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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-brotherhood-of-screenwriters).

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

**Craig Mazin:** I’m Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes. This is episode 24, in fact. Scriptnotes is a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters. And Craig, I’m in just the best possible mood, and I’m sure you can guess why.

**Craig:** Because, uh… Is it Glee-based?

**John:** Weirdly it is Glee-related, but it is not specifically Glee-based. What happened last Sunday, or as people are listening to this, two Sundays ago?

**Craig:** The Superbowl.

**John:** Well, yes, there was a sports game played, apparently. But, a very important thing happened on Sunday which I don’t think is getting enough cultural attention.

**Craig:** [laughs] A sports game?!?

**John:** Well, I don’t know. The judges picked who the best sports team was.

**Craig:** Judges. [laughs]

**John:** More importantly —

**Craig:** Yeah?

**John:** — a cultural event happened that as a listener to the show, I assume you listen to the show in addition to just talking on the show —

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** — you would know is incredibly dear to my heart. What do I love more than anything?

**Craig:** Madonna?

**John:** No. Well, yeah, Madonna, fine. But whatever. Something even more important happened before, I think it was before Madonna in the show.

**Craig:** Was it one of the ads?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Um.

**John:** And even more than an ad. It was NBC’s promo for the whole network.

**Craig:** They did it. They actually did that thing.

**John:** They did that thing! That thing that I love more than anything on earth is a whole network promo where you see stars from various shows coming together.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** In this case singing a song together. So, it was pretty much just like a thousand Christmases for me.

**Craig:** And, the lens through which we both experience the Superbowl is so vastly different. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Now did you actually see it, or you just heard about it?

**Craig:** No, no. I saw it, but I didn’t care. I think I went to the bathroom. [laughs] But what was the song that they sang? What was their slogan?

**John:** Brotherhood of Man, which is from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** And I thought maybe we would spend just a minute or two replaying it so I can kind of talk you through it. I can give sort of the viewer’s commentary on it.

**Craig:** Please.

**John:** So, some scene setting. We start off in 30 Rock. We are in Jack Donaghy’s office. And we have Liz Lemon and the whole cast there. And they are gathered together to watch the Superbowl. And there is random chit chat. The office is somewhat over lit, because you can tell it is not the real crew doing all of this. And some people look a little bit strange; they are not acting quite right. She is holding a big plate of nachos.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And then, Jack Donaghy starts singing. And it is not quite clear why he is singing. The only thing that is also weird you notice is this is early in the season for taping 30 Rock because Jack’s hair this season, for some reason, is much redder than it should be.

It’s like the hair dye just got a little bit off, and they decided, “Oh, to get rid of the gray, maybe we are going to go a little bit more — ” I don’t know, what’s that color? It’s like a dragon red.

**Craig:** [laughs] This is so funny to me. Keep going. This is great.

**John:** So now we move from 30 Rock. First we go to The Office, and so the three of them, the three sort of leads who are left on the show, sing their little bit. And it is a continuous one-shot. Then Parks and Rec. And then, come on, the Parks and Rec folks are great.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a good show. I like that show.

**John:** And Community. Community still exists as a show on NBC.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Which is encouraging. Ken Jeong doing a little hip swivel.

**Craig:** That’s my boy.

**John:** It’s fantastic.

**Craig:** My boy, Ken.

**John:** So now we are back at 30 Rock, and Liz is carrying her nachos. She and Jack are talking. They are doing their little mentors thing. And they are going into the main set where they do the show, the show that is completely implausible within the show —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The thing called TGS. And Jane Krakowski gets to sing. Who, Jane Krakowski, by the way, is great. “Jane Krakowski from Go,” is what I always say, because she started off, you know —

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** — the first thing people know her from.

**Craig:** You should say, “Go’s Jane Krakowski.”

**John:** Go’s Jane Krakowski. Because the only other thing people would know about her before that would be Vacation. Because, you know, she is the girl in Vacation where, “Daddy says I’m the best kisser.” That’s her.

**Craig:** No way.

**John:** That is Jane Krakowski.

**Craig:** Really? I did not know that.

**John:** Okay. So now we have to cut away from here to Smash, which is of course a very natural cut here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Natural.

**John:** So Katherine McPhee and Megan Hilty are singing their belting their songs. And then the curtains open up, and then, like, the rest of the cast comes out really quickly and says, like, three lines. And you can’t even see it, it is such a wide shot. So if you are Debra Messing, you are probably not so happy.

But, then you go to Law & Order: SVU, and everyone from Law & Order: SVU is singing, except for the one guy, the hot guy who was in Oz, who was always naked on Oz. For some reason he is not here that day.

It’s a quick cutaway to Whitney and some other show that I don’t care about.

**Craig:** I have lost control, by the way. I just want people to know I am absolutely out of control right now.

**John:** Donald Trump shows up. And now the NBC news team is here.

**Craig:** Did they get naked?

**John:** They did not get naked. But now we are at the Saturday Night Live people who are all good singers. And so they are naturals for this. And it is weird how much Saturday Night Live has sort of taken over the comedy universe of NBC; so many of the people on all those shows are from SNL.

**Craig:** Yeah. They have cross-pollinated through the Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock.

**John:** And Alec Baldwin nearly falls over when he picks up the Rockette…

**Craig:** And was that it?

**John:** That was it. There is a little Jimmy Fallon tap dance number. And Jimmy is lovely, but the song is over. He is just sort of trying to mooch a little bit of energy.

**Craig:** So that, for you basically, they wrapped football pointlessly around that thing.

**John:** Yeah. It was basically an NBC promo/John August delivery vehicle.

**Craig:** Right. In a weird way the football was the promo for the show, which was the promo.

**John:** Exactly. It is like this was the hot dog, and they shoved the little medicine that the dog had to take inside the hot dog, and I ate it all up. So I ended up watching more football than I would usually watch.

**Craig:** The only thing that could have possibly made this gayer was the hot dog analogy. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] But, anyway, so I needed to share my satisfaction and my joy, because so often it is easy to talk about the bad things in life, and sort of like how the entertainment industry does things wrong. And so when they do something so amazingly right, I think we have to celebrate it.

**Craig:** You know what, listen man: passion. The key is to find something you love and be passionate about it. I’m from New Jersey. I love the Giants. It was a pretty good day for me.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** You love those things. It was a good day for you. [laughs] I think just all around it was a great Sunday.

**John:** It was a great Sunday.

**Craig:** And our friend, Grant Nieporte… I never know if it is Knee-Port-Eh or Knee-Port.

**John:** It is so weird. Those people who you only see their names, especially because of online stuff. You only see their names online, and you have no idea how to pronounce them.

**Craig:** I think it might be Knee-Port-Eh, because I think it is Portuguese or something. But anyway, he is a screenwriter, and he and a bunch of other guys were the people behind the Doritos Slingshot Baby ad. And they collectively won $1 million.

**John:** Well that’s great!

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Hurrah!

**Craig:** How about that. I mean, he was like, “Well, but then, you know, after we all divided up I get $28,000, and then I have to pay taxes on it.” So it sounded much better than it was. But it still, I mean, it’s pretty good.

**John:** It’s still great.

**Craig:** Yeah. They win. That is the important thing. They win.

**John:** Winning is nice.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So other small things happened this week. We announced a new screenplay format called Fountain.

