Search Results for: courier

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/draw-your-own-werewolf).

*[John and Craig pretend to be one another]*

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

**”Craig”:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**”John”:** And this is Episode 137 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, how are you?

**”Craig”:** I am doing just fine, John. I got my Diet Dr Pepper here. I got a beautiful summery afternoon. It’s good here. It’s good.

**”John”:** Well, we’ve got a big show today. We should probably get started on that.

**”Craig”:** I’m going to sort of jump ahead, if I can jump ahead? Is it okay if I jump ahead?

**”John”:** Sure.

**”Craig”:** Because so often on this show, I show up and I don’t have a One Cool Thing and I sort of feel bad, but I think I may have had like the one coolest thing of all. And so, I’m worried that a catastrophe could happen and I wouldn’t be able to share my One Cool Thing. Can I just share my One Cool Thing first?

**”John”:** Absolutely.

**”Craig”:** Okay, so, as I talked about on this show once or twice, I have a Tesla. I have an electric car. It’s a Tesla Sedan and it’s the best car ever made.

**”John”:** You have mentioned it once or twice.

**”Craig”:** The Tesla is a fantastic car but like all cars, there are things that come up and there’s this normal maintenance you need to do on a car. You have to keep the car clean. And so that means you take it down the street to the carwash and there’s people in your car and they’re messing stuff up and you have to wash it. In the inside you have to vacuum it. It’s a disaster. You don’t want this to happen at all.

**”John”:** Right.

**”Craig”:** And so, I’m so excited because I think Tesla has finally figured out how to get us past this boondoggle of keeping a car clean. So if you think about the Tesla, you may not know this, but the Tesla, the hood of the car, there’s actually nothing under there. That’s like an extra trunk and you have that sort of extra storage space there. But a lot of people have been speculating like there’s some reason why that’s there. There’s like there’s a big empty space like what is the purpose behind that.

I will tell you, or Elon Musk will tell us what the purpose is behind that. The purpose is that’s there to keep your car clean. A couple of months ago, he made sort of an illusion to what it was going to be. And so people thought like, well, is it going to be like some sort of robot. Is it going to be like a Roomba for your car that comes out and like cleans your car like when it’s charging? That would be kind of cool.

**”John”:** Yes.

**”Craig”:** John, just calm down. It’s better than that.

**”John”:** Okay.

**”Craig”:** It turns out there’s a lot of stuff inside your car that requires actually some kind of a delicate touch. And so even our best robots, they couldn’t really get in there and like really clean everything. You sort of need to do that by hand, but it’s not just like not my steady fingers. You need like really small little hands. This is what they figured out. It turns out the perfect thing to clean the inside of your car is a monkey.

**”John”:** Oh, I see, a monkey. Well, that’s very smart.

**”Craig”:** Yeah. So, essentially, you have a monkey that lives in your car and cleans it. The space that looks like the hood, it’s actually for the monkey to live in there. And so the monkey is in there and then when you’re charging your car a little light goes on and the monkey can come out of a little space that the monkey lives in and clean your car. So it can clean the inside of your car any given time but also keeps supplies in there, it can clean the outside of your car. It can wash your car while you’re in sleeping or doing something else. So that monkey can be a part of your car like an assistant for your car but just like has a little place to live. And so, it’s kind of everyone wins: the monkey gets a house; you keep your car really clean.

**”John”:** Great. So there’s a monkey in your car that cleans it. Terrific.

**”Craig”:** Where is the excitement there? I mean, this is an innovative business model here, John. I don’t understand why you’re not seeing the possibility here.

**”John”:** No, I do. I think that sounds great. A monkey is in your car and he cleans it.

Well, I also have One Cool Thing this week. Craig, you probably do a lot of sleeping.

**”Craig”:** I try to sleep about four or five hours a night if I can.

**”John”:** Well, honestly, that’s not quite enough, but I understand why because sleeping is time that we lose. It’s time that we could be spending on productive things with our family or on work or organizing. There’s a wonderful product that I purchased and it — are you smoking an electronic cigarette?

**”Craig”:** No, I’m not. I’m not. It’s nothing.

**”John”:** So it’s wonderful product that I purchased. It’s not particularly expensive but it’s really well designed and I have to give the designers credit. They’ve done a terrific job. It’s called the Standing Bed. It’s just like a regular bed, the mattress is like a regular mattress but it’s vertical. So when I sleep, I’m sleeping standing and it turns out this is much better for your joints.

