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

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

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

**John:** And this is the 3rd intro that I just did for Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters. How are you, Craig?

**Craig:** Uh, I’m exhausted. I’m so tired right now. Anything could happen. I could say anything.

**John:** Well, today we are going to mostly answer questions, so it should be kind of easy.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** This won’t be a particularly taxing one is what I am trying to say.

**Craig:** Thank God. Because normally, normally, I need to be on my A-game for this sort of thing.

**John:** Yeah. But your C-game, we will let it slide.

**Craig:** Yeah. Oh, by the way, my C-game may end up being my A-game. We will find out.

**John:** You never know.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We wanted to start off with an update because in a previous podcast we had talked about Toph Eggers who had written a criticism of Steve Koren, who is a fellow screenwriter, that we thought was poorly done. It was a bad choice of something to write about, and it was not the correct thing to do. And we sort of went at length on our feelings about that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But he wrote a follow up piece that was actually pretty nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was a pretty well thought out apology. I mean, I guess that is the headline, really, is that he apologized for it, and seems to own completely that he behaved poorly and boorishly. And not only did he apologize in a very convincing and thorough manner, but he also touched on why what he did was wrong, and why in fact Steve Koren doesn’t deserve harassment at all.

It was an A+ apology. And so I offer Toph Eggers my A+ acceptance.

**John:** He wasn’t really apologizing to you specifically, but acknowledgement.

**Craig:** I think he was apologizing to me, because I see everything as about me. [laughs]

**John:** Oh, I forgot the solipsism and narcissism that draws everything out.

**Craig:** Yes. Like he performed the role of “guy apologizing to me” extraordinarily well. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] But I would say, I like apologies, and I like apologizing. It’s weird that people aren’t better at it. I hate the modern form of apology which is, “I’m sorry you were offended.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This weird way of sort of redirecting it back at somebody, saying, “Oh, it is your fault that you were offended, but I don’t want you to feel bad about it in a strange way.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Liked I’m not apologizing for what I did; I’m apologizing for the weird interaction between what I did and your thin skin.

**John:** Yeah. Really apologizing and genuinely apologizing feels so good.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s like coming out, but of a blame thing.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. In fact, I remember during the strike when my blog was hoppin’, and there was an enormous amount of attention, I made a mistake. And the mistake that I made was I gave an interview to the LA Times, and in that interview I was very clear about the way I felt, but perhaps I was not as specific about insisting that they include a certain amount of context in what I said.

And when I read the article the next day, they had basically left out half of what I said and made me sound in a way, frankly, that was unflattering and counterproductive to what I wanted, which was an effective resolution to all of this. I wanted something good for the union and I didn’t like the way they made it sound. And people attacked me.

Now, the people attacking me, that was sort of par for the course; I would get that every day. But on that one, they were right, and the mistake that I made was, frankly, not taking my — not being as careful with the responsibility I had that came with the, I guess, my public presence. And I didn’t manage it well enough. And I apologized. And interestingly, I would say half of the people who follow the blog accepted the apology and took it for what it was, which was my mea culpa, and the other half viewed it as an opportunity to kick even more dirt in my face.

And I find people who do that particularly off, you know. [laughs] If somebody makes an apology, why not accept it? I mean, they are apologizing. If you won’t accept the apology all you are really doing is eliminating future apologies from people like that.

**John:** Yeah.

Wait, okay, I just did that thing where I say, “Yes,” and you say something long, and I just said, “Yeah.” It’s part of the drinking game apparently.

**Craig:** You did the “Yup” thing, yeah. You did the “Yup” thing.

**John:** I’m so sorry I just “Yupped” you.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** [laughs] I was reading the transcript of our podcast. One of the unusual things about our podcast is we do actually provide a transcript of all our podcasts a few days later, and it is on at johnaugust.com, you can look for it there. And I was reading through it, which I don’t usually read through it, but I was reading though it and this new person who is transcribing it will put in all of the yeahs that we have, and we say “Yeah” a lot.

**Craig:** We do.

**John:** And I tend to say “Yeah” after you have said something long and profound. And I will just follow it up with a “Yeah.”

**Craig:** I know. It takes all of the wind out of my sails. I feel so good. There is like a brief moment after I finish saying something profound and important where I feel so good. And it usually lasts about a second. And then you say, “Yup,” and then it is all gone.

**John:** Would you prefer in the future that I just leave a long, awkward silence, and then come back?

**Craig:** No. I think instead of saying, “Yeah,” because obviously there is nothing wrong with saying “Yeah” but I think a better word would be, “Wow.” [laughs]

**John:** How about a slow clap. [claps]

**Craig:** [laughs] I would also like a slow clap! I mean, I’m working my butt of here, man.

**John:** Maybe we could provide some sound effects that would sort of show the “Ooohh…”

**Craig:** You know what? We should sweeten this with laugh track and the Full House, “Ooohh!” I love it. Stuart, get that.

**John:** Stuart is on it. One of the most enjoyable things you can watch if you have about a minute to kill is Big Bang Theory without the laugh track. Have you seen this?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So they take like two minutes of the Big Bang Theory, of an episode, and they just take out all of the laughter, and your realize it is just such a creepy, strange show if you take out the laughter. Because they will say these weird things, and then there will just be awkward silence [laughs]. It looks like a show about serial killers.

**Craig:** That is why I always feel the jump from — and there are people who do it successfully — but jumping from sitcoms to movies is an enormous gulf because there is absolutely no help. And when you whiff, it is brutal. Brutal. Nothing is worse than silence. And, also, impacts every joke after it.

The more you don’t hear laughing, the less you want to laugh.

**John:** My friend Melissa is on a show now that is shot 3-camera with a live studio audience. And so I was talking with her, and they do pre-tape certain things, or they will stuff, like if they are driving a car and it is a green screen thing, so they may pre-record it, or they will do it just to sort of — they will do it for the live, studio audience with them just sitting on boxes on the stage and do it, and then they will actually go back and film the real thing. And they will patch it up with the laughter after the fact.

But she says it is just so odd when you have the audience there and they are anticipating the laugh, and you are waiting for the laugh, and then you have to try to match it in a context when you don’t have that. It has to be frustrating.

**Craig:** Very strange. Are you talking about your friend, Melissa McCarthy?

**John:** I am talking about my friend, Melissa McCarthy.

**Craig:** That’s my friend, Melissa McCarthy, now.

**John:** Oh, you get to work with her now.

**Craig:** Yeah. She’s mine. I took her from you.

**John:** She’s moving on up.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right. She graduated. [laughs]

**John:** Let’s get to some questions here.

**Craig:** Let’s do it.

**John:** Because questions are easy and I don’t say “Yup” at the end of them.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Scott asks, “Recently my partner and I sold our first spec to a major studio. It had been a long process that entailed attaching two major movie stars, and Oscar-winning producer, before it went to the market. When it did finally go out, it ended up in a minor bidding war that ended up with a truly modest deal. My question is, what do we do now? After we finish the two rewrites promised in our deal, where should we be putting out time and energy? What should we be asking our agents and managers to do for us? Should we be trying to pitch for existing assignments? Should we be trying to pitch original ideas? Should we be specking something? Should we try to get on staff for a series? What should we do?”

**Craig:** Okay, that last one threw me for a bit, because it sounded like they are feature writers.

**John:** They are feature writers I would say that a lot of feature writers sort of entering right now are really feature and TV people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I think it is maybe smart. We can talk about that, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I get that.

**John:** Don’t limit yourself to one thing.

**Craig:** No, I get that. I think it depends on how this particular project has gone for them. Assuming, I’m going to assume the best and it has gone well. If it has gone well then you have material and relationships that prove that you can do the job of professional screenwriting. So, if it were me, I would be asking my agents to get me general meetings and specific meetings about open assignments. Even if none of those meetings turn into work, they turn into relationships, which turn into work. Maybe not immediately, but done the road.

And simultaneously, I would be developing a pitch as soon as possible.

**John:** Yeah. You are going to have to focus your attention in a couple different areas and figure out what is most likely to work for you. But you are going to be going out on generals, which is basically the, “Hey, hello, how are you?” It is the bottled water tour of Los Angeles, where you sit down with all of the junior execs at different places and you see who you like and who you get along with.

Most of those meetings won’t really amount to anything, but they put a face with a name, and talk about stuff you like to write.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Some of those things will be going in for open assignments. And open assignments means that there is a movie that they want to make, or they have an idea, or some piece of property that they are talking to writers about doing. You want to go in and pitch on some of those, because some of those will become jobs. They will actually pay you to do them.

They are also incredibly good practice to figure out how to pitch a movie and how to take a nebulous idea and shape it as a movie and be able to present it to somebody. So, you are going to want to do some of that.

The danger, and what I have seen happen a lot, is you end up pitching on so many of these things that you are not writing anything new. So at the end of a year, all you have was that thing that you sold and a bunch of sort of pitches for movies you can’t make because you don’t have the underlying property.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I would say, I don’t know, if it is you and your writing partner, maybe you just break it down by day, or you break it down by sort of overall percentage of your time. But maybe on Mondays you are only going to work on your own stuff, which is you are writing that new spec, or figuring out your own pitches for something you can go out with. And Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, maybe you are going out on meetings and doing other people’s stuff.

But, you are going to have to plan for both things being possible. And if TV is a real possibility, you are going to have to have an honest conversation with your agents about what is the series, what is the season that they need you to be available to do stuff to go out on those meetings. What do they need from you to be able to show people so they can get you staffed on the show?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You are going to probably need to write something new. So it is not just a matter of, “Oh, I will do TV and someone will hire me.” It’s a tremendous amount of work to try to get hired on a TV show.

**Craig:** That’s the key. It is a tremendous amount of work. I think no matter what you are endeavoring, and this is the time when you must be extraordinarily aggressive with your time. You have to really work hard right now, because the door has been opened slightly. And I know that everybody has a romantic point of view on this, that when you finally get there and you have your break, the door is kicked open. And then you get to trip through the field of daisies and pick the jobs you want.

And, in fact, all they have really done is cracked the door slightly. You are going to have to work, and work, to get to that next thing. You want to be a professional writer, you need not one job, not two jobs, not three jobs. I think five jobs. Now you are one of the workforce. Now you are a known quantity.

And so you actually do need, unfortunately, to do a lot of work. And I totally echo your concern about over pitching on open assignments because here is the reality of those: they are a little bit of fool’s gold because nine times out of ten they end up going to whomever a director or actor wants, or a big writer, and you will exhaust yourself and your creative tools by cracking and solving problems for nothing, over and over and over.

So, be careful with those, which is why I suggest — there is nothing wrong with it. You are right; going on those is great practice. And it also helps show your problem solving side to these people. But general meetings are also great. And, pitch. Find something new and get out there and pitch it, because they are always looking for new stuff. And you guys get to walk into the room as people who have done it before, which is a big deal.

So, work hard right now.

**John:** Yes. And whatever you are taking out for your pitch should be something in the same ballpark as the thing that you sold. Because people read that script and they said, “Oh, we like this thing,” you know, minor bidding war. They were like, “Oh, there is something here that is promising.” So, if you sold a sci-fi/action movie, don’t try to go out with a comedy pitch next. That shouldn’t be your next spec because people aren’t going to know what to do with that. And they put you on some list, and they want to work with you, but they are not sure what to do with you on what list.

If you are going out to pitch on an open assignment, maybe that is a chance where you are going to stretch yourself to a genre that isn’t necessarily just like your spec. And they can see you do that because it is lower stakes.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I guess the only thing I would say is if you have a terrific pitch that is of a different kind of thing, but you believe in it, and you think it is sellable, then you just have to make sure that the expectations are managed before you walk in the room. That they here, “Listen, the guys who wrote this great science fiction/action-adventure have actually come up with this, amazingly have come up with this, incredible romantic comedy, which sounds like they wouldn’t be able to do it, but they have. So if you are looking for that, they would love to come in and talk to you about it.”

But, frankly, this is rarely a problem. Usually people have a natural genre. And early on in your career you should be going for depth rather than breadth, if that makes sense.

**John:** Yeah. You want to be like the guy who they want to do this next project that is sort of like that other project. That can be helpful. A little bit of pigeonholing is helpful very early on in your career.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I got pigeonholed as the guy who was adapting kids’ books. I didn’t only want to adapt kids’ books, which is why I wrote Go. The useful thing with Go, just even as a script, is I could go out for comedies with it, I could go out for action movies with it. I could go out for a lot of different kinds of movies with that script.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right.

**John:** Our next question is from a guy named Ruckus.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** “When handing in a rewrite, do either of you preface the draft in correspondence? My writing partner and I just submitted a pretty substantial rewrite, and I found myself struggling with the email. There were a few suggestions made by the producer that we didn’t think worked, but we found an alternate and hopefully more elegant solution in the writing. Is it better to let the producer know how you might have veered from the notes going into the reading, or should you let the script stand on its own?”

That’s a really good question.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a great question. First, I must of course say, “Can you describe the ruckus?” John, can you identify that quote?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** “Can you describe the ruckus?” I believe it is The Breakfast Club. “I heard a ruckus.” “Can you describe the ruckus?”

**John:** Oh, I don’t know The Breakfast Club that well.

**Craig:** My attitude about it is this: if you feel that you have addressed a problem in a creative and interesting way, that is good, go with it. It is a gamble, but it is a gamble that pays off huge if it works because all I think everyone that doesn’t write, but who advises writers on how to improve their writing, is secretly hoping that you are going to come back and just make them happy. They don’t really want to move your hand for you and type the words for you.

If they could do that, they would be writing. So, if you have a great solution that is off the beaten path of the notes, there is nothing wrong with saying, “Listen. We have in our back pocket the solution we all talked about, but we really wanted to try this.”

And if they don’t like it, just say, “Listen. You know what? It was something we believed in, and we thought about it. We always have the make good back here if we need to kind of go in that direction.” But, there is nothing wrong with showing, in my mind at least, nothing wrong with showing some creativity and some proactiveness, as it were.

**John:** I agree with you. I think if you have the better solution, let the better solution speak for itself. The only case where I would say to think twice is if you have promised that you are going to do a certain kind of thing, and then you don’t do that. Like let’s say you are working with a director and a studio, and you need to turn in this draft. If you promise a director you are going to do something, and you couldn’t do that thing, and you did this other thing instead, you have got to at least tell him or her that that that is there.

Because if it is going to everybody at once, and then they are surprised, and there is cross-talk that is not involving you, that is going to be a real problem.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** So there are cases where you want to either have that phone call or have that email ahead of time and everyone knows what is going on.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, it is really important to ask yourself, “How surprising will this be? And what if they don’t like it? Is this surprise going to compound the negative reaction?”

If you are going to really surprise them with something big, you have got to let them know ahead of time. Frankly, it has less to do with courtesy and more to do with being effective as a screenwriter. Because when people are shocked and surprised, they start to have an emotional reaction that is going to absolutely get in the way of their experience reading the script. That is just something you have to start to feel out, like what are kind of landmine type changes that you need to let them know about ahead of time to protect yourself and the work, and what are things that you can kind of just sort of go about because you are the writer of the script, and you are not a reactor.

**John:** Yeah. The more going into this rewrite process, you were talking about the areas that you were going to work on, but not the specific solutions, then you have a lot more freedom to do whatever you needed to do in order to get that thing to work right.

It is when… — A lot of times when you get very close to production and you had to sort of pitch the exact thing that you were going to do, not down to the word, but it is going to be this, and it is going to fit in this little place, and it is going to be this scene here, that is where it becomes tough where if you are doing something that is just very different it is going to ripple through other changes.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then maybe you need to really warn people about that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then there is sort of like, “What is the deal with these people? They are just not reliable. I don’t want to hire this guy again because we all discussed something in the room, he agreed, he went off. He came back and suddenly the guy that was supposed to be a little bit more of a mature dad instead of a bumbling dad has become an uncle from out of town who has no kids at all. What the hell is going on here?”

So be respectful of the fact that there is somebody else on the other end of this conversation.

