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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/follies-kindles-and-second-act-malaise).

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

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

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

**Craig:** A little tired. A little overworked right now.

**John:** I’m sorry to hear that.

**Craig:** Well, worse than underworked.

— I’m sorry, I said it’s worse than underworked. It’s better than underworked.

**John:** Yes. You wouldn’t want to be unemployed.

**Craig:** No, no. No.

**John:** No, no. At the worst of our jobs we’re not digging ditches.

**Craig:** Right, precisely.

**John:** We’re indoors most of the day. We have comfortable chairs. — If we’re smart we have comfortable chairs.

**Craig:** Yes. I’ve got the Aeron.

**John:** I’ve got the thing that’s not the Aeron. I’m going to stand up and look at the back of my chair so I can tell you what it is. Hold on one sec.

**Craig:** Exciting.

**John:** Exciting. I will post a link to whatever it is in the show notes. It’s the one that’s not the Aeron but it’s like the Aeron. It’s supposed to be they can rip it apart and recycle it better. It’s the next thing. Do you remember what that was called?

**Craig:** I think my wife has one of those. I’m one of the many beneficiaries of the dot com bust. Hundreds of start-ups bought thousands of Aeron chairs in a display of remarkable optimism and they all went belly up, so they sell these things on eBay or whatever.

**John:** A good chair is very crucial. I found that Aeron didn’t give me quite enough support and that’s why I was happy to switch to this one which has worked better for me.

**Craig:** I have a little guy here who pushes up on the bottom of the chair for me.

**John:** That’s crucial, having that small person in your employment who can provide lumbar support like that.

**Craig:** He’s actually not small. He’s six foot two but he takes pride in his work.

**John:** Pride in your work is really the crucial thing.

**Craig:** It’s key.

**John:** Hey, Craig, I have a question for you. As you’re working with a director — let’s just say you’re working with Todd Philips — and Todd Phillips says, “€œHey, you really need to see this one Orson Wells movie that you hadn’t seen before.”€ As you know, Orson Wells is a master of comedy and you really can’t make Hangover 3 without Orson Wells€ knowledge.

Todd said, “€œHey, you need to check out this Orson Wells movie.”€ What would you do?

**Craig:** I would watch the movie.

**John:** How would you watch the movie?

**Craig:** I guess I would try and iTunes it or Netflix it. Barring that, I guess I would go to a brick and mortar and rent it.

**John:** Isn’t it remarkable that you can find pretty much any Orson Wells movie that has probably ever been made? You can be able to find that movie.

**Craig:** Pretty much.

**John:** I bring this up because, as I’ve talked about before on the show, I’m working on €œBig Fish€ the Broadway Musical, so I’ve needed to see a ton of Broadway musicals so I’m up to speed and so I can talk somewhat intelligently about other Broadway musicals, and I’m finding it’s a very different situation.

If I want to see any movie that’s ever been made, I can go and find it either on Netflix or digitally or somehow I can find that movie. With a Broadway show, it’s much more difficult. You can find a cast album for a lot of things. You can sometimes find a recording. Lincoln Center has recordings of some Broadway shows that were staged in the last 10 years or before that.

Sometimes there’s a movie version of it so sometimes you can see — like — the movie version of West Side Story,€ which is great, but a lot of shows you can’t actually see because they’re not staged that often.

**Craig:** So you have to actually go and see shows?

**John:** Yeah. It’s like being a filmmaker or screenwriter in the 1970s, for example, where you actually had to see a print of the show, and if there wasn’t a print handy you couldn’t see it, but even more difficult because you actually have to physically be in a space where people have come together to put on a show.

I guess my point is it’s harder to get caught up with all of the history in musical theater than it is to get caught up to cinema.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m a musical theater fan but almost all of my fandom is based on the music. I listen to music and I listen to albums. I’ve seen almost no shows, so that’s something I guess I’ll have to rectify somewhere down the line.

**John:** In some ways you’re familiar with these musicals the same way if someone had only seen the action sequences in €œRaiders of the Lost Ark.€ You’re only getting the big highlights, but you’re not seeing how it all fits together in the bigger structure.

**Craig:** That’s right. On the other hand, though, I don’t have to sit through those really boring, bad songs.

**John:** Well, as the book writer who has to write all that really boring stuff I’ve needed to see a lot of those things. Luckily in a big city like LA we have Reprise!, which puts on a lot of the lesser staged Broadway shows. I think it’s Jason Alexander who is one of the big people behind Reprise!.

Several times a year over at UCLA they’ll put on a show that isn’t staged very often. I got to see €œHow to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying a couple years ago before this most recent incarnation, and I could see, “Oh, that’s what that show is really about and that song that I recognized needs to be in that show and that’s a good thing.”

This is all a very lengthy introduction to the point of I finally saw Follies for the first time two weeks ago in New York. It was really strange to see Follies. I’m guessing you’ve not seen €œFollies?

**Craig:** I haven’t seen Follies. I’ve heard quite a bit of the music of it, in consistent with my report from a few seconds ago, but €œFollies,€ by all accounts, was viewed as a very strange show from the start so you’re not alone in thinking that.

**John:** One of my frustrations, I should also add, when you’re trying to catch up on the history of musical theater is people inevitably say, “You should have seen the original.” That’s helpful because the original was in 1971 so unless you provide a time machine for me I really can’t go back and see the original staging of €œFollies.

The best I can do is a see a current staging of €œFollies, which is playing right now at the Marquee Theater in Broadway with Bernadette Peters and a lot of other talented people. Follies is this weird one, because I knew going into it that it has this weird place in the pantheon of Broadway musicals because it’s like a shibboleth.

You can’t say anything bad about €œFollies in a way because then you’re a godless heathen, but if you talk about it without acknowledging it’s generally perceived flaws you’re an idiot. It’s one of those things in describing it here and knowing that whatever I’m saying is going to be recorded for future people to listen to I have to be careful about talking about Follies.

**Craig:** But you’ve already blown it by saying that you have to be careful about talking about it. [laughs]

**John:** It’s like €œFight Club.€ You have to be careful about Fight Club. It’s such a strange, strange show. Do you know what it’s about? You’ve listened to the cast album.

**Craig:** It’s about these women who used to be burlesque-y stars and they all gather together for a reunion? Is that right?

**John:** That’s correct mostly. It’s not just women, it’s women and men. More women than men. It’s based on the €œZigfield Follies. This generation of it was between the two big wars so it’s the late ‘€œ40s, early ’50s I’m guessing. The show is staged with these older performers coming back to this theater that’s about to be destroyed for one last reunion.

A reunion setup is a very natural way of starting a story. What’s unusual about Follies is not only do you have all the older versions of these people, you have their younger versions as well, so the cast is huge because basically you have a younger version for each older person in the show so the cast gets giant.

