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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/mistakes-development-executives-make).

**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:** Yes!

**John:** Hooray, we did it right!

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** This is actually our second attempt to start the show.

**Craig:** You know, you could of course just record… — I mean, we have 50 versions of you doing that. They really should just put that on for us.

**John:** You know what? I think it should just be a simple copy and paste.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** For now on Stuart will just copy and paste it and start because it’s the same every week.

**Craig:** And you’re really consistent with the way you do it.

**John:** I really am.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Today we’re going to talk about two different topics that have nothing to do with Comic-Con. First we’re going to talk about the mistakes that development executives often make with writers and see if we can offer some suggestion for improving those mistakes, or not making those mistakes. And second we’re going to do the first couple of scripts that came in for the script challenge.

So, this Three Page Challenge that we talked about at the end of last week’s podcast, we asked readers to send in three pages of their screenplay and we would look at it and talk about it on the air. And a bunch of people did, and so many people did. And so Stuart dutifully read all of them and suggested a couple that we could look at, and we’re going to look at three of them today.

**Craig:** Fantastic. And just because I know people are going to ask: are we going to do it again?

**John:** Yes. I think we will do it again if it’s fun.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So you have to listen through to the end of the podcast to see if we had a good time. And then if we had a good time, we’ll do it again.

**Craig:** We’ll do it again. Great.

**John:** A bit of housekeeping. On the last podcast you were going to play your guitar, but then you didn’t play your guitar because you offered your own kind of challenge, which to recap: If we were to cross over to 100,000 listeners you would play a guitar solo as our outro music. And weirdly this last week the numbers showed that we crossed over to 100,000, but I don’t think it was really an accurate number. And here’s why I think it was an inaccurate number.

This last week was the week that Apple released the podcast app for the iPhone. And the podcast app is controversial because its user interface is kind of terrible. Also, it tends to want to download a bunch of things that you’ve already downloaded before. So, people who are already subscribers to our show might suddenly find themselves with like 20 episodes of our show being downloaded to their phone. And so I think a lot of these greatly inflated numbers are because people who are already fans and subscribers to the show and have downloaded that file again even though they already listened to it. So, we’ll give it a few weeks and see how it sorts itself out.

**Craig:** And because I wasn’t ready anyway. And just to be clear, I’m actually a terrible guitarist, but it’s really more about singing a song. I mean, I can play guitar along with myself, but guitar solo sounds Eddie Van Halen-ish.

**John:** Oh yeah. That’s a good point.

**Craig:** I can’t do that.

**John:** So you’re going to give us an acoustic session.

**Craig:** There you go. It will be unplugged. Yeah.

**John:** Yes, there you go. Craig Mazin Unplugged.

**Craig:** Unplugged.

**John:** And weirdly my Cool Thing for the end of the show is also about music. So, it’s all going to kind of fit together. Even though we don’t get the Craig Mazin singing experience.

**Craig:** Not yet. But if you get… — Friends can start listening to this thing, then finally the world will be rewarded with the thing it’s been waiting for the most.

**John:** That you never knew you wanted but now you can’t live without.

Also, in a bit of follow up, which is really kind of blog follow up so I’m not sure to what degree I’m allowed to talk about it on the podcast, but really it’s our rules.

**Craig:** Do it. There’s no rules here.

**John:** There’s no rules. So, AMC Theaters, which is one of the big theater chains in the nation, but Los Angeles and California has a lot of AMC Theaters, there is a lawsuit happening where some of the employees are suing AMC theaters saying they should be allowed to sit on the job if they’re selling tickets or ripping tickets and doing that kind of stuff.

And so it’s a class action lawsuit that we’ll see how it proceeds. And so I wrote about that on the blog and it got me… I sort of offhandedly mentioned that sitting is terrible for you and that I work at a standing desk. And so a lot of people wrote in to ask, “Oh, so what is your standing desk situation?” And so I thought I would talk a little bit about that if that’s okay.

**Craig:** Yeah. Go ahead. I mean, is there much to say other than that you’re standing at a desk?

**John:** I’m standing at a desk. And actually I do all the podcasts standing up and I’ve been doing that for a couple months, and it’s just better I think. Sitting is actually really bad for your body. It sort of… — Not only is it kind of bad for your back and you’re compressing your spine and stuff, someone how it slows down certain processes and your cholesterol gets weird. People should stand up more if they have the opportunity to stand up.

So my desk situation… — And I don’t want you to feel like they should do what I do, but it’s working well for me. I use this thing called an Anthro Cart. Anthro is a furniture company and they make a bunch of different kinds of desks. The one I have is I think the older version; it’s called the Adjusta. And I originally bought this desk because I’ve had horrible carpal tunnel problems. And I use a special weird keyboard that I’ve linked to before that has sort of vertical keys on it. And I need to set the typing surface really low so that it fits nice, so that my wrists are in the right position for typing on it.

The nice thing about the Adjusta desk is it can go really low but it can also go nice and high. And so when I’m standing up at the desk I can just literally raise the whole level of the front of the table up fairly high and just tilt my monitor up and it’s quite a comfortable service for working at, for typing at.

**Craig:** My working method is to curl up in a ball, as tightly as I can. And then I cry.

**John:** If they can just make a waterproof laptop and I can just work in the shower, that would be awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Be nice and clean.

**Craig:** Clean.

**John:** Clean things.

**Craig:** You know what’s so great is that all the people that sent in pages are like, “Get to my pages!”

**John:** We’re going to just keep stalling.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s get on to our first question, which was submitted to you by a friend or colleague I think. And he said he was talking to executives and they had a question for us which is this: What mistakes do development execs constantly make with writers?

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s quite a few, I think. You want to start? I’ve got a litany.

**John:** I’ve got a litany, too. But I have actually kind of a list whereas you’re going to have to think of them.

**Craig:** True. Well why don’t you do your list and then I’ll fill in.

**John:** Yeah. That’s pretty much how this podcast works.

**Craig:** [laughs] Because I don’t really prepare.

**John:** Here’s the first mistake I’ve noticed: not giving immediate feedback and acknowledgement. So, when a writer turns in a script to you, sends you his script, you should immediately say, “Thank you. I got your script and I will read it in this period of time and get right back to you.” So that first email just to say, “It actually came in and I got it and I’m printing it out or I’m putting it on my Kindle,” is so crucial because for the writer we’ve been working on this for days, weeks, months. We just need to know that you actually have it, that the email went through.

Because I can’t tell you how many times that I’ve sent something through on like a Thursday and then on Friday I haven’t heard anything back and I’m like, “Do they actually have it for the weekend to read? Did they really get it? Do I need to call? Do I need to resend?” And I’m going through the weekend with this question. So, email back and say, “Great. I’m so excited. And I will get back to you on Monday.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Then, when you say you’re going to get back on Monday, actually call back on Monday or email back on Monday. Or if you can’t get back with feedback on Monday, send an email that says, “I’m so sorry I can’t get back to you but I enjoyed it and I will get back to you with feedback really, really soon.”

Nothing is worse for a writer than uncertainty. We’d kind of rather hear that you didn’t like some things than to just be wondering, because we are our own worst enemies.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s just simple courtesy. I mean, it’s not going to ruin anything if you act like a jerk, but if you don’t have to act like a jerk, why?

**John:** Yeah. Here’s a magnifying factor: If you have pushed, and pushed, and pushed, and pushed for the writer to turn in the script…don’t badger them for three weeks to turn in the script and then not get back to them for a week.

**Craig:** That is really annoying. And, again, this is sort of in the category of stuff that doesn’t ruin the development process because eventually they call you and then the development process begins. But I have…there’s one producer I will not mention in particular where they would do that check-in call constantly and then it would take sometimes three months for them to read the script.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, guys, leave me alone then.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** By the way, I’m not one of those writers that blows through deadlines. I’m really good about it. I say this plane’s landing at 6:30pm, it lands at 6:30pm. Sometimes it lands at 6:25. I am really, really good. So it’s just annoying to me, frankly, to get those constant calls. And I know why they’re doing it because not all writers are good and they’re paranoid and freaked out and their boss is saying, “Don’t let people turn stuff in late,” and I get that. But then come on, [laughs] you know? I mean, at least hold up your end of the charade.

**John:** Yeah. There’s nothing wrong with a check-in call, particularly just so both sides are sort of synchronized in terms of when we think this is going to come in. There’s nothing wrong with a check-in call as long as it’s helpful and positive and doesn’t feel like I’m setting this big timer to go off.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But, come on, you can’t push a writer to turn something in and then not respond when they turn something in. It’s crazy.

**Craig:** It’s silly.

**John:** Then when you actually have the script and you’re ready to give feedback on the script, praise first. And I can’t tell you how often I’ll go into a meeting or go into something and they won’t tell me what they liked and what they loved. And like, yeah, I’m a grown up. I think I have a fairly thick skin as a writer, but come on, tell me what you liked first. Tell me what worked for you. Even if that’s just two minutes and then the next 90 minutes are going to be a lot of “this didn’t work,” give me some love first.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And then when you start to point out things that aren’t working, avoid speaking so broadly that I want to kill myself. Sometimes the first things out of your mouth will sound like you’re just talking about a completely different movie, like, “Well what if we did this, and this, and this, and this?” And in my head I’m just shutting down because I’m like, “You want to take this thing that I wrote which was set in the Middle Ages and move it to the future.” And I’m just like, and I’m all I’m doing is just seeing how much work that is going to be to do that and how everything I’ve done has been completely undone.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So even if that is sort of your agenda, why don’t you start on something smaller. Start on something that’s kind of achievable and move us to this bigger idea.

**Craig:** Or, look, sometimes you read a script and you think it’s all wrong.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then, look, I’m a little less requiring of praise maybe than you are. I mean, I’m okay with it. I like it. It actually makes me a little uncomfortable sometimes, too many compliments, because I’m like, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Get to the stuff we have to fix here.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it is annoying to me…when you talk about mistakes development executives make when they talk in a big sense about the things they don’t like without acknowledging it. Because sometimes I have had the experience with development executives where they’re saying, “Look, I think what we’d like to see out of this next draft is A, B, and C.” And they’re sort of saying casually, like, “You know, we’d love it if instead if he was a plumber, wouldn’t it be better if he were an electrician?” Except that they’re saying it like that, except what they’re saying is, “We think instead of a comedy it should be a drama.”

And you’re like, wait, don’t marry huge notes with casual tone. Go ahead and acknowledge it. Just say, “Listen, the truth is we actually think this script is far afield of where we want to be.” Just set the tone so at least then when we have the discussion I’m not deciphering that while you talk. I’m not on my own thinking, “Oh wait a second, um, they hate everything.” But I have to say that myself, in my head, putting it together from what they’re saying casually like, “La di da, di da.”

Don’t do that. If you really hate everything or if you — well, not hate. I mean, if you really think the script is just not where it should be story wise or character wise or tone, just be honest about it so at least you can contextualize what’s about to come next.

**John:** I would also stress that if this is something that you you’ve worked and developed with the writer and you think you’re so far afield, you’re going to have to at least take some of the blame for it being so far afield. If you come back and say, “Oh, I think you completely missed the mark, blah, blah, blah,” and this writer was actually doing what you guys agreed he was going to do, then you’re going to have to acknowledge that, “Okay, I think we took a wrong turn here.” And include yourself in that decision process.

**Craig:** Great point. Yes. That is very annoying when development executives divorce themselves from the very things that they input into the process, or that they ask for, or that they agreed to.

You know, I always make sure that we’re all on the same page before I start writing. I like to write outlines and I like to share the outlines with everybody specifically to avoid this. And it is very annoying. And look, to the development executives listening, here’s the upshot: you’re in control anyway. You want to fire us, you fire us; hire us, you hire us. Whatever.

The only thing that really I’m saying to you is I guess the most important step for you for your job is: you want us to do well right? Because you want the script to be good; that reflects well on you. That’s your gig. If you want the script to be good then you do have to acknowledge the partnership because if you don’t we start to hate you.