**John:** Yes. Our next question. Max asks, “I have been writing specs for a while now, and working with producers. I have tons of drafts of several scripts — notes in every draft, brainstorming, what have you. I am just wondering how you, someone who has had infinitely more notes and files to deal with, keeps everything accessible and in place?” So just organization strategy for drafts and files.

**Craig:** That is a question for you. You are the Sort Master.

**John:** I am the Sort Master. But I don’t deeply sort. Most things that I am working on actively, I have in Dropbox so that I can reach them through whatever computer that I am in. Or, I can pull them up on my iPad if I need to. So, in Dropbox I have folders for each of the basic projects. So I have one for Preacher, for Frankenweenie, for whatever, and all of the drafts and everything related to it goes in there.

If something is like an email and is attached to an email, I don’t always drag it out of there and stick it into Dropbox. I kind of feel like mail is another way to get to some of that stuff. And a lot of times if I am looking for a specific PDF that I sent through to somebody else, I will just pull it out of mail rather than pulling it out of Dropbox, because at least then I can see the context of what this last thing was that I sent.

But I am just using Dropbox for basically everything. And I am being very lazy, and sort of hoping that Dropbox doesn’t mess it up for me, for my active stuff.

For older backup stuff, I have it on just a “Projects” hard drive. I have a big tower, and I have four hard drive slots in there. I have one that I use for projects, and I just keep everything related to those projects in those folders in there. And that one I back up once a week.

**Craig:** I don’t really think that there is anything lazy about it, I mean, the way you just described it. Frankly, it is not like our job of archiving is that intense. I do a very similar arrangement to you. I have a folder that is essentially a writing archive. Everything that is done, that sort of sits on a folder, and all of that stuff is mirrored to Dropbox as well. I like Dropbox, just mostly because of the backup factor.

I mean, I take my laptop with me wherever I go, though it is nice to always have mobile access. And the projects that are scripts in progress, that is its own folder. And in that, each of those things, there will be — for instance, in my Identity Theft folder I organize things by sort of treatment. So anything in the treatment folder is all the stuff that led to up to the first draft. Then there is first draft folder. There is the second draft folder. And then once the movie gets green lit, then I create a production drafts folder. And in that folder there is a white folder, a blue folder, a pink folder, a salmon folder, and yada, yada.

**John:** That is actually much more organized than what I do. I just keep it in one big folder and I sort it by date. And the most recent stuff is at the top, and I can usually find everything I need.

**Craig:** Who would have thought that I would be the neat one? [laughs] No one!

**John:** The tidy one.

So now what are you doing with just like little bits of scraps that aren’t quite movies or projects yet? Do you have any sort of dump file for that? I use Evernote for it. Are you using anything like that for storing the bits and pieces of things?

**Craig:** If I have an idea, or a little bit of something, it is almost always attached to a project. And what I will do is I will just make a folder for that project. So, even if I don’t quite know what it is, if it is like, “Okay, I have this idea for a historical drama,” I will just write a folder that says, “Historical Drama Idea,” and then I will put that stuff in there.

But, I don’t have a folder that is, like, “Ideas” or “Whims.” Everything gets kind of a spot.

**John:** I started using Evernote because I did have a folder for like bits and pieces, and I would never really check that folder because there were just drips and drabs and stuff. Or, if I made a new folder for something, a year later I would go back and see a folder that had exactly one file in it. And it was like, “Well, that was weird.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s like that idea sort of never came to anything more than that. So, the stuff that I feel is kind of interesting, that could be a movie somewhere, I’m throwing that into Evernote right now. It’s not perfect.

I use for my day-to-day keeping track of stuff I need to do, I am using OmniFocus, and I will sometimes — I am debating between the “someday maybe” kind of tag you can put on stuff. And so there will be a little idea, and I will put a “someday maybe” on it, and that way it just kicks up for review every couple of weeks. And so it is like, “Oh, that little thing I was thinking about, is that still something I am thinking about? Or should that just go away?”

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m okay with the notion that there are… — I mean I have a couple of folders in my Scripts in Progress master folder that I haven’t touched in three years. And I am okay with that. They are there mocking me, and I like it. I like that one day I will have to address either their mortality or breathe some life back into them.

**John:** Cool. Our next question comes from Salvi from Los Angeles. He asks, “I read about spec scripts or screen rights ‘going to auction.’ Although I am familiar with the concept of an auction, I am wondering if you can explain what exactly this means in a Hollywood setting. What is the process, the formalities? Who manages the auction? How are offers submitted — fax, email, phone call? Where, to whom? How does it work? What is a script auction or a rights auction?”

**Craig:** Uh…I’m guessing that this is… — A script auction, I believe, has to do with the purchasing of a library of material from a company. In other words, a company is going out of business and being sold.

**John:** Yeah. In this case he is talking about spec scripts.

**Craig:** Oh…

**John:** I think what he is talking about is there is the situation where something becomes a bidding more on a spec. So, let’s say you wrote a spec script that suddenly everybody wants. And it gets to the point where you are getting offers from different people. I used to hear about this more. Maybe it still does happen where at some point the agents will say, “Okay, we are going to start at 5pm and say to just start bidding. And people can call in and say how high they will go.” And they will set a time limit on it.

**Craig:** Yeah. To that, there is no rocket science. Basically if it is a hot property, and everybody knows about it, then you just say, “We start fielding calls at this hour, and we will let you know what the highest offer is. And if you want to match it or exceed it, go for it.”

Sometimes the companies, in an effort to short circuit a kind of endlessly spiraling competition will say, “I’m going to offer you $1 million for this. You have to take it or leave it right now, or I am out.” They do all sorts of things.

There are script auctions and rights auctions that occur when companies are being bought and sold. For instance, famously The Terminator rights were auctioned off. And those occur the way assets are auctioned off for any business, when they have to disperse assets. But, probably he is talking about what you are talking about.

**John:** In the case of those big bundle of rights assets, there you would need to know, you have to pre-qualify as a bidder. They have to know that you actually could buy at the price that you are talking about. There would be all sorts of terms and things. But if you just wrote a normal spec script, that is not going to go out as auction in a meaningful way. It is not like Christie’s. It’s not like they say, “We have a new spec script from this writer you have never heard about,” that people can read. That doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** You are just desperate for anyone to read that script if it is somebody you have never heard of before.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** This I am going to read just because this came in with the whole bundle of questions. This is a guy named Josh. He wrote in, “Cool blog. Went there to wash sneaks. CAngel Full Throttle was excellent!!”

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** And God bless him. He kept it all in the subject line. There was no text that went with it.

**Craig:** Oh, no, no. Why would there be text? The subject line is there for you to write your entire thing. Yeah.

**John:** But there was punctuation, Craig, I should point out. There were two exclamation points at the very, very end.

**Craig:** Oh. Well, do me a favor. Read that again, because I got C. Angels 2, I think, or C. Angels, but say it again one more time.

**John:** Because when I first read it, I read it as “Cangel.” I’m like, what is “Cangel?”

**Craig:** Oh, it could be Cangel which was a very good movie. But start from the beginning.

**John:** “Cool blog. Went there to wash sneaks. CAngel Full Throttle was excellent!!”

**Craig:** I’m sorry, watch or wash sneaks?

**John:** Wash sneaks. So, this is something, it is esoteric information that as the person who wrote the blog I can tell you, is I have a random blog post on there that says, “You can wash sneakers.” Because no one every washes their sneakers, but you totally can wash sneakers and they look so much better. And things that you would normally throw out are actually quite wearable again after washing them in the washing machine.

So he probably had Googled “washing sneakers,” ended up on my blog. Saw that I wrote Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle, and that was the movie that he wanted to comment how much he loved.

**Craig:** Cangels.

**John:** Cangel Full Throttle.

**Craig:** Cangel Full Throttle.

**John:** Cangel Full Throttle is due for a remake, I think.

**Craig:** Um…thanks, Josh.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Cool blog!

**John:** So this is a segue for me internally, not to hold it against him, which is a phrase… — Or, actually here is the phrase: let’s not hold that against him. Sometimes in blog posts my name will come up, and they will say, “John August, who wrote Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle, but let’s not hold that against him.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**John:** It’s the weirdest, most backhanded thing. First off, if you are going to cherry pick one credit just to put for me, you are going to put the sequel to Charlie’s Angels as my credit?

**Craig:** But let’s not hold that against him. And the reason we have to advise you not to hold that against him is because it was a terrible crime.

**John:** It was a crime against cinema.

**Craig:** What a bad thing you did, John. Boo!

**John:** What a terrible, awful thing I did.

**Craig:** But let’s show our humanity and our magnanimity by advising everyone to not hold it against you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because holding it against you would be an understandable action. Let’s hold that movie against you.

**John:** Yeah, it’s like a genocide, but it is a film that someone could choose to watch, or not watch, at their time. And there is actually a better movie that stars the same movie, called Charlie’s Angels, that is also available for watching. If you like Charlie’s Angels, and don’t like the sequel, that’s okay. You can just watch the first one.

**Craig:** I don’t even think we need to go to genocide. Let’s just start with the most mild crime we can think of. Shoplifting.

**John:** Yeah. Okay.

**Craig:** What’s worse — Cangel or shoplifting? I’m going to say shoplifting. I’m going to say there literally isn’t one single thing for which there is some kind of statute that is worse than writing the worst movie in the world.

People need to shut up.

**John:** Oh, you know where people also need to shut up? They need to shut up in freaking movie theaters.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, I went to go see Hunger Games here in Times Square, and yeah, I’m sort of asking for it, going to see a movie in Times Square, but that’s where I was. And so I saw the movie.

So I saw it opening day. Or I saw it the Friday that it opened. And it was a packed house. And I really, really enjoyed the movie. I did not enjoy, first off, the two women who got into a fist fight before the movie began.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Which is not great.

**Craig:** Maybe they were hungry.

**John:** They were hungry. They were hungry for some…

**Craig:** Games.

**John:** Movies. But the guy next to me, the stranger who was sitting next to me decided that he had to sort of provide commentary on what he was seeing the whole time through. And I originally thought, “Oh, he must be with somebody and he is talking to that person.”

But, no. he was just sort of talking to me, or sort of anyone who could hear, and providing his sort of like, “Well that’s a dumb choice.” “Oh, come on, fire the cinematographer,” because it was all shaky cams.

**Craig:** Are you kidding? Really? He was doing that?

**John:** He was doing that.

**Craig:** I mean, because I understand the whole, “Bitch, don’t go in there!” But, I mean, now you have a film student mocking the movie next to you? Shut up!

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, come on! What a jerk.

**John:** Yeah. So anyway, that guy — you are a jerk. But, I’m in the middle of the theater, and this is two-thirds of the way through, so I am not going to actually… — It did tamper my enjoyment. Tamper? It muted my enjoyment somewhat of The Hunger Games. But I did quite like it, except for that person next to me.

And as the lights came up, he kind of turned to me to get agreement from me. I’m like, “No, I want to stab you. That is actually how I am feeling now.”

**Craig:** I always say to those people… — I will just say to them, “Hey, come on man, please.”

**John:** My husband will speak up, but then it becomes extra awkward.

**Craig:** I love the awkwardness. It actually makes the movie better for me. And it is hard on a movie like that, because I would imagine it was a packed house. But I will get up and change seats. Anything to get away from idiots.

**John:** Oh, yeah. In a normal situation I would do that.

**Craig:** Idiots, yeah. I remember my wife… — I didn’t see The Sixth Sense with my wife. For some reason we saw it separately. And she said the moment came in the movie where he is…

**John:** Say spoiler…

**Craig:** He remembers. Oh, spoiler alert, in case you haven’t seen that movie. [laughs] The moment comes where he is sort of flashing back and he sees the ring, and he realizes that he has been dead the whole time, and in the middle of that interesting montage where the filmmaker has cleverly designed a cinematic way to slowly shine the light on you, this older woman behind her, who was with her older female friend says in a loud whisper, “He doesn’t know he’s dead.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Got to love that. Just, way to kill it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “He doesn’t know he’s dead.”

**John:** They make television who need to talk back to the screen.

**Craig:** They also make guns for people who need to talk back to the screen.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah, one of the great spoof moments in spoof history is in the first Scary Movie, the Keenen Ivory Wayans’ Scary Movie where Regina Hall, a terrific actor, is playing the stereotypical black girl who must yell at the screen, at everything. And the audience all participates in stabbing her to death. [laughs]

**John:** I remember that.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was great. It was really great.

**John:** All right, the next question. Austin, who turns out we actually know people in common; we know some very tall women who are dancers in common. He writes in to say, “My partner and I were taken on at a management company,” whose name I will redact, “after they read our glorious first outing. It was a good script, but they didn’t want to make it, nor did their partners at Alcon. What they did want was for us to go off and write Bridesmaids Part 2, or the Hangover Again, or Bad Teacher Even Worse, or some other been-there/done-that thing.”

**Craig:** God forbid you write a sequel to a movie like that. [laughs]

**John:** As I read more about it, it is sort of a dense paragraph here. I think it was that they wanted him to write that same kind of movie. They weren’t literally saying, “Write the sequel to that movie.” They were saying, “Write exactly that kind of movie.”

**Craig:** Got it. And they don’t want to.

**John:** They basically didn’t want to. “They turned in outline after outline, high concept for high concept for high concept, piled like cord wood in the WGA Registry. And ultimately this producer/management company dropped us. Here we are six months later with our brilliant original first outing, plus additional treasurer’s trove of stories to be told. We have no connections in this world, other than the producers that just cut the cord.

I read that poorly, but you got the idea of what it is. So, you know what? That’s going to happen a lot. I would say 75% of working screenwriters had exactly that situation, where there was initial spark of interest from somebody who seemed real, who liked your stuff, and you worked your ass off to try to make them happy. They couldn’t be made happy, you weren’t made happy, and you parted ways.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s far from a rare circumstance. Although, there is a lesson here: don’t chase. And producers — particularly producers — are notorious for chasing. The Hangover happened in spite of quite a bit of resistance. Bridesmaids, I imagine, happened in the face of some amount of resistance. Almost every surprise hit comedy, particularly in comedy, seems to happen counter to what everyone is chasing. And you can see these kinds of cycles that come and go in comedy.

Right now we are in this kind of Rated R comedy for grownups phase. And we will at some point return to — because these things are cyclical, the kind of character-driven, broader PG-13 comedies that ruled the world in the ’90s. But producers chase because, just a little primer on the economics of producing. Producers don’t get paid to develop. They get paid some sort of insultingly small amount of money. It doesn’t support them. It doesn’t keep them going. All they get paid really is to produce an actual money. It needs to get green lit. It needs to be made.

So they are desperate to give the studios what the studios want to make. However, what that often leads producers to do is chase. Therefore, they then put that on you, especially newer writers who they feel they can absolutely tell anything to, and who will… — Finally here are writers that won’t look at me and go, “No, dummy, I’m going to do what I want.”

So then they force those writers to join the hunt in chasing. If you feel yourself chasing, you are never going to win. You have to write something you actually like, that you actually believe in, that you have actual passion for. And that doesn’t mean that it must be artistic or dramatic. It could also mean the dumbest comedy in the world. But you have to love the dumb comedies. And you have to love that style of movie.

Write what you love. If you, and this is a tough one because we are constantly put in our place as the peons, and yet we really are the leaders. We must lead everyone to something new and good.

**John:** You have to remember that screenwriting is essentially the research and development of the film industry. And there is a lag time. So by the time that the Hangovers, and all the R-rated comedies have become incredibly successful, well you could back up like three years before that that they actually started to go through the process.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So if you write a brand new one right now, it is going to be another three years, and that cycle will have passed. It feels very much like all the people, the other companies are trying to make an iPad competitor. Well, they are racing to try to catch up with where the iPad is right now, but the iPad is going to be, again, better by the time they are done with this thing.

So they end up releasing a tablet that would have been, “Oh, that would have been okay a year ago.”

**Craig:** Right. And meanwhile Apple, the iPad to them, that’s a small department where that makes minor iterations. The thing that they are going to come out within a year or two, everyone is going to go, “Wait, wait, wait, what?!” And then they are going to go chase that.