The younger versions don’t interact directly with the older versions, but a lot of times they’re echoing what they’re doing or you’re seeing an earlier moment that they’re talking about in the present back in the past.

Also troubling, not troubling but problematic, is that the present day of it is the 1970s so you’re watching this in 2011 watching a show set in the 1970s and in the 1940s and your frames of references are off.

The younger incarnations of these people I take it in the original staging were much more explicitly handled in ghosts. In this most recent one I wouldn’t really necessarily call them ghosts. They’re more like a CBS show, like a Cold Case. It’s like they’re half flashing back to earlier times.

The show, the soundtrack album that you’ve listened to, the only reason that people still talk about it as much as they do is there’s amazing songs in that show. €œI’m Still Here,€ €œBroadway Baby.

**Craig:** Broadway Baby is a classic. Elaine Stritch has an awesome version of Broadway Baby.€ It’s funny because I don’t know quite where. It’s a live version. It must have been a tribute concert. The thing about Sondheim is every — I would say — 14 hours there’s a tribute concert to Steven Sondheim where everybody gets together and sings his songs.

There’s a great Elaine Stritch that is really funny and then there’s this heartbreaking version of I’m Still Here€ by Dorothy Loudon that is my particular favorite.

**John:** Those two songs are classics. Too Many Mornings Could I Leave You. Losing My Mind which is a great, great song. They’re all written by Steven Sondheim, who’s, again, considered a deity. The book was written by James Goldman, who is a screenwriter who did a lot of different things, is the brother of William Goldman. There’s a tradition of screenwriters working in the theater.

The other song that I’d heard from it that I didn’t know was from the show was œWaiting for the Girls Upstairs.

**Craig:** Yes, that is from that show.

**John:** That is from that show. That is very literally the suitors waiting for the girl performers that are getting changed upstairs and taking too long to change upstairs. I’d heard that song many different times but I really had no context for it. I always assumed it was like the girls upstairs were in an apartment upstairs.

I kept envisioning the cast of €œFriends€ for that song and it’s not even remotely that way.

**Craig:** That’s my struggle with all these songs. I don’t know what €œI’m Still Here is about other than a woman who used to be a popular singer or performer of some kind now well on in her years and she struggled through tough times and lost of fame. I don’t know what the context is beyond that.

**John:** Hearing that song wouldn’t you assume that it’s one of the main characters who sings that song?

**Craig:** I would, although I happen to know it’s not.

**John:** No, it’s a really side character. The same with that and Broadway Baby. Naturally as screenwriters you can’t turn off that screenwriter brain of, “Okay, this isn’t really all working right and so how do you fix this?” The only reason the fix it instinct kicks in is that you recognize that the parts are working much better than the whole.

The parts being these really, really great numbers, these great songs, but the framework around them isn’t maybe all you would hope it could be. Those two songs, they’re not your lead characters singing them. They do help set up this whole sense of this generation has passed and some of the people are still performers and most of the people have gone on to other kinds of lives so it works on that level.

The real meat of the show are these two married couples and essentially the one girl really wanted the other guy and both of them are in unhappy marriages because of choices made decades ago. €œCould I Leave You is could the one wife leave the husband, and it’s a really good, funny song, but it plays strangely in what’s meant to be a deserted theater.

It feels like you want to see her in her house singing this song rather than in some theater. Losing My Mind,€ which is a great song, but you hear that song and it feels like a more recent love. It feels more like I’ve been in love with you for a year and you told me once that you loved me and were you just being kind?

It feels more like a recent romantic obsession rather than something that dates back 30 years.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, maybe I’m kind of the beneficiary, then, of sort of hearing these songs out of context. For instance, Broadway Baby€ is hysterical when Elaine Stritch sings it. It’s a very funny performance. Maybe it’s really tragic and sad in the musical but I sort of enjoy it on its own.

Actually, it’s funny, with Sondheim. Maybe because I’m just not quite… I am not a musical theatre nut. I’m just a casual fan.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I’ve never seen, for instance, €œSunday in the Park. I’ve never seen it. But I do love It’s Hot in Here and I do love €œPutting it Together. I feel like that’s okay. I enjoy those songs for what they are. I can figure out that It’s Hot in Here is… or It’s Hot up Here?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I can’t remember which one. But it’s the people in his famous painting that are singing about being stuck there. And that’s all I need to know. I’m good.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** By the way, a little trivia question. Who’s the actress who originated the role that sings I’m Still Here€ in The Follies?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Yvonne De Carlo who was famous for playing…

**John:** Ah-hah. Batwoman.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Catgirl.

**Craig:** No. Was she Catgirl?

**John:** Wasn’t she?

**Craig:** No. Well, maybe she was but I know her, most famously, as Lilly Munster.

**John:** Aaah.

**Craig:** Lilly Munster.

**John:** I’m looking at Yvonne De Carlo right now.

**Craig:** Yvonne De Carlo.

**John:** Just because that’s a crucial thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s crucial.

**John:** Yeah, I’m not seeing it here but she was in €œThe Girl from U.N.C.L.E.€ So that’s important.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. Trivia time… Done.

**John:** So, my other screenwriter brain. And this is, again, dangerous to criticize a show that is beloved by many people. But this is also useful for people, screenwriters, who are listening to this podcast.

In the clever idea of like, “Oh, you have the old version and the young version,”€ you end up dividing the audiences loyalties because it’s like, “€œWait. Am I supposed to be caring more about the older version or the younger version?”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which is, certainly, a challenge we had in the movie version of Big Fish, too. It’s that you’re splitting the roles between the young Edward Bloom and the older Edward Bloom. So, which one is the real Edward Bloom?

**Craig:** That’s a great way of putting it because in every movie where an individual is split, through time travel or just the framing of the movie, you never really believe they’re the same person. In your mind you can’t track it that way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you’re always… I mean, you try.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** As writers, we try and do the best we can. But, inevitably, the brain won’t allow it.

**John:** Yeah. The other issue I found… and it’s not unique to this musical but when you have people in unhappy marriages, the idea that their marriage is going to fall apart on this one night… or, actually, more specifically, that their marriage would have lasted up until this one night… can be a real challenge. It’s like, if you hate each other so much then how did you possibly get in the car to come here tonight?

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**John:** That’s a challenge.

**Craig:** It’s like the dilemma of drama. When marriages break up they usually break up slowly and miserably. It’s like dying. No-one ever dies by grabbing someone’s hand and whispering those last great words and then eyes roll back. It’s like two months in the hospital, bedpans, and machines that go “ping.”

