

**John:** Yeah, I would say my preference for shorter paragraphs isn’t just me as a writer, but it’s me as a reader. And it’s recognizing that I just tend to skip over longer things. It’s like, oh, my eyes don’t want to look through all those words.

And it’s laziness, but I don’t think I’m uncommon in that situation. And I will skip over stuff if it feels like it’s going to be too hard for me to read, or too much for me to read. And so that’s why I go for those short things.

For comedy I think short is also your friends.

**Craig:** For sure. Yeah, I mean, for setting up visual gags — if you’re setting up visual gags, the idea is that certain things must be there for the audience to see in a non-comic context and then something funny happens and you go, “Oh look, I didn’t realize that that was going to,” you know, you put a banana peel on the floor, and the guys walks around and walks into a pole.

And there are all sorts of ways that you can do that. And it’s sleight of hand with words. But, even more important then to not belabor stuff. Just, first of all, return. Okay? And I like capitalizing things that I want people’s eye to be drawn to.

Sometimes I’m capitalizing the wrong thing, because I want them to be looking here and then I hit them with this one. You know, he walks right around it and, whomp, a bus. You know? I mean, there’s a lot of ways you can do this. But very sparse. I really think in comedy in particular it’s important to be very sparse about that stuff.

It’s like watching a comedy. Keep it light.

**John:** Cool. Another question.

**Brooklyn Accent Audience Member:** How you doing guys?

**Craig:** Yeah! How you doin’?

**John:** That’s a great voice, by the way. We have to comment on that right from the start.

**Craig:** Everybody get out. It’s me and him. Brooklyn. How you doin’? How you doin’? Where you from?

**Brooklyn Accent Audience Member:** Here’s five bucks. Don’t tell your mother.

**Craig:** Where you from?

**Brooklyn Accent Audience Member:** Brooklyn.

**Craig:** Brooklyn! All right.

**Brooklyn Accent Audience Member:** Bensonhurst.

**Craig:** What part?

**Brooklyn Accent Audience Member:** Bensonhurst.

**Craig:** Bensonhurst is where my first apartment was, in Bensonhurst, right there. My mother was in Bensonhurst.

**Brooklyn Accent Audience Member:** 71st and Fourth.

**Craig:** Oh!

**Brooklyn Accent Audience Member:** Hey!

**Craig:** Hey! How you doin’?

**Brooklyn Accent Audience Member:** So, I love what you guys are doing. I think it’s fantastic. Now, speaking of New York, I read a couple of Goldman’s scripts and Woody Allen, and Goldman is specifically different because you can get quite annoyed reading his script. It’s cut, cut, cut, cut, cut.

**Craig:** He’s very unique.

**Brooklyn Accent Audience Member:** And Woody Allen leaves you absolutely dry. I mean, when he describes a room he says, “1920s Jean Harlow Room.” Have a nice day. That’s it.

So, then how do you — And he’s contextual funny. How do you navigate those extremes?

**Craig:** Choose between one or the other?

**John:** Yeah. I mean, so Woody Allen scripts are incredibly spare and it’s basically — you think about a Woody Allen movie, they are dialogue-driven. And so therefore he wants you to focus on what the characters are saying and that’s what the movie is largely going to be about.

William Goldman tends, there’s obviously good dialogue as well, but they tend to be sort of more, “I’m going to paint the whole world for you,” and that’s just the style. And it’s understanding what’s your natural writing style, what does your voice sound like, but what kind of movie are you writing.

And when I’m writing things that are dialogue-driven, there’s not going to be a lot of scene description in there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Also remember Woody Allen directs his own scripts. So, he doesn’t need to write a whole bunch of stuff in there, because he doesn’t need to sell it to anybody. He just has this kind of rotating deal. “I make a movie a year,” for better or worse at this point, you know. “But I make a movie a year. And people are going to give me money to make it. And, frankly, I’m more interested in getting actors. Usually I can get actors by saying, ‘I’m Woody Allen. Would you like to be in my movie?’ ‘Yeah.'”

At that point the script really becomes almost like notes. And from what I understand about his process, he’ll shoot and then he’ll reshoot a whole bunch, too, anyway. I mean, it seems like he kind of writes it as he shoots it. So, I wouldn’t draw too many lessons from that specific example.

Nor would I draw too many lessons from Goldman either because it’s just a very idiosyncratic way of writing. And here’s the truth: when you are established you can indulge yourself in whatever style of writing gets you to the movie, gets you to a good movie. And when you’re not, you have to kind of temper it a bit, because other people are reading it and making a choice about it.

With that in mind, you have to feel your own way. I think John’s right; if it’s a very heavy dialogue scene and nothing else is going on, you don’t need to go over the top. If you’re writing a scene where two people enter a ballroom, and it’s amazing, and there’s a dance, and there’s a gun fight — fill that space.

But, you’re going to have to find your own way. Obviously William Goldman didn’t care how Woody Allen wrote and vice versa. So, you shouldn’t probably care either.

**John:** Another question from out there. I see a gentleman right there.

**Gentleman Right There:** Hi, thank you guys for being here. The question that I have is you guys have both worked in franchises with Charlie’s Angels and The Hangover. How do you guys go about serving a franchise while still having your own unique stamp on it?

**John:** So, Charlie’s Angels, I loved the original series so, so much. And so when I went in to meet with Drew Barrymore and Amy Pascal about the movie, I told them — I expressed my love for it. And I felt like the movie could be a giant hug around the original series. We weren’t going to try to push back away from it. We were going to sort of embrace everything that was wonderful and sort of weird about the series and make the feature version of it.

The challenge for me was honestly the second movie. And when it came time to make the second movie, I met with each person involved with it individually and said like, “Let’s talk about what we’re going to do on the second movie and what kind of process we’re going to go through.” And I made everyone sign this little contract saying like, “These are the things we won’t do in the sequel. We won’t do all the stupid things that people do in the sequel that ruin sequels.”

And that checklist became the checklist of the things we did in the sequel that ruined it. It was just a bizarre self-fulfilling prophecy. I really wanted the second movie to be like the second episode of a great TV series that takes three years to shoot and costs $80 million. And I really wanted it to feel like a series, like the next episode. And I couldn’t do it. And it was outside of my power to make that thing happen.

Now, Craig, with The Hangover you came onboard with the second movie and you had a responsibility to sort of people’s expectations and the same filmmaker.

**Craig:** Yeah. For me it was — in a weird way the more relevant example for me for your question is the Scary Movie movies that I did. Because for Hangover it’s very much Todd Phillips’ movie and Todd called me — and when he called me on the second one he said, “Look, I want to make another episode,” actually. “It’s like Law & Order. I want it to happen again.” There’s another murder — or like Angela Lansbury — another murder, again, in my little town.

So, and that’s what we did and I liked it a lot. And the third movie he was like, “Here’s what I want to do. I want to go dark and I want to resolve this and I want to ask a question nobody every asks about characters like Alan. What’s wrong with this guy?”

So, that was following his lead very much, although obviously we worked very closely together to write the scripts. When I came on Scary Movie 3, the first two Scary Movies had been done by the Wayans brothers and they were both Rated R and they were of a certain kind — they were of a certain style. And I came onto Scary Movie 3 with David Zucker who had done Airplane, and Jim Abrahams, and Pat Proft, like all these old guys who had done Airplane, and Naked Gun, the movies that I kind of loved.

And we really said, “Let’s just do it a different way. Let’s make Scary Movie 3 like that. Let’s go old school with it.” And that was more of a big change and that was more of a decision. And I feel closer to those movies, frankly.

And unfortunately the studio, as you see, they let it get away from them all the time with sequels. They do seem to concentrate on the worst lessons. Writing sequels is very hard. It’s very, very hard. It is essentially thankless. And, yet, it’s probably half the jobs that are available. [laughs] So, you have to make your peace with it at some point.

**John:** Craig, did you see the list of the 2015 movies? So, like the summer 2015 movies that are already sort of scheduled out…

**Craig:** Number, number, number, number…

**John:** Number, number, number. It’s like the nadir of numbers.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, look, we’ve had already this year…

**John:** This year was big.

**Craig:** …so many. And they have some that are sequels but they’re not like — Superman is a reboot of a movie that came out three years ago. It’s, eh, a sequel, sequel-ish.

**John:** Yeah, it’s kind of sequel, kind of original.

Let’s do one last question and then we’re going to do wrap up. So, I see one more question.

**Initially Loud Audience Member:** Hey. Wow, that was loud. Would you guys talk about the difference — John, have you ever worked with a writing partner? And I guess that’s part of the question. And then talk about the difference between working with a writing partner and working on your own stuff and how the process differs and how you approach it in each circumstance.

**John:** I have written with a writing partner. So, I wrote a pilot for Fox with Jordan Mechner who is a really terrific writer. And Big Fish: The Musical I’m writing with Andrew Lippa who is the lyricist/composer.

And the challenge for me is that I’m not a very good roommate. I don’t share things well. And it’s like having a creative roommate. And you’re supposed to take this thing that fits in your brain and make it fit in both of your brains and share the same vision of stuff.

Writing partners can be really good for many writers because you have different skill sets. One of you may be good in the room. One of you may be good at sort of buckling down. You can hold each other accountable for actually getting the work done. There’s a lot of good reasons for why people should write with writing partners. I’m just not a person who is naturally especially good at that.

One of the challenges I had with Jordan, who is fantastic and who I adore, was because I was so much more experienced of a writer, that whenever we would come to a disagreement I would just like sort of throw the trump card. I would say, “Big Fish.” And so I would win too many of those arguments and it just wasn’t a fair balanced thing.

And so that’s why if you’re both at a sort of newer level it can be a really great situation. And with Big Fish, we are just completely different skill sets. And so I knew nothing about how to do a big stage musical and he didn’t know how to do this kind of story. And it was a good marriage.

**Craig:** I never realized it must have been very hard for you to invite me into your life as a creative partner of sorts.

**John:** There’s a reason we’re on Skype. Yeah. There’s a reason why I control the edit.

**Craig:** I actually think that one of the reasons our partnership on this podcast goes so well is because from the start, it wasn’t even a decision, I was like I’m not going to make any decisions. It’s actually very… — These things are, because if you want to make decisions and the other person also wants to make decisions, this is a problem. It can be a real, real problem. And I’m super laid back about the podcast to the point of almost being not there. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** He’s laughing like, [faint, sarcastic laugh].

**John:** There is one podcast that Craig was actually not there. We just cut him in and he just says, “Uh-huh, yeah,” a lot.

**Craig:** Good point. Good point.

I did have a writing partner. I started with a writing partner for the first five years of my career. And he’s a great guy. He’s still working today. He has a new writing partner. We stopped writing together I think around 2000. And the fact is that, so I write alone, typically. Sometimes I collaborate with the director. And he has a writing partner because he’s supposed to have a writing partner. He’s the kind of writer that needs a writing partner and wants a writing partner. And I’m the kind that doesn’t.

And neither one is better or worse. I mean, there are some amazing teams who are prodigious and talented on a level I can’t be. Looked at what Ganz and Mandel have done over the years. And Alexander and Karaszewski.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, there’s just a ton of great, great teams across all genres that are really impressive. And you have to ask yourself what kind of guy am I? What kind of person am I?

There are huge benefits to having the partner. The partner is somebody that can tell you, yes, those people were crazy. No, this isn’t bad.

Of course, a partner is also somebody who can tell you, “I just didn’t like what you wrote today,” even though you think it’s awesome. And then there’s just stuff, business stuff. If you become successful as a partnership, it’s difficult to un-partnership. You know, so there’s… — And we’re going to actually talk about this at length in a following episode, unless it’s a prior episode depending on how time works out, with Dennis Palumbo who is a psychotherapist who deals with screenwriters. And has apparently done quite a bit of couple’s therapy with partners.

**John:** Yes. So, a few little wrap up things here today. Did anybody here buy a t-shirt? A show of hands? Oh, yeah, a lot of t-shirts. T-shirts are going to start shipping on Monday and they look really cool. You’re going to see this little card if you bought a t-shirt. You’ll flip this card over and there may be something handwritten on the back from me and Craig. If so, that’s your Golden Ticket and you’ll get a special awesome little thing that we’ll announce later on.

**Craig:** There’s one.

**John:** There’s only one ticket.

**Craig:** Who will get it?

**John:** Guys, thank you so very much. This was really fun.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

****************

**Craig:** No, locked in!

**John:** All right, so people are gathering their things. People are taking a seat. And we can probably start. So, how many of you guys have actually heard this show that we usually do called Scriptnotes? Show of hands? Oh, hey, a lot of people. That’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** So, if you are familiar with the show you know that it starts exactly the same way ever time. So, what might be cool is if we’re like kind of quiet and then at a certain point when it becomes really obvious you can all like cheer, or applaud, or make some sort of noise to indicate that there are live people here in the audience. Does that sound cool? All right.

**Craig:** Do you want to point at them when they’re supposed to do that?

**John:** Now, that’s good.

**Craig:** I have no confidence that they will know what the appropriate time is.

**John:** All right, I have a lot more faith in our audience.

**Craig:** Well, you know me.

**John:** All right, so let’s do this. Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

[Applause!]

**Craig:** No, no. Yes! I was right! That was the wrong time! That wasn’t even close to the right time. I feel so good about what just happened.

**John:** Yeah, you probably should.

**Craig:** You know that there’s this ongoing war between us about people are good, people are bad.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I win again.

**John:** Craig and I are never in the same room when we do this, so it’s really rare that we actually can see each other. So, let’s try this again and let’s try to be quiet until I point to you, all right?

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

[Applause!]

Oh my god, still! All right. Total silence. All right.

**Craig:** You’re going to be quiet until he points to you. This is pointing.

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

[Applause!]

LINKS:

* [Writers Guild Foundation](https://www.wgfoundation.org)
* [Three Page Challenge packet](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/live_threepagers_final.pdf)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/lets-talk-about-nikki-finke).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 93 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

How are you Craig?

**Craig:** I’m good. I like it when you say 93. You can feel the pressure of the countdown.

**John:** It’s very exciting. We’re approaching our 100th episode. And we will have news later on in this very episode of the podcast about where and when and how the 100th episode is going to happen, but another live episode that we’re going to be doing later this very month.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But first there was actually some news this week, so I thought we would talk about the actual news that happened this week, because people kept tweeting me things about like, “Hey, are you going to talk about this?” And I said yes.

**Craig:** It’s funny. We get tweets now anytime anything happens vaguely related to screenwriting. I get 14 million tweets.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** “You should talk about this.”

**John:** “What is your opinion?”

**Craig:** And every tweet always begins, “You’re probably getting a lot of tweets about this, but…” Yes. Yes I am.

**John:** You know, you can actually check a person’s timeline and then you would see that. But, eh, it’s fine. I don’t mind. It’s fine.

**Craig:** Eh.

**John:** To completely sidetrack at the very start of our conversation, really the wonderful thing about Twitter which someone pointed out to me is that you never have to open a message on Twitter. The message that you see is just the message. So, you can scroll through and see the whole thing. It’s not like an email that you have to open and it’s like, oh, I don’t want to open an email.

It’s just the whole thing. That’s the genius of Twitter.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s true. We’re basically short-handing our experience of life down to “I’m awake. I just experienced something with no effort. Now I’m asleep.” [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. I find that if there’s any sort of real event happening in the world, my instinct is not to turn on the TV but to go to Twitter and just do a search for what that is.

**Craig:** It’s so true, granted that is a huge sidetrack, but isn’t that the fun of it all?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I’m watching baseball the other day, as I’m wont to do. And as Asdrúbal Cabrera — by the way, sidetrack to the sidetrack: baseball names have become awesome.