And that is what you kind of have to do. And all of the work that I have done that I sort of look at and go, “Huh, I don’t know if that was a good idea,” which is quite a bit of it, was me being involved in a chase. And getting enlisted in a chase. But it took me a long time, and many, many mistakes, and iffy to bad choices to arrive at a place where I understood that that wasn’t going to do anybody any good. And that — just write what you really want to.

And, look, we don’t have to be precious about it. There are a lot of things that get us excited to write. And we can choose to write something that excites us that we also know other people might be excited by. There’s nothing wrong with that. But when you sit down with these guys, and I am really speaking to the newer writers now, and these producers tell you in no uncertain terms that they are not making this kind of movie, and they are not making that kind of movie, they are only making this kind — just understand: they don’t know what they are talking about. None of them do.

Robert Towne, or was it William Goldman? Robert Towne? “No one knows anything.” Robert Towne? I think it was Robert Towne.

**John:** I think it was William Goldman.

**Craig:** William Goldman. We will give it to William Goldman. “No one knows anything” is absolutely true.

**John:** But, we do know the answer to this question, or at least we have two good answers to this next question. Stephen asks about formatting Shakespeare. “When adapting something like Shakespeare to a screenplay, does the original dialogue of the play get formatted like just normal dialogue, or do you do something different with it to show the verses?”

**Craig:** Oh…

**John:** You have written a lot of Shakespeare-based screenplays.

**Craig:** Uh… [laughs]

**John:** So, I will tell you my answer. If a bulk of your screenplay is going to be in verse, you treat it like as if it was going to be sung. And you are going to have to do something with it so that the lines of text make sense with the… — The end of a line makes sense.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so you may end up doing that thing which I do on some lyrics is I sort of cheat the margins out a little bit, and I put things in. Like Verdana or something. 11-point Verdana. Something a little bit smaller so that the lines can actually line up right.

**Craig:** But this is a whole script, right?

**John:** Yeah. Or you can do this thing which is what a stage play does which is when you get to that kind of stuff, you just really block over it like a lot more left, so you can get the whole line in. And you do the true line breaks the way they would be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If you are just doing sort of like Shakespearean-like dialogue, and it doesn’t actually have to — the meter or the rhyme doesn’t matter so much, just make it dialogue.

**Craig:** Yeah. I guess if I were to sit down and do it, I would probably keep the margins basically the same. I’m talking about adapting directly from Shakespeare. So I am pulling the dialogue from the play. Shift-return would be my friend. So, when you shift-return in screenwriting software, it doesn’t advance to the next element; it just does a character return within the element. But I would probably do little combinations. If there were short lines, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” I would probably… — Well, even that one I would probably shift-return. It’s a pretty big one.

But, you know, you need to be able to break it up a little bit so people can get a sense of the meter and rhyme as you just described.

**John:** And you have to remember that even if you are using a chunk of Shakespearean dialogue, you still are writing a screenplay, and so you are going to probably break it up in a different way than how Shakespeare would break it up. You are not going to put huge chunks there, because you will probably be interceding it with action and other stuff so that it really is a screenplay.

**Craig:** It’s an interesting question. You know, I think the smart thing to do would be to see if you can hunt down a copy of one of Branagh’s adaptations. Or…

**John:** John Logan just did Coriolanus.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. There you go. See if you can track down Logan’s script and see how one of the professionals did it. It’s a really good question. I don’t know.

And nor will I ever have to know. [laughs]

**John:** I’m going to end with a really easy one today.

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** Tea asks, “Do you have any advice for writing a scene with numerous characters? It is getting confusing who is saying what to whom, and who they are. Is there a limit to labeling people stereotypically just for clarity sake? This scene is in a holding cell with about 23 people and I cannot omit anybody.” [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] Wait, do they all speak?

**John:** I guess so. So, here’s the thing, the first half of the question is completely reasonable.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And so sometimes there is a… — Don’t say Guard Number 2, Guard Number 3 very much, especially if they are talking to each other. It’s good to have a little shorthand for who that person is. And sometimes you will even see this in the movie scroll. You will see like, you know, Old Lady with Bag, or a character who has a weird name which is really kind of their action.

**Craig:** Or like Sleepy Guard, or Short Guard.

**John:** Sleepy Guard, yes. And that is fine, and fair, and good, because it helps keep things more clear. But, yes, there is a limit. And there is a limit to how many people can be in a scene and actually talk. Because an audience can’t keep track of that many people. So if people are just piping out one line, it is okay to not even introduce them. And just give them the line. And, so, “SHARECROPPER: He’s a monster.” That’s fine.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you don’t have to sort of keep track. You don’t have to introduce them. You don’t have to say anything about them.

**Craig:** I mean, look, there is so much… — That question took such a hard left into crazy town.

**John:** You can’t have 23 people in a scene…

**Craig:** No! Let’s just start there. Let’s just start with the creative thing.

**John:** …and have any sense of how you are keeping track of people.

**Craig:** No. There is no scene with 23 people talking. That doesn’t exist. In movie history there has never been a scene where 23 individual people spoke in the scene.

There is something terribly wrong with your scene. Nobody is interested in hearing from 23 different people. Frankly, that means there is 23 lines of dialogue at a minimum if they only say one thing. That is a really, really long scene already. So I am bored and confused, and I don’t understand why the screenwriter isn’t focusing my attention on what matters.

So, there is sort of a failure of authorial intent there. But, let me also say this: putting aside whether there are 23 people, or 10 people, or 8, when you become a screenwriter that writes for production, the first time you go through it you will become attune to the concept of the day player. When they make movies, there are actors, and the actors that we think of as stars. But then there are what they call day players — people who show up to do that one or two lines.

A typical scene is your star walks into a 7-11, asks for a cup of coffee, and the clerk says, “I’m sorry, sir, we are out.” And the star storms out upset. Well, that guy is a day player. He has got one line. “I’m sorry, sir, we are out.” Day players, by and large, aren’t the best. It is hard to rely on them to be interesting. So you really need to limit what they say.

If you have a scene where 23 people are talking, and we are not going to see them again, obviously. They are all day players, or half of them are day players, not only do you have a scene that is populated by actors that don’t really command the screen normally, but you are also paying each one of those people a lot of money. And productions hate day players. They try and minimize day players as much as possible. They will go through the script and they will say, “Do we need this guy to actually say this line? Or can he just walk up, try and get a cup of coffee, and there is a sign that says ‘No Coffee Today?'”

So, no. No with the 23. What?! [laughs] No. If you are having trouble sorting it through, trust me, the audience will have an even bigger trouble sorting it through.

**John:** So I am trying to think of situations where you could have 23 characters in a scene. And there is a possibility. Like late in a story, like let say you have met a bunch of different people and they all, it’s like a Cannonball Run kind of movie, where you met a bunch of different people. Or Airplane, where there is a bunch of people in Airplane, and they are all in a similar space. And so they could conceivably, in a scene, everyone could…

**Craig:** There is no way. There’s no way. Think about it. 23 lines of dialogue. That is the minimum.

**John:** He’s not promising that all 23 people are going to speak all at the same time.

**Craig:** In the scene — they all have a line, right?

**John:** I will reread the question. “It is confusing who is saying what to who, and who they are. Is there…” I guess, yeah.

What I was going to say is there are going to be cases where you have introduced people separately, and they are coming into a bigger group. And there is a concept of keeping people alive in a scene. And sometimes you will notice, and this is important — this is actually one of the reasons why a table read is really good. You realize that a character is in a scene, but hasn’t said anything for a page and a half. And that’s bad.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because in real life, people do say something. And so, “Okay, I need to give that person a line here, or get them out of the scene because it is just weird to have a person standing around there.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I can envision some scenarios in which a bunch of people have come together at sort of the end of a thing, or as like a big rally, and people have come together. And so we know all of those people are there, but not everyone is going to get a line. You are still going to end up treating those people like blocks of people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So it is going to be that the Mad Mothers are there. And it is going to be the Drunk Fraternity Brothers over there. And it is going to be the Kickboxing Team over there. And one person from each of those things is going to be talking in the scene.

**Craig:** Correct. You will never get to 23. I don’t care if it is the end of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. You are never going to get there. It is never going to happen. It is bad filmmaking. I don’t even know how you direct that, frankly. [laughs] It’s just impossible.

**John:** Yeah. Every person you add to a scene — this is a useful thing to talk about. Like let’s say you have two people at a dinner table, and they are having a conversation. That is fairly straight-forward. You are going to have to cover — you will get masters, you will get each side, you will get some establishing. A minimum of three shots, probably more.

**Craig:** You have got your master, mini-master, over the shoulders, close-ups, extreme close-ups. I mean, you could make a meal out of it. But even if you are… — If you are doing 23 people, the problem is either they are all standing in a freaking clump, like in an audience, at which point why are 23 people in an audience?

You just won’t know where to focus your attention. Just think about it from the audience’s point of view. Who am I listening to? Who am I following? Who do I care about? The audience has the capacity for five or six voices, maybe seven, I don’t know. At some point it gets a little crazy.

**John:** So, wrapping up, maybe we will start doing this every week. I want to talk about one thing this week that I loved. Do you have anything this week that you loved?

**Craig:** Um, you say your thing.

**John:** I will say my thing, and then you can talk.

**Craig:** Is your thing me?

**John:** [laughs] It’s you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** I love you. I don’t say that often enough.

**Craig:** You really don’t. Or ever. Yeah.

**John:** I love to apologize. I love to tell people I love them.

The thing I loved this week — I saw Once, the Broadway musical version of Once. So, Once is the Irish film that had Falling Slowly in it, and got Oscar nominations, and I think won some good awards. And I loved the movie. I really loved the show.

So the Broadway show of it is the story of the movie, which means it is very small and slight. And you would think it would just disappear at any moment. But what really struck me about it is how literal — it’s not literal… — Theater can be presentational or representational. Representational means that you recognize what space — it can be acting style, too — but you recognize what space you are in. So, if you are in a post office, it will sort of look like a post office. And then you are someplace else and it is going to look to look like a bedroom.

So in Once, you go in there and as you enter the theater it is this Irish bar setup. And it looks like it fills the whole stage. And you are actually able to go up onto the stage and order a drink. And there are people that they are playing music. And then eventually the show kind of starts, but the lights are still on, and you start to realize, “Oh, the people that are playing music are actually the actors.”

And they never leave the stage. And that set is actually the only set. And they never… — So if characters are going someplace else, they are still in that same set, and everyone is still in the thing, and you are just creating the reality of this moment. Like, this piano comes in, and we are in a music store. And it’s fascinating.

Coming from a screenwriting perspective, where things tend be very…

**Craig:** Literal.

**John:** …literal, it’s nice to experience things where you just have to — you are asking your audience to use their imagination and trust that these people are in their own space. And that they will do the set dressing themselves in whichever way, and they will ignore the people who are sitting at the edges of the stage until they start playing, or singing, and that’s okay that they can do that at any given moment.

Sometimes, like Lars von Trier made Dogville, I guess, which sort of did that same thing, where everyone was around the whole time. But in a movie it is just really, really strange. And in theater you can get away with it. I recommend the show, but I also recommend just thinking about the difference between literality and representing something, versus sort of presenting what something is. It is very hard in a movie to have a space where like I am not sure where I am.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Even if you are filming in Toronto for Washington, DC, you know that you are supposed to be in Washington, DC. And if you don’t have a sense of what this place is supposed to be, you are really uncomfortable as an audience member.

**Craig:** That’s right. You are not sure where the ground is beneath your feet. Correct. But I do like when films adapt musicals or plays, sometimes they borrow that. For instance, when Rob Marshall did Chicago, I’m thinking of the He Had it Coming sequence. Clearly he went for that sort of representational.

He shot a scene that could have been on stage.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And yet it was in the movie, and you were okay because he moved in and out, and it was actually a very smart way of transitioning from the non-musical portions of the movie into the musical portions. You would leave the literal representation and enter this kind of interesting representational space.

**John:** If you were watching Smash you would know that they use that conventional as well.

**Craig:** Huge if. The big if. [laughs]

**John:** Big if. If you are watching Smash you would know that what tends to happen is they are starting to rehearse a musical number, and then it will go into one of the actor’s perspectives, and it will come out as the full production as they sort of see it. And then it will go back to the little version.

**Craig:** Yeah. Actually, now that I am thinking about it, it is kind of a time-tested cinematic device, when the director wants you to divorce yourself from the reality. For instance, if you watch the old Danny Kaye movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, when he goes into his Mitty daydreams, it becomes a set. It is quite clearly a set. And it is representational. It is not meant to be real or literal. And then he comes back to his life, and it is real and literal.

**John:** Anything that you loved that you want to share?

**Craig:** You know, I think a lot of people love this, but last night for the 4 billionth time I watched Casino, the Martin Scorsese movie. And I feel like sometimes Casino gets a little overlooked in the shadow of Goodfellas, which I truly love, because.. — And I remember even when I saw Casino in theaters, I thought, “Oh, this is cool. It is sort of like Goodfellas Part 2. And everybody is kind of doing the same thing.”

You know, De Niro is kind of the crafty one, and Pesci is the loose cannon, and it is mobsters and it is ’70s classic rock soundtracks, and corruption, and grifting, and money, and they all come to a bad end. But, there is something wonderful about Casino that is separate and apart from Goodfellas. There is almost, in a strange way, a little more tragedy to it. And I have to say that, what’s her name? [laughs]

**John:** Sharon Stone.

**Craig:** Sharon Stone. Sharon Stone is spectacular in that movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Really, really, really good. And there are wonderful moments in that film. Really great stuff. And there is a sequence… — The other thing is, everybody is very familiar with the sequence in Goodfellas when De Niro’s character, Jimmy Conway, I believe, is starting to kill all of the people that assisted him in the Lufthansa heist.

And the soundtrack that plays over it is that great coda to Layla, by Eric Clapton. But in Casino, there is this amazing sequence where they show — where Scorsese shows Pesci and his guys just kind of going nuts, and robbing everybody, and forgetting all the rules about what it means to kind of stay — keep their heads down in this new Wild West of Vegas. And he uses Can’t You Hear Me Knocking by the Stones.

And I think he plays the whole song. It’s a really long song. And it is really great. So, Casino, I think, probably gets its due from a lot of people, but maybe not as many. I love that movie.

**John:** I haven’t seen it in years. I remember loving it when it came out. And I just remember the sunshine of it. I just remember it being light and sunny in a way that you don’t expect a movie that is going to have the things that it has in it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, and it’s a great choice. And you can see that choice echoed in The Hangover, because I remember when I was talking with Todd about The Hangover, he said it was actually a very important thing to him to show Vegas in the sun, because most movies about Vegas show it at night. It’s so much more glamorous, and interesting, and lit up at night.

**John:** With Go we shot at night. It’s exactly what you want to see.

**Craig:** Yeah. But if you are kind of shooting a little bit of a tragedy, a Vegas tragedy, in the daylight Vegas is pretty grim. It is sort of the opposite of most cities where at night they seem grim. Vegas in the daylight is dirty and dusty and a bit absurd, frankly.

**John:** It’s the woman who is kind of hot when the lights are dim, but then you turn on lights and it is, “Oh my God!”

**Craig:** Yeah. And the Vegas sun is…[police sirens] Oh, there they go. The Vegas sun is truly bad light. And all the artifice of Vegas is exposed for what it is, which is just cheap.

But at night, I have got to say, at night the Venetian looks quite beautiful.

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** In the daytime it just looks dumb. And for a movie about how Vegas is entirely about a kind of false presentation, and what the reality is behind it, it was great that so much of it was during the day. Not much at night. Good call.

**John:** Nice. Great. So, Once and Casino. And one of them is a Broadway musical, and Casino probably wouldn’t be a very good Broadway musical.

**Craig:** No. No. No.

**John:** We will wrap up here, but I was talking with someone else today. It’s odd that there isn’t a Goodfellas or a Godfather of Broadway musicals. And his theory was that the violence just doesn’t work on stage in the way that you would want it to work.

**Craig:** That’s true.

**John:** It’s strange that that mafia stuff hasn’t become a central uniting principal of a Broadway show.

**Craig:** Well, and I must say that breaking into song is sort of a natural… [laughs]. Naturally undercuts the immediacy and the visceral reaction you want to get from violence.