**John:** Ping. Oh, I’m going to steal a line from Andrew Lippa, who is the composer on €œBig Fish.€ His father gave him an amazing deathbed line. His father was coherent enough so Andrew said, “€œDad, are you comfortable?”€ and his father opened his eyes and said, “€œI make a living.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Was he consciously joking, right there at the end? Or was he just confused?

**John:** Oh, he was consciously joking.

**Craig:** That guy is awesome.

**John:** That’s pretty amazing. Isn’t it?

**Craig:** That’s pretty awesome to be Vaudeville at the very end.

**John:** Yeah, Vaudeville to the end.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, by bigger framing around this whole Follies end, having to physically see musicals and see them staged, and having to really track down like… There are many musicals that I would rush out to see. Even a version that I know isn’t supposed to be the best possible version because otherwise I just couldn’t see it.

Another big difference with movies is movies have a fixed, finished form. €œRaiders of the Lost Arc€ is basically always going to be the same €œRaiders of the Lost Arc.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Which is why, when there are new releases where they change things, I think people get so pissed off. There’s this assumption with movies that once you’re done, you’re done. And you’re not going to change the movie anymore.

**Craig:** Right. In fact, this goes to the heart of a question that every screenwriter asks sooner or later. Typically, when they’re starting out and they’re dealing with a lot of the humiliations, the everyday humiliations of being a professional screenwriter.

They say, “Why? Why are playwrights treated so much differently? Why does everybody respect the playwright and never change a word? Not the directors. Not the actors. But, screenwriters are treated completely differently.”

The answer is very simple. Playwrights write a play and that’s done and then the play is performed. Performances are not intellectual property. They’re performances. They are not even works of art, in the legal sense. They’re performances of a work of art whereas screenplays are not.

Screenplays are intended to be transformed into a movie which is fixed, as you put it, and done and is, in fact, a work of art and intellectual property that is never changed.

The fact that the playwright writes something that is performed over and over and over in a million different ways requires consistency in the words. It must have it. Otherwise, what play are you seeing? Are you seeing Fiddler on the Roof or somebody else’s €œFiddler on the Roof?

That is why we are in a jam, as screenwriters.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Our work isn’t performed.

**John:** Our work is transformed into something else that is the finished thing.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** It’s a little sorbet, before we get to our next big topic. Are you reading a lot these days? Are you getting a chance to read for fun?

**Craig:** Not for fun. No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I mean, I got the Jobs autobiography. I have not even cracked it open. Mostly, I’ve just been reading stuff for jobs. I mean, for writing.

**John:** I’m sorry.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. Bummer. What are you reading?

**John:** I’ve read two things this last week. So, first off, I got the new Kindle. Not the Kindle Fire but the really cheap $79 Kindle, which is great, by the way.

I got the one with ads and the ads are a little bit annoying. They don’t interrupt your reading experience but if it’s just sitting there then suddenly it will turn into a hair care product ad. It’s like I don’t really want to see that.

**Craig:** Totally inapplicable to you.

**John:** Yeah. Not useful for me.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But it’s great and it’s small and it fits perfectly in my coat pocket, for when I’m in New York. I can be on the subway, I can pull out my Kindle and read for a bit on the subway and it’s great. So I find myself reading a lot more.

Or, and hopefully, if I’m in a restaurant and it’s too dark for me to use my real Kindle then I can just pull out my phone and read the same book on my phone.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, a useful advantage of living in 2011.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, I’m reading two things. I read Mindy Kaling’s book.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I heard that was great.

**John:** Yeah. Mindy Kaling is the producer and actress and director on The Office. It’s good. People want to compare it directly to the Tina Fey book and the Tina Fey book is meteor. There’s just more to it.

But what I found really interesting in Mindy Kaling’s book was her back story, in terms of how she got started. I’d know she’d written this play called Matt and Ben which is about Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

But her whole back story about how that got set up and started was really fascinating and very much proves the thing that we say here a lot, “You don’t know what is going to be the one thing that is going to push you over the edge and get you noticed and get you started.”

This was just something that she found funny and fascinating and she pursued with full vigor. And people liked it. That’s the thing that sort of got her put in a spotlight and she used that spotlight very well.

**Craig:** Yeah. Mary notes how funny talent plus unique perspective tends to stand out.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So, she’s great. I’m reading Thinking, Fast and Slow. I forget the author’s name, but I will put it in the show notes. It is a really good brain book. I have to read a good brain book, every year or two, about the mental processes. His basic argument is that you have two systems that process thought for you.

You have system one which does things automatically and subconsciously and can do most of the functions of making the simple decisions about things and noticing when something is wrong and that you have to pay attention to it. And system two which does your more difficult… What we really think of as thinking.

It does your complicated math and stuff like that. A lot of our decisions that we assume we’re consciously aware of are really being made in system one before we’re thinking about it.

**Craig:** Yeah, absolutely. There’s a really interesting book I recommend. Actually, I took a class with this guy when I was in college. His name is Julian Jaynes.

**John:** Oh, I know Julian Jaynes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Bicameral or the breakdown of the…

**Craig:** Yes, €œThe Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.€ I said that really fast but you’ll put up a note, I’m sure. It’s a really interesting book. He essentially argues that the root of consciousness is language and it’s why we are conscious, in the way we understand it to be, and animals are not. At least that’s his theory.

One of the things he talks about first is what consciousness isn’t. A knee-jerk response to the question, “€œWhat is consciousness?” is awareness. But he points out… We’ve all had that experience of driving in a car and then suddenly realizing, “I haven’t really actually been paying attention. How did I even get this far? I’ve been thinking about something else while I’m driving.”

But while you were thinking about something else you were staying in your lane, slowing down when cars in front of you slowed down, making right turns and left turns, and taking exits.

It’s remarkable how much your brain can do without you actually paying attention.

**John:** Yeah. It raises the question of what is the you. It’s like, without you paying attention… well, part of you is paying attention. It’s just not that part that we think about as being consciousness.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s not that part that sort of self reports and carries your awareness of your inner monologue. So, Jaynes’s book is fascinating. I’ve seen it a lot. I read it ten years ago, maybe. I’ve seen a lot of criticism about it since then.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I think it’s fascinating in terms of its ideas.

**Craig:** It’s essentially groundless but, as a groundless theory, it’s fun to read. His essential argument is that once we developed a capacity for language and came up with the word “I” and with metaphors, to be able to describe ourselves through language, that’s how we essentially began to become conscious.

There was one thing that I remember after I read the book. I went to bed and I had a dream. It was a normal dream…. I remember in the dream someone said something that surprised me. That happens all the time in dreams. People say things and you go, “€œOh, okay,” and then you respond. Just like a regular conversation.