And it’s fair for us to start to hate you because you’re being a jerk about it. You know, if I come in and I turn a script in and people are like, “Well, you tried this thing here, and we don’t like it.” Okay, you’re right. But, if you ask me to do something and I do it and you’re like, “Why is this here?” Oh my god, now I hate you so much. [laughs] Because I didn’t want to do it in the first place, probably. I might have even warned you.

**John:** Next point I will get to is: criticize the work and don’t criticize the writer. And only twice I think in my career have I gotten the note back saying like, “We think you rushed through this,” or, “We think you did a bad job,” and basically said, like, “We thought you were unprofessional in this.”

**Craig:** Oh, wow.

**John:** And when I hear that, I can never work with this person again. And there is a development executive who is quite well respected throughout the industry, but somehow for some reason she said that. And because of that I never want to work with her again, because I think it was very inaccurate but it was also: who are you to say what my process was or what this is?

If you’re unhappy with the script, say you’re not happy with the script. But don’t say that I didn’t do my job.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Don’t say that, like, I shouldn’t get paid. That’s a pretty crazy thing to go to.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, ultimately it’s not the development person’s job to make that call anyway. If somebody really blows it they blow it. But you’re right. I guess my point would be this to the development executive saying things like that: It might make you feel good and you might believe that that’s true, and it might even be true in some cases, but it’s not going to actually get things to be better. So just… — Just like I tell screenwriters, getting notes is hard, and it’s emotional. Keep your eye on the job.

I would say the same thing to you guys who are development executives. Getting scripts back that you don’t like is emotional and painful. Keep your eye on the job.

**John:** Next thing I’ll point to is credit where the notes are coming from. So, if you as a development executive have this opinion, but you don’t even know what the next level up’s opinion is going to be, or there is just some disagreement there, use your best judgment about how you’re going to share that information.

So I think it’s perfectly fine for a development executive to say, “Listen. I get what you’re going for here, and I really do like this. Here’s the reason why my boss doesn’t like this and that’s going to be a problem. So let’s together figure out how we’re going to get this to a stage where he’s going to respond positively to this thing.”

I will always take uncomfortable honesty over sort of a mystery.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s hard sometimes for them to do that I think though. Because look, ultimately who’s signing their check?

**John:** But the thing is we can always tell when somebody’s giving us a note that they themselves don’t believe at all.

**Craig:** Yeah, we can.

**John:** Because we’re going to be able to say…like, we will ask you three questions and you won’t be able to answer in a meaningful way. The illogic of what you’re saying will come through. And so as you’re giving notes, please before you sit down in the notes session with a writer, look through what your notes are and make sure they’re actually internally consistent, because it’s so tough to be the writer sitting on the couch giving these notes, recognizing these two things are at cross-purposes. And I’m going to point this out in the room and make everyone feel foolish, or I’m going to have to make the awkward call two days later for “classification” to point out you can’t do both of these two things you’re saying.

You can’t say, like, “We want the first act to be much funnier but we really want to feel the drama…” A lot of times you will get those things that are cross-purposes and it’s just not possible to implement them all.

**Craig:** Yeah, and you know, sometimes with those things I just sort of go, “Okay…” and I ignore one of them, you know? Because I feel like half the time really they’re struggling to figure out how to fix something and in the end it’s on our shoulders. Which leads me to one of my sort of pet peeves with development executives, and that’s when they try and fix it for you.

I do not want any development executive telling me how to fix it.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I want them to tell me what’s wrong. They are an audience. That’s the best version of…they are an audience proxy. And they should be, hopefully, very good at explaining why it’s wrong and a general direction of what they would prefer to see.

But I don’t want them telling me what to write because in the end they’re doing themselves a disservice. If they could write it, they should go ahead and write it. But they can’t. And that requires a little bit of humility, frankly, on the part of the development executive to say, “Look. I don’t like this way. We think a better way would be something like this. Please write something like that or do you have a better idea? Let us help you fix the problem.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When you dictate to us it makes me insane because all you’re really doing is wasting your money and your time. No writer — no writer — can write something they don’t believe in well. So don’t make us do it.

**John:** To summarize that: Tell us what’s not working for you and why. But do not try to provide the “hows.” Don’t try to provide the “whens” and the “wheres.” Don’t tell us what the solution is. Tell us what’s not working for you. Because if you tell us the problem then we can ask questions that could help root out what’s really the problem.

Because very often the thing that’s happening in the second act or like, “I don’t feel like I’m connected to this character,” the problem isn’t right there. The problem was something earlier and we’re going to have to do some detective work to figure out why you’re not getting this thing that we think is so obvious to you.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I want to get to sort of specific pet peeves, because this is a thing that came out a lot in the Charlie’s Angels movies is that sometimes you’ll get a note and it’s like, “Why am I getting this note?” And if it’s just because it’s your personal pet peeve, or someone’s personal pet peeve, that’s okay to label it as that.

So Nancy Juvonen — who I love — who is a producer on the Charlie’s Angels movies, there was this scene in one of the, I think it was the first movie, where the girls are eating and it was important for the girls to be eating because we wanted to show that girls — that the Angels actually did eat. And ketchup drips on this one file and we wipe it off. And I think I had it in there because it helped, “drops on a photo,” and it was just an easy way for me to show the villain’s face. Just a way to sort of connect who it is that we’re talking about.

And she was sort of talking through, like, “Oh, do we really need to do that?” And I’m like, “Nancy, what’s the problem?” She was like, “I hate that moment where characters are messy and stuff spills on things.” She hates the Carl’s Jr. aspect of that.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s just…

**John:** Well I said, “That’s fine.” I mean, she’s the producer of the movie. She gets one or two of those where it’s just like, she doesn’t like that, I’ll find another way to do it. And so rather than doing the big long dance over what it is and sort of how it all… — It’s like, you don’t like it. That’s okay. Especially if you’re the director. The director is always allowed to say, “I don’t like that. I don’t get it.”

**Craig:** The director is allowed to say it. That’s exactly what I was going to say. I don’t care if a producer has some weird hang up about the color blue, or people being messy, or singing, or anything. I don’t care. The director is going to make the movie.

So my point is if you have some weird fetish, you should do what we do which is shove it aside because you’re a big boy or a big girl, and you’re making a movie. You’re not exercising your own OCD. And it’s just not cool.

If the director doesn’t like it, they get a pass on it because they have to shoot it just like we get a pass when we have to write things. You can’t tell me that I have to write a certain way because I can’t. There’s some ways I just can’t write. I don’t like certain kinds of writing and I can’t do it, so I won’t. Hire somebody else to do that. But producers and development executives don’t get that pass. Sorry.

**John:** Yeah. I would agree on development executives. A producer, especially on something like Charlie’s Angels which was such a delicate balance of personalities and everything else, I felt like she totally got that right to do that one thing. If that’s the one thing she’s standing up for, awesome.

**Craig:** I guess. Give her the one.

**John:** Every movie’s going to be a little bit different. And there are movies that are really made by the producers and sort of aren’t made by the directors. And as a writer you recognize when those situations are happening and you…

**Craig:** Well, that’s true. That’s true. I mean, if you’re doing a Jerry Bruckheimer movie and Jerry has a real bug up his butt about a thing, Jerry is kind of a director of a lot of those movies in a weird way. But my sort of corollary for that for comedy is when a producer or development executive says, “I don’t think this line is very funny.” Well, are you funny?

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Because so many people that I meet in Hollywood actually are funny. They’re not funny in the sense of “I can write a funny script” or “I can write a great line here” or “come up with a great idea or situation,” but they’re just generally funny people. They laugh at things that I find funny; they don’t laugh at things I don’t find funny. And they have an innate sense of rhythm, which is what comedy is all about.

But then I meet a lot of people who don’t, you know. And when those people start telling me what is and isn’t funny, and I think to myself: “You? You’re as funny as a toothache.” Well here’s the deal: No. Absolutely not. If I say, “You know what? It’s a marginal line,” or, “Oh, yeah, you’re right,” that’s my judgment. But if I say, “Nope, I believe in this.” And then the director says, “I believe in this.” Back off.

Because, listen, nobody bats 1.000 when it comes to comedy, but I cannot — you know, Bob Weinstein comes to mind — I can’t tell you how many times he and I would fight over something that would absolutely kill in the theater, I mean, just lay people out. And I would turn to him and he would be so angry, [laughs] because he was wrong, you know. But I’m like, “But the point is you’re not funny. That’s not a shameful thing, it’s just you’re not funny. I’m sorry. What can I tell you?”

You know, know your strengths. And if you’re not a funny person and you’re dealing with a comedy script, stick to the stuff that you think you’re strong at. And then let the funny people deal with the funny stuff.

**John:** Indeed.

Television makes it a little bit easier because they split their comedy development from the drama development as two separate groups. Movies are just one big pile. And so you get a person who should never be working on a comedy working on a comedy and there you are.

**Craig:** One last thing I wanted to mention that is annoying is sometimes development people will zero in on… — Let me put it this way: We who write screenplays understand that there are some levers you push that have huge ripple effects, and others that have none at all. That’s the way screenplays are constructed. But a lot of development executives don’t understand that.

They will zero in and obsess over this little thing that we all understand is minutia, essentially, in the web of the screenplay. And they will just go over it, and over it, and over it. And all you can think in your head is, “What is this person talking about? This is something that I could just change in a minute. It’s something that could change in the day. It’s something that editorially could go away, or if it works or it doesn’t work.” Don’t get caught up on some little bugaboo that makes you nuts.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Especially if it’s not pushing on the concept, the main character, the theme, the essence of the narrative. Just don’t go crazy. Lodge your complaint and move on.

**John:** Yeah. I agree. Far too often the whole meeting ends up being about this one little thing, and like that’s not the important thing at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then you walk out of there going, “That?! We just talked for an hour about that? Did this person see anything else, you know? I’ve built this whole thing…”

And sometimes… Here’s the most amazing thing about development executives — sorry guys. In success sometimes these things are even more annoying. I write a screenplay and everybody goes, “Wow, great job. You know what? You nailed it. We’re green-lighting the movie. And this actor is in. And this director is on. And you did it. You built a whole world for us and we’re gonna throw money into it and make it come to life. But, now let’s talk for an hour about how annoyed we are about the fact that in this one scene this one person says this stupid thing.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Really?! And the rest of it just sort of blew by in a blur and we’re just gonna talk for an hour about that? Cut it out. That’s what I say. Cut it out.

**John:** So, some advice for development executives.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So this is now a podcast for screenwriters and development executives.

**Craig:** Development executives. And things that are interesting to development executives.

**John:** Sure. And one thing that might be interesting to development executives is the first three pages of a screenplay, because very rarely will they read past it unless they’re really, really intrigued.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So we had invited listeners to send in the first three pages, really any three pages of their screenplay. The ones we’re looking at today are the first three pages for the three samples.

And we got a lot of people wrote in, send in their scripts. And weirdly, like, right away, like within 20 minutes of the podcast going up we had like seven people had written in with their things. So, thank you everyone who sent them in. We have a bunch. We probably have plenty, but if people are still going to send some in, okay, send them in. We may get to it in a future podcast episode.

And I thought we’d start with one by — I may pronounce his name wrong — Ajay Bhai.

**Craig:** Okay. That’s the one that begins with “Fade In.”

**John:** So this one we don’t know the name of it because there wasn’t a title page, which is fine, we don’t need to know the name. But I wrote a little summary so people don’t have to — we’re not going to read his whole thing aloud because that would be awful to read it aloud. But I’ll give you a summary of what his script is about.

So, we open with a 6’5″ guy and he wakes up handcuffed naked to a railing outside a New York apartment. We don’t learn his name. The movie then cuts to 40 hours earlier just establishing NYC. We see some kids playing basketball. Both the kids say that they’re “Kevin Hayes,” and so evidently Kevin Hayes is an important basketball player, or like, a superstar.

