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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/dashes-ellipses-and-underground-monsters).

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

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

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

Craig, I have kind of a big agenda for us today.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** I thought we might answer four questions and do three samples of the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Are you up for it?

**Craig:** I’m always up for it.

**John:** Great. Let’s get right to it. This is a question from Bianca in Ann Arbor. She writes, “I’m moving to Los Angeles in a few months and I’ve already got a final interview lined up for an assistant position at a top 4 agency. I’ve already had the first interview. I want to be a writer and I have a short film I’d like to direct. A friend of mine says I should skip the assistant job and get a steady 9 to 5 non-industry job so I can have more time and money to work on my writing and directing. I wanted your honest opinion: Am I better off pursuing an entry level industry job with long hours and low wages so I can make contacts and learn how the business works, or should I get a steady 9 to 5 job outside the industry that leaves more time for writing and directing? I’m not sure which way to go.”

**Craig:** I am. [laughs]

**John:** What’s your opinion?

**Craig:** I’m super sure which way to go. You should go work at the agency. Of course. Of course. Look, yeah, it’ll be long hours. But, did she say how old she was?

**John:** She did not. My guess is she is kind of immediately post-college.

**Craig:** Okay great. So, guess what? You’re bulletproof and immortal and you can work a lot longer hours than I can. You don’t have a family, you don’t have children. You’re going to work. Yeah, of course. But the point is by working at an agency you are going to have people to give your script to. You’re going to have access to people who represent the best writers, actors, directors in the world. You will not get any of that working at TJ Maxx. I’m sorry. I don’t understand your friend’s advice at all. It makes no sense to me.

I’m sorry you might be a little tired. Yeah, tough. That’s called breaking into the business. Your friend could not be wrongerer.

**John:** Here’s where I think the friend has the right instinct but isn’t sort of putting all the pieces together: Bianca is moving from Ann Arbor. She probably doesn’t know a lot about how the film industry works. She probably doesn’t have a lot of contacts. She would get both those things working at an agency.

She would also have a tremendous amount of stress and long hours and she probably wouldn’t get as much creative work done for the first year that she’s in Los Angeles. Maybe that’s okay, because the tradeoffs, the things she would get out of it, are pretty great.

Should she stay in a very busy industry job she despises after a year or so of experience? Maybe not. And I think there does come a point in time where if you really are going to be a writer-director, if you’re really going to be trying to do that stuff, you can’t have an agent-assistant job and still be working on being a writer-director. There could be a place in your early career where you have to sort of pull the rip cord, get a boring job, and just buckle down and write. But that’s not when you’re first moving to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Yeah. 100 percent. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. And I want to add another thing: Right now you think you want to be a writer-director. No, no, right now — I take it back. You do want to be a writer-director, but the point is you don’t really know what writing and directing professionally means exactly.

One of the interesting things that happens when people move to Los Angeles and get involved in the entertainment business is they suddenly find that there are 50 different things to do. And their skill set, their passion level, may change. What we see in front of us affects what we’re going to do.

I didn’t come out here to be a screenwriter. I just kind of found it and it was exciting. But really I came out with a very open mind. Some people do come out to be screenwriters and that’s exactly what they become. Some people want to be producers that become screenwriters. Some people want to be screenwriters that become directors.

But the point is access, friends, people that you can show your work to, people who can help you find financing — frankly, these are the things that set apart most people from the hundreds or thousands behind them who just have a script. So, I strongly urge you to take the agency job.

**John:** Yeah. Is there a chance you could become trapped in an agency job and not fulfill your dreams of writing and directing? Yes. But you would have trapped yourself. And you can’t be voluntarily trapped, so you can always leave the job if it’s not what you need it to be.

I moved out to Los Angeles to come to film school at USC. I got into a producers’ program, so I was learning sort of the nuts and bolts of the business, everything from contract negotiation to scheduling and budgeting. And development was part of it, but my whole life plan wasn’t to be a writer-director. I kind of knew I would write, but I didn’t know what it was. And that’s the place that you’re at right now. You don’t know what it is that you’re really going to end up doing. So why not go someplace where you can see as much as you possibly can, read a ton of scripts, and figure out what you want to do?

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure.

**John:** Next question. Mike writes, “I work on a TV writing staff where one of the junior writers rather brazenly bragged about writing during the WGA strike.” So, the great WGA strike of a couple of years ago. “She thought it was highly amusing that she wrote for studios at night while picketing during the day. Needless to say, no one else found this amusing. I’m very curious what you or Craig would do in the situation, which unfortunately probably happens more than anyone would like. Should I call the WGA? Should I talk to her one-on-one about how her selfish, self-centered actions affect others? Just forget she ever said it and move on?”

**Craig:** Boy. I mean, look, I have no, not one ounce of sympathy for somebody who was scabbing during the strike. I mean, if they’re a WGA member and they’re writing for signatories during a strike, I loathe them. I loathe them.

Yes, I think there is an excellent case to be made that you should pick up a phone and call the Guild and tell them what you heard. I don’t like — we all have a kind of “don’t be a tattle tale, don’t be a rat” built into us. I don’t think talking to her directly is going to do a damn thing. She’s already made herself and her position clear. I’m not sure what talking to her is going to do other than maybe she’ll think twice when the next strike rolls around?

No, I think that frankly there is a case to be made that, yeah, you pick up the phone and call the guild. I don’t like it any more than you do, but if we’re going to strike and people are going to do this, I mean, what’s the point? How do I turn around and tell somebody who’s barely hanging on, “Yeah, don’t write,” because we’re all in this together except for that person.

**John:** I think my overall concern… — I have two concerns. One is that this writer evidently did scab and write during the strike. Sort of my bigger, more immediate concern is that she’s bragging about it, and which to me sets a very dangerous culture of expectations so that, “Oh, it’s fine.” If you sort of let that go unchallenged like, “Oh, it’s fine that you did that.” If you don’t say anything, it’s sort of tacit approval. So I think having the conversation with the staff, “That’s not cool,” is make sure that everyone who has heard this conversation understands why that’s really not cool.

And then, listen, I don’t know your position on the staff, I don’t know her position on the staff. I don’t know sort of how it all works there. But I would say, “You know what, that’s not cool.” If nothing else it will probably shut her up from saying that again and again and setting this expectation that what she did was okay.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s important to make sure that she actually was scabbing. Because she’s an assistant, there’s a chance here in my mind that she actually wasn’t a Writers Guild member. If she wasn’t a Writers Guild member, she was not — I mean, she was essentially hurting the strike, but she wasn’t breaking any rules.

**John:** Well it says here, it doesn’t say that she was an assistant during that time. It says, “One of the junior writers rather brazenly…”

**Craig:** Oh, junior writer. Oh, I’m sorry. I heard wrong. Well then I’m going to presume that she was a member of the Writers Guild. So I do agree that, yes, everybody else in that room needs to know that’s not cool. Frankly, I would think about firing her for sure because that’s disgusting to me. And then on top of that I would call the Guild. I hate to say it, but yeah.

**John:** Next question from Sean. “When writing slug lines for scenes that take place in a high school, is it acceptable to write, for instance, ‘INT. HIGH SCHOOL — STAIRWAY — DAY?’ Or it preferable just to write ‘INT. HIGH SCHOOL STAIRWELL — DAY?’ The majority of the film takes place in a school, so it seemed to make sense to specify the exact area of the school in the slug line. I’m just not sure which or either is the correct approach.”

**Craig:** How would you go about that? I mean, I know what I would do.

**John:** If most of the movie is taking place at the high school, to me I would cut the “high school” out of it at a certain point.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Because it would just become an extra sort of cruft on the page. There are times where I will do the specifiers where you talk about the general location — dash — the specifying location inside that. But that’s usually if it’s going to be… — You’re always thinking about the reader. What’s going to make most sense for the reader? Is the reader going to get confused if I don’t do it this way?

**Craig:** You’re absolutely right. If most of the movie is set in this high school, or a long sequence is set in the high school moving around within different locations inside the high school, once you’ve established that you’re definitely in the high school it’s okay to just lose that part and just say INT. STAIRWAY, INT. HALLWAY, INT. PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE, INT. CLASSROOM.

The second you leave the high school when you come back you’ve got to do high school again. The whole point of the slug line stuff, at least initially, is to make sure the reader knows where the hell they are. There is no slavish need to follow some kind of orthodoxy. Eventually when the movie goes into production, if there’s any question or concern from the first AD they will come and ask you, “Is this is the high school or…?”

But, I mean, everybody should be able to get it. So, clarity should be the rule of the day.

**John:** Absolutely. So, clarity for the reader. Simplicity for the reader. Ultimately you’re trying to avoid ambiguity for production so that if it says INT. HALLWAY, “Wait, is it the hallway of the high school or is it the hallway of the house?” You have to sort that stuff out. But at this stage, generally the shorter slug line is going to be the better choice.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Next question is not really a question. It’s one of those things that it’s sort of phrased like a question, but at the end it’s just, “So what do you think?” So it’s really more of a statement.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s a little essay?

**John:** It’s a small essay with a question mark at the end.

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh, okay.

**John:** But I thought I would bring it up because it’s a guy who wrote in before and I thought it made interesting points that we can talk about. Tucker writes, “From where I sit the business looks like it’s in real trouble. The business model itself seems broken, especially on the creative side. Making big, dumb, loud movies to build international franchises is fine if people buy tickets and like the product. The problem is they don’t and they aren’t. This has been a bad year at theaters; attendance is in a major downturn.”

So I’m going to pause here for one second because I want to challenge the thesis of that second part which I think it’s reported a lot really without backup. So the idea that the business is down a lot isn’t really… — It’s harder to defend that. If you actually look at the year to date, this year versus previous years, going up through — we’re recording this on August 15th. I pulled it up on Box Office Mojo.

Year to date we’re at $7.1 billion for 2012 versus $6.8 billion in 2011. So we’re actually $300 million ahead of where we were this time last year, so you can’t say that the business is down. You can say that attendance is probably down. I don’t have it broken down by the months, but overall ticket purchases have dropped since the high in 2002, so that is true to say that it’s down. But I get frustrated by the articles that sort of preface themselves saying, “Everybody knows the movie industry is falling apart,” when in fact by the actual dollar figures it isn’t down.

So, that’s my pause.

**Craig:** I agree with your pause. I have more to say, but go ahead, keep reading.

**John:** Tucker continues, “And I feel there is a perfect storm going on. The studios need to make big bets on big franchises that makes big committees come together to manage the creative, and there are all these Hollywood pros and execs in a grip of fear from the bleeding the business is going through, and that fear makes us play either safe or stupid, so the product lacks innovation and freshness and passion. And the public notices and stays away.”

So, let’s go back to the pause.

**Craig:** Wait. Wait. Where was the question?

**John:** Oh, I had cut out the part of the question which was the, “What do you guys think?”

**Craig:** [laughs] Ah, if that was the question I would give him a… — Look, I think that he’s half right. There’s no question that the business has become obsessed with big, loud franchise event movies. They are convincing themselves that event movies are the business of movies and that that’s where all the money is going to be. Event movies lend themselves to 3D and IMAX, which allows everyone to greedily pull down higher ticket prices.

And they are doing that in part to supplant the disappearance or the continuing disappearance of the DVD market. Where he’s wrong is that people are absolutely still showing up. No question. You can’t look at The Avengers — which I think would be a prime example of what he would call big and loud, because it is big and loud, it’s an enormous, big, loud movie, although I liked it —

**John:** It’s not dumb. It’s very popcorn, but it’s not dumb.

**Craig:** It’s not dumb. I mean, look: when he says “dumb,” I don’t know what he thinks dumb is. I don’t know if he thinks dumb is anything that’s big. I don’t know what he thinks dumb is. All I can say is you can’t look at what The Avengers did and go, “Oh yeah, the movie business doesn’t work anymore and people don’t want to go see this stuff.”

They absolutely want to see it. And frankly international audiences want to see it just as much if not more so than domestic audiences. So, really part of what’s going on in Hollywood is that they’ve decided that there’s a certain kind of movie that they should make. And it’s not that the audiences are rewarding them. It’s just that the audiences are failing to punish them for it. I don’t recognize that the movie business is floundering. They still pack ’em in, all over the world.

I absolutely recognize that the movie business is under-serving a certain market. And they seem to have forgotten that you can still make a lot of money making a certain kind of movie that isn’t the big, huge, loud spectacle.

**John:** Yeah. A lot of what we talk about on the podcast comes from the perspective of screenwriters who are trying to write the movies that will three years down the road become the big movies. And as the studios have pursued these big giant tent poles, my frustration which I think you share is that a lot of times the decision is basically, “We’re going to make this movie come hell or high water. We will throw a director at it. We’ll throw an actor on it. And somehow we’ll make it happen.” And they are not actually developing movies to shoot anymore. They’re just trying to… — They’re writing a one sheet and figuring out what a trailer is and then trying to make the movies to match that.

That is absolutely true, and that’s a frustration of content creation and the process early on. But as far as what is actually hitting in theaters right now, I don’t think that’s really entirely fair to be slamming the movies that are coming out right now. Often when people talk about like, “Oh, the movie business is doomed,” they try to bring up John Carter from earlier this year. And there’s nothing at all cynical about John Carter. I saw John Carter. I mean, John Carter is a big, goofy, delightful film.

I wish it had made a lot more money, but it’s not indicative of some sort of, like, Hollywood falling apart. Yes, it was really expensive. You can talk about it being really probably too expensive. But you can’t say that it was trying to be this big, dumb movie when it was kind of a swing for the fences. And so I kind of wish we would reward the chance that it took, or acknowledge the risk that was taken on John Carter, and not be slamming it for its simplicity.

**Craig:** John Carter is the worst example for people to use. The fact is when people think about risk they are completely upside down on the reality. They think that small independent movies take on this enormous financial risk and studio films aren’t risky at all. It’s the opposite.

The little independent movies, people have to understand this: They don’t get made unless… — not unless — often unless the financiers can pre-sell that movie overseas. So if the movie is going to cost $5 million and it’s this little beautiful, not loud, not noisy, not dumb art film, they’re not making it for $5 million unless they know ahead of time, “I’ve actually already sold this movie overseas based on who’s in it, or who the director is, for $5 million.”

“When we start to make this movie, I’m even. There’s no risk there.” That’s that model. And then it really is just about, “Okay, can we make a little bit of money, or a decent amount of money, or a lot of money for the effort?” And that’s that model.

When you look at John Carter, that’s a company that decides, “We’re going to spend $300 million just on the production alone. We’re going to make a movie that is based on a book no one has read, and almost no one has heard of, Edgar Rice Burroughs. We’re going to hire a director that is brilliant but has no live action track record whatsoever. And we’re going to let him make his movie.”

I’m sorry. Yeah, it didn’t work out. Okay? They don’t always work out. But to me, John Carter is an example of studio bravery.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And so when people bring up John Carter I go, no, no, no, that’s not the problem. The problem is Battleship. That’s the problem.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I say that as somebody who is friends with a number of people who were involved. But the issue with Battleship is when you take something and you make it for too much money because you think the audience wants it, because they know the name or the word but there’s really nothing there.

I mean, look, John Carter is a novel. It was literature. I mean, I can’t say it’s great literature, but Burroughs is no slouch. Whereas Battleship was just pegs. It was pieces of plastic that were sold to us as children. And there is no narrative inherent to it. So, let’s not blame John Carter. But let’s also not engage in this pointless sort of… — I always smell resentment underneath these essays, like, “Good, the fat cats are dying. And now it will be time for the YouTubers to take over the world.”

No. Sorry. People still go to movies. I wish it were easier for $30 million comedies that are interesting to get made. I do. And it’s hard. But, you know, the same producer that made Battleship made Identity Thief. He’s a good guy. He sees that there are plays on both ends of the spectrum.