When I woke up, it occurred to me those aren’t other people. They’re just me. I mean, obviously, my brain is writing and playing all the roles in a dream. But you don’t know what they’re going to say. So, somehow your brain is capable of splitting off and creating multiple consciousnesses that can interact with each other in a dream.

Well, that happens most efficiently when we’re dreaming. Certainly, that’s a big part of what we do when we’re screenwriting. We do it with awareness, but part of the tool of the screenwriter is to somehow become schizophrenic and have people inside of your head think differently than you and surprise you.

**John:** I don’t remember if this is Jaynes’s book specifically, but I recall one of these books was talking about when we read the really classic Greek literature and there’s all the talk about the gods talking to people, that may have actually been the experience of what it was like to be alive at that time.

Well, our assumption that, “Oh, people back then were exactly the way that people are now,” that may not be entirely true and that people may have actually heard voices the way we consider a schizophrenic hears voices much more commonly because of just the way the brain was organized and the way that language had shaped how we’re thinking about things.

So people in the classic times or the pre-classic times may have literally been hearing voices a lot, and so their experience of who they were and who the outside world was could have been very different.

**Craig:** Yeah, that was Jaynes. He was arguing that the two hemispheres of the brain are connected by this big huge bundle of fibers called the corpus callosum, which is much larger in women by the way than men. Men are more split brain on the average than women, which by the way accounts for some of these very persistent cognitive differences so they think that we see over and over in men and women.

But his suggestion was that in the old days there was even less of a connection between the two hemispheres, and what we tend to think of as our own mind talking to us, people then either literally heard as an auditory hallucination or just interpreted it as somebody else speaking to us. It accounts in some small part for why people back then were so much more religious.

People are religious now, but not in the way they were then. I mean people then truly did hear gods telling them what to do, and it was quite commonplace. Interestingly, no one ever said, “€œOh, that guy who says God is talking to him, he’s crazy.”€ Quite the opposite. Those people were prophets. Now, of course, if you say that God is talking to you, it’s time for some chlorpromazine.

**John:** Yeah, I don’t want gods talking to me. I’m happy to have a sense of the universe being sane and rational and ordered and me being a player within it.

**Craig:** I beg to differ. I want to be in charge. Yeah. I prefer the solipsistic vision where you’re all here for my benefit. It’s just a big play, and…

[laughter]

**Craig:** …When I close my eyes you all die. When I open my eyes, you wake up again. [laughs]

**John:** Having made The Nines,€ which was essentially that whole premise, it’s not really quite how I view the universe. But it is fascinating and telling.

**Craig:** Tempting, isn’t it?

**John:** Tempting, yes.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** One other thing I want to talk about is what I described in our setup email is second act malaise. I should say second act, not in the sense of theatre second act because theatre has two acts. It has a first act and then an intermission and a second act. Second act malaise in terms of screenwriting, which is you have your first act which sets everything up. You have your last act which wraps everything up.

The second act is this vast stretch in the middle of writing, which can both be challenging narratively but also challenging really hard just in work because I find that when I’m deep in the second act like I am on this one project, you’re excited about all the stuff you’ve written. You’re excited about the stuff that’s coming up, but where you’re at right there in the middle can just be a slog.

**Craig:** It can. In fact, I am right there right now on a script, right in the middle, and because I knew we were going to be talking about this, I started thinking about why. Because look, the first act is actually the hardest thing to write I think. You have to invent all the voices, the characters, the appearances, the situations, the premises, and so forth.

The third act is a little easier because theoretically it is what must occur. The second act shouldn’t be so much harder than the first. So I started asking myself is this psychological? Is it just, “Okay, the excitement of the new is gone?” The excitement of “I’m almost finished” is gone?€ So is that the cause of the fatigue? But I came upon a possible different solution, so I’m curious to see what you think.

I think that when we write, we naturally identify with our protagonist. Even if they’re very different than us, their experience is something that we have to feel emotionally or we don’t write them very well.

In the middle of the movie our characters tend to be lost. [laughs] They tend to be unmoored from their comforting surroundings. They’re in the middle of their journey. It is the hard part of their journey.

There is no resolution around the corner. In fact, sometimes they don’t even know what they’re supposed to do next. I actually feel like when we’re writing, it’s not surprising that we get tired and a little overwhelmed and fatigued in the middle because that’s how our characters are.

**John:** Yeah, that’s a nice way of thinking about it. I like that.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** I would push back and say I find the first act to be the easiest part to write.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** I find starting a script to be very difficult. Much like our friend, who describes her of having to climb into the water very gently and splash water on her toes, I have a hard time literally starting the work.

But the first act is fascinating and exciting for me because I am setting up the rules of the world. So anything is possible in the first act because what could happen in this movie? Well, whatever I want to have happen in this movie. I’m setting up the rules and the boundaries of what this movie is.

The second act for me partly is challenging because I already have established those boundaries, so I know that I can only go this far to this far, this far, this far. You’re on a path, and you have to stay on that path. You’ve decided we’re going to drive to Wichita, so you have to find a way to make that drive to Wichita as interesting as possible.

You’re not allowed to introduce a lot of new characters. You’re not supposed to be introducing brand new ideas in terms of what characters should want.

Sometimes you are revisiting things from earlier on in the story, so they’re not new. One of the projects I’m working on right now, the director has an interesting mandate, which has been challenging to carry out but also fascinating to carry out is that she doesn’t want to see the same set twice, which is…

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Really. Which is really a great goal. I don’t know necessarily that it was achievable. But her point worth discussing is anytime you come back to a set, you have a sense that the story is not moving forward because you’ve literally returned to someplace that you’ve been to before.

So even if some other things have changed or the characters in a different place now, you are going back someplace and you want to always go forward.

**Craig:** Well, there goes €œCasablanca€ and quite a few other movies. [laughs]

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Go on.

**John:** But some of my favorite movies, that is actually I think really true. €œRaiders of the Lost Ark€ is never going back to the same set twice.

**Craig:** That’s a really good question. Does it ever go back to the same set twice?

**John:** And Star Wars might but only in things like the Millennium Falcon or in the vehicles that are physically going someplace new.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, he goes back home and sees the skeletons of his aunt and uncle.

**John:** Aha! So that’s why I would add an addendum. It’s like you can go back to a place but only if it is destroyed…

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or significantly transformed.

**Craig:** I think that that’s true actually. In thinking about the script I’m writing right now, I don’t think there are any returns. It’s a weird thing. I never thought of it that way, but yeah. It’s a good point.

**John:** Maybe part of the reason why I also am fascinated about second act malaise or maybe because I experience second act malaise so deeply and it frustrates me so much, a lot of my movies don’t have second acts in a classic sense. Like €œGo€ just restarts itself twice. The Nines restarts itself twice, and so The Nines is essentially three first acts. There’s something really exciting about that that you’re burning everything behind you.