We have a montage of short scenes with everyone talking about Kevin Hayes and a big game coming up. The last scene in this montage on page three is longer and it is set in an office, and there are two characters named Vijay and Ian. They’re talking about Kevin Hayes but they’re also talking about work. And that’s how much we get in the first three pages.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Craig, how did these three pages work for you?

**Craig:** Not well. Not well.

**John:** Yeah, not well for me either.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’ll just sort of run through my issues. I thought the opening was nice. I mean, it was very visual, and it was a little bit of a mystery. So there’s a man. He’s handcuffed outside. I was a little confused because I’m not quite sure how you can be handcuffed outside in New York and not have anybody notice, so that was a little odd. And perhaps I was a little confused. But, it says, it looks like he’s on the concrete outside a NYC apartment. So right away I was a little annoyed.

And by the way, if sometimes you’re doing things like putting people handcuffed outside the middle of New York, okay, but then explain it for me so I don’t stop and go, “What?”

**John:** Yeah. I’m sure there’s a way geographically that could work where he’s sort of hidden behind trash cans or something so people aren’t wandering by seeing him. But otherwise I’m thinking, “Why isn’t someone seeing him?”

**Craig:** It says he’s lying under a pile of garbage. But if he’s lying under a pile of garbage, his face is still exposed. We know his face is exposed. Generally speaking it’s very hard to be handcuffed outside with your face exposed in New York and not have somebody notice. Just an aside.

**John:** That’s a personal experience — the times that you woken up naked handcuffed in New York, everyone seeing you.

**Craig:** Yeah. They wake me up. I don’t just happen to wake up. 40 hours earlier is nice. You probably want to put a title on that so we know it’s 40 hours earlier and not just people reading the script. And then here’s the problem: The next page and a half is what I just call fake dialogue. The purpose of the next page and a half is to tell us, the audience, that Kevin Hayes, who I presume is the man that’s handcuffed, is super duper popular in New York.

The problem is, it belabors it. There are kids who are practicing and talking about being Kevin Hayes and arguing about being Kevin Hayes, which is a little annoying. Then we see the only shot you need which is Madison Square Garden and all these people walking around with Hayes. Then we go to a pizzeria where this guy is saying, “Limited time Kevin Hayes specials. Knicks win tomorrow get a free championship slice all week long.”

**John:** Impossible. No one has ever said that in the history of time.

**Craig:** No one has ever — no one talks like that. Certainly no one in New York talks like that. There are no such specials that exist in New York where literally using the bathroom costs you money. [laughs] Also just as a general thing: very popular athletes are not referred to by their first and last name over and over by everybody. Usually it’s just the last name. If you’re a Jordan fan, you’re a “Jordan fan.” If you’re a Pujols fan, you’re a “Pujols fan.” Everybody doesn’t keep repeating the name, first and last, over and over and over.

We get to, I thought Middle Eastern men cooking up falafels and then occasionally if they dropped Kevin and just said, “Hayes,” that might be nice.

**John:** Yeah. That would be nice.

**Craig:** Yeah, so okay, I get it. Everybody gets it. Even people that aren’t American or have just recently immigrated. Then we have an old lady — ugh, this just gets so broad — an old lady asks for two balls of yarn, one orange, one blue. Clerk says, “Another sweater for your grandson?” So I don’t know where we are. Now we’re in middle America and not New York. And she says, “My own Kevin Hayes jersey. They’re sold out everywhere.”

“She holds the balls in her hand, as if they were a balls of golden treasure.” So first of all, typos. Second of all, no — they’re just yarn. I mean, again, people have to be normal. And also she’s not going to knit herself her own Kevin Hayes jersey. And, no, they’re not sold out everywhere. There is not a single sports jersey that has ever been sold out. Ever.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then this final scene where I presume we’re meeting our two main characters, Vijay and Ian, who work in an office. And there is a lot of very juvenile play acting pretending to be Kevin Hayes, which again, adults or even twenty-somethings simply don’t do. It’s the kind of thing you see the kids on Suite Life on Deck doing. But you don’t see young people, twenty-somethings or thirty-somethings in an office ever doing.

And, once again, every single person who mentions Kevin Hayes must say Kevin Hayes. [laughs] So, I didn’t like it.

**John:** I have a few additional points to yours.

I thought the opening was interesting. It was visual. And the way he’s revealing like you’re not quite sure what the situation is or what the tone is going to be. But like we leave the scene without any idea of what the tone is. And so like, well, what kind of movie are we in? There’s no dialogue being done in that. And so if this is a comedy, then that guy who presumably is Kevin Hayes needs to say something. Or he needs to respond to his situation somehow other than just like panic.

Because I don’t know what panic — is it a funny panic? It is an “Oh no, they’ve captured my wife” panic? I don’t know what kind of movie this is.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. Yeah. It felt almost like it started like Saw.

**John:** I agree with you on if you’re going to cut to an earlier time you have to show us that it’s an earlier time. You can’t just tell the reader that; it has to be shown to the audience.

I got really confused by the kids playing basketball. I had to reread it a couple of times because I thought, like, “Are they saying that their name is Kevin Hayes? Oh, no, they’re pretending that they’re Kevin Hayes but there was no setup for who that was.” If that scene came later in the montage I might get it a little better.

I also — some characters were named and some characters weren’t named. So, the old woman is Vespasian. Is she a character we’re going to see again? If she’s not a character we’re going to see again, don’t give her a name. Because every time I see a character with a name I assume it’s a person we’re going to see.

And then we finally get to the office, which like you, I guess that those characters are important people that we’re actually going to follow in the course of the story. But this is something that we talked about in the last podcast. It’s just “INT. OFFICE.” That tells me nothing. I have no idea what kind of workplace this is. And so if it’s meant to be a generic office, then just say “Generic Office” and give us, like, “The most pedestrian, ordinary cubicle farm you’ve ever seen.” Give us some sort of color so we know what kind of place this is, because “Office” doesn’t mean anything.

**Craig:** You would probably want to also do an exterior so that we understand are they working at a large corporate building, are they working in a loft, are they working in a small place, are they working in Brooklyn, are they Manhattan? Something so we know what’s going on.

But that’s a great point on tone. Because honestly the beginning I thought, “Oh, this is like Saw,” you know, a guy chained to a thing.

**John:** And, again, the writer doesn’t need to direct from the page, but give us sense of what’s important and what’s the montage. And so even if you put the “Cut To” in after his waking up and probably giving some sort of reaction line, “Cut To,” okay, now we’re going through a couple of short scenes. And then give us another “Cut To” before we get to the office. That will at least give us a sense of what the flow of this movie is and where we should put our relative weight of attention.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. And know you’re world because when you’re writing a movie about a very specific thing that isn’t maybe something people are familiar with, like the way Special Forces teams move through the jungle, you’re allowed to kind of build your own world. Everybody knows how sports figures are discussed. Everybody. And I don’t care who you are.

**John:** Even I know that, and I can’t stand sports.

**Craig:** You know that. Exactly. LeBron James, probably the best player in the NBA. Now people will tweet back at me, but LeBron James gets ripped to shreds every day on ESPN by Stephen Smith and Skip Bayless and ding-a-lings like that.

Nobody, nobody is talked about the way this guy is. And it just seems so unreal that I’m already out. I’m out on page 3. The buy-in isn’t there.

**John:** By the way, if you’re going to talk about a sports figure, why haven’t we seen a TV talking about that? I mean, it feels like that’s the natural sort of cut, part of that montage to set up who this guy is. And I guess they’re trying to avoid showing you his face so you will be surprised that that was the guy who woke up buck naked. But it’s not a surprise.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not going to work.

**John:** Because you know what? We’ve seen movies before.

**Craig:** Exactly. We know it’s that guy. He’s six foot tall.

**John:** I don’t want to be completely negative. First off, Ajay, thank you for sending in the script. And I assume based on these first three pages that it’s some sort of sports comedy and that it’s going to be telling the story of that guy’s night and maybe it’s a Hangover kind of situation. It’s a promising enough idea, a major professional athlete going through some sort of spiral. I just think the scene work in setting up those first three pages can be a lot stronger.

**Craig:** Yeah. The tone of this comes off too juvenile for what the subject matter is.

**John:** Yeah. Even though like the Hangover movies, they’re kind of juvenile. I don’t mean to offend you at all. But they’re smarter and more specific than this.

**Craig:** I don’t think they’re juvenile. What I mean by juvenile is targeted towards an audience. In the Hangover movies, people behave, characters behave in juvenile ways, but the tone of the movie and the things that happen are pitched to people who are in their 20s, 30s, 40s.

**John:** Definitely.

**Craig:** And this movie feels like it’s pitched towards 10-year-olds, but it’s not supposed to be, I can tell.

**John:** Yeah. So pitch higher. If you’re going to have somebody waking up naked, it should feel like a grown up movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s go on to the next script. This one actually has a name. It’s called Exposure. And it’s by J. Nicholas Smith.

**Craig:** No, no. It’s called “Exposusre.” Did you notice this? How do you have a typo of your title?

**John:** Where is that? On the first page?

**Craig:** On the front page. On the cover page. Do you see that?

**John:** Oh wow. I didn’t. Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, look, I’m not a typo Nazi. But for the love of god, if you can’t get your title page right it shows a lack of regard for the reader that is astonishing to me. Just astonishing. Please, I mean look, I saw typos on all these things. Please, at the very least, spell your name right and spell your title right.

**John:** That’s the minimum we could ask.

**Craig:** Minimum.

**John:** I would say though, despite that typo which I completely ignored on the first page, I kind of quite enjoyed this. I’ll give a summary for readers so they can know what we’re talking about.

So the scene starts with blood on the snow. We crane up and we find a 17-year-old girl named Molly. She’s half-naked in a tree. She’s bleeding out. And she’s using the flash on her camera. It’s not clear if she’s trying to attract attention to herself or take photos, but we just see the flashing.

The next scene is one month earlier. There’s a super that tells us that, so thank you for giving us the super. We see Molly spying on her neighbor, Warren, and she’s using her same camera and she’s smoking a joint. They establish a bit about her neighborhood and her dog. The last scene of the three pages is Warren, the guys she’s spying on, a guy named John, and Molly’s father, Sam. They’re sitting by a fire, drinking beers, and smoking.

So, things to note: There’s no dialogue in these first three pages. It’s one of those just done visually sequences. I thought actually fairly nicely done. I enjoyed reading through every bit of it. J. Nicholas Smith does a good job of keeping scene description tight and short and like no line of action is more than three lines which is very helpful, because readers tend to skip anything that’s more than three lines. And if you see a paragraph you’re like, “Yeah, maybe I won’t read that paragraph,” but it’s two or three lines, “Yeah, sure, we’ll read that.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There was good specificity. I like that. But some stuff got so specific that it was a little bit annoying. There’s a sequence on page two where she’s dealing with this red scarf and its red is way too important. It was a bit giant like underscore when she’s touching her red scarf.

But I like that he’s setting up a world, and I’d keep reading it. If I read to page three I would have read to page four.

**Craig:** I agree. I think the good news is that J. Nicholas Smith can write. So I like the way — I think there was good craft here. Certainly it’s not an easy thing to write the first three pages without dialogue. You’re forcing yourself to tell the story visually and I thought he did a pretty good job.

My issues: I was a little confused on the first page about where she was versus the camera and whether she was triggering the camera or whether the camera was on some sort of auto flash thing. I think part of it was that the Canon is nestled in the crook of a thick maple branch. “Its body, marked with bloody handprints…” And so just the word “Body” kind of through me off even though when you read it — it’s just one of those things where you have to read it twice which you don’t want.

**John:** No. You never want to read something twice.

**Craig:** Right. And then she’s bleeding out and the camera flashes, and that’s really good. I like that a lot. So the first page was exciting and had a tone. And what was nice is the second page maintained that tone even though, once again, we get a nice super of one month ago. And we see also that she’s on the roof, which I love. And I liked the way that it started with the leaves in the gutter, and then you find the legs, and you realize this girl is on the roof. I know so much about her already.