**John:** That’s a good name.

**Craig:** In large part because of all the players coming from the Dominican Republic and from Cuba. For whatever reason folks in the Dominican Republic and in Cuba use these really — I mean, a lot of them just have crazy, kooky, funny names that aren’t even like traditional. They’ve just been inventing names. And Asdrúbal, I can’t imagine that that’s popular, but Asdrúbal Cabrera was running a ground ball out or a single out to first and just suddenly stopped and collapsed over. And something terrible had happened to his leg.

And I’m sitting there trying to figure out what happened. Was it his knee? Was it his hamstring? Was it his quad? How bad is it? You know what? I think I’ll just jump on Twitter. Ten seconds after it happens there’s like a thousand tweets. And the first wave of tweets are, “Oh, no, a thing happened.” The second wave of tweets about a minute later are, “Oh, no, a thing happened. This is what I think happened.”

And then a third wave, maybe a minute later, the criticisms: “Doesn’t Asdrúbal Cabrera stretch?” It’s like, god, God! [laughs] The guy is still writhing in pain and they’ve already managed to do an entire week of news cycle in a minute.

**John:** Yeah. The media cycle has shrunk down to about 140 characters.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And once it cycles through once, because once someone has actually put out a tweet about something, well they can’t put out the same tweet. They have to have a new opinion. So, therefore, they cycle out a new opinion and therefore it goes through really quickly.

I do find that something will happen in the news that I’ll want to comment on, but I’ll have to sort of go though my timeline first just to make sure that not everyone has already said that thing. Because I don’t want to be the “me too” guy on that.

**Craig:** You’re absolutely right.

**John:** Sometimes you’ll think of like the absolute best possible joke for something, and then you realize that someone said that about three minutes ago. And even if they hadn’t said it, you get the sense that, “Yeah, someone’s going to have already said that. You’re three minutes too late for that.”

**Craig:** Oddly, this sidetrack is a pretty decent segue into the news that we’re going to discuss.

**John:** Which is absolutely true, because other than Twitter who else reflects our modern fixation on the present tense and on personality than Nikki Finke.

And so this week Nikki Finke is apparently — I’m overstating this week — this week Sharon Waxman, who is the editor of this publication called The Wrap, which is another online publication, on June 2 put out the headline, “Shocker: Jay Penske Fires Nikki Finke from Deadline Hollywood, Sources Say.” That was the headline.

And at this point we should probably sidebar and talk about who these people are because it’s very possible that if you’re listening to this podcast in Australia or someplace you’ll have no idea who we’re talking about. So, should I give the backstory? Do you want to give the backstory of who these people are and why it matters at all?

**Craig:** Well, I mean, there’s not that much backstory except that Sharon Waxman used to be a reporter, I think, for the New York Times and other things. And then she started The Wrap which is an online — basically an online publication reporting on the entertainment industry the way that Variety and Hollywood Reporter used to do solely, that is to say an industry publication, a trade publication.

But it was a Johnny-come-lately because Deadline was there first. That was and continues — at least theoretically — to be run by Nikki Finke, a longtime entertainment journalist who used to write something called Deadline Hollywood for LA Weekly, which was an old school print publication. She then started Deadline. Jay Penske is a rich dude who bought Deadline and then also bought Variety.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that’s where the fun part begins because Nikki Finke loathes Variety, she loathes the Hollywood Reporter, she loathes Sharon Waxman, she loathes The Wrap. She loathes everybody that’s in the business she’s in that’s not her. And this immediately put her into a weird position with Jay Penske in part because, some surmised, she wanted to run Variety because of course sometimes we secretly love and lust after the things we profess to loathe.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, how is that for backstory?

**John:** That’s a fantastic backstory. Thank you for filling us in.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So, there are many fascinating elements to this story. First off is Nikki Finke herself, or at least our perception of who Nikki Finke is, because while she has a tremendous presence online through her blog and tweets and things, she is reclusive and no one actually sees her. And she’s famously protective of her privacy.

And so there’s this sort of cult of personality that is somewhat built by her and somewhat projected upon her by everybody else, which is fascinating. So, I think that’s a thing worth discussing because she as a character independently is really interesting. And there’s a reason why there was an attempt to make an HBO series that was not based on her but sort of inspired by that kind of figure because she’s actually genuinely fascinating.

**Craig:** In part what fascinates me about that aspect of it is that it takes our goofy stereotype of an online blogging type of person to its extreme. Normally our fictionalizations are more extreme than reality. So, you could see creating a fictional blogger who in fact is a recluse who never leaves their house and just sits in a kind of a Cheetos-stained chair, angrily banging away at a keyboard, affecting the world around them in a very serious way without engaging in it.

And yet it turns out that usually that’s not the case. Except this time it is the case. [laughs] She literally — from what I understand — she is literally a shut-in. She does not leave the house. She has things delivered to her. There are no photographs of her except one that is endlessly reprinted when people do articles about her. And it’s very kind of odd.

**John:** It’s sort of like glamour movie lighting. It’s a black and white photo with sort of glam movie lighting that seems to be airbrushed in sort of the way that things used to be airbrushed, not like sort of Photoshop, but like sort of airbrushed in a way.

**Craig:** Right! Or like the way that Bob Guccione used to put nylon stockings over the lens when he shot the nudie models. You know, it’s like the weird soft lighty boudoir headshot. [laughs]. I don’t know what else to call it; it’s very odd. It’s a very odd headshot.

**John:** Yeah. And so in discussing her personality I don’t want to sort of reduce her down to just one thing, but I think it’s fascinating that because she’s this semi-public/incredibly private figure who only presents what she sort of want to present, and then everything else is projected upon her, so the only things we know about her are she frequently writes about herself in the sense of like, “I was out sick for a week,” or “this happened.”

You get these little glimpses into her private life, but it’s only about sort of an illness or something else that happened that affected why she was late reporting these numbers, or how much somebody pissed her off.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And in a weird way, what’s I think fascinating about her as a figure — and I think there are other media figures we can talk about who embody this to — is that the news is actually about her. It’s not actually about sort of what is happening out there in Hollywood. It’s about her reaction to the news and that you’re supposed to read her site because of her reaction to something rather than strictly the facts of what it is.

**Craig:** It’s fascinating, isn’t it? And she’s very litigious by all accounts to the point where, for instance, you and I will probably be sued by her because we dare to offer certain opinions here, so I should say these are all opinions and conjecture. We don’t know actually know that she’s legitimately a shut-in. I don’t know that. I know what I read, you know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But you’re absolutely right. You are forced to piece together this strange narrative following this breadcrumb trail that she leaves behind through her reportage, which is kind of a furious reportage. It is highly personal. It violates every standard I would think of normal journalism.

I mean, she’s a huge part of articles that she’s writing about other things. She berates the topics of her reportage. Everything is kind of just a crazy editorialization. Her catchphrase is “TOLDJA!” as if that matters. So, she’ll say, “I hear that blah, blah, blah,” and then a week later that happens or is confirmed. “TOLDJA!” Okay. [laughs]

Now, I should say before we go any further in the spirit of full disclosure I happen to know for a fact that Nikki Finke hates me. She hates me.

**John:** Oh…I don’t think she has any opinion about me whatsoever. That’ll change after this.

**Craig:** Well, she does now buddy.

Here’s why she hates me. Back when I was actively blogging — hmm, I guess I should say here’s why she says she hates me. Back when I was actively blogging she basically told a friend of mine or a mutual acquaintance that I had written terrible things about her on my blog. And that’s just not true. That I can actually say is simply not true.

I went back and I looked at my blog. I did say I wasn’t a big fan of her breathless style of reporting. I don’t think that that’s that terrible of a thing to say. I will point out I said it within the context of an article that was basically praising her for being right about something and kind of going after Sharon Waxman for being wrong. Didn’t matter.

She then, I reached out to her. I said, “Look, I’m very sorry if I said something that offended you. I certainly didn’t mean it. I don’t believe I’ve said anything terrible.” She dismissed that apology completely. I then offered to get on the… — Oh, I made a huge mistake by offering to sit down and meet her for coffee or something. I didn’t realize I was stepping in it there. [laughs] That didn’t go well.

**John:** Yeah, that doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** You don’t say that to shut-ins. And then she basically, I said, “Well I’ll get on the phone with you.” And she essentially said in an email, “No, I don’t trust you.”

Really paranoid. I found it to be very paranoid and very weird. She’s gone after me a few times. she also, I’ve noted, a couple times I’ve tried to comment on things neutrally, you know, like for instance there was an article early on about Identity Thief and they left out the original writer’s name, so I commented and said actually the original script is by so-and-so. That comment was never published.

I have, however, had comments published not under my name. [laughs] It’s pretty fun. But anyway, that’s my… — Now, I suspect, I should say, that the real reason that she hated me so much was because frankly my blog got a huge bunch of attention at the time during the strike. And that’s not attention that meant anything to me. I wasn’t doing it for attention. But shortly after I got all that attention I noticed that she really steered her blog towards strike coverage and to great effect for herself and to profit I presume.

**John:** Yeah. She wants to be the voice talking about things. And I think you were probably a rival voice talking about things and you were taking eyeballs from her and you were taking attention from her.

Now, a little bit more about sort of who she is as a figure before we sort of get into the nature of the site and sort of the ecosystem of entertainment journalism right now as it is in Hollywood.

What I find fascinating about Nikki Finke, and I have to say there’s other figures kind of like her that I would describe similar, sort of like weirdly disproportional importance — Matt Drudge. If you look at Matt Drudge’s site, it’s just like a bunch of links and it sort of shouldn’t matter at all. And yet it’s hugely influential and he’s sort of built this cult of personality around him and sort of who he is. It’s this guy who wears this fedora and whatever that is.

You look at Nate Silver and sort of the journalism he was doing and the statistics work he was doing with all the election stuff. He became like sort of a figure who was independent of just what he was reporting; he was a figure in and of himself. That he was considered an expert on these things. Now, he ended up becoming more of a physical public figure unlike Matt Drudge who is also sort of reclusive. Nate Silver was going on The Daily Show, but he became really part of the story to the degree where during the election coverage people were sort of focusing on him as much as they were focusing on the numbers.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, I think it’s a strange time because in a weird way — and this could be fact of Twitter as well — we don’t just want the story; we want someone’s take on the story. We want to hear the news from somebody that we want to hear the news from.

And I think for the last couple of years that’s largely been Deadline Hollywood. And it’s largely been Nikki Finke. And whether we sort of want to or not, we sort of feel compelled to at least check that because everyone else sort of — all the eyes went to there and the rest of the ecosystem just sort of dried up.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, as much as Nikki — there’s much about Nikki that I find detestable, quite frankly. But, you have to acknowledge, anyone must acknowledge, that Nikki Finke saw a gaping hole in the way that entertainment industry was being covered and just drove a truck through it. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter for years had been the only game in town. And, frankly, Variety was really the only game in town, so they were sort of, you know, kind of the A-list normal standard of daily reporting. And then The Hollywood Reporter was the other one.

And everybody got the trades in the morning. And everybody read the trades in the morning. And that’s the way things happened. And when the internet came along, Variety and Hollywood Reporter…

Now, let me take a step back. When I started working in Hollywood, do you remember the day, John, early in the nineties when you started when you found out what a subscription to Variety cost? [laughs]

**John:** It was tremendously expensive. Now, I was lucky because in the Stark Program — Variety, for whatever reason, took pity on us and gave everybody in the Stark Program their own free copy of Variety so we would be hooked. But $200, $300 a year?

**Craig:** I think it was more. I think that there were prices they would give you for a professional price, if you could show that you were a professional. But if you were just a guy that wanted to get Variety every morning and not pay the insane cover price for it, it was like almost $400. And this was in the ’90s. $400 a year.

**John:** Yeah. And I should say that the trades at that point were delivered to your office or to your home. And so I would get my LA Times and I would get my Variety every morning delivered to my house. And that was a crucial thing, or at least I thought it was a crucial thing at the time.

**Craig:** And unlike a daily newspaper, which is substantial, daily Variety was usually 10 or 12 glossy pages, a bunch of which was ads. A bunch of which was crap. It was basically three or four articles and photos. And it was yesterday’s news.

**John:** Yeah. So, here’s where I think you’re leading here is that she saw that, and I think Nate Silver did, too, that the blog was really the best way to get these things out. Because rather than sort of having all the news to be delivered at once, it’s as stories came in they would be the top story and it push the rest of the stories down.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And she saw that before other people saw that. And that was a disruptive…

**Craig:** It was hugely disruptive.

**John:** …business model.

**Craig:** She also saw that Variety and Hollywood Reporter were addicted to the absurd free ride they had been getting essentially, that because of the nature of our business, they had managed to extort an unfair price for the actual value of their information. She comes along and says, “Here are these guys that by dint of their monopoly have been charging you hundreds of dollars a year for this stuff. I’m going to charge you nothing for it. And you’re going to get it faster.”

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And, oh my god, overnight. And listen, you want to ask how could Nikki Finke have been stopped? Easy, all Variety and Hollywood Reporter had to do would be to dump their old model, which they can barely still manage to do today, and just go to that model. But they couldn’t do it because they were addicted to the money.

**John:** Yeah. There’s many books written about that, but it’s — I guess — the innovator’s dilemma. It’s like, you know, once you’re the established business it’s actually very hard to be nimble and sort of say, “Okay, well we have to junk this business model and try a brand new thing.”

And they couldn’t do it quickly enough. And so there’s an alt-universe where Variety recognized like, okay, the blog is the way to go and they would have started that in parallel and eventually shifted everything over. They would have had to lay off most of their staff, though. There’s no way, you know…

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There’s no way a blog can support sort of all the staff that they have. That business model kind of had to go away.

**Craig:** Everything had to go away. And they couldn’t adjust quick enough. So, along comes this incredibly aggressive person. And in journalism aggression is rewarded and as well it should be. Nikki is truly a double-edged sword. The plus side is that she simply had no concern for the kind of gentlemanly rules of the past. So, if you’re interested in proper journalism you don’t want an overly cozy relationship between the journalists and the people they’re reporting on. You want somebody who doesn’t care, who doesn’t care about what parties they’re invited to because they don’t leave their apartment.

What she wants is the dirt and the truth. And she reported it.

**John:** I feel in some of the popular coverage of what’s been happening this last time with Nikki Finke, too quickly do they draw comparisons to like gossip people. And that’s not accurate or fair to sort of what she does.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** Because she’s not reporting gossip about sort of like, you know, Brangelina stuff. She’s reporting stuff that is, I would say, most of the times generally and specifically entertainment news, but she’s very, very aggressive in getting it and sort of getting people to tell her rather than tell anybody else for fear of god, because if anyone else gets the story before she does, she will go after you guns blazing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s one of the things that was actually pointed out in… — So, on June 3, Nikki Finke replied to Sharon Waxman saying, “Cut it out, Sharon Waxman. Your story is full of lies and fabrications,” yet there was also a non-denial denial in there saying that it’s pretty clear that something is going to happen about her employment situation at deadline.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, here’s what she wrote. “The fact is I’m out of town and about to begin my long-planned summer vacation. And the last thing I want is to be bothered now by a bunch of media and/or moguls asking for comment.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Which is truly rich. I mean, the last thing I want is for somebody to do to me what I do to everybody else every single second of every single day.

**John:** “As it happens, I was napping in a different time zone when The Wrap crapped on me yet again Sunday night. Nothing new: the desperate Sharon Waxman and her revolving door staff have been writing inaccurately about me for years, and doing it to drive traffic to her failing website, and refusing to correct even the most blatant errors.”

