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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/action).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 53 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So, Craig, right before we started recording this you were going to tell me the history of “D’oh!”

**Craig:** D’oh! So, I said “D’oh!” or you said “D’oh!” because I hit the button wrong. And so you pointed out correctly that “D’oh!” as popularized by Dan Castellaneta, the actor behind Homer Simpson, is never actually written out as “D’oh!” in the scripts. It’s written out as…

**John:** Exasperated gasp or grunt?

**Craig:** Annoyed grunt.

**John:** Annoyed grunt.

**Craig:** Annoyed grunt. It’s always been “annoyed grunt.” No Simpsons script ever says, “D’oh!” And there was an interesting interview with Dan — an awesome guy, by the way, I don’t know if you’ve ever met him; the nicest guy in the world. And he, when they asked him to come up with something there for annoyed grunt, because there was nothing there, they didn’t even know, they were just thinking that it would just be some kind of annoyed grunt. He remembered that there was this actor, I believe his name is Jim Finlayson — I think it’s Finlayson — who is a Scottish actor who played the straight guy in a lot of old Laurel & Hardy movies.

And he would go, “Doohh!” and usually it was because the idea was that he was trying to say “damn” but you couldn’t say “damn” back then.

**John:** A-ha. Yeah.

**Craig:** So he would say, “Doohh!” [laughs] And so Dan Castellaneta sort of converted that into “D’oh!” and gave us this wonderful annoyed grunt that we have today.

**John:** Yeah, the world is better for having “D’oh!”

**Craig:** Oh for sure.

**John:** It’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. Doohh! I like the old Scottish word, “Doohh!” It’s somewhere online. You know what? I’ll send you a link and you can put it up for the podcast. There’s actually a very brief clip of Jim Finlayson saying, “Doohh!” on YouTube. It’s quite educational.

**John:** Very good.

Craig, today I thought we would talk about action.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** And so I’m not talking about action like a genre, so we’re not talking Lethal Weapon movies, but action as stuff that characters do. So, anything a character says, well that’s dialogue. Anything a character does, that’s action.

So when you look at it at that level, really almost any script you’re going to write is going to be full of action. I guess maybe some genres, like a romantic comedy or like My Dinner with Andre, wouldn’t have a lot of action, but most movies are going to have a tremendous amount of action. It’s the kind of thing we don’t pay necessarily as much attention to because you never really get credit for it as a screenwriter.

**Craig:** That’s true.

**John:** If there’s dialogue people will say, “Oh, well somebody wrote that funny dialogue.” If there is a well-constructed sequence of action, no one really thinks about the fact that the screenwriter had to write that. But somebody did write that, and this is going to be talking about writing that kind of stuff.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** So, there are certain movies where action is just sort of peppered in between things. And so, you know, a lot of comedies there will be action, but it’s mostly about the talking. Some genres, you know, horror movies, war movies, will have big set pieces that are all action. And writing those is incredibly draining and difficult, but rewarding when it’s done just right. So, let’s talk about making those awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah. What should we do? How do we make it awesome?

**John:** Well, I think the first thing to think about is: think about reading the action sequences. And obviously the first thing a screenwriter needs to do is read a ton of scripts. And if you read a lot of scripts that have long action sequences, you’ll start to recognize what does not work on the page. And what tends to not work on the page is the stuff that makes you want to stop reading it. Either you stop reading the script all together or you just sort of skim the page and you don’t really read the action.

And if a person isn’t really reading the action in a comedy, it’s probably going to be okay, because that’s not really the meat of it. But if you’re writing a war movie and they stop reading the action, or a horror movie and they stop reading the action, you’re sort of dead. So…

**Craig:** Yeah. This is one of the most frustrating things about writing action in the screenplay format. Because you’ve made two interesting points. The first point is that it is incumbent upon us as screenwriters to actually create the action that we intend to see on film. It may not work out exactly like that, but ultimately the — For instance, let’s take Die Hard: So he’s on a roof and he has to get off the roof because there is going to be a bomb going off and he sees that there’s a fire hose, a water hose for fire. And he takes that and he wraps it around his waist. And he jumps, and he goes down, and then the thing goes against the thing. And then it falls over…

**John:** It breaks.

**Craig:** …and he shoots his way through the glass. That’s an idea that the writer has to invent. So you are responsible for what’s on the screen. But, your second point: very well taken. You are responsible up to a point. The point where you have to stop being responsible is the point where it gets really boring to read. So we are forced to be both creative and incredibly economic in the way that we get those ideas across. It can be a challenge.

**John:** Yeah. So some suggestions I have for any action sequence or any bit of action that you have to describe: Keep your sentences short. Long sentences are more likely to get skipped and short sentences feel short; it feels like you’re getting right to it.

Keep your blocks of action scene description short. Three lines is probably a lot. You can vary them up — some can be one line, some can be two lines, some can be three lines, but if you have action blocks that are four lines, five lines, ten lines, people are going to skip them. They just will. So, as you’re going through your script and you see blocks of action that are more than five lines, see how you can break them up. See if there’s ways you can make them… either by cutting inside there or by just breaking them in half so that they not so intimidating for a reader to read.

Now, that’s not universal. Some writers love big blocks of action, and they get away with it. I read a David Koepp script that was like a half a page solid of action. But, in general, as I find the scripts that I’m actually willing to read, they keep those action lines short and tight. And they keep the blocks kind of small.

**Craig:** Yeah. Another tip is to think about how the text actually looks on the page. I get very OCD and finicky about it, particularly when the action leads up to something. Every action moment should be its own microcosm of beginning, middle, and end. And the end should be something that is surprising, and a revelation, and interesting, and moving us forward to the next thing.

You don’t want to necessarily have that thing drop off and end up on the top of the next page. You want it to pay off in that moment, and you want to use white space on the page to create suspense and tension. It actually works very well that way. Sometimes the best way to write action is to actually use more space, so take away some of the text and use some of the white page to really create impact.

And you can also — and I hesitate to say this because I don’t want people to go nuts with this — but I have seen some scripts where people use interesting formatting choices to kind of sell the action. I read a script from a young writer named Adam Barker, he’s very talented, and he did a very cool thing. There was an action sequence where someone is stalking somebody in the woods and our stalker has a bow and an arrow. And he pulls the bow back and he…

LETS…

IT…

FLY…

And “Lets” was its own line. And then “It” was kind of indented in. And “Fly” was indented even more. Like you could see the arrow flying just from the way he indented the words. Very clever. And it was fun to read. And it evoked — in its own way it evoked what his intention was, was for that arrow release to be a real release, instead of just, “He picks up the arrow and fires.”

**John:** Exactly. Remember, you’re always trying to create the experience of watching and hearing the movie in the theater just on the page. So, breaking those into three separate lines makes it feel like you’re really in that moment. You’re trying to create this hyper present tense as you’re working with the words on the page.

A script I did pretty recently, there is this very giant mechanical sound that preceded just really bad things happening, and so it’s a DWAAARRRM. And so for that DWAAARRRM I wrote it out as a big long onomatopoetic word. And that’s one of my rare sort of bold underlined words with double exclamation points at the end. But it’s saying, like, this is a really important thing. You are really going to pay attention and everyone is going to really notice this thing.

It’s important the first time it happens, but it becomes an important rhyming device, because later on in the sequence when you hear that thing happening you know stuff is about to get much, much, much worse. So, keeping in mind sort of how — not just how the reader is going to read that one page, but how you are structuring the sequence overall so that there is give and there is build.

And talk about white space, one of the most useful things I have found is using intermediate slug lines. So, a slug line is just a word over in the left hand margin, or a couple of words on the left hand margin, all upper case, that highlight a new moment within the action. So, it’s not that you’re moving to a different scene usually, but you’re going to a different moment in the action, or you’re highlighting a certain aspect of what’s going on there.

It replaces a lot of times, used to do “Angle On” or “Close-up Of.” A lot of times the slug line just by itself can give you that feeling of what the camera is doing next.

**Craig:** Yeah. I also like capitalize. And I don’t have a specific set of rules for when I capitalize or not, but sometimes in action if there’s something I want people to pull out of it, assuming they’re skimming, I give it all caps. He FALLS. “Falls” might be in all caps. Grabbing onto a ROPE. Swinging down and landing with a crunch, he looks up, BLOOD. And “blood” is in all caps. Something just to engage — you know, you can actually see this in children’s books. Children’s authors have gotten really good at figuring how to capture young readers’ imaginations just through the manipulation of text font size, style, and even though we don’t quite need that level of ADD-oriented writing for our readers, it’s nice to at least throw them some things so it’s not all just a stream of Courier.

Because, your script is the fourth script they’re going to read today, of twelve maybe.

**John:** Yeah. To clarify, we’re not saying that you shouldn’t be writing in Courier. You should write in Courier. Your script should only be in Courier. I don’t think I’ve ever read a good script that used anything other than Courier, have you?

**Craig:** I’ve never written a script that used anything other than Courier.

**John:** There was Gus Van Sant script at one point that like every line was sort of in a different font, and it was as crazy as it sounds.

So, you’re still using Courier. What we’re saying is that there may be special cases where you are breaking out the bold or you’re breaking out the underline. But those should be special treats.

If you need the reader to focus on something, you can give it upper case. You can sort of break the lines in a certain way that they’re going to be noticing that special thing. I’ll put down a script if I see page after page where things get, like, asterisked and double underlined and bold faced. If you are shouting that everything is important then nothing becomes important.

**Craig:** Correct. Yeah. You don’t want to turn it into something ugly. And this comes down to taste. And now suddenly the writer has to be visually aware of what the page actually looks like.

There is sort of a trope that you can sort of tell if the script is bad just by flipping through it and looking at the way the pages look. And, it’s not always true, but there is something to it, that well-composed pages that have a… — You know, for instance, I don’t like pages to just have dialogue on them. And I see it all the time.

I’ll add action lines just to break up the dialogue, even if they’re not technically necessary, because I just don’t like the strips, you know?

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** There’s just something about the way the page looks that becomes more pleasing and inviting to the reader.

**John:** When you have a lot of pages that is just dialogue, it looks like a bobsled shoot, like you’re just going to shoot down the page and nothing is going to stop it. And you want something that just breaks it up in the right place. You know, actual people speaking does have give and take and starts and stops. And just adding that bit of sort of throwaway action that people aren’t really even reading the action, it’s just stopping them enough so that it has some texture to it.

**Craig:** And it reminds you along the way that maybe you’re missing an opportunity for something to be going on beyond two people talking. You know, Ted Elliott tells this great story about how he and Terry Rossio were hired to work on Aladdin. And it was their first animated movie. And so they wrote this scene where Aladdin meets the princess in the marketplace and she’s disguised as a beggar and he doesn’t know she’s a princess. And they wrote the scene, it was really good dialogue that they liked between the two of them.

And then the story artist showed them what it looked like and it was basically his face, her face, his face, her face, his face, her face. And they looked at each other like, “Oh no, that’s really boring.” And that’s when they decided to… — Then they said, “Okay, well we have this monkey; maybe the monkey is jealous? Maybe the monkey is doing something behind their back while they’re…”

And suddenly the scene became a scene. And that’s a great lesson to think about when you’re talking about live action, too. Sometimes just ping-ponging back and forth between faces is boring. And if you look at a script at you just see strips of dialogue, in your mind that’s what will be happening. Ping-ponging.