**Craig:** Fountain. This, actually, is an exciting thing. Tell them what it is.

**John:** So, Fountain is basically a screenplay markup language that is just plain text. So every fountain file is just a text file. You can open it in any text editor. You can write it in any text editor. What is different about Fountain versus just a normal plain text file is just how you lay it on the screen. So, it is basically what you think: character names are in uppercase; a line following a character’s name is dialogue; parentheticals are in parentheses; transitions end in “TO:”

It is very simple. It is very much how you would write on paper, if you were writing out on paper. Out of the box you can use any text editor. And the main screenwriting apps like Final Draft or Movie Magic Screenwriter, they will take these files really happily, and do a pretty good job interpreting them. New stuff is coming down the pike that will actually do great jobs natively with Fountain files, and will be able to interpret things like bolding, and centering, and sectioning.

And from Beth Schacter, a friend of ours, we have built in a feature called Boneyard, which is if you have a scene that you just want to omit, but you just want to leave it in place and omit it, you can just bracket it out, and it will just not be in your file anymore. It won’t show up or print.

**Craig:** That’s great. You know what I like about this? Eventually, they are going to… What I would love to be able to do on a set is have a script on my iPad. And then, if I really quickly wanted to make a change, take a pen, which I know Steve Jobs hates stylists in editing, but take a pen, cross it out, hit a button to insert, and then write very quickly a couple of new lines of dialogue. Hit a button it reincorporates it in. And then it prints them out.

And it seems like the first thing —

**John:** We are very close to that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because you can’t really do that until… Because handwriting recognition goes to text, not to Final Draft gobbledygook markup. So, it seems like this is a very good step forward.

**John:** Yeah. And, weirdly, handwriting recognition is relatively simple, and kind of a solved problem. Speech recognition is getting much better now, too. So, it may just be as simple to tap where you want to tap, and just tell Siri what you want to put in there. I find myself using Siri a lot for sending myself reminders, or a text message.

**Craig:** Yeah. Me too.

**John:** There’s good news down the road.

**Craig:** That is a good point, that you would be able to speak it in there. I like it. Good job. Nice work from the skunkworks.

**John:** Skunkworks, yeah. So, there is nothing to buy with Fountain. And that is one of the sort of hard things to communicate is people are used to, like there is a product announcement, “So where do I buy it, where do I get it?” And the point we try to communicate is that you already have it. It’s a way of using any text editor you have on your iPad, on your computer, on your phone you can do it in mail if you want to.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s a way of laying that out and just getting those files into screenplay format down the road.

**Craig:** And where can I buy this?

**John:** Yeah. Exactly. Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** No problem. I’m interested in this product. How can I buy it, and how much does it cost?

**John:** Yeah. So I spent yesterday doing screen caps to sort of talk through different workflows on how to do things. And screen caps seem like a really easy thing to do, because it is just talking. It’s a lot like what we are doing right here. But you are trying to talk while you are also moving stuff around on the screen, and it gets to be really confusing, and really cognitively draining.

So, I sort of burned out yesterday. And Ryan and Stuart were downstairs doing their work, while I was up here trying to record this. And so they would hear me say, like, the same half of a sentence about twenty times. And I’m sure they wanted to kill themselves.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, they probably already showed up at work wanting to kill themselves, but then that pushed them over the edge.

**John:** There is a reason we all wear headsets in this office, so we don’t have to hear each other.

**Craig:** I love it. You guys are like the Borg Collective over there.

**John:** Yeah. We are. We are very Borg.

**Craig:** By the way, I met Rawson Thurber yesterday.

**John:** Oh, Rawson’s awesome.

**Craig:** Great guy. I met him at a roundtable, and he was terrific.

**John:** Context for people who don’t know every detail about my life: Rawson Thurber was one of my very first assistants. And he was my assistant on a terrible TV show called D.C., and stuck with me after I got fired off that show. And during the time that he worked for me, he directed the Terry Tate Office Linebacker commercial, and wrote what became Dodgeball.

**Craig:** Very funny guy. Smart guy. But, I’m starting to put a little something together, John August. So, you also have one of your other former assistants is Chad Creasey.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I met Chad Creasey. And I don’t want to malign screenwriters, but we are not the handsomest looking bunch in the world. You know what I mean? You get a WGA gathering together, you look around, it’s like, “Boy, slim pickings!” Okay? I mean, Chad Creasey though, boy, this is a good-looking guy. And, I meet Rawson Thurber yesterday; I go, “Uh-huh. This is another pretty good-looking guy.”

I just want you to know I am on to you.

**John:** Well, Dana Fox is an attractive woman.

**Craig:** That was a mistake. It is accidentally attractive. You didn’t know. You don’t know. I know what is going on. I’m just saying, “I know what is going on.” And now everybody knows what is going on.

**John:** Well, clearly working for me does make people more attractive.

**Craig:** That was my point. That was my point.

**John:** Yeah. Hey, let’s do some questions. Let’s open the mailbag.

**Craig:** Awesome. Let’s do it.

**John:** All right. Sam in Brooklyn writes, “Hi there. I was wondering the proper format for a musical number in a teleplay. Here is the thing I plan on writing in the musical number.” That is actually not worthy of being spoken aloud. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Basically he is asking what is the proper format for —

**Craig:** Please keep that in there. That was great.

**John:** — What is the proper format for a musical number in a teleplay? And it is a completely valid question.

When you are doing a real Broadway show, there is a special format where the lyrics go off on the left hand margin, they are uppercase.

In movies and teleplays, it is not such a clear cut format, because there is not a way that we always do it. I have written a lot of songs in movies, and what I usually end up doing is putting the… It is like a dialogue block, but it is in italics. I will often move it from Courier to Verdana, or some sort of Sans-Serif face that can squeeze a little bit more onto a line. I will cheat the margins a little bit if I have to, to keep a line together.

And then rather than putting slashes in there, I will break it line by line. And so you sort of do the soft returns so that you can keep individual lines in dialogue in the songs.

**Craig:** That makes sense. I don’t think I have ever written a full musical number in the sense of a full song with verse/chorus/verse sort of thing. I have had, obviously, characters sing. And for that, usually, I just do it in dialogue, and I just italicize and do like “shift return” so that the lyrics get each line. But I guess your way makes sense. It is an interesting one.

**John:** If you want to look at sort of how I did it for Big Fish, I think that is the only thing I have in the library that shows it. I have a song Twice the Love in there, which is the song that the Siamese twins sing. And you can see the whole lyrics for that. And that is how we did it.

**Craig:** I believe that question has been answered.

**John:** Done. Checked.

**Craig:** Next.

**John:** I will go into OmniFocus, and I will put a little tick mark right by there.

Luke from Poland, the actual Poland, writes, “I have been seeing the term ‘overall deal’ on a lot of different sites. And I was wondering how they work for writers. For example, I read that a deal like that for some high level TV writer is worth seven figures for two years. Does that mean a writer-producer gets a salary regardless of what he does? Or is that figure contingent on how much work is actually done by the writer?”

**Craig:** Eh, both really. I mean it is a guarantee. In other words, they are saying, “We are going to make a deal with you. We are going to pay you, let’s say, $2 million over the course of two years. And in exchange for that $2 million, you owe us a pilot. You owe us a script.” And they spell out what you owe them.

If you write beyond that, I suppose it would be negotiated, an additional amount would be negotiated. But essentially they are saying this is the baseline of what we are going to pay you for sure.