**Craig:** And so, you know, this is an endless song of, “I’m the victim; everybody else is failing and desperate. I’m great; everyone else stinks.”

**John:** So, within this same article she goes through — Sharon Waxman had specifically said that a point of contention between Nikki Finke and Jay Penske was this situation with the UTA and some sort of finance arrangement, which I don’t honestly quite understand what it is. But so Nikki printed a bunch of the emails that were involved in this chain.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I tweeted that that doesn’t kind of seem like journalism just to print a bunch of emails. But, she printed them. So, one of them, which was I think the sort of most revealing about sort of my concern of what it is that she does, it’s actually an email that Mike Fleming sent out to Chris Day who is the Head of Publicity for UTA. And in this email he talks about this deal, the people talked with at UTA, and he says, “You denied it all. Now I see in The Hollywood Reporter that you have engaged the guy who is going to make that deal. False denials come with consequences at Deadline Hollywood. I’m sure you understand.”

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** “Because they piss us off and most people know better than to do that.” What the hell is going on here with this?

**Craig:** It’s just a threat.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not even an especially veiled threat.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. What consequences? We’re not going to report on you? We’re going to be mean to you? We’re going to make fun of you? We’re going to slant our coverage?

It’s disgusting. But everybody knows — here’s the thing — this is definitely an, “I’m shocked. Shocked that gambling is going on here!” Everybody knows that’s how it works over there. That’s Nikki’s thing. It’s entirely about vindictiveness. And she carries through on it. I mean, she does.

You know, I read comments about me on her site that are completely out of line. And, but you know, it says, “Keep it civil,” or whatever. Yeah, uh-huh. I mean, look, [laughs], I get it over there. She went after me.

I mean, forget me. Let’s put me aside. That’s the deal over there. In fact, what happens sometimes when I look at people like this and I think, “You are exceptional.” I mean, this is an exceptional woman in a lot of regards. And you have accomplished an enormous amount. But unfortunately the fuel that you’re using to burn this new path is also going to kind of consume you as well, because in the end it cannot maintain. It can’t hold. You are just going to go too far.

And when you have no friends left there will be that critical mass moment where everybody just says, “Apparently we’re all in the doghouse. So, now who needs you?”

**John:** Yeah. It’s been interesting to sort of watch the ascendency and sort of, you know, her place there in the industry. Because I think everyone sort of in the back of their minds thought, like, well this is going to end at some point; and it’s not going to end pretty, because you could sort of see what this is because we’ve seen this show before. We sort of know what happens to these characters is that the thing that makes them rise and succeed so much will generally be their undoing.

It’s a very classic sort of almost Shakespearean plot. Once you get to a certain ascendency, it’s not just that everyone else is going to drag you down. You are going to drag yourself down by going too far.

And one of the things which I… — So, you talked about sort of comments that would show up or not show up based on sort of the whims of whoever is approving comments, which may be Nikki Finke herself often. I also noticed that stories, which is also sort of the new journalism here, stories were often posted and then reedited to make them factual when they weren’t factual before.

**Craig:** Without notice of correction.

**John:** No notice of correction. So, even that thing I just read to you, which is “False Denials Come With Consequences, Deadline Hollywood,” that got taken out of the email.

**Craig:** Isn’t that amazing.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a Gawker article I put in the links to the show notes called “Why Nikki Finke Never Makes a Mistake.” It sort of goes through and takes the screenshots of like this is the original story and this is how she corrected the story.

**Craig:** And she does it all the time.

**John:** Yeah. And so that’s the frustration is that she’s often sort of badgering people about journalism, and sort of like, you know, this is what being a journalist is. Yet, journalism is also acknowledging, it’s about being correct, and it’s about sort of acknowledging when you’re not correct. And, you know, pointing that out. And I don’t think I’ve ever really seen a correction.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that there is a fine line between sort of a taboo-smashing iconoclast and a bully. And Nikki, in my opinion, danced far over the line towards bully years ago. And I hope that somehow out of all of this mess comes a new kind of reporting that doesn’t feel incestuous with the people you’re reporting on, but by the same token follows some basic journalistic standards, doesn’t make the story about the reporter, isn’t vindictive.

I mean, like Nate Silver, yeah, the story became about him. Nate Silver you could just tell is a good guy who just writes what he believes and isn’t in it for himself. I don’t actually believe he is, you know?

**John:** Yeah. Also, Nate Silver, I think, first and foremost, would always say, “This is how I could be wrong. And this is why I’m saying these things. This is why I believe that the data suggests this. But these are the reasons why I could be wrong and here’s the chance of that.” And there’s never a shred of that in the Nikki Finke of it all.

Let’s talk about what the ecosystem might be. So, I would assume, and these are just assumptions — I have no inside information about this — but based on the articles that we’ve seen, sort of the non-denial denials, and to me the really telling thing that there’s some anti-Nikki Finke comments that are showing up on Deadline Hollywood Daily, which means that she’s not editing out those anti-Nikki Finke comments. I would suspect that one way or another she will part company. That doesn’t necessarily mean she’s fired. It doesn’t mean she quit. But she may not be running that publication the way she was before.

And if there’s any sort of clause where she can’t compete against it for awhile, she couldn’t compete against it for awhile. Regardless, something will change. And let’s talk about what the ideal circumstances would be/situation would be in the next generation of entertainment coverage. What do we want to see, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, the best of Deadline is the immediacy of it and the thoroughness of it. So, even though people think of Deadline as a place where juicy stories were reported about people losing their jobs or being hired, a ton of it is really about the minutia that frankly wouldn’t even make it into the pages of Variety, but which I often find interesting. You know, somebody is now a showrunner on a show.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, there’s a thoroughness to it and an immediacy to it that works. And I think also there is — there are — quite a few reporters there at Deadline who frankly are just imports from Variety, like Mike Fleming.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, Mike Fleming reported normally for years. Mike Fleming is capable of being a normal journalist with a normal demeanor who doesn’t threaten people, because he did it for years writing for Variety in a very respectful way. Certainly he can get back to that. And then honestly I think that this comment thing has to get under control because it’s just gross. I mean, it’s a joke, just so people at home don’t think it’s me personally, because I don’t care, but Deadline commenters as a group are just a punch line when you talk to people who are in the business. It’s a joke.

**John:** Yeah. There’s sort of two, I think kinds, of Deadline commenters. There are the ones who actually have no relationship to the business at all, and just pile on about whatever, and then they’re actually assistants at some production company who see a negative story or see some of story about one of their clients or someone involved in their movie and sort of throw in the other way, they try to tip the perception one way or the other. And it becomes just very silly to read.

And, granted, you should never read below the fold in general. You should never read comments.

**Craig:** Ever.

**John:** The times I have dipped below the fold, it just reminds me of why you should never dip below the fold.

**Craig:** Take a Silkwood shower afterwards. I mean, it’s particularly sad to me when there are these innocuous articles about somebody getting promoted. Somebody has been named vice president of development at Comedy Central, who knows, something. And then there are four comments like, “Great person. Great. Congratulations for them.” And then there’s four comments of, “Disgusting individual. Mistreats people. I hope they die.”

I mean, nobody can — you can’t have a birthday over there without somebody basically saying, “I know this person and they kicked me and they’re evil.” There’s a strain of bitterness throughout it. So, typically there will be just a very neutral report on a writer being hired to write something. And then 12 comments about how the writer is great, 14 comments about how the writer is awful, 16 comments about how the writer can’t write at all and is stupid and this is why Hollywood is a disaster. Another four comments about how that person is really a writer who never writes anything and the commenter is a jerk.

**John:** But then it will actually be about sort of how the actor on that TV show got really, really fat and someone needs to…

**Craig:** [laughs] It just devolves and… — It is truly a playground for the stupid and venal.

**John:** To be fair, that’s honestly most comment threads.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s just that that’s the place we’re actually seeing comments these days.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now, I also want to bring up why it matters at all, because I think people who aren’t sort of living in this little ecosystem think, “Well, it’s silly that you guys are talking about this for 20 minutes; just don’t read the stories. Why does it matter?”

Here’s where it does matter and I especially found this to be true during TV season is that perception is very much reality in terms of TV season. Like movies take so long, and they’re so long to put together that it’s not such a big deal, but when you’re trying to cast a show and everyone is fighting over the same actors, the one Deadline article or any sort of meaningful publication article that says, “This actor is leaning towards this,” can completely tip the balance of something.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And suddenly you don’t have that actor. Or, that director you think you’re going to have is not there. Or, you get this perception that your show is falling apart and so therefore everyone jumps onto the next show. It does matter. That’s why accuracy matters. And it’s why people sort of keep clicking over to those sites to see what that is.

What I hope to see in the ecosystem that develops down the road from here is whatever Deadline becomes, Deadline becomes. Whatever Nikki Finke does, she can do and god bless her. But I would like to see Variety, Hollywood Reporter, The LA Times, and maybe some other, The Wrap, or whoever else pick up the pieces so that you have a reason to click through to multiple places. Because right now I’ve found that unless something gets reported in Deadline, sort of nobody notices.

That’s sort of the only place where something actually lands. And so if Variety writes about something I did, no one sends the email. But if it shows up in Deadline, I get like four emails about it. It’s a strange thing. And I think any sort of monoculture is ultimately harmful for an industry.

**Craig:** I totally agree. And it makes sense that just as Nikki very wisely and cannily saw this opening, somebody is looking at this situation right now and they see an opening. The truth is the town is sick to death of her. That’s the god’s honest truth.

I think all the people that used her to their advantage are growing weary and sick of her. And there is an opening. And somebody is going to start something new. And this is, after all, the internet where MySpace just roamed the earth like the dinosaur. And then, oh my god, meteor, meteor, Facebook! This is the way it goes.

**John:** At this point the last question there will be is will we be willing to accept something that doesn’t have a face associated with it, or at least a personality associated with it? Because I think that’s one of the things that made it unique. And I’ll be curious whether we’re willing to go to an anon, like sort of a quasi-anonymous news source after having a personality associated with our news. We’ll see.

**Craig:** I hope so, because, frankly, I’m not a big fan of that.

**John:** What I am a big fan of is our two live shows this summer. So, I want to talk to you about that.

So, we are going to be having people come see us as we record our shows, and we will be interacting with those people who come to see us record our shows. And I’m very, very excited about both of these opportunities. And they’re really different and they’ve become very different events which I think is an exciting thing to happen, too.

The first of our live shows is Saturday June 29, and it’s part of a much bigger event. It’s Craft Day for the Writers Guild Foundation. So, it’s an all-day event with four different panels and writers, and agents, and industry folk. And so it’s all about screenwriting and probably TV writing as well. And because it’s Craft Day, Craig and I are going to be doing a Three Page Challenge live, somehow. I think we’re going to have like projections so we can actually look at the pages that we’re talking about.

We may actually have the people who wrote those three pages in the audience.

**Craig:** Oh…

**John:** There might be a situation where if you know you’re coming and you would like us to look at your three pages, send it Stuart and sort of say in the subject line like, “I will be there,” and that way we could pick those things and know that you are there in the audience and can respond and be up on stage with us maybe.

**Craig:** That would be great.

**John:** It would be fun. And it’s a chance to really — I enjoy doing the Three Page Challenges but we are sort of talking to a third party who’s not there. And so being able to see people face to face could be fantastic.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I’m also thinking we might share some three pages of, I might be willing to, and I haven’t confirmed whether you’d be willing to, some three pages of stuff that hasn’t shot, so stuff that hasn’t actually been made of my own, or if you are willing to do that, of your stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think I probably have a script or two that it’s safe to do that with at this point.

**John:** Yeah, because sometimes that’s exciting to see, too, and it might be something that would be exclusively there for the people who are in the audience with us, something that we wouldn’t put up as PDFs because it really shouldn’t go out wide, but it could go out to 200 people.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Sure. So, tickets are on sale right now for this June 29th event. It’s through the Writers Guild Foundation. If you go to the show notes, there’s a link to get there. You can also Google “Writers Guild Foundation” and that’s up there.

So, because it’s a full day event the ticket price right now is $85 for the whole day. So, it’s a big deal; it’s also a fundraiser for the Writers Guild Foundation which does great work with writers, and veterans, and the library, and kids.

**Craig:** Kids.

**John:** It’s a good group.

**Craig:** It’s a great group.

**John:** Our second even is the party.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah!

**John:** So, the second even — oh yeah — so this is… — Craig and I actually saw each face-to-face this week because we needed to go visit the space where we’re going to have this 100th anniversary — 100th Episode Extravaganza thing. That’s Thursday July 25 in Hollywood. We’re going to be at the Academy’s Lab, which is this space that’s right next, just south of the Arclight Theaters on Vine.

And it’s kind of great. And so just a huge thank you to the Academy for letting us put this together because it’s going to be really, really cool. There will be food and beverages, and alcoholic beverages, and special guests, and stuff that you could only kind of do as a 100th episode.

So, tickets for that will probably be on sale July 1st. Space is limited, so I think it will probably sell out. So, you may want to mark your calendar for — God, are there 31 days in June? 30 days in June?

**Craig:** 31. No, June 30. “30 days has September, April, June, and November, except for February which has 28, oh my god, unless it’s 29.” I think that’s how the rhyme goes.

**John:** Okay. I don’t remember the “oh my god” part of it. I don’t remember any of the rhyme. [laughs]

**Craig:** I think I definitely made up the last part.

**John:** I never learned any of those little mnemonics for…

**Craig:** You never learned, “30 days has September; April, June, and November?”

**John:** No. I don’t know I missed that. I had a bad second grade teacher.

**Craig:** Terrible.

**John:** Terrible.

Anyway, you should probably mark your calendar for June 30th if you really want to come, because I think it’s going to be one those situations where tickets are on sale and then they’re not on sale anymore because we have limited space.

**Craig:** And the tickets are cheap, right?

**John:** Tickets for that are $5.

**Craig:** Five bucks. And that’s not for us. Do we get to keep that $5?

**John:** No, no. It’s $5. It benefits the Educational Foundation of the Academy, the people who do the Nicholl Fellowships.

**Craig:** There you go. So, once again, the most important thing is we get nothing.

**John:** Yes. We get nothing from that.

**Craig:** Nothing!

**John:** If you have two beers then you have gotten your $5 worth, because the alcohol is free for whatever reason.

…I shouldn’t have said that on the podcast.

**Craig:** Nah, you know what? Now we’re just going to have alcoholics showing up. Rummies. Rummies not interested in screenwriting. But the good news is that there’s a little bit of a mix and mingle thing before. Then we’re going to do the podcast. It will be our normal hour-long podcast. And then we’ll have a nice little mix and mingle after, so you get to experience the glory of us in person, which is not particularly glorious, but it is in person.

**John:** I can be fairly radiant at times.

**Craig:** You can.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Not me.

**John:** But I’m excited about our special guests, which we have not announced yet, but they’re going to be great and special.

**Craig:** Very special.

**John:** So, that is reason enough alone to come.

**Craig:** Very special.

**John:** So, next point of news that happened this week was this morning I got 15 tweets about this thing called Amazon Storyteller.

**Craig:** [laughs] Me too!

**John:** Did you check it out?

**Craig:** I got 15 million tweets. Well, I mean, I see what it is. The thing is, is there a demo online? Because I haven’t seen the demo.

**John:** Yeah, it was actually really hard to find a demo, but I clicked through and started the demo. And so what Amazon Storyteller is, it’s part of Amazon Studios which is the branch of Amazon we’ve talked about on the podcast several times. Amazon Studios is attempting to make feature films with a model that is sort of, you know, you submit to them and they have an option on things, and they can work up these sample projects. It’s problematic in a lot of ways. And it’s improved in some ways. But the feature side of it, I think, is still a real open question about whether anyone should approach that with a ten-foot pole.