**John:** The point you’re making there is it’s crucial because we shouldn’t just be talking about action like this, action sequences. Action is what’s happening within the scenes. It’s all the stuff that the characters are doing. And so you had a scene that the dialogue was fine but you still have to be able to write all that action of what that monkey is doing that’s making that scene interesting and alive. And making sure that however you’re writing the action for the monkey is really interesting, but it’s not going to pull the reader away from what’s actually happening in the dialogue.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so finding that balance is really tough, so that it can both be about the dialogue and be about the background action that’s happening as part of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Ideally they’re both interrelated and that’s how you get layering.

**John:** Yeah. Another sort of technique you can think about for when you need to write action is what I call parallel structure, which is that sometimes you can find — if you have a lot of sentences that start like, “He runs down the alley. He breaks open the door. He charges up the stairs.” You can often lop off your subjects of those lines. So, “He runs down the alley. Busts open the door. Races up the stairs.”

You can often use fragments once you’ve established what the subject of those sentences is going to be. It’s a way again of just making you feel very present in those moments by losing little bits of it. You can often still lose punctuation. So, a lot of times when you have action sequences, a couple action lines, especially if they’re feeding into some dialogue, don’t end the sentence. Give it like two dashes or a dot-dot-dot that feeds into the next line of dialogue.

So, just don’t stop things. Let them keep running.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. It’s rare that I put a period on the end of anything, really, I mean unless it’s sort of a final thing. You should just ask yourself what am I supposed to — what do I want the audience to be feeling right now? If I want them to feel anxious sometimes I’ll run a bunch of words together and take the spaces out from between the words, like the paragraph is on coke, you know?

There are all sorts of things you can do. You don’t want to overdo them. You just want to be aware. And you want to ask yourself is this action paragraph or action sentence conveying a sense of my intention or is it just boringly descriptive, or is over descriptive, is it prosy? That’s the other classic rookie mistake is to write action like you’re writing a novel, describing the shade of the light as it passes over the glistening due covering the flowers, the blah, blah, blah.

**John:** Yeah. And it’s not just an adjective problem. I find a lot of times it is people use really poetic verbs to describe some things that are like, wow, that just pulled me completely out of the moment. It’s too much — the sky is always being painted by things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And a little of that scene description can be lovely. Too much of it becomes really, really frustrating. I find characters also have a hard time walking in scripts. They’re always “approaching,” and “advancing,” and “skulking.” And sometimes that specificity is really important and sometimes people should just walk. Or sometimes people should just be where they need to be.

**Craig:** I like “crossing,” because at that point… — See, sometimes what I don’t like about the purple prose is that it is giving me the sense that the writer isn’t really into the movie. They’re into their document of the screenplay. And I want the reader to be into the movie. So, I like crossing because that’s in fact what’s happening.

“He crosses over to her.” We’re blocking now. We’re making a movie. Sometimes you do need to be more descriptive about how people move, but yeah, the skulking stuff and all that, it can get a little much.

**John:** So, general advice for all of these kinds of situations is to read a lot of scripts and read scripts of movies you like and try to find styles of stuff you like. For me, and actually for most writers I think of my generation, the James Cameron scripts were incredibly influential and incredibly helpful. So you read James Cameron’s Aliens script and you have a really good sense of what this world is going to be like and how it’s going to feel.

And the kinds of things we’re talking about — the keeping the blocks short, keeping sentences short, only talking about the camera when you really need to talk about the camera — that’s a very James Cameron kind of thing to do. And that was an incredibly important thing for me. The Aliens script, the Point Break script were both hugely influential.

But we have some different scripts that we can talk about today because we are actually going to do four samples…

**Craig:** Four!

**John:** …of the Three Page Challenge. So, it’s a groundbreaking episode in that we’re going to talk about four. And we specifically chose these samples because they’re about action. And so we can talk about what these scripts are doing terrifically well in action, and what they could do a little bit better in action.

So, we’ll talk about them overall and our impressions, but we’re really going to focus on the action in these scripts and what’s there and what could be better.

So, the four scripts that we’re going to talk about, if you want to read along with us they are all going to be in the show notes for the episode, so johnaugust.com, and podcast, and find this episode. And let’s get started.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** We’re going to start with a script by Ben Jacoby. And I’ll give you a little summary here of what happens. So, we open in an alley in Plav, Montenegro where we meet Terry Redding, who’s in his 40s. He meets up with Ian Morris, who is also in his 40s. Ian tells him that the target is upstairs and alone. So it feels like some sort of assassination or something is going on here.

We see Terry walking down a hallway. He passes some assault agents who are apparently on his side. From outside there are thermal sites that look through the brick wall and show that a man is sitting in a certain position in a room. Terry knocks on the door; there is no answer. He opens it to find General Aliyev bound to a chair. He’s dead, electrodes through his body, and there are these pipes that are pumping these colored fluids into him.

Terry realizes it’s a bomb. He runs for it. There is a huge explosion, blue flames that melt flash. At the bottom of page three we have an aerial shot of the CIA headquarters of Langley, and it’s snowing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I enjoyed it. I thought it moved along pretty snappily. I mean, there is a cool idea in it which I like, and I thought that the idea was revealed well. It was setup well and revealed well, so there is this concept: “We’re going to lure these guys to get someone and then we’re going to blow them up. But we know that they have thermal imaging and they can see if someone is alive or not, so they’re going to see this dead body in there and not fall for it. But what if we take this body, heat it up, and make it look like he’s alive with the very stuff that we’ll then use to blow these people up?”

So I thought it was actually setup well. There was good suspense. There was an explosion. I was a little confused by the nature of the explosion, which almost bordered on supernatural. Perhaps that’s intentional.

But, I wasn’t bored by much. I thought it was, you know, set the — I liked it. What do you think?

**John:** I liked it, too. There’s some really good stuff there. I actually really like the description of the explosion because it was sort of supernatural. It was clearly supposed to be a very unique kind of explosive device happening, and so I liked that the description took its time for that. And I liked the description of the machinery that was pumping the stuff through. I thought it was all really well done.

Just some style notes. This one, he uses bold slug lines, which is fine. If you like to bold your slug lines, go for it. And so there is no right or wrong bolding or not bolding it.

I thought he did a great job keeping his blocks of action pretty short.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I was never tempted to skip over stuff because I’m not making too much of a commitment to read two or three lines at a time.

I got confused by some stuff. On page two — I’m sorry, actually — On page one, “Terry advances down a dilapidated hallway.” Okay, “advances down” is one of sort of my, like, well he’s walking. I just felt like we could do better than “advancing” because it makes me think of, like, “What does advancing really mean?” I stop to think about it; and you never want me to stop and think.

**Craig:** Right. “Moves” would have been a perfectly good word there.

**John:** Yeah. “Moves.” “Makes his way down.”

“Pre-Soviet floorboards creak under each footfall as he passes ASSAULT AGENTS, one after another, nestled in nooks, Vector machine-guns at the ready.” Couple issues. First off, that’s a really long sentence that is bringing together a whole bunch of different stuff. So, are we focusing on the creaky floorboards, that it’s Pre-Soviet Russia, Assault Agents? I don’t know what Assault Agents are so I felt like I needed that broken into two sentences and, like, tell me who assault agents are. Are they soldiers with Kevlar and night vision goggles? I don’t know who these people are.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I was confused and, again, I had to stop and think about it. Oh, and there was a bit of poetry at the start that I wasn’t crazy about. “Gray autumn wind strokes the streets with dead leaves.”

**Craig:** Ah, yeah. I mean, don’t need that sort of thing. It’s not the end of the world but, I think… I mean, ultimately here’s what happens: It doesn’t get read. It becomes literally whitewash for your eyeballs.

**John:** Yeah. Here’s the other thing I’d say: We can’t see wind. We can see dead leaves. And so if you really want the leaves blowing down the street, like, “Dead leaves scrape across the street as we reveal Terry Redding.” I mean, you can have those dead leaves there, but we can’t see gray wind, so give us the leaves if you’re going to do that kind of thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** An overall general note: I liked sort of what happened in this teaser, but it felt like an Alias teaser to me. It felt like, okay, this is the first opening act thing and then we’re going to get to Langley and then we’re going to sort of start the story. I didn’t know anything about these characters, and I wanted to know a little bit more about what was unique or special about these people given these three pages. Just something more specific about them, because all the dialogue that we have here is very sort of standard boiler-platy for this kind of genre.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s true. Of course, page four could be spectacular and we could find out about these people and what happened. I hesitate to judge on that basis. I mean, yes, it’s true: many, many action movies open this way with guys on a mission and then something explodes. But, in terms of the way he crafted it, I thought it was well done. There is an interesting idea at the heart of it.

And I liked on page two, just to circle back to my point about white space, “Terry pauses. Deep breath.” Return. “HE KNOCKS ON THE DOOR.” All Caps. Return. “No response.”

I like that. He took the time on the page, and that creates anticipation. You know, what you can’t teach, what no one I don’t think can teach to screenwriters, is rhythm and dramatic rhythm. You know that this guy is going to walk up to a door. He’s going to knock on the door. And you know as the writer that on the other side of that door is something that is quite the opposite of what he expects, of what everyone expects. That justifies a sense of anticipation.

And that justifies writing it out this way. So there’s a good, innate sense of rhythm and how this should be executed. So, all told, I think it’s a good example of how to write action well. And good job. What was the writer’s name again?

**John:** Ben Jacoby.

**Craig:** Well done.

**John:** Yeah. Hooray. Congratulations, Ben.

Let’s move onto our next sample. This is by Trevor Hollen. And it’s a script, the title page on this was Everything Means Nothing to Me.

**Craig:** Great title.

**John:** It’s a great title. What a great title. It feels like a good dark anthem, or like sort of a punk rock emo kind of awesomeness. I like it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Really cool.

**John:** So some description about what’s happening here. So, we open with a beaten up woman named Max. She bursts out of a warehouse, handcuffed to a dead man, which she drags behind her. There are some headlights. She looks up as brakes squeal. We cut to Max watching a movie at a theater. This is obviously, evidently before, because she’s not beaten up. Then we’re with her in the lobby where she looks at a poster for a movie called Streets of Fire.

She checks her phone. Two missed messages. The battery dies. She drives and she smokes. Then, earlier that night, we have a scene at Meltdown Comics — which I think is where they record the Nerdist Podcast —

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** — where we meet a new guy named Johnny who shoplifts, and then he exits. We crosscut this with Max, and then we go back to Johnny, who is pursued by two guys. And that’s the end of page three.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, it’s hard to critique this on the basis of the way that the action was written out. It wasn’t that the action was written out poorly per se; it’s just that I was bored. I mean, and I shouldn’t have been bored because it starts with this woman — she’s not dragging a body; she’s got a body slung over her back, which immediately stops me. It’s not easy, assuming this is an average weight man of 175 pounds — 175 pounds of dead weight over a woman’s shoulder as she’s walking is a little bit of a tough one to buy, especially because she’s tiny.

And then these headlights light up her face. She turns. Brakes squeal. Okay, and now we’re in this theater. I got a little confused. I thought, okay, this is actually set in the ’80s because she’s watching… — the Streets of Fire is going to be coming up, but then I know she’s got a cell phone, it must be a retro theater, I guess, that shows old movies.

Now she’s in the car. I’m not sure if the scene, Int. Max’s Car, where she’s driving and listening to South Pacific, is necessary. Nothing happens in it.