And I love the specificity of where she puts the joint and how she puts it away. And now I get she’s a voyeur. She sees this guy. And then, good lessons for screenwriters, this guy Warren Shaw, so our writer makes a choice here to demonstrate this character’s sensibility through a simple thing — not being able to leave the mailbox flag alone until it’s straight up and down. So it’s all these nice little things.

I kind of had the same issue that you had in the bedroom. I got a little confused about what was going on with the dog. I assume the red scarf is important, that’s why it’s in — that later on this red scarf will be a big deal. But the dog stuff got me a little confused. I wasn’t quite sure what was going on, why she was checking the time and rolling around.

It’s a fine line between keeping me interested by building a mystery and then confusing me. And that’s where it started to tip into confusing. The only last thing I would say was I was kind of thrown off by these Djarum Black Clove cigarettes, because John Hastings, who’s the character that pulls them out, pulls up in a truck with a six-pack of Bud Light, grubby jeans, and a sweatshirt flecked with paint, which to me — so his character introduction says blue color guy, but he’s pulling out the most effete cigarettes possible.

**John:** It feels like hipster cigarettes.

**Craig:** Right. Now, by the way, that may be a point. That may be something that’s interesting about him. But then I think the author needs to acknowledge that to me so that I don’t feel like, “What?” So if he says, “John improbably pulls out a pack of Djarum Black Clove cigarettes, the last thing you’d imagine him smoking.”

And then, finally, this is a big thing that I’ve been talking about a little bit on DoneDealPro. “Sam Gray, 48, wants to be a better father to Molly but doesn’t know how.” Don’t do that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Please let me discover that Sam Gray wants to be a better father to Molly but doesn’t know how. Don’t tell me in this. You’re cheating.

**John:** Yeah. It’s cheating. So, it’s okay to give us something that’s not quite filmable, but don’t give us something that’s unfilmable that’s also about another character who’s not in the scene. Like, you can give us an action for him to play, but you can’t just talk about how he fits into the world.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If you wanted to give us something that says, like, “he’s a man that’s been kicked around his whole life,” or something like that is to me fine. But don’t establish important things about your entire relationship in your movie on one line of scene description.

**Craig:** Yeah. Don’t sum up what is obviously going to be an important central relationship in the screenplay with a line of action that the audience will never have access to, in no small part because by doing that you let yourself off the hook of having to do the work later through the scene work itself. And if you’re going to do the work through the scene work then it really isn’t important there. In fact, you’re just ruining the fun of us discovering that relationship. And if you’re not doing it, well then you’re blowing it. So either way it doesn’t work.

**John:** One thing I’m nervous about in this script is what the first line of dialogue is going to be, because you have two choices. Is the dialogue going to be really important because it’s the first thing that some character says? Or, maybe the better choice is that it’s something that is sort of thrown away and we don’t make a big deal of the fact that no one has spoken for three minutes.

**Craig:** That’s a really good point. I find that when you go two or three pages without dialogue because you’re being impressionistic or very visual, it’s a nice thing to ease the audience into dialogue. It’s a very jarring thing to go from this sort of silent, poetic way of revealing story to somebody blabbing. A one-word response might be a nice thing. You know? [laughs] Just something to slowly ease us back into the world of talking. Good point.

**John:** Or it could be the character of Molly might walk in on a conversation that’s already happening in the background and she actually gets something from the refrigerator, or just ease us into that world because otherwise it’s going to be too much of a big deal.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Too big of a spotlight.

Let’s go to our third and final one for this week. This is a script by Bryan DeGuire. Three pages by Bryan DeGuire, called Wasteland Vacation. And I did not look at the title of the script when I first read the pages and it would have been very helpful because it would have helped set the right expectation. But let me give you a summary of what happens in these three pages.

So we start in a post-apocalyptic Hellscape. We meet Dr. Robert Fleming, who’s a scientist, and Jeremiah, who’s 27. We don’t know much more about Jeremiah. Jeremiah drives off in a 2012 minivan. So this post-apocalyptic thing is sometimes way in the future. I think we are have a super that says 2068.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so then Jeremiah drives off in this 2012 minivan and he honks the horn three times and travels back through time to present day suburbia which is very banal, but he thinks it’s beautiful.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And then we meet, the movie cuts to introduce us to Bob, in his forties, and he’s a life insurance salesman. And the script tells us that he will be our hero. We see him at work and then we see him at home with his bickering kids, Lucy and Max.

**Craig:** So I’m glad you brought up the point on the first set of pages about the basketball player about aligning the tone. Because in comedy there’s a non-comedy plot against which the comedy plays. And in this case it appears from the way that the first page was written, and I enjoyed the first page until Dr. Fleming started talking — but we’ll get to that — but the first half of the first page was evocative and it was certainly not funny.

It was quite serious. It felt like Book of Eli or Mad Max or something like that. And I just want to tie that in. When Jeremiah arrives in our time, he does so as a joke. There’s a mom… — So the minivan goes racing across the desert and Back to the Future style disappears with a honking, which I did not like, and then emerges in our time. But before it emerges there is a mom saying, “What do we always do before we cross? We do we always do? Look both ways.” It’s all clear. They take a walk. And then, zoom, this minivan appears out of nowhere, almost missing them, which is now sort of a slapsticky introduction.

And my issue is, look, when you’re doing these comedies with big science fiction conceits, that stuff has to be grounded. Keep that stuff grounded. Don’t be goofy-funny with that. You can be goofy-funny, you know, have him zip off into the future and have him emerge into our present and look around, like, “Oh my god,” and it’s kind of awesome. Then when we go to Bob, that’s okay, that’s a new jump, because Bob’s a funny guy so we can now be funny with him. And we’ll know that when he runs into Jeremiah and that plot there’s something to play against that’s real. Because if everything is funny, nothing matters. You got to keep that stuff grounded.

**John:** Yeah. I didn’t like the start as much as you did. And partly because I didn’t know that it was supposed to be a comedy to start, that I was reading it as if it was — I was trying to read it as real, like it was a real Hellscape. And it felt sloppy to me. It didn’t feel like it was doing a particularly good job of setting up what this world was like. Because it’s not really giving us — it says, “Flying over a desert hellscape. Scorched earth and human skulls.” But I’m not really feeling what that world is like, and apparently it’s important, but I’m not really noticing or caring.

And then when we get to the doctor, and once it becomes clear that this is going to be a Back to the Future kind of minivan, then I just sort of checked out for awhile.

**Craig:** Yeah. I understand what you mean. I kind of just read the first half and, okay, I get it. At least I understood what was going on. Then I felt that when the minivan showed up in our time I felt the kind of torque of tone fight going on. I was not helped by Dr. Fleming’s dialogue. “There will be many distractions but you must stay focused on the mission. This is our only chance to stop the apocalypse.”

There’s no subtext whatsoever. This man literally says exactly what he thinks. And he says it to somebody that already knows the information. So, this is not good craft. There’s a way… — We will fill in all sorts of gaps. He’s older. This guy’s younger. This guy’s deferential to him. We get that Fleming’s the boss. We get that Jeremiah is doing this. He says, “It’s time,” which is movie code for something important and dangerous is going to happen. They load this minivan up and then I think it sort of, you know, “It all comes down to you. You cannot fail.” Something like that. We’ll just get it.

It’s like, okay, they’re in the middle of an apocalypse. He’s going back in time. We’ll put it together. But this kind of over-expository radio play stuff is never good.

**John:** Yeah. And we don’t anything about the relationship between them. All we know is that it’s like a boss and employee, but if Jeremiah is the more important character because we’re going to see him in the present day, we should really come to it from his perspective rather than from the doctor’s perspective.

**Craig:** I think that’s a fair point.

**John:** So if the first person we see in future time is Jeremiah, and he carries us to the doctor, that helps establish the weight between the two of them better.

**Craig:** I agree. That’s a great point.

**John:** My other issue is with Bob and his introduction at the end.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I like the idea that the arrival into present day, either it should not be funny, it shouldn’t go for the joke, or if it does go for the joke then I feel like then you cut to the pre-title sequence or you do something else to make a clear divider so that when we get to Bob, the first thing that Bob has right now, he’s selling insurance, and the guy he’s sort of selling insurance to is talking about his mistress. It’s fine, but I’d rather Bob who’s our lead and our hero, get the first laugh.

It would be much better if our hero was the guy who owned the first joke rather than the guy who has to react to the first joke.

**Craig:** That’s right. Yes. For sure. Look, Bob is going to be Steve Carell, probably.

**John:** Yeah. That’s what I read.

**Craig:** I see these a lot. If Steve Carell is in a comedy about saving the world from Armageddon, set up the Armageddon reel and then cut to the silly mundanity of Steve Carell’s life in juxtaposition. But it has to be juxtaposed.

And, yes, he has to be the funny one. Once again we have an “INT. OFFICE.”

**John:** Yes. A generic interior office.

**Craig:** Yeah, so that’s helpful. I don’t know where it is. I don’t know what kind of office. How big? I don’t even know whose office it is, because Bob Miller, who is an insurance salesman, is selling insurance to a corporate executive. Are we in the corporate executive’s office? Are we in Bob’s office? Why is the corporate executive in Bob’s office? Why is he in the corporate executive’s office? No idea where they are or what’s going on until he looks down at the insurance brochure on his desk.

But, you know, you have to think always about how where people sit and what they look like, and how they’re dressed, and where they are. Setting, from our last podcast, can tell us so much about our characters And for comedy can add so much.

You know, when you have two people talking about a brochure, I would love for something else in that scene to be going on to just give it a little bit of life.

**John:** So, again, you don’t know what Bryan has in store for this movie, although I can kind of guess, and I think it’s going to be that these two guys are going to have to come together and stop the apocalypse. I would suggest to Bryan that he might want to do what I think we were just implying there, is set up the apocalypse, set up there’s a plan that you must do, smash cut to — have some line that takes us to, “You must go to the glorious past,” and then we see Bob who’s in the present day which is not glorious at all.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So as an audience we’ll know that these three things are going to be related, and then we’re going to go to the future time and see the minivan or whatever mechanism it is that sends him back in time. That would probably be more rewarding for the moviegoer.

**Craig:** Yes. Without question. And it would be nice if when we see Bob we connect Bob to the activity that is ultimately going to lead to the Armageddon, if it’s some sort of petty thing like littering or whatever.

And then we see Bob return home. He’s in an upscale Kansas neighborhood. I don’t know how I know it’s Kansas. And if it’s important that it’s Kansas, show me it’s Kansas. If it’s more important that it’s just middle America, clue me into middle America but give me a sense of it. Just give me a sense of geography in one way or another.

“When he walks into his house his kids are fighting.” And this is just simple dialogue stuff. His daughter says, “I told you not to delete 30 Rock from the DVR.” Max, her brother says, “Just watch it on Hulu.” Lucy says, “It’s the principle.” Bob says, “Cool it guys. It’s not the end of the world.” Okay, so we get what that line’s about. But “I told you not to delete 30 Rock from the DVR” is not really a line that one child says to another.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** They would be more like, “Idiot, watch it on Hulu!” You know what I mean?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We don’t need to know the details of their fight. She could just hit him and he could say, “Just watch it on Hulu. Who cares? It’s the principle. Don’t touch the remote.”

**John:** And it’s better if they’re actually beating the crap out of each other rather than just arguing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Give the scene; we don’t need details that we don’t need. It’s more fun, frankly, to get an evocation of life in that house than the specifics of the DVR fight.

**John:** If two kids are — like — wrestling and he has to come in and break them up, it’s like, “Whoa, what happened, what happened?” It’s like, “He deleted my show. Just watch it on Hulu.”

**Craig:** “Oh my god.” And then he just walks out.

**John:** Has a reaction.

**Craig:** And he literally walks out of the room and let’s them go back to fighting because he’s given up; he doesn’t care — let them beat each other up. But that sort of thing is about building a scene that informs us. And these — listen, it’s great that people send in the first three pages because the first three pages should be beautifully crafted. They should be just jam-packed with stuff. All sorts of really good stuff about the characters, the tone, the world that the characters live in.