**John:** Exactly. So, they give you an overall deal because they want to keep you working for that studio/network. They want your next thing. They don’t want you slipping away to another network for six years on another hit show; much more common in TV land than in feature land. There are very few feature writers now who have overall deals in place.

Seth Grahame-Smith and his writing partner just made some sort of deal at Warner Brothers for that. Joss Whedon for awhile had a deal like that at Fox.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But most of those cases are also folded into TV deals. So it is hard to pull them apart, one to the other. And then there are also sort of mega-producer people, like J.J .Abrams who is producing movies, directing movies, writing some movies, too. He has a deal at Fox, but that is really —

**Craig:** That’s a producing deal, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. That is a different class of thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I had an overall feature deal at Miramax a number of years ago. And it was structured in such that there was a guaranteed amount of money over the course of — I think it was two years. And for that, the way we worked it out was they are guaranteeing me this, whether I write a word for them or not. Then we sort of preset with each kind of writing what it would be worth. So here is what a rewrite would be worth; here is what a first draft is worth; here is what a polish is worth.

And then as I did those things, they would apply that against the amount that they were guaranteeing me. And so if I went over, then I would get more. If they asked for less, I would still get the minimum guarantee.

**John:** Was that a good deal for both of your sides? Because in some ways it kind of rewards you for not working, doesn’t it? Because they are drawing down off of things they are going to pay you anyway.

**Craig:** It was probably… It was a fair deal, I think, given that it was understood that they were going to be… It was an interesting time, with an interesting company.

I mean, the truth is it was a better deal for me because what I was giving them in addition to the writing was a certain amount of comfort. Basically, “We like you, and we don’t want you to go anywhere else. And we want you to be here when we need you. So we are going to pay a premium to make sure you are not busy when we need you.”

So, maybe I do 70% of the amount that I would normally have to do to even make that amount of money, but when they want me to write I was available to write.

**John:** A lot of people assumed I had an overall deal at Sony because I was just working for them for such a long time. But mostly what happened is they bought the rights to Big Fish for me, and said, “Oh, great, you can adapt this book. But, hey, would you do this little bit of work on this script first? And then this script, and then this script.” And basically just kept putting things in front of Big Fish.

And so Big Fish was always something I owed them. I always had to do Big Fish, but there was always something that they would slip in front of it. And so Big Fish just kept getting pushed back further and further. It wasn’t a bad thing for me. I was able to sort of build up my quote, job after job after job at Sony, and get good stuff done. And I was delighted to work for them. But it wasn’t like an overall deal; I was free to go other places.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wouldn’t do it again. I think at the time that I did it, it made sense for me. But, frankly, I would much rather be available now to work for a good director, find a great piece of material, find a great actor. I am just more interested now in following the material as opposed to a home.

But listen, this is a difficult business, and it is a scary business. And when you are raising a family, you know, security has real value. And at the time it made sense.

**John:** There is also a value to working with people you like to work with. And if there is a studio or network that you get along with especially well, maybe there is a good reason to keep going back to that same place.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is a, um, and I think everybody kind of has maybe this never goes away but for a while in your career I think there is a gnawing hunger for appreciation. And when you find people that really get you, and like what you do, it is hard to then leave that and go work for people, frankly, who may not like what you do at all when you have done it.

And, that is something that you have to actually concentrate on weaning yourself off of, I think. Better to not chase that stuff, and chase just the material itself.

**John:** One last thought I had about the TV overall deals. Josh Friedman, I think, made an overall deal with Fox. And when he didn’t have a show running on Fox, they would ask him to go in as a consulting producer on an existing show. So, I think, this last year he worked as a consulting producer on Finder.

And that is kind of good for everybody because you have an experienced person who can go in there and help, and help write shows, and help break stories. So if they are not busy doing their own show, they can help out on an existing show. So that is another reason why TV, in particular wants to hold onto those experienced people.

**Craig:** Yeah. In TV it makes the most sense, for sure.

**John:** Next question. Mischa from Toronto. “Last year I wrote a screenplay called,” this is a long one, “The 8 Ways I Could Have Kissed the Tall Lanky Jew: Based on the Pathetically True Events, as well as Memories Too Exquisite for Existence, as told by a Highly Sensitive Person.”

That’s a long title.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** “Last week, I was doing some research, just briefly Googling the phrase Tall Lanky Jew, just to see if there was some other movie or book that had a variation of my title.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** “There were no books or movies, but I came across a Jewish man’s blog entitled Tall Lanky Jew. In the event that I sold my screenplay to a studio, and had it in wide release in theaters, would I be legally obligated to pay this individual money? Does he already own the copyrights to the term Tall Lanky Jew?”

**Craig:** No. No. You can’t copyright a title. Titles are, actually movie titles exist outside of the realm of copyright, but they are managed by the MPAA, so, all of the member studios of the MPAA, the Motion Picture Association of America. And that covers, essentially, every big studio you know. They have to register the titles with the MPAA which is their trade organization. And then the MPAA acts as a referee to make sure that basically Sony can’t come out with a movie called The Hangover to try and trade confuse and market confuse.

But, that aside, no. You don’t have anything to worry about, other than your absurd title. [laughs]

**John:** So, let’s start with her title. Her title is — I don’t know how many words that is.

**Craig:** It’s a lot.

**John:** 40 word title. Sometimes on spec scripts that does happen, where you write just a crazy long title because it is just memorable for being so long. The movie that became American Pie had some famously long title, which I will look up on Google. But, Words, Words, Words, Words, Words that can be Shot for Under $10 million and Make $100 billion. It had like a very provocative title.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was like American Sex Comedy That Can Be Shot For Less Than —

Yeah, I mean, and that is a trend lately. I have noticed people are doing these kind of run-on titles, frankly just to separate themselves from the pack. And it does add a certain weird kind of honesty to the script. In the same way that in marketing departments the no-frills titles become incredibly attractive to them, like Horrible Bosses. What’s it about? It is about horrible bosses. They are not going for anything other than no-frills. But it is a trend.

And the trend will not save your bad script. Nor will bucking the trend hurt your great script.

**John:** I would agree. Tall Lanky Jew could be trademarked. Someone could probably trademark that. And then there would be an issue. Trademark is a whole separate thing, and if you are not seeing the TM there, no one has trademarked it.

**Craig:** Yeah. The trademark would be if they were selling products under the trademark of Tall Lanky Jew, and that your movie could somehow create marketplace confusion where people might think that they were somehow involved, but that is not the case. It is a blog. You don’t have anything to worry about.

**John:** Speaking to the MPAA title things, with The Nines we had to go through a fight for our title, The Nines, because there were competing projects. There was that animated movie 9. There was the Rob Marshall-directed musical Nine. And there was something else that had… There was a movie called Nine Lives that came out at the same time.

So, fortunately we were one of the first people to register, and so we were able to sort of win the first couple of rounds. And then we had to go through and actually give permission for the other movies to use that title.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it is this whole kind of Kabuki, because you are not really going to be a jerk about it, and no one is going to get these things confused. But we had to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is a producer who I will not mention who told me that he basically registers titles. Like he comes up with ideas for titles, and then just registers them. And, in fact, has made money essentially extorting studios who do development material under that title. Draw your own conclusions.