**John:** Because the Sharks and the Jets, while terrific dancers, are not as threatening…

**Craig:** No. Even Sondheim could not craft lyrics that made those guys actually sound dangerous.

**John:** [singsong] Da-da, da-da-da. Dada.

**Craig:** Yeah. It just comes off, I don’t want to say “gay.”

**John:** No. You need to not say that. It comes off as less threatening. It’s hard to feel like you are in that much danger when people are singing.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know what it is? It’s silly. It’s a silly combination. If you are a killer, you don’t dance and sing, frankly. I feel like killers never performed in their productions in school. And they don’t sing. They are just killers. So, yeah, that’s a tough one.

**John:** Cool. Craig, thank you for another fun podcast.

**Craig:** That was a good one.

**John:** We went into this with absolutely nothing to talk about, and we ended up talking about a lot of things.

**Craig:** We always do. Yeah. And I sang for Stuart while you took a break in the middle there.

**John:** That was very nice for him. I’m sure he appreciated it. Craig, actually, people should know, has a lovely voice. I have heard him sing a nice Broadway song.

**Craig:** Thank you. I was not doing particularly well when I was singing to Stuart. [laughs] But one day I will sing for everybody on the podcast. It will be lovely.

**John:** Lovely. Maybe when we do our live episode. We can do our stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah! There you go. Excellent. Oh, wait, before you go, one last thing. One last thing. As you know, and I suppose many of our listeners know, I am an avid fan of SiriusXM on Broadway, the satellite radio show tunes channel. And you are working on Broadway, and somehow or another I really want you to get on Seth Rudetsky’s show. I feel this is important to me.

By the way, is Big Fish, it’s a musical so there is no reason you shouldn’t be on Seth Rudetsky’s show. Seth Rudetsky is sort of like 80% of the DJing of that channel. And for whatever reason I am just so taken with this guy. He just cracks me up. And I learn a lot from him, and I am a big fan of his. But I don’t do musicals, so I am not going to be with him. But you have got to get on his show. For me.

**John:** I will work on it. I feel like we need to be closer to actually being a show-show. Closer down to being a show that people can buy tickets for, and then I will work on that.

**Craig:** Yeah. But when you get there, you have to do it. For me.

**John:** Come on, I will.

**Craig:** For me.

**John:** It’s a promise.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Craig, thank you again.

**Craig:** Thank you. We’ll see you next time. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

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

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

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

**John:** And you are listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

**Craig:** Uh, Erin go Bragh, and so forth.

**John:** Yeah. Has Erin go Bragh been used as like a catch phrase/tag, like the last thing the hero says before shooting the bad guy?

**Craig:** Like “Erin go Bragh emmer effer?”

**John:** Yeah. Exactly.

**Craig:** Like, “Erin go Die?”

**John:** Like that.

**Craig:** No, I don’t think so. Maybe. I mean, I never saw those Boondock Saints movies, but it sounds like that.

**John:** It also feels like McGarnagle on The Simpsons might have done that, where there is sort of like an action hero. McGarnagle is the Schwarzenegger of the Simpsons’ world, I think.

**Craig:** That doesn’t sound right. It’s not McGarnagle. It’s… — I can’t remember. It’s not McGarnagle.

**John:** And now it is going to frustrate us.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Matt Selman, who is a Simpsons writer and producer, is a listener to the podcast. So I’m sure he will write in on that.

**Craig:** It’s McBain.

**John:** McBain! Why did I think McGarnagle?

**Craig:** You might be thinking of MacGruber, and you combined MacGruber with gargling.

**John:** But it feels like a McBain thing. “Erin go Bragh” — in some sort of Ireland episode they did that. What did you do for your St. Patrick’s Day? Did you do anything special?

**Craig:** No. No. No. Do you know what Jews do on St. Patrick’s Day?

**John:** Eat Chinese food?

**Craig:** Not drink.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s our thing. We don’t do it. We’re not big on the drinking.

**John:** This year, of course, I was in the epicenter for St. Patrick’s Day because I am in New York City. And so where I am working is right at Times Square. And so, it is like the center of gravity for all “I want to be drunk and Irish — or Irish-seeming — and I want to be wearing big green glasses and stupid hair.” And that’s where they are. They congregate there.

And it was just fantastic.

**Craig:** Did you have a little fun?

**John:** No. I didn’t really have any fun at all. Didn’t drink a beer. I went straight from work to seeing 21 Jump Street, which is actually quite good.

**Craig:** I hear that it is very funny. And I want to go see that. And I should also mention, as I often do every time MacGruber comes up, that I think MacGruber is a really funny movie. I always talk about MacGruber…

**John:** So horribly underrated.

**Craig:** It really is.

**John:** The fact that MacGruber goes for the offer of oral sex at any moment…

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Just like, something goes wrong, he gets a hang nail, he will offer somebody oral sex. It’s good.

**Craig:** Yeah, there is so much… — If you haven’t seen MacGruber, I’m telling you, that movie is criminally underappreciated.

**John:** I saw it opening night at the Chinese.

**Craig:** Nice!

**John:** That’s how I roll.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I should say, if people are hearing things a little bit different here, I’m in a very different room. It’s this apartment that I am renting. And I am near a firehouse. So, in addition to the Craig Mazin bus station background noise, you get some passing fire trucks every once and awhile.

**Craig:** Finally. Finally I am not the only one.

**John:** Other podcasts might give you quality information, but will they give you the same ambience? It is hard to say.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But we have questions. And so let’s do some questions, because there are good questions this week.

**Craig:** Let’s do it.

**John:** And I was trying to figure out how to best break these up, but we will start with the ones that you sent, because you sent two questions that actually have been posted on Done Deal Pro which is that message board full of aspiring writers. You do the Lord’s work going in there and interacting with them.

**Craig:** Yes. I should add that they were…

**John:** Here’s two questions that you sent me.

**Craig:** …well, they weren’t publicly posted. They were sent to me privately. So, make sure to strip out anything that you might think would be particularly identifying.

**John:** I will edit as I read.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** “In the spirit of last month’s podcast on producers, I have got a question. I had a couple managers vying to sign me last month. I picked one over the other. Long effing story short, one of them is trying to jump on a spec as an EP, or executive producer, and it is the manager I passed on. I know, I know. Why would (blank),” he actually uses his name so I won’t use his name, “Why would you even? Like I said, long story. My question is, would a manager attaching himself as an executive producer affect another manager to sign one’s status, pay, say anyway, or just simply a coattail paycheck grab?”

**Craig:** That is the weirdest thing.

**John:** It’s the weirdest situation. So, I want to make sure I am actually understanding his scenario right. Of course, we can’t really ask him, but this is the scenario I think he is asking is he met with two different managers, Manager A and Manager B. He signed with Manager A. Manager B says, “I love your script and I want to attach myself as executive producer.” That is what it sounds like he is asking.

**Craig:** That is in fact what it sounds like he is asking. And the reason that you and I both feel so puzzled is because the answer is so obviously, “No.” Right? Where is the upside?

**John:** I don’t know what the upside is. The only thing I could imagine is if Manager B is really a producer who is sort of managing sometimes…

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And he says it is a spec. I’m taking this as a feature spec, not as a TV thing, so I don’t even understand what executive producer really means. What is this person… — If he is trying to produce the movie, I guess I can kind of see that.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Signing on as executive producer, what is he trying to do as the executive producer? Executive producer for a feature is this nebulous title that could mean he brought money. It could mean that he brought some package element. But it is not the person who made the movie.

**Craig:** Right. I don’t quite get this. Again, we are sort of trying to figure out, well, how would this ever make sense? Or why would this question even be asked?

If the manager that this guy didn’t go with was a particularly powerful manager, and was at a place like 3 Arts, or one of those deals, where they represent a lot of actors as well, or directors, then maybe you could think, “Well, okay, he might be able to bring something to the table.” But it doesn’t sound like that is the case. And, frankly, if that were the case, why didn’t you just go with that guy?

So, no. This doesn’t make any sense at all. Look, studios don’t really like this sort of thing at all. The deal with managers is writers will pay them 10% unless the manager comes on board as a producer, which is something that agents can’t do, in which case the manager draws a producing fee from the studio and does not commission the writer at all, which is kind of great for the writer, not so great for the studio, obviously. And in general, studios just sort of detest this practice.

They will put up with it if that person is bringing along an element that makes the movie happen.

**John:** Such as a powerful director, an acting piece of talent that is worth something.

**Craig:** Yeah. But in the absence of that, and it sounds like… — I would imagine that this questioner would have included that; it is kind of an important detail. To me, it is such an obvious, “No, go away. You lost. Piss off.”

**John:** Yeah. In a more general sense, this person was picking between two managers. And you do have to make a choice. And when you make a choice, you say yes to one person, and you say no to the other person. And saying no to the other person doesn’t mean, like, “You are a terrible person; I never want to talk to you again in your life.” Just, you found somebody who you felt was a better choice for you.

And, you shouldn’t try to keep the relationship with the person you didn’t pick necessarily going on any great guns, because you aren’t working with them. You picked somebody else. It is like that whole horrible show, The Bachelor. Once you cut the girl from the show, once you don’t give her a rose or whatever and she has to go away, you don’t get keep dating her.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right.

**John:** That doesn’t mean that you can’t be perfectly nice when you bump into her at the grocery store, but you are done dating her.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s funny — when I analogize this to sexual politics, I usually cast us in the role of a woman. Because I feel like women have mastered the art of selection. And only out of necessity, because men are far less selective about this stuff than women. Women have to be kind of choosy.

So, a woman walks into a bar, and there are 12 guys there that all of a sudden are on top of her. And she has to…

**John:** Well, not literally on top of her.

**Craig:** Not literally.

**John:** They are all potential suitors.

**Craig:** They are within proximity. And she has to make a choice. And when you choose, and when you turn a guy down, in the back of your head you should also know: if it doesn’t work out with this guy, and you called that guy and he was really into you, he would probably be okay with that. And it is the same thing with managers. Look, if it doesn’t work out with this one… — Managers and agents, they are into money. And if you are worth money, you can always change your mind. It is not the end of the world.

I think writers get so backwards on who is holding the gun in these situations.

**John:** The second question was also from Done Deal. I am editing as I scan through here. “My writing partner and I are repped at a very reputable management company and a boutique agency. The long and the short, our agent doesn’t like the way we are telling our story in our new spec script.” They have been with their agent three years and have made no sales. “We came close, but haven’t sold yet. Our managers came after our agent. Our agent has made it clear he won’t send out our new spec and doesn’t believe in it. I’m in a weird place right now because I take meetings with high-to-mid-tier producers in developing a few projects with them. Our managers seem like they don’t want to tell us to leave our agent for political reasons. Our agent is doing nothing for us and is really hindering our careers. And we feel very, very strongly about this new spec. What should a writer in my position do?”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “Should I tell my manager that I want to fire my agent? Should I just fire my agent? Also, my agent never gets us meetings…” [laughs]

So this is basically like, “My husband keeps beating me, what should I do?” “Dear Abby, my husband keeps beating me.”

**Craig:** I know. I mean, questions need to have two possible answers, otherwise they are not really questions.

**John:** Yeah. It should be like how should I handle the situation rather than should I leave or not.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. Technically, “Will the sun come up tomorrow?” is a question, but it is not really a question.

**John:** No. It’s not a meaningful question.

**Craig:** No. There is no reason for you to not fire your agent, sir or madam. None of that makes sense.

First of all, I don’t care what an agent particularly thinks of a spec script. Agents, their skill set is not to evaluate material and say, “This is a brilliant piece of material.” Their skill set is to procure you employment that is currently being offered and to put you in rooms with people who could offer you employment, and to promote the work that you do. This is what you do. If they don’t like it, then you fire them and find somebody who does.

Obviously the managers are okay with it. I will point out that managers and agents always, always when asked, “Hey, should I fire the other guy?” will say, “Eh, you know, let’s not be hasty.” That is their default position on everything because you are not the only client the manager or agent represents. They are all intertwined in their business. They don’t want to get into a war.

It really comes down to you. You are the one who has to pull the trigger. Pull it. You already have a manager, so the point is that manager can help set you up on meetings with other agents. But, for God’s sake, why would you stay with this person? Why would you ask this question and why would you stay with this person?

**John:** The only devil’s advocate I will put here, not necessarily to stay with the person, is really about the script itself. And so I only want to sort of defend the agent who might say, “I don’t think this script is ready.” Because the agent is looking at the script as, “Is this something I can sell?” And if the agent looks at the script and says, “I don’t think I can sell this,” he doesn’t want to take it out on the town and have it not sell.

The flip side of that is some good scripts don’t sell, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be shown to people because those scripts that don’t sell, people still like them, and people still read them. And they still say, “Oh, this is a good writer. I never considered this writing team for this kind of project, but look at what they just did here. This is really good. I should consider them for something else.”

Go, my script that sort of made me who I am, didn’t sell to any of the studios. It ended up getting picked up by a very small little company because all the studios said, “We can’t make this movie.” But it was very good that we took it out on the town, and honestly, the agent who I had as I started to write Go, he had read an early draft of it and didn’t like it, and didn’t think it was anything good. And that was my signal, “You know what? This is not the right agent for me to be with.” And so I looked for a new agent.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. Exactly.

**John:** By the way, this is the perfect time to be going to a new agent because you have a new spec script that the new agent can take out on the town.

**Craig:** Right. And that is how you are going to figure out who the right agent is for you, because someone is going to respond to that material. Yes, it is possible that the material isn’t as good as it should be, or that there is some piece of it that could be improved. In fact, that is a certainty.

But, agents aren’t really particularly good at figuring out what those problems are and how to solve them. And, whether an agent likes it or not, I mean, this town is full of agents that have passed on clients that they should not have passed on. And in the end, you need a representative who is in creative sync with you.

If you stink, and all of your scripts are bad, it doesn’t matter who your agent is, so you might as well fire this guy anyway.

**John:** Yup. Done.

**Craig:** Done.

**John:** Everybody is going to be changing employment after listening to this podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The agencies will be upset.

**Craig:** Meh, whatever.

**John:** Yeah, whatever.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Adam from Cincinnati wrote in to ask@johnaugust.com and wrote, “Where do script doctors fall in the various screenwriting jobs you discussed in the past?” So, he is basically confused about the term script doctors. “I have heard in the past how famous writers like Joss Whedon and Aaron Sorkin have been script doctors before lead writers, and I am always curious about that role because it had seemed to me like an enticing job — stalking into a project and tweaking someone else’s script, and then vanishing into the night with a paycheck.”

Oh, Adam. It’s delightful.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And I do remember this one [laughs]…this one fellow student in film school who ended up actually writing and directing a movie. So as his movie was set up, and they were getting financing for stuff, he came back and was like, “Oh, I’m just looking for some script doctoring work I could do.”

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** I’m like, “Who are you?!” So, let me explain what script doctors are. And it is a term that is kind of not really used in the industry the way it is used in popular press. I don’t even hear people…

**Craig:** No. It’s a…

**John:** It’s only a term you would see in like Premiere Magazine or Entertainment Weekly sometimes.

**Craig:** It is douchey, frankly.

**John:** It is a douchey word.

**Craig:** It’s a douche term, yeah.

**John:** So, what they are really referring to are not unknown writers, or like aspiring writers. It is really established, professional writers with big credits who make a lot of money who come in to do some surgical work. I think surgical is probably how it got to script doctoring I guess?

**Craig:** Maybe.

**John:** You do very targeted work on a screenplay before it goes into production to take care of some perceived problems. So, Steve Zaillian is a big script doctor. To some degree, I’m a script doctor. I’m a person who comes in and does weekly work on projects that are about to go into production and get them to where they need to be based on the needs of the director, the needs of the studio, the needs of the star, whatever.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Craig and I are friends with many of the people who would fall into this general category. It is not anything different than being a screenwriter.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And there is no equivalent of, like, the theater dramaturge who is not really the playwright but is there to help figure out the textual meaning of stuff — it’s nothing like that at all. A script doctor, the way that they are trying to use it here, is just a very high level screenwriter who comes in to do some work on a script before production. And gets paid a lot of money for it.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it certainly doesn’t come prior to being what this questioner describes as being a lead writer, although that is also a term that doesn’t really exist.