And so I would love to see Hollywood kind of be a little less pie-eyed about these big huge movies, especially when they can get you in trouble like this, you know, the World War Z movie that’s…

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** …you know, they’re going to have to do a lot of reshoots and a lot of money because they have so much into it. But, no, I don’t think we should be dancing on… — If you want to dance on the corpse of Hollywood, don’t dance with glee. Because I’ll tell you what, buddy: when this thing goes down, nothing will take its place, not like this.

**John:** I think the only time… I’m trying to think of examples of where you can really fault Hollywood cynicism. And Battleship does feel like one of those cases because Battleship was made kind of for the wrong reasons. To me they were clearly chasing Transformers. It felt like Transformers on water. And I wasn’t rooting against the movie, but I was concerned on those levels.

I see DC Comics/Warner Brothers trying to emulate the success of The Avengers and trying to put together the whole super group of their heroes, and that feels.. — I can’t help but feel that that seems a little cynical. “Well that worked for them, so we should do it with our group.”

It’s like, well, but there was something really inherently right about doing it the way Marvel did it, and it was tremendously risky and, god bless them, they took the risk and they made it. But I’m concerned that they’re going to spend $600 million, $800 million trying to assemble these heroes to make this movie that I’m not sure that we definitely need to make.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s possible. Certainly Hollywood, this is nothing new. They’ve always chased success. There’s a movie coming out about 21 year olds who have a hangover night. There is also a movie about 70 year olds who have a hangover night. [laughs] And there’s the DC one, Justice League, I think.

They have done this throughout history. A big movie comes out and then people make movies like that movie. They’ve been doing that since I got into the business. There’s no trend here. That’s standard operating procedure. Mind you, not only in this business, in every business.

Look around at smartphones and find me one that isn’t a rip-off of the iPhone. Everyone in every business does this. Absolutely normal. But, of course, it’s the people that innovate successfully and first, I guess that’s sort of inherent in the word innovate who really reap the benefits and the rewards.

And I have to say, year after year, while things get creaky and maybe things get really, really top heavy, there are always good movies that come out. There are always movies that take us by surprise and that we really like. And I just feel like if you’re going to take a look at the business, look at it objectively and leave the resentment out f it. Because I don’t hate Hollywood. I love it. I love it enough to say, “Stop doing dumb stuff like A, B, and C, and do more smart stuff like D, E, and F.”

But I do love it. I love movies and I love Hollywood.

**John:** Yeah. Schadenfreude helps nobody. And it’s sort of a cliché, but a rising tide lifts all boats. And you want the box office to be really good because then they’re going to be spending more money to make more movies. It does actually help everybody if my movies succeed.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** All right. I’m ready for our Three Page Challenges if you are ready to start?

**Craig:** Heck yeah. Gosh yes.

**John:** Let’s start with Terrance Mulloy’s one. It’s the one that starts in New York City. It doesn’t have a title.

**Craig:** You’re going to hear pages rustling around because I printed it out again, John.

**John:** You did? That’s fine. You’re allowed to print.

**Craig:** I know you hate that.

**John:** So while you’re rustling through your pages, I will give a quick summary of what Terrance’s script is about. I should say that if you are interested in reading any of these Three Page Challenges that people sent in, they are all linked to on johnaugust.com. You can go to the podcast section and read the screenplays along with us. So, we can pause here for a moment so you can do that.

**Craig:** Pausing.

**John:** Pausing. This is Terrance Mulloy’s script. And I want to thank our three people who wrote in and volunteered to have us be talking about their things on air. That was very generous of you.

So, here’s Terrance:

So we have establishing shots of New York City. We then descend through the concrete and into a subway tunnel where two MTA maintenance workers are walking and talking. They talk about chili and try to figure out where they are on this map. They get off the tracks and the train goes passed, or sort of rushes, blasts passed. And one of them sees a human shape hop down into a hole. After the train passes, they investigate, thinking it’s maybe a homeless person, but it’s not.

And one guy gets his throat ripped out as we get to the end of page three. So it’s some sort of monstrous creature is in the subway tunnel.

**Craig:** Underneath Manhattan.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** These pages were… — Nothing wrong with the way they were written. Everything seemed okay. The dialogue was sort of fine in its craft. Everything here was fine except that I’ve seen this a billion times.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s no invention here really. I mean, if you were to say to anybody, “Can you write a scene like the one you’ve seen a million times in the horror/monster movies where two guys are just innocently walking along in the darkness, doing their job, chitchatting about nothing, and then suddenly a monster kills one of them and the other one goes, ‘Oh my god!'” It would be this. It’s incredibly generic. So, I’m not sure what else to say.

You can’t ignore the 14,000 movies that have come before you. You have to really surprise us.

**John:** Yeah. I feel like with this, the conventions, it’s following the conventions so closely that I wanted to see some pushback, because by the bottom of page one I kind of knew what was going to happen. Like, if we are descended down into the subway and two people are just walking and talking and doing normal stuff, the minute I see, like, a shadowy creature move by it’s like, “Well, I know exactly what movie this is.”

And so if you’re going to give us that shadowy creature walking by, surprise us somehow. Let us know that there’s something — there’s a reason that something different is going to be happening, that you’re aware of the conventions. I mean, it doesn’t have to be Scream where it’s meta conventions, but you need to surprise us a little bit more than I felt like we were getting in these three pages.

I would say overall I was more curious about the story than I was about the writing. And sometimes you can write something that’s kind of conventional, but if it was really, really well-written that could serve you very well. Here the writing, it was only okay. It was doing what it needed to do. There were some significant typos that I wanted to point out.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We had an “it’s” and “its” problem.

**Craig:** That kills me.

**John:** Yeah. So the possessive “its” is just I-T-S. There’s no apostrophe. And it doesn’t make sense, but it’s just how English works. “Chili” has one L. And then I want to talk about these two MTA workers who throughout the three pages are MTA Worker #1 and MTA Worker #2.

**Craig:** I got so confused. I didn’t even know who was dead at one point.

**John:** Yeah. So here’s the thing: It’s fine to say MTA Worker, but if you’re going to have two of them and they’re going to be talking for more than two lines, just give them actual names. I think they should probably have last names, so one is Ramirez and one is Jones. It doesn’t kind of really matter. You don’t have to get into great detail and you don’t have to write up whole backstories on them. But just so we can keep them straight, because there’s a lot of times in the scene description where like, “MTA Worker #1 stops to survey through his surroundings.” But it’s like, “Wait, which one is that? Is it the guy who said this, the guy who said that?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Give us some actual names so that we can focus on that a little bit more.

**Craig:** Yeah. You get trapped in the garden of “he”s and “she”s where you’re not sure to whom the pronoun is referring. And also, I’ve got to tell you: if you write the script well enough and somebody wants to make this, sooner or later some casting lady is going to be calling going, “Um, MTA Worker #1, white, back, tall, short?”

**John:** That’s where Ramirez saves your ass. It’s like, boom, helps you figure it out.

**Craig:** Yeah. Give us something. I mean, but in general I can’t… — You’re right, if for instance, there are ways where you can sort of say, “You know what? The pot of this movie is going to be incredibly generic. What’s going to be interesting is the speech of the people in it. I’m going to go Tarantino on this,” if you want. And sometimes that works. But this sort of had generic… — It just felt like kind of one of those movies, you’re flipping around late at night, and then suddenly there’s this sort of generic never-was-released monster movie starring somebody that might have been on TV once. There’s nothing to it to make me go, “Ah, cool.”

**John:** Yeah. Syfy Channel does originals of those now.

**Craig:** Yeah, even the monster. I’m like, “Okay, so it’s a pale Gollumy dude. It’s C.H.U.D.” You know what I mean?

**John:** I’m actually fine with it if it’s unapologetically that. But maybe it needs to acknowledge what it is a little. I don’t know, it felt like it wasn’t quite acknowledging what it was yet. Granted, it was only three pages so maybe there was a remarkable twist on page 6 that we see that actually there is a bigger thing happening. But I don’t necessarily have faith…

**Craig:** Yeah. There wasn’t even a sense of campiness to it, like, “Okay, that’s where the fun is going to come in. This thing is going to be just over the top and sicko,” or something. It just felt very down the middle.

**John:** So, there was a question that came in this week and I thought I would not actually raise the question because we could talk about it here just on these pages, which is the difference between ellipses and double dashes, because this is a script that uses a lot of ellipses. And so it uses them — it never really ends sentences. There’s just a lot of “…” and “…” and it’s a style. You see a lot of screenwriters that use it, and it’s absolutely fine.

It’s not a style I particularly care for, but it’s certainly a style. So, if you’re trailing off the end of a sentence that’s leading into a line of dialogue, often you’ll see, often I will use “…” so it sort of flows into the next line of dialogue. So this is going from scene description into dialogue. Dashes also work. The Wibberleys are big dash uses. And so there’s a script that they worked on, that I worked on, that they worked on, and every time it went back and forth one of the first things we would ever do is change all their dashes to ellipses, and all the ellipses to dashes.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Either one is fine. If you pick a style and you like it, that’s great. This guy is using “…” and it’s not a way I would do it, but it reads fine.

**Craig:** I didn’t mind it. I always say about these things: if the three pages had been really interesting and gripping, I wouldn’t have cared less. I will say that I tend to use “…” the way you do, to trail off things and then to break up things inside a paragraph if I’m sort of reporting. “He turns. Oh my god, a shot — ” Then I’ll do “–” because the “…”s somehow get a little…they look a little cluttery on the page. It makes my eyes hurt a little bit.

But it’s not really… — If somebody is writing a great script and they want to “…” the hell out of it, have fun.

**John:** Yeah. Either one is okay with us.

I’m trying to think of other last notes on this. The first bit of dialogue in a script is really crucial because that gives us a sense of the tone and sort of what kind of movie this is. Right now they’re having a discussion on chili con carne with garlic, and it just wasn’t great. And there’s probably a great version of this kind of conversation. Basically, if we’re laughing because what they’re saying is so funny then the horror stuff is great. But if it’s just so two people talking, it’s not going to really work for us.

**Craig:** Yeah. The only other suggestion I would make, just something to think about: I read once that Spielberg likes to find within the first image or the first few images something that’s thematically symbolic to the movie, to the guts of the movie.

I think the opening shot of Schindler’s List is a woman praying over a candle, and we just see the smoke kind of going up in the air and the whole thing, it’s like, “This is life, it burns and then it goes to smoke and it’s gone. It’s that fragile.” And I always thought that was a really interesting idea. And a lot of times I do try and think, “Well, what is that first thing I see?”

Now here it’s a trick, and it’s a trick we’ve seen, again, a billion times, where we do the macro to micro bit, where we fly down into Manhattan, and then we’re into people, and then we’re underground. But really all that’s done is say, “Look, there’s stuff underground Manhattan.” Yeah. We know. We know about the subway. [laughs]

So then the question is: what else could you do? I mean, is it two guys walking underneath and one of them sees like a bug and crushes it? Something where we get a sense that maybe there’s a bit of hubris that we think that we’re in charge here and actually there is this whole world underneath us that’s pissed off and ready to revolt?

Just find something that makes it visually significant. This to me was just, again, a very generic, technical trick. It was empty aesthetics.

**John:** It felt like the compulsory exercises in figure skating. It did its circle 8s, and it did a good job in circle 8s, but it wasn’t expressive in a way that could be awesome.

**Craig:** It was not a Triple Lutz.

**John:** No Triple Lutz there. There was no Lutz at all.

Next, let’s go to Trunk by Mario DiPesa. Here’s a synopsis of Trunk. So, we start at a tranquil lake and then suddenly a car plunges into it and sinks. Then we get a card that reads “Seconds Before.” We’re in a new scene. We see the car parked at the edge of a cliff. There’s a driver at the wheel. He looks at two bodies in the car. The police come up from behind, tell him to surrender. Then he drives the car off the cliff into the lake, so the thing we just saw before.

A new card that says “Minutes Earlier.” We see the car racing down a road pursued by the police. The men in the car are shooting at the cops who shoot back. And we have some dialogue among the men. And that’s the three pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. So you figure out pretty quickly that we’re doing a reverse narrative here. I presume that once we see that three scenes have now occurred moving backwards through time that we’re in Memento-ville.

And obviously that’s the first thing that people are going to read is, “Oh, okay, so we’re Memento-ing some kind of heist or criminal move that’s gone bad and we’re ending with a death and going backwards to see how it all starts.” And that’s, I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that.

**John:** I don’t know. I’m not convinced…

**Craig:** If it works, and it’s great. Memento is so good and it’s so good at that, and there’s also that great Gaspar Noé, I mean, it’s kind of a sick Gaspar Noé movie called…

**John:** Irreversible?

**Craig:** …Irreversible, I believe. So, okay, you know, the reader will have to either be into that or not into that, and there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s your deal.

I like the way that this writer wrote. I thought the description was well done, because I didn’t get bored and I didn’t get lost in it. And I thought it was a nice mix of poetic but not purple. I was infuriated on page 2 when there was a type in dialogue.

**John:** That was terrible.

**Craig:** I mean, if you’re going to do the its/it’s thing in action, or you’re going to do something in action, I get it. But in dialogue, that’s just embarrassing.

**John:** You’re talking about, “Comes out now, this is your final warning.”

**Craig:** Yeah! I mean, guys, you’re only sending us three pages. We’re not asking you to proofread with a fine tooth comb 120 pages. At least read the three pages you’re sending. It’s embarrassing to you, because we’re going to make fun of you and embarrass you. [laughs] So don’t do that.

I also thought the dialogue, I liked the dialogue in the sense that it seemed very simple and realistic to the moment of what was going on. It was certainly not over-written. I’ll take under-written any day of the week when people are driving from cops, and wounded, and bleeding, and trying to get away.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, a lot of good things here to say.

**John:** I liked it too. I don’t know that this time conceit is actually going to stay for the whole movie. I feel like this may be a setup kind of thing and once, at a certain point we may not be moving backwards in time. So I’m curious whether that’s going to happen. And my curiosity is partly what would keep me reading more of the script.

So, I liked the technique and I thought it was sort of well-handled. I felt like if the driver is going to have a name he should have it by now. So right now the driver is just called Driver. And maybe that’s fine. I think he’s probably our main character. I think we’re going to follow him through the whole movie. If that’s the case, and he’s going to have a name at any point in the movie, he should have his name by now.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Maybe it’s Drive and he doesn’t have a name. And that’s fine. Maybe it’s actually a sequel to Drive.

My theory with the typo is I’m not convinced that Mario DiPesa is a native English speaker. While it’s well-written, there are some strange choices that to me indicated that English may not be his only language. On page 2 he says, “Shifts the car’s gear.” What is it, “He shifts the car’s gear.” That isn’t sort of the way we would actually say that.

**Craig:** I guess. But then so much of this other stuff feels, I mean, I agree that that’s a little awkward, but I mean a lot of this stuff feels like, the action stuff, it’s hard to imagine this isn’t somebody that speaks English.

**John:** I think he speaks English, but something feels a little wrong. Also on page 2, “Wheels SCREECH as dust fills the air behind the car.” Fills the air behind the car? That seems like it’s coming from a different language.

**Craig:** I’ve got to tell you, [laughs] if this guy isn’t foreign he’s putting a gun in his mouth right now.

**John:** He’s just mortified right now. Maybe he’s special.

**Craig:** I don’t know. But, “The car bobs like a cork for a brief moment, then slowly sinks.” That’s very colloquial.

**John:** But, and then in the next paragraph; this is a style thing which isn’t an English speaker or not, but first page: “Water explodes like a thousand broken mirrors. The car bobs like a cork for a brief moment, then slowly sinks.” The double simile isn’t the most graceful. They have two likes back to back. That’s not ideal.