**John:** Our last question for the day is from Christopher. “I’m a novelist working on a text which is set immediately preceding the Russian Revolution, and am having trouble composing the dialogue. The issues are great in number. I am having trouble working through the fact that some characters are English, and others are Russian, and sometimes they speak either language. I am finding it hard to make Russian sound more Russian than the English dialogue. Basically, how do I do this?”

That can be a real problem. If you are having characters… Like what language characters are speaking in movies when they really should be speaking a different language.

**Craig:** But he is writing a novel, he said.

**John:** He said a novel, but let’s just, whatever. We are mostly about screenwriting, so let’s talk about screenwriting.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I mean, you have had that situation with characters speaking other languages.

**Craig:** Yeah, sure. I mean, basically if they are speaking other languages, your choice is —

Well, obviously, are they speaking another language, or are they speaking accented English?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** If you go with them speaking the other language, you just have to make a point in the action. “They speak in Russian and we see subtitles.” And then you just write the dialogue in English.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I have to say for a novel, I have no idea what his problem is. You just write.

**John:** Just write.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just write.

**John:** He is having trouble with voice, though. Let’s talk about him as a novelist, first. Writing dialogue in novels kind of blows anyway. It is, like the times I have had to do prose fiction, I always find dialogue especially challenging because just the weird deal we make with the reader. You are going to ignore all the “he says” and “she says,” but they are going to be there. And we have the weird thing with the double quotes, and where the comma goes it is just really strange how we do it in English.

Spanish and other languages are much more natural. They use dashes or just different ways to sort of mark off what people are saying.

I think what he is having trouble is in places where they are supposed to be speaking Russian, it is written in English, and it just feels like English, so you don’t have a sense that anything is different or special.

**Craig:** Yeah. But I think that he is concerned based on a false premise. I’m guessing that what his issue is is that he is thinking of these Russians the way that Russians speak when they are speaking English, which is a weird stilted thing. But when they speak Russian, they are as fluid as English people speaking English.

A good example is City of Thieves, which is a novel by our friend, David Benioff, who is also an excellent screenwriter and television writer. And that takes place entirely in St. Petersburg, with a brief prologue in America. And everybody is Russian, and everybody speaks English, of course, because he is an English author.

**John:** He is not trying to create a false accent in English.

**Craig:** No, of course not. That’s the point. Really, if you understood Russian fluently, your understanding of those words would be no different than English. I don’t see what the problem is. I deny this question.

**John:** Let’s try to apply this question though a bit to screenwriting. And you mentioned before that in a screenplay, if you have a character who is going to be speaking in subtitles, on the page you tend to, either the first time, or a couple times if it is going to be confusing, you do a parenthetical, say like “Subtitled” or “English Subtitled” or “Russian Subtitled.”

Sometimes it makes sense to put the words in italics just so people get a sense that it is different, so you can understand, “Okay, the other characters who are only speaking English won’t be able to understand what is happening here.” But there are times where you need to have — think of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The remake of it was shot entirely in English, but they did use some accent and some word choices just to give you a feel that this wasn’t happening in English. And that is a subtle thing. And that’s a real thing. You can’t deny me that.

**Craig:** No. I can’t. I wouldn’t. But I also would caution against building that into the script itself. To me, that is so much a function of how you cast the movie, and how you direct the movie. And if you start to build that into the screenwriting itself, I think you start running into a little bit of trouble.

I mean, here and there you can pepper it in a little bit. Look, you have to acknowledge your characters. The script I am writing right now, there are a couple of characters who are Israelis, and one of them speaks English, and one of them doesn’t. So, the one who speaks English converses in sort of a broken English with people, and then translates for her friend, and then they have little arguments. And then she turns back and delivers the verdict.

But I don’t really write out the Israeli stuff. Occasionally I will if there is a little punctuation, or something like that. And similarly, when she is talking to people, I try and not get too pidgin English, because my feeling is ultimately what is most important is the flavor of what we are trying to get across here. Somebody is going to have to actually deliver that. So much of that comes in the performance.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, look, the more you pen the actor in with the specificity of the language, the more you are going to get just your version of what that would be, as opposed to maybe what their version is, particularly when you are employing actors who, in fact, are not American.

I would much rather have a Swedish actor tell me how a Swedish person would say it.

**John:** That’s a good point. When we were doing one of our readings of Big Fish, I had to have on the first day the general discussion to the whole group saying, “This is a story that takes place in the American South. It takes place specifically in Montgomery, Alabama, but we cannot let specificity get in the way of understandability.”

And, so, I wanted to caution everybody against sort of the Accent Arms race, where one actor chooses to do a really crazy specific accent, and everyone else feels like they have to reach that level. And then day by day it would get worse and worse. You want this sprinkling of the American South.

And I was specific enough to say, like, “We are still rhotic; like the letter R still exists. Characters go off to War, they don’t go off to a Wah.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** “The letter G has taken a holiday. So we are always dancin’ and singin'”. But I didn’t want any more than that. And that is the kind of thing that on the page I try to give a sense of what the language feels like, but I am not going to take off every G off of every ING. It’s crazy.

**Craig:** Exactly. If how the actors deliver the lines is part and parcel with what your dramatic intention is as you write the screenplay, in a global way, not an individual line, but globally I don’t want this to sound like Gone with the Wind. It is okay to do a little prologue, a little advisory. There is no problem with that. But you just don’t want to get caught in, like, yeah —

It gets really annoying to read every single IN’ on every single gerund. It gets annoying. And also the script just seems stupid at that point. Like, come on, you know. Get out of here!

**John:** I once made a horrible mistake. [laughs] I was talking to a friend of mine, who is actually my agent, David Kramer, and I said something about… It may have been in relation to Big Fish, like when were down shooting. And I said something about like how I always tend to underestimate people with a southern accent, just because I have been conditioned by popular culture that people from the south aren’t as smart.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And he was like, “You know I had a southern accent when I got here?”

**Craig:** Yeah. He is from Florida.

**John:** Yeah. He is from like the south part of Florida. He is from the part that actually has an accent.

**Craig:** I thought he was from Northern Florida?

**John:** That’s what I am saying. So he is —

**Craig:** Oh, I see. I thought you meant the south part of the state. Yes. He is from Northern Florida which is, in fact, deep south. That’s true.

**John:** And so it is interesting. And, so then of course the minute he told me that, I’m going back through all of the previous conversations where I mocked something about a southern accent.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, you know, he can take a punch.

**John:** He can take a punch.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, what a great podcast.

**Craig:** Yes. This was a fun one. It was a great one. I like all of these questions that people ask; it makes our lives super easy.

**John:** It does. Good fodder for discussion.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So thank you. Please keep sending those in. My standard disclaimers: if you have a question for us to answer, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. For anything that we talked about here, including NBC’s Brotherhood of Man, we will provide links to that on the show notes. And the show notes are always on johnaugust.com.

If you are subscribing on iTunes, usually those links come through clickable, and great, and lovely. Also, if you are a person who sometimes enjoys podcasts, but sometimes enjoys reading with your eyes, we do have transcripts of all of our previous episodes online at JohnAugust.com, so you can check back; usually a couple days after the podcast is posted we will have the full transcript for you.

**Craig:** Remarkably efficient.

**John:** We try.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Thanks, Craig. Have a good week.

**Craig:** Thanks. You, too, John. Bye-bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-happy-funtime-smile-hour).

**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. This is episode number 23, and this episode will not be depressing.