But, what was interesting this morning is they announced this new sort of software that they have as part of Amazon Studios where the scripts that are in Amazon Studios, you can load them up and they show up on the left hand side of your screen. And on the right hand side of the screen you have this toolbox for making storyboards. And they look like drawn storyboards for the scenes.

And I have to say it was actually, like it’s pretty well done. And so it’s not FrameForge. Like FrameForge is like the really high quality 3D software that you use for pre-visualizations or for setting up shots or figuring out angles and things. This is much more and looks like just a drawn storyboard. And yet for being done in the browser it’s really well done.

And so I could see it being a useful tool for someone who wanted to mock something up. Now, the limitations of it, at least in its current form is, it could only work on the things that are in Amazon Studios. And so in order to do something for your own script you have to load your script in there. Or, I guess you could just like make up some shots and screen capture them out and do something else.

The software though is smart in that it has these sort of city kind of backgrounds so that you’re not going to be able to do like a medieval epic with this. And there’s people you can put in, but like you’re ability to stack people in the frame and move them around and turn them is surprisingly good. I was impressed by what that is.

Ultimately it feels like really good Clip Art for making storyboards. And that’s a plus and a minus. I think there’s a lot to be said for keeping storyboards simple so you can see like this is what the intention is, and it’s not meant to look like the final frame. So, useful to some people.

**Craig:** Yeah. I can’t help but feel like this is just one more entry in the big toolbox of procrastination crap and also a little bit of the kind of, look, you’re making something real. You know, kind of the industry of “you’re doing it — now you have a storyboard — yay!”

No, you’re not doing it, because no one is making that script, you know, unless they are. And if they are, here’s the best news. If you work with actual storyboard artists, who are people with a specific skill that is not replicable by a software package, then you get the benefit of their talent, which is quite significant. You know, you talk with them and you describe what it’s supposed to be like and they start to do it. And it really does help tremendously. It helps you organize. The whole point of a storyboard is to organize your shooting day. That’s what it’s for.

It’s not to go, “Look at me! I’m a screenwriter.”

**John:** So, let’s talk about storyboarding…

**Craig:** That’s my new voice by the way.

**John:** That’s a good voice. Please use that on every podcast.

**Craig:** “Yay! I’m for real.”

**John:** You’re like Pinocchio. You’re a real boy.

**Craig:** “I’m a real screenwriter!”

**John:** I think the Craig Mazin version of Pinocchio would be fascinating.

**Craig:** I’ll wear my little pants, my suspenders, and I’m like, “I’m not, my script isn’t crap! It’s good.”

**John:** Ooh, “It’s good!”

**Craig:** “I’m going to storyboard.” He’s such a…he’s so great. You know what he is? He’s optimistic. He doesn’t listen to grouchy podcasters. He believes!

**John:** He believes. Except that instead of his nose growing when he tells a lie, his nose grows with umbrage. So, every time he gets angry he doesn’t Hulk out; his nose just grows a little bit.

**Craig:** “Ah-ah-ah-ah.”

**John:** Let’s talk about storyboarding in general, what it really is. Because I could see if I were a storyboard artist and I saw this stuff I’d be incensed, for a couple reasons. First off, it’s trying to automate something that actually takes real talent to do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s not going to be as good and everyone is going to be like, “Oh, it’s just like having a storyboard artist.” No, it’s not like having a storyboard artist. Those are actually professional people who can be incredibly useful in the process of making a movie. The storyboard artist for the two Charlie’s Angels movies was incredibly involved in figuring out how stuff could actually be and fit together.

And for a director, like the first pass at shooting something is the director talking to a storyboard artist often. So, it’s incredibly useful for those reasons.

Storyboarding is really useful when you’re actually the director who actually needs to make the movie. I think for most screenwriters it is a mistake to get involved in storyboarding because you are going to lock yourself down to the visuals of how stuff is supposed to fit together at two early of a process.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So, that’s my criticism of that. It makes it seem like, “Oh, well storyboarding is this vital part of screenwriting,” and it’s not at all. Storyboarding is part of the process of taking something that is just 12 point Courier and getting it towards the screen.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And it’s not always the final process. It’s an important thing to do when there’s real questions about how you’re going to do something. It could save you time. It could help you create better shots. But many movies that you’ve loved had no storyboarding in them at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a little bit of a diminishing that goes on with storyboarding. When you’re writing a screenplay I always advise people to be very visual and to really see the space in your head and understand the geography of the space as best you can. And to get that intention across for the reader so that they’re watching a movie as they read. That’s very, very important.

Storyboarding actually tends to minimize all that down. That’s why it’s not story-painting but storyboarding, you see, and that’s why it’s stick figures because really what storyboarding is where are they going to stand vis-à-vis my camera? How many of them will be in the frame vis-‡-vis my camera. And how close will my camera be? Am I waist high? Am I thigh high? Am I head and shoulders?

And in terms of the action, is the car going from left to right depending on where the street is and all the rest of it? It’s such a nuts and bolts thing. And I guess the reason I’m doing my Pinocchio voice is not because I want people out there thinking, “Oh, look at you, you’re putting your script on Amazon; you’re not a real screenwriter.”

I bet a ton of you are, and I bet a bunch of you are way, way better than I am. What I’m saying is don’t get caught up in stuff that makes you feel like you’re accomplishing things when it’s really not. You could write a screenplay and if it’s a great screenplay — that’s the accomplishment. The storyboarding stuff, it’s a little bit like Final Draft has this function where it gives you story statistics and you can sit there after you finish your screenplay and go, “Oh, look at this. This character talks 25% of the time. And this one mostly has conversations with this one.”

Well, that’s just wankery. Who cares?

**John:** Yeah. No actual screenwriter does that.

**Craig:** Ever.

**John:** No one ever generates that report.

**Craig:** Ever. But I’ve actually talked to new screenwriters who are like really into those reports because it’s like something happened. It’s the simulation of achievement. And I think that storyboard is providing you a simulation of achievement that is irrelevant to your purpose at this stage.

**John:** Where I think this kind of software would be tremendously useful is people who are trying to learn about directing shots.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, people who are in a class, or even in an online class, where you talk about like this is what camera movement is. This is how you arrange the frame. This is how you maintain eye lines. Things that are sort of difficult to see if — difficult to describe just with words. You see this, “Oh, I get what this is.” So, you’re assignment could be storyboard out this sequence and show me how you’re going to do it. That’s incredibly useful and I could see that being a great thing for any budding film student.

I found as I’ve needed to figure out projects and figure out like how I was going to do stuff, even when I was dealing with my storyboard artist for The Nines, he and I would honestly just go around with a camera and sort of get the shots that I wanted. And then he would take those shots and journalize them back down to sort of illustrate and storyboard so I could remember like what it was I was going for.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, you have an incredibly good storyboarding tool in your pocket right now. It’s called your iPhone. And so you just go around and you take the pictures with that. And there’s even software that will give you the simulation of different lenses, so if you really have a question about like would I be able to get like a dirty over the shoulder literally in this location, you could pull out your iPhone and put on that lens and see what it would actually turn out to look like.

So, again, I’m impressed that — it’s actually sort of better software but it’s not necessarily a great benefit to most people who are going to be probably using it.

**Craig:** It’s true. There is, however, something that we can use, note my segue, that is very simple and it’s five letters. And yet for whatever reason there are all of these people out there who are teaching each other and their students that they out not use it.

Do you know to what I refer?

**John:** I do because we talked about it ahead of time. So, this is a rule that I’ve seen cited so many times about, you know, you should never use these two words in a screenplay. And the rule is wrong. And so tell us what the wrong rule is.

**Craig:** Never use “we see” in a screenplay.

**John:** So, let’s talk about how do you think that rule came about? How do you think people — was it just some arbitrary person who didn’t like the words “we see?”

**Craig:** No. I think this is what’s going on. Somewhere down the line in film departments the auteurist theory kind of blend in. And what happened was people who are more aligned with directors than screenwriters started coming up with rules for screenwriters that are nonsensical. And they’re academic rules. They’re dogmatic. They have no relation to the way we who do this job actually do our job.

So, the generally philosophy was, “Hey screenwriter, don’t tell me the director how to direct my movie. I don’t want you saying close up and I don’t want you saying ‘we see this’ and ‘the camera goes here.’ Because I’m the director and I decide all that.” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Which is not how directors actually talk.

The truth is that here in the business of making movies, everybody — the screenwriters, the producers, the executive, and yes, the directors — are interested in reading a script that reads like a movie. I have never once in whatever it’s been now, 17 years, had a director say to me, “Don’t tell me to close up or don’t tell me ‘we see from behind or we see.’ Don’t do any of that.”

Not once. Ever. Have you?

**John:** No. Never.

**Craig:** No! So, what is — but then here’s the part that makes me the most nuts. Okay, so first of all, let’s talk about the value of the words. The reason that we “we see” has value in description is because the audience is a participant in the movie. There are times when we — the audience — see something that the characters do not.

When we’re describing scenes in action paragraphs, the default understanding of the reader is that we’re talking about the characters. So, “Jim enters the room. There is a snake on the chair.” We, in our minds, we understand Jim sees the snake on the chair.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** “Jim enters the room. Crosses to grab himself a drink. We see behind him in the chair a snake. It rises.” We now understand we see that, and Jim doesn’t. That’s just one minor use of it, but frankly it’s very conversational. You may use it when you feel. It doesn’t matter. But what I hear these people on Twitter — and they’re teachers, for the love of god. “Well, it’s not good writing. It’s clumsy, it’s lazy, it’s a crutch.” What is it — a crutch for what? What is it taking the place of?

You have no answer because there is no answer.

**John:** There is no answer. “We see” actually can take the place of a lot of those terrible camera words that pull you out of the story and make you remember, like, oh that’s right, we’re watching a movie.

**Craig:** Bingo.

**John:** So, “we see,” I always feel like that “we” is the audience. You’re literally — you’re job as a screenwriter is to put the reader in the chair of the theater and everything we see, and also we hear, I use “we hear” a lot…

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** Those are the — you only have sight and sound, so these are these are the things we are going to be able to share with the audience, that we are experiencing these things. And that is great and fine.

Now, could you overuse “we see” or “we hear?” Yes, absolutely. And in most times you won’t need it because if you have a scene, like if you’re an establishing shot where no one is in that shot, you can probably just describe what’s happening there without the we see or the we hear. But there might be times where you want to, like, “We track along the path leading up to the door.” There might be times where that’s actually really important.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** And so the “we” is great.

**Craig:** You’re absolutely right. You are absolutely right. Joseph Conrad popularized a certain kind of writing going back to Heart of Darkness. And it paralleled a little bit of what was going on in the world of visual art, of painting, and that was an impressionistic way of writing. There’s this wonderful moment in Heart of Darkness where they’re on a boat and Marlow watches as a man suddenly reacts in pain and falls to the ground with a cane in his hand.

And then in the ensuing melee Marlow realizes that’s not a cane at all. It’s a spear. And the spear has been thrown at him and they’re under attack. But in the moment it seemed just like a man fell with a cane in his hand. It’s wonderful. It’s experiential. It’s impressionistic.

When you’re writing for movies, that — to me — is a great way of getting across for the person reading the experience or the impression of being in the movie theater. “We see” allows you to say what you think you see in the moment. “We see a flash of light. No, it’s a gunshot.” You know, “We see lightning. Not lightning, but this.”

Whatever it is that you want to do, it’s actually an important tool. What I find these people are misunderstanding is the purpose of the screenplay itself. We hear what we hear. We see what we see. Dialogue is spoken. When we write action paragraphs the purpose of the action paragraph is not to be read by a consumer. It is to create the illusion of a movie in the mind of the reader and the reader is a professional.

So, I say to all of you out there who are repeating this nonsense: (A) “We see” is a valuable tool for screenwriters. (B) If you want to use it, us it; and if you don’t, don’t. (C) I don’t know a single professional screenwriter who doesn’t use it and I could definitely point you to some amazing screenwriters who do. What letter am I up to? D?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** (D) There isn’t one person in the movie business who has ever complained to me once about it. So, with the preponderance of that evidence, sirs and madams, would you please stop telling people not to do it? It’s absurd.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** Done. Ka-boom.

**John:** Done. “We see” and “we hear” will go on forever.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Craig, to wrap us up today we have another very exciting announcement. We finally — finally after 93 episodes — we have t-shirts.

**Craig:** Oh! Oh thank god! [laughs]

**John:** So, here’s the deal on t-shirts. So, they’re really cool. If you are looking at this podcast on your iPhone or if you’re in iTunes you will see the typewriter is orange that glows. Well, there’s an orange t-shirt with that typewriter that is really, really good, that Ryan Nelson, our designer, did. And it’s fantastic. They’re beautiful American Apparel shirts.

There is an orange version. There’s also a very — a gray that’s like a heathery-blue gray. It’s a really good color with a white typewriter on it. Stuart and Ryan actually went down to our printers to check out the t-shirts themselves and the fabric. Stuart reports back that they blue shirt is the softest t-shirt he’s ever touched in his life.

**Craig:** Ooh. Well, I certainly like a soft shirt. And I will say that I, being completely color stupid and shirt stupid, showed a picture of it to one of my assistants and she said that it looked awesome and that her hipster friends would love it.

**John:** That is the goal is to have a shirt that is loved by hipster friends and by people like Craig’s assistant.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, they are good t-shirts that everyone can wear. Here’s the thing. I don’t want to be shipping out t-shirts for like the rest of my life. So, we are going to only be selling these t-shirts for about two weeks. The deadline on t-shirts will be June 21st is when we’re closing sales on t-shirts. So, if you would like a t-shirt, you should go and follow the link that is on this podcast or just go to johnaugust.com where there will be a post about buying a t-shirt.

**Craig:** I should buy one, shouldn’t I?

**John:** I think we’ll actually give you one. So you can choose either or blue and we’ll just give you one.

**Craig:** Blue sounds great. I mean, it’s the softest t-shirt of all time.

**John:** It’s the softest t-shirt in the world.

**Craig:** John, how is the sizing of these t-shirts?

**John:** They’re American Apparel shirts, so I think they’re sized a little bit smaller than most shirts. So, look through your closet and find an American Apparel shirt and recognize that it’s probably a little bit smaller than other shirts.

So, the shirts are $19, which basically covers our ability to make them, and then there’s some shipping. And so they’re available at johnaugust.com/store is where you can find them.

**Craig:** Nifty.

**John:** Nifty. So, again, a reminder, there’s only two weeks of t-shirts, so if you want t-shirts you should get on that.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** And you should wear it to our 100th anniversary episode. We might even have them done in time for the WGA thing.

**Craig:** Then we’ll all just look like a big cult.

**John:** It would be awesome.

**Craig:** Mm, big typewriter cult.

**John:** Yup. Craig, are you doing a One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** I do have a One Cool Thing this week.

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** So, I met Bob Gordon a couple weeks ago in Nashville, the Nashville Screenwriting Conference which was one of my One Cool Things many moons ago. Bob Gordon wrote Galaxy Quest, among others…

**John:** Oh my god, Galaxy Quest is so good.

**Craig:** It’s the best. So, I would love for us to do a whole podcast just on Galaxy Quest, because it kind of deserves to be…

**John:** Oh yeah! Let’s do that. That would be great.

**Craig:** Bob is awesome. And so we kind of became fast friends. And he and I were talking quite a bit about sort of the geeky/nerdy view of insomnia. He struggles with sleeping issues and we were talking about light and how light affects your circadian rhythm. And about the impact that we have now with screens, just screens in our eyes.