So, we’re “like a thousand broken mirrors” and “like a cork” back to back. It feels a little less graceful

**Craig:** That I agree with. That’s the sort of thing you want to kind of comb through and not do, but that’s not indicative of not speaking English. That’s just indicative of…

**John:** Well I will say that if Mario DiPesa, if you do speak English natively I apologize for implying that you didn’t, but I think you’re a much better writer in English than many people are. Anyway, so…

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s terrible.

**John:** No! I’m saying…

**Craig:** Because I really do think he is. I think he’s American and I think he’s like so a better writer than people, than you are in French.

**John:** Oh my god. He’s so much better.

**Craig:** Thanks.

**John:** I’m just wondering whether maybe he’s spoken English for ten years, and so is therefore really good, but some stuff is always going to be a little bit off. I’m looking him up right now to just see if he has an international…

**Craig:** See, the “Comes out now” thing is definitely a typo. Because the captain says, “Come out of the car with your hands on your head.” And then two lines of dialogue later, “Comes out now. This is your final warning.” It has to be a typo.

Also, because S is right near E on the keyboard.

**John:** Oh my god. So I just checked through my email and I’m completely wrong. So, Mario, I believe reading an actual email from you.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** For some reason I guessed that you are not a native speaker, but you are a native speaker.

**Craig:** Hey, Mario, listen, you don’t have to take this crap from him, okay? [laughs] I want you to do something. I want you to write in and really give him hell.

**John:** He actually wrote in about our last podcast and had, like, many paragraphs. And this does not feel at all like a person who does not speak English natively.

**Craig:** Shame. On. You.

**John:** Maybe he’s just poetic.

**Craig:** I think it was just a typo.

**John:** Well, no, “the car’s gear,” that read weird to me. Like I read that three times. Like, “Wait, that doesn’t actually make sense.”

**Craig:** It’s not good.

**John:** You don’t shift the car’s gear.

**Craig:** You’re right. That should have just been, you know, “Takes a deep breath. Puts the car in gear.” We put the car in gear. We don’t shift it into gear. But, meh.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not enough to take the guy’s citizenship away.

**John:** No, it really wasn’t.

Our last Three Page Challenge entry is by, oh, here I am going to try it: Andrew Lauwasser. Lauwasser? It’s a good name. I just don’t know how to pronounce it.

**Craig:** I would say Lau-wasser.

**John:** Lau-wasser?

**Craig:** Lau-wasser. Yeah.

**John:** Let me give you a summary here. So we meet Justin and Amy in their apartment. They’re both mid-20s. Amy tells Justin she’s breaking up with him. We cut to a new house where we meet Marshall who’s around 60, and Brooke, his wife, she’s mid-30s. She’s divorcing him. We cut back and forth between Justin and Amy and Marshall and Brooke while they have dialogue and start to break up and move stuff out.

And that’s the three pages.

**Craig:** You want to start?

**John:** I’ll go first. This felt very setup-y. And setup-y in a way that I could see some credits playing underneath this maybe? It was, you know, I’ll give it this: It gets going really quickly. You see like, okay, these are two guys who are being dumped by the women in their lives. And the script is called Wingmen. I suspect they’re going to buddy up and help each other out. See the guy in his 60s and a guy in his mid-20s and they’re going to help each other out. And so I get the conceit of the character.

The Amy character is so horrible; I want her to be eaten by sled dogs. She says just the meanest things. And not in sort of like a really funny way. I didn’t… — Weirdly I had… — This happens sometimes in movies: if you see somebody who is in a relationship with somebody who is just terrible you stop having sympathy for them at a certain point. It’s like, “Why are you with this person?” So I felt that with Amy.

**Craig:** Uh…yeah. Okay, well, and by the way, I kind of suspect that this is a father and son thing. I don’t know why.

**John:** Oh, maybe.

**Craig:** I think that’s what the payoff will be. But, look, Andrew, come here. Come here, buddy. Let’s sit down, okay, let’s have a drink. You and me.

So, you got your drink? Good. I’ve got mine, too. I have written stuff like this before. Okay? So don’t take this the wrong way. This does not mean that you stink. It just means these pages stink. Okay?

I’m glad you got these out of your system. They’re terrible, but I understand why you wrote them this way, because I’ve done it before. When I was starting out, I would do this a lot. What you’re doing is you’re supplanting clever and quippy for human. These are not human beings. They are little joke glands you’re squeezing to get out lines that you think are clever. Frankly, none of them are that clever anyway, and the worst thing about being clever is you never really get credit for it anyway.

People smile at clever things. Your job as a comedy writer is to be making them laugh. To make people laugh in a theater, it’s not easy. God knows I know it’s not easy. You’re trying to cause an involuntary physical response. It’s a tough deal, okay?

People laugh when they see human things happening. They can identify with the humanity in it. Even if it’s slapstick it is partly about connecting with the humanity of it. The issue with this stuff is none of these people are real. Nobody breaks up like this. Nobody talks like this.

Oh, ah, Marshall says — he’s the older man — “You’re leaving me?” Brooke, “I don’t like to think of it as leaving. More like escaping.” I mean, that line alone is brutal. I mean, escaping from — first of all, I’m like, “What? Was he beating her? What was going on that she needs to escape?” And it’s so cold. And by the way, that’s not the character that John is talking about, who’s even worse.

Then Marshall says, “Is there anything I should do?” Which is a weird thing to say. And he’s not upset oddly, and she says, “Ah! I almost forgot. I need you to sign the divorce papers.” How? Really? You almost forgot? And the divorce papers were shoved in your purse? And he didn’t know? And he just goes ahead and signs the? Without even reading them?

And then when he says, “How long have you been carrying these around?” “Since I started seeing Ian. Sign on the…” “I know where to sign. You’re cheating on me?” Really?

This just doesn’t feel like humans responding to human things. The Amy situation is much worse because Amy just seems sociopathic. You have to ask yourself: Why was this person with this other person in the first place? I mean, he says, “We’re going to sit here and we’re going to talk this out. You can’t just throw away nine years like that.” Nine years of what? Living with this psycho? It’s crazy.

Then let’s go back to Marshall. And listen, Andrew, I know this sucks, okay? But we have to do this because I want you to get this out of your system. Okay?

Your first scene with Marshall and Brooke. Marshall is oddly calm. “(Not upset),” in parentheses, “Is there anything I should do?” “Here. Sign the divorce papers.” “Okay. You’re cheating on me?”

Next scene. “You’re such a bitch.” What?!

Then he starts talking about her tits. And now he’s complaining about the tits and now doing a joke about gravity and Parkinson’s, like a boob joke. And now she’s doing a dick joke. None of this makes me understand a single thing about who these people are. Does this really hurt either one of them? Are they real? Is this the way people really do breakup?

No. Not even in comedies. Okay? So, I want you to say with me, Andrew, because I’m your friend. Because you’re a comedy writer and we’re all friends, okay? So say this with me: I’m going to let go of this clever stuff and I’m going to start writing people. And when I write people, unless I’m writing a spoof, and then you can be an absolute idiot, okay? It grants you full license. But if you’re writing a movie that’s a romantic comedy like this is going to be, then find the comedy in the real stuff. And you can push it a little bit, but you can’t do this.

**John:** No.

A few craft things I want to talk about along the way, as he’s rewriting this, and as people are reading along with this. I kind of liked what he said about Justin, “27 years old and lean, with a mop of curls on his head and a face that only knows puppy dog sincerity.” Sure.

But he introduces both Justin and Amy in the same very, very long sentence. That sentence is five lines long. No. Don’t do that. Shorten. Each of them, they’re main characters, they deserve their own sentence. Break that into two sentences.

Both of these introductory scenes would be so much better if we cut out the first lines of them. So if the first line of the movie were actually Amy’s, “I’m keeping the apartment, so technically you’re the one who’s leaving.” That’s a much funnier start of a scene than, “You’re leaving me?”

**Craig:** That’s a great note.

**John:** Start with the answer rather than the question. And then you can cut out Marshall’s question, too. Start with Brooke like, “I don’t like to think of it as leaving, more like escaping.” That’s a good start, a funny line of a scene. Kind of everything that follows after it has to change. But it’s not a bad way to start a scene.

**Craig:** I just want to interrupt you for a second. This is why I love what you’re saying. Because by cutting out that lead-in line, my mind will fill in that there was a reasonable, rational, human exchange that led to that line. But with the lead-in line there isn’t, because it’s not. So that’s a great, great note.

**John:** Cool.

Beyond that, my notes are your notes, but probably kinder and softer, but maybe some tough love was needed.

I get what he’s kind of going for here. I think he’s just so desperate to sort of start the comedy engine that he’s not taking the time to actually make these people real human beings. And he’s making the two women so unlikeable that we don’t know what kind of reality that we’re in.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there’s another danger here, too. I’ve read a million comedy scripts, so I’m going to tell you what happens in this one. These two guys are going to get together and they’re going to go looking for women. And they both feel beaten up by women and angry at women. And then they’re going to meet women and those women are going to change their minds. Naturally.

The problem is the script starts off extraordinarily misogynistically. [laughs] There’s nothing wrong with one mean woman. I loved, I loved Rachel Harris, right, in The Hangover. That’s her name, right? Rachel Harris, the actress?

**John:** Yeah, she’s awesome. Blonde.

**Craig:** Yeah. The blonde one. Exactly. Who’s married to Ed Helms. Are they married? No, they’re going to be married. They’re engaged to be married, I think.

**John:** Congratulations to them.

**Craig:** And she was hysterical because she was this over the top horror show, but I also understood that he was an absolute weenie. That was his character. He had no spine at all. That’s why their relationship was stable. He was the beaten wife and it was actually kind of funny. But, it came inside the context of a movie where another one of his friends is getting married to a really nice girl who’s a normal, healthy human being that isn’t mean or awful.

We are starting the movie with two mean, awful, cold women. And I’ve got to tell you, there isn’t a single woman in the audience who’s going to be interested in watching past that because, frankly, it’s insulting.

It’s also just not honest. I don’t think it’s honest. And if comedy is false it’s just not going to work.

**John:** Let’s think about those first two scenes where we’re meeting the guys, if they are going to be our protagonists for the course of the movie those scenes need to be about them. And it needs to give us a sense of what they need to accomplish over the course of the movie. So, your description about Ed Helms is apt. It’s like, you know, Rachel Harris’s character was there to let us see what was wrong with him and where he needed to grow. So, as he’s rewriting these scenes and figuring out how this movie starts, those scenes need to be about those guys and not about the relationship falling apart.

**Craig:** 100 percent. Because all I know about these guys is that they made really bad choices of women. I don’t know what’s wrong with them. They are the protagonists. It has to be about them. All the more reason, frankly, if these women are leaving that they should be right. The women should be correct to leave.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Those are our pages.

**Craig:** But Andrew. Andrew, I’m serious dude, you can do this. Everybody that writes comedies makes this mistake at some point. You made yours. You can do this; I believe in you.

**John:** Yeah. Step away from the balcony.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Terrance, Andrew, and Mario, thank you so much for writing in with your three page samples. That was very brave of you and I hope it was helpful. I hope we gave you useful things to think about with this script and with the next thing. And thank you for sharing with everybody else who’s going to read these pages and get some sense of how they might want to start telling their stories.

I think the time has come for our One Cool Things. And you have a very cool thing this week in that you’re going to play us a song.

**Craig:** I’m going to play a song. That’s right. Do you have a cool — and by the way, because we have 100,000 people listening.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve consistently crossed over our 100,000 barrier. So we have a lot of good listeners out there. And 100,000 of them, at least, which is amazing.

**Craig:** It’s awesome.

**John:** And nuts. So, you will play us out this week so there won’t be a normal song, so I guess I should do my Cool Thing now, and then we can just be done.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So my Cool Thing, I recognize that a lot of times the Cool Things are like, “buy this product,” and that’s never the intention. I don’t want to have an Amazon link for everything that we talk about. So my One Cool Thing is absolutely free, which this week is the LA Public Library, and your local public library if you don’t live in Los Angeles.

Because the thing is I sort of stopped going to the library for many years until I had a kid, and then you go to the library because it saves you from having to buy a gazillion books. And so you just take them to the library and they pick a bunch of books off the shelf, and you return them after three weeks.

What’s weird is going back to the library as a grown up and recognizing that libraries are kind of amazing. It’s sort of like Netflix, but for books. And that you don’t have to like actually purchase things, you can just borrow them, and then when you’re done with them they go away and they don’t have to live in your house anymore. Because so much of what I read now I read on the Kindle or through iBooks or whatever. And that’s great for like the modern books, or the new book that you read about online and you really want to read the book.

What’s so good about the library is it’s not just… — The books that are on the shelves aren’t necessarily books that you would ever want to buy. They’re books that you wonder why they’re on the shelf at all, and that’s kind of amazing.

So these last couple weeks at the LA Public Library, I found The Anarchist Cookbook, which I can’t believe is actually…to me it always felt like the Necronomicon, like — one of those things that’s rumored but doesn’t actually exist.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But The Anarchist Cookbook, which was this sort of famous book of the late ’60s, which told you how to build bombs and stab police officers, is actually on the shelf there, which I thought was kind of amazing.

This last week I discovered that our local library actually has big books of sheet music. So there are piano songs I want to learn — they’re right there. So I would say go visit your local public library. It’s not just for homeless people who want to get out of the rain. It’s a useful resource that’s out there. And just take advantage of it. Go in there and wander.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Some of my favorite childhood memories are going with my dad to the New Dorp Library in Staten Island. New Dorp. [laughs] It’s one of the great names. New York was sort of founded and settled by the Dutch, so there are a lot of strange Dutch names. And the New Dorp Public Library was this wonderful old east coast institutional building. It was the kind that had the fallout shelter signs, you know. It was very midcentury-ish.

And I loved it. I loved going. And I would just go and just look through the stacks until I found a book that interested me. And I would always walk away with three, or four, or five of them because I loved reading. And I take my kids to the La Cañada Public Library, and it’s a great thing.

And for those of you who do live in Los Angeles, if you haven’t been to the big downtown library, just go and walk around to marvel at it. It’s gorgeous. It’s just a beautiful building. Absolutely beautiful. Even if you’re not there for a book, you just want to walk around. It’s spectacular.

**John:** Growing up, one of my favorite libraries in Boulder was this little small library they built into the Meadows Shopping Center. And it seemed so weird to stick a library in a shopping center, but it was actually kind of genius because it was around places where people already were. And so people could just, like, drop into the library. And it was close to the grocery store. I liked that it sort of took away the fanciness of like it’s its own building and has this great thing. Like, no, it’s part of the mall and you can go in there and get the books you want to get.

And libraries in all forms are great. And I think I had sort of forgotten about them until I had a kid and ended up going to the library more. They’re cool.

**Craig:** Yeah. Fantastic.

**John:** And also I should say: we’ve been trying to get rid of a lot of books. We’re sort of doing a house purge. And I have this sort of rule that if it’s a book that I haven’t touched in five years, I don’t think I’ll touch in the next five years, it’s better off on somebody else’s shelf. And so the library has been taking a lot of our old books and they sell them in book sales and they make some money. So libraries are also a great way to part with the books that you believe should be on someone else’s shelf.

**Craig:** For sure.

**John:** Cool.

So, Craig, it’s come to that time. So, what setup do we need to do for your song? Tell us about this?

**Craig:** There’s no real setup. I initially tried to figure out how to run my acoustic — I have an acoustic electric, so it’s an acoustic guitar but there’s a little pickup inside. And I bought this little Behringer thing to connect in directly so I could record the guitar on one track and my voice on the other. That thing does not work at all. [laughs] Could not get it to work at all. So, I think I’m just going to play guitar and sing into one mic. So, it’s going to sound a little different because I’ve got to adjust the mic and whatever.

But the song is by John Prine and it’s called Killing the Blues. It was made slightly more popular by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

**John:** Krauss, yeah.

**Craig:** Is that right?

**John:** Yeah. Alison Krauss.

**Craig:** Yeah. Alison Kraus. And it’s short, so it won’t bore you. And there you go.

**John:** Great. Craig, thank you very much. Have a great week and we’ll let you play us out. Thanks. Bye.

**Craig:** Here we go.

[Strums and sings]

Sorry about all the bus noise. But no sirens!