**John:** No, it doesn’t.

**Craig:** First you establish yourself as a proper screenwriter who can write a full-length feature film that people are interested in. And then, over time, they might ask you to come in and pretty much everybody that you and I know who operates at a certain level has done this, or things like this. They ask you to come in on movies that are either right before they are going to go into production, or during production, or pre-production, to work for a few weeks to improve a character, or tighten up the third act.

There is usually some sort of aspect, you know. Or sometimes they are brought in by a star, an actor who just likes a certain writer to come in and do a dialogue pass with them so that they are more comfortable with the voice of it. But, script doctoring, that phrase is a result of this nonsense romanticization of what screenwriting is. There is nothing romantic about this. [laughs]

And, we are not dashing brilliant heart surgeons, swooping in to save the patient, and then disappearing into the night. I have never once disappeared into the night. I have tripped and falled. Fell. I said “falled.”

**John:** You did say “falled.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I tripped and falled.

**John:** That was a verbal…

**Craig:** I can’t even say it without blowing it. So, that is me trying to disappear into a sentence. Again, I’m so clumsy.

**John:** Yeah. So basically never say the word script doctor again.

**Craig:** No. Never.

**John:** The easiest answer to this question.

**Craig:** I will say that you and I both know a screenwriter who has posted on Facebook a reference to her script doctoring. And when she did it I went, “No, no, no, no, no. Don’t say that.”

**John:** Yeah. What you would actually say is, like, “I’m doing some weekly work on a project.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A weekly is where they are actually paying your for a period of time, rather than for a full draft. And you go in, and you describe, “This is the work I think I can do in this week,” and they say, “That sounds great.” And you do that work, and you turn it in, and they may bring you on for another week, or another week. That does happen. But that is different.

**Craig:** Yeah. You could say, “I’m on a weekly.”

**John:** “I’m on a weekly right now.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m not on a weekly right now.

**Craig:** I’m not on a weekly either.

**John:** Yeah. Doru asks, I don’t know where Doru is from. What a great name — Doru.

**Craig:** Doru. Nice.

**John:** Doru asks — he is from somewhere else, and I have cleaned up the language a little bit, but let’s see. “My script is set in a specific historical time. How much into details should I go when I talk about their clothes? In some scenes where the clothes are important to underline a social status I did, but in others I think it might be too much for the reader. Should I leave the clothes descriptions out of some of the places, even though they are not wearing jeans and t-shirts? Or should I explain in every scene what the characters are wearing?”

This is a 101 kind of question, but I think it is a valid question.

**Craig:** Yeah. I could see where it would be a little bit of a concern if you were writing something where you thought the reader wouldn’t quite get how they were dressed.

**John:** Yeah. So, if you are doing something that is not set in present day, where the clothes kind of matter, in early scenes it may be worth throwing a line of description about the kind of thing that they are wearing. But you would never do that in every scene. First, it would be annoying for the reader. It would be annoying for everyone else involved in the movie. You need to setup the flavor of what your movie is, and what your world is, but don’t go into every little detail or dress.

If there are specific things like, “She is wearing a stunning red dress,” because that becomes an important detail later on, or it becomes something that is spoken in dialogue, that is great.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But, generally, no. It is not your responsibility to… — It’s great that you did the research, and you actually can kind of picture in your head what these people would look like, but you don’t need to tell us that. That is the difference between a screenplay and a novel.

**Craig:** For sure. Yeah. It is legal to say things like — he mentioned status at one point — to say, “So-and-so enters the room dressed in the regal garb of a royal.” I mean, that is fine in that kind of general sense. And in the beginning, you can sort of say, “We find ourselves in Agrabah where everyone is dressed in flowing turbans and silk,” just to sort of set the scene on page one. But then, that’s it. Stop.

**John:** Done. Done. Yeah.

And sometimes you just want that one specific word that lets you know, like, okay, I get what that is. And that is where… — God bless the Internet. For this one project I had to find this very specific cowboy hat. And I could picture what it looked like, but I had no idea what you call that hat. It was an Antietam hat.

**Craig:** Oh, an Antietam hat. Yeah.

**John:** And so I looked it up. So, the reader may not necessarily know what the Antietam hat is, but if he or she does, then I have specifically said it. If the reader doesn’t know it’s like, “Well, that sounds like an historical Civil War ear hat.” It has that connotation.

**Craig:** It does even more for you than that. Specificity is impressive to the reader. It makes them feel like you are in control. They don’t need to know what the Antietam hat is. They just know that you do, and that is comforting.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s comforting.

**John:** Slight tangent, but the specificity also plays in comedies. And I think this expectation that people don’t know what those words mean, so they won’t know what you are really talking about — that doesn’t matter. It is that you believe that the characters in the world know what they are talking about.

So, if you see a Wall Street movie, most times you are not really going to understand what they are talking about. But sometimes you don’t really need to know what they are talking about as long as you believe they know what they are talking about.

If you are watching Frasier, Niles and Frasier will go off on a long tirade about sherry, and you have no idea what a quality sherry is, or sort of what it means, but you believe that they do. And it is funny to watch them get all freaked out about it.

**Craig:** Yeah. The comedy of trivia. I mean, the whole point is that they are arguing over stuff that none of us know about. And, yes, specificity is a wonderful thing, but you don’t want to…

**John:** But too much is deadly.

**Craig:** Yeah. You just don’t want to push people’s face into boredom on the page with endless description. I see this, frankly, on Done Deal where people will post pages and I will look through. We ask them to put, I think, four pages. And sometimes three of the four pages are just incredibly overwrought descriptions about the quality of the sunlight, and the blades of grass. And I am just like, “What is going on here?”

**John:** Don’t do that.

**Craig:** No. It enrages me.

**John:** Write a poem.

**Craig:** Yeah. Write a poem.

**John:** So, this afternoon I went to see John Carter of Mars, or John Carter. I’m not sure what I am supposed to call it. I went with Nima, the Jolly Elf Nima. And for people who play the drinking game, that, I think, was like three shots right there by saying “Jolly Elf Nima.”

**Craig:** Now it’s six shots.

**John:** See?

**Craig:** Because you said, “Jolly Elf Nima. Jolly Elf Nima.” And…you are hospitalized.

**John:** I enjoyed John Carter. And I remember swapping emails back and forth with Michael Chabon as he was working on it, so I was happy to see the end result of it. The strange thing about it, which also happens in Avatar, as I am watching and listening to it, there are a few sentences in the movie where more than half of the words are invented words.

So, like, when they are talking about, “We have to get something from helium to…” And like most of those words are actually not English that you just put in that sentence.

**Craig:** Yeah. Lord of the Rings would occasionally dip into that.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Like, well hold on a second. “If the error of Isolder is caught by the Nazgul, while he is entering Rivendell.” It is true. I actually feel like they could have done a much worse job of that in Lord of the Rings, and they must have been cognizant of it. Because if you read Tolkien, like that was his thing.

**John:** It is all that.

**Craig:** He was a linguist. So, he loved that stuff. You know, it was all that. But, probably not a good idea to jam-pack too many sentences with more than two.

**John:** Yeah. Michael asks, “My question concerns the often…” Okay, so I am just going to preface this: we have two questions left. Both of these questions could tick towards despair.

**Craig:** Oh, great! So everyone turn it up. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] But here is a trick for you. Your facial muscles are related to your overall emotional state you are not fully cognizant of. So, it is hard to think negative thoughts while you are visibly smiling. So, if at any point listening to these next two questions you feel like, “Oh no, I’m going to have to jump off a bridge,” force yourself into a smile, and the bridge jumping thoughts will disappear.

**Craig:** Yeah, they will just… — You turn it off. Like a light switch, you turn it off. [sings]

**John:** Like a light switch, you turn it off. [sings]

**Craig:** Do- do-do-dee-do. [sings] I cut that off before we would have to pay royalties.

**John:** Yeah, that’s good. Thank you. What a great song. What a great musical.

**Craig:** Every song is great. The Book of Mormon.

**John:** So good.

**Craig:** The Book of Mormon. Spectacular. Spectacular arrangement of songs.

**John:** Okay…

**Craig:** Here we go…

**John:** …a little tangent. I really love the show. I have one song which is distinctly my least favorite song that I will always skip when it comes up on the playlist.

**Craig:** And that song is Hasa Diga Eebowai?

**John:** Oh, no, I love Hasa Diga Eebowai. It is Spooky Mormon Hell Dream.

**Craig:** Ah, it’s the best! [laughs]

**John:** I’m glad somebody likes it.

**Craig:** I love it!

**John:** It is just not my taste.

**Craig:** Well, it’s the most South Park of those songs.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Yes. But what is your favorite song?

**John:** It’s probably Turn it Off. I love Turn it Off.

**Craig:** Turn it Off is pretty great. But I think my favorite, it’s kind of a tossup here, between…it’s not fair to say a three-way tossup, because I will put Sal Tlay Ka Siti as number 2. Hello is tied at number one with I Believe. I Believe is my number one. I Believe.

**John:** I Believe is certainly a very strong anthem. I just love all of the storytelling that happens in Turn it Off. Because you always think about it, “Oh, he’s gay, he doesn’t want to admit it.” But then there is also the guy who is waiting in line for the iPhone… [laughs]

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** There’s so many things, like his father.

**Craig:** Yeah. His father is beating his mom when the Jazz would lose. But then, All American Prophet is also an amazing…

**John:** Oh, come on, great storytelling in that.

**Craig:** Amazing storytelling. It’s actually this beautiful little moment, because I think that some people feel maybe that The Book of Mormon is very anti-Mormon, and while it is… — I don’t know if I would say it is pro-Mormon, because they certainly point out some of the stranger things that Mormons believe, like God has his own planet, there is a beautiful little thing that happens when they are telling the story in All American Prophet of Joseph Smith.

So, an angel tells him to go dig up golden plates in his backyard, and he digs them up, and the Angel Moroni says, “These golden plates are our New Testament, and you have to write them down, but you cannot show them to anyone.” And Joseph Smith says, “But then no one will believe me.” And the angel says, “Yeah, but that is kind of what God is going for.”

And then they go through this whole song, and then Joseph Smith is shot by an angry mob, and as he is dying he is talking to God, and Heaven, and he just says, “Why did you let me die? You never let me show the golden tablets to anyone…”

**John:** [humming the score]

**Craig:** Yeah, “You never let me show the golden tablets to anyone. Now they will have no reason to believe in me. They will have to believe just ’cause.”

**John:** “’cause.”

**Craig:** And then there is a nice pause and he goes, “Oh, I guess that is what you were going for.”

**John:** “Going for.”

**Craig:** And it is a nice little discovery of the purpose of faith at the very end, and then he dies. It really is… — And I also would say for screenwriters, if you look at how much information and expository value there is in Hello, which is the opening number of The Book of Mormon, it is a great lesson for how to get information across.

For instance, Josh Gad’s character in The Book of Mormon has a problem with making things up. And right there in the middle of Hello, before we even know who he is or what he is doing, in the middle of a joke the church elder in charge of him says, “No, no, no. You are making things up, again.”

And that one little word, “Again,” has so much expository value.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, okay. He always makes things up. Interesting. Yeah, great musical. Awesome stuff. Everyone should get it. Everyone.

**John:** Everyone should do it.

**Craig:** Everyone!

**John:** And you have seen the show, too? You are not just basing it on the…

**Craig:** No. No!

**John:** Oh my god! I can’t believe you haven’t seen it yet. Here’s the thing: part of the reason why I think I don’t like Spooky Mormon Hell Dream so much is it is a really busy number, but to me it is not the best staging of all the numbers. I am criticizing something that I think is really amazing, but of all the pieces and parts and stuff, that is the one that felt just the most chaotic to me.

So, I picture it when I hear it…

**Craig:** I got it. This is another reason I am so impressed with the musical, even though I haven’t seen it on stage yet, is because I feel like they did such a great job of telling the story through the songs, I know the story… — I bet I know the 85% version of what this show is just from the storytelling in the music. So, when I finally see it at the Pantages, I think it is coming here in September, it will be like slipping into an old pair of slippers.

**John:** That sounds good. So, with all of that happiness…

**Craig:** Let’s ruin it.

**John:** …we discussed.

**Craig:** Ruin it.

**John:** Michael asks, “My question concerns the often hopeless nature of writing.”

**Craig:** [laughs] “You turn it off, light a light switch.” [sings]

**John:** “I’m fine tuning a screenplay, writing a novel, and in the process of creating a comic. I work through thick and thin even if I absolutely don’t feel like it. As I write I look at the odds of receiving any interest for things that can often feel incredibly hopeless. Will I forever be stuck with my day job? Will I never be able to succeed as a writer? Will anyone actually ever care? I discard these doubts and continue trying, but it can often make for a miserable experience.”

**Craig:** Hmm. Okay, well, you know what? I won’t be particularly shattering about this. The answer, well, to the factual part of the question is sort of prospective part of it, which is “will any of this ever come to anything?” I don’t know. Maybe? Maybe not?

I mean, we all know the odds. They are long, but they are discrete. People do succeed. So, the real question is how do you handle the fact that there is this fear and doubt of failure. And the way you handle the fear and doubt of failure is, at least for me, here is my advice to you — two part advice.

Part number one: accept that you might fail. I was talking about this with another screenwriter friend of mine. And make your piece with that now. Don’t not make your piece with it because eventually that will harm your chances; literally the tightening up in fear of failure is going to make you a worse writer. So, make your piece with the possibility.

And then the other thing I always recommend, this is something I got from Dennis Palumbo, he is a former screenwriter and therapist, is the feelings that you have are normal, and natural — don’t assign logical meaning to them. If you feel like a failure, or if you feel like you are failing, it doesn’t mean you are. If you feel like this is all for naught, it doesn’t mean it is all for naught; it just means you feel that way.

So, just accept that the feeling is irrational, but real. Honor it. Respect it. But don’t over think it.

**John:** Yeah. I would say recognize what is under your control and what is not under your control. And failure is… — There’s really two things you are trying to address here. Will you fail to write something good? Well, that is under you control. Will you fail to be recognized for your good writing? That is less under your control.

The luxury of being a screenwriter is that no one can stop you, or any kind of writer — no one can stop you. You have full permission to write at any time. And that is remarkable. Because if you look at the other kind of professions, like an actor, well you can’t act unless somebody sort of lets you act; unless somebody invites you to act in their something, you are stuck, whereas a screenwriter can also write something new. And that is remarkable.

The challenge is that it is very hard to get a quantifiable gauge of how you are doing. And you can count how many pages you have written, but, like, “Are you a good writer, are you not a good writer?” Well, those are just two different people’s opinions. Versus, if you were playing a sport, it is like how many passes did you sink? That is something that is verifiable, and everyone can say, “He is a good basketball player.” No one can point to a person and say, “He’s a good writer,” and have everyone else agree. And that is just the nature of the profession you have chosen.

**Craig:** That is exactly right. And just accept it. And also know that you are far from alone. The percentage of writers that have experienced what you are experiencing is 100%. And that is up and down the chain. There is a wonderful thing if you look on the Internet. F. Scott Fitzgerald…no, I take it back, it was Steinbeck. Steinbeck had an editor that he worked with his whole career. And he would write him; they had this amazing correspondence.

And in one of the letters, Steinbeck basically talks about how he is pretty much every day just soaking in the fear that he is just no good. Steinbeck. You know? So, hey, if it is good enough for him, it is good enough for you.

**John:** I think so. So, our last question is a related thing. But, a little further down the assembly line. A reader named M asks, “When is the right time to call it quits? I have been working for the past six years to ‘break in’ to the screenwriting industry and have met with middling to mediocre results. I’m currently with my second manager. I have never had an agent. And other than receiving modest pay, non-union, for a few scripts that never got off the ground, I have never sold or optioned a screenplay.

I have always had a strong belief in my abilities as a writer, but the question comes up, ‘What am I doing?'”