And I was a little behind the curve here. He kind of got me flat-footed because my understanding was that regular light bulbs kind of have a limited wavelength and that they don’t really impact us the way that the sun does. If you walk outside, if you’re sleepy and suddenly there’s sunlight in your eyes, your brain will try and wake you up.

And it is true that there’s a part of the wavelength called blue light that seems to trigger our wakefulness more than the rest. And that blue light isn’t really in your typical incandescent bulb. But it is, however, in these newfangled LED screens on your laptop and your iPad. So, there’s some research that indicates maybe shining that stuff in your eyes right before you go to bed might not be a great idea.

Enter this very cool piece of software called f.lux. And currently it is for the Mac and there’s a Windows beta. It’s also available for the iPhone and iPad. I have installed it and it’s great. And basically what it does is this: it figures out what time of day, or rather where the sun is for you in your time of day, so it accesses location services, and then when nighttime happens, essentially when the sun sets, it changes the lighting of your screen to reduce the blue and get it really nice and warm and brownish and not blue lighting, so that you don’t fry your suprachiasmatic nucleus with circadian rhythm shifting blue light.

I can’t tell you if it’s working or not. All I can tell you is it’s cool! And so I just like fact that my computer is like, “Yawn, it’s sleepy time.” So, check it out. You can go to justgetflux.com.

**John:** Cool. My One Cool Thing is something you should not do right before bedtime because you will be using your iPad and therefore waking up your circadian rhythms in ways. And you’ll also be thinking about this little game the entire time you’re trying to sleep. So, lesson learned — don’t try to do that.

Kingdom Rush, which was one of my favorite tower defense games of all time, this last week came out with Kingdom Rush Frontiers which is an expansion and redesign of Kingdom Rush, which is really terrific. So, if you like tower defense games, which the basic definition of a tower defense game is that monsters are trying to get from point A to point B and you can only set up these towers to stop them.

And it’s a really well designed game for the iPad. I love it. The remake they did for this new version is really smart. They sort of took what had been a very kind of classically fantasy, you know, dwarves and elves kind of thing and pushed it into a desert environment in ways that is actually nicely smart and rewarding.

So, I would recommend Kingdom Rush Frontiers, which is on the iPad right now. There will be a link to that. It’s in the App Store.

**Craig:** Sweet. And I should mention that f.lux is free!

**John:** Free is nice. We like f.lux.

**Craig:** Free!

**John:** Cool. Craig, thank you very much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** And I will talk to you next week.

LINKS:

* The Daily Beast on [Nikki Finke’s 8 Greatest Freakouts](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/04/deadline-hollywood-editor-in-chief-nikki-finke-s-8-greatest-freakouts.html)
* The LA Times on how [Nikki Finke’s next big story may be her own exit](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-fi-ct-nikki-finke-20130604,0,4915206,full.story)
* Time asks [What’s Next for Hollywood’s Most Feared Reporter?](http://entertainment.time.com/2013/06/06/whats-next-for-hollywoods-most-feared-reporter/)
* The (one and only?) infamous [Nikki Finke headshot](http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlla/files/original/nikki_finke.jpg)
* Gawker on [Why Nikki Finke Never Makes a Mistake](http://gawker.com/5392863/why-nikki-finke-never-makes-a-mistake) and the [commenter edition](http://gawker.com/5501268/why-nikki-finke-never-makes-a-mistake-commenter-edition)
* The Writers Guild Foundation presents [The Screenwriter’s Craft: Finding Your Voice](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/the-screenwriters-craft-finding-your-voice/) featuring Scriptnotes Live
* [Submit your Three Pages](http://johnaugust.com/threepage) for the Writers Guild Foundation event and let us know you’ll be there
* John’s blog post on [this summer’s two live shows](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-live-in-la)
* [Amazon Storyteller](http://studios.amazon.com/storyteller) from Amazon Studios
* Get your Scriptnotes shirt from [the John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/) until June 21st
* [f.lux](http://justgetflux.com/) adjusts your displays for the time of day
* [Kingdom Rush Frontiers](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/kingdom-rush-frontiers-hd/id598581619?mt=8) is available now

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 92 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, way back in Episode 73 we did a special episode where we talked about nothing except for Raiders of the Lost Ark.

**Craig:** Perhaps our finest episode.

**John:** That was a great episode. It was a very fun time. And so we’ve been looking for another film that could get that same kind of treatment. And today we have found that movie I believe.

**Craig:** Well, we have. And today we’re going to be talking about a film that not only was a big hit but also changed the business; brought a slumbering business back to life. And that movie is The Little Mermaid.

**John:** Yes. Disney’s 1989 film, written and directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, with songs — important songs — by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So, a couple reasons why I thought this was a good movie for us to be talking about. What you said in terms of it changing the industry I think is really crucial and important. This was the first of the modern Disney films. The first of the musical films that really succeeded. And if we didn’t have The Little Mermaid we wouldn’t Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Lion King, Pocahontas, Mulan. We wouldn’t have Brave.

This sort of set the template for this idea of the follow your protagonist in a musical adventure.

**Craig:** That’s right. And, also, you wouldn’t have Pixar either, frankly, because a lot of those guys came — Joe Ranft, for instance — worked on this movie.

**John:** And I would argue that Pixar with Toy Story changed the game again.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** I mean, if you look at 1995’s Toy Story, that was one of the first huge successes that wasn’t a musical, that wasn’t sort of following this template. But this was a template that was very important and I think it still is a very clear template.

And what’s useful about The Little Mermaid is the template is really clear. I think a lot of time when we talk about certain ideas in screenwriting — like the hero’s quest, want vs. need, two worlds, irrevocable choices — we’re trying to look at those in complicated live action movies where things are sort of buried underneath and you have to argue about, okay, it’s at that point, or that point.

Because The Little Mermaid is really simple, it’s actually very easy to see what those points are. And I think it’s going to be good to be able to talk through and really see very clearly what those notes are.

**Craig:** Yes. And as we talk through this movie today, let’s also note how it is old fashioned. And Toy Story has, the Toy Story, the Pixar model that was established in Toy Story has essentially subsumed this one. It’s a very different kind of story than the modern, what we call modern animated movies, that is to say post-Pixar.

**John:** Yeah. And the other reason why I thought this was a good movie for us to pick is that it’s an adaptation.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** The Little Mermaid is an adaption of the Hans Christian Andersen story, The Little Mermaid, from 1837. And I wasn’t familiar with what the original story was, so I looked it up on Wikipedia.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s horrifying.

**John:** Did you do that, too?

**Craig:** I actually was familiar with it. Well, Hans Christian Andersen in and of himself, he was beloved. And yet for whatever reason… — Why he was beloved? He’s a great writer. His stories are horrifying. They are terrible, terrible stories. They’re scary.

For instance, The Little Red Shoes is a girl who puts on red shoes because she wants to dance well and she keeps dancing because the shoes won’t let her stop. And she dances herself to death. The Matchstick Girl who sells matchsticks and is freezing outside looking into a window at a happy family. And she begins lighting matches to keep herself warm and she just ends up freezing to death in the cold surrounded by burnt out matches.

And, of course, then you have The Little Mermaid, a story that is perhaps his most frightening, horrifying, unrelenting bleak tale. And, I don’t know, do you want to tell the story?

**John:** Yeah, I do. So, actually I looked it up on Wikipedia and I’m going to do a shortened summary of the Wikipedia story because I was actually surprised how closely a lot of it does mirror our film in terms of actual plot.

**Craig:** Some of it.

**John:** If you actually look at the plot.

**Craig:** Some of it, yes. Some of it.

**John:** Yeah. If you look at the plot synopsis versus plot synopsis, it’s like, oh, those are really similar.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And then it’s all the ways that they’re different which I think is important for us to be discussing here today. So, bear with me while I sort of read the Wikipedia summary of Hans Christian Andersen’s version of The Little Mermaid:

So, The Little Mermaid dwells in an underwater kingdom with her father (the sea king or mer-king), her grandmother, and her five sisters. Her five sisters are each born one year apart. When a mermaid turns 15, she is permitted to swim to the surface to watch the world above, and when the sisters become old enough, each of them visits the upper world every year. As each of them returns, the Little Mermaid listens longingly to their various descriptions of the surface and of human beings.

When the Little Mermaid’s turn comes, she rises up to the surface, sees a ship with a handsome prince, and falls in love with him from a distance. A great storm hits, and the Little Mermaid saves the prince from nearly drowning. She delivers him unconscious to the shore near a temple. Here she waits until a young girl from the temple finds him. The prince never sees the Little Mermaid.

The Little Mermaid asks her grandmother if humans can live forever if they breathe under water. The grandmother explains that humans have a much shorter lifespan than merfolks’ 300 years, but that when mermaids die they turn to sea foam and cease to exist, while humans have an eternal soul that lives on in Heaven.

**Craig:** Sea foam.

**John:** Sea foam.

**Craig:** They turn into sea foam and they cease to exist.

**John:** The Little Mermaid, longing for the prince and an eternal soul, eventually visits the Sea Witch, who sells her a potion that gives her legs in exchange for her tongue (as the Little Mermaid has the most enchanting voice in the world). The Sea Witch warns, however, that once she becomes a human, she will never be able to return to the sea. She will only obtain a soul if she finds true love’s kiss and the prince loves her and marries her, for then a part of his soul will flow into her. Otherwise, at dawn on the first day after he marries another woman, the Little Mermaid will die brokenhearted and disintegrate into sea foam.

The Little Mermaid drinks the potion and meets the prince, who is mesmerized by her beauty and grace even though she is mute. The prince’s father orders his son to marry the neighboring king’s daughter, the prince tells the Little Mermaid he will not because he does not love the princess. He goes on to say he can only love the young woman from the temple, who he believes rescued him. It turns out that the princess that he’s supposed to marry is actually the temple girl, who had been sent to the temple to be educated. So, the prince loves her, and the wedding is announced.

**Craig:** Now, hold on a second. Before you finish this story, I think everybody at home surely is thinking, “Well, that wedding is going to be interrupted because the Little Mermaid is going to end up marrying the prince, right?”

**John:** Absolutely. Because it’s a fairy tale. It’s going to have a happy ending.

**Craig:** It’s a fairy tale. It’s going to have a happy ending.

**John:** The prince and princess marry, and the Little Mermaid’s heart breaks.

**Craig:** Wait, what?! [laughs]

**John:** She despairs, thinking of the death that awaits her, but before dawn, her sisters bring her a knife that the Sea Witch has given them in exchange for their long hair. So, the sisters sold their long hair for this knife.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** If the Little Mermaid slays the prince with the knife and lets his blood drip on her feet, she will become a mermaid again, all her suffering will end, and she will live out her full life.

**Craig:** Okay, now hold on. Before you go any further, surely what’s going to happen is she’s going to think about killing him and then decide not to. And because she does that super nice thing the prince realizes that and ends up marrying her, right?

**John:** Let’s keep reading.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** However the Little Mermaid cannot bring herself to kill the sleeping prince lying with his bride, and she throws herself into the sea as dawn breaks.

**Craig:** Wait, what?! [laugh]

**John:** Her body dissolves into foam…

**Craig:** Wait, what?!

**John:** …but instead of ceasing to exist, she feels the sun; she has turned into a spirit, a daughter of the air. The other daughters tell her she has become like them because she strove with all her heart to obtain an immortal soul. She will earn her own soul by doing good deeds and she will eventually rise up into the kingdom of God.

Now, note that this is actually a rewrite by Hans Christian Andersen. That was not the original ending he first penned. It was actually bleaker than that.

**Craig:** [laughs] I believe the original ending was such that she turns into sea foam. Period. The end.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** But, wait, I think you left out something.

**John:** Wikipedia might have left out something. I read what I had.

**Craig:** I had a memory that when she becomes human her legs are…

**John:** Oh, I did summarize that out. So, summarize for us. It was so gruesome I couldn’t even read it.

**Craig:** As I recall, the sea witch says, “You can have legs and you’ll be a really good dancer, so that’s how you’re going to attract him. Not because you can’t speak. But you can dance. But, your legs will essentially be excruciatingly painful for you and even more so when you dance. So, she has to dance with this guy, and he loves it, but it’s literally killing her.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That’s Hans Christian Andersen.

**John:** And she will bleed when she does it, which is, of course, a menstrual kind of thing, too.

**Craig:** Oh, grody. I didn’t know about that part. All right. I mean, it’s the worst story ever.

**John:** Well, it’s the worst story but it’s also the best story.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** It’s about forbidden love. It’s very much a Romeo and Juliet kind of story at its heart. And there’s terrific elements in it. And, honestly, reading back on the history of the film The Little Mermaid, all the way back to Walt Disney, they had drafts of The Little Mermaid. They had talked about making The Little Mermaid as a movie way back in Disney’s time.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, fast-forward to sometime in the ’80s and they decide, “Well, let’s make this movie.” And this is the Jeffrey Katzenberg era. And they said, “Well, let’s make this a big animated movie.” And god bless them, they did. But they made some significant changes and choices.

And so what I thought we’d do today is talk through the movie as it actually happens, it exists in real time. Because if you look at the synopsis of the story, it’s going to read a lot like what we just read because things get moved around in a synopsis because it’s easy to sort of understand that way.

But, I’m going to talk through sort of the movie as it actually happens on screen so we can see how they did what they did and what the choices were they made.

**Craig:** And remind me how we did it the last time. Are we stopping and starting, or are you just going to summarize?

**John:** We will start and stop a lot.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So, the movie The Little Mermaid begins with, actually on top of the ocean, begins with the ship. And so we see Eric and his crew, the sailors, and a bit of the kingdom. And the first song we hear, not very much of, it’s called Mysterious Fathoms Below. It’s very classically kind of like setting up the world. It’s surprising that we’re setting up the surface world before the undersea world, but I actually did it because it’s establishing that there is a normal world up above.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that it’s important. And then we’re going to go to see the world below. And how we’re actually getting there is there’s one of the fish that they catch and they haul up in the nets slips off and goes into the water. And once were in the water then we establish our real title sequence and then we know like, okay, we’re in this ocean world and this is where we’re going to spend most of our movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. And they do such a good job. I happen to know Ron and John. They’re amazing guys. Great directors. They did a spectacular job writing and directing this film.

And, if you want to talk about tight writing, you begin with this ship. You see the front of the ship is that classic carved woman who is essentially a mermaid. And here’s what we learn in about three or four lines of dialogue: We learn that Eric is kind of romantic about the sea and even mentions mermaids in this song; we learn…

**John:** Specially they mention King Triton, the ruler of the mer people, which is like, wow, that’s a lot to wedge in there at the start.

**Craig:** So, boom, right. So, right away we know that there is a King Triton and that there are mermaids. He is romantic about the sea. We meet this kind of fuss-budgety guy, Grimsby I believe his name is. Is that right, Grimsby?

**John:** Yeah. Grimsby who is sort of an advisor, like it sort of takes the role of his father. He’s like the counselor, I guess.

**Craig:** Correct. The prince’s counselor. And we learn that he is, unlike our hero, he’s puking because he’s seasick. And he doesn’t believe in any of this nonsense about the ocean. But the crew member says, “No, no, it’s true. King Triton is real and mermaids are real.” And he’s slapping Grimsby in the face with this fish that gets away. And then the fish takes us down into the depth.

So, going back to our discussion about transitions. You will find no genre that is more transition-dependent than animation because you can make any transition you want.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They do such a good job here. But in that short amount of time you get so much information. Pretty great.