**Craig:** No. This is going to be uplifting, exciting, enlightening, life affirming.

**John:** Because you know what? That last podcast, we talked about some serious issues; we did some good, but I think, we also did a little harm, if I take another listen to it. It is kind of suicide inducing. It was depressing. It was realistic in a way that is not necessarily always helpful.

It was like Lars von Trier snuck in to the last 20 minutes of the podcast, and just said, “Do it. I will take over from here. There’s no hope.”

**Craig:** Well, but as you point out, this is the… That is the podcast that gets us an Oscar. We don’t get —

**John:** Oh!

**Craig:** — we don’t get nominations for this podcast, or the goofy ones. That one, though, that may be the one.

**John:** Yeah. I wonder how soon there will be like genuine podcast awards? I’m sure there is some sort of podcast award happening right now, because there is an award for everything. But, I feel like podcasting is an emerging form, that cultural signifier. It is something that will eventually become better acclaimed. And once it becomes better acclaimed, how will they award it?

**Craig:** You think that there is going to be like Poddies and things like that?

**John:** Yeah. Although, what are the equivalent radio awards? There must be radio awards; I’m trying to think about that.

**Craig:** There are, but nobody cares about them. There are radio awards, but they are — yeah, nobody cares.

**John:** Nobody cares.

My week is better than it was last week, for a couple of reasons. First off, I’m no longer on heavy allergy medication. That helps.

**Craig:** Oh, nice.

**John:** I have a brand new to-do organizer thing, which I love. So, what are you using to keep track of, like, the stuff you have to actually get done? What is your system?

**Craig:** You know, you were the first person to ever even reveal to me that there was this thing out there of to-do systems. And you turned me on to that whole FTL, FTC, TBD —

**John:** GTD, yeah.

**Craig:** — GTD, yeah. It is like GTL from Jersey Shore. And I bought the book because, you know, I like to try things.

You are one of those guys, when you say, “You should try something,” I always think, “Yeah, it is worth a shot.” Like I tried the crazy Dana Fox upright typewriter for, like, two minutes. I’m like, “What is this? I can’t do this.” It’s in my garage. Oh, my kids play with it.

And that thing, the to-do thing, I tried. But the truth is: I actually don’t need a system. I just feel like I get stuff done. I don’t know, am I weird?

**John:** No. You are not weird. I mean, stuff will get done; it is a matter of sort of how stressful your life is while that stuff is getting done. That is what I found to be most useful about these systems. And I have gone back and forth between some, and have been incredibly religious and dogmatic about it sometimes; I have been much looser about it sometimes.

Where the systems tend to be best is when you have a bunch of little things you need to get done, and they just keep stacking up every day. You have piles of tasks, and it is a great way of plowing through the piles of tasks. So, for a lot of the stuff related to apps, like the stuff we are developing, and two new products we are pushing out the door in the next two weeks, there is a lot of stuff like that that I have to keep on top of that is really time sensitive. It’s great for that.

And just for getting stuff out of your head and into your systems so that you are not thinking about it and stressing out about it. Because most of what stresses you out isn’t really the work that you have to do, it is kind of remembering the work that you have to do. And so you end up spending a lot of brain cycles thinking about the stuff that you can’t forget about.

And if you just had it down on paper, or had it in some other system, you wouldn’t stress out about it so much. It’s good for that.

**Craig:** It’s weird. Of all the problems I have, and I have got a ton of them, that has just never been a problem for me. I remember the things I have to do.

And, by the way, I remember them down to tiny, little details. I have like a weird Rainman-y ability to know all of the things that need to be done. And sometimes, if it is a really tiny, little thing that I know I am going to forget, I just write it on a little slip of paper. But most of the time I don’t really need a system. And I don’t forget to do things.

On the other hand, I was late for this podcast. So, there you go.

**John:** Yeah. This has not been one of your finer days in terms of getting stuff together for this. But, that happens to everybody.

**Craig:** Hey, you know what? I will tell you what, man: someone called, and I couldn’t get off the phone. It was one of those. It was one of those conversations where I could not get off the phone. I wanted to get off the phone. It wouldn’t have been cool if I had gotten off the phone. It is one of those deals. Like, I have a friend, who we both know, a mutual friend. And he works in the same… he has an office in the same building.

**John:** We both know him. He might be your friend, but actually my mortal enemy.

**Craig:** He is no one’s mortal enemy. [laughs]

**John:** He is just the nicest guy ever, right? Yeah.

**Craig:** He really is. When you hear the story you will say, “Oh, no, that was ridiculous. He is no one’s mortal enemy.”

He and I have offices in the same building. And about two years ago, he stopped into my office, he knocked on the door, and he wanted to chat. And the thing was, I had a cold, and I was on a deadline, and I was miserable. And I just said, “Oh, I’m so sorry man, I can’t talk to you right now. I can’t. I’m just in the worst mood, and I have got to get this done. I have a cold; I’m so sorry. I have a cold.”

I felt like, you know, when you say you have a cold it really excuses a lot, because you are sick. And he was like, “Oh, no problem. No problem.” And he walks out, and then at the end of the day he sends me an email to tell me that he had just stopped by to tell me that he had been diagnosed with cancer.

That was, I mean, I was… “I have a cold. Don’t talk to me right now. I have a cold!” “Oh really? I have cancer.” Ugh. So, that is why there are times when you just, you know what? You should have the conversation. Just have the conversation. Be late for the podcast; it is probably for the best.

**John:** So someone else had to call you to tell you that they have cancer.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Okay. Good.

**Craig:** No. No. It wasn’t anything like that at all. In fact, it was frivolous, and I should have just gotten off the phone, but I couldn’t. Sorry.

**John:** I hate being on the phone. I hate phone calls now. I have come to resent every time the phone rings, because it is almost never ringing for a good purpose. It is always somebody who is, like, just going to steal some of my time.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not, I mean, there are phone calls that are fun to do and the rest, but it is true that most of the things that actually happen in life that are good happen face to face. This phone stuff —

That is why I could never be an agent. They are on the phone all day. It never ends.

**John:** Yeah. It’s never good. So, we got on a tangent there. What I am so happy about with my new system, I switched over to OmniFocus, finally, because I used to use OmniFocus and there were some things I didn’t like about it, so I switched to Things. And then I didn’t like Things, so I kept going through various systems. I was on paper for a long time. I had a little Moleskine notebook.

OmniFocus has gotten really good, again, in the last year or whenever; since the last time I paid attention to it, it got really good. And one of the actual great things about it now is if you have an iPhone with Siri on it, you can say, “Siri, remember to call Craig Mazin.” And it will create that reminder, and it will go straight to OmniFocus, so it is just on your list.

So, like, while you are out walking the dog, that thought comes to you, you have a place to put it. And that is what I find, probably, most useful about any sort of system for getting things done is just to, like, when that stuff happens, to capture it, and get it out of your head so you can focus on other things.

**Craig:** I think maybe as you spoke about that, I started to realize why maybe the reason that I don’t do these things is because I find that I am a very impulsive person. When it comes to my mind to do something, I do it. Because, and I know that people behave in different ways; some people like to defer these things to the right time.

But, I’m that guy who is just like, “Oh, that’s right. I need to call somebody. I am calling them now.” And then I will leave a message. But I am an impulse doer. I’m an impulse purchaser/buyer. That’s my thing. So, maybe it is just a reflection of my personality.