**Craig:** Well, I’m a fan of a good, well-crafted traditional second act, but a lot of what I think about when I’m in the middle of it is making sure that…

I always like to think of these things in terms of the relationship between the character or the protagonist and the theme of the story, and making sure that as we go through the second act that they are encountering glimpses of this new way of living and this new truth and resisting it and fighting it.

So I feel like I never fear second acts. I don’t know — maybe all it really boils down to is the second act is that also the part of the process where you realize, “I’ve been doing this for a while.” And when you do anything for a while, it gets a little boring. It’s exciting to finish — god, it’s exciting to finish — and it’s exciting to start. But what’s exciting about page 40 through 80?

**John:** No, not that much.

**Craig:** Not that much.

**John:** This last weekend in New York I was lucky to be able to see my friend Quinn run the New York Marathon, and writing a script is very much a marathon. I suspect it’s a similar experience to a marathon runner. Those first four miles, that’s going to feel great. “Hey, you’re running a marathon!”€ Those last couple miles, like, “€œGreat, I’m almost done with my marathon!”

If I were running the marathon I would suspect miles 8 through 20 would get annoying because there’s nothing new about them. It’s just more fatigue and keeping it interesting for yourself.

**John:** Well, that’s what sets marathon runners apart from we mortals, and I would suggest that that’s what sets we professional screenwriters apart from the people who start 12 scripts and never finish them. If you can’t find the joy in that middle slog, some sick perverted joy, maybe this isn’t for you.

Bummer!

**Craig:** Bummer.

**John:** Gunshot.

[laughter]

**John:** That feels like the perfect note to end our podcast here.

One thing I should say and I meant to bring this up earlier is we talk about the show notes or the links. If you’re listening to this podcast or through iTunes or through wherever else, the links for every show are always on johnaugust.com. So just johnaugust.com, Scriptnotes, and all the shows are there.

Links that we’re talking about for anything that we bring up in the show will always be there.

Anything more, Craig?

**Craig:** No, I’m tapped.

**John:** Yeah, I’m tapped, too.

**Craig:** I’m exhausted.

**John:** But thank you, sir.

**Craig:** Thank you. That was good. That was fun. I really enjoyed the Musical Theatre Monday. That was fun.

[laughter]

**John:** Very good. All right. We’ll talk soon

**Craig:** Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/good-actors-and-bad-writing-partners).

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

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

**John:** This is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screen writers.

How are you, Craig?

**Craig:** I’m doing fine today. How are you, sir?

**John:** Very well. We are recording this on Halloween, so I should ask you, how has your Halloween been so far?

**Craig:** Nothing Halloweenie has happened yet, although my wife did say this morning something that I never thought I would hear her say. “I’m going out to get the dog a costume.”

**John:** You’ve hit that phase, haven’t you?

**Craig:** We have a new dog. She’s a Labradoodle puppy. She’s 15 weeks old. And it was kind of a fight to get my wife to even agree to have a dog, just as it was a fight to get her to agree to have a child and then a second child. So this is why it’s so improbable, but here she is getting her a costume.

**John:** What’s interesting is because Halloween is falling on a Monday this year, for people with kids, Halloween is still the actual Halloween day. It’s like that’s when we’re doing the actual trick or treating and that kind of stuff. But for people like Stuart, my assistant, who’s in his mid twenties, this whole last weekend has been Halloween. It’s been like a long blur from Friday, to Saturday, to Sunday of Halloween activities. It’s a generational observation, I would say.

**Craig:** Halloween is certainly an enormous amount of fun when you’re in your twenties. It’s another great excuse to get drunk, plus girls… Somewhere along the line, everybody sort of made the observation that every costume became sexy blank. So whatever it is, sexy.

It’s basically, “Let’s see your boobs.” So it’s a pretty good holiday actually for straight guys. But once you have your kids, it really is flashlights and traffic safety. [laughs] Totally different experience!

**John:** In Los Angeles, we do our trick or treating on that actual holiday. My husband grew up in Columbus, Ohio where they actually moved the day of trick or treating, so they will decide as a city or as a village what day they’re going to do trick or treating. I guess it’s because of football. They don’t want to compete with the local high school football game. But they would do their trick or treating on like say, the 26th.

**Craig:** That’s not cool.

**John:** It’s bizarre. I could imagine there being good reasons for doing it. It just seems like creating more problems for yourself.

**Craig:** There was an article about a guy who owns those — I don’t know what you call these, like — popup stores that just appear about a month and a half before Halloween, sell costumes and then disappear on November 1st. And he’s a billionaire.

One of the things he’s been trying to get the country to do is establish the last Saturday in October as Halloween for safety reasons more than anything else, I guess. I don’t know why. It was cuckoo. — It was to make money. I’m sorry. I forgot, it was so he could make more money. But it had something to do with safety.

**John:** For a holiday that was created by Pagans to celebrate some sort of God, or Samhain or killing of things, it is strange it has become the thing it has become.

**Craig:** I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before. I’m really fascinated with Jack Chick who writes Chick Tracts, the super fundamentalist Christian tracts. He really hates Halloween, so I always check on his site to see whatever his latest tract is about how basically Halloween is Satan crawling inside kids and sending them to Hell. It’s awesome.

**John:** He’s probably right.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** On the topic of things evolving beyond what they originally were created to do, just today we announced Screenwriting.io which is a new spin-off site we’re doing for johnaugust.com. And it actually got me looking back through what I’ve been doing on the site since the beginning.

So johnaugust.com, it really started that I was answering these questions for IMDb. They had this Ask a Filmmaker column and they asked me to be one of the guest columnists for that. I ended up being a guest columnist for three years. But it started back in 2000 and it was hard for me to believe that it was all the way back in 2000 that I started doing this.

People would write in questions to IMDb and I would answer their questions. They would write into IMDb and then an editor there would go through the questions and pick out the best of them, email me and I would email back answers. I was publishing through a third party. It was all very basic and very HTML-y. It was an interesting thing for me to do at the time.

I became frustrated that I would answer the same kinds of questions again and again. For a site that was setup to be about searching and finding information, it was really hard to find the prettiest questions. So I did johnaugust.com as sort of a way answering those questions more definitively on my own timetable with the hope that once I answered a question, it could actually kind of stay answered for awhile.

And so for a long time, I was answering all of those questions and eventually, I got tired of answering those questions and the site sort of progressed beyond just those questions. So today, we’re introducing a new site that’s just back to that spirit of answering those really simple questions about things like, “What is a slug line?” or, “Do I have to format screenplays in a certain way?” It will be interesting to see.