The bed also comes with a built in alert system to help you organize your sleep. So your sleep comes in alpha waves and light sleep and REM sleep and dreaming sleep. And the bed tells you what part of the sleep you should be in. Naturally there are also some workspace areas that are ergonomically designed so that you can take care of things while you’re standing sleeping. It’s terrific and I bought one for everyone in my house. There’s an adjustment period but I think everyone is enjoying it.

**”Craig”:** Well, you talked about on the show before that like people think that I come from a lot of money but my parents were school teachers and this seems like the kind of thing that like if my parents could have afforded it would have been amazing for our house because it would have like it would have saved some space too, right? I mean, like, you don’t have to have the big floor space of like a bed being down. It could be like up. You could stick this in your closet.

**”John”:** Right.

**”Craig”:** I think it’s a great invention. I don’t see why everyone doesn’t do it.

**”John”:** No.

**”Craig”:** Between this and your apps, I just feel like you’re working all the time and I think this is good.

**”John”:** Yes.

**”Craig”:** John, one more thing. Happy April Fools!

*[They stop pretending to be one another]*

**Craig:** I can’t do it anymore. [laughs] It’s so hard. Happy April Fools. It’s so hard to be you. It requires an enormous amount of constraint.

**John:** Yeah. It does and maintaining that level of sort of like you string a lot of sentences together in a way that I just don’t do and so I did a poor approximation of you.

**Craig:** No, but it was good. I mean, you did a really good job and it’s much easier for me because I get to be just really calm.

**John:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Craig:** I actually wonder because I can’t tell if that made me more or less anxious. I can’t tell if that raised my blood pressure or lowered my blood pressure. Was it more freeing for you or did it raise your blood pressure?

**John:** Oh, it was absolutely, it was fine for me. I didn’t feel bad at all about this. What you actually described was a very close approximation of a thing that I would love.

**Craig:** The Standing Bed.

**John:** A standing bed. [laughs]

**Craig:** I know. [laughs] That’s like the worst possible thing I can imagine, a standing bed.

**John:** I was — I wanted, here’s the thing, is like I felt like I would have done the follow-up questions about it, like I would have been horrified about the monkey and so I had a whole like line of stuff like prepared for like — that John August being horrified about what you’re doing to this monkey.

**Craig:** I know, but the thing is like I never felt like — I think the most horrified reaction you ever give me is just to restate what I’ve said and then silence. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Because I was going to talk about like the monkey disposal and it was going to be great.

**Craig:** Oh, god, that’s pretty good. Well —

**John:** It was a whole organic thing.

Well, hello, and welcome to our actual podcast.

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** Today on the show we are going to be talking about how disruption affects TV writers —

**Craig:** And podcasts.

**John:** The process of getting a first draft done. And we’re going to answer a bunch of questions from listeners.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But first we have some follow up, on formatting, and oh, my god, this thread that I got thread-jacked into on Twitter. I just — I want — come on Twitter. Like, Twitter this last week put out an update that lets you like tag people and photos and stuff like —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** No, the thing I want you to do more than anything is to be able to like yank myself out of a thread and that I have no desire to be a part of.

**Craig:** You want an unsubscribe function.

**John:** So big. I want just that.

**Craig:** Yeah, every time I did this I just kept laughing because I knew that you were getting tweeted or tweets.

**John:** Because here’s the thing like this thread like this thread got so big that there were like five names in it, so literally, like people could put two words in addition to the thing. You couldn’t actually have a message —

**Craig:** That by the way —

**John:** Because it was all just jammed with the names.

**Craig:** That annoys me. Like I don’t understand why Twitter penalizes you for adding names on to something. Why should that eat into your message length?

**John:** What’s weird is that this last week, what they did with photo tagging, it no longer does count against it. So it’s just weird.

I suspect — I honestly think that Twitter names are going to vanish in this next year because they are confusing to new users and they’ll just get rid of them.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, in terms of just being incorporated in the messages like that.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, I just don’t understand why if I want to talk to five people why now I’m down to 14 characters. That’s just dumb.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Regardless. This is this debate that occurred, David Stripinis.