We go to Johnny. Johnny is reading a comic book. He walks outside. And now he’s being followed. We cut back to Max’s car; she’s still singing — not sure why. And then now these other people are following Johnny and, oh my gosh, here comes a truck, which I just saw on page one. I just saw trucks. [laughs] This is a different truck, by the way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If it were the same truck I’d think, “Okay, there’s killer trucks out there,” but there’s two box trucks on the first page. There is a pickup truck that is about to hit Johnny on page three. The whole “I’m about to get hit by a truck” thing is a tough one to pull off anyway because it’s a little bit cliché. To try it two times in the first three pages, you’re starting to push it.

**John:** When you first said that you got bored, and it seems like it should be really hard to get bored in three pages, but I kind of got bored, too. And it’s because I got confused. I got confused. I lost faith that my rapt attention would be rewarded.

I felt like the script wasn’t connecting, like the dots weren’t connecting, and I didn’t believe the dots necessarily were going to connect, especially while it’s sort of line to line. And it honestly starts at the very beginning for me, is that as I gave you the description I told you, like, this girl Max, but as it’s actually on the page, “Door flies open. MAX exits bloody as hell. Right eye is swollen shut. A (very dead) man is handcuffed to her left wrist and slung over her back.”

Okay, wait, so she’s a girl but the only way that we know that she’s a woman — Max feels like a man’s name — but we know it’s a woman because of “her left wrist.” But, why are you burying that here? Why did you let that go through… — You already gave us an image of her right eye being swollen shut, so we saw that in our head, but we think it’s a man. So, now we have to go back and replace that image in our head with a woman.

If you had just gave us like, “A young woman exits, bloody as hell. Right eye swollen shut. A man is handcuffed to her left wrist and slung over her back. This girl is MAX.” Then, like, okay, so we know it’s a woman first, and then we know her name. Then this would be a little bit more into this first moment that’s happening.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. That’s a really good point, John, because you know what: it’s funny — when I read that paragraph I just didn’t understand why, but you’ve put your finger on it, of why I stopped. My impression was that, “Oh, the author is being a bit clever here,” like, “Look, I’m just going to subtly point out she’s a woman this way.” And I thought, “Eh, don’t be clever, I hate that.”

But actually your point is the right one. I had to rebuild the image in my head. And that’s on the top of page one. That’s a bad feeling.

**John:** Yeah. Also at the top of page one. “FADE IN:”

“EXT. ABANDONED WAREHOUSE — NIGHT.”

Next line. “The Warehouse District of L.A.”

Okay, so you said warehouse twice in two lines. That doesn’t actually give me anything else. So, rather than sort of saying, “The Warehouse District of L.A.” that line could be something that gives me a sense of what this place is like. If you want to say that we’re in Los Angeles, that’s fine, but give us a sense of what this actual space is rather than just like “Warehouse District” because I don’t know what the Warehouse District looks like or feels like.

So, give us some color of light. Give us some dogs barking in the distance. Give us something else that gives us some color to it rather than just, like, giving me a thing that I don’t know.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** There was some stuff I did like, and I want to point that out. I felt like the writer had some interesting detail stuff that made me curious about the characters. I liked that her car stereo is ripped out of the dash, and so she’s listening to a boom box instead. That’s cool.

I like that we’re in specific places, like Meltdown Comics. But where I lost faith was we were cross-cutting between… — So we start in, it feels like, the presence tense, and then we move back in time, and we’re sort of catching up for awhile. But then we move to Johnny, that’s apparently earlier that night. And, like, okay, so we’re still moving back further in time, okay, but it’s not clear then — is he in the same timeline as Max at this point? And it’s only three pages in.

**Craig:** God, I didn’t even notice that. In my mind, literally in my mind, I just assumed that this was happening simultaneously. You’re right, it does say earlier. That’s insane; you can’t do that. You can’t do that. [laughs]

**John:** It’s unclear to me whether that “Earlier that night” means earlier than the very first scene we saw where she was dragging the body, or if it means earlier…

**Craig:** No, no.

**John:** …It should be earlier than the last thing we saw. And the last thing we saw was Max driving. And so, wait. Are we in a third time sequence here?

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re apparently going… — Maybe this is one of those going…No, it’s not a going in reverse movie because it starts after, and then we go back, and then we’re moving forward because she walks out of the theater. I don’t understand what’s going on now. Now I’m really confused. I also have to say, you know, you don’t want to read the first three pages and think there’s two scenes I could just cut here because they’re not doing anything for me. This is precious real estate; everything has to be earned.

Wow, you’re right. That is earlier. Yeah, no, you can’t do that.

**John:** So, Go, my first script, my first produced movie, it opens with something that happens later in the movie, so we see Ronna in the ditch and she’s “18, bloody, and bleeding,” and so that’s a description of her. And so we’re like, oh, we know that something interesting is going to happen there.

And then we have Claire giving some dialogue, which sort of sets up the question of the movie. And then it does start moving forward in time. But it’s not trying to be incredibly clever or sophisticated at that point. It’s like it is setting up sort of a world, and then the story starts. And I just didn’t have faith that this story was going to be starting here because just a bunch of stuff was happening.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a bit of a confusion that’s going on in there. So, I think this one needs a little love, a little help.

**John:** Needs a little love.

Next, go to a script by Randall Knox and Jason Zahodnik called Dog Tags. So, some description on Dog Tags. We begin at an infantry camp in North Africa, 1942 — I love period movies —

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** — where a private slides a field report under Colonel Mason’s door. Inside the Colonel’s quarters we see a man in silhouette who is smoking. He looks through the field reports. A hand pulls out a handgun. Then a single gunshot. Only then do we realize there was a second man in the room and he’s staging this to look like a suicide.

We cut to a British transport plane roaring through the sky. Inside a few dozen soldiers. The copilot says they’ll be down in 20.

On the runway we single out a British officer, Jack Sherman, and an American military police officer named Richards. They introduce themselves to each other. The British Officer has, surprisingly, a southern accent. He’s here to investigate the Colonel’s death. And that’s the bottom of page three.

**Craig:** Right. Well, so this is sort of a prime example of overwriting action. Here’s the good news — I’ll lead with the good news. I really liked what was happening. I like the trick of what happened in the room. I thought there was a really good idea behind it. It was interesting. And I liked the final exchange between the guy who runs the outpost and the man who’s been sent to investigate this crime. It had good promise.

There are some dialogue issues. You made a point a couple of these, when we did one of these, remember there were three pages where the first line of dialogue was on the third page? There’s a little bit of dialogue on the first page. The second page is all dialogue-free. And then the third page, this copilot comes out and delivers very clunky dialogue. And similarly then Major Richards has clunky dialogue. And a lot of people announcing stuff that everybody in the scene already ought to know, that kind of thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But this could be improved greatly by just thinning out the action descriptions to get to the meat of what we need to know.

**John:** I agree. I felt that the opening was overwritten for what it was. All we’re seeing is a private delivering a folder to his commanding officer. And so there was a lot of stuff sort of happening that didn’t really get us very much of anything.

So, if you want to setup a world, maybe we should have walked through the camp a little bit more, seen a little bit more of sort of what this universe was. But it felt like a lot of shoe leather just to get a folder underneath the door.

Then, once we were inside, I actually kind of dug the description of what was going on. It felt very Hitchcockian, that it’s a very limited focus in that the camera is looking at this, the camera is looking at this. One thing I would point out though: there’s a lot of “we sees” and “we hears,” and some people hate “we see” and “we hear.” I actually like “we see” and “we hear” when used judiciously. Here I thought there was a little too much of it.

**Craig:** I agree actually. Yeah, I’m a big fan of “we see” when it is called for. But, for instance, “We see a limp arm dangling from a chair,” you could actually just say, “A limp arm.” Or, “we see” is okay there, but I don’t know…

**John:** On page two, it starts with, “We hear him sigh as he sets his glasses on the desk.”

**Craig:** That should be, “He sighs.”

**John:** “He sighs.” And I would make the…

**Craig:** “He sets his glasses on the desk,” you know.

**John:** I would make — “A limp arm dangles” is fine, too.

To me, here is the criteria for when I think you are justified using a “we see” or “we hear:” If the cause is invisible, a “we see” or “we hear” may save you. It might say like, okay, “We hear a tremendous rushing of something,” or a lot of times I’ll use the “we” for if we are describing how the camera is moving. So, like, “We float over the camp as we slowly descend into something.” I’ll use the “we”s for that, but a lot of times — I would always look for if I can take the “we see” or “we hear” out, and it makes as much sense, then cut it out.

**Craig:** Yeah, I tend to use “we see” for things that I want the audience to be aware of but also for the audience to be aware that other characters aren’t aware of. So, “A man rises. Behind him, we see a killer with a knife.” Because if you don’t say “we see” sometimes it is implied that he might know that there is a killer with a knife back there.

But, everybody has their different cause for it, but in this case what sort of pops out to me about the way this was written — I’m not surprised that you liked the action description of the part in the tent, because aside from the fact that it was innately interesting, we are more forging of description of big ticket items: murders, suicides, sex. We are far less forgiving of long descriptive paragraphs of sleepy military camps while folks snooze.

And, frankly, the biggest crime of the first paragraph is that by overwriting about the moonlight and the smoking cigarettes and the quiet and the sleeping, is that he’s burying — the writer is burying an important thing that he has put in there, which is that artillery is going off in the background.

**John:** I completely missed it.

**Craig:** And the reason that’s important, is because I believe now that someone could get shot and no one would flinch because they just think it’s just an artillery. So, if I were doing this I would probably say, “SUPER: North Africa — 1942. A military camp. Rows of tents. Men are sleeping. In the background, pop, pop, POP. Artillery goes off. The men barely flinch. They’re used to it by now. A private walks across to…”

You know what I mean? Make that something, so that we get that it is important later. You’d be surprised, screenwriters, how often the rest of the producing world, the directors and ADs and prop don’t ever get that that was important. [laughs] Do you know what I mean? So you make it important.

**John:** Looking back at that first paragraph, which I’ll admit I did skim because it was seven lines long, I missed that the artillery was going off partly because it wasn’t capitalized. And we’re sort of past the stage where like, oh, all sound effects and have to be capitalized. We’re not doing radio plays anymore, so it’s not that that’s important, but the artillery is really important. That’s the most important thing that’s helping to set up the scene there, so that should be capitalized.

I also feel like all the other people that he’s passing, or groups of people, capitalize them too so that we see that there are more people in this world. Because just looking at that first paragraph, I sort of assumed that the private was the only person that we’re seeing in the whole scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. And just very quickly on dialogue — because I read it and might as well help you out here if I can: What the private said was fine. And then we get to this copilot. “All right, you lot. We’re twenty minutes, give or take a tick, from the base, so be prepared to get out and unload sharpish. We’ve got to keep the runway clear.” That’s a lot of talking from a guy who’s talking to seasoned — what appears to be — seasoned people, or at least people who know what their job is. It’s not like they’re jumping out of a plane for the first time or getting off a plane for the first time.

To me it could be as simple as “’20 minutes.’ Slams the door shut.” Do you know what I mean? “The guys all look at each other.”

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Then, when they land, Jack, our hero I assume, who is going to be investigating this, comes out of the plane. And there is a pudgy military officer, Major Richards, and he says to Jack, “Major Sherman, I’m Major Richards. I’m the head Military Police officer here at the base. Welcome to Algeria.”