**John:** I would say in general that is a good way to approach many things. You shouldn’t defer things if you can do it right now. And, so, a lot of times I will be in a meeting with somebody about a project, or about a movie, or a name will come up say, like, “I wonder if that person would be in our movie?” And I say, like, “Well, let me call them right now, and see if they will be in our movie.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s a very good overall system. But there are times where you can’t do that, or it is 11 o’clock at night, so you are not going to be able to do that. Or, it is really a bigger idea that is going to have many steps along the way. Well what do you do with that bigger idea?

And as writers, you need to capture that little bit of dialogue, that little bit of, “Oh, here is an idea for how to do something.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And I have found it incredibly beneficial just to write that down. I always have this notebook in the bathroom so that at three in the morning I can run in there, and write down that good bit of dialogue that I thought of. And it is the same kind of thing for the stuff that I need to get done.

**Craig:** Right. It is a horrifying feeling waking up, going to bed, and as you are falling asleep going, “Oh, that’s it. I got it. I know exactly how the scene should go.” And then you wake up in the morning, and you can’t remember. It is a horrifying feeling.

**John:** Never let yourself do that. Always go to the bathroom, write it down.

**Craig:** Go to the bathroom. Write it down.

**John:** Yeah. And the other good thing I will talk about, and then I will shut up about the system, is I have added a list for Brain Dead. So, basically, you have projects which are… Projects are anything that involve more than one step. So, this thing I am writing for Fox, that is a project. And I have all the little things in there related to that, that have to get done for it.

There is also Context. And contexts are the situations that you find yourself in. So, I have a context for work. I have a context for Ryan Nelson, who is a graphic designer who I work with, so next time that I see him I need to talk to him about these things.

I created a context called Brain Dead for when I have absolutely no energy or will to do anything. It is, like, 5 o’clock at night, I have really stupid little tasks that I can burn off there that are things that actually need to get done, but I shouldn’t try to do them when I have energy to do anything real. So, it is a good way to use that time where otherwise I would be spending it clicking through websites, or doing other stuff.

**Craig:** Right. Yes.

**John:** Or playing Skyrim.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m suspicious of this —

But this is, what, you are German. This is why Germany does so well at everything they do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Other than large-scale dual-front world wars.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Single-front wars they are awesome.

**John:** Yeah. Well, does anyone thrive on dual-front wars?

**Craig:** No one has managed to pull one off successfully except for the United States.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. We actually were able to. We did that. We pulled it off.

**John:** Yes. But, granted, my knowledge of military history is incredibly slight, but what I would say is that we came into that war so late, in a way, that we sort of got in on the tail end of that goodness, and on the European goodness, and then had to do the Asian — the Pacific War ourselves.

**Craig:** Yeah. We hit Pacific pretty hard right off the start. Definitely eased in to the European theater, no question. Yeah, because Pearl Harbor was 1941. We went right into it in the Pacific. And then D-Day was ’44, I believe. Yeah.

**John:** See, all these details are murky to me because they haven’t reached that period yet in Downton Abbey, so I don’t have the context for it.

**Craig:** [laughs] That is tragic. [laughs]

**John:** Now, one thing that you do have, you do find the time to do, which I cannot believe you find the time to do, is to respond in online forums to incredibly esoteric questions. And that is what I think we will spend the bulk of our time doing today.

**Craig:** What am I doing?! I’m so stupid.

**John:** What are you doing?

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** So, I will set us up on this, because there is a forum, an online forum, called Done Deal Pro.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And, tell me what it even really is? I don’t go on, so explain it.

**Craig:** The name alone makes me laugh, because Done Deal Pro implies that there are pros there, and that deals are done, and neither of those things occur. But it is not a bad place. I think if you are an aspiring screenwriter, it is donedealpro.com, and it has got all sorts of things you can pay for. I don’t pay for any of it, personally. Maybe there is use in some of those —

**John:** You are kind of opposed to paying for things like that.

**Craig:** I mean, I don’t know what they offer, so I can’t evaluate it, because I refuse to pay for it. [laughs] So I don’t know what it is.

But, there is a free forum. And the forum is, like every Internet forum, full of interesting people, and actually a few quite talented people, I think. I have read a couple of scripts that I was impressed with. And then cranks, and idiots. But by and large, I think the tendency there is for people who mean well, who are serious about being screenwriters, and who are trying quite hard, and quite seriously, to do it, and want to learn.

And Derek Haas sort of pulled me on this one.

**John:** Derek Haas, who does somehow find extra time in the day to do all of these things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** When he is not like, you know, recording songs on YouTube and other things.

**Craig:** Right. And writing novels. Yeah. He pulled me in, and I got frustrated pretty early on because I felt like what was going on was a lot of people – who had no experience as a professional screenwriter – giving other people – who had no experience as professional screenwriters – the kind of advice that requires experience as a professional screenwriter.

So, it was just the blind leading the blind. There is a ton of bad advice in there. And I got kind of frustrated, and said, “You guys have got to stop doing that.” But then, unfortunately, what that means is then I have to start doing it. And I’m just, not like I am the Oracle of Delphi, but we did have after —

Because a lot of the questions are the sort of inane questions that professional screenwriters roll their eyes at like, “How do you format? And should you use is it okay to use voice-over?” And all these really just grindy questions. It is like, “I don’t know, is the script good?” That’s all anybody cares about. Is the script good?

But, there was finally a very, very, very interesting thread, I thought, and it is going on right now about the central dramatic argument.

**John:** And when you say it is going on right now, literally, there are new posts from today and yesterday. It is up to 43 web pages, so that is like 430 entries probably —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A long thread. And you are a good 30 or 40 of these entries.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m an idiot. [laughs]

**John:** This thread, and I haven’t read all of it, because I couldn’t possibly read all of this.

**Craig:** Put it on your Brain Dead list. [laughs]

**John:** We will link it in the show notes.

**Craig:** No. I think you should do it at 5 o’clock, when you are really tired. [laughs]

**John:** So there will be a link to this in the show notes. But it is the central question here. Someone asks, “What is the difference between theme and central dramatic argument?” And your response is?

**Craig:** Well, central dramatic argument is a phrase that I basically made up, although then one guy found like an example of it in a book from 1950 as if to say, “No you didn’t make it up.” Uh, this is the Internet, you know. God bless the Internet.

But the reason I made it up was because the word “theme” can be distorted when we talk about writing screenplays and theme. Some people can use the word theme the way we should probably use the world motif like brotherhood, or justice, or bravery. Those are motifs. But they are not actually useful when you are writing a movie.

What is useful when you are writing a movie is what Aristotle, going all the way back to Poetics, called “unity.” And that is, at its core, an argument, and what I call a central dramatic argument: an assertion that is the answer to a question, that you could agree or disagree with, but ultimately is at the… It is when people say, “What is this movie really about?” It’s about that.

**John:** Would you say that any argument could be rephrased as a question?

**Craig:** Any argument could be rephrased as a question. And in fact, to me, what is interesting about thinking about this when we write screenplays is that that question is the one… That question should have two answers. And ideally your hero is answering the question one way on page one, and the opposite way at the end of the movie.

That is sort of, when we talk about character arcs, and people say, “Well, your character has to change.” Well, okay. But why? And how? Is it a random change? Is it just that he got braver? Stronger? Smarter? No, it is that he is answering a question differently, a fundamental question about life differently. And, to me, at least.