**John:** That’s what I’m guessing.

**Craig:** Stripinis, we’ll call him David, is a podcast listener and he works in the visual effects industry I believe.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And there’s also a guy named VFX Law who I’m guessing is a lawyer in the VFX business. And the two of them got quite umbraged over something that we had suggested doing as part of our hypothetical new screenplay format.

We talked about the idea that if say I were writing a scene and I wrote EXT. MOUNT RUSHMORE, that we would like that to be clickable. So if you clicked on that slug line, a little window would pop up or an image would pop up like a light box kind of thing and you could see an image of Mount Rushmore, in case people were unfamiliar.

Similarly, if I put something like music, Paradise by the Dashboard Light, if somebody clicked on that maybe they could hear a little snippet of it so they can go, “Oh, yeah that song.”

So these guys got super duper, duper upset and they’re super duper upset because they feel like this is a copyright infringement on the images that people are creating. That somebody takes a photo of Mount Rushmore; they put it on their website and now I’m basically taking it, making an illegal copy and embedding it into my screenplay and what’s worse, I’m profiting off of it by selling my screenplay with their image in it.

Now, my initial reaction was, hogwash, argle-bargle, foofaraw. And I say this as somebody that is obviously a believer in copyright because I create content myself. But my problem is that we’re not selling their images to anybody. We’re using them as reference, and this happens constantly throughout the day in any creative business. You’re constantly saying — well, here’s an image, an available image, something that has been made public by somebody. I’m showing this to you not because I’m selling this to you or representing it as my work but rather to say, “Like this. I may do something like this or this is what something looks like.” Not selling it.

And it occurred to me that this became really — I don’t know, it came really ridiculous to me when I started thinking about how this format would actually work because let’s say we’re all on our iPads and we’re all reading the new August-Mazin format on our iPads and it’s connected to the Internet.

And the way we’ve designed it with the reader that is involved is that if I tap on EXT. MOUNT RUSHMORE, essentially a browser window comes up. And the browser window is doing what browsers do, accessing images from somebody’s server somewhere. That’s what browsers do.

When you put an image on a web-hosting site, you are by default saying, you may view this through a browser. That’s okay. But if I embed the image itself somehow, that’s not okay, even though to the naked eye there is no difference whatsoever.

**John:** So let’s slice through this little part here, because you and I both had it both ways on this topic which is the difference between linking and embedding. So if we think back to the Tarantino scripts that Gawker got — Tarantino sued Gawker for his script. They are arguing, no, we linked to it, we didn’t embed it. And that’s actually — we weren’t violating copyright, we were just providing a link so viewers could find it. So I want to at least acknowledge the fact that that’s a complicated area that we sort of had both ways on.

**Craig:** It is and it isn’t, because with Tarantino’s screenplay and with the screenplay that you or I write or anybody’s screenplay, we have not put that screenplay ourselves on the Internet. It was stolen or it was put on the Internet by somebody who’s not authorized to do so. But let’s say David Stripinis has a website, I think he does, and there are images on that website. They are designed to be viewed by the public.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Anybody that writes a browser can view those including you or me.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** At some point, you have to ask if there’s no difference to the visible eye, then what’s the problem?

Well, technically, the problem is copyright is the right to make copies and you’re making a copy and that’s technically against copyright, so let’s talk about this aspect.

I started getting really annoyed by this whole thing because I just thought I was arguing nonsense. It just seemed minutia and it seemed ridiculous and one thing I know about the law is that it’s not as cut and dry as it’s supposed to be or meant to be. That in fact the law takes context into a consideration.

So I decided to talk to a lawyer. This isn’t somebody I know. I asked my attorney, who’s a great copyright attorney that you know, who would be willing to talk to me on a pro bono basis about a question that I have.

And he sent me the name of a guy that I — and I checked on, he’s top-notch. And I called him and I said, “Here’s what we’re talking about doing. The screenplay format and images that we either want to pipe in browser style or take the file from the Web and embed. The idea is that we would not be warranting that we created those images nor would we be publicly distributing those images. This would be for reference to show to people that we’re working for people we’re selling a screenplay to.”