I’m pretty sure that he’s been expecting him. “Major Sherman. I’m Major Richards. Welcome to Algeria,” would be fine. “I’m the head military police officer here at the base” — eh, that’s probably unnecessary. We should be able to tell from his stature or from something that’s not spoken that he’s in charge.

“Given how quickly you were flown out here, I’m sure you’re wondering what the situation is.” Perhaps maybe just, “You’re probably wondering what the situation is.”

And then Jack says, “Y’all have a dead colonel on your hands and you need me to confirm how it happened.” “Oh, so you’ve been briefed.” “No.” I like that. I like the fact that he hadn’t been briefed, but somehow he knows what’s going on. That’s kind of cool.

But just watch the overdone dialogue, particularly when you’ve done such a good job of creating silent, interesting stuff — meaning dialogue-free interesting stuff.

**John:** Agreed.

One more thing I’m just catching on page three: So we’re at exterior runway, “20 minutes, give or take a tick later,” which is kind of funny. The copilot was saying, “Give or take a tick later,” and he uses that, that’s fine. But the actual scene description here, “The plane touches down and taxis to a halt. The men inside file down the staircase and unload their cargo from the rear.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** That’s — you both have the plane landing, taxiing…

**Craig:** And taxiing.

**John:** And the men have disembarked and gotten their gear. In two sentences. So that is fast. And while it’s true that once upon a time we used to do, “Atlanta burns” for like Gone with the Wind, and there wasn’t more description, it’s like…that is a tremendous amount to pack in two lines. So, I would question whether, do we need to see the plane land? Okay, let the plane land in a scene header and then let’s get right to the people that we want to pay attention to disembarking.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** Don’t setup all the background action.

**Craig:** Yeah, the way that’s going to be in the movie is, “A plane comes down for a landing. Cut to…” I mean, whether you want to write “Cut To” or not, “The men are offloading the plane.” We’re not watching planes land and taxiing. You might as well write that they unbuckle, send their service items to the aisle, etc.

**John:** Yeah. There are movies where all that specific detail is really important. This is clearly not that movie, so I would say: edit it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** Our final action sequence for this batch is by David Stripinis. And let me give you some description here:

We start in a South Boston bar in 1984, where everyone is watching Mary Lou Retton win the Olympics. Fire trucks outside take us to a brownstone fire. One of the fire fighters, Kavanagh, is going through the house. In the nursery he finds a dead woman cradling a baby. The baby is still alive. Part of the house collapses, apparently trapping Kavanagh and the baby as we end page three.

**Craig:** Right. So, well, there’s a very, very, very generic thing going on here. It doesn’t start that way. I had hopes on the first page. There’s this bar scene; it’s very Boston. People are watching Mary Lou Retton. They’re getting excited. I understand completely what time it is because of that, which I thought was very nice.

And suddenly these fire trucks are going by, people run outside, and that carries us to this fire. Now, page two just comes from the generic fire book: men going through, saying things that firemen say like, “Get out of there,” and, “We’re out of here,” and, “No, I’m not leaving until I check this room. Someone is here.” “Get out of there.” Very, very rote.

And you have to be aware of the movies that have come before you and not simply just do exactly — I mean, that is the fire scene. Everybody has done that fire scene. But it’s not that it was written poorly — I mean, there are some interesting touches. A teddy bear that’s melting. That’s kind of cool.

So, in terms of action description, “Flames whip around a nursery. A large TEDDY BEAR melts, it’s polyester…” Now, “it’s” with an apostrophe is a problem. “It’s polyester guts oozing out.” If you had put a period there I would have given him a gold star. But he says, “It’s polyester guts oozing out like the lava of Kilauea.” So that’s what we call a mixed metaphor folks. [laughs] That is the definition of mixed metaphor. Try not to do that; it’s unnecessary.

And this man finds this baby, which is really horrifying. This is the other thing, is tonally I have no idea what the hell is going on, because we started with this kind of funny scene in a pub, then we go to a very standard B-movie firefighting scene, and on page three we are literally looking at the most horrifying graphic thing I’ve ever seen.

And if this movie rests on being super horrifying and graphic, okay. But truthfully, you have to be really aware when you get this graphic and gross. And you have to give it credit and you have to honor it. I mean, like in Silence of the Lambs there are moments that honor it, but they don’t come on page three. And you’re really putting people back on their feet with something this — that is, I mean, you’re going to get people walking out.

**John:** It’s a really gruesome image. I think it’s an effective image, it’s just really, really gruesome. And your point about Silence of the Lambs is key, because in Silence of the Lambs we have invested interest in Jodie Foster and these characters by the time the gross, gruesome stuff comes. So we’re not going to, like, turn off from the movie when it happens.

But here it is happening so early, like, oh my god, I don’t know if I want to keep watching that.

**Craig:** Well, also, there’s no reaction to it. I mean, in Silence of the Lambs you have people looking at photos and turning away and reacting and being human, even in small ways, because they are disgusted by what they see. This man looks at something that’s the grossest thing ever and no response from him whatsoever in the pages. And that’s the most important part is how the characters respond.

Just as a thought: in the beginning it seems to me that if you’re going to show this bar, you probably don’t need three-quarters of a page of bar stuff and then have trouble, unless you were going to interrupt it in an interesting way. For instance, they’re all sitting around, woo-woo, they’re all cheering for the Olympics, and then BOOM, something rattles the window and they all turn up and look. And then they move to the glass and they see in the distance, BOOM, another fire ball. And then three fire trucks go by. Something that’s a little more astonishing than — I mean, anyone who listens to this podcast hears three fire trucks going by on any given day. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. We don’t even look anymore. We just know that they’re going to pass by.

**Craig:** Exactly. They’re going to pass by.

**John:** I agree. To me that first sequence, I like that it is setting up 1984. I think Mary Lou Retton is actually a very smart way to tell us exactly when this is happening and sort of what our world is, but I want to get out of there right after the bartender’s first line, either with some explosion or just the passing lights that lead us to that thing to let us know that this is just to setup the world and the time and now we’re going to follow these fire trucks and we’ll be in a firefighting mode.

The dialogue is an issue, and I felt so many of these lines could have been in our podcast last week where we talked about those sort of, like, the lines that you keep hearing way too much in movies. “Someone’s in there. I’ve got a live one.”

**Craig:** Even “Pull your team out.”

**John:** Yeah, “Pull your team out.” That’s in every firefighter movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, “Get out.” Just, “All right, everyone out.”

**John:** Since we’re talking about action, I do want to talk about the action, because even some of the stuff felt a little cliché to me, the actual description of stuff happening was kind of nice. And that moment that was described was really gruesome, but it was well-described. Our block length is really short. I was never tempted to skim because most of these times I’m only committed to reading one and a half lines at a time. So, you’re going to get me through the page that way.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And a pretty good breakup of sort of dialogue — I wasn’t happy with some of the dialogue but I was happy that the dialogue was interspersing the action. So, it’s not just I’m going to commit to reading a line or a block of scene description, but if a page is nothing but scene description I will panic a bit because it is like, “Oh my god, I can’t read that whole page.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But because you were interspersing and you were doing other stuff on the page — in this case it is dialogue breaking up the page — I’m more inclined to actually read every word of it. So, that stuff I liked. And so to me it felt like a pretty good version of a scene that I’m going to probably see in Derek Haas’s firefighter show. But when Derek has his firefighter show I will know who these characters are ahead of time and will have a vested interest in their safety, and security, and what they’re doing in that scene.

Here I don’t because it’s the first time I’ve met this guy Kavanagh.

**Craig:** And I would be surprised if Derek’s show had this level of clamminess. “Get out of there.” “I told you get out of there, man.” You know, maybe it will, but hopefully not.

**John:** I think it can do better than that. But, at the bottom of page three right now Kavanagh is saying, “Sorry little guy. Guess I wasn’t meant to be a hero after all.”

**Craig:** Oh yeah. That’s brutal. Brutal.

**John:** What?! Maybe if you set up 15 pages before that his father never believed in him, or I don’t know, or where he’s going through training or something. But, like, what?!

**Craig:** It’s crazy. Who’s the screenwriter again of this one?

**John:** David Stripinis.

**Craig:** David. Okay, I like to talk to people by name. David, here’s the deal: This man just saw a burned alive woman with no eyes. Her eyes were melted away. He has found a live baby with a charred forearm. And injured babies are horrifying things for us to look at. He is facing death, and he has this very calm moment where he just sort of says, “Sorry little guy. Guess I wasn’t meant…”

I mean, no. Now here’s the thing: You don’t need that line at all. “He slumps down, back against the wall defeated. He pulls off his respirator.” That’s great. He’s giving up. I love it.

“The infant looks at him with a startling amount of clarity in his eyes. He looks back.” That’s all you need. No talking there. You’ve got to know when to talk and you’ve got to know when you don’t talk. And you don’t talk when you’re alone with a charred baby about to die.

You can get away with no talking there if you eliminate some of this other stuff. I would also argue, David, that you don’t need the whole “Get out” stuff. Because if you think about it, all you’re really doing is giving away what’s so shocking about what you’ve written. This should be quite the opposite. It’s a house fire, but it’s pretty standard. Everybody should be under control. We’re just doing what we do. It’s a fire. It’s dangerous. “How are we doing in there?” “Okay, just checking the last hallway.” “We gotta go man; this doesn’t look too good.” “Um, yeah, just give me one second.” “Boss says we gotta go now.” “Yeah, I said one second.” Opens up a door. There’s no one in there. And he walks over and he finds the baby. “Holy shit.” “We gotta go.”

And then suddenly out of nowhere, KABOOM.

It just would be so much more interesting than somebody explaining to us before we ever meet this guy, you’re about to die. Don’t you think?

**John:** I agree. Surprise. Because the minute we hear “Pull your people out,” it’s like we know the whole thing is going down.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And the whole “Pull your people out,” the whole thing is going down — that is usually used as surprised stuffing. It’s like filler surprise. It’s not really surprise. It’s fake surprise because we’ve seen it so often, but that’s what it’s there for.

You don’t need that filler. You have an actual surprise: A baby underneath a burnt-alive woman. Yikes. Yuck. So, I mean, use that.

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** Gross.

**John:** So, again, I want to thank our four people who wrote in with their samples, because these were amazing and you guys were so brave to write in and let us talk about your work. And I hope it was helpful.

Most people who have gone through this process seem to have enjoyed it. I’ve gotten good feedback from the people we’ve reviewed before, so I hope these four felt it was helpful and useful in their further writing careers.

**Craig:** And I just want to add, for our four people who sent things in, I just want to add for them that I thought each one of them had something that was very encouraging. There wasn’t one of them this week that I thought, “Oh, you’ll never be able to do this.” So, is that encouraging? Did that sound encouraging?

**John:** That did sound encouraging.

**Craig:** I love it.

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

**Craig:** Oh my god. I keep forgetting that we have One Cool Thing.

**John:** Yeah, that’s okay. I’ll just give you my One Cool Thing and we’ll wrap it up early.

My One Cool Thing is a movie that’s in theaters right now. It’s called Sleepwalk With Me. It’s by a guy named Mike Birbiglia, who is a comedian who starts in and co-wrote and directed this movie. And it’s really charming, and I would highly recommend it. It feels very much like Annie Hall as a structure, in that it’s a guy analyzing a relationship and talking to camera at times while the story is being told. But it’s really funny and really well done.