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/losing-sleep-over-critic).

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

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

**John:** Craig, how is your groin?

**Craig:** [laughs] Why don’t you come over here and tell me?

**John:** Last week on the podcast you were talking about how you had started P90X and how you had pulled your groin doing that. Has it recovered?

**Craig:** Yeah. My groin completely recovered. Now I’m just super tired because I had one of those nights last night where I just couldn’t fall asleep. And, you know that terrible feeling when you know you have to wake up at say, 8, and it’s 3:30, and you’re like, oh god. And now you can’t fall asleep because you’re thinking about how you’re not going to get enough sleep. It was awful.

**John:** Yeah, so stress becomes panic becomes not being able to sleep. Yeah, it’s pretty awful. That often happens to me with travel whereas like I know that I have a meeting in the morning but I’m on a wrong time schedule anyway. And then I’m paranoid that my alarm won’t really go off because it’s my iPhone alarm and will it really ring if I have it set to vibrate? And it’s all those concerns.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, I think traveling is what… — I was in Philadelphia this weekend for a wedding. And I always think, “Oh, it will be great, I’ll just fly east for two days.” And it just messes you up. It’s amazing how thoroughly it messes you up. And I know people do it all the time. Maybe they get used to it. I certainly don’t.

**John:** I was in New York for three days this last week, and I actually should start by apologizing to listeners because we are a day or two late on the podcast because we were both traveling and it was hard to find a time for us to both record this podcast. But I was there for a couple of days and what I’ve learned to do is that the minute I feel tired I just go to bed. And like I don’t try to stay up at all because when I get to New York usually I’m taking an afternoon flight that gets me there at like 10pm. And there’s that instinct like, “Oh, I’m not really that tired, I can do a little bit more work.”

But then it becomes like 2:30 in the morning and I can’t fall asleep. And that’s a bad, dangerous thing. That starts a bad cycle.

**Craig:** Yeah, I remember my plan when I went to Thailand was…because when you get to Thailand you’re awake, but when you land, I mean, you’ve been up for hours and hours and hours. It’s time for you to go to sleep but it’s maybe 11am. So, you just say, “All right, I’m just going to stay up. I’m just going to stay up, and stay up, and stay up, and stay up.”

And I remember walking like a zombie to a Starbucks in Bangkok, getting a coffee in a desperate attempt to stay up. Sort of falling asleep as I carried the coffee to the little area where you put your sugar and stuff in, dropping the coffee all over the floor. [laughs] It was tragic.

And it almost felt like they looked at me like, “Hmm, must have just gotten off a plane, because we see white people in here dropping coffee all the time.”

**John:** Yeah. Not a big deal for them.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My worst is always flying to Europe for whatever reason. Because I’ll sleep some on the plane, and I think like, “Oh, I slept once on a plane, I’m going to be just fine.” But it gets to be about 5pm, just as it starts to get dusky there where there’s like dinner plans, like, “Oh, we’ve got to rally to get to dinner.” “All I want to do is to be in bed. I’m starting to cry because I just want to be in bed.”

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** And I’m trying to stay up.

**Craig:** You know, that happened to me. I went to Ireland and I remember we had a dinner scheduled, and I literally just got up and walked out. [laughs] Couldn’t handle it. I had to go to bed.

**John:** So this last weekend was my birthday.

**Craig:** Oh, happy birthday.

**John:** Yeah, it was nice. And I got to celebrate my birthday twice in one weekend, because I had a birthday dinner that was Friday night that went into Saturday that was quite late. And then I got to fly back and have a second birthday dinner here. But then I went to bed at about like 9. And there’s something kind of luxurious about going to bed early on your birthday. It’s what I wanted to do most.

**Craig:** Huh.

**John:** What I want to do most right now is some follow-up. So, on the last podcast we talked about the WGA Screenwriters Survey. And one of the things that came up was bake-offs, which is where you bring in a lot of writers to pitch how they would write a project for assignment. And somebody wrote in with a question, and I can’t find the actual email, so I’m going to say that it was Brian, but I’m just making up the name Brian. But his question was basically if bake-offs are the wrong way to pick a writer for an assignment, what’s the right way?

**Craig:** That’s a good question.

**John:** It’s actually a good question. And so bake-offs, there have always been bake-offs, there have always been things that are sort of like bake-off. And the very first job I got, How to Eat Fried Worms, was essentially a bake-off. They invited me and some really funny Simpsons writers to come in and talk about how they would adapt this book.

So we went through a couple rounds of meetings and ultimately I won the bake-off. We didn’t have the term bake-off then, but that’s really basically what it was. Since that time, when I go in for projects, usually fortunately I’m not in a bake-off situation. And I think the better way that you could wish this would happen is, “We have this great property. Who would be a really good writer for it? Let’s ask that really good writer if he or she has a good approach for how to do it.”

And you go to a writer and you say, “Hey, do you want to do this?” And the writer says, “Sure, I want to do this.” And you evaluate and say, “Oh, yeah, that’s the way we went to do it. This is the right writer, the right approach. We trust this person who will go and do it.”

That doesn’t often or always happen, but that’s sort of the fantasy.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a good way… — I mean, I think that for projects where the studio may not have that much money, so they aren’t necessarily going to the kind of writers, when you say, “Okay, well let’s find a really good writer that fits this project.” “Well that really good writer costs $1 million.” “We don’t have $1 million. We have $150,000.”

Well, you’re not going to go in and pitch on that. So, in those circumstances I’m okay with the notion of what happened with you on How to Eat Fried Worms. I think limiting it to a reasonable amount of writers is a good practice.

Frankly, I don’t even understand how it makes good business practice from their point of view to talk to 20 writers. It just seems exhausting. At some point how can you even tell who’s better, who’s number one as opposed to number two as opposed to number 14?

So, limit it to a reasonable amount of writers so that you don’t have 20 people out there beating their brains in to try and get this gig. Three or four, I suppose, seems like a good number. And as was the case with you, ask them how they would approach the movie. “What is their take?” as we say here in Hollywood. And that should be enough. Don’t have them write things. You know, just don’t create a lot of unused pointless labor so that you can make an over-informed decision that frankly is not very predictive of the quality of the screenplay anyway.

**John:** Yeah, you ran into that paradox of choice problem where the more people’s pitches you hear from the less likely you are to be happy with any one of them, because you’re starting to optimize and your instinct is to take the best of all those things.

You may be one of those people who loves the Cheesecake Factory menu where there’s like thousands of options, but you might actually be happier with the one or two things that are actually really, really good. So, yes, I would agree that sometimes on projects where you know you’re not going to be paying a lot of money for the script, you may be bringing in some newer writers, you may talk to two or three or four people for that.

But really you should be basing the decision on what they’ve already written, not on how fancy the pitch is going to be and how much pre-writing they’re going to do for you, because that’s not the best gauge of it. Ultimately you’re going to be trying to get a script out of this, not a good conversation with the guy who’s clever at pitching in the room.

**Craig:** Right. I think it indicates a general poverty of decision-making ability. You should be able to sort of narrow it down to three or four reasonable candidates, and then based on their discussions with you narrow it down to the person you want to write the script. I mean, having 20 people come in is… Who does that for anything else? You know?

I mean, hiring an architect or an interior decorator or, I don’t know. Who sees 20 people? It’s just crazy.

**John:** It’s crazy. And the other thing I’ll say is that if that one or two or three people that you’ve met with, you’re not happy with any of their approaches, move on. So, “Thank you very much, that’s not what we want to do,” and then you’re looking at the next person. That’s kind of okay.

It’s when you have eight people in parallel trying to pitch you this thing, that’s not good.

**Craig:** No, it’s lame.

**John:** So next we have a question from a guy named Ollie. And this is sort of more a psychological question. “I’m a 26-year-old UK screenwriter/director.” So he’s a writer/director in the UK. “I recently made a horror movie, an indie film we made for about $40,000. It ended up getting a limited theatrical release here in the UK. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. We got great reviews from genre magazines and a few genre bloggers and horror fans, but we got slaughtered in the major press. I could draw up a table with the good and bad comments from each critic and they pretty much cancel each other out. Given our success, now is the time I should be hammering out more screenplays, but when I sit down to write I find it almost impossible. I’m thinking about what The Guardian would say about this line, etc. How do you guys deal/feel with negative press over a film you’ve written? Do you pay attention to the things they say? Also, do you think it’s something I should have to worry about even going into future meetings, knowing the person may have seen some of it?”

Craig, what are your thoughts, because you’ve had movies that have not gotten good reviews?

**Craig:** Oh, I’m so happy that this guy asked this question. Well this isn’t going to endear me with many critics. I don’t care.

I do not care. I don’t write movies for critics. I write movies for audiences. My entire focus is on what the audience thinks of a film. We actually now have a somewhat objective audience-ometer in something called CinemaScore, which works like an exit poll. People leave the theater and there are people from the CinemaScore company that say, “What did you think of the movie? Give it an A+ all the way down to F.” And then they average out all the scores and they report the scores.

And I’m far more interested in that because I’m not writing movies for critics. I have a friend, Alec Berg, who we both know well, and he’s a terrific writer. He wrote on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm and a lot of movies. And he had a great point. He said, “What if your job was to be a hamburger reviewer?” So every day for dinner you had a hamburger. Every single day. At some point your ability to judge what the general hamburger eating populace wants becomes incredibly distorted.

Movies are not intended… — No one is intended to see every single movie. Reviewers see every single movie. More to the point, they see them with other reviewers which changes the entire dynamic. I don’t dispute that there is some value to reviews for certain kinds of movies, but for other kinds of movies they’re essentially pointless.

The last thing in the world you want to do as any kind of artist is write towards a critic. Write instead with your attention toward your audience. There will always be critics. They are not going away. If everybody that created things became concerned about critics, critics would have nothing to criticize because nothing would get done. They are not your friend. And, frankly, they serve an incredibly questionable purpose in the relationship between the artist and the audience. So, believe me, I understand your pain. I’ve gotten my fair share of bad reviews. I’ve gotten bad reviews that I thought I deserved. I’ve gotten bad reviews I thought I didn’t deserve.

I’ve gotten good reviews I thought I didn’t deserve. If you feel like beating yourself up with those, go ahead and have a masochistic pity party with it. But beyond that, you need to put them in the box they belong in which is not relevant to your job, and your purpose.

**John:** One thing I would stress is that really look at what the function of reviews are. And reviews in general aren’t trying to further the art of movie making. They are really about: should I see this movie that comes out on Friday? And so the reviewer’s first audience is the person who might go to see a movie.

And what the person who is looking at the review really wants to know is, “Is this going to be worth my time and dollars to go see this move?” You are not that person. You are the person who made the movie. And so it’s unlikely that you’re going to find things that are particularly helpful for you in reading those reviews.

So, I wish I could say I was the person who is strong enough to never look through the reviews when one of my movies comes out. I do look at all the reviews. And, you know, I am secretly happy when I know that a movie that I’ve worked on is going to have good reviews. But, I can’t let that sort of drive my decision-making going forward. You know, it comes back to something we talked about on an earlier podcast is you should be writing the movie that you would spend $12 to $13 to go see on opening night.

That should be your whole focus. Not about what The Guardian is going to say about your movie. It’s about what would you say if you had the chance to go see that movie opening night. Think about that movie and don’t think about The Guardian’s review of that movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, I always tell, you know, when I have friends and they’re like, “Oh my god, I read this review. I’m so depressed.” And I always say: Have you ever had that experience where you see a movie and you just love it? You go with a friend and you just love it. And you walk out of the theater and you’re like, oh my god, that was great. I mean, it moved me, it touched me, it made me laugh. Whatever it was supposed to do it did it really effectively. And your friend you were seeing it goes, “I hated it; it was stupid.” Don’t you want to punch them in the face?

Well, sometimes that person is a reviewer. And I think now more than ever the mega phone of media has been demystified and de-romanticized to the point where volume is irrelevant, and we all get that. Your friend’s opinion is shared with you and you alone. Somebody else who writes for the The Guardian shares their opinion with the world, and then amusingly, one hundred to two hundred people review the reviewer in the comments section.

And everybody is reviewing everybody because you have to stand out in the cacophony of reviewing and meta reviewing. Snark and exaggeration sort of carry the day. Reviewers I think now more than ever are trying to entertain as opposed to actually review. They tend to engage in insane hyperbole.

I remember the very first movie I wrote, it was a movie for kids. And I guess somewhere in the press materials it referred to the fact that I, and my writing partner, graduated from Princeton, which we had just I think four years before that movie came out. And one reviewer said, “The writers, Craig Mazin and Greg Erb,” and then in parenthesis, “(who attended Princeton University and apparently never got over it).”

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** I don’t even know what that means. I mean, I would understand if the movie were some sort of pompous navel-gazing thing, or snobby, and you think, “Oh, these snobby Princeton guys obviously love their Princeton lives so much.”

It was a movie about an idiot. [laughs] It was a clumsy idiot who goes into space. It was for children. It didn’t even make sense. And it was so pointless. And then when you — god, I’m really not doing myself any favors here — but when you meet a lot of these reviewers you go, “Oooh, oh, you’re just lame. [laughs] You’re just a lame person.”

I also remember I was at Comic-Con like in 2000, I guess this was before Comic-Con turned into like mega Comic-Con. It was sort of just big Comic-Con. And there was a panel and Kevin Smith was on the panel. And this guy asked a question. He announced that he was Jeffrey Wells who is an internet film critic. And Kevin Smith heard and he goes, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, you’re Jeffrey Wells? Oh, interesting. You’ve written a lot of really mean stuff about me. But now that I get an eyeful of you, it doesn’t seem that bad.” [laughs]

And the room exploded. And the truth is, that’s kind of what it comes down to. It’s like, “Oh, you’re The Guardian reviewer? Oh, I wouldn’t want to have lunch with you. You’re lame.”

So, a lot of times it’s just like we blow these things up because people write about them and they attack us and they feel entitled to attack us. And it hurts. The pain is absolutely real. But you have to be able to parse that from your approach, or you’re dead. You will not write a second movie and you will certainly not get your revenge.

**John:** So one thing I’ve been considering doing for quite a long time, but as everyone knows I have a lot of irons in the fire, so it’s probably not the best use of my time. But I’ll describe it now because maybe someone else will want to do this: I have a theory, an operating theory, that the screenwriter’s name is mentioned about five times more often in a negative review than in a positive review.

That is to say: if a review is positive the screenwriter’s name generally goes unmentioned; if the review is negative the screenwriter’s name is much more often, much more likely to be mentioned. Now that anecdotally feels true to me, but I think the only way to really know if that’s true would be to do a systematic study of reviews over the last five years and really go through and just figure out, sort of the Rotten Tomatoes, positive versus negative. Go through each and every review and figure out whether the screenwriter’s name is mentioned.

That to me feels like the perfect kind of senior thesis or master’s thesis kind of thing for a statistics major to go through and see whether there really is a pattern there or if I’m just imagining there is this pattern. My hunch is that the screenwriter’s name is almost only mentioned in negative reviews.

**Craig:** I agree with you. And, in fact, I would take it one step further. I would be interested to see, to model the question in this way: When the screenwriter’s name is mentioned, is it mentioned negatively? Because I even see in positive reviews, they will say things like, “Such and such working from a so-so script by blah blah blah manages to somehow make a great movie.” [laughs]

I just feel like we’re only cited in the context of, “ugh, screenplay.”

**John:** Yeah. And so the example that you gave is very classically what you see when the screenwriter’s name is mentioned is that if the story is not working, well, that was the screenwriter’s fault. And somehow the critic has perfect insight into what really happened behind the scenes for why it is that way.