**Craig:** That’s great. And out of curiosity, .io, where is that?

**John:** .io, I think is technically the Indian Ocean. So .io has become a newly popular domain extension because it’s short and it’s kind of feels like it could be part of a word. It’s the same way .us became something folded into Delicious and other sort of things. .io is sort of a new thing.

So it’s exciting. It’s actually been in beta for awhile, that we’ve been figuring out how to do this. And now, we’re launching it upon the unsuspecting public to see how they like it.

**Craig:** Another excellent service from the John August empire!

**John:** I think the empire is what we’re going for. But on the topic of questions people write in seeking answers, I thought we might just do some viewer mail today.

**Craig:** Yeah, viewer mail!

**John:** Now you were just at the Austin Film Festival and you got to talk to some people who listen to the podcast.

**Craig:** So many more, than I thought would be. Dozens of people came up to me, all very, very pleased with the podcast. They listen to it. I did write down — because there were a lot of parties and mostly you just get drunk and talk to people — I was very drunk when I sent an email to myself saying, “Remember to mention Stacy Ashworth on the podcast.” She was there. She really wanted us to say her name. I can’t remember the rest of the context. But Stacy, I followed through.

**John:** That is your Casey Kasem dedication for Stacy Ashworth.

**Craig:** That’s my long distance dedication, I guess.

**John:** I love it.

Here are some questions that came into the site and I thought we would just take a few minutes to answer them. First is from Mike from Twitter. Who knows where Mike actually lives, because on Twitter, you could live anywhere. Mike asks, “I know bad actors can ruin a great script, but can great actors improve a terrible script?”

**Craig:** They can improve a terrible scene, but I don’t think they can improve a terrible script. I mean, I would watch two terrific actors read any bad scene from any movie and I would be fascinated by the two and a half minutes it took. But a movie is a collection of scenes taken as a whole to create a narrative. I just don’t think great acting can save bad narrative over the course of an hour and a half.

**John:** I would say that in terms of a comedy — because sometimes a film comedy can actually just be a collection of very, very funny moments that somehow all holds together in a way that is rewarding. It’s hard for me to say that some of my favorite comedies…

Like Stripes isn’t a very good movie, but I enjoy the movie because I enjoy the performances. I enjoy what happens in it. Sometimes comedies, yes, a great performance, great actors can make something happen that couldn’t otherwise work.

**Craig:** The criticism that you usually hear about Stripes is that third act just kind of falls apart, and that’s sort of true.

**John:** Once the RV shows up, it’s a very different movie.

**Craig:** They kind of give up. But I have to say, that could have been fixed and it could have been even better. It’s why Stripes, for instance, isn’t as good as Groundhog Day, or I don’t know. It was an interesting time. Caddyshack is actually a better movie to me than Stripes.

But there was some pretty great screenwriting in the first act. I loved the way they set those characters up, so it wasn’t a bad screenplay.

**John:** No. I was sort of picking Stripes as a random example, but I can actually think of a more recent example of something I love that performances are really the reason why I’m loving it. It’s American Horror Story. Are you watching this show?

**Craig:** As you know if you ask me the question, “Are you watching this show?” the answer I’m going to give you for every show is, “No.” [laughs] I’m the worst, but tell me about this.

**John:** Let me tell you about American Horror Story. It comes from the very talented people who do Glee and who did Nip/Tuck before that. It has many of the best and many of the most frustrating qualities of Glee and Nip/Tuck in that it feels like it’s running full speed towards a cliff. And it’s not afraid of the cliff. It’s just going to run as fast as it possibly can towards this cliff.

You’re watching this show and it’s about a family that moves into a house that is obviously haunted in Los Angeles. And it’s not that it’s a slow build to anything, like things happen really, really quick in the show. By episode three, they’re trying to sell the house and move out of the house because they recognize that something really horrible is going on with this house.

There are many aspect of the show that I enjoy, but by far the aspect I enjoy most is Connie Britton, who plays the wife and mother and is just amazing. She’s the glue holding this whole thing together.

You’re watching this show and the experience of watching this show — it’s not even that’s it good or bad. I can’t say that the writing is fantastic or that the writing is the problem. But the feeling of watching this show is, you know when you’re kind of sick and you have Vicks VapoRub on your chest and your mom puts too many blankets on you and you start to smother? That’s the feeling of watching this show.

It’s kind of great and awful at the same time. But she is an example of one actor who can pull something off. I feel like they could give her the absolute worst script possible and I would watch it just because she’s amazing.

**Craig:** Well, there are some actors that definitely cut through anything and they seem to make everything better. Philip Seymour Hoffman, it doesn’t matter what he’s in, and he’s been in some kind of bad movies and he’s been in some amazing movies. But in all movies, I always feel like I’ll just stop and watch him. I can watch an entire movie of him doing nothing — and I think he made that movie with Charlie Kaufman. [laughs]

But, yes. There are actors that sort of strike us in a certain way. But of course, that’s just one actor and what about the rest of them?

A movie that comes to my mind, I saw The Help. The story of The Help is a fairly traditional one and I presume it’s the story that’s in the novel. But Viola Davis is another actor who is so good. I would watch her do anything. She’s amazing.

**John:** I think we’re going to answer this question, “Can great actors improve a terrible script?” Yes. I don’t think they can necessarily pull off the whole movie, but they can certainly improve a scene or a sequence. There are definitely movies that you love where you recognize that the movie itself isn’t really cooking on all burners, but that one actor is sort of making it worth your time watching.

**Craig:** When you say “terrible,” I don’t think you can say “terrible.” But good actors can make mediocre movies very watchable.

**John:** The next question comes from Dan in Los Angeles. “Two writers co-write a feature script. The partnership breaks up. Writer A unilaterally takes the script and with a manager wants to option it at a production company. Writer A asks Writer B to take her name off the script since she is no longer interested in working on it, and the manager thinks it’s a simpler sale if her name is removed. They’re only offering a verbal guarantee that she’ll be compensated.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Dan goes on to say that, “It sounds ridiculous to me and I would like to tell her to get something in writing, but it seems like anything in writing would freak out the manager since it creates a paper trail that there was an uncredited writer.”

**Craig:** [laughs] This is stupid. First of all, great lesson here. When managers are talking, it means you are being lied to. “It will be an easier sale with one name.” No. If it’s a really good script, it would be a perfectly easy sale with four billion names. It could have been written by the country of Pakistan and it would be a perfectly easy sale. People like to buy scripts. They don’t care how many names are on the page.

Now here’s the deal. Writer A and Writer B wrote something together. They are the authors of that script. If somebody wants to develop that script further down the line and Writer B has lost interest, no problem. The script can then be written by Writer A who is now writing separately and as an individual who’s employed.

But under no circumstances for any reason should you ever, ever agree to have your name taken off of a script that you have co-written. That is insane and pointless.