And sometimes when you think about movies, like for instance last week, I think, we talked about Ferris Bueller, or two weeks ago, we talked about Ferris Bueller, and how Cameron is actually the protagonist of that movie. Because he is the one that answers the question differently at the end of the movie. Ferris Bueller doesn’t have a problem, other than that he doesn’t have a car.

**John:** The same with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Charlie really has no fundamental problem.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** He’s poor.

**Craig:** That’s right. Like you, yes, it is an interesting… Actually, it is interesting that you bring that up, because I always felt like in the original Willy Wonka movie, they are making Willy Wonka the protagonist. And his question is a very simple one, it seems: Is there someone worthy?

And maybe he starts by thinking there is no one worthy. And then in the end he changes his mind and says, “There is somebody worthy.” And you had a totally different argument.

**John:** I would also say in the original Willy Wonka movie, which I hadn’t seen until after we got started with the new one, but in the original Willy Wonka movie, I felt them desperately trying to make Charlie have hero/protagonist problems.

So that is why they had him stealing stuff, and making many choices that would seem to give him an arc, but he didn’t really need to have an arc.

**Craig:** Well, and I actually don’t even think that he does. I mean, in the Gene Wilder movie, I think that Gene Wilder starts essentially with a presumption that there is nobody pure enough to take on what he has created. He is a skeptic. He is a cynic. And at the end of the movie it is that little thing he says when he puts his hand over the Gobstopper, you know, that Charlie is behind. He says something to the effect of, you know, I can’t remember what he says, but it is quite lovely, and that is his new answer to the question.

And in your Willy Wonka it was really about, it was about a son and a father, and —

**John:** Yes. It’s letting someone in. So to me, Willy Wonka is a strange, sad shut-in who doesn’t want to let anybody in, but ultimately has to let somebody in.

**Craig:** Right. And then I would say that the central dramatic argument of your movie is you need to let people in. [laughs] So that is how I would phrase that, because what is nice about that is in the beginning of the movie, just flip that on its head, and that is where your character starts. I need to not let people in.

And, literally, by just keeping the same statement, even the fact that “I need to not let people in,” as opposed to, “I shouldn’t let people in,” or, “I don’t want to let people in. I need to.” Now, all of a sudden, I start to realize why this guy behaves the way he does, why he lives the way he does, why he acts the way he does because he needs to keep people out.

And so, I like to think about movies in terms of those questions that go from what they are in the beginning to the opposite of that at the end. And I like to let that inform how these characters should grow and change. It also helps you design the obstacles they face. It helps you design the antagonists. It helps you design their allies. You know now what their sore spot is.

**John:** Yeah. So, but let’s talk about the 43 pages of it all. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So, I mean, I accept that as a thesis, and I would say that we can… I can push back to a certain degree because I feel like many of my movies, and many of my successful movies — the movies that I enjoy that I think work really well — don’t lend themselves to easy expression of the central dramatic argument, and weren’t conceived with that central dramatic argument.

So, it is a question of, you can say like, “Well, this ultimately is the central dramatic argument of Go,” but that really wasn’t in my conception as I was creating it. So, it is a question of was that the author’s intent, or is that something that you are applying ex post facto to the final product.

But looking at the 43 pages of this, looking at how it changes over the course of these pages, some of it is talking about just semantics, like “what is theme.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And growing up, going through junior high, theme was always stated as something versus something. So, it was man versus society, or man versus the wild, and it was easy for most stories to find that theme. It wasn’t especially helpful.

Deeper in this thread, as I was skipping through it, the question was like, “Well is greed a theme? Is greed a central dramatic argument?” And, the pushback was, “No, that is not enough of one because it is not saying anything about greed. It is just a thing.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** What is your philosophy on something like greed, or envy? You need more than that. Is that correct?

**Craig:** I would say so. I mean, I just don’t know how that helps me write anything. I mean, I understand that you are giving me an emotion, or a motivation. I like the fact that a character is motivated by greed, but in the end I want to know why.

To me, that is what it all comes down to. When we think about these characters, I mean you may say, “Look, I didn’t think of the ‘central dramatic argument’ in that stupid phrasey way,” because I know I sound like Robert McKee when I am saying stuff like that, and that is the last thing I want to do.

You may not have thought of that while you were writing that movie, but at the same token, I can’t imagine that you weren’t thinking about why what this guy’s problem was. What is his real issue? That has got to be there, I assume.

**John:** I would honestly say, “No.” I approach most of my movies from the perspective of, “What is this movie about, and what is this movie about to me?”

So, I look at, you know, Charlie’s Angels is one of the things that I got actually bumped up in this thread. I should say that I never actually go to DoneDealPro, I don’t really sort of, like, hang out there. But every couple of months I will just do a forum search for my name to see what people are talking about me.

**Craig:** Ha-ha.

**John:** A specialized form of Googling yourself.

**Craig:** And what are they saying?

**John:** Mostly decent things. Mostly.

**Craig:** Mostly. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. So in this forum, someone bumped up a post that is on my site, which I will also link to in the show notes, where I talk about writing from theme. And, so I bring up several of my projects, and discuss what I mean when I say writing from theme on those things.

And, so, Charlie’s Angels’ I said is, “Three princesses who have to save their father, the King.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Now that is not, by your definition, a central dramatic argument. It is not a theme. But that is what that movie is to me. Without that, I don’t have a movie at all. I can only think of that movie in terms of this is what it feels like to me.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And so once I know what the movie feels like to me, and who the people are within this kind of movie, then I can write it. But, I could have a really clear “this is what the thesis of the movie is” figured out, and still have no ability to write that movie unless I had that sort of core aspect, that core element.

**Craig:** I get it. I mean, look, I think you need all of that stuff. I don’t think you can write a movie if you don’t know what the basic attraction to it is, what the hook is, and the idea. The plot needs its own kind of archetype. You need to have a grasp of your story. And there are certain kinds of movies that are simpler in their execution. No. Let me take that back. Simpler in their construction.

You know, for instance, I wrote spoof movies. There is no central dramatic argument to those. They are a different kind of construction. If you are writing a fairy tale, or something that is larger than life, oftentimes you are right. It is really about —

If you are writing something with a little more drama to it; I mean, I don’t think of Charlie’s Angels as a drama.

**John:** Okay. Well, let’s take Big Fish. It’s hard to get more, sort of, like, that is a movie that feels like it should have a central dramatic argument.

**Craig:** And does it?

**John:** I would argue no. It is very hard to find a central dramatic argument that you are going to state that way? There are certainly key touchstone things that cycle back through, you know; what is the difference between factual truth and emotional truth? So that is a key idea. So the stories that Edward Bloom is telling, are they literally true, or are they emotionally true?

**Craig:** Well, but —

**John:** What is the difference between inspiration and sort of idealization?

**Craig:** Who is the protagonist of Big Fish?

**John:** It is a dual protagonist structure. Edward Bloom is the protagonist of the overall arc of his life, and so he is a boy who starts with humble beginnings and grows to some measure of success through these bigger-than-life stories.

The present day protagonist is his son, Will, who has to figure out who his father really is, and discover the secret that his father has been keeping.

**Craig:** And who is —

**John:** So, Will functions as the antagonist to —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** — the function as protagonist/antagonist through the present-day story.