**John:** Yeah. So, the fish carries us down underneath the sea where we see the sea kingdom, and specifically we meet Triton who is the ruler of the sea and who’s like the big sort of grumbly king guy who is Triton.

His conductor is this little crab named Sebastian who is sort of his advisor/consigliore, but also leads his orchestra, his choir. And we’re at this concert where the five daughters are supposed to perform and it’s supposed to be the debut performance of Ariel, the youngest daughter. But Ariel is missing.

So, we’ve established all these characters. We still have not yet met Ariel.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We get to a little kind of throwaway song called the Daughters of Triton. And when we get to the last verse that she’s supposed to sing, she’s not there. It’s like, “Where’s Ariel?” Classically cut to: there’s Ariel.

We’re five minutes into the movie but we have not met our named character, the Little Mermaid character.

**Craig:** Which I like, actually. I kind of like the notion that we’re going to meet our surrounding cast of characters very, very quickly, get them completely out of the way, on their own separate from the hero, and then we meet the hero. Because the whole point of this movie is that the hero feels apart from everybody around her. So, it makes sense that she’s not there with them. She’s there in spirit. I mean, there’s this little line where Sebastian says, “She’s got the most beautiful voice, if only she would show up to rehearsals.” We get it. She’s rebellious, you know. She doesn’t fit in.

So, I like that. She shouldn’t have been there in that opening scene.

**John:** Yes. And the song itself, like “She’s got a voice just like a bell.” It’s all about her even though she’s not there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, therefore when we cut to her, the next thing we should see is Ariel. If we were to cut to anything other than Ariel we would throw something at the screen. We need to see her at this point.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** We see Ariel and Flounder, her best friend the fish, exploring a shipwreck. And so this is establishing who she is and who he is. She is very curious. She will go and explore things and she’ll go places where she’s not supposed to go. Flounder is more classically the wet blanket. He says, “No, we shouldn’t go in there. This isn’t safe.”

He’s the comic relief but also sort of the voice of reason to some degree.

**Craig:** Yeah. I have to say that one of my… — There are things that I look at in this movie and I think, okay, there is a mistake here. And you could see that Ron and John got better at this. Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast are better movies than this movie…

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** But, so, not to pick on them because they’re amazing and this was kind of a ground-breaking film, so you have to give them a few mulligans here. Flounder is a bad character. Flounder has no personality really. He is vaguely cowardice. Sort of vaguely amusing. He’s her friend. Maybe he talks a little bit too much. But, the truth is everything about him is duplicated by Sebastian. So, he tends to blab and get her in trouble. He’s over-cautious. He kind of doesn’t need to — he’s not distinct.

**John:** Yeah. He’s basically there so Ariel has someone to talk to.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And here’s the secret about Flounder and Sebastian. Flounder is a fish, so Flounder can’t get out of the water. Sebastian is a crab, so crabs can go up on land. And so when we get to the second half of the movie where we’re up on land, Sebastian can do things and Flounder is stuck in the water and has to swim along in a canal. It’s not useful to us.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know, and they kind of got jammed there by the water thing. You can see that, because Sebastian is just a much funnier, more interesting character. Granted, I think today you would struggle to get away with that Jamaican accent. You know, we live in a different time now. It’s not racist, it’s just I think that there’s a sensitivity to that now that didn’t exist back then. People had no problem laughing along with something like that and nowadays it seems like they do.

**John:** I don’t think actually Sebastian is all that minstrelsy, if that’s the concern. I mean, it’s nothing compared to sort of what you see in the Transformers movies.

**Craig:** No, but for instance that thing that happened in the Transformers movies with the weird ghetto robots, that was kind of racist and people did not like that. This isn’t, it’s just that — I guess the way I would put it is this: I feel like anything that puts something between you and the audience, whether it’s justified or not, is to be avoided.

And when I’m watching it now, it’s funny. I remember seeing this movie in theaters and not blinking twice at this. And now when I watch it I blink a little bit like, huh.

**John:** See, Sebastian is the C-3PO of our story.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** He’s like the cautious, “Oh, we can’t go there, we can’t go there.” But Flounder isn’t really even R2D2. He’s just like this little immature fish who swims around with her. And I have no idea what Flounder actually wants. And you should want him to want something.

**Craig:** Yeah, Sebastian — awesome and interesting, albeit a little minstrelsy. Flounder — kind of a zero. But, that leads us to…

**John:** Well, let’s talk about sort of what happens in the shipwreck. So, in the shipwreck they find some things and you see that she’s always trying to pick up stuff and explore and gather stuff. And she finds a fork and a pipe and she doesn’t know what they are. And she sort of misassumes what they are. And that becomes a recurring gag.

And so it’s not just that she found any human things, she’s found those specific things, and those things are going to — in a very classic comedy way — pay off three times.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, inside that ship there’s also a shark attack. We see that there is danger in the world. She out-swims it. It’s not an amazing sequence…

**Craig:** No.

**John:** …but it establishes there is some action and danger in the world.

**Craig:** It’s actually a bad sequence because it is establishing danger that is irrelevant. It felt like they just jammed in some action to jam it in, because the truth is the danger that the movie establishes in a much better way later on when Sebastian sings Under the Sea is the danger of humans to mer people. We shouldn’t perceive danger from sharks in this movie because the shark will never appear again, nor will sharks appear again in general. Nor will predation really appear in any specific way.

So, it felt, frankly, unnecessary.

**John:** Tacked in a bit. The next character we meet is Scuttle who is this idiot seagull who lives up on the rocks. He’s our first character we sort of talk to who’s above ground. And we establish at this point that Ariel can talk to every animal in this world. And that’s sort of — actually, that’s not true. She can talk to all the sea animals in the world, I guess, is the rule.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Scuttle takes a look at the things she brings up and says like, “Oh, that fork is a dingle hopper. It’s for combing your hair and the pipe is an instrument they use to blow.” And he has no idea what’s going on.

It’s as she’s talking with Scuttle that she realizes, “Oh no, I forgot the concert!” and so she races back to get to the kingdom. It’s also here that we first establish the idea of Flotsam and Jetsam, who are these two eels, these who evil eels who swim around and will cause havoc for our heroine.

**Craig:** Well, and I think we immediately then go to — we establish that as they watch her, each one of them has one orange or yellow eye, and those become the sort of psychic vision of Ursula, our villain, and I think we go right to her at that point.

**John:** We do.

**Craig:** She does a little quick thing. And so it’s great because in any kind of story like this you’re getting an enormous amount of information very quickly. We’ve established the two separate worlds, the separation of the worlds, the existence of a king, and Sebastian, and a daughter who is the fifth of five daughters who is young, who is rebellious, who hasn’t shown up, who in fact is obsessed with the human world and her friend Flounder. And there’s a seagull up top who’s trying to explain the human world to her but he doesn’t know how it works. And oh my god, I’m late for this, I’ve got to get back. And what are we, like probably minute six, and now, oh my gosh, here’s a villain. And she’s great.

And when movies pile this much in and somehow avoid overstressing your brain, you start to feel like you’re listening to a really good song with lots of themes and lots of changes and not something that’s just going to be a repetitive beat.

And Ursula is, in my estimation, the best thing about this movie. She may be the best Disney villain ever.

**John:** She’s a fantastic villain.

**Craig:** Spectacular. And when we get to her song, we should also talk about the existence — there’s a song that they did for the Broadway version which is — I wish were in this movie, because it’s an incredible song.

**John:** Let’s talk about what we learn about Ursula at this point. So, we learn from Ursula that she used to live in the palace and she’s somehow banished from there. She uses the word banished. And that she has some vague kind of plan. She wants to get back in. And after seeing Ariel and Ariel going up to the surface, she says, “She may be the key to Triton’s undoing.” So, she has a vengeance against Triton and she wants to use our Little Mermaid heroine to do that.

**Craig:** And actually I should say this is — in the musical, in the stage musical she sings a song, I believe the title is let’s bring the good times back, where she sings about the good times that are gone and past when she did live in the palace. And she describes what life was like when she was in charge. And now she’s saying, “Let’s bring those good times back.”

And it’s such a great explanation of her motivation. You can take jealousy or power hunger. That’s a very flat sort of thing, you know, hunger for power. But this lady doesn’t just hunger for power. She’s wickedly passionate. She believes that those were the good times and she wants them back. So, I love that.

**John:** Yeah. So, she doesn’t get to sing her “I want” song here, but she does communicate what her ambitions are.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Ariel goes back to the palace. Triton, her dad, finds out that she was up at the surface where the humans can see her. He’s pissed off at her. “Not another word,” he says to her.

At this point we’ve musically introduced the idea, the musical theme of Part of Your World many, many times. We have not actually sung it. It’s not until we get to — so, Triton assigns Sebastian, like, “Keep an eye on Ariel. I want to make sure she stays away from those humans.

We follow Ariel to the secret cave which is where she keeps all of the human stuff that she finds. It’s in that cave where we sing maybe one of the great “I want” songs, which is Part of Your World.

**Craig:** Yes, including the lyric “I wanna.”

**John:** “I wanna.” Yes. So, this is a thing to talk about sort of in musicals overall, and this is being one of the sort of seminal animated musicals, is that idea of first song establishes the world. So, Fathoms Below, even though we don’t use a lot of it.

Second song, or quite early on song needs to be the lead character singing “I want.” And let us know clearly what it is the character is trying to achieve in the course of the story. So, she sings, “I want to be part of that world.” And interesting she says, the song is called Part of Your World, but it’s actually “part of that world” is what she sings most of the time.

**Craig:** Right. “That world.”

**John:** So, she’s around all this human stuff and she wants to be up there where people can dance and she doesn’t even understand what that world is but she knows she wants to be a part of it.

**Craig:** Mm-hmmm. Yeah. She does. And it is, first of all, let’s hang our heads for the late, great Howard Ashman who was simply the best at this. I don’t think we’ll ever see anyone come close to his ability to not only lyrically be clever, but also lyrically to express things like these simple desires in a way that was so fresh and captivating and honest. Her passion here is the passion of an innocent person, which is the best kind of passion, so we find her ignorance adorable.

There are little animated touches that Ron and John do. While she’s singing she gracefully plants the fork in a candelabra because she thinks that maybe that’s where it goes. And they just do that sort of back-grounded as she’s singing the song. But there’s a yearning to it that is gorgeous because it’s not, “I want something that I suppose I can have with effort.”

It’s, “I want something I can’t have at all. I’m a fish. That’s there, I’m here.” And it’s sort of heartbreaking but it also sets up why she would be willing to go through terrible lengths to achieve what she wants.

**John:** Yes. And as the song is mostly concluded, a boat sails overhead, a shadow of a boat sails overhead, and that is Prince Eric’s boat. She swims up to see Prince Eric’s boat. So, we reestablish Eric, the guy who we started at the head of the movie. We see more about his dog, Max, who is like a big sheepdog who is very classically a Disney dog.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just like a great dog who doesn’t talk, has no magical powers, just is a great dog. He starts to sniff out that, like, oh, there’s a mermaid there. But, of course, he can’t say anything.

**Craig:** No. It’s like a classic Disney dog that barks happily and licks the faces of people with good intentions and growls at people with bad intentions. [laughs] It’s just perfect.

**John:** And so Max’s function is largely to let us know that Eric is a great guy, because what’s going to happen is really the inciting incident of our film which is the storm. This giant storm suddenly rears up, destroys the ship. The ship catches fire. Eric goes back to the ship to rescue his dog Max. Talk about a hero.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** He goes back to rescue his dog.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Goes back to rescue his dog. The ship blows up because of the cannons. Eric is knocked overboard. Ariel saves him.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Ariel pulls him to shore. Rescues him/saves him. She sings the reprise of Part of Your World, which actually she says Part of YOUR world now, and she wants to be with HIM. So, it’s gone from a general sense of like I want to be up on the surface to like I want to be wherever he is is where I want to be.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then swims off as Max and Grimsby find Eric there on the beach.

**Craig:** Right. So, a couple of things. First off, we’ve got, of all the stuff that we sort of laid out there, including songs and action set pieces and meeting all these characters, that lightning storm happens at 22 minutes. So, it’s incredible how much they’ve jammed in to 22 minutes without feeling like it’s overstuffed or too rushed.

When she’s looking at him on the boat, the movie changes permanently to a romance. So, for the first 22 minutes it really is a story about a young woman who is struggling with her father’s inability to let her kind of wander off and experience life the way she wants to experience it. In that regard it’s very similar to Finding Nemo.

We can see parallels between this movie and Finding Nemo. Obviously they both take place under the water. And they are both about parents struggling with children who want to be free. Those parallels end pretty quickly right here on the 22nd minute when she just gets all googly-eyed for Eric.

And this is one of the lines in the sand where we can look at the Pixar era and this early Disney era… – Early Disney era? You and I were already grown men! — [laughs] But these Disney movies of the revitalization of the Disney era that started with The Little Mermaid was a fairytale princess and prince-oriented romantic era.

And so the stories are both buoyed and dragged down by the emphasis on straight ahead googly-eyed romance. It’s love at first sight which is a very simple, frankly not true, thing. And, also, the story then takes on a very adolescent nature. It is very much about a young woman who just wants to get a guy and has to figure out how to do it. And this is not a particularly feminist movie. We’ll see that as we go along.

But, anyway, this is the big change. I’ll say one other thing. When he washes up on shore and she’s cradling him and he’s kind of passed out, it is a very iconic representation of an adolescent fantasy. It is the fantasy of being found and being taken care of by a woman. It is the fantasy of finding and taking care of a helpless man. There is something about that, that kind of patient/nurse thing that is very ingrained in us in a sort of Jungian way.

And, also, I have to say one of the great comic takes in film history is when she’s holding him like this and you cut to Sebastian and his jaw drops and hits the rock with a clang.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** It is just a great example of how funny animation can be. And now it seems just a little corny, I suppose, but in its time it was spectacular. I mean, I remember the audience losing their minds.

**John:** Now, it’s important to note that this inciting incident, it changed the course of the story. It’s like that Passover Principle of like why today is like no other day, that everything is different. But unlike Finding Nemo, where Nemo gets pulled off and gets pulled away from his situation, she doesn’t get pulled away. It’s just that her ambition changes. Her ambition and her focus changes.

And she’s not going to be willing to live under the sea anymore. But it’s not like the storm pulled her away from her family or anything like that. It’s that her goals have changed. And because of that she is going to change the story, which is notable.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, if we had introduced the story, if we’d established the romance from the very start, like if she had seen Prince Eric on page 5, this would be a different thing because it would have been about just her wanting to be with this cute boy. Because we’ve established that she overall wants to get up to the surface and wants to live that life, it has a — I don’t know — I feel better we’re out in the movie, that it’s not just this teenage romance.

**Craig:** I agree. And all that stuff has kind of led to her conundrum. What we’ve established with the pre-romantic moment movie is that she can’t be part of their world regardless of love, because she’s a mermaid, she’s a fish, she doesn’t have legs.

I mean, she makes a big deal about legs and feet and walking in the sun. Really, it’s interesting how Ron and John really smartly specified her problem down to legs. Because she can breathe above water just fine. We see that. It’s just she doesn’t have legs. So, when she runs away from him, she’s aware that she can’t be with him if she has a fish bottom. She needs legs.

And in her mind, at this point in the movie all she knows is I can’t be with him because I don’t have legs. I really wish I could be with him. But they haven’t gone any further than that.

**John:** Specifically she sings, “What would I pay to stay here beside you?”

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** Which is what she will do. She’ll pay with her soul.