And so if everything works well, well, the director did a great job. If everything is a disaster, well, the screenplay was terrible. And it feeds into my other frustration that we tend to vote on screenwriting awards without ever seeing the script for the screenplay which is…

**Craig:** It’s ridiculous. I think movie critics are facing kind of an end of life, frankly. In the last couple of years it seems to me that if the primary function of the film reviewer as you point out is to advise moviegoers whether or not they ought to see a film, they’ve been replaced by Twitter.

People hear from their friends. And Facebook.

**John:** And they hear in real time. I will say that the one function that critics do perform that I think is actually an important function is to champion things that might otherwise go overlooked.

**Craig:** Correct. Yes.

**John:** And so there are cases where a movie really is fantastic and if it were not for important critics jumping up and down saying, “Everyone go see this movie,” we might not see this movie and that’s a very useful function. But that’s not the majority of the work they do.

**Craig:** Yeah. And even then I have to say I feel like that is going to go away, too, for them. Because there are still so many ways that people can promote things themselves. And, frankly, people respond to their friend’s sort of voluntary passions more than they do picking up the New York Times and reading what the reviewer there has to say about a particular movie.

That eventually even that function will go away. And you can see the commoditization of reviews already occurring, the whole Rotten Tomatoes/Metacritic phenomenon has essentially removed any of the individual value of any particular filmmaker and just boil them into a melting pot of averages.

**John:** The brand name of both the publication and the reviewer used to be an important gate-keeping function. That was a way into knowledge about whether that movie was good or bad. And now through aggregation it’s become less significant. And so you don’t really — you see a Rotten Tomatoes score but you don’t really know who those people are who liked it. You don’t know… — Like the person in the paper at Wichita has as much weight in some of those scales as the New York Times.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s right. I really miss — I mean, I really miss what you and I had when we were growing up with Siskel & Ebert. Because aside from, “Well I really like that reviewer,” people will say. You like them when you agree with them, and when you disagree with them you don’t like them. That’s sort of normal. But I always liked Siskel & Ebert in the sense that they seem like movie fans as opposed to cinema fans or promoting a certain particular kind of film or being culturally snobbish.

I mean, Siskel famously thought that Saturday Night Fever was one of the greatest films ever made. And, by the way, I think he’s right. But what was so wonderful about that show was that they disagreed, passionately, sometimes violently. And that underscored, frankly, one of the important things to remember, and so I’ll say this again to the person writing in: For everyone that squats on your movie there’s somebody that believes in it and loves it.

And maybe you don’t read those, or you discount those, or they just don’t have a job at The Guardian. And maybe working at The Guardian is kind of something that’s going to skew people to like one kind of movie as opposed to another. But, don’t fall into the trap of magnifying the negativity in your mind.

**John:** I would agree.

And let me put that up here as an official offer. If you are, I would say, an undergrad statistics major but more likely a grad student who would be seriously interested in doing something like a research project about reviews, write in at ask@johnaugust.com and talk to me about what you want to do. Because it’s the kind of thing that I think really would be great data to have, because it feels anecdotally true but I don’t know if it’s actually true.

And if it is anecdotally true, sorry, if it’s actually factually true, if there’s data to back up this idea that reviewers really are only mentioning the screenwriter’s name in negative context, or predominately in negative context, that’s worth talking about.

And I think that’s the kind of thing that you could share with reviewers and maybe effect some small change.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** Cool. Last question. This is from Ryan and Jessica in Santa Monica. “Dear John and Craig: A feature film we wrote is currently in preproduction. And the producers recently attached an actress with considerable clout in the TV world. The actress is a big fan of work; that’s really exciting to us. But what’s the best way to capitalize on this fact. We were thinking about specking her show or another show on the network she’s on. Any thoughts?”

Well, first off, congratulations. I’m glad that you have a movie in preproduction. I’m glad you have an actress that you like. Do not spec her show. That’s a terrible idea. This is an actress, and I’m not…I didn’t genericize her name. They didn’t tell me who the actress is. But it’s great that she’s on a TV show. It’s great that she’s in your movie. You trying to write something for her TV show is not going to be a happy outcome.

If you want to write something else for her, that’s great. Write her another movie. But if she’s an actress on a TV show who’s doing this movie, she probably wants to do movies. And so your trying to come on board he TV show is not going to be a great outcome and it looks like you’re muscling in on stuff that she already has. It’s just not happy and good.

So, don’t do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. There’s a phrase that comes to mind: Act like you’ve been there before. You know, you’re a movie writer. You just wrote a movie. She’s in the movie. Act like you’ve been there before. You don’t want to turn around and ask her if you can clean her house or maybe get a job as entry level writers on her staff of her show. And by the way, she doesn’t make the hiring decisions at all on her TV show. I can guarantee that. The showrunner does.

And the showrunner is not going to want to get jammed with people that are beholden to one particular actor on the show. That’s a recipe for disaster. Act like you’ve been there before. You’re confident. You wrote a movie. You like writing movies. Write another movie. If you really love her, write a movie for her.

I would definitely wait and see how well she does in the film you’re talking about, because you may not like her.

**John:** You might not.

**Craig:** You may not like her performance, you know?

**John:** So the only thread of an idea that’s in this question that I would say is maybe worth pursuing: If you are interested in doing television, the fact that you wrote this movie that this TV actress is in is sort of interesting to some TV people. So, as your agents start to setup meetings with TV stuff, as you’re pitching shows people can sort of remember, “Oh, they wrote the movie that that TV actress is in. They feel like they’re TV kind of people.” That may be a little bit helpful.

And so whatever the studio is and the network that that actress has a TV show on, that could be kind of helpful and useful. But specking her specific show is not going to help you at all. If you are trying to staff on things, first off writing specs of existing shows isn’t the big way that people get staffed these days. It tends to be through originals.

So, you wrote a feature script; that’s awesome. Write an original pilot for something that feels like the kind of show you want to do and let that be your sample. But just don’t try to get her involved with this. Let her be the actress in the movie that you wrote and don’t try to make more of it than that.

**Craig:** Do you think it would be okay if they, let’s say, they wanted to sort of do television and movies. And they had an interesting idea for their own television show and they thought she was great for it. That’s fair to bring to her, right?

**John:** But she’s already on a hit TV show.

**Craig:** That’s true. She can’t be on another show.

**John:** She can’t be on another show. I mean, here’s the thing: If that show went away. I don’t know, it’s going to be so dangerous trying to talk about an actress, but let’s say it was Marcia Cross who was on Desperate Housewives. Let’s say it was her. And so after things go really well with the movie, you have a good relationship with Marcia Cross, and you want to pitch a show that she’d be perfect for, that’s maybe something to consider.

But I wouldn’t do that until you’re movie is actually happening because otherwise you’re just, you’re making things more complicate than they should be.

Marcia Cross is awesome by the way. She’s so good. I love her to death. All the way from Melrose Place.

**Craig:** Melrose Place.

**John:** Craig, I think it’s about time for us to do our One Cool Things and we’ll save bigger topics for other weeks. Does that sound good?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I should leave with one last bit of follow-up. It says, “Hello Mr. August.” Chris writes, “I just wanted to let you know, you and Mr. Mazin know, that thanks to his Cool Thing recommendation I tried and quite enjoyed PB2.”

**Craig:** Ah-ha. That’s my peanut butter powder, yes.

**John:** Yeah, the peanut butter powder. And now he’s not talking about Pottery Barn 2, an offshoot of Pottery Barn. Talking about a powderized Peanut Butter.

**Craig:** I think you’re thinking actually of CB2, Crate & Barrel.

**John:** Oh yeah. CB2. PB2. It’s crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** They’re all kind of related. They’re not quite flat-pack furniture, but sort of like it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It relates to our IKEA conversation. “For now, it’s fine.”

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s right.

**John:** Who’s first with our Cool Things?

**Craig:** You know, you know that my entire approach to this podcast is to do as little as possible, so you have to make the decision. [laughs]

**John:** I will go first.

A couple weeks ago on the podcast I talked about sort of my writing setup and that my ideal writing setup would be somehow to have a waterproof computer so I could just write in the shower. Hearing the suggestion, Nima Yousefi, who works with me and is a fan and listener to the show, who just got a little flush in his cheeks to hear his name on the podcast, for my birthday he sent me this thing called Aqua Pad. And what it is is a pad of waterproof paper with a little suction cup on it that you can stick to your wall of your shower, and a little suction cup thing to hold a pencil. And you can jot down your notes while you’re in the shower.

And it just seems like, well, that’s absurd. But literally that same day I used it because for this project I need to figure out the names for the main characters. And I was like wrestling through with like, “What’s the wife’s name? Is she a Jen? Is she a….oh, she’s a Lisa!” And I’m like in the shower as this is happening. I’m like, “Lisa!” And so I wrote the names for all the five family members on that little pad, ripped it off, and here I am.

So thank you, Nima, for the Aqua Pad. And it’s actually, I mean, here’s the thing: Fortunately I have it stuck on a wall where like a person walking into the bathroom is not going to see it, because it does look kind of crazy. But it’s actually kind of useful. And waterproof paper, for those who don’t know, is kind of an under-appreciated miracle. You see it in film production because script supervisors will often do their…they’ll make a copy of their script on waterproof paper because if they’re outside in the rain or whatever, they can take their notes on the script with that.

And it’s this weirdly plasticized paper that you can only really write on with pencil. Like, you can’t write on it with a pen because pens are water-based. But you can write on it with a pencil, and now you can write on it in the shower.

So I’ll put a link in the show notes at johnaugust.com for this Aqua Pad thing which is probably a few bucks at Amazon.

**Craig:** There’s a whole world of shower products. And I always feel like all of them are ridiculous. I remember years ago I tried getting one of those shower mirrors so you could shave in the shower.

**John:** Those are the worst. They never work.

**Craig:** And there’s shower radios. And there’s shower this, and shower that. And in the end I realized I just like going into the shower with soap.

**John:** Yeah. I like to go to the shower with soap and a song in my heart. So…

**Craig:** Yeah. My Cool Thing is an app, as they often are, but this is one that I use every single day. And this is mostly useful for those of you who live in cities, but not exclusively American cities, because I know we have a lot of international listeners. And it’s an app called Inrix. I-N-R-I-X. Do you use this, John?

**John:** I don’t. I don’t know what it is.

**Craig:** Oh, John, you’ll be downloading it later, as soon as we’re done.

**John:** It does sound like some sort of drug you take for a venereal disease.

**Craig:** It is probably somewhere a drug you take for a venereal disease. But for the iPhone, and this is not going to help you with your venereal disease, it is on the surface a very simple thing. It’s a traffic app. So it’s like a traditional traffic app: It shows you a map and it shows you where the traffic is.

And you might think, well, I already have that. It’s actually in Maps on iPhone for instance, sort of a basic thing. And it will show you red is uh-oh and yellow is sort of sluggish and green is wide open.

Here’s what’s great about Inrix: First, you can put in addresses — your home, the airport, your work, whatever. And based on current traffic information it will give you two alternate routes and it will show you the approximate time you will be arriving.

This alone is worth a lot to me, because it settles me down. So there’s… — The worst thing in the world, especially in LA, is thinking, “Okay, I’ve got two ways I could go. They both look a little dicey. I’m not sure which way is best. I’ll just pick one. Oh god, I think I picked wrong.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And I would have been there by now if I’d gone the other way. That’s all gone with Inrix. They solve it for you. Sometimes, actually, what I love about it is it will — it has no problem — you know sometimes in your car it will be like, okay, avoid highways and you can force it to avoid highways. This thing will on its own decide you should probably get off the highway here because that part is crazy, and then get back on here.

I mean, they’re great.

**John:** So it’s basically serving the function I serve in the car when Mike asks me, “Take a look at Maps and see how bad the traffic is on the 405.”

**Craig:** Yes. However, this gets to the second wonderful part. I don’t know how other apps collect their traffic data. There are traffic reporting agencies in places and they use a system of cameras and sensors and things like that.

But here’s what’s awesome about Inrix: Inrix is also…every time you’re using it, it’s measuring you. So, you’re reporting back to the server. It knows where you are, and it knows how fast you’re going. And it knows what the speed limit is there.

So, it’s actually got an incredibly good system of up-to-date stuff. They aggregate a lot of data: The traditional camera-based data and sensor-based data and weather data and construction data. But they also just see how all their users are moving. And sometimes if you get somewhere and you’re like, “Whoa, this is a little slower than it says,” you click a button and it will start tracking you and update it based on you, which is spectacular.

And I have found by and large Inrix to be far more accurate than the sort of general Google Maps traffic thing. So, between the routing, and it will also update your route as you go. If something happens it will change it. I think it’s awesome.

**John:** That’s terrific.

**Craig:** Okay, and so the only downside is to get all that super awesome functionality you have to pay like a one-time fee of like $25. But, it’s tied to your — it’s a subscription. It’s not tied to the device but to your Apple ID for mine, because I use an iPhone. So it will work from device to device.

**John:** That sounds cool.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Some of that functionality is built into iOS 6 which is supposed to come out in September, but this is something that exists now and works and sometimes that’s worth a lot — the thing that actually exists rather than promise of future things.

I know iOS 6, I don’t think I’m breaking any NDAs here, because I think they talked about this publicly, it does gather data from all iPhones to figure out real-time traffic which is good, is smart.

**Craig:** But does it do the thing where it plans routes for you and then tells you when it thinks you’ll get there?

**John:** I don’t know that it does. It does turn-by-turn navigation now finally which is good. But, that’s great. I like that it exists. I like people using data for good rather than for evil.

**Craig:** Yeah, for once.

**John:** For once. And who knows? Maybe someone will write in who has a statistics background who can use the movie review data for good rather than for evil and see whether reviewers are actually mentioning the screenwriter’s name in positive ways that I’m just missing somehow, because I’m only looking for the bad reviews.

**Craig:** It would also be interesting for this hypothetical grad student to figure out how many movie reviews mention the screenwriter at all.

**John:** Totally. I think the fantasy I would have is that a person basically going through and creating a database that tracks every review: Was the screenwriter mentioned? Was the review positive or negative? Was the mention of the screenwriter positive or negative? And does a bunch of that, and with enough data that you press a button and it spits out your result of which percentage of reviews do which things.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** I should say, and I obviously can’t talk about what specific movie it is, but one thing that people may not know about both the movie review process but also how movies are talked about and how they are covered, is press screenings actually happen sometimes significantly before a movie comes out. And one of the things that they do after they show — reviewers sometimes, but also editors of magazines and other long-lead press, lights come up and they say, “What did you think?”

And they will ask for like two to three sentences for a person, just their quick first impressions. And they’re like, oh, they’re just curious to know. But exactly what they say gets typed up in a memo that circulates between everyone at the studio. And so there’s this ongoing document that’s called the Reaction Memo.

So you always say that it was a surprise that somebody got good reviews or got bad reviews. Not it isn’t, because a lot of that stuff has been discussed for weeks and weeks ahead of time. So, studios tend to have a very good sense of what the critical reception will be for a movie long before it comes out.

**Craig:** Yes. That is correct.

**John:** Bit of trivia.

Craig, go to bed. Have a great night of sleep.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m gonna go to bed. This is going to be great. And next week, I mean, should you say?

**John:** Yeah. Next week I think Craig is going to be breaking out his guitar because our numbers have come back over the 100,000 mark and they seem to be sort of reliably there. So I feel like our Cool Thing may be a song that Craig gets to play us out with.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m going to be playing a song. It’s happening next week.

**John:** It’s gonna be great.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Craig, enjoy.

**Craig:** Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/what-script-should-you-write).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name, Craig Mazin.

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

**Craig:** I’m doing fine, John. Enjoying a nice day of not writing. It’s my favorite kind of day.

**John:** Those can be very good days. This last week my Tuesday, for whatever reason, was spectacular and I really considered maybe just calling it a week. And it’s like — I’m just not even going to try to work the rest of the week. I’m not going to try to do anything. I’ll just say that was a really good week and it was only Tuesday. Everything was coming up roses on Tuesday.