I first recognize Mike from he’s in Lena Dunham’s show, Girls. He plays the guy who — Lena does a job interview, and he’s the guy who may hire her. And they have a very funny just one-off scene. And the scene was so good just by itself that I’m like — he’s on my radar.

And, god bless him, he made a really good little movie. Ira Glass of NPR fame produced it and co-wrote it. And I highly recommend it. So it’s playing in like 140 theaters across the country and I think people will really like it. I think it’s going to be the one little movie this year that could really break out. So I would encourage you to see it if it’s in your neck of the woods.

**Craig:** Fantastic!

**John:** Great. Craig, thank you for a week full of action.

**Craig:** Yeah, that was, oh, I mean, I’m exhausted.

**John:** I know. Tiring.

**Craig:** Exhausted. Should we do another one? Should we stop the podcast and never do another one? Or should we keep going?

**John:** No, I think I’ll see you next week.

**Craig:** All right, screw it. Let’s do it again.

**John:** Talk to you soon. Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/grammar-guns-butter).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 52 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, 52!

**Craig:** A year of podcasts.

**John:** I was going to say it’s hard to believe, but it’s actually not hard to believe. It feels like 52 episodes to me. Does it feel like it to you?

**Craig:** I don’t think so. To me I would have… — If you had said we were over 40 I would have still been a little skeptical. I don’t know. They just go by kind of quickly.

**John:** They do. But I’m happy that we made it this far. I’m happy that people seem to be liking our show, so this is a good thing. And last week you treated us with a song.

**Craig:** A song.

**John:** That was very nice, Craig. Because we actually just let you play it out I didn’t get to sort of clap or applaud afterwards or hold up my little virtual lighter, but I thought you did a terrific job, so thank you very much for doing that.

**Craig:** Thank you. How nice of you to say. There were a lot of lovely comments from people on Twitter.

**John:** Good.

**Craig:** I now get to say stuff like, “Yeah, it’s blowing up on twitter, y’all.”

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Although it’s not really blowing up. But it was fun to do and I think maybe I’ll do it again if we can get to…150?

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’ll see.

**Craig:** We’ll pick an appropriate benchmark, because we can either do it more regularly or you could really go nuts and just say we’ve got to hit 500.

**John:** Yeah. That would be a lot. Another option might be a benchmark of like where we rank on iTunes, because that might be a little bit more indicative of people who are listening to it now or subscribing now versus just people who are catching up on previous episodes, because downloads can be people who are just going back through the whole catalog. We need those new, fresh listeners for some imaginary metric that doesn’t really mean anything because we’re not selling any advertising. So it’s just ego gratification, really.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, that’s what this is all about.

**John:** And on the topic of ego gratification, last week I… — we were doing the Three Page Challenges — and while reading one of the Three Page Challenges, I speculated that one of the people who wrote in was not a native English speaker. And you took a little umbrage at that. You took umbrage on his behalf that I did not believe that he was a native English speaker.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yup.

**John:** And I was right. So, Mario DiPesa wrote in to say, “I am from Montreal, Quebec and my native language is French. Although as most Montrealers I’ve been exposed to English at a pretty early age through TV, comic books, and movies, I’ve only been in the US for about five years and I just started using English as my main language.”

So some of his odd word choices that I noticed, that was because English is not his native language.

**Craig:** You were absolutely right. I was completely wrong. And I’m embarrassed, because this is the kind of thing I feel like I should be good at. It’s language. You picked up on something. I’m mortified. And the only way I can think of to rectify this error is to kill you. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** If I kill you, I feel like I set it right.

**John:** Yeah. There are times I’m very happy that we’re not recording this in the same space, that you are far off in Pasadena while I’m safely here in Hancock Park at an address you’ve never been to.

Ah, that’s not true; you’ve been to my house once.

**Craig:** I have. I’ve been there. I know exactly where to go. And I know exactly how I’m going to kill you. [laughs] So enjoy this victory.

**John:** Yes. By the time this podcast airs it will be past.

**Craig:** You’re dead.

**John:** But I wanted to talk a little bit about sort of what I noticed in Mario DiPesa’s writing and the sense… — Because it wasn’t ungrammatical in the sense of “these are the rules of English and he broke the rules of English.” It wasn’t that at all. Like everything in it was by the rules grammatical. But grammar is really how we speak; it’s how a native person speaks. And it didn’t sound like how a native person would use the language.

And that’s something I want to start talking about. We’ll get into some questions later on, but I want to start talking about this and get your feedback on it.

A lot of times when we talk about English and we talk about sort of people coming in from other languages, we always assume there’s a one-to-one correlation between the things we do in English and the things that people do in other languages. But that’s not really true, and you start to notice those things as you meet people who are writing in something that’s not their native language.

One example that often occurs to me is the sense of time. Because when you think of time as being, well there’s the past, the present, and the future, but if you actually listen to how we speak, our sense of time in spoken language and written language is actually quite a bit more complicated.

We have actions that were started in the past and completed in the past. We have actions that were started in the past but are still ongoing. We have things that we think are going to happen. Things that we know are going to happen. It’s much more complicated and a lot of languages treat it very differently.

One thing I notice from time to time is our nanny who is native Spanish speaking, her English is fantastic but she — if you ask her like what did she have for dinner tonight, she says, “Oh, she eats green beans and broccoli and chicken,” which would actually be a really good meal for my kid because my kid is a terrible eater. But she says, “She eats,” or like I’ll ask did she have a bath, it’s like, “She does.” And so she’s answering back in our present tense verb for something that we would use a past tense verb. And that’s just the way that Spanish works versus how English works.

Their sense of what you use the present tense for is wider than what we use the present tense for. In Spanish they put a wider umbrella over the present tense than we do in English. And so those things don’t match up perfectly.

**Craig:** No, that’s true. And the language where you’ll see huge differences like that, where it’s not even subtle, is Chinese. The Chinese language has a bunch of quirks. We would call them quirks. I assume that they would look at our language and call our language quirks. Here’s a sentence that — you can’t ask the following question in Chinese: You can’t say, “You’re not really thinking of doing that, are you?” They don’t recognize negatively phrased questions.

**John:** Yeah. And in Spanish that would kick into the subjunctive probably. And it’s more complicated. And I think people want to reduce things to simple rules that like could be machine translated between things, and it’s more complicated than that. It’s more subtle.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are a lot of strange things, just the way that — and I think we’ve had a Chomsky festival before on this podcast — but the grammar that we use reflects our consciousness and the way we think about things. But there are gaps. And you obviously picked up on a very subtle one in Mario’s language that I did not. I’m still going to kill you over this.

**John:** Which is fine.

A reader a couple of months ago sent in through — he had gone to one of those paid coverage services and he sent through the coverage. And it was too long to really talk about either on the website or on the podcast, but looking through it, I was a little bit frustrated by what this reader wrote in terms of his comments, like things to change in his script.

And it was something like he was criticizing him for using the passive voice. And the example the guy cited was something like, “Mary is cooking dinner.” And the reader said, “No, it should be, ‘Mary cooks dinner,'” which is wrong sort of on two levels. First off, that’s not passive voice.

**Craig:** Right. “The dinner was cooked by Mary” is passive.

**John:** Exactly. So passive is any construction in which the subject of the sentence is receiving the action of the verb. So, “The casket is lowered into the ground by the men.” That’s a passive voice.

And, first off, there is nothing wrong with a passive voice. There are a lot of reasons why you might want to use an active voice and there are a lot of reasons why in screenwriting you should be thinking about, like, “Wait — does the active voice make more sense for this?” Rather than “The blindfold is removed,” it’s like, you know, “The bandit removes the blindfold.” There may be reasons why the active voice works better for you. That’s not to say that passive voice is wrong.

But with, “Mary is cooking dinner,” that’s actually the present progressive, and that’s like a remarkably good thing that English has that not every language has. The present progressive is that “ing” form, so the “to be” plus an “ing.” So, “Mary is cooking. Bob is running.” And what’s great about the present progressive for screenwriting is that you can interrupt it. And so if a scene starts with, “Todd is running down the street.” You can — “Todd is running down the street when…” something happens. You can stop that action.

If it’s, “Todd runs down the street,” well, does he finish running down the street? It implies that something has been completed when it may be something that you want to stop midway.

**Craig:** This is one of those “rules” that you hear tossed around by halfwits on the internet who don’t know anything about what it means to write a screenplay effectively. They’ll say things like, “Go through your script and remove all ‘ing’ verbs.” No. No. Swallow poison, idiot, because that’s the… — These reductive nonsense rules that people use for screenplays make me crazier than anything.

Of course there are times when you want to say “is running’ or “is doing,” especially in a screenplay which is attempting to invite the reader into an immediate present. Something is happening RIGHT NOW. Isn’t that more dramatic than a thing happened?

So, not to highjack this and turn it into a celebration of my hatred for so many people, but you definitely hit upon something that invokes great umbrage-taking from me.

**John:** Oh, it wouldn’t be a year anniversary podcast without some umbrage.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And really most of these so-called “rules” are people trying to implement Latin and English, or they’re trying to sort of pull rules from a perfect language, which they believe to be Latin, into English. So they say, “Well, Latin doesn’t do this so therefore we shouldn’t do this.” Like Latin doesn’t break up infinitives, so like, “To slowly roast…” they won’t put a word in between the “to” and the infinitive form of the verb. And so therefore we shouldn’t do it.

Well, Latin is different. And in English it tends to make a lot more sense to split up that infinitive in a lot of cases. And if it sounds better to the ear, well that’s the point.

**Craig:** I’m with you on that. Like I don’t understand the whole rule against split infinitive. Who cares? Sometimes it’s much better and much more expressive to do it that way. I’m not one of these people that fetishizes avoiding prepositions at the end of a sentence. It’s all silly.

And certainly when we talk about writing, the nice thing about screenwriting is you can write anything you want because it’s not going to be read.

**John:** Yeah. A weird thing happened in a script that I just finished, and Stuart and I went back and forth a couple times on this one line of dialogue. And the line is, “Ethics is easy when you’re winning.”

And so is it “ethics is easy” or “ethics are easy when you’re winning?” And so when you actually look it up it turns out ethic and ethics are two different words and they actually mean two different things.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So it became a very subtle, like, “Well what is the definition of this?” “What is the definition of this?” “What is the real sense in which the character is using this?” But it also became, “Which sounds better coming out of someone’s mouth?” “Which would you actually say?”

**Craig:** You could do it either. I think you could do it either way presuming that you’re not talking about the study of ethics but rather individual ethics, like having ethics. You could say, “Ethics is easy,” meaning the concept of having ethics which is silently implied. Or, ethics — plural — having them “are easy.” I think you could do either one.

But if you were talking about “ethics is easy when you’re winning,” meaning the class where they teach ethics, that would be “ethics is.”

**John:** The class Ethics — Ethics 101 is easy in winning.

**Craig:** Or the study of ethics or the field of ethics.

**John:** But ultimately it came down to which is going to sound better coming out of this character’s mouth, because this character isn’t going to know the distinction between these two things. I mean, maybe if he were a linguist he would… — If he were a linguist he would use the right one.