**Craig:** Right. She hasn’t imagined that it’s even a possibility. It’s funny; she’s not depressed at all. When she goes back down under the ocean, she’s the opposite of depressed. The next thing we see is she’s like super duper in love girl, like la-da-da-da, swimming around, singing. Her sisters tell the dad, “Oh boy, she’s in love.”

**John:** Before we get under water, though, Ursula sees her up on the shore. And that, I think, is an important point to make. So, Flotsam and Jetsam have watched this, too. And we cut to Ursula who is forming a plan. And this is also a moment where we introduce what Ursula actually does. And she has this garden of souls, which is really disturbing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And it was even disturbing watching it again as a grownup, because essentially these mer folk who have come to her — we’ll learn the specifics in the song in a little bit — but these mer-folk who have come to her asking for favors have invariably gotten their souls caught by her. And they are these little wretched newt things that are sort of stuck in the sand and are pathetic. And that’s the danger that we’ve established at this moment.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And that’s the danger that we’ve established at this moment.

**Craig:** Yes. And it was great to bring her back, again. You almost forget that she’s there and then there she is again. So, we just think, “Boy, there’s a lot going on dramatically in this story.”

It’s one of the reasons why Star Wars, I think, captivates kids even now today. Ariel and Luke Skywalker are essentially the same person. They’re both saying, I want to be part of that world up there, with the two suns, or up there by the beach. And then you get into that character drama and then you go, “Oh, wait, but also there’s Darth Vader.”

Same thing with Titanic. Watching these two people fall in love, I want to be part of his world. Oh, wait, there’s also an iceberg. Exciting.

**John:** Exciting. So, under the sea we see that the sisters have recognized that, oh, that girl is in love. Triton is like, “Oh, she’s in love? Well, Sebastian should know about this.” So he asks Sebastian. Sebastian is like, “Ah, la, la, la.” He’s sort of yada-yada-ing, like trying not to spill the beans.

And Sebastian is trying to convince Ariel like, “I know you like that boy up here, but everything is much better under the sea, which becomes Under the Sea, which is a very classic, iconic number from the show, which is again trying to establish why our world underneath here is better than the world above.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And this is the one I think actually got the Grammy nominations and sort of the acclaim at the time.

**Craig:** And they did an amazing job. It is an amazing song. Remarkably clever lyrics. There is, when you first start to listen to it you think this doesn’t need to be in the movie because we know that we’re under the sea and obviously they’ve been saying over and over that you shouldn’t go up there. So, why are we singing another song about how it’s better down here?

And then if you listen to the lyrics, they take a shift, and Sebastian starts singing about what it’s like up there. Up there they eat you. They fry you. They put you in fricassee. They chop you to bits. It’s a violent world up there to people like them.

So, even though the song is called Under the Sea, “come down here where it’s hotter and it’s more fun,” it’s not a song about home is great. What it really is a song about is stay away from the dangerous world up there. It’s a song of warning disguised as a calypso romp.

**John:** Yeah. Ariel and Flounder take off in the middle of this giant production number and Sebastian finishes the production number and realizes that, oh crap, they’re gone.

Triton summons him to say, like, “So tell me the specifics of who it is that she’s in love with.” Sebastian says, “Ah, la, la, la,” and finally gets the word out of it.

We’re in Ariel’s cave and Flounder has rescued this — somehow rescued sort of magically — this giant statue of Eric…

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah, I’m not quite sure how he did that.

**John:** Flounder had the help of a bunch of octopuses I guess? They sort of rescued the statue and brought it down.

**Craig:** He used a system of pulleys.

**John:** And this is a moment that I honestly felt went on too long and could have been trimmed down a bit. But, anyway, Triton comes and finds the cave and says, “You cannot go up with those humans anymore. I’m furious.” And he uses his trident to zap and fry all of the stuff that she’s gathered from places.

Now, I think it’s important that the father freak out, because when your father abandons you, the one man who you’re supposed to be safe with, when he gets scary and violent, it’s understandable that she’s going to run away.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It just went on a little long for me here.

**Craig:** I personally thought, it’s one of my favorite parts of the movie, only because there is something legitimate about his anger. And I always think about these movies, particularly these coming of age stories… — Well, if you look at Nemo, Nemo is the story about a parent. Nemo is a movie for parents about parenting. Kids enjoy it. They don’t realize that they’re watching a story about parenting, but they are.

This movie is a story about growing up. It is from the kid’s perspective. And when your father yells at you and you are smaller, that’s what it seems like to me. You know, that suddenly your dad gets big and orangey reddish and starts shooting fire. And she’s afraid of him. She is legitimately afraid of him.

And, of course, he’s blowing up the stuff that she’s gathered and she’s very upset because they mean something to her and they mean nothing to him. But, it all leads up to the final, you know, the crescendo that builds to the climax of him destroying the statue of Eric, which will then payback in this fascinating way.

This little moment where after he leaves, and he leaves, and Ron and John do a great job of showing that he’s remorseful. Every time he yells at her he walks away like, “Oh, maybe I overdid it.”

So, she’s upset and then along come Flotsam and Jetsam. And they’re there to say to her…

**John:** “There may be a way that you can get up there.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** “Have you heard of Ursula, like the sea witch?”

“Well, I couldn’t possibly.”

And it’s like, “Well, you possibly could. What’s the harm? You could at least talk with her.”

**Craig:** Right. And she’s sort of, you know, because everybody knows you don’t talk to Ursula the Sea Witch. She’s scary and she’s bad. And so Ariel properly is resisting this. So, okay, she’s not a dummy. But, as they’re kind of saying, “Oh, you know, she’s not that bad. And she could really help you out,” The face, Eric’s face from the statue, floats down and lands in the sand right next to her.

And she goes, “Okay, yeah, I think I’m going to go.” Because then it really is like, I love him, and I’m angry at daddy. And screw it. Let’s go talk to the sea witch and see how that goes.

And what’s interesting is we have a movie where the hero and the villain don’t meet eye to eye until minute 37, which is probably about halfway through this thing.

**John:** Yeah, it is. And so I would say overall as I was keeping track of time in this, it was like, “Ooh, things are happening a little bit later than I would have expected them to happen.” I don’t necessarily know that I wanted to rush through anything faster than this.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** But it’s strange though that in a movie that is actually pretty short because it’s an animated movie, it’s a very, very long first act. This movie is essentially a first act and a second act.

**Craig:** It is musical structure, no question. No question. It’s a musical structure movie. It’s a two-act movie. You can see where the curtain comes down for intermission. We’re about to get there.

**John:** So, Ariel goes to see the sea witch, Ursula. This is where we have Poor Unfortunate Souls which is a song that Ursula sings that explains sort of what she does, which is that people come to her with problems, this one wants to be thin, and this one wants to get the girl. Do I help them, yes indeed.

And, of course, sometimes they can’t pay the price and therefore they become these wretched — this wretched soul garden that she has. But this won’t happen to Ariel because, you know, because it won’t. And so this is where Ursula sets up the rules that in exchange for her voice she will have legs and she can go up to the surface. And she has three days in which to get true love’s kiss from the prince. And if she can do that then she’s fine; if not, then, well, she’s risking her soul.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. So, first, let’s talk about the song. Amazing. I mean, it’s so campy and wonderful. And this is, it’s just, I don’t know how you do better than this.

The first time we meet her actually, going way back to the beginning, Ursula is complaining about how she’s starving, and she’s just obese, like super big boozy old lady. It’s just great.

**John:** Modeled on Divine, the drag queen.

**Craig:** Big time. And the whole thing is just a very gay, campy presentation of this bigger than life woman. And the song title itself is spectacular. Poor Unfortunate Souls. You come to me and I help you because of your poor unfortunate souls. But what ends up happening to all of you. You all end up basically getting hoisted by your own petard. I get you. And now you are my own Poor Unfortunate Souls. And I literally have your souls now and they are poor and unfortunate. It’s a great little double entendre.

The song itself is kind of a masterpiece of seduction. This old woman, you know, here’s this young girl who is uncertain about her sexuality. She’s met a boy for the first time but he’s not a fish boy. He’s a human boy. And I don’t know what to do and my daddy is angry at me. It’s just classic sort of stuff.

And what does Ursula do? She slithers out of her big shell. She immediately puts on some makeup. She’s a woman. You know what I mean? As she sings this song she’s very enticing, like baby this is who it is to be a woman. These are the things we do. I understand that this is love and the things we do for love, but you’ll get your man. You know, she’s this big thing.

And then she tells Ariel she has to take her voice, she’s like, well then, “How am I going to get a man without a voice?” And she says, “Oh, you use that pretty face.”

**John:** “Body language.”

**Craig:** “Body language.” I mean, this big… — It’s just all about sort of the bad, bad mommy. And it’s about kind of taking advantage of this youthful girl. And so it’s this perfect little presentation of how to be a villain and how to be a seductive villain. And it’s so important that you be a seductive villain here so that we believe that Ariel is doing this because she’s been convinced, you know.

**John:** Well, the other important lesson here for screenwriting, though, is Ariel is making an irrevocable choice. I mean, what Ursula says is, “Life’s full of touch choices, innit?”

**Craig:** She goes, “Innit?”

**John:** “Innit.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Either you do this or you don’t get it at all. And if you do this there’s no going back. And so you’re going to lose your fins and you’re going to swim to the surface and that’s it. And that’s an important lesson to learn, because so often you’ll see stories in which characters are allowed to take these little sort of half steps. And you always feel like could go back home at any point. But, no, Ariel is essentially burning down her house.

She is changing her body permanently so she can go on to this next part of the story. And that’s an important lesson to learn.

**Craig:** Yes. And we’ll come back to this, sort of the ending. It always reminds me of the end of Grease where it turns out if you just put on the stretch pants and get a perm you can get a guy. That appears the lesson of that movie. The lesson of this movie is legs definitely help you get a dude.

But, for those of you who are looking for lessons here on how to apply any of this stuff to your own writing, there’s a little moment in this song that is a great example of how to both compress what you’re doing and layer it and enhance it by doing that.

We know that Ursula is a sea witch and she’s saying I can whip up a potion to do this. She starts making the potion while she’s convincing Ariel to still do it. She’s making the potion while Ariel is saying, “I’m not sure.” So, she is both convincing her and making the potion, which is very visual. And by making the potion almost like this is happening, kiddo. [laughs] You know? Get on board. It becomes a very smart confluence of lyric, seduction, character intention, and visuals.

**John:** Agreed. It’s a question of thinking about not then the character doe this. It’s like while the character is doing this. So, if you have characters, I mean, most movies you’re not going to have characters singing, but characters are going to be talking and doing other stuff. Well, don’t have them stand there and talk to the person straight on. They can be doing the thing that they’re talking about doing and present them with a finished choice rather than having to stop and make the potion.

**Craig:** Right-o.

**John:** So, we’re 43 minutes into the movie.

**Craig:** Let’s drop the curtain. It’s time for Act Two. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. Ariel becomes a human. And that really is very much a classic act break.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And what I had forgotten about the movie is that Ariel becomes human and suddenly she cannot be underwater. And so it’s only with the help of Flounder and Sebastian that she’s able to get up to the surface in time so she doesn’t drown. That was just a lovely, nice choice.

**Craig:** Correct. And for those of us who are into mermaids, and I am, I mean, she’s hot. Ariel is hot. I mean, okay, fine, whatever, she’s 16. But she’s not real, so I don’t feel like I’m really being gross about it. She was a hot mermaid. And she wears this little shell bra, but then her body, she doesn’t have to wear pants because she’s got a fish bottom. But when she gets out of the water…

**John:** But now she’s naked.

**Craig:** …she’s naked. And they do a really good job of cutting around her pelvis. It’s very frustrating. And then they eventually put clothes on her.

**John:** So, she gets up to the surface. Up at the surface we see Eric. He’s playing the melody of Part of Your World, I think.

**Craig:** I believe he’s actually… [hums]

**John:** [hums] Oh, he’s playing the same version. [hums]

**Craig:** Which is derived from Part of Your World.

**John:** Sebastian, while up at the surface, Sebastian is trying to, again, convince Ariel to go back. Maybe your father can save this, stop this somehow. But finally he agrees to help her.

This is, again, sort of Sebastian being C-3PO. Like, “No, no, no, we shouldn’t do this, we shouldn’t do this. Okay, fine, well then I’m going to help you because you’re helpless.”

Max finds her. Max the dog finds her. We have established that she can’t speak. That she’s really pretty but she can’t speak.

**Craig:** And therefore she can’t be the girl that he remembered, because the girl who rescued him had this wonderful voice.

**John:** Exactly. Yes. So, she’s lovely and all, but she can’t be that girl.

We dress her in some sail cloth and we send her off to the palace. She takes a bubble bath. We have dinner and the advisor, Grimsby. We re-payoff the fork and the pipe.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** She tries to use the fork at dinner and she tries to use the pipe and doesn’t know what it is. So, she seems really kooky and wacky because she doesn’t know what these things are.

I would honestly say that my least favorite part of this movie is Ariel on the surface.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** The fish out of water. Because she comes off as very much the manic pixie dream girl. And this is a girl who worked really hard underneath the sea and on the land she just doesn’t sort of put the pieces together. We don’t see her being smart on the land.

**Craig:** Yeah. A bunch of things happen to really make this the saggiest part of the movie. It’s hard to trump “I’ve just turned you into a human.” You know, that’s a big deal.

We’ve taken away her voice. It is necessary for the story, but it also then naturally turns her character into kind of a silent movie goofball. And the fact that Eric takes her in and she has the wishful foam and bubble bath and the fancy dress gets put on. And, you know, she’s at dinner with this guy she’s in love with. It’s getting very super rom-com-y. It’s played for goofs. And then, unfortunately, we get the song Les Poissons.

Now, I love Les Poissons…

**John:** But it’s just a song.

**Craig:** It’s just a song.

**John:** It’s just a musical number.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So, this is just a song in which the cook is talking about all the fish that he’s going to put into the stew and he tries to kill Sebastian. And it’s a payoff I guess to the idea of how dangerous the world is up above. It’s what Sebastian said before. But it’s not all that useful.

**Craig:** It’s not, because the truth is that danger for her is gone. She has legs now. So, no one is going to cook her. Sebastian is there because he’s watching her. The song, Les Poissons, is incredibly clever. I mean, really smart wordplay. And the sequence is entirely for laughs, although it gets a little gory and creepy in it. But the biggest issue with it is it could just be lifted from the movie entirely and the story wouldn’t change.

**John:** Nothing would change one bit.

**Craig:** But, you know, I guarantee you that it was one of the top rated songs and a crowd favorite and that’s why they’re keeping it.

**John:** Yeah. But, again, it’s pointing out the fact that she doesn’t have anything to do and she’s not actually trying to do anything.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** We’ve established this rule that she has three days to do it, but — I’m not spoiling anything to the movie we’re about to talk through — she doesn’t do anything. She’s not trying to do anything. And it’s a weird case where like you don’t want her to try too hard because then it’s not really true love. At the same time, you want to see her sort of making more of an effort. Instead, everyone around her is trying to make an effort to make this happen, including this next song, Kiss the Girl, which is a better number. At least it’s on story point, which is a number led by Sebastian where he’s trying to get all the other animals to sing the song and make the most romantic moment possible so that Eric will actually kiss her.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so it’s this boat ride and it’s lovely. To me, this also went on a little bit long.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a romantic thing and they almost kiss and all the rest of it. What you’re starting to feel the burden of is her lack of choices. And, yes, she doesn’t have a voice, but she also isn’t making a choice either. She makes one huge choice, “Turn me into a human.” Once she does that, she makes no choice again for the rest of the movie.