**Craig:** I’ve done it. I’ve done it. I’ve started on a Monday morning and thought, “You know what? Don’t feel it.” And that feeling stayed with me all the way through Friday. [laughs]

You know, I sometimes feel a little weird because when I do write I’m very intense and I can write a whole lot all at one time. I can kind of sprint. And then there are times where I just do nothing. And I always feel guilty because sometimes people say, “How do you do all the stuff you do? You have a podcast. And you write…and you…”

And I go, “Well yeah, that’s true. But I must tell you I actually spend enormous quantities of time doing nothing at all.” But I don’t say that because I think that would make them feel even worse. Like not only am I lapping you but I’m sleeping for most of the race.

**John:** Yeah. What was so marvelous about my Tuesday, it wasn’t really a writing Tuesday, but it was all the other parts of screenwriting, which is like the taking the meeting and the doing the stuff and making the phone calls. And so I was over at the Fox lot for some of this, and I always forget that like when you have lunch on the lot you see all the other people there.

And so like I met Seth Grahame-Smith, who weirdly we’d worked together and we talked on the phone but I’d never met him in person, so I met him. I saw my friend Josh. I saw my friend Dana who has a TV show. I got to see her wonderful offices. It was great. So, a very fun, good afternoon spent at the Fox lot.

**Craig:** You know what? I had that experience over at Warner Bros. I was over there the other day, and normally I’ll sit in the office with Todd Phillips and we’ll eat there while we’re working, but on this particular day we decided to go out and we sat on their little dining area and Chris Nolan came by. I met Chris Nolan — how cool is that?

**John:** Oooh!

**Craig:** Let’s see…Chris Nolan. Jay Roach. Baz Luhrmann came by.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, it was so much fun for me. And, you know, they all know Todd. They don’t know me. I’m just sort of sitting there. Then at the very end I’m like, “Hi, how are you?” I get so awestruck.

I was standing in front of Todd’s office and Paul Thomas Anderson came by, which was crazy. I just love meeting people like that. If I ever don’t get star struck by these people, I’m done, as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a different kind of thing. It’s like I’m not star struck in the way of like I want somebody’s autograph. But when you meet somebody in a social situation where they know the other person, it is a little bit unusual. Like Seth Rogan for the first time I met in a cafeteria situation. And it was like, “Oh, that’s Seth Rogan.” And he’s like, “Oh hey. I’m a big fan.”

I’m like, “Wow, you know who I am.” That’s incredibly exciting to me. So that is nice when it happens.

**Craig:** I never believe it when anybody says they even know who I am. I never believe it. I just don’t believe it. I don’t think it’s true. Jay Roach was like, “Oh hey.” He did that. And I’m like, “Nah, I don’t believe it; I don’t think you know who I am.”

But I guess the star struck part of it for me is when I meet people who are operating…who do the craft of filmmaking at a level that is just astounding to me. I’m particularly enamored of people who do things that I don’t even understand. I don’t understand how Paul Thomas Anderson does what he does. I don’t understand how Baz Luhrmann does what he does. I could never do it in a million years. It’s so much fun for me to watch. Chris Nolan.

So when I meet them I feel like I’m meeting wizards. It’s great. I just love it. I love it.

**John:** That’s nice.

So this week I thought we would talk about a couple of listener questions, just random stuff that came into the mailbag. And also talk about really an evergreen question that I often get after I’m on a panel for something, which is somebody comes up to me and asks, “Hey, I’m thinking about these two different things. I’m trying to decide which one to write.” And so I thought we would talk about which movie you should write.

**Craig:** Good idea.

**John:** So, for follow up, I have a couple things to go through. First off, last week was our first Three Page Challenge. And, Craig, how did you feel about the Three Page Challenge?

**Craig:** I enjoyed doing it. I felt a little guilty afterwards.

**John:** How so?

**Craig:** I don’t know. I just feel like, god, we were a little hard on the Beaver, but that’s kind of what people need, I think. So, I mean, I love the exercise. I was a little nervous that maybe I in particular was too harsh.

**John:** I can hear that. I temper that with the realization that everybody sent in those scripts anticipating criticism, so not just like a, “Hey — that was great.” It was, like, we were talking about what could make it better. And hopefully we had some suggestions for making it better. And most people who wrote in with responses, a lot of them on Twitter, and some on the actual blog post itself, seemed to dig the exercise, so I think we should do it again.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree.

**John:** Not this week, but maybe every couple weeks we’ll do a few more of those. Because it is constructive and it’s very much about the words on the page which is hard to do in a podcast otherwise.

**Craig:** I also think it’s one of the only opportunities people can have to sample what’s coming. You know, if you’re not in the business you have no idea the kind of scrutiny and criticism you’re going to be in for. I’d like to think that you and are particularly good at it as opposed to what they might get at a lower level in Hollywood where ding-a-lings are reading it and giving notes. But this is what’s coming.

So, it’s probably a good thing. And I was very pleased with the feedback. I think it was sort of unanimously positive, so that’s great.

**John:** A few things to clarify. Craig and I — actually it was Stuart who picked which of the three scripts we were going to read. So, Stuart has read everything and Stuart picked three really good ones. And so that was actually a criteria going into it. Like these were three of the best ones that came in, not necessarily the very, very best, but of the sample that we had at that time those were three of the best ones.

I did write to each of the people who wrote in, each of those three guys who submitted their scripts, to let them know that they were going to be on the podcast, so it wasn’t a shock and a surprise. And two of the people wrote back after listening to the podcast and said, “Hey, that was actually really great. And it was scary but it was good.” And they thanked us for doing it.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So good. I’m glad it was helpful for them.

So far we had 204 entries. Of those, 12% were written by women.

**Craig:** 12% were written by women?

**John:** And I don’t know quite how to process that. Is it that there are not more women writers? Is it that women don’t feel like writing into the thing?

**Craig:** No, there’s not…

**John:** I think there’s just not more women writers.

**Craig:** There’s just not more women writers. And this is, you know, I’ll go ahead and just jump on the third rail because I hate tiptoeing up to third rails; I like to hug them and let all the voltage course through my body.

You know, the Writers Guild every year does a study that tell us what we already know, which is that women are underrepresented as professional screen and television writers. Racial minorities are underrepresented. Gay people are underrepresented.

**John:** Are gay people actually underrepresented?

**Craig:** Well, nobody really knows because no one knows how many gay people there are.

**John:** Because there’s not a form to mark on the boxes.

**Craig:** Correct, that’s true. But, I’ll withdraw that. Transgendered people are underrepresented. But the argument has always been: Is this because of racism? Is it because of sexism? Is it because simply fewer of those underrepresented groups are actually going for these jobs?

The truth is, I don’t know the answer when it comes to race at all. I suspect that there’s got to be some element of racism going on. It’s just too stark. And also because I know too many black writers who tell me stories and I go, “God. Yup, that’s blatant.”

But when it comes to gender, and I’ve always said, look, women in very high positions at all these studios. There was a time when the majority of studios were being run by women, or if not run by women, women at very high levels. Women are heavily represented, I would assume equitably represented in the ranks of development executives. It seems to me that they are.

So what’s going on with screenwriters? And then we run this little…it’s not scientific, but here’s just the thing, open to anyone. And I know that we have women who listen to us and men, and only 12% of women send scripts in. — I’m sorry, 12% of scripts are sent in by women. I have to presume it’s because women just are less interested.

Am I wrong?

**John:** I don’t know that you’re wrong. And what’s interesting is I think this contest, this challenge, is really targeted at sort of new, incoming screenwriters. So this isn’t something that’s targeted towards people who may have left the industry for whatever reason. Like, is there a reason why women are coming into the industry and then leaving the industry because there aren’t opportunities there?

I would suspect most of the people who are writing into this challenge are new, young, aspiring screenwriters. And so, if there are fewer women who are new, young aspiring screenwriters that’s going to ripple up through the whole way. If there’s fewer women trying to enter the pool there’s going to be fewer women down the road.

**Craig:** No question. And, look, that’s not to say that there isn’t also sexism going on. I’m sure there is, which only makes it harder once you’re there. But, some of the numbers that you see when we say, “Why aren’t there more female screenwriters?” The kneejerk conclusion is because Hollywood is evil and hates women. And, in fact, part of the issue is women just aren’t as interested. And I don’t know why.

Are they more interested in other kinds of writing? Are they smarter because this is a really stupid thing to do?

**John:** [laughs] Because they recognize it’s a dying field that they should stay away from?

**Craig:** [laughs] Right. Exactly.

**John:** I think it’s worth studying. And I think what you’re pointing out is that we’ve always looked at the demand aspect of it as that women can’t get jobs as screenwriters, and maybe that’s true, but we should also look at is there a limitation somehow on supply of women screenwriters. And is that something that needs to be addressed as well?

**Craig:** Well, if you are one of our many female listeners, and we run this Three Page thing again, you know, come on.

**John:** And when we do this next time we’ll make sure to pick some women writers just to make sure that they are heard as well.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So after the last podcast we had a bit of bad news. Dick Zanuck died. Dick Zanuck, who is a legendary producer, who produced Jaws, Cocoon, Driving Miss Daisy. He produced Big Fish of mine and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He passed away, which was a surprise.

Dick Zanuck was 77 years old. And often when you have an older person who’s in your life, somewhere there’s like a little mental tick box on the record you keep for that person, like, “could die.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** That sounds horrible and morbid, but I think there’s a reason why it’s shocking when a…

**Craig:** It’s not horrible and morbid; it’s just so you. I just love that you have, like there’s a MySQL column. There’s a thing called “Might Die.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And it’s checked “yes” or “no.” Am I still in the “no” column though?

**John:** There’s some faculty we have in us that sort of when a person is a certain age we recognize the fact that, okay, we should be ready for the fact that this person might not be around forever. And the reason why it is so shocking and surprising when a child dies, or when a younger person dies, and it’s less surprising and shocking when an older person dies. I think that’s a natural instinct.

Zanuck was sort of a weird special case because while he was 77 years old, he was like nowhere near retirement. He was one of the most fit and active people you’re ever going to meet. And a very active producer. He produced all of Tim’s movies.

And on an earlier podcast you and I talked about the different kinds of producers and the different roles that producers play. And Dick Zanuck was a protector. He was the bodyguard. He would protect Tim Burton from the studio, or whichever director of the movie from the studio, but he’d also protect the studio. The studio felt comfortable with him because he would help protect the movie to make sure it didn’t get knocked off track. He was really good that that.

And what was so fascinating about his funeral which was yesterday — we’re recording this on Friday, the funeral was Thursday — was to hear people from all parts of his life reflect on not just what his skills as a producer but sort of his skills as a person. And it was a very Big Fishy kind of funeral in the sense that you had your laughter and your tears. And you had the recognition that this is a man who lived a very, very full life and had the love of his life and the love of his life up the very last moment of his life, Lili Zanuck.

And it, I don’t know, weirdly I hadn’t gotten emotional until I’d gotten to the funeral and suddenly I’m like, “Oh my god, I won’t stop crying.” It was the recognition that, I don’t know — I don’t ever want to die, but if I were to die that would be the way to die is to, like, you have breakfast in the morning, you have lunch with friends, you talk to your kids twice a day — he talks to his kids every day — he has everything just right, and then suddenly gone. There’s not that long dragged out thing. It was like — to go out happy and on top.

**Craig:** I want to die covered in snakes, like most people.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, Zanuck was — you don’t want to use the phrase dying breed when somebody just died, but it’s true, it’s a dying breed of producer. The people who understood how to do what he did and when you described protecting both the director from the studio, and protecting the studio from the studio, and protecting the movie from the director and the studio, that to me is what producing really is. It’s protecting. And it’s just gone. You don’t see it anymore. It’s so hard to find guys who really know how to do that, you know.

They’re out there. I have been lucky to work with a few of them recently. But so many fewer than used to be. And it’s a bummer. It’s a sad thing.

But you’re right. I mean, there is something to be said to kind of go out like that. Personally, I’m going to retire long before I die. That’s my whole thing.

**John:** No. I’m never going to retire. He was actually one of the people who I thought about when I recognized like, oh, do I want to retire at some point? I’m like, no. I’m not going to retire. I don’t want to golf. I don’t want to do that. I want to keep making new stuff. And he kept making new stuff until the very end.

One of the things I tweeted about right when I found out that he passed away, I got an email from my agent saying we’ve heard that Dick Zanuck died but it’s not confirmed yet. And so I was sort of sitting on it for 20 minutes, like do I say anything about that, do I acknowledge it? Or do I wait for some confirmation?

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh my god. You’re News Rooming.

**John:** I was totally News Rooming it.

**Craig:** You were News Rooming.

**John:** And then I was like, “Oh, but I hope it’s not Deadline Hollywood Daily that prints it first.” But then they did say it first. And so like it was confirmation so I could say what I wanted to say, but then it felt like I was responding to her post.

**Craig:** Yeah, god.

**John:** But what I needed to say, and what I appreciated so much about Zanuck was that he recognized the long game of it all. And he recognized that relationships were more important than any one movie. And so when we would have to call me with bad news, he would pick up the phone and call me with bad news. And he would call me to tell me that I was fired, or that they weren’t making a movie, or that stuff had fallen apart, and he was brilliant at being able to that and not making it feel like the world was going to end. And so many people are so afraid to share negative news, and you have to. And he was terrific at that.

So I will very much miss him. But I will also miss the qualities that I thought he brought to that part of the industry.

**Craig:** That was so beautiful that I can’t help but fondly imagine what it’s going to be like when I die and you do that first podcast after I’m gone.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. The eulogy podcast will be the new trend by that point.

**Craig:** I think actually that podcast will just be like, “Hi, this is John August. This Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. I’m John August. And, anyway, today we’re gonna go on. We have some news. There’s nothing really to follow up on.”

**John:** That was the moment of silence was when you should have spoken.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s like a weird little pause.

**John:** Let’s answer some questions, Craig.

**Craig:** Let’s do it, while I’m still alive.

**John:** Paul from Onalaska, Wisconsin — come on, Onalaska, Wisconsin? That’s a great name.

**Craig:** Onalaska.

**John:** Onalaska. “In a previous podcast you told the story about how Hayden Christensen and his brother were pitching a show to a USA studio exec. That exec turned around and developed a similar show, seemingly based on Christensen’s idea.” Emphasis on seemingly, allegedly. The court case that happened said that they did actually have to proceed and investigate further, so.

“With that in mind, what are your thoughts on pitch festivals or websites like logline.com? It seems very risky putting your ideas out there, especially at pitch festivals for aspiring screenwriters looking for a foot in the door. To me it seems like a bunch of production companies and producer wannabes are getting together to find good ideas without having to hire the creator of the ideas. Will they likely take it, put their own people on it, and develop it as their own? Is it worth it, or do we stay away from these things?”

**Craig:** And, you know, this is one thing where I think everybody involved is silly. They’re not going to steal… — Let me just say this, because I know you and I [laughs] have said this.

**John:** We’ve said it so many times. But say it again.

**Craig:** I’m gonna say it again.

**John:** Or put it on a tee-shirt.

**Craig:** Now the umbrage is coming.

No one wants to steal you idea.

This is, for our podcast, this is the “You don’t have Lupus.” It’s not Lupus, okay? Nobody wants to steal your idea people. This fantasy you have that you’ve come up with the flux capacitor and they’re going to take it from you and stick it into the DeLorean and rip you off…

**John:** Or how about the windshield wiper…

**Craig:** Is not valid. The pitch festivals — listen to me carefully — the pitch festivals are not there to steal your ideas. You know what they are there to steal? Your money. Okay? That’s what it’s about. Yes, it’s a scam and stupid — don’t do it because no movies come out of pitch festivals. The point is, they’re gathering $50 to $100 from each one of you people. That’s the thing.