**John:** I agree with you. If you are actually leaving the film industry completely and never have an intention of coming back to it, there might be some circumstances which would kind of make sense. Or if there was such a huge disparity between your name and reputation and their name and reputation, I could see there being some cause for that.

Like one of you is Scott Frank and the other person is someone you have never ever heard of, then I can sort of imagine some scenarios in which this could make sense. But that doesn’t sound like this case at all.

This just sounds like there is a partnership that isn’t working out and one of the writers wants to take the script. And this happens a lot. Writers do get divorced. They break apart and it’s horrible to figure out who gets ownership of what different thing. You have to figure that out and you have to put it in writing. But you’re not going to change history to pretend that one person wrote something and the other person didn’t write something.

**Craig:** No. I mean, actually when it comes to the divorce, the divorce is difficult prospectively for what comes after you split up. It is not a problem at all to figure out who divides up these scripts. The answer is you don’t. It’s like: okay, husband and wife gets divorced. The kids still have a mom and a dad. It doesn’t change.

So that’s it. You don’t take you name off of a script. I don’t think any circumstance really matters unless they were literally shoving bucketfuls of money down your pants. And in this case, they’re not.

**John:** But in terms of scripts you’ve written, I agree that you’re not changing the past and who wrote the things. But moving forward, if you’re not a writing team anymore and one of you is going to be handling it independently, you have to figure that out. So that’s going to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah, sure.

**John:** There’re also those things that aren’t quite script, but they’re the ideas you were going to work on.

**Craig:** Those are the perspective issues, the things that are not quite yet written. That’s where it gets tricky. The nice thing about this question is it has a clear answer and the answer is, “Good God, no!”

**John:** Next question. “Hello and Shalom from Ruth in Israel. Flashbacks: I understand they’re often a fallback, reverse the pace, and other commonly cited ills. However, in Slumdog Millionaire and Forrest Gump they work.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Let me confess that this was an incredibly long question, like paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs. I just excerpted it to two sentences I found most interesting and then the third sentence was, “How do you feel about this?”

**Craig:** I’m glad you said that because it sounded to me it was a question where somebody said, “What do you think about flashbacks? In these two movies it works. Should you never do this?” Obviously in those two movies it worked. So the answer to that question is: no, you shouldn’t never do it. Flashbacks are a perfectly good instrument to use as long as they’re interesting.

I like to think of flashbacks as having certain requirements that other things don’t have. They either have to be very short and very funny or they have to add a revelation that re-contextualizes the character for you in an exciting way. So you don’t use them for boring purposes like figuring out what that guy had for breakfast that morning. A good flashback can be awesome.

**John:** I think it’s worth asking why flashbacks get such a bad rep, and it’s because they’re used so horribly in so many screenplays. You so often see a flashback that is setting up some piece of, “this is what it was like when he was a boy” and the flashback was over and it’s like, “I didn’t care about that. I really didn’t need to know what it was like when he was a boy. I didn’t need to know why he put on the blue jumper at that moment.”

Flashbacks work in the kinds of movies that need flashbacks to move forward. Either your story is the kind of story that supports flashbacks or it’s not going to support flashbacks, but if your script has one flashback, it’s probably an indication that you should have no flashbacks in your script at all. It’s a kind of screenwriting device that you’re either going to use a fair amount in your screenplay or not at all.

**John:** Another reason why flashbacks get a bad rep is because screenwriters use them to paper over their mistakes. Typically example is, you’re doing a thriller, just the audience doesn’t understand the logic of how this character knew that a woman was going to be there at a certain time and he says, “Well,” and then you flash back and see that he was following her. Well, that’s just dumb.

You’re literally using a flashback to plug a hole in your story and it’s unsatisfying. It’s dramatically boring. We had a flashback in Hangover 2 which I thought was interesting. Because we learn something about the character of Zack and the way he sees the world — or rather Alan — and the way he sees the world around him. Everybody is a 12-year-old boy to him that he likes. So it’s fun.

**John:** By the way, that flashback in Hangover 2, I don’t know if we talked about it on the podcast itself, that was ridiculously difficult to do. That was one of the most impressive sequences in the movie because clearly you had to bring in those 12-year-old boys to re-shoot half of what you were shooting in the movie, which was great.

**Craig:** It was. I remember Todd was saying, “I can’t believe we’re doing this because I have to shoot the movie twice,” and some of those scenes were big scenes like a riot in the middle of Bangkok. It’s like you finally finished it, “All right, now bring in the kids and let’s do it again.” It was an enormously big thing to do and, frankly, we didn’t know if it was going to work.

The first time we ran the movie for an audience that flashback came and went and it wasn’t quite rolling laughs and we thought, “Oh no, that was a big waste of time.” It was the only time in my career that reading the cards helped. What happens is you test a movie and everyone gives you the score and usually you can tell from the score and the response what the deal is and you don’t read the cards which is everybody’s comment.

Famously they’re really crudely rendered opinions.

**John:** — Written on a pencil on somebody’s knee, so they’re really hard to read anyway.

**Craig:** — By a guy that’s high. Card after card people singled that out. It wasn’t so much that they were laughing, but they were fascinated by that, so we kept it. You can certainly use flashbacks. Make them interesting and make the important dramatically. A great example of a movie that uses flashbacks brilliantly is Dead Again, which is almost all flashbacks. The whole movie’s flashbacks and it works great.

**John:** A similar kind of problem is with voice over. Voice over is used so terribly in so many movies that it’s become the, “Oh, you need to avoid voice over no matter what you do.” It’s because it’s used badly to pepper over problems and to get around situations that should be resolved in a completely different way.

Any time you see something advised that you should never do something in screenplays, you need to take a big step back and recognize there’s a reason why people try to avoid it, but there’s also probably a reason why it’s awesome when it’s done just right.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** Fourth question. Connor from London writes, and I picked sort of an international sampling as you see. London, Connor. “I’m currently at a film school in London studying screenwriting. For someone living an ocean and a country away from Los Angeles, I was wondering what you would recommend. I want to work in the US, however I’m unsure about the best way to approach it. My tutors urge me to stay in Britain and work in the British film industry, yet the number of opportunities available to me over here are dwindling by the day. I’m 19. I write bigger, high concept comedies and I don’t have an agent. What do you recommend?”

**Craig:** Obviously this advice has to be given in the context presuming that Connor is talented. If Connor is not talented it doesn’t matter where he lives. [laughs] However, if we are to presume that Connor has what it takes to write big budget action movies —

**John:** — It says high concept comedies.

**Craig:** — High concept comedies, I’m sorry. Yes, I would probably recommend the move. I would say Los Angeles. I have some friends that live in the UK, a friend that lives in Ireland and works in the movie business there. It’s difficult. It gets more and more difficult. You are relying not only on the dwindling private sector but also a cash strapped government, because a lot of film is publicly financed there. It’s just on a different scale.