**Craig:** Good question.

**John:** “It is appearing in the back of my mind with every word I have been typing lately into Final Draft. To shed a little bit of light on my situation, I currently have a 40-hour a week job. I also shoot and edit wedding videos on the side to make extra money. I’m not really in a situation now where I can give up either of those, and right now I am just tired and burned out from everything.

Screenwriting has always been my passion, but unfortunately I see that passion fading. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.”

**Craig:** Again, I sort of feel like this doesn’t have to be a mopey answer.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** I feel like there is nothing wrong with saying, “That’s that.” There is nothing wrong with saying… — Listen, screenwriting is not the be all/end all of life. There are a lot of wonderful things to do in life. And the truth of the matter is that we have passions for things, but those passions are never as much fun as when they are engaged in something that brings us success.

And I have a great passion for baseball, but I’m no good at it. I mean I can’t play. [laughs] You know, I play a little, but not the way I wish I could. It would have been insane for me to keep on, and keep on, and keep on. Whereas with screenwriting, I get feedback that is encouraging, and feeds and renews the passion as I go on.

If you are starting to get burnt out to the place where you feel like, “You know what? I just, I don’t know; I just don’t feel it the way I used to anymore.” Well, that’s normal. You are not getting that kind of feedback encouragement that you would want. You are 40-years-old. You have a career. Maybe you have a family. Invest in a passion that rewards you.

And if screenwriting is not rewarding you, let it go.

**John:** I agree. I answered offline a similar question someone had written in. And it was a person who actually had some success. They had been staff on TV shows. But just were really contemplating just stopping, and saying, “That’s failure.”

And I was, like, I almost wanted to reframe it as it is not actually failure if you are transitioning from something that is no longer giving you professional satisfaction, no longer paying the bills, and is no longer interesting to you to something that is interesting to you and can pay rent. That’s probably a good thing.

And, so, just because this was your dream, it doesn’t mean that you can’t have a different dream that will take its place or enable you to go someplace new that you really want to go. It’s not the only way.

I also feel like a lot of times people get into screenwriting because they kind of really want to get into movies, and they have no idea how to direct a movie, or how to do any other stuff, and that just takes so much money and so much time, versus the luxury of writing is anyone can be a writer.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But they are not really writers. And so they are doing it because they want to sort of be in the movie business somehow. But they never really…

**Craig:** That’s a great point.

**John:** They aren’t really screenwriters. They would never consider themselves a writer naturally. They just want to be in the film industry.

**Craig:** There is no barrier to starting.

**John:** Exactly. And honestly, I know some writers who are kind of successful, who I could, if we are really being honest, that is true for them. They are not really much of writers, but they are pretty good about making movies. Or they are pretty good about sort of…

**Craig:** Producers. Or…

**John:** Yeah. They are really producers who can write well enough that they are writing movies. And they are having a career, but I don’t think it is their passion at all. I think if you could give them permission to never write again, they would never write again.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. I think that is a great point. That people get into screenwriting because it seems like the path of least resistance. Curiously, it may be the path of most resistance. And that is saying something because you think, like, “God, it would be so much harder to become an actor.” But every movie has lots, and lots, and lots of actors. Every movie tends to have one to four screenwriters.

And we work on a lot of those movies, overlapping kind of. It is very difficult. And if it is not working out, I don’t think… — I don’t even think of it as failure.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** To me, failure is like when I fail to do something that I could do. I could have written five pages today and I didn’t. I failed. That is different than, “I failed at being a professional singer. I just don’t think I am good enough to be a professional singer.” That is not a failure, it’s just the way it is.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, and I have got to say. There is a great essay out there that you should link to that Terry Rossio wrote years ago called, “Throw in the Towel.” And it is brutal, where he really goes after it. Because Terry and Ted Elliott ran the proto screenwriting website called Wordplayer. I think it is still there. I mean, the forum is powered on 1993 software. But, I guess at one point Terry just got fed up with the terrible, terrible scripts that people were sending him.

And he just wrote this really long thing about how you should throw in the towel and why. And then he kind of backed away from it at the end and said, “Well, if you can ignore all of that, then maybe you have a chance.” And I like that advice to some extent. But to another extent I sort of think, like, listen, I meet people and I just think, “Eh, it ain’t going to happen for you.”

**John:** Yeah. It goes back to, again, the quantitative versus qualitative judgment. Like, you are not going to get consistency of opinion about, “Is that a good basketball player?” Certainly. “Is that a good screenwriter?” Who knows? “Is that next script going to be great?” Who knows?

And, that is tough. That doesn’t mean that you need to stick it out forever. Especially if it sucks, don’t keep doing it.

**Craig:** Well, and that is why the stories of people who stick it out, and stick it out, and stick it out, and then finally you are discovered or make it are so dangerous, because they feed the dreams of so many incompetent people. And American Idol, part of the secret to their success was exposing that amazing phenomena of delusion.

You know, people say, “Well my friends all tell me I sound great.” God, you don’t.

**John:** You don’t.

**Craig:** I mean, my favorite phrase from American Idol is “Singing is not for you.” And I have met some people where I read their stuff and I just go, “Screenwriting is not for you.” You don’t have… — As Steve Martin said, “Some people have a way with words, and other people not have way.”

**John:** Here’s a question for you. If you are auditioning for American Idol, at what point is it most devastating to be cut? Is it most devastating to be cut at that big open call, or you made it through to the Vegas round, or you made it through and you didn’t make it down to the top?

**Craig:** I think the most devastating cut is the one where they split everybody into the four rooms, the two rooms make it through, but they didn’t really make it through. Only half of those people are going to make it through. And there is nothing you can even do about that. It is the weirdest thing that they pull.

So, it is the bit where you would go up the elevator to the room with the wooden floor. That is the worst, because, you didn’t even get a chance to change that. That was already in play when they said you are part of this good group, but not really. Only half of you are good. And that is brutal. That would be the worst.

**John:** Yeah. But you see all the tears that happen there, and you try to remind these kids, and really I am trying to remind these writers who are writing in is you got picked because you were one of the best singers they had, or one of the best writers they found. You got hired on to write a movie for somebody. That is amazing. No one else that you know, no one else back in Topeka that happened for.

And so, it is a setback when it doesn’t happen, but it doesn’t mean that you are a failure.

**Craig:** No, it doesn’t. Although we have to be realistic about something that writing screenplays professionally is akin to playing sports professionally. And there are amazing athletes who just aren’t amazing enough to be major league baseball players. And, at some point, you have got to be realistic about this.

If you are trying to be one of the best in the world, you are going to have to actually be one of the best in the world. And when everybody looks around in movies and goes, “Well that guy who writes that is a dope…”

Yeah, and he is one of the best in the world. So, you have got to beat that guy, you know?

**John:** Are we going to talk about Steve Koren and that whole article?

**Craig:** That was atrocious.

**John:** That was atrocious.

**Craig:** We should talk about it. That was gross.

**John:** We will link to it in the show notes. So, there is a screenwriter named Steve Koren who has written a bunch of the Adam Sandler comedies. And another screenwriter, who is not produced yet, but is… — Now I forget his name. He is the kid who is written about in the book…

**Craig:** A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

**John:** A Heartbreaking Work. His last name is Eggers, so we will find his real name and figure out who he is. So, he wrote, the young version of the kid who was in this book, who has now grown up and now is a screenwriter wrote this article for Slate, I think, just excoriating Steve Koren’s work, and trying to start essentially a Kickstarter campaign…

**Craig:** “We have to stop Steve Koren!”

**John:** Exactly. “Let’s get him to stop writing.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it was such a weirdly misguided and just mean-spirited…

**Craig:** Infantile.

**John:** Infantile.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, like, I don’t know Steve Koren. I have not seen his movies. I don’t really want to essentially see those movies. But to say that it is all Steve Koren’s fault that these movies exist is just ridiculous, and naive, and infantile.

**Craig:** Stupid. I mean, look: first of all, the writing credits are the writing credits, but other people work on movies. Second of all, the writer ultimately is not in charge of shooting that day’s work. And particularly when you working with big stars who control their work creatively, they are in control; and they will drift away and change the script.

Every screenwriter has had multiple examples of seeing their work on screen and thinking, “That’s actually not my work on screen. That is something else that I don’t like.”

**John:** Oh, yes. Yes.

**Craig:** So there is that whole thing. But even if every single movie that had Steve Koren’s name on it was a perfect reflection of what Steve Koren’s intention was, screw this guy for saying stop Steve Koren because you don’t like his movies. Guess what? You are not the only person out there. It is not all about you.

There is this thing called taste. And some people like different stuff. I don’t like Justin Bieber. Do you think I slap my daughter around because she does? She likes it. Does that make Justin Bieber stupid? No.

This whole thing of pop culture absolutism just blows my mind. Just blows my mind. That is why I always stick up for MacGruber. [laughs]

You know, it’s like, if it makes you laugh it is funny and you like it, and that is that. And it is so dumb. “Oh, let’s stop him.” Yeah, because that is what the world needs, to stop Steve Koren from writing, because that is the biggest problem we have right behind AIDS, and rape, and ball cancer.

**John:** I even want to step back to what you were saying. He didn’t direct these movies. There were other people involved. He didn’t start it. Even take Tyler Perry, who writes, and directs and stars in his movies. I don’t particularly want to see a Tyler Perry movie, but I am not going to try to stop all Tyler Perry movies from existing.

**Craig:** Right!

**John:** It is ultimately not a zero sum game. Yes, there is some degree to which by making those movies there are other movies that don’t get made. But Tyler Perry is not hurting you. He is not hurting anyone. And if people want to pay money to see those movies, God bless them.

**Craig:** Exactly. Here is the thing: I am not a churchy guy. Tyler Perry movies are churchy movies. If I were to say, “We have got to stop Tyler Perry,” it wouldn’t even be accurate. What I am really saying is we have to stop his audience. And what this guy really should have said, if he were to be accurate to his own stupidity is, “We have to stop the waves of humanity that have gone on to see Steve Koren films. Or who chose not to…” whatever, or, “the small chunks of humanity that went to go see Steve Koren films.” That is really what this is about. It is not anger at Steve Koren. It is resentment at an audience for liking something that you think is stupid.

Well, tough. Dammit.

**John:** Well said.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** On a similar note, I would say genres of movies — I watch all of the Sturm und Drang about the Battleship trailer, and about the Battleship movie. The Battleship movie doesn’t look great to movie, but I look at this movie as, like, “Wait, you really like Transformers and now you are going to go crazy about how bad Battleship looks?”

I don’t understand you people. There is not a fundamental difference between those two. So, if people are going to pay money to go see the Transformers movie, but they won’t pay money to go see the Battleship movie, I don’t get it.

**Craig:** Anybody who goes on the Internet months before a movie comes out, and announces based on the trailer why they have made a principled decision not to buy a ticket to that movie is a moron. They are a moron. And, also probably have some spectrum disorder. Because that is ridiculous.

It is not something to get worked up about. It is entertainment. My whole thing is, when I love a movie, I really, really love it. If I don’t like a movie, it’s over. It’s gone. I forget about it. It feels like people have gone backwards on this whole thing where they just enjoy hating a particular movie. So, like the whole Jack and Jill phenomenon, it was like there was just an orgy of hatred for this thing for even existing. But then the movies that they really love they kind of privately talk about it with their friends. It is so strange to me.

Who cares about Jack and Jill? Just let it be.

**John:** Rather than complain about it, why don’t you just go see Drive again and you are going to be happy.

**Craig:** Well, and that is the thing, and then they don’t. And by the way, Battleship will have a huge opening.

And I remember going to see… It’s funny, I remember going to see Transformers. And I just didn’t like it. I just didn’t like the movie. I didn’t like the story at all. I was wowed by the Michael Bay action, but I thought the story was just boring, and oftentimes made no sense, and just didn’t satisfy me. So I didn’t go back for the second two. But I don’t talk about it, because it doesn’t matter.

It just doesn’t matter. Never once have I ever thought, “What is wrong with America that they keep seeing Transformer movies?” No. I just don’t care! What is wrong with that, Eggers? Jerk.

**John:** Yeah. If you want better movies, buy tickets for better movies, and pay for them, and more of those movies get made.

**Craig:** And by the way, I will tell you what: even if they don’t make more of those movies, just go see the movies you like. [laughs]

You just go see the ones you like, and then when you see the one coming down the line that doesn’t match your taste, just ignore it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t go and eat mayonnaise in restaurants, because I hate mayonnaise. I don’t rail against Americans who love mayonnaise. I don’t make snarky comments about the mayonnaise industry. I don’t sit down and have another mayonnaise sandwich and then say, “Oh my God.”

**John:** To be fair, you do complain about mayonnaise pretty much constantly when we are not on the air, but at least you are not podcasting about your hatred of mayonnaise.

**Craig:** Well, I actually do have another podcast about that, that I do with another guy. It’s just a different guy.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s a lot like you, though. He is very similar. But, what is wrong with these people? Don’t they have anything better to do? This guy is a screenwriter. Hey dude, how about this: you go ahead and write a script, and get it made, and go through that process, and then you will have earned the right to get up on your chair and go on about the great criminal Steve Koren who really deserves your wrath.

There is a target well-deserving of your ire. Until that time, you are just a blogger.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Piss off.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, I feel good after that.

**John:** I feel better. It’s good. We got a lot off our chest there.

**Craig:** Oh my God. I want Steve Koren to come on our podcast. I want to…

**John:** Yeah. Matt Selman has volunteered to be on our podcast. And so we are talking about ways we can involve other writers on it. It has just been a two-man show so far, so we are thinking about doing that. We are thinking about doing a live show. There’s a lot of possibilities in the air.

**Craig:** I think Selman would be great. That would be fun to get him on. We could talk about The Simpsons.

**John:** I love The Simpsons so much.

**Craig:** I know. He is a cool guy. And, by the way, neither one of us, I’m speaking for you; neither one of us knows Steve Koren. I’ve never met the guy in my life. I’m just sticking up for him just on principle.

**John:** Yeah. Principle totally.

**Craig:** Yeah. The hell?!

**John:** The hell.

**Craig:** I know. In fact, don’t link to this guy’s thing. I don’t even want to give credit to him. People can Google it on their own.

**John:** Okay. There will be no link. Craig has declared there be no link.

**Craig:** No link! I have autocratically decided there will be no link.

**John:** Craig, thank you for another fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. We will see you next time.

**John:** All right. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/how-to-cut-pages-2).

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

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

**John:** And you are listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Things that are interesting to people who are interested in what screenwriters are talking about, I guess.

**Craig:** Things that are interesting to people who are interested in the things that interest screenwriters.

**John:** Yeah. It’s one of those nesting things; it can keep going on and on and on…

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

**John:** Hello, Craig Mazin.

Craig Mazin, I heard your name mentioned this week because you gave a presentation at the WGA for members that was very well received. What was that about?

**Craig:** That’s great to hear. I did. It is the second time I have done it now. It is basically a seminar on how to survive and thrive during development, and to a lesser extent, during production. And this is something that you simply will not find anywhere. There is no book that can tell you how to do this because all of the people who write books are writing them for people who aren’t in development.

But people who want to be in development, and also, of course, as I have pointed out many, many times, most people writing books have never been in development because they are not really screenwriters. So this was a very focused sort of seminar for people who have to deal with the misery of writing a script, getting notes from multiple sources, navigating those notes, and somehow surviving the process. And doing well during it.

And so it is a little bit of therapy. It is a little bit of psychology. It is a little bit of strategy. And, yeah, it is the second time I have done it and people seem to dig it.

**John:** What is challenging about development is that there are things that are actually part of your contract. You have a writing period. You should be able to turn things in at the end of your writing period. They need to pay you. You have your order to commence. There are some technical things that should be there.

But there are also standard business practices, and there is all the psychology of how to really figure out when to get them to pay you for another step. So I assume you got into that kind of stuff?

**Craig:** Not really. Actually, no.

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** I sort of stayed away from the business arrangements. I mean, there was a little bit of a sidebar on how to handle the producer draft or the so-called “free rewrite.” Most of what I talked about really was how to behave. How to behave in such a way and how to manage your own behavior in such a way as to maximize your chance of protecting your intention from the beginning, the first day you are hired, to the premiere.