Get it? It’s like Die Hard. They’re not terrorists. It’s just a bank robbery. Okay? So that’s the deal. John?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** John? I feel good. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, your instincts were right but wrong.

**Craig:** I feel really good about that.

**John:** Yeah, you got the umbrage out? You hulked out there?

**Craig:** [yarr] I feel good. I’m calm. I’m calm.

**John:** So, to summarize: pitch festivals — probably a bad idea because they’re a scam that wants to take your money, not because they want to take your idea.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. I mean, this whole concern that — first of all, I’m sure they make you sign a billion waivers anyway. Yeah, of course they’re making you sign away your rights. But they’re not there for your ideas.

I mean, if John and I ran a pitch fest, we could make a lot of money, just to listen to you, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And these things are enormous, right? Have you ever — I’ve never gone to like whatever that one is downtown.

**John:** At one point, I think in Austin, I was on a pitch panel festival thing, and I found it painful because people were trying to pitch their ideas and there was a special format they were supposed to do and it was awkward and some of the things were terrible.

So, no, but I’ve never been paid to do this. Blech. No.

**Craig:** Yeah, no. So, anyway, the point is no they’re not trying to rip you off. No, you shouldn’t be doing them anyway. No one is trying to steal your idea. They’re just trying to make money off of you. You do not have Lupus.

**John:** Question number two. Oh, I think I should respond to this one first because you’re just going to go into full umbrage mode.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** Sharice asks, “Me and a couple friends are very interested in shooting a pilot for TV show on any network about our lives and daily activities. Who should we contact? Sent from my iPad.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So, Sharice, so here is why I’m going to treat your question seriously and sort of not mock you for it, because I think it is great that you are probably a younger person who wrote in with a question and you said, like, “I want to make a TV show and I’m going to go online and figure out who makes TV shows and ask my question.” So, I don’t want to mock you for doing that, because maybe you’re like 16, and baby, that’s awesome.

So, here is what I will say about you wanting to make a TV show with your friends: I think there’s probably never been a better time for you just to make a TV show with your friends. And that’s what YouTube is for, honestly. You should be shooting whatever you want to shoot on whatever cameras you sort of feel like shooting. Write as much as you feel like writing beforehand. And just try to make it together.

Because, if you are this 16-year-old girl who has interesting friends, maybe someone will see it and want to do something more with it. So I don’t want to sort of squash your dreams of that.

Sometimes there are really talented people who get together and it’s like, “Oh, we’re just gonna shoot something,” and it becomes something useful. Like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Those guys were smart and they wrote a show, and they shot their show, and people liked it.

What I would say, and what Craig would throw a chair at you for, is the idea that, “Oh, I have an idea. And if I have an idea then someone’s going to want to pay me to write and make this show.” That’s not going to happen because you’ve not shown that you actually have the ability to write something, to do something, to make something. So, you’re going to have to do that, and there’s probably never been a better time to do that than now.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, everybody’s experience with their friends is colored by the fact that it’s their friends. It’s, you know, “you had to be there” — you ever hear of that expression?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** My guess is that your friends, like 99.9999% of everybody’s friends, are not interesting enough to anyone else to actually pay money to watch. I mean, if you go to a restaurant and people literally all stop eating and just gather around you and listen and applaud as you and your friends do your stuff, then you’re on to something. But other than that, it’s just funny to you guys, you know.

You can be inspired by it to create characters that are universal that people might relate to, but generally speaking you don’t want to start from a position of narcissism. Very, very difficult to make a show out of yourself and your buddies.

**John:** Yeah. So Go, my first produced script, is very much influenced by people I knew and grew up with. And that said, I wasn’t trying to make a movie about them. I was just taking the very, very most interesting things I could find about them and their lives, and in most cases asking permission to say like, “Can I borrow that thing where you set the hotel room on fire?” And I put those together as a package, but it wasn’t literally about them.

You may find that you actually have a life that’s interesting enough that it’s worth becoming a TV show. You might be Lena Dunham and you just wrote kind of a lame email. Who knows?

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. And even in Go you took characters that were influenced by people that you knew in real life but you put them in a situation that was very compressed and very dramatic.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You weren’t just sitting around Diner style. I mean, I think movies like Diner have ruined more people than anyone else. I mean, because they seem easy. They’re not. [laughs]. And it kind of helps to be really, really smart and really, really funny when you write them. But ultimately they’re about bigger things. You watch Diner, there’s quite a bit of drama in there as well, so, there you go.

**John:** There you go. Question three is actually related to this. “If someone writes a screenplay that includes characters taking part in illegal activity that’s a comedy, but part of the comedy is that the screenplay is based on true events and the writer is totally open about that, then when the film is released can the writer or their characters,” basically, the writer’s real friends, “get arrested for that illegal activity?”

**Craig:** Oh, wait, hold on. [laughs] First of all, no one’s getting arrested. But can you explain what this guy is talking about?

**John:** “Does the law look at films and can investigations get underway based simply on speculation? I may just a neurotic plagued to paranoia, but it’s a concern for me.”

Well, he answered his own question. You are a neurotic plagued with paranoia. Basically this guy is saying, “I want to write a script about some crazy stuff that happened. It’s kind of based on my friends,” and he’s worried that because everyone will know, or it will be promoted as like sort of based on some real stuff that happened, that the police could come after him for…

**Craig:** Hey listen, listen. Here they come. [police sirens] Here they come, buddy. They’re coming for your script. “Uh, we have a report of a possibly too-true-real-life scene in route.”

Yeah, listen: You can’t use someone’s life freely. They actually own their life. You have to get the rights to their life if you’re going to use their life. However, if you’re picking little incidents, things that would… — At the end of movies they say, “Any resemblance to persons living or dead are intentional,” I think is the language. You should ask for permission if there’s something specific. If you have a friend, however, that exhibits some behavior that you find interesting that other people also exhibit, it’s fair game.

If there’s something real specific though that you’re taking, then you should ask them and get permission. Either way, you’re not arrested; it’s not a crime. It’s a tort.

**John:** His concern isn’t for himself and being sued for having taken somebody’s life rights. His concern is that the people who he is fictionalizing in his story, that would become the basis for them getting in trouble.

So, the examples he brings up…

**Craig:** Oh, I see, like the law will say, “You wrote a character that did a crime; we’re going to come after this guy because of your script?”

**John:** Yeah, examples he has, like being of a foreign nationality and working under the table in the US. Collecting disability checks but working part-time as an independent limo driver.

**Craig:** No. No, it’s fiction. You’re creating fiction. Your script is evidence of nothing in a court of law.

**John:** I agree. So don’t be paranoid.

**Craig:** I mean, neither one of us are lawyers, so if somebody ends up in jail, whoops. But I just don’t see how a lawyer could possibly say, “Look, he wrote a script…”

The only instance where I could see that — now I understand the question, I’m so sorry — but the only way I could possibly see a screenplay being evidentiary is if, for instance, you killed Mike. And a week before you killed Mike you sent a spec out about how this guy kills his husband. And it was the same exact method, and motive, and all the rest. Then they would go, “Um, this is admissible.”

But if somebody reads a script and says, “Well this character reminds me a lot of his friend. And in the movie this character is doing something illegal.” No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Don’t worry about.

So, let’s get onto our big topic this week which is what script should you write, which is kind of an evergreen question because when I was first starting to work as a screenwriter I was writing spec scripts. And so I could write anything. I could write a comedy. I could write a drama. I could write an alien western. I could do anything I wanted to do. And that freedom was great, but it was also a little terrifying because I wasn’t sure if I was spending my time writing the right thing.

That question continues throughout your whole career, because you’re always choosing, well what is it that I’m going to spend my time working on? It gets more complicated as you become a writer for hire because there could be money involved. There could be personalities involved. There could be reasons why you want to take one project or another project, or why you don’t want to take any of the projects you’re being offered and go off and write that spec script for the thing you want to do.

So, the decision about what you’re going to spend your time doing is going to be a factor in every screenwriter’s life, at every stage of the career. So I thought we’d spend a few minutes talking about that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I see this online a lot, too, where people are juggling three or four different things. I mean, I like the notion of thinking, “Which one of these ideas would actually seem most like a movie? Would people want to see one of these?” Although I still think the primary question should be, “Which one of these do I feel the most interested in writing? Which one of these ideas inspires the most passion?” Ultimately that will lead to the better script.

And I’m confused by people that are like, “I don’t’ know. I like them both the same.” And I feel like, eh, you’re not really a writer.

**John:** So here’s some criteria that I thought of and maybe we can add to this list as we go through in that sort of decision matrix of how to figure out which of these projects you want to write.

First off, people always say “write what you know,” which I think is terrible advice.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** From people who don’t know anything.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** To me, the criteria should be write the movie you wish you could see. And by wish you could see, I’m literally talking like write the movie you would pay money to see opening weekend. Don’t waste your time writing a movie that you’re like, “Oh, I’d catch it on cable.” Why are you writing that movie?

If it’s not a movie that you were dying to see you shouldn’t be spending your time writing the movie.

**Craig:** Right. That’s good advice.

**John:** If you’re writing something because you think it will sell, it’s probably the wrong movie to write. And that is just personal experience. The movie that I wrote, I was like, “Oh, I’m going to do this because I think I can totally sell it and I see other movies that are like it that are selling, and I read on Deadline Hollywood that this thing sold.” Don’t. Because it’s unlikely that it’s going to be the movie you really want to make. You’re going to be thinking about the dollar signs every time you sit down at the computer. And trends change. And so by the time you finish that script six months from now, that may not be the kind of movie that’s big or selling right now.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, the process of writing a movie, selling it, getting it into production, having it made, edited, released, marketed, that entire process after you type The End is a very cynical process. It cynicizes everything — that’s not a verb but I’m going to make it up. So if you start that cynical it’s just going to get even worse. Start pure. Let everybody else smear mud all over it because they will.

**John:** Yeah. Another question from me. If you think there’s any chance at all you might be a director or that you might want to direct a movie, or might want to direct the movie that you’re writing, write the smaller thing that you could actually direct yourself. Write the one that was in your wheel house and range ability to direct.

So, if you’re thinking about writing a giant Fast-and-the-Furious-but-with-robots movie, or Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and you want to direct, probably Sex, Lies, and Videotape would be your way to go — you know, characters in a contained setting.

I say this just because while there are rare exceptions, there’s the Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, where some guy just writes a script and somehow makes it, most cases you’re going to need to write something that’s actually of a scale that you could do it yourself if it’s really going to be your first movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. And in that case I think production experience helps, if you’ve actually spent time on movie sets you can see the dramatic difference between a day of shooting where two people are talking over a table, and a day of shooting where there is a car chase. The amount of screen minutes you can generate in a day is dramatically different. And so if, you know, “What I’d like to do is make a little movie and I have $100,000 cobbled together from various sources to spend,” write with that budget in mind. No question.

**John:** Yeah. Or do Buried. Buried was very much written as a script that the writer could direct. The writer ended up letting another director do it, but it’s a guy in a coffin. I mean, it’s obviously a huge challenge to write that movie, but it’s a very specific — it’s a script that was written to be shot, and there’s a lot to be said for that, if that’s your goal. If your goal is to direct. Or, I think in his case, he was actually an actor as well, so like in his head he might have been acting in that movie. That’s smart.

**Craig:** I have another one to add on. I don’t know if it’s on your list, but the sort of the better version of “write what you know” is “write what you’re supposed to write.” I know the kinds of movies I’m supposed to write, and I write those. And that’s not — it’s not narrow. There’s actually a pretty decent range of kinds of comedies I can do. Like for instance, Identity Theft is, I think, the closest to the sort of movie I ought to be writing more of, and I’d like to be writing more of, but I can also do this kind or that kind. But what I don’t do is I don’t write horror movies. And I don’t write romantic comedies because I don’t understand them.

There was a romantic comedy that very good directors were talking to me about, and it was a really good idea, and they had really good casting ideas, and we had lots of interesting conversations. But in the end I realized I’m actually not capable of writing a romantic comedy. It’s not what I ought to be writing. I don’t have that gear.

You have to accept the kind of writer you are. Forget writing fancier or writing less fancy, just write what you ought to be writing.

**John:** My agent has a list beside his phone, or he did at some point earlier on in my career, of like “These are the genres that John just won’t write.” And because these things would keep coming up and it’s like, no, because that’s not my kind of movie.

And so, prison movies. I like prison movies but I’m just not going to write a prison movie. That’s just not my thing. Futuristic prison movies, which is like a subcategory that was really big for a while, and so I had to keep passing on futuristic prison movies. Jewel heist movies. I don’t care. I don’t like them. I don’t like caper movies. That’s not my thing at all. And kind of war movies. There’s people who are great at writing movies, and so you should go to one of the war movie people to write the war movies because I’m just never going to be that guy.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you can try if you want. it will just come out dead. It’s just not a good idea.

**John:** So write something that intrigues you. And so often I will pick something that is like I’m a little bit nervous about writing it because it’s not exactly what I’m sort of known for, and I think I have a wider range of genres than many other screenwriters do, and so sometimes I’ll pick something that I’m a little bit scared of, but I’m not going to pick something that’s just completely out of left field.

And it’s not for fear of being pigeon-holed. It’s for fear of like I’m not going to care about that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you want to be… — Look, the nice thing is you want to be able to have some sort of… You want to be in touch with your own voice so you know if you are straying a little bit outside of your wheel house that you’re still bringing your voice to whatever it is.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If you can’t — I can’t bring my voice. I mean, I suppose I could. Well, I think about for instance horror movies. You know, I could take a stab at one of those, but I’d rather watch Kevin Williamson do it. He’s better at being funny horror writer than I ever could be, so what’s the point? Just let him do it. He’s really good at it.

**John:** Yeah. And potentially a controversial note, but I think one you might agree with. All things being equal, write a comedy. So, if you’re choosing between the drama and the comedy, and all the other criteria has sort of balanced themselves out, if you’re a funny person write the comedy.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Because you will get more enjoyment out of writing the comedy. They’re generally more fun to write. They’re generally more fun to read. It’s easier to keep the ball up in the air in a comedy than it is in a drama. And there’s a lot to kind of be said for that.

This thing I just, a friend of mine just read this last week, which is one of the first originals I’ve written in quite a long time, it’s a comedy. And he said, and he didn’t mean to say it in a bad way, he’s like, “Oh, I didn’t realize you were funny.” And I was like, “Oh, well, thanks.” But I’m not sort of known for doing comedies recently. And so it was new for him to see me writing a comedy and it made him want to write comedy more because I said, like, yeah, you know, it’s actually kind of great. And it’s like stuff is easier. It’s…

**Craig:** If you’re funny.

**John:** If you’re funny. And that’s the thing. And you may not be funny. And, you know, maybe you won’t know until you write something, until you write the first 30 pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, if you’re not funny it’s harder. You know, David Zucker has a great saying. “Kids, don’t try this at home.” Comedy looks easier from the outside, and in some ways there are a lot of things that work in your favor as a writer, but it’s very specialized and either you’re going to be able to do it or you’re not going to be able to do it. Your premise is well-put. All things being equal, yeah, of course.

Writing comedy in Hollywood is a little bit like being a left-handed pitcher in the major leagues. There’s fewer of you. And you’re needed more. So it’s a great thing to be. if you’re a left-handed pitcher nobody tries to make you a right-handed pitcher. Ever. It’s just a good skill. It’s a rare skill in Hollywood. So, yeah, jeez, all things being equal, if you love writing comedy and you’re good at it, absolutely.

**John:** And let’s see if we have more bullet points to add as we try to wrap these up. And the reason why this topic is on here at all is I was speaking at the Writers Guild a couple weeks ago and these two guys came up. They were writing partners. And they said — I think they may have been brothers even — “We’re considering these two things.” So I had them describe like the one sentence version of what the two projects were. And I said, “You need to write that one.”