And here’s what he said: Not a problem. He said, look, reference is a real thing especially when you’re talking about publicly available images. He said, if you were to take somebody’s raw image, if somebody took a photograph of Mount Rushmore and you got their raw data, their complete original image and you embedded that massive file into your thing, maybe somebody could possibly get you on that. But he said, there’s a lot of case laws establishing that things like thumbnails or degraded images, essentially compressed images of originals can be used for reference and, yes, it’s fair use. He said, fair use is vague. I mean, fair use is defined on a case-by-case basis. But he said, there are two issues to consider. There’s infringement and then there’s damages.

And he said, in the case of damages there are none. There’s no damage done here. If I walk into an office and I show them a printed out picture of your photograph of Mount Rushmore and I say, “Yeah, here, Mount Rushmore,” there’s no damage there because I’m not stealing anything from them nor am I pretending that it’s mine.

And he said, similarly on the infringement, he goes, look, on an infringement basis, assuming that, I mean, statutory damage is assuming that somebody had registered their work with a copyright obviously and all the rest of it and the rest of it. He said in the case that you’re describing, they would still just get laughed out of the courtroom. It’s stupid.

I mean, his point and my point was, as we discussed it, if I can sit in a conference and open up my laptop and show you the image from somebody’s website, then, frankly, I can show you the image from that website. He said, the things to consider for our format. And he said if you did this, you would be fine: Don’t use the original full resolution photographs that somebody did, but rather use compressed versions, thumbnails, those are sort of established as good reference.

If you can credit or notate from where they are, that is helpful. Place a general disclaimer at the top of the screenplay or the screenplay format that states that any image contained within is not authored by you nor is it for sale but rather for fair use as a reference and for the educational purposes of enlightening people as to what you’re talking about.

He said for music, he said in the case of music don’t play the whole song. That’s sort of the equivalent of don’t show the full res image. Play five or 10 seconds so people get a sense of it. But this argument that these guys have seems to be about something entirely different which is this fear that they’re going to get ripped off, specifically the fear that they’re going to create a work of art, a creative work of art, we’re going to look at it and then we’re going to basically steal it by changing a little bit of it and then putting it out there.

But I have news for them. If it’s on their website, then anyone can look at it right now and do that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What we’re talking about changes none of that.

**John:** Yeah, and that’s where I got most frustrated by this thread that I got sucked in to was that sense that, you know, we’re talking in a vague sense about this different kind of format and there’s this outrage about like, well, people are going to do this and they’re going to do these horrible things. It’s like, to me, it’s like, if you built a car, somebody could use that car to like run over people or to like drive liquor across state lines. There’s all these terrible things you could do with that new technology.

Well, it’s like, that’s not both the purpose of it but it’s also not the technology’s fault. It’s like we’re talking about like could a person commit copyright violations with something? Yes, they can do that with anything. They can do that with a photocopier. They can do that with any machine that can sort of duplicate anything, can create a copyright violation. That’s not what this is about whatsoever.

The other thing which I think that this has showed was like a — and this may have been partly, I wonder if this is sort of how where their head was at, is that, it’s very common when you’re pitching a project, especially if you’re a director pitching a project, to do what’s essentially called a rip reel.

And a rip reel is where you take existing footage from other movies and maybe some stuff you shoot yourself and paste it together to show this is what the movie feels like. This is how I would shoot it. This is what it looks like.

And if you’re doing a big VFX-heavy film, maybe you are actually grabbing a lot of sort of VFX stuff and maybe that is what they are pissed about is that that’s the kind of stuff that’s getting pulled and it looks like their work is getting used to make someone else’s movie. But it’s really, it’s getting that next person’s movie green lit. And it’s not the actual finished work. It’s just like a part of getting the job.

**Craig:** Right, and there’s this kind of bizarre thing where, like, “I got you that job.” No, you didn’t. Referring to something is referring to something. It’s not representing as yours.

The whole point is I didn’t do that. Everybody knows that in the room. If somebody goes and makes a presentation on the kind of movie they want to shoot and they take a clip from Big Fish or they take a clip from Hangover or whatever, why would I even care? I don’t even know it’s happening. It doesn’t matter. It’s not for the public. It’s not being sold.

They might as well be talking about it in their living room while they’re watching it. It’s ridiculous. Their argument is willfully oblivious to the way the world actually functions and has always functioned. And their kind of moral consternation that an image they make publicly available should be referred to without their expressed written consent is insane.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s insane. And also, not legally valid. So, there’s no legal argument there that they can stand on. There is absolutely no moral argument at all. I mean, again, I just want to draw the line between stuff the creator makes publicly available and stuff the creator gets stolen from them.