I want to get things from their clothes, their environment, their setting. I want to know — even the pace. Even the pacing. Everything gets set in these first three pages so you can’t be flabby or loose with it

**John:** So I want to thank, I should highlight, but I also want to end on saying Ajay, and Bryan, and J. Nicholas Smith, thank you so much for sending in your three pages. And if we were harsh at any points it’s because we love you and because we’re so very thankful that you were willing to share your three pages of script.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. You know what? I have to say, guys, John and I have both written pages worse than those. Guarantee you.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And it’s part of the deal. And the fact that you’re willing to be brave enough to go and do it speaks well to your chances. And hopefully we didn’t make too many of the same mistakes that we were telling the development executives to not make. [laughs].

**John:** Do you have a Cool Thing this week? Because I have a Cool Thing.

**Craig:** I do have a Cool Thing this week, but you go ahead and do your Cool Thing first.

**John:** So my Cool Thing this week is a book I just read this week, it’s for the iPad, so it’s through the iBook store, and it’s Hooktheory. And it’s one of the new iPad books that has built-in stuff. So it has little video clips built-in and little quizzes built-in.

And so the idea of the book is to talk through music theory in terms of how pop music is built. And a part of me bristles at the thought of me because I always rip on screenwriting theory books, because I find those frustrating, but with music I’m giving it a pass because music theory, there is actual logic behind music. There’s a reason why certain chord progressions are easy and certain chord progressions are really tough to make work. And there are reasons why you find stuff in between.

And since I’ve been working on the musical, I’ll often look over at the music department and they’re figuring out how to move from this key to this key. And they have a grammar and a way of talking about it that’s actually useful in daily life.

So what Hooktheory does is take a look at pop songs, mostly things of the last 10 or 20 years, and they’ll give you these little short 15 second snippets that will break down what the chords are and then how the melody fits into those chords. And by chords they’re not talking C, F, G, but they’re talking relative chords. So they’re teaching you sort of how relative chords work which is 1 through 7, and how you can compare sort of — and the natural ways that you can move from one chord to the next chord, and why certain things fit together really easily and certain things are harder. And it’s very good and proscriptive is saying, like, “Well, you can’t ever do this.” It’s saying these are choices that make it easier. And this is why if you go to this cadence chord you’re going to find it much easier to start your next phrase.

So it’s very, very smart. A really good use of the iPad because it’s the kind of thing that would be almost impossible to talk about in a meaningful way with a normal conventionally printed book. If you didn’t have those little examples right in front of you that you could play back through and see, it really wouldn’t make a lot of sense.

So I read through this and I found myself very intellectual satisfied because it answered a lot of those questions that I’ve always had about how music works. And also frustrated because I felt like this is stuff that I should have been taught in high school. This isn’t Music 101 stuff, but like once I knew how to play an instrument, once I knew how to play piano past a certain point, someone should have taught me how this stuff works, because a lot of things just make much more sense now.

And I’ve ranted before on music education and everyone always accuses me of hating trombones, and that’s not the case at all, but I just felt like this would be a great resource for anybody who is curious about how music works and wants to sort of see the inner workings of harmony.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is absolutely different than screenwriting books. Screenplays are of not fixed length and wildly variable length whereas most pop music songs are between three and five minutes long. And most pop music songs have verse/verse/chorus, verse/bridge/chorus, out. I mean, there’s a real rigid structure to those things and it’s beautiful.

There are some wonderful videos on YouTube where some guy on keyboards, and I think in one case a band, was just going through a very common core progression. One example is the U2 song With or Without You. [hums melody] Okay, now those are all notes, but there’s chords there. [hums again] And it keeps coming back to that same, I think it’s the diatonic or the tonic. But the point is I think it’s a four-chord progression. And that four-chord progression is used by, in these videos you will see, 80, 90 really familiar songs in different ways.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s astonishing. I mean, you would never think that I’m Going Down by Bruce Springsteen is the same as With or Without You, is the same as Glycerine by Bush, is the same as Don’t Stop Believing. It’s pretty remarkable.

**John:** Yeah. Where I come out on this is that it’s not, the book isn’t trying to teach you “here’s how you write a pop song.” It’s basically saying, “These are the components.” And it’s like teaching “these are nouns, these are verbs, these are adjectives. There’s reasons why these fit together in a certain way. And it doesn’t mean you have to absolutely do them in these ways, but if you are trying to do them in different ways you are going to find some things are really natural and some things are really, really hard to do.” So it was a good introduction.

Now, I do want to stress it’s not a 101; it’s like a 201. Because if you were to approach this book and you couldn’t visualize a scale and know what are sharps and what are flats in different scales, it would be a hard book to sort of embrace. And there were times where I had to either go to the piano or pull up a little piano keyboard on the iPad to figure out what stuff was.

But, it also makes good use of sort of the quiz function of the iBooks, is that it will give you an example and you have to figure out what chords could actually fit in these blanks.

**Craig:** I like that. Yeah, put the link up to that. I’m gonna get that. That sounds great.

**John:** It’s good. And so it’s called Hooktheory and they also have a website that it’s based on and so if you don’t have an iPad go to Hooktheory.com. You can see sort of the way they built it out. And it’s very, very smart. It uses a little flash player that you can drag in notes and see sort of how things fit together.

**Craig:** Well interestingly enough my Cool Thing of the week is also music-oriented mostly. It is an app called Audio Essentials. And the internet has been sort of littered with these so-called sound enhancers for laptops.

Laptops have really tiny speakers, obviously, and the smaller that laptops get the smaller the speaker gets. Speaker science is actually pretty amazing, the way that they create speakers and the way that they can… — Because, you know, initially speakers were all about size. When we were kids in the ’70s and ’80s the bigger the speaker the better it was because the woofer was huge and the tweeter could be really big. And then you had a mid-range guy in between the tweeter and the woofer, so you’re EQ, the whole spectral band was represented beautifully, and separated, and gorgeous, and great. But, of course, you know, people don’t really listen to these massive cabinet speakers anymore so much as listen to through headphones and these tiny laptop speakers.

This company Audio Essentials put this app out that what they propose, what they allege, is that it would make your laptop speakers sound super, super better. So, I downloaded it. And, guess what? It makes everything sound super, super better.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** I don’t know how their doing it just through software manipulation alone. All I can say is that there is a separation of the stereo feel that you don’t get. They’re probably doing some version of “exciting.” Exciting is basically where the human ear responds to certain frequencies — frankly, we are excited by certain frequencies more than others which is why literally cymbals are exiting to us, you know. And poor drummers start to experience deafness at certain frequencies because of the cymbals.

But they’re probably pulling out certain frequencies and exciting them. I’m not sure exactly how they’re getting that stereo spread the way that they are, but it really sounds great. And for, I don’t know, whatever it is, $30, I feel like it honestly transformed the sound that’s coming out of my laptop to something that I actually like listening to now.

**John:** That’s great. Just this last week I had people over that needed to play some songs off the laptop. And I ended up running it through separate Bluetooth speakers because it sounds so bad on a laptop. So this might have been a good solution.

**Craig:** Give it a shot. See what you think.

**John:** Cool. Well, Craig, thank you so much. And I would say, and I hope you agree, that it was actually really quite fun going through these three pages, so I would be inclined to do that again in the future.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was great. And I will say this: For those of you who listened to that and went, “Oh no, oh no,” I’ve been doing a very similar thing like this on DoneDealPro. I do it when I can. It’s occasional because we’re busy.

But I read three pages about a half a year ago or a year ago I would say, and I loved them. And I hooked that writer up. I asked him to send me the entire script. I read it. I thought it was really, really good. I gave him suggestions on what to do for a next draft. He finished that draft. I hooked him up with a manager, he has a manager now. And he has an actor attached to another script that he’s writing.

And he’s a screenwriter now. He’s actually getting paid.

**John:** Hooray!

**Craig:** So it’s not all just being smashed in your kneecaps.

**John:** [laughs] Yes.

**Craig:** But mostly it is. [laughs]

**John:** I hope we weren’t smashing in kneecaps. We were pointing out what worked and giving opportunities for improvement.

**Craig:** But I will say, honestly, please, please spell check and watch the typos. When I write I check. I really proofread. I just don’t like sending in things — it just feels unprofessional to me frankly.

**John:** Don’t do that.

Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John, that was great.

**John:** All right, have a fun time, and I will see you next week.

**Craig:** See you next week.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/setting-perspective-and-terrible-numbers).

**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.

So, Craig, my working theory is that most of our listeners are not actual screenwriters, or they’re people who are interested in screenwriting but they’re actively pursuing a career in screenwriting. Is that consistent with your perspective?

**Craig:** Given the numbers that you’ve been reporting, it has to be true.

**John:** Because there are no 65,000 aspiring screenwriters I would assume.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So just people who are interested in screenwriting. And so I really thought this was great news that came out this week is that — it was a study released by the WGA. They released the earnings and clearly there’s never been a better time to not be a screenwriter.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s exactly right. If that’s your interest, if you are actively pursuing not being a screenwriter the trends are definitely in your favor.

**John:** Definitely. Really pretty much any other career you might want to pick other than screenwriting, it’s looking great. Or if you were thinking, “Maybe screenwriting? Or maybe dog grooming?” Well, the numbers are pretty clear that dog grooming is really your future.

**Craig:** It couldn’t be worse than the screenwriting numbers. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] So the numbers we’re talking about, and it’s really hard to talk about numbers and charts on a podcast so I’ll include links to them at johnaugust.com. The Writers Guild every year, I think, has to report earnings for its members.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And so essentially everyone who works as a screenwriter or TV writer in Hollywood is a member of the WGA, the Writers Guild, and the WGA has access to all their payment information, so they know how much these people are bringing in. And so what’s helpful is you can look historically to see how much did people make last year, or the year before, or ten years ago and see whether the trends are positive or negative.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the trends are not positive if you are a person who wishes to be employed in the Hollywood system.

**Craig:** Certainly not for theatrical. For television maybe it’s a little bit better. But for screenwriting right now it’s horrendous.

**John:** Yes. So the number that you actually, the chart you sent me which is Earnings and Employment in Screen, was that for features or was that for TV and…

**Craig:** That’s just for features.

**John:** That’s just for features.

**Craig:** Yeah. The Screen is what they call movie screens.

**John:** So, for this last year, for 2011, which is the last year that they have numbers, there are 1,562 writers reporting earnings for Screen, for the big screen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which was down 8.1%.

**Craig:** From the year before.

**John:** From the year before. And down significantly more from prior years. And the total amount of earnings of all those writers writing for feature films was down 12.6%, which is a lot.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a lot. And at some point you can’t quite…you have to get off of the thing of blaming just the economy. If you look at the sort of year-on-year trends you realize that even though we sort of hit rock bottom with the economy in 2008, somehow there are still so many fewer of us who are reporting any earnings. Reporting earnings means that you made a dollar. There are so many fewer of us reporting earnings now than in 2008. And we are making much less as an aggregate because so many fewer of us are reporting earnings.

And if you go back to the last number that the Guild reports historically, in 2006, to give you perspective on it, 1,993 writers earned money in screenwriting for movies. That’s down to 1,562. So that’s 431 jobs, or 431 writers that earn money, gone.

**John:** Yeah. So someone might be thinking, “Well, there’s less competition, so that’s a good thing.” But that’s not really the case at all. It’s probably the same number of writers pursuing fewer jobs, and in pursuing fewer jobs fewer of them actually end up landing jobs.

The other sort of dangerous statistic which is a temptation but I would urge you to really step back away from the precipice there is to take the total amount of earnings and divide it by the number of writers employed. Because that would give you a number that is like $200,000 which makes it sound like, “Wow, everyone’s making $200,000,” which is not a very useful metric by anything because you’re making up an imaginary average writer who doesn’t actually exist.

**Craig:** That’s right. There is a distribution of income across writers. And this is a… — I’ve actually asked one of our Guild board members to see if they can’t put a chart like this together for us because this is what I’m most interested in.