And this where you can see Ron and John getting much, much better with Aladdin and with Beauty and the Beast. And Disney movies to follow as well, Pocahontas and so forth. And certainly the Pixar movies take it to another level. But we are now firmly in fairy tale-ville, where we started with this really kind of self-directed aspirational female character who is now curiously sort of as she physically evolved, emotionally devolved into passive and moony faced.

She will not choose anything again. She will not learn anything for the rest of the movie. And this is my, you know, when we get to the end we’ll sort of talk like who is the hero of this movie? It’s actually kind of hard to figure out because thematically it’s quite thin. And in terms of choices it becomes very, very thin. It becomes a very plot-oriented movie in the second act.

**John:** So, spit-balling, but I would say if you were to rebuild this in a way so that this second act could actually have something for her to do, if on the surface there was something that they were planning on doing that was going to hurt the kingdom or it would have some greater impact on the world that she discovers while she’s up there and needs to involve herself to stop it. That she needs to be selfless to stop it. That would be showing her making some choices. And complicated by the fact that she can’t speak and therefore can’t do these things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But instead it’s just, you know, be pretty so that he’ll kiss you. And that’s not a playable action.

**Craig:** It’s not. And it gets papered over by this beautiful song — it’s actually a beautiful song — and again, Menken and Ashman, just an incredible job. You know, now that I think about it, it becomes evident and I’m just sort of racing ahead here to the end, but it becomes evident that really King Triton is the protagonist of the movie. And he’s the person who sort of articulates an anti-theme and a theme and makes the biggest choices. He makes a choice of sacrifice. And he makes a choice of ultimate sacrifice at the end.

Which is interesting, because I’m sure when I watched the movie I thought it was her, but I don’t think it is.

**John:** Yeah, not every father is going to have to give up his soul, but every father is going to have to give up his daughter.

**Craig:** Right. And he chooses to do both, right.

**John:** Yeah, that’s thematic choice.

So, specifically what’s happening here, so we have this Kiss the Girl sequence. They almost kiss. They don’t quite kiss. Flotsam and Jetsam sort of rock the boat at the last moment. Ursula realizes, oh no, this is getting too close, she’s actually going to get the kiss, so she’s going to have to get more involved. And we see Ursula casting this great spell. And she’s going to use the voice that she has from Ariel to win over this guy.

**Craig:** Right. She transforms herself into this beautiful girl and because she has the voice, and this is also one of the things I wasn’t quite thrilled with — Eric sees this beautiful girl who has this voice that he remembered, but that’s not what convinces him to marry her. What convinces him is she basically puts a spell on him to marry her.

**John:** Yeah. It’s like a hat on a hat. So, is it because she has the voice and is beautiful, or is it because he’s charmed. And they sort of do both. Like you see his eyes change colors and such.

**Craig:** Right. And he talks robot language.

**John:** Robotically. Not the strongest moment here. So, I think you’ve got to pick one or pick the other.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s also, frankly, it’s a little annoying that she’s cheating, Ursula is cheating. And by cheating, you start to feel like, well, okay, I bought into all these roles. It’s not fair that you’re cheating. And our hero, or our presumable hero, still isn’t making any choices. In fact, she just sort of gets cast aside.

**John:** So, an option here, which I’m not sure is a better option, but would have been an option. If we established that there was another princess, like the girl who he’s supposed to love, he’s supposed to marry, and then Ursula went to that girl and gave her this thing, or appeared as that girl, and it’s someone who’s established in this world. And it’s like, “Oh, I thought you actually were this girl the whole time,” then that would be more reasonable. So, there’s already a rival romantic interest.

But instead it’s just like a girl who shows up from nowhere who suddenly he’s going to get married to. And the news that he’s going to get married to, it’s kind of interesting, but it’s kind of — again, points out sort of how disconnected Ariel is from her own story at this point.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Scuttle, the seagull, shows up in her bedroom one morning and says, “Great news, kid. There’s going to be a royal wedding.” And it’s like, “Oh, that’s great, that’s fantastic. He’s going to marry me.” No, no, he’s going to marry this other girl. It’s like, really? You are that disconnected from the whole story that you didn’t realize that he’d met this other girl and this other thing was going to happen? Frustrating.

**Craig:** I know. It is. And you’re just starting to feel the burden of the fact that she’s so passive here. And there’s this attempt at a wedding. The sea creatures rally together to disrupt it. She fights her way back on board. In the melee the little shell with Ariel’s voice gets knocked off of Hot Ursula’s neck, lands by Ariel’s feet.

Ariel gets her voice back. Eric runs over. “Oh my god, it was you the whole time.” They’re about to kiss and the sun goes down. And she turns back into a mermaid. Which, you know, I have to say, okay, great, because I’m sure at some point somebody said, “They kiss and she lives happily ever after.” And that would have been boring.

And then Ursula goes nuts.

**John:** Let’s talk about that, because we do split into three action threads here as we get into the royal wedding sequence, which are worth discussing. And none of them worked brilliantly, but they were definitely the right ideas.

First off, Flounder and Ariel are going to go towards the boat. So, the wedding is going to happen on this boat. And Ariel and Flounder are going to be on the boat. Well, she can’t swim, which I think is such an interesting idea. So, she’s this mermaid who can’t swim, so she’s on this barrel and Flounder has to pull her.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It doesn’t really quite work, but it’s the right idea.

Sebastian goes to tell Triton and to get Triton involved. That’s the right idea. And Scuttle goes to lead the other birds and other animals to try to disrupt the wedding, which is a good comedy idea. So, those are all the kind of general right ideas. And Scuttle is the one who actually figured out that Vanessa was in fact the sea witch and what all was happening.

Again, the fact that this minor character has such a more important role than Ariel at this point is frustrating and is an indication that something is not working quite right.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s what’s going to try to happen. Triton, this is where we get to the point of Triton makes the ultimate sacrifice. He says like, “Instead of taking my daughter’s soul you can take my soul,” which is, of course, what Ursula wants more than anything else.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So, he’s willing to take his daughter’s place in this. Ursula will get his trident and his crown. And in a surprising amount of new power becomes this giant monstrous creature who rises from the ocean.

**Craig:** Correct. She does. She rises from the ocean. She’s at first sort of just delighted that she’s back in power. But, Eric, who has decided he’s not going to let Ariel go again, so everybody’s more active than Ariel at this point, swims down and kind of jabs her in the leg.

And that makes Ursula super angry. She tries to kill him by shooting her trident and in doing so misses. I think Ariel knocks into her, she misses. And she kills Flotsam and Jetsam instead. And this gets her super angry and she turns into this big, huge, crazy octopus monster thing.

**John:** Yeah. Eric pulls the ship around and rams her with the front of the ship, the sort of mermaid front of the ship. And kills Ursula with the front of the ship. And Ursula dies.

In Ursula’s death her magic is undone. Triton returns. The poor unfortunate souls return. And order is once again restored to things. Ariel is still a mermaid until…

**Craig:** Well, wait, hold on. Let’s point out that there is an entire climax and Ariel did noting.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Nothing. She did nothing. She sat there and watched it like we did, which I have to say is the part of this that’s sort of for girls was frustrating for me. That this very promising young woman turned into sort of a helpless passerby. And, you know, I didn’t like that that much. I should point out that there’s, just aside from all this, one of the strangest moments in animation history is when Ursula is dying and gets kind of like hit by lightning, and we see her skeleton inside of her body.

And she has a fat skeleton. [laughs] It’s fascinating.

**John:** [laughs] Nothing better than a fat skeleton.

Yes, these are my concerns as well. And so this may be apocryphal, I don’t know if it’s actually true. The story is that, I mean, the ending of the movie was originally quite a bit different. And Katzenberg saw Die Hard and came back and said, “The ending must be much, much, much bigger.” And so they threw out the last reel and wrote a much bigger ending.

And I can tend to believe that in a sense of like the movie’s scale suddenly increases hugely beyond where it had been anywhere before. And it doesn’t kind of track logically how some of this all fits together. First off, like why is she so powerful?

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Why does the trident give her so much more power than Triton seems to have? Also, why did no one kill the witch before now? I mean, if she was out there and she was killable, why did no one try to kill her before now? It raised sort of strange questions for me.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And it felt out of scale. And also there’s got to be a solution in which Ariel can actually do something.

**Craig:** To me that’s the biggest one. I mean, look, you’re right. There are some logic issues there. You could sort of presuppose that because she’s a very magical person, if you combine her already powerful magic with the trident then maybe she could do all of this stuff.

She’s killed by, she creates a whirlpool and Eric rides a kind of dredged up wreck of a ship upwards through the whirlpool and then basically steers the prow into her. So, that’s a pretty big thing to kill her. But, yeah, she’s killable. But my biggest issue is just that Ariel is not doing anything.

By the way, neither is Triton. That’s the other thing. I mean, either she’s the protagonist, or Triton is the protagonist. I kind of think Triton is. Either way, one of the two of them has to do something here. Instead we have Eric doing it.

**John:** Triton at this point, he’s a soul in the garden though.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** He’s already given up. So, he’s a little worm guy.

**Craig:** He can’t do anything. She can do something.

**John:** But, by the way, who’s in our movie that’s not doing anything important. Ariel, first and foremost. Sebastian. Flounder, who’s kind of useless, but Flounder should do something. And there’s all these characters who we established could and should do something, or the sisters even had been better established.

These people should be doing something and they’re not getting a chance to do anything. And that is a frustration that comes out. And it just feels really rushed because it honestly is rushed, partly because it’s an animated movie and there’s an expectation about how long an animated movie can last.

**Craig:** Well, sure…

**John:** Kids can only go so long without having to run to the bathroom.

**Craig:** But I think that what we’re dealing with here is the climax ultimately feels a little meaningless because we’ve run out of thematic juice. When you look at the climax of Finding Nemo, Marlin sends Nemo into that big fishing net to get Dory out. And that is thematically valuable because he’s tracked his son down after all this time. He wants nothing more than to have his son back and safe. And he’s gotten him.

And he now has to let him go again on purpose, into danger on purpose. And so it’s such a pregnant act, you know; there’s so much value to that act. And the aftermath of it is so heartbreaking because we think he’s lost his son again by making that choice that he felt he finally needed to make.

Nothing like that happens here. This is really just action. It’s just sort of action and noise, because there is no thematic value to her. I mean, look, if you were to write a modern version of The Little Mermaid, I suspect it would be about a little mermaid who believes she needs to be human for some reason only to realize, no, I must be a mermaid. I want to be a mermaid. I don’t want to be a human at all.

That’s not this movie. [laughs]

**John:** I would argue that The Little Mermaid myth, that the story is really much more like the Persephone myth which is like she lives some of the time above the ground and some of the time in the underworld. And she’s meant to live in those two worlds simultaneously.

I think she should be in both places. But that’s not what we’ve got here. Instead what we end up with at the very end is Triton is like, “I was wrong.” He zaps her and gives her legs back so she can live as a human. And the last line is, “I love you, Daddy.” Oh, okay.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so the ending feels incredibly abrupt and rushed after that big production number, which is so weird because we spent such a good long time with people in the first act establishing things, to sort of race through the ending was disappointing to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, they have a wedding. It’s very fairytale. I mean, that’s what it is. But the truth is the most disappointing thing about the ending was that I found it unsatisfying that… — What I like, especially in animated movies, and this is where they went very quickly; you could see it happening in Aladdin for instance. I like when a character in the beginning of the movie says, “I want this.” And at the end of the movie they say, “I want the opposite of that.” I finally figured it out, okay.

Shrek wants his swamp and to be left alone. At the end: I don’t want my swamp; I want to risk rejection for love.

Here, in this movie, she wants to be somebody else and to be a human. And at the end of the movie she wants to be somebody else and to be a human. There’s no real change, or progression, or growth in this character. She is not one of my favorite Disney characters. And on top of that, there is a weird kind of “I’m a girl; I will literally leave my family and be physically altered so I can be with you.”

How about giving him fish body? Why doesn’t he come down here.

**John:** Yeah, that’s the obvious choice. Triton says, “I can’t make you a human.”

**Craig:** “But I can make him a fish.”

**John:** “Can you make me a merman?”

**Craig:** Right. That would be cool. By the way, that’s how Splash ended. And Splash is a much better mermaid story. So, in any case, this movie, I think, has more value in terms of what it began, both in terms of its music and the animation itself, and a lot of the choices that were made — tone and so forth — than its own movie.

I think what this movie led to, particularly with Musker and Clements, and with Ashman and Menken, I think. That’s where the value is. It’s what it started.

**John:** I think it’s also a valuable movie for talking about just hitting those bells really hard in terms of like this is a character, establishing what she wants and being very clear about what she wants. Characters identifying what their goals are in the movie. Not necessarily paying off those goals especially well, but establishing what they are. And that’s important.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A few little bits of trivia that I noticed as I was watching the movie again. First, one of the opening credits is Silver Screen Partners IV. So, Silver Screen Partners was sort of, I want to say it was a Kickstarter of the day, just to anger you. So, Silver Screen Partners is this fascinating thing where Disney raised money by essentially selling shares of the profits of their upcoming movies.

And so they would put together this big financing package and ordinary investors could invest in them. And so I think my dad actually invested in one of these at some point, like $1,000 or whatever. And in success you would get paid back from these movies doing really well.

It’s fascinating that we don’t do those now. But, it was an interesting idea at the time.

**Craig:** Yeah. My guess is we don’t do them because essentially the studios would make it such that if the movie were successful they wouldn’t give much money at all, and also they wouldn’t want to give out any money, frankly. So, they just want to keep the money and success. They would much rather just own all the success, I suppose.

But, there are also some names as you look through the credits that are family. I mean, like I mentioned, Joe Ranft, who passed away unfortunately way too young in a car accident, I believe; but he was a big guy at Pixar, so you can see him here as a story artist.

Glen Keane is sort of a Disney legend. A lot of great guys.

Interesting, also, to look at the casting of the movie. And frankly, I think, this is a trend I wish we could recapture. The movie is not cast with celebrities. It’s cast with voice actors. The woman who sings the part of Ariel is also the voice of Ariel, which I think is great. That sort of started to drift away as well. And now we’ve sort of landed here, and I think this is also an area where it wasn’t so much the early Disney movies, but I’m not sure what the first animated movie was that sort of exploded that. Maybe it was Aladdin when everybody went crazy for Robin Williams?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But now we’re in an era where you have to have famous people doing your voices, or no one is going to go to it.

**John:** Yeah. Whether they’re the right people or not.

**Craig:** Right. That’s a shame. But that’s the world.

**John:** Craig, thank you for taking about The Little Mermaid.

**Craig:** Thank you. It was a great suggestion. And, you know, it was nice to talk about a movie that isn’t perfect and isn’t sort of, you know; look, I think Raiders is a very special movie and I love it. I actually think sometimes we can learn just as much from what movies don’t do right for you and me.

On the whole, even if we’re giving The Little Mermaid a little stick here, it is a really enjoyable film to watch. It was wildly successful for excellent reason. Some brilliant people involved. So, for all of the things that maybe weren’t what we look at now and say in hindsight are correct, there was so much done that was great. And the spirit of it was so pure and nice.

So, overall, I remain a fan.

**John:** I remain a huge fan, too. Craig, thank you, and I will talk to you next week.

**Craig:** Sounds good, John. All right, bye.

**John:** Bye.

LINKS:

* Scriptnotes, Episode 73: [Raiders of the Lost Ark](http://johnaugust.com/2013/raiders-of-the-lost-ark)
* Wikipedia on [Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Mermaid) and [Disney’s 1989 version](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Mermaid_(1989_film))