If you create an image in your house or on your computer that isn’t on the Web and somebody hacks into your computer and steals it or somebody that you give it to for private use publishes it online, that’s different. You got ripped off. You got hacked. And that was not your intention.

I understand that you’d want to withdraw that or pull that back, just as Quentin Tarantino didn’t want his script out there. But if you put it on your website, I mean, for the love of god, it’s out there in the world, people are going to talk about it. If I publish a screenplay online on a website, am I really going to be outraged when somebody goes into a meeting and hands somebody printed pages from it and says, “I like this scene, I’m going to write a scene like this.” That’s insane.

**John:** That is insane. So, to close this up, I would say, I think it’s appropriate to have moral and ethical outrage when someone takes work and represents it as their own when it was not their own. That, I don’t think anyone is going to argue about that. We’re just coming down on the side that using something as reference, saying like, we’re aiming for something like this is not the same as representing that as your work and there’s a clear distinction there.

There’s a video I put up on the site this week where Michael Arndt, our friend Michael Arndt, did this great talk about writing the first part of Toy Story 3. And so someone had tweeted a link about it and so I looked at it and I was like, oh, this is really, really great. I’m so surprised I haven’t seen it because this is like animated and like where is this is from.

And so then I checked the person whose YouTube thing it was on and it’s like, well, he obviously didn’t make this so like where is this from? And I couldn’t find it anywhere else. And so, that was a case where I felt really shady linking to it or putting it on the site because like I don’t know where this is from and this is clearly not some amateur thing.

So I wrote to Michael Arndt.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And said like where is this from? And he told me where it’s from. He told me it was an extra on the Toy Story 3 Blu-ray from a couple of years ago. He was cool with me doing it. Disney might not be cool with me doing it, and you what, if Disney’s not cool with it, I’ll just take it down.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But like it was a thing that can be out in the world and no one is getting ripped off here is the point. And I was making a moral choice about sort of what ethical choice about when I felt it was okay to link to it and when it wasn’t okay to link to it.

**Craig:** Yeah, nobody is getting ripped off and, frankly, you wouldn’t have even had that ethical choice if what you were considering was whether or not to show it to three people in an office and say, “What do you think of this?”

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** There would have been no ethical issue there whatsoever, just as there isn’t for our work. And I think that lurking behind all of this is this thing that we see in screenwriters far too often and apparently it’s the case with visual effects artists where they believe that they’re constantly being ripped off. Guess what? You’re ripping off people too.

Everybody is ripping everybody off to some extent. Copyright isn’t it a lock box where nobody can draw a werewolf anymore. We’re all allowed to draw our own werewolf and I’m allowed to look at your werewolf and say, “I like parts of this werewolf, I’m going to be inspired by that werewolf but I’m going to do my own werewolf.”

That’s life. That happens and everybody is like, you know, we just did this show where people are like, “Oh, my god, that’s my movie.” And similarly, “Oh, my god, that’s my…” and in the middle of this discussion, another person says, “Well, I’ve had my work ripped off nine times by a studio.” I don’t know what to say about that. That has nothing to do with what we’re talking about. We’re just talking about reference.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Reference! [laughs]

**John:** Reference.

**Craig:** Reference!

**John:** So we won’t get into it this week but next week I want to talk through what the actual format of screenplay like material looks like because we got a great length a listener sent in from Clockwork Orange.

**Craig:** Oh, I love that, yeah.

**John:** That showed like what his layout was on the page, which was bizarre and it was sort of more like what a stage play layout would be, but it was fine. It was like recognizable. You could see sort of what things were supposed to be. We should also talk about multi-cam, because I find multi-cam incredibly frustrating to read but that’s just my own bias.

So, let’s talk about some different way of laying stuff out on the page next week.

**Craig:** Right. So we’re going to do some questions now or we’re going to do some — ?

**John:** First of all, I want to talk about TV stuff.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** Because there were some great links that got sent through and it’s also very applicable to what’s happening WGA wise right now. So, TV, if you’ve watched TV in the last couple of years, you’ve noticed that things have changed. And so some of the big changes are, of course, the entrance of Netflix, and to some degree, Amazon — the dominance of one-hour dramas and especially in cable.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Especially on the HBOs and the premium channels. And with these new kinds of shows, seasons have gotten a lot shorter. So rather than 22 episodes, the classic model of TV was 22 episodes. Then they’d take a break during the summer and they’d come back in the fall and that’s how everything worked.