How can you survive this, not lose your mind, not get fired, and protect what matters to you in the movie. So, it was really all about that, and not so much about the gears.

Although, you know, what we are talking about is the Writers Guild does something called the Television Showrunners Training Program, which was actually a get that we received in negotiations from the companies where they basically pay for it. It is not much to them, but it was kind of a smart thing for them to do because basically writers end up running shows, and the better they know how to run a show, theoretically, the better it will be for the companies.

And it is such a specific skill set. It goes far beyond writing, of course. You become, really, management — writer management, I guess. And that has been a very successful program. And since 2004, when I was first on the board, I have been kind of clamoring for an equal thing for screenwriters, not because we would ever become management — we rarely do — but just because I feel like there is a lot that most screenwriters simply don’t know.

And those of us who have been doing this for 15 to 20 years have picked up quite a bit. So, finally, they are talking about it now. And this would be part of it. And then certainly there would be other topics, like if I could design a screenwriters training program today it would be first how to survive and thrive during development.

I guess actually even before that: pitching. How to pitch. Then how to survive and thrive during development. How to work with a director. How to behave, and survive, and thrive during production. And the fifth topic probably would be how to best manage your relationship with your representation.

But I am also open to ideas. If you think there are other big topics that would make sense in a training program, tell me.

**John:** Definitely. I was just meeting with my new WGA mentees. I got assigned a group of four new members who I am going to be meeting with regularly to help them get started in their careers. And they are all tremendously gifted writers, so they don’t need any help on that front.

But, they are asking questions that are really kind of fundamental to that first part of your career which is, “I am being sent out on a thousand meetings. I don’t know which ones to sort of take seriously. I don’t know how seriously to approach that idea that the producer sort of brings up in the room that I am kind of interested in, but I don’t know if it is a real project or not a real project. How do I apportion my time between writing the stuff that I want to write for myself and pursuing these projects that may never become a real project, for which there may be six other writers also pursuing this topic? How do you figure all of that out?”

And that is the kind of stuff I hope the screenwriting training program would cover.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the trick with some of those topics is that they are so circumstance-dependent that it is hard to kind of codify a best practice, because it really depends. It depends on the kind of work you do. It depends on, frankly, how much money you require. Are you somebody that can kind of go for a year or two before selling something? Or do you have a family and a mortgage?

So there are a lot of different circumstances, but sometimes the best way to sort of codify that is to just give people the instruction set for how to even discuss that with their representation.

**John:** Absolutely. You are not going to provide them the answer, but you are going to give them the smart questions to be asking, so they can ask themselves the question about what is important to them. At what point are they going to be willing to jump out of competition for something that may or may not become real?

**Craig:** You know, John, I think you just might be instructing that segment of the screenwriting training program.

**John:** Perhaps I will.

**Craig:** Yes. Perhaps you will. And by perhaps we mean “you will.”

**John:** I will definitely be instructing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s tough. So today I wanted to talk some more crafty kind of things if we could?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Last week, you and I both got offers to run major studios, which was really flattering, but I really want to go back to our screenwriting roots and talk about the words on the page and those drafts that you have to turn in that become part of development.

And today I want to talk about cutting pages, which so much of your work as a screenwriter is to try to generate pages — to write those three, or five, or seven, or ten pages in that day, and build up to a whole script. And then, eventually, you have to start cutting it down because your script is too long. And I guess we should talk about what is too long. What is a good benchmark?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** For feature screenwriters, 120 pages is often thrown about as like the upper limit to how long a screenplay should be. That is an invented figure. That figure basically probably came from most movies are about two hours long. Most scripts kind of average out to about a minute of paper to a minute of screen time, so the script should be about 120 pages.

It is really arbitrary, and yet it has become kind of codified as that is the upper limit. To the point where if you turn in a script that was 122 pages, your first note will always be, “You need to cut a little bit here.”

**Craig:** Well, it goes even further than that. I know that Warner Brothers, and possibly Universal, puts that in your contract. They have the right to refuse delivery of a script that is over 120 pages. And I think part of it is that even though… — It’s a funny thing; this is how you can tell a writer from a non-writer: non-writers tend to under-deliver on pages.

Those were the kids in class who turned in book reports and the teacher said, “You need three more paragraphs.” Writers are the ones who write way too much. There’s never enough pages for them. And every screenwriter I know is constantly in a panic that they are on page 50 and they have 200 more pages to go. Because they have so much they want to say, and so much they want to do in the story, and studios have been burned before by these really long drafts that ultimately are unwieldy and unproduceable, and unbudgetable.

And you would think that they could just simply go, “Well, look, obviously these 40 pages need to go.” But, they don’t know how to do that. And frankly, if the writer did, they wouldn’t have turned in that draft.

So, 120 pages is pretty hard and fast. If you are doing an epic, a historical epic, or something like Lord of the Rings, where you know that the movie is really ambitious, you just have to all agree beforehand that the draft will be longer than the average draft.

**John:** Yeah. We should state the obvious that it is not a hard and fast rule that 120 pages equals a 2 hour movie. Go was 126 pages and it is well under 2 hours.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Big Fish was the same situation. So, it is a mistaken assumption. It is a bad benchmark, but it is still what people expect. And if a producer has two scripts to read, and they were printed out, back in the days when everything was printed out, if there are two scripts to read they will flip through the end. They will read the 111-page script before they read the 120-page script every time.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right. And your point is well taken. Go is a perfect example because there is a certain caffeination, or it is speedified, you know, the movie is on speed. And, similarly, with kind of rat-a-tat comedies — spoofs are sort of notorious. I mean, I would get into these wars with Bob Weinstein where he would insist that the script had to be 105 pages.

And I would say, “Just so you know, our script is timed at nearly 30 seconds a page. You are just simply not going to have enough movie.” And we never did. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We were also like pad… — Because it is so fast. And there is a great story recently from The Social Network, because Sorkin writes very — the dialogue is designed to be delivered at an insane pace. And he turned the script in and everybody was kind of freaking out. And he recorded that great opening sequence with Mark Zuckerberg being dumped by his girlfriend.

He recorded it the way, at the pace he thought it should be, and supposedly — this sounds true to me — Fincher basically timed everything per Sorkin. And on the day, he would sit there and his script supervisor had a stopwatch, and if they didn’t hit it, they did it again. [laughs] It had to be at that pace.

So, the one minute per page rule is something that, some standard needs to be there, but… — Like I said, if you know that it is supposed to go faster, just make sure everybody knows beforehand.

**John:** Yeah. The same also applies for TV. We should say that TV actually has much more stringent guidelines because shows are a half hour, or they are an hour long. And you can’t be long. You can’t run long. There is no arbitrariness there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So you are going to have to hit your act breaks. You are going to have to hit your end times on those things. So, a lot of times you really do need to cut to match your amount of time that you have. When Melissa was working on Gilmore Girls, she said their scripts were hugely long. That is because, again, it is that rat-a-tat tempo, blasting through stuff.

**Craig:** Right. I would imagine 30 Rock scripts are probably quite long.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I mean, they are going at this nuts-o pace. But I could also see like CSI scripts not being able to go long because there is a lot of silence, and looking around, and studying for clues.

**John:** Yeah. And then there is Family Guy, which often will have Peter staring at the camera for about 30 seconds.

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

**John:** So regardless, at some point you are going to be in situations where you are going to have to cut pages. So let’s talk about the situations that you might want to have to cut pages. And sometimes it is really simple. Sometimes you want to just cut a page or two.

Let’s just talk cosmetic cutting, where you aren’t really trying to change the story, you aren’t trying to change what is really happening, you are just trying to make your script look shorter.

**Craig:** Okay. So we are not talking about nibbling at content really?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. Well, some simple things that I always do is I look for those gerunds that don’t need to be there. So, “He is looking through the file,” should be, “he looks through the file.” You are looking for those action descriptions that have one little word sticking off to save a line.

Sometimes you have action broken up and you think, “Yeah, I could probably pull it up and make that a paragraph.” I don’t like going more than three lines really, or four max, for an action paragraph. But if I have, like, three in a row that are just single lines, and they are not super important that they be like that, I pull them up.

Actually, I have to say: Movie Magic has a fantastic little add-on thing that scans your script and basically says, “If you could shorten this word by five letters, then your script would be pulled up by one-eighth of a page.” It is very cool. And so you can kind of go through and look for those targeted ones that actually start saving you page length.

**John:** Yeah. What you start to recognize is, because feature scripts are 120 pages, very small changes will ripple through and create huge differences because of how paragraphs are breaking up, because of dialogue that is breaking across pages. So, literally changing… — cutting one paragraph on page 20 might make your whole script a page shorter.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And so looking for those is good. I would caution against some of the really obvious things that people attempt to do, like these screenwriters attempt to do. Don’t try to change the margins because they will know if you tried to change the margins.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Don’t try to change the font size. Don’t try to change the line spacing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Final Draft will let you do the tight spacing…

**Craig:** Uh, don’t do it.

**John:** Don’t do it.

**Craig:** Look, the first thing I do when I get a script to rewrite is I put it through my format which is a very standard AD-approved format. And so I get a 119-page script, I put it through my format. I immediately call everybody and say, “Just so you know, this is 138 pages. So there is more going on here than we realize. Don’t be surprised when things start disappearing.”

Because, you know, they — “they” meaning producers and studio executives — are just as childish as we are when it comes to page count. Prior to the green light coming on, everybody is shoving as much in as possible, and page count is sort of a fantasy. The second the green light goes on, it is a panic. And pages become absolutely critical. Because the way…

For screenwriters that haven’t been through production, they have to understand. The way the schedule is laid out, it is in eighths of pages. And every day is two and three-eighths of a page, something like that. And every eighth of a page matters. And every additional day of shooting is six figures.

So, it really becomes very… — It is just an academic grind to start removing stuff and winnowing away to what is absolutely necessary to put on screen. And what is tough is, of course, once it goes into editorial even more of that will be cut. The director that knows exactly what is going to be on screen before he shoots it is the greatest director in the world. And he doesn’t exist. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, that’s a good point you are making there. You could be cutting this at a script stage and actually do it gracefully, or you have to cut it in the editing room and it be probably much less graceful. So for the logic and sake of your story, if there are changes you can make on the script to make it more like what you think the final movie is going to be, it is worth it to try to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I have two cosmetic things before we get into the actual cutting the meat issues. The first is CUT TO’s, TRANSITIONS TO. At the end of every scene, some writers use those, like every scene ends with a CUT TO.

**Craig:** Really? Wow.

**John:** Yeah. And some writers still use those. And, you don’t have to.

**Craig:** That’s crazy. No. I mean, use them for impact.

**John:** But don’t use them every time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So there you have saved a tremendous amount of money.

**Craig:** That’s huge.

**John:** I would also say look for orphans. And orphans are those little bits and fragments of lines that are taking up a whole line of your page but actually aren’t doing anything meaningful.

So, sometimes you can rewrite a sentence to get rid of that orphan and bump everything up a line.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Other times, the only time I will occasionally cheat a margin is in a dialogue block.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** And I will bump the right edge of a dialogue block just a few characters over to pull an orphan up.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** And no one will ever see that.

**Craig:** And, by the way, it is legal, and here’s why: That word doesn’t add time to the day. You see savvy, and this where… — You know, it’s funny, I’m going through it now on this script that is shooting at Universal. Sometimes people who aren’t savvy about what takes time on a given day will obsess over page length. ADs know. Directors know. But, others may not. And they may say, “Look, is there a way for you…we can cut the scene down if you got rid of this line of dialogue.”

That will not cut the day down at all. What takes time is setups. How many angles there are. If I am shooting two people talking in a restaurant at a table, frankly, I could double the page count and it really won’t add that much to the day.

**John:** Exactly. But if you were to add, the scene would be the same number of pages, but you added another person to that table, you have doubled the amount of shooting you have to do.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** You have to shoot all the angles to cover that.

**Craig:** And sometimes you will get suggestions where, and this is where production experience is so important, and why I urge screenwriters to go to sets and sit there and watch how they do it, as boring as it may be, because you are able to see, say, “Listen, your suggestion is to take these five lines of dialogue that are an exchange between these two people at the table and just cut them and replace them with just one waiter walking over and saying, ‘Are you guys okay?'”

That literally makes it longer. And sometimes they just don’t get it.

**John:** They don’t. Because they are not going through that and they don’t see what that is. But you are right, the AD will always see what that is.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** The other thing which is frustrating is when they are trying to cut stuff that is important. Like, it is kind of reader setup. As you are first introducing a character, you are first introducing one of your major heroes or one of your major villains, you may throw two or three lines at that character’s scene description lines to really setup who that person is.

That is not screen time. That is just to help the reader who is trapped with only seeing stuff on the page to understand what that person is going to be like in the movie. That is not shooting time. So…

**Craig:** Don’t obsess over that, right?

**John:** Yeah, don’t obsess over that. And if you have to cut something just for cosmetics…but that is the reason why you have it.

**Craig:** It’s free. It’s free page. And a nice rebuttal to that is to sort of say, “Not only does it not cost us time on the day. Not only do those three lines budget out to zero dollars, but in casting it is going to be enormously important.”

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So, as long as you have some sort of practical reason for them other than, “Because my words are so precious,” then they will be cool. You can’t just say, “Well, because it is just cool. I really liked the way the words lined up there.” “Well, great. You are not writing a novel, buddy. We have to cut pages.”

**John:** So let’s say we actually have to cut some meat. You have that script that is 138 pages. You are going to have to cut some serious things. What are easy targets for cuts?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know if there is any category that is specifically easy. I think that you have to look for… — First of all, if you really want to cut a script, you have got to ask yourself if there are any sequences that can come out. Start big, frankly.

It is a rare script that can meet a schedule when it is currently budgeted at over schedule or over dollars that can comply and conform to what they have through little tiny cuts across the whole thing. So, big question first: Is there a sequence we can just do without?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And sometimes a fresh pair of eyes is helpful with that. Because, remember, while you are a good writer, and you have written everything with intention and purpose, many of those scenes were written before the whole script was written. In fact, all of them except the last one. So, you should be able to recontextualize some things, too.

Now you have the whole thing in front of you. Maybe one of those sequences can go.

**John:** The smaller things I sometimes try to take a look at, especially if I am being sent something for a rewrite. I will always target any scene in which a character recaps something that the audience has seen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s wasted time. There is no reason for that to happen. And surprisingly it still happens a lot in TV, and I don’t know why. I guess, you are coming back from an act breaking, you need to sort of remind people what happened. But, yikes, it always feels very frustrating.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** If that conversation has to happen, come to the very end of that conversation and just let the audience know that that character now is up to speed.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly. There is a logic thing.

**John:** Yeah. But take out the dialogue that actually does it.

**Craig:** Correct. You could just open up with one character just staring at the person who has told them this story off-screen, and that character just goes, “Wow, really? Yup. Okay.” [laughs]

**John:** Or a meaningful follow-up question that actually pushes the scene forward.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, but a recap is dreadful. Yeah.

**John:** Try to get out of scenes… — Classic advice for screenwriting in general, but try to come into scenes later, try to get out of scenes earlier. And so don’t let characters walk through doors, either to enter a scene or to exit a scene. And sometimes just trimming those will create some space, but will also speed up the pace of things and not make things feel so long.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I would also say to look at your setups. And this is a place where you and I may disagree a little bit, but you have said that you tend to write long first acts, and really have a lot of setup of character. I tend to have less of that. And just because in my experience a lot of times you will shoot that meaningful thing that sort of introduces the character, and then when you actually put the thing together, you go like, “I didn’t need to catch that last moment. I could catch them at this moment and follow along.”

**Craig:** You know, I think it is a little genre dependent. I tend to like shorter first acts in action movies, thrillers, even in dramas, I think. Comedies, I like a longer first act because I feel like that is the broccoli that you have to eat to enjoy all of the comedy of the second and third act.