You will find that if you are making very specific, smart, smaller comedies you can probably get away with that in the UK a little more easily than you can here where things have to appeal to an international audience. From what he describes, I think I’d say: yeah, move. You’re 19, you don’t have kids, you don’t have a spouse.

**John:** I think you should move. If you want to write smart, little comedies he could do a good job there. Between the movies that get made and the television that gets made there, there’s a lot he could do in Britain, but if he’s trying to write bigger feature comedies he has to go to a place where they make bigger feature comedies and that’s Los Angeles.

I always say if you want to write country songs you should probably move to Nashville because that’s where they write country songs. Also, he’s 19-years-old. It’s much easier to pick up and move at 19-years-old than it will be at 30-years-old, so the fact that he has few burdens on him, he can come to the US on a student visa, take classes at USC or wherever he’s going to do it, and get started.

**Craig:** Yeah. Go for it man. If it doesn’t work out take a mulligan, fly back home. I spoke at BAFTA LA, which is a pretty good organization that connects people from England who out here trying to make their way in the business, so you can network with your fellow countryman and find your way.

**John:** Come. Los Angeles is nice.

**Craig:** Welcome.

**John:** It’s really nice this time of year. We don’t have the burdens of snow and rain. It can be a nice place to come.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. Do it.

**John:** Craig, it was fun answering some listener questions.

**Craig:** Yeah. Those were pretty good questions, I have to say. I like that we were hitting multiple continents this time. This is nice. I’d love to see the vast reach of the John August empire extend into deeper Asia perhaps.

**John:** It’s actually fun because looking at people who come to just the website I’m able to track who comes from different places, and you get these weird little pockets. Obviously the US, Australia, Great Britain are going to be the largest ones, but a lot of readers in Germany. I guess that’s partly because so many people in Germany speak English and it’s easy for them to fall onto the blog.

You get South Africa hits and stuff like that. There are also just weird little pockets in India you get people listening.

**Craig:** Welcome our Indian listeners. It would be nice, I think, for people to not only write in with questions but if there’s a topic you want us to talk about, we have an ability to blather for half an hour about almost anything.

**John:** It’s really a skill that we’ve honed over years and years.

**Craig:** Honed. Carefully honed.

**John:** Well, Craig. Happy Halloween. I hope the trick or treating goes really well. What costumes are your kids going for this year?

**Craig:** My daughter’s going to be a witch.

**John:** Classic?

**Craig:** Yes, classic. She needs the green face paint. That’s what they’re hunting for today. And my son is for just

**John:** — [hesitates]

**Craig:** — Yes? Go ahead.

**John:** Granted, the green face paint is very classic and it’s very wicked witch sort of thing, but I feel with the rise of Hermione Granger and the Hogwarts of it all you could go for a non-verdant face.

**Craig:** No, no. Listen, she watches “The Wizards of Waverly Place. She’s entirely steeped in the world of the neo-witch and she’s basically said, “I’m a classic Margaret Hamilton witch girl. Green face.” I think mostly she wants the makeup, frankly. She’s firm on that. My son is going to be, like so many 10-year-old boys, a nondescript commando working for some unidentified military unit that allows you to carry Nerf guns.

**John:** Will there be some black camouflage or anything like that?

**Craig:** There’s going to be some camo, yeah. Going to be a little bit of camo. We’ll be walking around with those two. Then the dog, I’m as excited as you are.

**John:** By the way, there could not be a safer Halloween costume for trick or treating at night than camouflage.

**Craig:** Exactly. The only costume that’s more dangerous is dressing as pavement, which I will be doing.

**John:** We don’t know what the dog’s going to be dressed as.

**Craig:** It’s a big surprise.

What about you and the family?

**John:** We are trick or treating in a nearby neighborhood. Our neighborhood is actually surprisingly difficult for trick or treating because we’re on a hill. It’s 30 steps up to get to our front door from the street. No kid is going to walk up 30 steps. You’re going to burn up the fun sized Snicker Bar just getting up to our front door. We have very few trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood.

Just blocks away in the Zak Penn neighborhood wonderland of trick or treating. In fact, I’ve helped out Josh Friedman trick or treating sometimes at his house and they’ll get like 1,000 kids.

**Craig:** Wow. You should definitely knock on Zak’s door and report back on what he’s giving out.

**John:** It’ll be good stuff.

**Craig:** If it’s not good stuff we should have words with him for sure.

**John:** I think so, because he’s doing well. He’s got a TV show, he’s rewriting a zillion movies. He’s doing great.

**Craig:** He’s Zak freaking Penn.

**John:** He is Zak Penn.

My daughter’s going to be Wonder Woman for the fourth year in a row. She’s a girl that makes up her mind, sticks with her mind. Wonder Woman, by the way, has a fantastic both mission and genesis. First of all, she’s made out of sand. She’s made out of beach sand that’s been brought to life.

**Craig:** I did not know that. I thought she was just part of that tribe?

**John:** She is. She’s Amazonian, but her actual genesis, and I don’t know at what point this got retconned. Her mother wanted a daughter so she fashioned her out of sand on the beach and the gods brought her to life. That’s why of all the Amazonians, she’s the most powerful of all of them.

**Craig:** Her mom gave her that chest? She gave her huge sand boobs? Thank you. Thanks mom. You’re cool.

**John:** She’s pretty great. The other amazing thing about Wonder Woman is her missions in life, she also wants to beat up bad guys like all heroes do, but she’s also more about social justice and making the world a better place, whereas Batman, for instance, has more limited ways of seeing the world.

**Craig:** Batman doesn’t care about that stuff. Batman votes Ron Paul.

**John:** I think so. We’re going to save the Dark Knight, the Frank Millers and all that, for later in her education. I will say if you have a young daughter, I’ll put a link to it, there’s this amazing My First Reader Wonder Woman book that is incredibly girl positive and the illustrations in it she looks like a teenager girl and not a voluptuously slutty Amazonian warrior.

**Craig:** Losing interest. Losing interest. [laughs]

**John:** But for your daughter.

**Craig:** For my daughter, yes, of course…

**John:** Happy Halloween and Happy Halloween to our listeners who will be getting this the day after Halloween probably. Keep sending in your questions and you can also become friends with us or like us or whatever action you’d like to take on the Facebook page, which will be set up by the time this is posted, and follow us there.

**Craig:** Awesome man. Good podcast.

**John:** Thank you. Have a great weekend and we’ll talk to you soon.

**Craig:** Bye guys.