But he wasn’t a linguist. He was a sports coach, so it didn’t make sense he would actually say the grammatically correct one or the definitely correct one. So it’s which one sounds better.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** I thought this would be a good transition into some things that will always sound terrible. And this was a list that a listener sent in, which I thought is just terrific. It’s from Go Into The Story, and it’s a list of bits of dialogue that you should probably always avoid.

And so it’s a lengthy list and we’re going to do our best to sort of sell you on how they sound and why you should never hear them. They will all be familiar to you. And if you were going to use any of the lines we’re about to state, you can, but you’re going to have to spin them somehow to take the curse off them, because they are all kind of cursed lines.

**Craig:** Hmm. Or just don’t use them.

**John:** Or just don’t use them. But I would say in a comedy there is probably a way you could use them, but you’d have to do something very smart to spin it in a new direction. Or not.

**Craig:** Yes. I agree. Some of these unfortunately are already attempts to spin something. They are jokes that have been beaten to death, so I don’t know how you spin something that’s already poorly spun and over spun.

**John:** Yeah. Jane Espenson defines these as “clams.” And so they were funny once but through repetition they become really not funny and smell horrible.

**Craig:** Yes. [laughs] Correct. Clams.

**John:** So shall we do this? “Are you ready?”

**Craig:** “I was born ready.”

**John:** “Are you sitting down?”

**Craig:** “Let’s get out of here!”

**John:** “_____ is my middle name.”

**Craig:** “Is that all you got?” “I’m just getting started.”

**John:** “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

**Craig:** “Don’t you die on me!”

**John:** “Tell my wife and kids I love them.”

**Craig:** “Breathe, dammit!”

**John:** “Cover me. I’m going in.”

**Craig:** “He’s standing right behind me, isn’t he?”

**John:** “No, no, no, no, no, no, I’m not going.” Cut to them going.

**Craig:** “No, come in. _____ was just leaving.”

**John:** “You better come in.”

**Craig:** “So, we meet again.”

**John:** “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

**Craig:** “Well, if it isn’t _____.”

**John:** “I’m just doing my job.”

**Craig:** “You give ______ a bad name.” / “Calling you a ______ is an insult to ______.”

**John:** “You’ll never get away with this.” “Watch me.”

**Craig:** “Lookin’ good,” said into a mirror.

**John:** “Now, where were we?”

**Craig:** “What the…?”

**John:** “How hard can it be?”

**Craig:** “Time to die.”

**John:** “Follow that car!”

**Craig:** “Let’s do this thing!”

**John:** “You go girl!”

**Craig:** “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

**John:** “Yeah, a little too quiet.”

**Craig:** “If I’m not back in five minutes get out of here,” or, “blow the whole thing up,” or, “call the cops.”

**John:** “What part of _____ don’t you understand?”

**Craig:** “I’m not leaving you!” “You have to go on without me.”

**John:** “Don’t even go there.”

**Craig:** “I’ve always wanted to say that.”

**John:** “Ready when you are.”

**Craig:** “Is this some kind of sick joke?”

**John:** “Oh, ha, ha, very funny.”

**Craig:** “Did I just say that out loud?”

**John:** “Wait. Do you hear something?”

**Craig:** “It’s…just a scratch.”

**John:** “How is he?” “He’ll live.”

**Craig:** “I’m…so…cold!”

**John:** “Is that clear?” “Crystal.”

**Craig:** “What if…nah, it would never work.”

**John:** “And there’s nothing you or anyone else can do to stop me.”

**Craig:** “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

**John:** “Note to self.”

**Craig:** “Honey, is that you?”

**John:** “What’s the meaning of this?”

**Craig:** “What seems to be the problem officer?”

**John:** “What’s the worst that could happen?” / “What have we got to lose?”

**Craig:** “I have a bad feeling about this.”

**John:** “Leave it. They’re already dead.”

**Craig:** “Don’t you think I know that?”

**John:** “Whatever you do, don’t look down.”

**Craig:** “Why won’t you die!”

**John:** “I eat guys like you for breakfast.”

**Craig:** “Oh, now you’re really starting to piss me off.”

**John:** “We’ve got company.”

**Craig:** “Hang on. If you’re here, then that means…uh-oh.”

**John:** “Oh, that’s not good.”

**Craig:** “Awkward!”

**John:** “What just happened?”

**Craig:** “We’ll never make it in time!”

**John:** “Stay here.” “No way, I’m coming with you.”

**Craig:** “This isn’t over.”

**John:** “Jesus H. Christ!”

**Craig:** “It’s no use!”

**John:** “It’s a trap!”

**Craig:** “She’s gonna blow!”

**John:** “Okay. Here’s what we do…” And cut to a different scene.

**Craig:** “Wait a minute. Are you saying…?”

**John:** “You’ll never take me alive.”

**Craig:** “Okay. Let’s call that Plan B.”

**John:** “I always knew you’d come crawling back.”

**Craig:** “Try to get some sleep.”

**John:** “I just threw up in my mouth a little.”

**Craig:** “Leave this to me. I’ve got a plan.”

**John:** “No. That’s what they want us to think.”

**Craig:** “Why are you doing this to me?!”

**John:** “When I’m through with you…”

**Craig:** “Impossible!”

**John:** “Wait! I can explain. This isn’t what it looks like.”

**Craig:** “Showtime!”

**John:** “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

**Craig:** “If we make this out alive…”

**John:** “That’s it! You’re off the case.”

**Craig:** “How long have we known each other?” “We go back a long way.”

**John:** “Well. Well. Well.”

**Craig:** “Ah-ha! I knew it!”

**John:** “Done and done!”

**Craig:** “Leave it. He’s not worth it.”

**John:** “In English please?”

**Craig:** “As many of you know…” and then a bunch of exposition.

**John:** “Too much information!”

**Craig:** “Yeah, you better run!”

**John:** “Unless…” “Unless what?”

**Craig:** “What are you doing here?” “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

**John:** “So, who died? Oh…”

**Craig:** “You’re either brave or very stupid. ”

**John:** “Oh, yeah? You and whose army?”

**Craig:** “Now that’s what I’m talking about.”

**John:** “Don’t call us. We’ll call you.”

**Craig:** “It’s not you. It’s me.”

**John:** “This just gets better and better.”

**Craig:** “This is not happening. This is not happening!”

**John:** “Make it stop!”

**Craig:** “Shut up and kiss me.”

**John:** “I’ll see you in hell.”

**Craig:** “Lock and load!”

**John:** “Oh, hell no!”

**Craig:** That was too white. [laughs]

**John:** [trying again] “Oh hell no!”

**Craig:** Yes. I love that one.

“Not on my watch!”

**John:** “You just don’t get it, do you?”

**Craig:** “I have got to get me one of these.”

**John:** “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

**Craig:** “It’s called _____. You should try it sometime.”

**John:** “That went well.”

**Craig:** That did go well.

**John:** And scene.

**Craig:** So that was a pretty great list of awful, awful lines to not write. And there are so many more. I mean, people can write in. It’s a fun game of coming up with the cliché awful lines. I think in comedy it’s particularly embarrassing when you trot one of these things out as if you haven’t already seen it a hundred times on a sitcom. And for dramas, these kind of overwrought lines are actually indicative usually of stories and character issues.

I mean, in comedy, okay, you’re just going for an easy laugh with a joke. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there is wrought. But if you’re writing a drama and you have a scene where someone has tripped and fallen and the other person is trying to drag them away and they say, “No. Leave me. You go on.” You just…you blew it. There’s a big problem there.

**John:** Some of these are transitional phrases that they are trying to, like — the scene was going in this direction and then it has to go in a different direction. Like someone has to start some exposition or someone has to do something different. The energy of the scene has to change. And they are just space killers; you have to find a way to not do them, because in real world situations you wouldn’t say that, they wouldn’t be there. You would just actually start the next thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. This kind of stuff actually came in very handy when I was writing spoof movies, because the spoof characters almost only speak in these things. I used to talk about it with Anna Faris, because we were trying to figure out how it was that these sort of lines worked in spoof but not in anything else; in anything else they were horrible. And we both realized that in spoof, characters have no subtext whatsoever; they simply say what’s on their mind. [laughs] They’re just very, very stupid people.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And this is the way very, very stupid people talk. So don’t make your characters very, very stupid.

**John:** All of these lines sort of sound like a Tracy Jordan movie, from 30 Rock. So when they do the cutaways to one of the movies that Tracy has made, these are all lines that he would have said in one of his movies.

**Craig:** Exactly, like, “I’ve gotta get me one of these.” It’s just so…You’re just not trying at that point. And I don’t like using the word “lazy” for writing, because I feel like writing is super hard and there’s nothing lazy about it, but in that case it’s actually not hard to write that line. It was written for you, chewed up, and spat out 100 times. So now you’re just sort of retyping something. It’s not very inventive.

**John:** One of these lines, the first time I heard it was in Rawson Thurber’s script and his movie for Dodgeball, which was, “I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.” And maybe it was originally Rawson, or maybe it had been there for a long time and I just happened to never hear it, but Christine Taylor says it to Ben Stiller, and it actually works really well in the scene. But that was the first time I heard it. I don’t know if that that was the origin of it.

**Craig:** It long predates Dodgeball. When it showed up in Dodgeball it was kind of just sort of… — He was still in the safe zone, but it was already tilting into clamage. And the thing about those kinds of lines is that once they appear in something big and prominent and they use that in the ads, it’s done. Like, nobody else should go near it. So, you might say, “Oh man, you know, I came up with that line, I put it in a show and no one saw the show and then three years later I see it pop up in an ad for a movie, and now everyone thinks the movie came up with it.”

Well, you know, suck it up. That’s part of comedy and we’re all in this together. But, once it does show up in something like that, one cannot go near it again. It is done.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** And yet I will still see it. You know, my daughter watches the Disney Channel sitcoms and they’re just clam festivals.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a clambake.

**Craig:** It’s a clambake like you have no idea. Yeah.

**John:** So here’s how I would use the “I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.” In a situation where that could be a line, why don’t you just have the character kind of throw up in their mouth and literally have to spit out the vomit? It’s funny again.

**Craig:** Right. Like I actually threw up in mouth.

**John:** So they don’t even have to say anything because we sort of know what it is. And so just, like, have them upchuck a little bit and have to put it in a little towel and it would be great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Or in their hand, because bodily fluids in hands is funny.

**Craig:** Or like a man kisses a woman in a bar and she says, “I think I threw up in your mouth a little.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] That’s funnier.

**Craig:** However you need to put something on it.

**John:** Yeah. I think if he says, “I think you just threw up in my mouth a little.”

**Craig:** “Did you just throw up in my mouth a little?” [laughs] It could be a question.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah.

**Craig:** “I think I might have thrown up in your mouth a little.” Yeah. Hmm.

**John:** Hmm. It’s good. See, we’re writing here.

We have some questions, so let’s get to some questions, which is I think one of the things I’ve enjoyed most about doing this podcast over the last two years, answering some questions and getting some multiple opinions here.

So the question is from Jared in Weston, Connecticut. He asks, “What is the process of selling a spec script as a completely new writer? Maybe you could use Go as an example. Do you have to have representation in order to sell a spec? Who buys a spec — producers or studios? I totally understand if this is one of those cringe-worthy ‘how do I get an agent’ questions, but I’d really love to hear your insight into the process.”

So, yeah, I think some 101 questions are valid every once and awhile.