Typically you will see bell curves for income distribution in any field. So, the fewest people earn sort of the bottom end of the thing. Another small amount of people are in the top end, but most people working in the business tend to earn the sort of middle average salary for that business.

For us, I suspect we’re looking at something like an inverted bell curve, a U-curve where the bulk of people are either earning at the lower end or at the very high end. And it’s the middle class of writing that has been decimated as the amount of jobs that are available go down, and as the amount of writers who are employed go down, and as the amount of writers who are employed go down, and as the total earnings go down.

**John:** And that’s what we’ve talked about many times on the podcast is that screenwriting is essentially the research and development of the film industry. You are designing the movies that may or may not get made, but that’s what they’re bringing you in to do.

And it feels to me like the biggest crisis in the film industry right now, especially as it affects screenwriters, is the decision not to even do the research and development. We’re basically just deciding, “We’re going to make this movie and we’ll spend however much money we have to make this movie, but we’re not going to try to figure out other stuff. We’re not going to experiment along the way. And so we’re only writing big checks and we’re not writing any small checks.”

**Craig:** Yeah. And unfortunately what’s happening, I think, is sort of akin to what the New York Yankees went through under Steinbrenner in the last ’70s. And I know you know what I’m going to say, John.

**John:** Absolutely. 100%. A sports reference, a sports metaphor, I’ll totally be with you.

**Craig:** [laughs] George Steinbrenner in his zeal to win World Series would routinely trade away all his young farm system players, all of his prospects, for middle aged or aging superstars who could give you that one great season and push you over the line. And in doing so kind of mortgaging the future.

And I think right now studios are kidding themselves if they think they’re not hurting the movies ten years from now, because if they can’t figure out a way to make screenwriting an attractive occupation for smart people, smart people won’t do it. They just won’t do it. It’s too hard of a job. It’s too unpredictable of a job to throw your lot in and hope that maybe you can make $100,000 a year when you could go into finance, or law, or medicine or something that frankly is more satisfying on some kind of a human level. Whether your interests are financial or just quality of life, it’s too easy to go do something else.

So, who’s going to be writing these movies ten years from now if they can’t figure out how to make this a reasonable occupation? I don’t know the answer to that question.

**John:** No. But let’s not dwell on the glumness of that. It’s not something we’re going to solve here today. And sometimes our podcast does get a little negative, so I want to make sure that we’re not driving people to the bridge that they want to jump off.

**Craig:** I know. And we do do this and I apologize. The truth is it would be… — It is unfair, in a sense, to go on and on about this stuff in a discouraging way to the person out there who is going to end up making $1 million because they going to make $1 million, no matter what we say, no matter how bad things are. But it would be equally unfair, I think, to hide the truth for people which is that it’s looking not good.

The only thing I will say… Here, I will end on an optimistic note. So if you are driving to the bridge, pull over. This business is remarkably cyclical. Almost fetishistically cyclical. I think Hollywood is built on the notion that new is good. And that permeates everything, even business, I think. So, it seems like what’s going to happen is in a year or two, I’m hoping, they just get sick of the current way of doing it and try something new.

**John:** Great. And I want to believe, Craig. You know I want to believe. What I worry about is that the next stage isn’t going to be actually a better stage. It’s going to be a riskier stage that’s not going to actually be helpful to people.

**Craig:** Well, you know, I was trying to be helpful. [laughs]

**John:** Where I do think your thesis is correct is that this is a business that is built on the new, and so if you’re a person who is now entering the film and television industry, there may be opportunities that weren’t there before, and there’s new stuff that will come up and new opportunities and new ways to do things. That doesn’t necessarily help the person who reached the middle of the career and it’s just sort of going away now.

**Craig:** I was really struggling to say something hopeful and you killed it.

**John:** I did. I’m so sorry. We won’t try to spin gold out of this anymore. We’ll just go on to something new and happy.

Let’s talk about craft. Let’s talk about a question from Kyle, a reader who says, “It would be great to hear from you and Craig to discuss setting and its impact on character, conflict, and story. I’ve been reading a lot of scripts lately and the kitchen, the car, and the sidewalk are due for an upgrade.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s a good observation. A lot of times you will see just sort of generic settings used in movies. And movies don’t have to take place in normal areas and necessarily probably shouldn’t. So settings should be one of those early things you’re thinking about in the conception of your movie. And, you know, think about it… — Remember, you’re not just writing a script, you’re writing a movie, so where will be the interesting place to stage those scenes of your movie that have the visual and emotional impact that they could have?

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. It’s, to me, eventually somebody is gonna have to go scout, and how do you scout “Park?” How do you scout “Parking Lot?” How do you scout “Super Market?” There has to be something, I think, when you sit down and write a scene that connects the setting to what’s going on. And even if the nature of what’s going on is sort of setting independent, find a way to at least place it so it feels real. Interact with the world around you. Who is moving in and out of the space? What can the space tell us about the people who are employed there or the people who are visiting there, the people who are robbing from it?

Whatever it is, figure out how to make it integral. Otherwise, frankly, you’re just doing a sitcom, you know. It’s boring. Sets are boring.

**John:** The reason why you see the same settings again, and again, and again on TV is because TV is trying to shoot on a 7 or 8 day schedule. And so if you see parking garages a lot in TV that’s because they could get to the parking garage and it’s a location they can control. They don’t need to worry about day or night. Parking garages are common in TV because they’re easy to shoot. They’re sort of terrible for sound but they’re easy to shoot.

But if you’re writing a feature, well, I would say no matter what you’re writing, don’t be limited by what you tend to see on one-hour dramas. Think bigger. Classically a sort of like at this point clichéd-ly — is that the right way to say it? “Clichéd-ly?”

**Craig:** I’ll take it. Yeah.

**John:** Almost every Bruckheimer movie will have some scene that takes place in a boxing ring. And it will usually be some sort of exposition scene where somebody has to go to talk to somebody about something, and for whatever reason they’re going to be in a boxing ring. They just do that. Because it’s more visual.

And that’s a choice, but find your own boxing ring to stage that scene where two characters are talking.

**Craig:** By the way, the boxing ring is what happens when the screenwriter doesn’t come up with something better.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Because the director is like, “Look, I’m not having two people talk about this over a sandwich. So, oh, here’s a great space. And here’s light shining through. And here’s something with aesthetic value that’s gonna look cinematic.”

Now the truth is those things seem ridiculous because they seem superimposed onto the drama of what matters. But to me that goes back to, okay, at least… — If that happens to you it’s because they just didn’t like your idea, but at least have an idea. Have a better, more interesting setting.

Your point about television is a great one. Remember: hour-long dramas are on budgets. They are shot for a small screen. And they are confined by time. The show must be certain length. Movies don’t have to be a certain length at all and they’re very, very big. So that means when somebody drives to a spot the camera can linger on it. It can rise up. It can reveal. It can really make a meal out of it if it’s interesting, you know.

So, if you are effectively seeing the scene in your head before you write it, that doesn’t mean just the people and their mouths. It means the world around the them, for sure. And think about…I always like to think about the things that you can’t see immediately but then you can see on people, like heat, wind, dust, smells. Really work with the world.

And, you know, you will find sometimes that you get comedy or interesting surprises out of characters who are desperately focused on the thing that is the story and yet distracted by the world around them. And that creates a verisimilitude that I think is very satisfying.

**John:** Definitely. If that scene is now walking through a meat packing plant it’s going to have a very different feel and texture and you’re giving the actor something to respond to as they’re going through things.

And I’ve kind of forked this answer into two parts. There’s the setting that come to, “This is the world in which this movie takes place.” And so quite early on in the process you’re figuring out, “What is the setting of this movie?” “What part of the world does this take place in?” “What kind of things are in this movie?”

There are two projects I’m working on right now where setting, those big setting questions are really key and crucial. One of them, the initial version of the project was taking place in sort of Park Slope, Brooklyn. And I like Park Slope, Brooklyn, but I have weird sort of sympathy issues with Park Slope, Brooklyn and our expectations that come bundled with people who live in that neighborhood. So, is that the right place to tell this story next, or should we tell it in a different neighborhood? So we’re looking at sort of what are the alternatives that gives a lot of what Park Slope has but doesn’t have all the pressures of what Park Slope would give you.

Another thing I’m thinking about, it’s a dark movie, but could we take this dark movie and do it in San Diego? And you don’t think about San Diego being dark, but if we were going to do it in San Diego, what are the dark parts of San Diego? And that could be really interesting.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. I mean, that is how directors approach the stuff and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t do that as well. For a lot of the complaining that we do as screenwriters about directors “screwing up” our screenplays, sometimes they do. Sometimes they’re filling in gaps we just didn’t get across.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And the more you can put into a script that conveys your intentions as an author, the more the director will tend to absorb that and use it directly or be influenced by it.

**John:** Look at The Hangover II. You had to make a choice very early on where you were going to set that movie. And picking, was it Thailand? Bangkok?

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Once you picked that place that was a fundamental decision about everything else that was going to radiate out from there. And so if for whatever reason you couldn’t have shot there, you could have moved the movie somewhere else but it would have been a very different movie and you would have had to go through probably every scene and look at sort of, “What is this? If we’re now in Tokyo rather than Bangkok, what is different about our movie?” And kind of everything is different about your movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it would have just been a complete rewrite.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You can’t, particularly in a movie in which the location is such an enormous part of the plot itself, it needs to be tied in integrally, which means if you pull it out that’s not a simple stitch up. And frankly with that movie, Todd and I did a scout in Bangkok and in Malaysia and wrote — I probably rewrote 20% of the script just based on the locations that were there to be the locations we had wanted. So it was even, “Okay, we want to do something in a marketplace.” And we looked online and we studied and researched and found pictures.

So we wrote the scene crafted towards a marketplace. But then you get there and you walk around and you go back and you rewrite it again because you have to use what’s around you. It’s sort of fundamental to the gig. Which, by the way, another reason I feel like directors who sort of as a rule of thumb don’t like to have writers around during preproduction are hurting themselves.

**John:** Because they may have found an amazing location, but they’re going to try to shoehorn that location onto a scene that already exists. And if they’d actually brought the writer to that location and talked with them about like these are the opportunities at this place, “What do you think? What can we do? How could this affect the scene?” The writer might have great ideas for how it actually impacts things.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And, frankly, I’m okay with the director saying, “I want to shoot the scene here. I love the way this looks. I think it’s going to be exciting. And it’s going to put the audience in the mood I want. Please help me fit the scene as well for this space as you fit it for your theoretical space.”

**John:** Exactly. So, this is really staking to the other fork of the conversation is you’ve made the big setting choice in terms of this is the location, this is the world this is taking place in, and now it’s getting very specific. And so as you’re just the screenwriter working by yourself, you are approaching the scene and you’re sort of doing that looping in your head. You’re figuring out what’s in the scene. One of the first questions you should ask is, “Am I really setting this scene in the right place? Is this moment taking place in the most interesting place?”

A director I’m working with, one of her cardinal rules is she never wants to see the same set twice, which seems really, really hardcore but it’s actually a wonderful challenge. So you look at if you saw that character’s house before, she never wants to see that house again. She never wants to see that living room again. And so you’re constantly having to move on.

Her point, which I think is an interesting point, is that visually if we’ve been in a place before and we come back to that space it’s going to feel like, “Well, we’re just back to where we began.” Like we haven’t really moved forward.

So, you can go back to a space but only if you basically fundamentally destroyed something or completely changed what’s happened when you’ve gotten there.

**Craig:** It’s a good rule of thumb. It really is. In fact, I remember you were telling me about this and I looked back and it’s something that I naturally do anyway. I don’t adhere to it slavishly. There are a couple of times where you might see the same set twice for good reason. And certainly movies that are about journeys always require a return. But in general, yeah, that’s right.

**John:** You’ve got to burn the bridges behind the characters. And sometimes that literally means burning their house down. Always a good choice.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** So as you’re looking at that individual scene that you’re writing, and you’re looping it in your head, “Where is the best place for that to happen?” And your first instinct will probably be something kind of pedestrian. And it’s like, “Oh, it’s a normal real world kind of thing, but it doesn’t have to be that at all.” And so look for what it is.