And I could do it because I could tell there’s one they actually cared about and there’s one they were just going to write because they thought it could sell. And if you’re writing something just because you think it can sell it’s not going to be the interesting one.

And here’s the other thing: Just because you’re picking this one to write, that doesn’t mean you never get to write the other one. Write the one that is sort of most appealing to you to write, get it done, and then quickly write the next one.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, the summary would be: Write the movie you wish you could see. And write the movie you would actually pay money, your own dollars to see in the movie theater on Friday. So, if you can’t say that you’d really see that movie, you’re probably writing the wrong movie. It’s probably not the movie for you to be writing.

And I think that’s a good criteria because if the movie you desperately want to see is the four-hour version of Pride and Prejudice done with puppets, then that’s the movie you should probably write because it’s going to be different than every other movie that’s out there right now. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy to make, but I can respect the person who writes that movie because they really want to see that movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Write comedy if you’re funny. And write small if it’s something you want to direct yourself. Don’t write super small if it’s something you want someone else to direct.

**Craig:** I agree with all of that.

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

**Craig:** I have a Relatively Cool Thing.

**John:** Uh-oh.

**Craig:** I say “relatively cool” because in fact it’s not cool. But it’s cooler than the alternative. I was sort of hesitating to even talk about it, but I think it’s probably a good thing to talk about.

So, I am a cigar smoker. I love cigars.

**John:** Oh no.

**Craig:** No, oh yes.

**John:** Craig, I want you to be alive for the podcast in 57 years.

**Craig:** I know. Now here’s the thing: Cigars…

**John:** Oh, they’re healthy.

**Craig:** They’re not healthy. [laughs] But on the other hand, as far as I can tell from the various research, if you smoke a cigar without inhaling any of the smoke, which is the way I smoke, and most cigar smokers do, the incidence of cancer and so forth is actually fairly low. It’s pretty close to the baseline. But that said, not a great idea anyway. There’s still carcinogens in the smoke and there’s a slightly elevated risk for lip, tongue, and so-forth cancer.

Again, if you don’t inhale at all. If you inhale even a little bit you’re in big trouble. But, given that, I wanted to sort of wean myself off. But the truth is I love nicotine. Nicotine does wonderful things to my brain. I smoked cigarettes for seven years, many years ago. I quit the week before I got married actually because I thought, can’t do that to my wife, you know. And so I haven’t smoked a cigarette in over 15 years. But what do you do if you like nicotine, which is a spectacular drug — it’s sort of like caffeine but much, much better.

What do you do? So, here’s my sort of Cool Thing for the week to help wean myself off cigars and reduce the number down to maybe one a week. They now have electronic cigarettes. Have you seen these, John?

**John:** I’ve heard of them. I’ve never seen them so I want a full description.

**Craig:** It’s actually a pretty amazing invention. And I’m talking about it mostly because I know there are people out there that smoke regular cigarettes and I want them to stop because that in fact is absolutely 100% for sure super duper bad, as we all know.

So, the idea of the electronic cigarette is: what if we could make a device that would allow you to inhale vapor that had nicotine in it and then just a bunch of inert stuff that doesn’t do anything? And typically the stuff is propylene glycol which is the inert substance that they use in fog machines or in asthma inhalers. Or, vegetable glycerin which is, again, just an inert substance. It does nothing to you.

So, we create this little device. And the only chemical that’s in it is just nicotine, which in and of itself is not carcinogenic at all. So the way it works is there is a battery and there are two kinds of batteries that they use. One is manual and one is automatic — the automatic one is the one that is sort of amazing to me. There’s a little membrane inside of it, and as you inhale the membrane moves forward and closes a circuit that then sends electricity into the next part of this thing which is what they call a cartomizer which…is bowdlerization the word when you combine words together to make a word?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a bowdlerization of cartridge and atomizer. And all that really is is a cylinder, and inside the cylinder is cotton wadding of some kind, some fibrous wadding, and a wire. So, the battery, so you inhale, the membrane in the battery closes circuit. Electricity goes through the battery, hits the atomizer wire. Wire heats up, heats up the liquid that’s soaked up in the cotton wadding. That essentially vaporizes. You inhale the vapor. You breathe it out. It’s water vapor when you breathe it out.

**John:** So there’s no second-hand smoke?

**Craig:** No second-hand smoke. No smell. No odor. No ash. And also none of the carcinogenic byproducts of combustion, and there’s a whole big bunch of them, because as it turns out the things that kill you in tobacco are not nicotine at all.

**John:** Yeah. The tars, the resins, and everything else.

**Craig:** All of that stuff. Exactly. So then the question is: what about nicotine in and of itself? Is that bad for you? And you know, it’s kind of interesting. Some people sort of say, well, it’s a little bit bad for you the way caffeine is a little bit bad for you. And some people say, in moderation, frankly no, it’s not that bad for you. So certainly if you smoke cigarettes there’s no question that you should stop and smoke one of these things instead. No question.

**John:** Thank you for your description of the actual cigarette, because I didn’t understand how they actually worked. So, do you throw away that thing when you’re done with it?

**Craig:** Well, there’s a couple different kinds. The kind that you might see, gas stations are starting to sell these things now, these sort of disposable ones, and yes, you would throw one of those away.

For people that do this regularly you would actually buy some batteries and some cartridges that you could refill on your own.

**John:** I was thinking about throwing away the battery, it feels horrible. So that’s not a great thing for the world.

**Craig:** True. You don’t want to just chuck batteries. The batteries that you can buy for these things are rechargeable batteries, and you can use them over, and over, and over, and over, and the cartridges. And then you can even buy, there’s like a whole cottage industry — it’s one of the dumbest words I’ve ever heard: vaping. So that’s what they call it, vaping, instead of smoking, which is really annoying.

But, regardless, there’s a whole cottage industry of people that make what they call E-Juice or Electronic Cigarette Juice which comes in various flavors, some of which are to mimic tobacco flavors. Some of which are kooky flavors like chocolate, and cherry, and all this nonsense, which I don’t go near.

But, it’s so much better for you than smoking a real cigarette and I think it’s better for you than smoking a cigar. And, also, you can do it indoors because there’s no smell. You can smoke it anywhere.

**John:** Yeah. I grew up in a smoking household. And so smoking has appalled me my entire life. So, this does sound vastly better. What I wonder, and you know, there’s obviously the possibility that it becomes a gateway to like somebody trying this and then going to real cigarettes. I also wonder if there’s a happy gateway where like someone who smokes goes to this and says, “This just feels really stupid and plasticy now. I’m just going to stop doing it all together,” which could also be great.

**Craig:** That would be great. And they do have various levels of nicotine. I mean, I only use the kind that is the literally the lowest possible amount of nicotine. And there are some indications that very little bit of nicotine actually even makes it into your bloodstream by the time you heat the wire up and do all this stuff. But it is, to me, it should be viewed as a way to get yourself off of this other stuff. Because the truth is we can say to people quit smoking or smoke less, and they don’t. This is sort of like the smoking equivalent of a needle exchange.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. A reasonable solution to a problem that is going to be there whether you like it or not.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. I mean, we can say that people with free needles are going to go heroin crazy, but the truth is, no, they’re already kind of crazy with the heroin so you might as well keep them from getting AIDS. I mean, bottom line.

So I think that this thing is actually a spectacular invention and I urge anybody that is struggling with cigarettes to give it a shot. The version I use, a very popular one, it’s the Joyetech 510. The 510 model.

**John:** When Apple comes out with theirs it will be so much better than all the other ones.

**Craig:** Oh my god, it will be the best. It will be the best. But until that time I use the 510 with a Boge cartomizer. And I use E-Juice from Johnson. So there you go.

**John:** Good. My One Cool Thing is similar in a way in that it’s nothing I can actually fully recommend to people to use, but maybe to borrow a friend’s to see sort of what it’s like because it’s an intriguing vision of the future.

I bought one of the Nexus 7s, which is the little small Android-powered tablets that Google sells directly from their website. And I bought it because I really wanted to see what that form factor was like, because it’s a 7-inch which is sort of in-between what an iPhone size is and what a full iPad size is. And I wanted to see what that was like. I wanted to see what the most up-to-date version of Android was like, and what it felt like on the tablets. And consistent with a lot of the reviews — I didn’t read the reviews ahead of time, but now that I’ve gone back and read the reviews, I think a lot of them are largely right, is that it’s a pretty good little tablet.

And for $200 there’s actually a very valid case to be made for buying this if you can’t buy an iPad. Like if you were a kid who was using his own money to buy something, and you have $200 and you want a tablet, you can get this tablet and it would actually be pretty good.

I’m not in love with the Android of it all. And there’s stuff that gets to be very frustratingly… — I try to differentiate between stuff that’s just different from how I’m used to it on Apple stuff and stuff that it’s just like, well, that didn’t seem like a very smart decision.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And there’s some things which are interface stuff which is just really kind of random. You can’t figure out where you are at in the applications. But the size of it is actually kind of appealing. And for an e-reader, for a book, it’s actually really good. It’s a nice size. I find the iPad is really heavy to read a book on.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** This is a much more reasonable size. So, it was interesting. Part of the reason why I bought it is I wanted to see whether we should be converting some of our apps that are on iOS over to Android and whether this is going to become a really viable tablet. I don’t feel the pressing need to be working on a Reader app, a Screenplay Reader app for this now, quite yet, because it doesn’t feel…

**Craig:** What is the app store situation for that? Because I don’t have any Android stuff. Is the app store full?

**John:** The Android app store is — here’s a difference, is that on Android platforms you can install things from multiple places, and so you’re not locked to just the one official app store. There’s Google Play which is the main app store. And installing the apps from there or from Amazon’s app stores are the most places you’d find them.

For developers, it becomes much more complicated because with an iPhone or an iPad there’s only very few number of devices you have to be able to build for. With Android you really have no idea what screen size you’re going to end up on. You have to make so many more allowances for what the actual hardware is, then it becomes much more problematic. And because of that, sometimes the apps aren’t as sort of fit and finished as they are in the iOS thing. But there are official places where you can buy apps and people could theoretically — some developers make money selling apps there.

**Craig:** It used to be when we were young, if you recall, John, that the knock on Apple was that they were restricted by the fact that they controlled the software and hardware together at the same time. And it seems — and they were restricted in part because the PC clone industry was able to essentially outsource a billion little pieces form a billion different people and reduce the price on these things. And Microsoft was sort of the king in terms of the software.

But now you can see how controlling that pipeline completely from soup to nuts has given Apple a tremendous advantage.

**John:** Yes. If you read the articles on how Apple sort of buys the future, because in success they have so much money that they are able to go to factories and say, “Hey, you are working on this new display technology. We will give you $200 billion to build a new factory, but we’re going to ask for the first 18 months of your output. We get to buy all of it.” And that’s how they sort of get the new technology before anyone else can because they have enough money and leverage to be able to do that.

So, controlling that whole thing has been amazing for them.

**Craig:** Yeah. The guy that run that is now running the whole company. Obviously they take supply chain extremely seriously. They’re clearly the best at it. No one comes close.

**John:** So, my bottom line on the Nexus 7, because also my mother-in-law has the Kindle Fire, so I’ve also been able to try that. It’s a much better device than the Kindle Fire for just using, like maps on this thing is terrific. And a couple years ago on the maps application on this all by itself would have been worth the price of admission.

The Kindle Fire has a better catalog just because Amazon has so many more movies, and shows, and books you can get on it. The Google Play thing is okay. But you also have the Amazon Kindle store is an app just on the Nexus 7 and it’s really good.

Part of the reason I also bought this is because I was curious; there’s all this talk about there’s going to be an iPad Mini probably coming down the pike, and I thought that’s going to be a terrible idea. That’s going to be a really bad size for a screen for everything. And I was wrong. And I think it’s a good size for a lot of people, especially if it comes down to price where more people can buy it. I think it can be terrifically successful.

And I definitely recognize that the iOS apps that we’re building right now, we’re going to have to plan for screens that size and I think they’ll be successful.

**Craig:** And this is the Nexus 7?

**John:** The Nexus 7. So I would recommend, like listen: If you’re really curious about where the Android platform is and sort of what the best of it is, I think it’s a good way to spend $200 because you get like the actual most recent device. You don’t have to pay for a contract if you’re buying a phone. You get a chance to play around with it.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** And if this device becomes popular or if the iPad version of this becomes popular, you can definitely see like loading up schools with these, because if it’s a $200 thing you can actually afford to buy them for the whole classroom and use them as books for things. Whereas at $400 or $500 the iPad becomes too expensive.

**Craig:** Right. And do they have a Kindle app?

**John:** They do. There’s a Kindle app on it just like there’s a Kindle app for the iPad. There’s a Kindle app for this and it’s pretty good.

**Craig:** Maybe I’ll buy one for my son. Because, you know, mostly I just want him to read books.

**John:** Yeah. And the frustration that there aren’t as many great games on it will mean that he’ll read books.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** Although I will say my favorite book reader device is still by far the $79 Kindle from Amazon, which is the non-backlit E-ink screen. It has ads on it but it’s a really good reader and it’s so lightweight that I’ll actually stick it in a jacket pocket and carry it around with me.

**Craig:** What about that Barnes & Noble one? Is that dead? The Nook?

**John:** The Nook? This, I think, is going to make a little bit harder case for the Nook. There’s a version of the Nook now that has lighting on it that people like a lot, that has a touch screen that has lighting on it that some people like a lot. So, god bless them, they’re still making stuff.

But I think a lot of nerds were buying the Nook and then rooting it to sort of put it back to a real Android software and they’re using that to develop and stuff. And I feel like this Nexus 7 would replace that instinct.

**Craig:** One last question about the Nexus 7. Can I smoke it?

**John:** You could totally smoke. And you put little batteries in there and the wire hits the membrane, and just inhale. It’s really good.

**Craig:** Even your pretend smoking didn’t sound right.

**John:** Yeah, god, I’m not an actor, but my fantasy is at some point when I become quite old — when I become 80-years old and have lived a good long life — I want be like the Gore Vidal who sort of like enters in and becomes the wise old man in movies. But they can’t have me smoke because I just couldn’t do it. And you can always tell when an actor has no idea how to smoke.

**Craig:** Clearly.

**John:** They hold a cigarette wrong. Everything’s just wrong about it.

**Craig:** They hold it wrong. They inhale sort of like a cigar and puff it out. I will tell you this, I’m on record: Once I cross 85 I’m going out, buying a pack of Marlboro Reds and get going. [laughs] Because I don’t care anymore.

**John:** A better idea might be to buy a pack right now and stick it in a vault, because they won’t be selling them.

**Craig:** They won’t. And I actually do believe, in all seriousness, that the electronic cigarette will kill regular cigarettes. I do.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** I think that — here’s the trick, not to bring it back around to that, but really it comes down to the government. If the government gets stupid in their anti-smoking zeal and bans these things, that will be a tragedy. Interestingly, there have been a number of major medical associations, I think the American Medical Association, perhaps, or the Heart and Lung — one of the larger medical associations came out and supported these things and said these should be legal for sure. This is way better than smoking for people who smoke. Way better.

**John:** Yeah, you convinced me.

**Craig:** So get smoking…

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** …and I may pick up that Nook…I mean, not the Nook, the Nexus 7 just to give it a swing and see what it’s like. And if I hate it I promise to take a video of myself smashing it with a baseball bat.

**John:** Yeah, $200, it’s not mad money. I mean, $200 is real money to be spending on something, so I don’t want people to wantonly say, “Oh, John August recommends it,” because it’s a half-hearted recommendation. But I did find it fascinating, and for people who are curious about it, I was curious and my curiosity was sated.

**Craig:** Excellent. Well that was a good Cool Thing.

**John:** Awesome. All right. Thank you so much, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Talk to next week.

**Craig:** Bye.