**Craig:** It’s a good question.

**John:** Good question. A spec is a script — just so we’ll define terms here from the start — a spec is a script that you wrote yourself that is not based on anything. It’s just you sat down at your computer and you wrote a spec script. This was 100 percent your idea and something you did. And you own it, completely, so no one owns any other part of it.

Generally, if it’s not a movie you’re going to make yourself but you’re trying to sell it to someone else to make it, that would go out into the world with an agent or a manager or someone else who is representing you and the script to buyers. Those buyers could be producers. Those buyers could be big studios. They could be some sort of in between production entity. But generally it’s pretty rare, I think, for a production company to find your script and directly buy it without some other intermediary force. Craig, you can correct me if you disagree.

**Craig:** No. I think that that’s absolutely correct and it’s going to be the studio that buys it, not a producer. Producers attach themselves to specs. Producers aren’t really employers. This is a hard concept for people to wrap their minds around when they haven’t been exposed to the very strange business of studios versus producers.

Producers basically are just hired guns by the studio to shepherd projects, but they don’t actually pay you. They don’t buy stuff. They may option things. I mean, occasionally they buy things if they have a discretionary fund, which is a pool of development money that the producer has access to and can use freely.

Still, even in those cases the money is from the studio. But you were right on.

**John:** So, the advantage of writing a spec script is that obviously you can just write it and it’s free and clear and it’s yours and you can do whatever you want with it. Maybe you will sell that script to somebody, and that script will not become a movie. Most cases, no one will buy that script. That doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly valuable.

So the first script I wrote was this romantic tragedy set in Boulder, Colorado. It never sold. God bless it, it should never have sold because it really is not a movie, but people read it because they could read it. And they liked it enough that it got me my first jobs, my first assignments.

Go was the first spec script that I sold, and that sold to a tiny little production company. But it was sent around all over town, so at that point I had an agent who sent it to all the studios who said, “We love the writing. We can’t make this movie.” And a little tiny company said yes and that was the start of that.

**Craig:** And that’s the case now more than ever. There once was a burgeoning spec market, not so much anymore. Occasionally still people sell specs. But more often than not the specs today are calling cards for people to advertise their talent and their abilities.

**John:** And so there are weird exceptions. Like Amazon Studios will buy things that has no agent or manager or sort of anybody representing it. But Amazon Studios is a weird, sort of special case that I wouldn’t strongly recommend to anybody.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** A question from Armin in Tehran, Iran. We have a listener in Tehran.

**Craig:** Cool!

**John:** How great is the world?

**Craig:** The world is pretty great. Iran is not so great. I just read that they are now banning women from various classes in their universities. Not cool.

**John:** Not cool at all.

**Craig:** But, you know, the other fascinating thing about Iran, and we’ll get to his question in a second, is that did you know that there are no gay people in Iran?

**John:** That’s fascinating.

**Craig:** Yeah. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad assures us that there are no gay people in Iran. [laughs] It’s the one place in the world where they just don’t grow.

**John:** Yeah. Wow. They figured something out!

**Craig:** Cool guy. So, what’s the question? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] “I’m a screenwriter and I wrote some screenplays that I think have a chance to sell. Would you please help me know about ways to save my rights? As you know, unfortunately Iran isn’t under copyright law or a WTO copyright registration. So if I register my works at the WGA, how can I present them? I have a trustful friend in the USA, so is it possible to ship to him? If yes, what are the legal stages? Thanks for your attention.”

**Craig:** Oh boy. Wow.

**John:** So, way outside of our realm of experience. First off, I don’t know this to be true, so I’m taking him at his word that Iran actually doesn’t abide by copyright law. But that just kind of throws a wrench in everything.

**Craig:** It does. I mean, it may be true. There is copyright law which is country to country. And then there is essentially the Berne Convention, which is a kind of overarching regulator of copyright throughout the world, but even for instance the United States doesn’t subscribe to all the parts of the Berne Convention.

For instance, droit moral and so forth, we have work-for-hire, Europe doesn’t. Our copyright here in the United States is actually enshrined in the Constitution itself. Most people don’t know that. There’s part of the constitution that just talks about copyright. I have no idea what the situation is in Iran. I’m going to take his word for it that they don’t have any copyright protection, which seems odd to me.

And if that is the case and this person was trying to sell screenplays not in Iran, which I would imagine is the case given the situation there, then what I would do is probably send the script to, I guess, to the United States Copyright Office. Because the truth is anybody anywhere can register something with the Copyright Office in the United States. I don’t think you need to be a citizen, per se. And you would get the protections of that copyright where it applies, mainly the United States. But other people would respect it as well.

**John:** Yeah. My first line of investigation would be to figure out — there are Iranian filmmakers, and so obviously they are doing something. But, look at Iranian novelists or sort of anyone who is publishing outside of Iran and try to figure out how they’re doing what they’re doing, because they must have some copyright protection in places outside of Iran. So that would probably the first and best way to pursue — whatever they’re doing is probably the right thing to do.

US Copyright Office, certainly if a non-citizen can do that, that’s a great idea, too. Worse comes to worst, I think there might also be a way that if he has this trusted American friend — and again, this is just speculation, because it could be a work-for-hire in which the copyright vests in the employer — you could do something where potentially the person is buying it here for a nominal fee and registering that as being the owner — registering himself as being the owner of this copyrighted material.

**Craig:** You don’t actually need to do work-for-hire for that. You can transfer copyrights. The other thing is, the simplest thing if you wanted to go that route would simply be to send the script to your friend and have them register it as their own copyrighted work.

However, the purpose of copyright and all of this ultimately is to properly credit authorship. And the person who is writing the question is the author, not his friend. I have to believe somewhat that that can be protected. But, you know, this is one we’ll have to do a little research on and come back to, because that’s tricky. And I feel like I need more facts before I can answer properly.

**John:** Yeah. But I’m just excited that somebody in Iran is listening to our podcast.

**Craig:** That is fantastic, by the way. And we have here in Los Angeles we have a very large, very significant Persian community. I have a lot of Persian friends. And I am a fan of the people of Iran. Not so much the government, but the people.

**John:** We all hope for a very positive outcome in the decade to come for Iran.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** A question about following up after a meeting. So, Bin Lee writes in to ask, “By dumb luck I ran into an established Hollywood writer at an airport in Cleveland this weekend. He was very nice and gave me his email since we ran out of business cards.” We had an earlier conversation about business cards.

“The next day I sent him an email reminding him who I was and it was nice to meet him. I also asked if he was free to meet up for lunch so I could pick his brain on some topics. Was it too forward of me to ask him to meet for lunch? I know there’s a fine line between friendly and too aggressive. I’m sure he’s super busy and I’m a small fish, but let’s say he doesn’t reply to my email. How long should I wait before I try to email him again? Two weeks? One month?”

**Craig:** Well, there’s nothing wrong with asking somebody to lunch. There’s nothing particularly too forward about that. It’s only forward to presume that they must have lunch with you. And he doesn’t have to have lunch with you and he may not want to, because like you said he’s busy. I think you could always shoot him another one in a month I think is fair and just say, “Hey, doesn’t have to be lunch, by the way, maybe just coffee. Or maybe we just get on the phone for 20 minutes. I just have some questions.”

I think you should err on the side of making it as easy as possible for this person to help you.

**John:** I would agree. I would also… — The huge advantage to me for coffee is that coffee has a much more limited time commitment implicit. And so I will tend to do coffee with people who are sort of in the situation where he’s a friend of a friend who, you know, I don’t know whether this is going to be a good time or a not so good time. Coffee could be 15 minutes. It could be an hour. But it’s much less of a commitment, so that’s a helpful thing for me.

In terms of following up, I think it’s a great use of the email, that’s good initiative. If after a week you heard nothing, maybe lob another, but after two contacts and you hear nothing, let it be done, because it’s not something that’s going to… — More follow up isn’t going to make that better.

**Craig:** I totally agree. Two emails is plenty. The lack of response should be presumed to be a “no,” and while it may seem rude, and it technically is rude, the truth is I get a lot of emails from people. I don’t even know how some of them get my email. And what happens is I find myself suddenly spending an hour helping people with stuff. And I don’t have an hour sometimes.

Sometimes I have the hour, I just don’t want to do it. I just want to lie down.

**John:** Yeah, that’s fair.

Brendan writes, “My writing partner and I have recently collaborated with a director on an idea he had for a movie. It was made clear at the beginning that the director wanted a shared ‘Story by’ credit and some form of compensation since the pitch was based on his original idea. We agreed in principle to this — no contracts yet — and used the WGA residual formula to determine the percentage of any initial sale. Therefore, one-half of a ‘Story by’ credit is 12.5 percent. We then sold the pitch to a studio, and between our lawyers and studio business affairs no one can seem to come up with a clean way to execute what seems to be a standard type of situation. How does this not happen all the time? WGA says their jurisdiction begins at the written story treatment level and do not cover pitches. Any suggestions on how to proceed?”

**Craig:** Oh, boy. This sort of stuff happens all the time. The Writers Guild is correct. The problem is: What writers sell is written material; what producers sell are ideas. So, what I would suggest, since the director appears to have not written anything but rather tossed ideas around with you, gave you an idea which you then took and started to write, what I would suggest is that you take the amount of money that the studio is willing to pay you — let’s just say, we’ll call it $100,000. You take 87.5 percent of that. So you say to the studio reduce the amount you would give me for the writing by 12.5 percent. You are the only writer employed. Take that remaining money, whatever I just said, $12,500, give that to the director and pay him under a producing deal.

**John:** But here’s the problem: Ultimately if the movie gets made there’s nothing guaranteeing that director a ‘Story by’ credit when it comes to determining credits.

**Craig:** He shouldn’t have a “Story by” credit. Here’s the deal: He didn’t write it. And sometimes people get really cranky about this because they feel like, “Well but it was my idea and I talked it out and I told them what to do.” Yeah, but you didn’t write it. Trust me, pal, and I’m being mean to this guy, it’s not fair — I’ll be nice to him. Trust me, friend, [laughs], the reason that you told that thing to him and then had him write it is because writing is annoying and/or hard.

There is actually value in the writing itself. And that’s what screen credit is for. Writing credit is for written words on a page, not for ideas or thoughts. If you want to open up the notion that credit be for ideas and thoughts, everybody gets credit. You’re not the only one who is going to be asking for story credit. Why won’t the producer, the executives, the actors, everybody — the writing credit is a really specific thing. Words fixed on a page literary material.

**John:** So, I basically agree. I think Craig’s solution is probably the best solution for the situation as it exists right now. Let’s play time machine, though. If you decided at the start that this director wanted “Story by” credit, shared “Story by” credit, what you should have probably done is worked up the pitch in a written form with him involved in writing up the pitch so that he was one of the people who helped write the pitch for it. And therefore there was some literary material that you could register and say this was the underlying material behind this so that it was natural that he was going to be getting his percentage down the road, that this “Story by” credit was going to be shared between the three of you.

**Craig:** And if my solution doesn’t fly for any number of reasons, I guess the only remaining thing to do would be to resubmit the original treatment as written-by the two of you. And then the problem is solved.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It may not be true, though; in fact, it isn’t true. So the Writers Guild at that point may do something called a participating writer investigation or a pre-arbitration to make sure that you weren’t strong-armed into this sort of thing.