And that’s not an invitation to go nuts on your scene description and sort of do that, again, that D&D description where you’re talking about the tapestries on the walls, but just give us someplace interesting that’s going to have not just hopefully something visually interesting to see but will create interesting opportunities with the people or the characters who would be in that spot.

**Craig:** Absolutely. There’s no reason to over-describe the space if the slug line does all the work for you. Like you said, “Meatpacking Plant. Two people are having a discussion. He walks in.” “It’s an interior Meatpacking Plant. Day. It is a fully-functioning meatpacking plant full of cows, and blood, and workers wearing chain mail, wielding knives. Chunks of meat hit the floor. So and so moves to…”

That’s it. And by the way, here’s the thing, and think about this as a reader, anybody reading a script is going to remember that. It’s instantly specific. And people complain sometimes about writers skimming, we’ll naturally skim over the generic every time. It’s just sort of a neurological glitch.

**John:** Yeah. So, specific, interesting. Try to sort of pick the least boring place possible to set that individual scene. And, as you’re approaching the big idea of your movie, where’s the best place for it to happen? Where’s going to be the most visually interesting and create the most challenges for your character as you’re going through it?

**Craig:** Yeah. And when you’re sitting around sort of thinking, “Okay, now how do I make this interesting because they’re going to have a fight and they’re going to have a chase?” Well how will it be interesting? Stop and go, space. The space will make it interesting. But then think about how the space makes it interesting. It’s your friend.

**John:** Next topic I want to switch to is something that came up with something that you and I both interacted with this last week, but also a project that I’m trying to set up. There’s a book that may be made into a movie that I’m sort of taking around town and pitching. And as people read the book they like the book a lot, but the book is complicated in that it has multiple narrators and there’s overlapping narrations, and the story is told from different points of view, and some of those points of view overlap so you see the same events from multiple places.

So, the first question that people ask me when they read the book and want to know how I’m going to do this movie is like, “Well, so who’s story are we telling? How are we seeing it?” And they assume that because I was the guy who wrote Go and The Nines that I had this really complicated plan for how I’m going to do it. And I say, “No, no, I’m actually doing it very simple and very straightforward and I’m telling it with a camera and we’re moving forward in time,” and people feel much more confident when I sort of talk them off that edge.

But that idea of point of view and perspective is something I want to talk into right now. Because every movie is going to be told from some character’s point of view. And as I read screenplays from newer writers, sometimes that point of view is really murky and unclear. And so I want to talk about some of the deliberate choices you make as a screenwriter for who’s point of view you’re telling a story from.

I thought I might start with Bridesmaids.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So at the very start of Bridesmaids we’re seeing Kristen Wiig, we’re seeing Jon Hamm, and other important characters come through. There’s the other Bridesmaids. There’s Chris O’Dowd. Let’s just talk about Chris O’Dowd who plays the policeman, the unrealistically Irishman Irish police policeman. But he’s one of the main characters.

So, what if early on in the story we cut to a scene with Chris O’Dowd before we had met him with Kristen Wiig and we saw him going about his daily life, or we saw him like making an arrest? And a screenwriter might put that scene in saying like, “Oh, well this is going to be an important character. I want to know who he is. I want to know a little bit about him before we he and Kristen Wiig’s characters meet.”

That would change the script fundamentally if we had a scene with him that did not involve her. That’s my thesis.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. Certainly, because it would start to feel much more like a romantic comedy centered around the two of them and less about the story of a woman growing up. Yeah, for sure. There are certain conventions that we use in the first act to cue the audience about what sort of story they are to expect and what kind of weight to apply to characters. And you’ll get this note constantly from studios to, “We need to see this person on their own. We need to get who they are, and where they live, and all the rest.” And that makes sense for some kinds of movies.

But like you say, for other kinds, no. No it does not.

**John:** So I would argue that in most movies your protagonist is going to be driving scenes, and by driving scenes I mean they are going to be the main engine behind a scene. And it would be very unusual to have a scene that does not involve your protagonist or some other characters providing some crucial service to your protagonist which could by your villain.

I mean, with something like Bridesmaids, though, let’s take for example what would happen if we did catch Chris O’Dowd. Our audience’s expectation would be this is going to be a two-hander. This is going to be a movie about how the two of these people meet and fall in love. And the only thing that would change is just that one extra scene with Chris O’Dowd would set that expectation.

If you have a movie that’s like a thriller and we’re following our hero and then suddenly this minor character who we’re cutting away to who is doing something, our expectation is going to be that that person is going to be very, very important. And so we’re going to watch and be waiting for that person. If that person doesn’t’ come back and do something interesting in the next 20 minutes we’re going to be frustrated.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a difficult thing to instruct. This is kind of one of those things you have to have a sense for. You have to have an ear for it. Because there are times where you could sort of feel like you might be able to go either way, or does this person deserve a little bit extra? You just kind of have to feel it. Yeah.

It’s funny that you mention because there is I know in Identity Thief, the first 10, 15 pages is kind of split perspective between Jason Bateman’s character and Melissa McCarthy’s character even though their nowhere near each other geographically, nor do they know each other. But that sets up the expectation that in fact the movie is about their relationship, which it is.

**John:** Yeah, exactly. So, it has a romantic comedy setup even though it’s not a classic romantic comedy.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** But if you did have that split setup and they were not going to overlap you have an audience revolt. If those two characters did not meet pretty quickly into the second act, your audience would get very, very impatient with you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you’re essentially… — The only people you introduce in the beginning, and from their perspective, are the key players of the key relationship. In an action movie you would obviously know your hero and you could split perspective to the villain, which they do all the time, because that’s the key relationship of the movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But beyond that, if it’s a story about one person growing up, the story about one person, I mean, because what is the central relationship in Bridesmaids? Well, you could argue it’s between her and the cop, you could argue it’s between her and Maya Rudolf, you could argue it’s between her and her friends, her and her mom, her and the world. It’s her. It’s her and herself. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. The primary relationship is Kristen Wiig and herself.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. It’s the same thing with 40-Year-Old Virgin. We don’t spend time meeting other people on their own because everything is through the lens of the person who has to grow up. So, it is an important thing to figure out. Are you telling a story about one person kind of blossoming, or are you telling the story of one person locked in battle with one other person? Or are you telling the story of one person falling in love with one other person? And that should help you figure this out.

**John:** So, an alternative if you are faced with a situation where you do need to introduce this character but you’re having a hard time finding out about this person without, you know, basically your instinct is to give the cutaway scene where you can figure everything out about the Chris O’Dowd character or whoever, and you don’t know quite how to do it. You probably need to find a way that your protagonist can come to wherever that other character is and see them there in their setting.

If you need to find that character in a setting, somehow you’re going to need to take your protagonist and bring them there to see that, because otherwise we’re under the expectation that we can cut to that character at all times and that person is going to have equal weight in the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you can’t leave the character. The character doesn’t get their own introduction. You can’t leave them flat and sort of uninteresting without a life, but one of the things that brings us and the audience closer to the protagonist which is precisely what you want.

It is for the protagonist to ask the questions we’re asking. So we’re going, “Well what’s the deal, why is that guy Irish? And what is the deal with him being a cop? And why does he live here?” And then she asks him, and that’s comforting to me because I think, “Oh, she’s like me.” And we want that. We want that.

**John:** She is your window into the movie. And so you’re seeing things from her point of view and you have the same questions that she would have in the scenes.

Now, a related issue which often comes up is voiceover. And voiceover is like POV but sort of like a super power POV. And that’s the ability of a character to talk directly to the audience. There’s probably two or three different flavors of voiceover. There’s the voiceover that’s not attached to anything, so that’s literally just the character is talking to you directly as the audience. And you see that in some movies that sort of set up the “once upon a time”, or the…

**Craig:** American Beauty.

**John:** Exactly. And so the person is talking directly to you. There’s the attached voiceover which is a character starts talking and then it transitions into something else and that character is talking kind of continuous over that. So, Forrest Gump does that where Forrest will start talking to somebody on a bench and then we’ll transition into that. At a certain point they kind of blur together because if it’s been so long since we went back to the attached scene we’re going to sort of forget that it’s attached to anything.

But Big Fish actually has examples of both kind of voiceover, where most of the voiceover in the story is something that Albert Finney or Ewan McGregor started talking about a story and then we transition to what that was. But Billy Crudup’s character does have sort of direct voiceover power to the audience. And that was a choice we had to make along the way: “How are we going to get inside their perspective on what this story is about to them?”

**Craig:** Voiceover is sort of unfairly maligned because so many bad screenwriters use it as a crutch. They pour it like ketchup all over something because they don’t know how else to convey the information in an interesting way. But that’s unfortunate because in the hands of masters voiceover is amazing. And it can also evoke a certain tone, a wonderful tone.

I mean, you know, Blade Runner is the great — the great debate over the voiceover in Blade Runner. I kind of love it. I just feel like, okay, it’s film noir, that’s the point. And that’s what film noir has. It has voiceover. I love it. And the voiceover is good.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** So I enjoy it.

One of the most fascinating uses of voiceover, perhaps misuses, is in Dune, the David Lynch film.

**John:** Absolutely. I love David Lynch, too.

**Craig:** I mean, I’m obsessed with this movie. I’ve watched it a billion times. It’s not a good movie, but it’s a wonderful movie anyway. It’s amazing. Parts of it are just stunningly incredibly great. Overall, I could see why, really the problem with the movie is I think you do have to watch it 12 times before you start to like it. [laughs] So that’s not really what you want out of a movie, but I love it.

But it has one of the.. — I don’t think any other movie has ever done this, where multiple characters will do voiceover of what they’re thinking. Sometimes in the same scene. One person will say something and then will hear what they are thinking.

Then you will cut to the other person they are talking to who will answer back and then will hear what they’re thinking. It’s bizarre. I just love that he did it.

**John:** Yeah. It feels very Lynchian, so there you go.

**Craig:** It does. It’s wild, man. But, you know, be careful with VO. A little goes a long way. And if you’re going to use it, just understand it has a big impact on the way the story is unfolding.

**John:** And the other related sort of super power tool that some characters are allowed to drive and some characters aren’t is flashbacks. And flashbacks are one of those controversial things because it’s like, “Oh, I need to find out more information about that character. I need to understand why they are saying this thing they are doing in the present.”

And that can be fine. There’s lots of movies that do flashbacks extraordinarily well, or that are built in a way that works them in really well. The big point of caution I would have with any sort of flashback situation is whenever you’re in a flashback that means that nothing bad can happen to your protagonist in the present. So, any time you are cutting away from the present tense storyline, you’re basically letting your character off the hook.

We know that nothing terrible is going to happen to them in the present which could be a bad thing if you’re in a thriller or some sort of action movie. But it’s also bad in a comedy because we were supposed to be caring about what was happening in the present tense of the comedy, and if you’re cutting away from the present tense of the comedy for a long period of time we have no idea what’s going on.

**Craig:** Yeah, comedies will sometimes use flashbacks just as goofs, you know, almost to make fun of the trope of flashbacks. The thing about flashbacks is that they are cheesy. So, if you’re going to do them, figure out how to do them in an un-cheesy way. Make them shocking, or confusing, or surprising. But, uh, you know…

**John:** I would also argue that anytime you’re going to a flashback, our having seen that flashback has to fundamentally change our experience of watching the present right at that moment. So you can’t just like — a character can’t just be sitting there on the lawn and then have a flashback to think about their life when they were a child, and then come back to them on the lawn and not have anything changed. It needs to be a crucial bit of revelation for us as an audience that changes what this character is doing next for us.

**Craig:** The only exception I can think of to that is if part of what is going on is that it’s not so much a flashback as a memory that is unconstructed or not completely realized. So a person is trying to remember something and they can remember all the way up to a point and then it collapses. And then that’s creating a mystery. But that’s really more about a memory and not a flashback.