And, I will also say that you will eventually, once you get into the editing room, decide where and how you need to kind of compress it down a little bit. And there is a magic that occurs in production where things jump out. And you realize the actor has packed an enormous amount of information in simply a look. And so things can start coming out that way.

But you don’t know that until you see the performance. So, frankly, where I like to compress things is the third act. I feel like every movie I have ever been to, with rare exception, by the time I get to an hour and 30 in my seat I’m kind of like, “Let’s finish this. Let’s wrap it up.”

So, long, drawn out climaxes are not a bad place to take a look.

**John:** I think the third act problem also comes because of the way that we write screenplays in general. We have all of this energy and drive as we are writing through the first act. And the second act we are dealing with all of the complications we have created. And by the third act we are just exhausted and we are sort of slogging through it.

So that is the process of writing the script the first time. And some of that lethargy, and some of that exhaustion sort of creeps in, just sort of stays with the script I should say, throughout its process. So, you are really tight when you are writing your first act, because you went through it a lot of times, and you have really figured out the best way to do it.

And that third act, you are like, “Well, all of this stuff has to happen. We will make it all happen.” And, writing your third act with the same vigor as the first act will often shorten it down a lot.

**Craig:** That is a great point. And there is a point under that point which again goes to — it sort of identifies who writers are. Non-writers when they get tired write less, and writers when they get tired write more. They just get long and they lose that kind of parallel construction and concision. And if you feel it happening, just take the day off. Take the day off and come back to it.

**John:** Yeah. It is also worth asking the question: Which threads do I really need to wrap up, and which threads are important? And are there ways I can wrap up multiple threads in one moment together? So rather than having to cut between all of the different characters and subplots I have set up, is there a way to bring those together in a way that is going to feel more rewarding?

Sometimes it is helpful to think about, if I had to watch this sequence with the sound turned off would I be able to understand kind of where everybody ends up at the end? And if it relies on a lot of dialogue to wrap things up, that is not probably your ideal situation.

**Craig:** That’s right. As much as I loved all of the Harry Potter books, the one criticism I have of J.K. Rowling is that she tended to talk her way through every climax.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I understood to a point, because they were all mysteries. They were all basically elaborate Scooby Doo episodes, so the whodunit and why needed long talks. But you could see how great of a job Kloves did to not do that in the movies. He deserves a huge tip of the hat for visualizing those climaxes and letting the performances…

And frankly, we also forget when we are writing that there is this other voice. We know that we have what we have written. And we know that there are camera angles. And we know that there are actors for sure. But don’t forget score. Score sometimes is the best way to think about how to save pages. Because great score against an actor’s face is writing.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And if you know what your intention is for that moment, it is amazing what you can get away with.

**John:** Yeah. It’s hard to reference the score in screenplays. I will do it sometimes. I have done things like, “As music swells we descend upon…” giving that sense of an operatic moment, or some sort of big transition. Getting a sense that this is a Lawrence of Arabia moment here can buy you that.

But the challenge is that readers, and producers, and everyone who is going to be taking a look at your script are used to going through it so fast that you have to really signal to them that, “Really we are doing this in a shot. So don’t skim it.”

**Craig:** I don’t think I have ever once referred to score on the page itself. But in my mind, if I know that that is what is going on, sometimes I will take a little bit of extra space for the action lines, break them up a little bit more, nice short sentences, and maybe underline the one that matters.

And then that sort of implies that this is one of those moments. It is just one of those ways of thinking intentionally as opposed to spelling it all out. But I honestly feel that nine times out of ten, when your script is really long it is because there is some sequence in there that just doesn’t need to be there, or could be combined with something else in a fun way.

**John:** Yeah. The other good test, which I talked about at lunch with my mentees yesterday, was you sort of take each little piece of your script out, and you hold it up to the light and say, “Is this my movie? Does this feel like my movie? Does this have to be in my movie?” And if there is a sequence that doesn’t sort of meet that criteria you have to really look at whether it belongs back in your movie, or whether something else is going to be better in its place.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And sometimes the best way to cut pages is to cut a lot of pages and write a better, shorter thing that can take its place.

**Craig:** Yeah. Every writer is familiar with the concept of killing your babies. So, we are sort of taught very early on, “Don’t get precious about those things that you love. You have to cut them.” But I actually found… Dennis Palumbo, who is a screenwriter-turned-therapist, had a more elegant explanation of why it was hard. And his explanation also allowed me to understand why — or rather made it easier for me to cut those things.

His point was it is not like… — Killing your baby sort of implies that you have written something beautiful and wonderful, but it just has to go because of some sort of circumstance. His point was: actually let’s think about why we call them our babies. Because the truth is a lot of times the things that we write that we don’t think of as our babies are fantastic.

And then there are these things that we do think of as our babies, and people are like, “I just don’t get it.” And his point was: it is your baby because the writing of that line was significant to you. That was a kind of a line that you admire, and you did it. Or, that was a kind of a thing that you have struggled with a lot and you feel like you finally grew as a writer by writing that line.

None of that is relevant to the audience’s experience.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** So, give yourself a huge pat on the back for whatever you accomplished with that line, but if it needs to be cut, cut it.

**John:** Yeah. You are talking about sort of sunk costs. So, either you want to hold onto it because it was so hard to write, or you want to hold onto it because you felt so great about having written it. And those are completely valid for why you feel that way, and no one else can know that, until they see the director’s commentary, or the writer’s commentary…

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** …and you can say, “That’s the best line in the whole thing.” And then you sound incredibly conceited.

**Craig:** And what’s more, once you realize that that is why you care so much about that line, cutting it doesn’t take away the victory. You still have the victory. You just realized that was important for me. So I will put that on an index card and paste it to the wall, and I feel really good about that. But nobody else is going to… — It is not a gift for anyone else, so let’s not impose it upon them.

**John:** Yeah. It does become easier to cut things once you have written a lot more. So in those early scripts it was just torture to cut like three lines because, “Oh, but I love these three lines.” But then you have written 20,000 lines and you are like, “Oh, fine.”

**Craig:** It’s the “There’s more where that comes from syndrome.” I mean, you and I in a distant podcast talked about how many individual drafts we produced. I assume at this point we will eventually hit 100 at least. And at that point you become a little less concerned.

It’s the difference between hitting your first home run and hitting your 530th. It is just not that big of a deal.

**John:** So, one last piece of advice I would offer is that as you approach as section with your script where you are going to be cutting a lot of things, go into it with a plan. Know what you are going to cut. Cut on paper first if that makes sense to you, if it is helpful for you. But definitely go in with a plan because otherwise you are going to go through your script and just start moving commas.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You have to really go in with, like, “This is the focus of what I am trying to do here.” So, if it is to write new sequences, delete the sequences that are going out and write the new things. If you are doing a major overhaul and a lot of stuff is moving around, open up a new file and just copy and paste in the stuff that stays. But don’t try to work in that original file.

And that can be freeing, too, because you are not surrounded by all of the stuff that was there.

**Craig:** Absolutely. You and I obviously approach very differently at the start. You write longhand initially. I compose on the computer. But we both finish the same way. Print it out. Do not make that first pass on your computer because there is something about physically looking at the page that makes it so much easier to cut.

And I also find it very helpful to just read it. Out loud. Read the script out loud. You will suddenly realize in the middle of a particular line that you are bored.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that the scene is long and boring. And that there is a shorter way to get to this. Perform it for yourself. You can record it and play it back if you want. But reading it out loud, reading it with a friend — you don’t need a whole megillah of actors showing up at your house, or friends sitting around in chairs reading all the parts. Just read it with two of you. Just go through each scene. A huge help.

**John:** Well, Craig, this was a good conversation.

**Craig:** It was fantastic. I mean, you know what we should have done: we should have recorded this and then put it on the internet because it was such a useful —

**John:** Oh my god, that is so great. Because others could benefit from our conversation about our working practices.

**Craig:** Right. I don’t know why we don’t do that?

**John:** I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do that.

**Craig:** No. I know why everybody doesn’t do that. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** There are a lot of people that should not do that.

**John:** Craig, I meant to ask you. Are you listening to any other podcasts?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. You don’t watch any TV.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You don’t listen to podcasts.

**Craig:** No, but I’m a…

**John:** Basically, you do some writing. You kind of father your children. And you play Skyrim.

**Craig:** I totally father my children. And a lot of baseball practices and games.

**John:** Oh yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** And I am waiting for Skyrim DLC. So while I am waiting for Skyrim DLC, I am now 58% of the way through Arkham City — which is spectacular, by the way.

**John:** I heard that is great, too.

**Craig:** Oh my god, it’s so good. It’s so good.

**John:** So the DLC for Skyrim is like new missions? Or are they new things, new monsters? New what?

**Craig:** No. Bethesda has a pretty longstanding tradition with all of their titles to do quest line DLCs. Some of them are very short. But most of them are rather long. Their idea is, like, you buy it for — I don’t know — maybe ten bucks or something, or $15, and we will give you another 20 hours of game play.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** So, with Skyrim, I don’t think they are anywhere near there yet, but all of the initial press seems to indicate that they are going bigger. That they kind of want…

And they did that for Fallout, too. I mean, almost like getting new games.

**John:** Yeah. I had to stop. So, I was playing Skyrim, and then eventually I had a hard time with like the marriage quest. It was like, “Oh, I’m going to get married.” And so I went through all of that, and I sort of got through all the steps, and I had a hard time finding the guy in the city who I needed to get the amulet from.

And so I finally got… — It just ended up being a lot of hassle and a lot of work. And so then I finally got married and it was like, “Yeah, now I’m bored.”

**Craig:** Oh, I killed my wife.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what, here’s the thing.

**John:** That sounds better.

**Craig:** [laughs] In Skyrim you can get married. And the way you get married is you put on this particular amulet and you walk around. And if you have done nice things for people, and you have achieved enough, they will say, “Hey, I see you are wearing the amulet. Are you interested in hooking up?”

**John:** The Amulet of Mara.

**Craig:** Correct. The Amulet of Mara. And then you say, “Yeah, let’s get married,” which seems like an atrocious way to actually approach marriage in Skyrim, although they are very progressive — men can marry men, women can marry women. I don’t think you can marry animals. Regardless, my wife who is super hot, she was this warrior, and she was really badass. That’s why I married her, you know? She was really tough.

And then the second I married her she just went into my house, stayed there, and made food. And she just kept saying, “Hi, oh hello, love.” And I’m like, “Eh, you are not…” — Bait and switch, you know?

And so I chopped her head off.

**John:** Yeah, that’s not good. Can you marry again after you have committed wife-icide?

**Craig:** I just don’t want to now. Once I see…I think it is uxoricide. Is it uxoricide? I believe U-X-O-R-icide.

**John:** Well, I have Google up, so I am going to type it in right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s see if I got that one right.

**John:** Latin, murder of one’s wife.

**Craig:** Beautiful. No reason for my wife to be concerned whatsoever that I know that word.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** But uxoricide, no. Once you commit uxoricide you really shouldn’t marry again. You have a problem.

**John:** Yeah, that’s true.

**Craig:** Your problem is that you solve your marital issues with beheadings. So…

**John:** [laughs] With violence, yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, also I just feel like the domestication… — I mean, did that happen with the guy you married? Did he just become, like, a weenie?

**John:** Yeah. He became kind of a weenie. And he was sort of a pity marriage anyway. It was the guy…

**Craig:** [laughs] Which one?

**John:** Angrenor Once-Honored.

**Craig:** Oh, that guy? Really? Alright. I mean, I know something about you, John.

**John:** He had sort of a wounded Daniel Craig quality that I found sort of endearing, but then he became kind of a sop. But I married him, and then like five minutes later I stopped playing the game completely.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well marriage just killed it for you. I married Aela the Huntress. I mean, she was so cool. And then she just stopped being a huntress. She became Aela the Boring.

**John:** So she wouldn’t go out on a quest with you?

**Craig:** Well, she would, but the point is I can get anybody to go on a quest with me. I wanted her to be cool. And I wanted it to be exciting. And I didn’t want her to lose her personality just because I married her, but she just sat there and she would say, “Oh, honey, I made you a home-cooked meal.” “What?! Your head is coming off!”

**John:** Now, could she carry more as a wife? Or does she still have the same sort of burden requirements?

**Craig:** No. Same crap. And then they open a store and they give you money. But if you have played the game long enough, you don’t need that $100. It is like, “Get out of here with this. I’m rich! Look at my house. What’s wrong with you?! Why did I marry you? I hate you!” [laughs]

**John:** You should be able to marry a dragon.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, that’s kind of cool. At least then, you know, the sex would be interesting. Eh, Angrenor, really? That guy?

**John:** Yeah. I’m not saying it was the best choice. But I just sort of made the decision, and I felt bad for him. And apparently, because I was looking up sort of who was marriageable, and apparently at a certain point in the game he dies. Like if you don’t marry him, he will just die.

**Craig:** Oh, well that’s a great reason to not marry him. You shouldn’t have married him then and just let him die. I don’t remember that guy specifically.

**John:** He is the guy who didn’t just take an arrow to the knee like all the other guards. He was actually deeply wounded in some battle.

**Craig:** Oh, I remember that guy. Yeah, enough with him. I can’t believe you married that guy. By the way, it’s interesting that you and I both portray a certain amount of racism because neither one of us married like a lizard person.

**John:** Or the cat people.

**Craig:** Or the cat people. Well the cat people basically are thieves. I don’t trust them. I don’t trust them. I’m racist against cat people. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah, totally racist against cat people. Lizard people I am okay with.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They are just basically drug addicts. [laughs]

**John:** So at this point we are falling into the “and things that screenwriters might be interested in.” But it’s good. And so you are not going to marry anyone in Arkham Asylum or Arkham City or whatever that is called.

**Craig:** You can’t. Batman doesn’t marry people. Batman is a tragic figure. Frankly, I don’t even know if Batman has a penis. I mean, Batman is so…

There is a little bit of a romance, like a hint of a romance between Batman and the daughter of Ra’s al Ghul. Which by the way, in the movie, it was Ra’s al Ghul. And apparently, I always feel like the videogame people are that many more clicks to the right on the nerdometer, so I think the right — they say it’s Ray-shal-ghoul.

**John:** Ra’s al Ghul.

**Craig:** Whatevs. Anyway, it is a great game. It is really cool. You should play it. Just do it.

**John:** I will never play it.

**Craig:** Oh, because you have to watch another episode of Glee?

**John:** [laughs] Exactly. But Glee is actually a thing I can watch with my family, for example.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You used to watch American Idol, though. Are you watching American Idol?

**Craig:** No. I finally… — Well, you know what? After Simon left, I gave it a shot. I just couldn’t get into what had happened to it. I mean, Randy was always the worst judge anyway.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The worst. Jennifer Lopez is fine. Steven Tyler is bizarre. But really what I couldn’t get into was the fact that what had been so awesome about that show — that it was the first show to tell the truth ever in the history of television. That was gone. It was back to being fake praise and nonsense.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that was a bummer.

**John:** But now that I am watching it with a six-year-old daughter I am happy to have no Simon on the screen. We don’t really even watch the judges part of it, but we do see the girls sing. And so you see like, “Oh my god, she really likes the Justin Bieber-looking guy.” Yeah. That happens early. It is hard-coded in the brain. It’s like the same way that you like puppies. A little kid with blond hair that looks like Justin Bieber. Just like him.

**Craig:** Justin Bieber really is the perfect… — I guess the idea is that girls at that age, anywhere from 6 to 12, what they are attracted to is boys that are girls.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And boys, I guess, aren’t really attracted to girls, or boys. They just want to shoot stuff. [laughs] That’s the way it goes in my family.

**John:** Yeah. But then once they start getting attracted to girls, they sort of leap up towards women. And not girls their own age.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know, because my son I have to say, he is in fifth grade. And every night we have the same discussion about this girl he likes. Every. Single. Night. And she is in his grade. And it’s adorable. It is just every night he says, “I just don’t know if she even knows I exist.” [laughs] Every night. And I just comfort him every night.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s cute.

**John:** Parenting advice from Craig Mazin and John August.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Craig, thank you very much for another great podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Talk to you soon.

**Craig:** You got it. Bye.