**John:** And it doesn’t sound like he was strong-armed. It sounds like from the very start this was the intention. And we don’t know all the facts on what this collaboration was. And maybe there were zillions of emails back and forth, and so there is writing happening on what this project was way back when. So, we’ll see.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A question from Josh. Josh writes, “Scriptnotes has introduced me to podcasts and now I’m hungry for more. John has mentioned a few times listening to podcasts while doing dishes, so I’m wondering what other podcasts do you recommend for your listeners, either screenwriting related if there are others, or otherwise?”

So, Craig, if I recall correctly you don’t listen to any podcasts at all?

**Craig:** No. I do not listen to podcasts. I’m not a very auditory — auditorily inclined learner. I’m much more visual. So, I tend to read everything and listen to very little, except for music.

**John:** So I listen to a lot of podcasts. So, the four or five that I picked out, which I think are fantastic, which won’t be to everyone’s taste, but I recommend them so you should try them in iTunes. First is a comedy podcast called Throwing Shade with Erin Gibson and Bryan Safi. It’s absolutely filthy and it’s great fun.

Build & Analyze is a Mac iOS development centered — really iOS development centered podcast with Marco Arment that is fantastic, and Dave Benjamin.

John Gruber’s podcast I was on a couple months ago. He’s great. And so he’s been doing a podcast for quite a long time. He describes it as being the director’s commentary for Daring Fireball, his website, which is very popular and is good.

And then for all my political stuff I really love the Slate Political Gabfest, which is a weekly podcast which has three very smart people from Slate talking about three issues that are on the national stage. And so listening through the Republican primaries and sort of getting into the actual campaign season, it’s been a great source of both information and commentary about that.

For screenwriting, the only other one that I listen to with some regularity is the Nerdist Writer’s Podcast, which is actually fantastic. And so it’s a TV-focused podcast that talks to showrunners and other television writers about the craft, and it tends to be more of a roundtable setting, and it’s really great. And so we’ve talked about doing some sort of shared podcast with them at some point which hopefully in this next year will get to happen.

**Craig:** Oh, that sounds kind of cool.

**John:** Yeah. Our last question of the day is about finishing, so I thought this appropriate. Josh in LA writes, “I have a problem. And that problem is finishing a script. It may sound pathetic, but for me it’s very real and very worrisome. I have what I think are great ideas. I understand mechanics of writing and all that, but I find that during the process I either begin to dislike the idea or I’ll come up with some reason why it’s not the right script to be writing, and once that happens I’m zapped of all motivation.

“I produce a lot of material. I think it’s good material, but I seem to struggle with crossing the finish line. I have attention deficit disorder and I don’t take medication for it, which may have something to do with impatience or lack of focus, but outside of that I’m curious if this is a common problem and would be grateful to hear you or Craig give advice.”

**Craig:** I’m sorry. I just love “I have attention deficit disorder but I don’t take medication for it.” You know, maybe you do have attention deficit disorder; I don’t know. That has nothing to do with why you can’t finish your screenplay.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** If you enough attention to write 70 pages, you have enough attention to write 110 pages. The problem that you’re experiencing is very common and I would argue almost always is the result of poor planning before you start it. There is no reason that you shouldn’t know precisely what the ending of your movie is before you start writing it.

The beginning and the ending are married to each other. And the fun of writing the movie is moving from one to the other in an interesting way, taking a character from one to the other in an interesting way. So, if you don’t know how the movie ends or you lose sight of what the movie’s ending should be, it’s because you just didn’t start right. So I would suggest if you are not already doing this, you — specifically you — should outline your movie completely.

You should be able to describe the movie to somebody as if you just saw it scene by scene before you write “Fade In.”

**John:** A lot of what he’s facing I think is also the-grass-is-always-greener problem. When you are in the middle of a script, you see all the problems with your script because you’re facing them every day. And so every time you sit down to work on it, you’re bombarded by everything that’s not working right in your script.

And so there’s always going to be that shiny other idea that’s like, “Oh, well that would be a better thing for me to write because that’s all new.” It’s the pretty girl sitting over there that doesn’t have all the baggage of the girl who’s sitting in front of you.

So you are fascinated by that other thing because you are not aware of its problems. And so of course that other idea is going to look better. And you want to go off and write that one instead of the one you’re in right now.

You’ve got to finish. And what I think a lot of people don’t understand about screenwriting when they first start to work in the form is 120 pages is really long. I mean, it’s the longest thing that most people ever have to write. And it can be a challenge to get through it all. And so with good planning you’ll hopefully be able to know what the next thing is. When you encounter that second act malaise, which really I think encounter that moment of like, “Oh, I’m stuck in the middle of this and it doesn’t seem like it will ever end,” jump forward and write something else that is exciting for you to write. Write those things at the end. Write those things that got you excited about it.

And I always forget which writer first told me about this idea, but it’s a really good idea that I’ve never actually implemented but I sort of should. Right when you first get excited to write a project, when you first set out, this woman, she writes a letter to herself about how much she loves this project and why she’s writing it. She writes it. She seals it in an envelope. And then when she hits that moment where she can’t do anymore with it, she rips open the envelope and reads that letter and that helps her get through the draft.

**Craig:** Aw. She gives herself a hug.

**John:** She gives herself a big hug.

**Craig:** Aw!

**John:** Which is nice. So, I say, Josh, give yourself a big hug. Know that really every script sort of feels like it’s never going to be finished. I mean, this thing I just turned, it wasn’t that I was even struggling with the work — I wasn’t struggling with any scene or any one moment of it. I was just like, “I can never get this thing finished.” But then I got it finished and it’s mostly just sitting down, or in my case standing up, and doing the work.

**Craig:** Yeah. You certainly can’t let despair stop you. If you let despair stop you — if everyone who wrote screenplays let despair stop them, your multiplex would be empty.

**John:** Yup. And with that, I want to talk about One Cool Things. Do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** I do have a Cool Thing this week.

**John:** I hope ours isn’t the same thing. I worry that it might be the same thing.

**Craig:** There’s not a chance.

**John:** Okay, good.

**Craig:** You go first.

**John:** My one cool thing is a book trailer for a book by Derek Haas, who is a friend of both of ours.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, I liked his book trailer.

**John:** It’s a good book trailer. So, Derek Haas is a very prolific screenwriter and now a TV writer, and he has a new show, Chicago Fire, on NBC which was advertised incessantly during the Olympics. I felt like the Olympics were on fire how often they were showing that commercial. He writes with a writing partner, Michael Brandt, but he also by himself writes books.

And I don’t know how he does it. It’s some sort of drug that lets him just create a tremendous amount of words. But he has a new book coming out this fall called The Right Hand. And there is a trailer for the book which is actually really good. They did a great job with it.

And I’m not sure I completely believe in trailers for books, but this kind of sells me on it, because it feels like this is a spy novel and I see sort of why a person might see this and think, “Wow, I’d see that movie. Since the movie doesn’t exist yet I’ll read this book.”

So, in the show notes you’ll see a link to The Right Hand, a book by Derek Haas.

**Craig:** Excellent. Yeah. It’s very cool. And Derek is a good guy. I just, in fact, came back from lunch with him.

**John:** Ah.

**Craig:** He’s my friend. I have a Cool Thing this week that I don’t understand. And I think one of the great things about this podcast is that while ostensibly it’s about us helping people, I feel like we have this amazing cohort of listeners out there who are really smart. And I notice in the comments and tweets and things, sometimes they’re just a step ahead of us on some things. And I feel like somebody, one of our listeners, is going to be able to explain to me, because I’m so fascinated by it.

So there was this really cool article in Gizmodo, a website I love, and it was titled The Algorithm that Controls Your Life. Did you read this, John?

**John:** I did not.

**Craig:** It’s really cool. Okay. So an algorithm is basically a decision-making chart. It’s just a way of approaching how to make decisions and determine outcomes. And so, for instance, “A fund manager,” I’m reading from the article, “a fund manager might want to arrange a portfolio optimally to balance risk and expected return over a range of stocks. Or, a railway timetabler wants to decide how to best roster staff for trains. Or a factory manager tries to work out how to juggle finite machine resources. This is the job of the algorithm.”

There is one algorithm that emerged in the ’40s from the work of a mathematician here in the United States named George Dantzig. And his job back then was to increase the logistical efficiency of the US Air Force, a pretty mundane kind of problem. But what he came up with was an algorithm that is represented by something called a polytope; it’s basically a chart — a pathway decision chart. And it’s this kooky looking sort of — it looks like a weird gem almost. And his particular algorithm was called the simplex algorithm.

And it turns out that the simplex algorithm is the most useful algorithm of all. And it is used in everything — search engines, how food gets to the market, everything. One academic quoted in the article says, “Tens or hundreds of thousands of calls of the simplex method are made every minute.”

So, to you out there: What is this? [laughs] I need to know. I need you to explain the simplex algorithm and I need to understand how an algorithm is represented by a shape and why this one is so powerful.

**John:** That’s great. That’s a great call to action, because I think we have some very smart listeners who will be able to describe it in terms that are not necessarily layman, but smart-but-not-maybe-gear-heady people can understand. That would be great.

**Craig:** Yeah. I just love that there’s some dude in the ’40s who came up with a shape and the shape is controlling our lives. [laughs] It’s so cool. And I need to understand how. So thank you. Thank you, unnamed person.

**John:** I find all these kinds of optimization and sort of, you know, trying to look at how decisions are made fascinating. So, economics, I loved taking the classes but none of it really stuck. Like supply and demand stuck, but the bigger implications of it always sort of went over my head. And so I like that people understand it. I guess I trust that people understand it. Sometimes I have moments of doubt that where I think that people are sort of just making stuff up. But it’s neat.

**Craig:** The fun thing about economics — and I’m with you by the way, exactly with you; I understand basic concepts but then once they leap past those I’m gone — but economics is one of the few areas of academic study where no one seems to agree at all. It’s almost to the point where it’s useless. I mean, there’s a predominance of people who believe that something is true in terms of medicine or biology or physics.

I mean, most physicists believe that the Higgs boson was real. Some didn’t. But most did. Economics, it just seems like, well, you’ve got Vienna over here and you’ve got the other one over there. [laughs] Keynes. And they just don’t agree at all. And they argue all the time.

**John:** Well the trouble becomes is you’re trying to control — it all looks really pretty on a chart, but in the real world you are controlling for so many variables; you really can’t say whether that had this impact or had this impact. So, did raising that marginal tax rate make this change, or did it have all of these other manifestations in ways that you can’t have anticipated? So, that’s where I get confused.

And so it’s always fun to talk about, “oh, guns and butter,” but then when you actually really drill down and get into more specifics it’s not as simple or fun.

**Craig:** I feel like psychology is a bit like that, too. Psychology is so open-ended. It can almost account for any outcome. Any one theory can account for any outcome which makes all of it useless.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But not the simplex algorithm. That will someday tell us what to do. I think it already is, actually.

**John:** Yeah. Right now. It has told us that it is time to end this podcast.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Craig, thank you for a fun year of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** And here’s to many more. We should have a little cake. We should make a little cake and give it to our microphones.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** The microphone is one year old. So cute!

**John:** Which microphone are you using, by the way?

**Craig:** I use the same one you do, the AT2020.

**John:** It has a little glowing blue light.

**Craig:** The glowing blue light.

**John:** It makes me so happy.

**Craig:** Yeah. The glowing blue light is very comforting.

**John:** Craig, thank you again. Talk to you next week.

**Craig:** Thank you. You got it.