**Craig:** And what is Will’s opinion of his father in the beginning of the movie?

**John:** His father is a liar.

**Craig:** And what is his opinion at the end?

**John:** His father… That he was asking the wrong questions. That his father was telling the emotional truth, even if it wasn’t the factual truth.

**Craig:** So, in my mind, even though you weren’t consciously doing this, there is a central dramatic argument there. And the central dramatic argument is that our parents are more complicated people than we understand them to be as children. And the concept that your father is a liar is a childlike understanding of your parent, because you view them as some sort of authority figure that has failed you because of their failings, their shortcomings.

And then you finally get to know them as a person, and you realize that they are far more complicated. And that is an argument. And that permeates the entire thing, not to mention necessitates what is so interesting about Big Fish, which is that this man is a liar.

See, to me, that is always there. And you may have not thought of it, but I think it is there.

**John:** I agree that is an element of it. But what I am saying is, that alone would not have driven, I don’t think drives the story. I don’t think it could drive the story.

**Craig:** Of course not.

**John:** And it doesn’t drive this particular story.

**Craig:** I acknowledge that. I am not suggesting that these are the things that even drive a story. What I am suggesting is that they are valuable, at least for me, and it is fine if they are not for you; but for me, they are valuable when I am trying to figure out, particularly if it is not an adaptation, if you are really just like, “Okay, I’ve got a blank page here. What is my story to tell?” What should come next?

And that is why I always, to me… — And by the way, the only reason that I started thinking about this is because it is so evident in Pixar films. And I feel like Pixar films are so gorgeously structured. And it is so clear that this is part and parcel with what they do.

And so I started thinking about it for those reasons.

**John:** Great. Let me throw out a similar but contrasting way of looking at, I don’t even really want to call it theme, but let me describe what it is, and then we will find the right name for it. This is something that actually occurred to me when I was doing D.C., which was this terrible TV show I did for the WB network that I actually had a nervous breakdown during.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** But that was the extreme version of, I think, something that happens on every project, with everything you are writing, is you are trying to figure out what fits in this movie, and what doesn’t fit in this movie. And you are basically making two boxes. And as stuff comes out you are like, “Is this the kind of thing that fits in this movie, or the kind of thing that doesn’t fit in this movie? Is it in the box, or is it outside the box?”

And the extreme version of it on D.C. was I had to write so much, and oversee so much, and I was flying on planes constantly. Basically, any song that played on the radio, within five seconds I had to decide, okay, does that fit into my world. Is that a song I need to hold onto? Yes? It goes in the box.

People would be talking and I would just be sort of recording the whole conversation and figuring out what out of that can I fit into the box. Does this fit into the box? So something that wouldn’t fit into my show, I would walk away because, like, this is not helping me write my show.

To some degree, I think that is what you are doing on every project is you are figuring out some heuristic for sorting what belongs in your movie, and what doesn’t belong in your movie. And, if theme or your central dramatic argument helps you figure out, like, is this the kind of moment that exists in my movie, or does it not exist in my movie?

And when you read bad screenplays, it is often because they are trying to wedge in things that just fundamentally don’t belong in those pages. Especially, I think, it is also a syndrome of first-time writing syndrome is that you don’t know how many things you are going to write in your life, so, like, “Well, I have always wanted to write this thing, so I am going to write this in this script, even if it doesn’t make sense in this script.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that is absolutely the case. Everybody who writes a screenplay has to have that weird horse sense about whether something fits, or doesn’t fit, the world that they have built.

But, what you are describing is almost like a passive filter in a way, like something emerges and I just decide, “Does that pass through or not?” And one of the benefits, I think, about to thinking about an argument underlying your story is that it helps you actively determine what ought to go in.

**John:** Yeah. So it is like writing a regular expression. I am going to get super nerdy here. Writing a regular expression which can sort of pattern match, and figure out, like okay, out of all of this possible stuff, what actually fits into our story?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I always think of these things as like when you look at a movie like Groundhog Day, for instance, which is appropriate because I believe we just had it.

**John:** And a new book about Groundhog Day just came out, which I linked to on the site.

**Craig:** Excellent. Groundhog Day is sort of the… To me it is the perfect execution of this kind of thing. And when we look at movies like this, whether there is a supernatural component or not. For instance, okay, Identity Theft, the movie that I have written for Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy, coming soon to a theater near you. Starts shooting soon. That’s my big plug.

That movie does not have any supernatural elements. A man’s identify is stolen. He has to get his life back together. In both of those situations, a man keeps waking up on the same day over-and-over. A man has his identity stolen, and needs to put his life back together. My argument as a writer is that as writers we are like, we are God, and we see Job, and we go, “Boink! We are going to make your life miserable. And the reason we are making your life miserable is, look, the side effect is we are going to entertain people. But the reason as God that we are making your life miserable in this specific way is because you need it. You need it. There is something wrong with you. You needed this to happen.”

That is why, and so then I say to people, “Okay, if you have a great concept for a movie, if you had a concept, ‘I imagine a man who tells these incredibly tall tales, and his son, who things he is a liar,’ I immediately think, ‘Wow, that is interesting.'” Now, who needs that to happen? Who needs that experience, to talk to that man, and have that guy be your dad? What is wrong with you? That is the way my mind works at least.

**John:** That is a reasonable way to approach it. And what you are describing with Identity Theft very much fits, I think, our expectation of going into these kind of comedies in particular is that the premise is straightforward, relatable, and everything that flows out of it should… Every important element of the movie should flow out of that premise.

So, the fact that his identity his stolen, or the idea of identity, or the idea of who it is to be you should be the central element of every sequence.

**Craig:** But, by the same token, it is a good thing for, I think it is a good thing if the internal problem is actually somewhat unrelated to the external problem. I think it is fun for an audience to match up a strange external adventure with a far more mundane internal problem. Finding Nemo is the best example. I mean, there is this enormous external problem: my son is lost in an ocean, and I have to find him. And internally there is this other, almost opposite, competing problem: I need to learn how to let my kid go.

And you can see how they both affect each other, but they are different, you know? And I love that.

**John:** And then Pixar made Cars 2.

**Craig:** Well, listen — [laughs]

**John:** You can’t hit it out of the park every time.

**Craig:** I mean, their batting average is still startling.

**John:** It’s pretty good.

**Craig:** And you have to forgive them for Cars 2, because I know some people talk about this, but maybe others don’t know. The most profitable Pixar movie by far is Cars.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s Cars. I know! Because, look: I am a huge Pixar fan. Is Cars near the top of my list? Nope. Is Cars 2 near the top of my list? No. But, they sold more crapola, more Cars stuff, and you know, if that funds another Nemo, I’m cool. I’m down.

**John:** Yeah. We’re cool. Yeah. We are not going to be negative this podcast.

**Craig:** No!

**John:** This is a positive podcast. How dare I bring up, you know, disappointing Pixar movies, when this is a podcast of celebration and joy, and not wrist slitting. And we are not going to talk about the sad realities of things. We are going to talk about the happy possibilities of things.

**Craig:** In fact, can you make the outro music the Ewok Celebration Song?

**John:** Well, it’s done.

**Craig:** Thank you! Jub Jub. Do-do-do-do. [singing]

**John:** You don’t have to even have to sing it yourself, Craig, because right now it is already playing underneath.

**Craig:** [singing along]

**John:** Craig.

**Craig:** John.

**John:** Thank you very much for a nice podcast.

**Craig:** Jub Jub who? [singing] See you later.