I always feel like a flashback is the movie sending you somewhere, which I don’t like.

**John:** Yeah, it can be tough. Again, any of these techniques done masterfully are great, and they’re wonderful, and they’re awesome. And there are movies that do strange things with point of view and perspective that kind of shouldn’t work but because they do work they are kind of extra brilliant.

I love a movie that in the third act suddenly a character who shouldn’t really be able to drive a scene by him or herself does and it’s surprising and exciting. And that feels… — You notice that because it’s almost always a mistake. But then when it’s not a mistake it’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah. And can sort of recontextualize everything that came before it. And there are movies that sort of make a meal of being split perspective, and that’s a stylistic thing. The key is, of course, if you’re going to go for something, go for it and do it. So, Pulp Fiction fragments its perspective across a number of characters and just goes for it completely. It commits.

You know, there’s a fine line between mistake and on purpose, but it’s a line. So, if you’re going to do it, do it.

**John:** Quite early on in Go, I had to make the deliberate choice of every scene is from — as the movie starts — is from Ronna’s perspective. But then we’re able to cut back to Claire and Gaines at the apartment by themselves, and that was an important choice because that let the audience know that we were going to be jumping around between people and it’s going to be okay. And suddenly as the second act starts we’re going to be jumping to a whole new group of people who you kind of barely know and they’re going to have storytelling power for the next thirty minutes.

**Craig:** It’s funny, one of the most common words used in criticisms of big Hollywood movies is “Lazy.” They’ll say, “Well, it’s just a lazy movie.” But, frankly, I think there’s nothing lazier than a movie that doesn’t feel any obligation to make sense. I mean, god, give me two hours I write one of those.

**John:** Yeah, easy.

**Craig:** Easy!

**John:** Yeah, basically just write a bunch of scenes and then scramble them up and done.

**Craig:** Exactly. [laughs] Exactly. It’s why… — I don’t know if you’re familiar with The Shaggs.

**John:** I don’t know what The Shaggs are.

**Craig:** So The Shaggs were a…I hesitate to say a musical group. It was the 1960s and this guy in New Hampshire, I think, was looking at all these bands and a lot of the bands were family bands. And they were making money. And so he had three daughters and he bought each of them an instrument — a guitar, a bass guitar, and a drum set. And basically sent them to the barn because he was a farmer and said, “Learn how to play this and then I’ll write songs and then I’ll take you into Boston and well record an album.”

And the problem is they had absolutely no musical talent whatsoever. Nor music songwriting talent. In fact, they’re aggressively untalented. And he didn’t quite get that. And he took them to Boston and they recorded an album. And it’s the most amazing thing you’ve ever heard. And it’s freely available online. And Frank Zappa sort of famously said, “If any musician had done this on purpose they would be the greatest musician of all time.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] Because the time signatures were incredibly complicated. The patterns were… — You really have to hear it; it’s remarkable.

**John:** It’s like outsider art.

**Craig:** It really is. It was just remarkable. And sometimes I feel like when I see really, really bad things that are just jumbled together and make no sense in and of itself, I think I couldn’t have done this if I tried. And no musician could do what The Shaggs did if they tried.

**John:** So maybe they shouldn’t try it.

**Craig:** Yeah, don’t try.

**John:** Don’t try.

**Craig:** Don’t try it.

**John:** I’m ready for Cool Things. Do you have a Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** I do. I do. I have a really cool thing this week. This is like the coolest thing to me. It’s so stupid but I love it. [laughs] So, I love peanut butter. And I’ve always loved peanut butter. And peanut butter is one of those foods that depending on who you talk to it’s either good for you or bad for you because it’s lots of protein, it’s a legume, and the kind of fat that is has is very good fat, but there’s also a lot of fat, there’s a lot of oil in it, and it’s very caloric. So, you get differing opinions on this.

But there is this new thing called PB2 and basically this company took peanut butter and smashed out all the oil and then dehydrated it basically into a powder. And then you just mix it with water and you get what is essentially peanut butter with almost no fat in it at all.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** And so the caloric difference is like basically it goes from 200 calories to like 50 calories. It’s crazy. So I’ve been eating this stuff literally by the boatload. It’s spectacular. And so they have regular and they have chocolate flavored, so almost like a Nutella. And, okay, so the question is: Does it taste just like peanut butter? Almost! Yeah. And it’s not like “almost” like the way that Diet Coke “almost” tastes like Coke except it’s got that weird chemical thing going on. It’s totally natural. They haven’t put anything into it. They’ve just taken one thing out. And, oddly, you miss it less than you would think. So, you can get it on Amazon. I am not a paid endorser of this company, even though I sound like it. I just love it. I think it’s so cool.

**John:** We will put a link in the show notes.

**Craig:** Yeah, PB2.

**John:** I’m not a peanut butter eater. I’m an almond butter eater. I eat way too much almond butter. Like some days I think maybe 30% or 40% of my calories come from almonds in some form.

**Craig:** It’s good.

**John:** But, yeah, peanuts are good. Now, is the peanut butter fine enough that you could maybe distribute it in the ventilator system of a building and kill all the people with peanut allergies?

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Ah, see, we made a plot right here.

**Craig:** No question. No question. If you wanted to kill somebody with a peanut allergy it’s done.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Cool.

My Cool Thing is a simple little thing that you can buy at most office supply stores now. Now we talked in the podcast previously about how I tend to write by hand. So when I go off to do a first draft I will write by hand. I usually use sort of stiff-backed legal pad and white legal pad is my preferable legal pad. And it’s worked fine. The challenges of a legal pad is you’re always flipping the pages back over themselves and it gets to be a little bit unwieldy. So, I said, “Well maybe there might be a wirebound notebook that I would like.” And it turns out there’s one that’s amazing.

So, it’s the Cambridge Ivory Wirebound Notebook. And it looks just like kind of the notebook you remember from high school with like the little spiral wire thing, but it’s wider so that the pages are actually full size and have perfect perforations so you can rip out pages and they’re nice and neat and clean.

It’s slightly off-white which seems weird when you first look at it but it’s actually really comfortable for your eyes. It’s just the right heaviness and thickness.

So, I try not to be one of those people who’s obsessive about having to have one specific thing, or one specific pencil, or one specific anything, but I really love these notebooks. So, if you’re writing by hand I would urge you to pick up a three-pack of these because they’re really good.

**Craig:** I don’t understand. Because you said you don’t like flipping back and forth with the legal pad but don’t you have to flip back and forth with this, too.

**John:** No, here’s what I’m saying. As you’re writing on a legal pad you’re always bending those top pages back over.

**Craig:** Oh, I see.

**John:** Bending over the top of the sheet.

**Craig:** And then by the time you get to like the 80th page…

**John:** And it gets messy and those pages get sort of bent.

**Craig:** So this lays flat like a proper spiral.

**John:** It lays flat like a proper spiral. And it’s good. And it’s easier to sort of carry around because a lot times when I’m doing writing someplace, I’ll be in Vegas, or Boston, or whatever, I’m taking this pad around and it always sort of gets dinged up and this actually has a cover on it so you can do it properly.

**Craig:** Ah, yeah. If I ever use paper for anything I would probably get that.

**John:** Yeah. But you don’t use paper because you’re a digital boy.

**Craig:** I’m digital. But I will tell you what, I do use that PB2 for everything.

**John:** If you could write just on a sheet made of PB2. And then if you don’t like you could just eat your words.

**Craig:** Just eat it. I’d just eat it. Yeah. Yeah, it’s delicious.

**John:** What if you get sick of it? What if like three weeks from now you’re like, “God, I never want to see that stuff again?”

**Craig:** Well, you know, they send it to you in a regular peanut butter sized jar which I blow through really quickly. Like, you know, my wife was out of town. And I don’t know if it’s the same thing with you and Mike, but when my wife is out of town I don’t go to the grocery store.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So what happens is I just start going down layers of old food, [laughs] because at some point I’m like I haven’t eaten in eight hours, because I’m lazy, but I don’t want to leave the house. So now I’m going to eat graham crackers for dinner. Which is what I did last night.

So the PB2 has been a huge thing because Amazon shipped it over. But it doesn’t come in massive sizes. So you’ll get through it pretty quickly, and if you don’t like it just chuck it. Send it to me.

**John:** I’ll send it Craig. Craig will eat it.

**Craig:** And for those one or two of you who are thinking, “Oh, why isn’t he playing his guitar?” I was thinking about it and then I realized it’s a little dumb to pointlessly play guitar and sing on a podcast about screenwriting.

But then I thought, you know, what if we get to 100,000 people…

**John:** [gasps]

**Craig:** …Then I would do it.

**John:** Okay, so if people get their friends to listen to the podcast then…

**Craig:** Yeah. If we can get, I mean, 100,000 people, at that point I am playing for a venue that’s bigger than Dodger’s Stadium or the old Meadowlands. Then I’ll do it.

**John:** That feels like a lot of pressure, but it’s certainly a good opportunity.

**Craig:** No, I have…I’m fearless because I’m a sociopath.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So that’s one challenge. And then we talked before we got on the air today, a second challenge that we’re going to do for next week. Basically we’ll be taking submissions this next week, and it may not be the next podcast we record, but a subsequent podcast. Let’s do a first Three Page Challenge. So this is a thing where you send us the first three pages of your screenplay and we’ll sort of randomly pick through and grab some of these screenplays that are sent to us.

Only send the first three pages. If you send more than three pages we will not open it. We will just delete the email. So, only three pages of your script. And we will read the screenplay and we will probably talk about it on air. And we will tell you what was awesome and what was not so awesome.

And we’ll also include links to…so that other people who are wanting to read those first three pages can read it, too. So, first three pages, it could be any genre, it could be any kind of thing.

**Craig:** Does it have to be the first three. What if they do like…

**John:** It could be a disaster, honestly, as I’m talking about it. It could be a horrible thing but it could be a lot of fun.

**Craig:** What if they do three pages from the middle of the script?

**John:** Oh, that’s an interesting choice.

**Craig:** Yeah. Why don’t we just say any three pages.

**John:** Any three pages.

**Craig:** As long as they’re consecutive.

**John:** First three pages make a lot of sense. But if the middle three pages are more appealing, that’s great, too. First three pages we would probably talk more about how you’re setting up your story. Middle three pages we might talk a little bit more about the words you’re choosing and sort of what you’re doing on the page. So, your choice. Please only submit once.

Other disclaimers: Don’t see us for stealing your idea or something because we’ll just mock you endlessly.

**Craig:** You should actually probably, if you’re going to do this online, make them sign a thing.

**John:** Yeah. Signing stuff online is really weird, though.

**Craig:** Oh it is?

**John:** I’m not sure that it actually holds up. Because how is somebody to say that it was really their script and not somebody else’s script? Yeah, when I first considered the idea I thought maybe we’ll do, like we’ll assign them a topic so that they would have to write on a certain topic so therefore they wouldn’t feel like there’s the…we’re stealing someone’s idea.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, we’re not going to steal your idea.

**John:** Maybe we should have talked all about this before we actually got on the air and started recording it.

**Craig:** [laughs] Maybe we should quickly go to law school.

**John:** I am willing to try the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it will be fun. The only other thing I would say to people is don’t send us your three pages if you’re not willing to get punched in the face super hard if we don’t like it.

**John:** Absolutely. So if you want to use a fake, a handle, a pen name, pseudonym, go for it. But, we might talk about your thing on the air and we might love it, or we might not love it. So, do be aware of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. But otherwise, let’s do it.

**John:** So final bits of business here. Anything we talked about on the show today, including Craig’s weird peanut butter, and my notebook obsession, and…

**Craig:** The Shaggs.

**John:** Bridesmaids, and The Shaggs, of course. Bridesmaids, if you’ve never heard of that incredibly successful movie. And, of course, the WGA earnings stuff, all those links will be at johnaugust.com which is a website that I run.

**Craig:** [laughs] They know. They better know what dot com means.

**John:** [laughs] Yes. On Twitter I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin?

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And that’s it. Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** See you next time.

**John:** Take care. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.