Now seasons are a lot shorter and I think as a viewer that’s going to be kind of great, and I think the quality has actually improved partly because of these shorter seasons.

The challenge is that it puts weird pressures on writers. So some of the pressures which were referenced in the email to Writers Guild members about the negotiations is that writers on TV series are being held under options of exclusivity for all the time that they’re not — that show isn’t running.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So you could have written, you know, on a show, you could have written a 13-episode order of a show. Nine months later, those episodes finally start airing and then six months later they finally decide like, “Oh, you know what? We’re going to order another season.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, that could have been a year that you were basically unemployed being held under contract in that original series.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re holding you for like you’re working on a 26-episode season or something but you’re really only working on a 13-episode season or a 9-episode season. That’s a problem.

**John:** Yeah, we’ll want to talk with the WGA people about that when the negotiations are finished. But two other interesting articles that came out this last couple of weeks that I wanted to talk through.

First is by Derek Thompson for The Atlantic who asked a provocative question, “Is House of Cards really a hit?” And the question is essentially we used to know what we meant by hit, which is basically how many eyeballs, how many viewers are watching that show and how is it growing week to week.

But when you have something like House of Cards on Netflix which is distributed all at once and a person can like binge watch all 13 episodes or space them out. They can watch them in any timeframe they wish to watch them in, it becomes much harder to say whether that show is a hit or not a hit particularly because Netflix has no obligation to reveal any of its numbers. It doesn’t have advertisers. It has no incentive to say this is how many people are watching it. It’s entirely a private decision.

**Craig:** Moreover they refuse to say.

**John:** Exactly. They refuse to say.

**Craig:** They know, they just won’t say.

**John:** And this is a question that, you know, back when Sue Naegle was running HBO, I asked her at lunch one day, it’s like, “Well, how do you figure out what shows to keep and what shows to not keep? Is it about by viewers?” She’s like, “Yes, but then also you survey, you figure out what show if we didn’t have people would cancel the service.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s essentially what Netflix’s decision is. It’s like, they want their House of Cards and their Orange is the New Black. They want a diverse slate so that, man, you’ve got to watch them. And so there’s at least one show there that you definitely want to watch and that you’re willing to keep subscribing to that show. So it’s just a very different way of thinking about what is a hit.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, for paid television of any kind or I guess you’d call it subscriber-based television, the only way to define a hit is something that the company is willing to renew.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And their criteria for that could be whatever they feel like including fancy, including critical acclaim, attract other artists that we’re interested in, profile, general company branding. It could be anything but when you’re talking about a subscription base or a model of any kind, eyeballs are completely irrelevant. If one person watches it, but it’s talked about constantly and your actors have their faces on the cover of magazines with your company name, it’s a hit.

**John:** It is a hit.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, I think the question should be. You’re a hit if you can get Entertainment Weekly to give you the cover and that to some degree is one of the qualifiers. If there’s a big enough segment of your possible viewing audience who desperately want to watch that show, you’re a hit.

**Craig:** Yeah, pretty much.

**John:** So the second article that was, from this last week, is also kind of about Netflix but it’s really about broadcast. And I found it really fascinating because it’s a question I’ve often had and sort of addresses that questions, which is why when you go to watch back episodes of a show in its current season can you only get the last five episodes. Because there’s been a lot of times where I would love to catch up on a show that people say is really great but you can’t actually get all of the episodes. They’ll only have a certain number of them out that are available for you to see.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Sometimes you can buy the whole — you can buy each of the episodes on iTunes but there’s no way to like on Hulu or Netflix to get stuff within the season.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so that’s called in-season stacking and it’s a fight between networks and studios. Studios basically don’t want to show you all of the season. They don’t want you to be able to get to all of the season at once because they want you to come back and watch it in reruns. Studios still want you to watch shows in reruns because that’s where they used to make their money.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Networks would be delighted to show you any episodes you want anytime you want as long as it’s going to keep building the audience for the show.

**Craig:** So let me ask you, what’s interesting about this? NBC wants to do in-season stacking and run the whole season but Universal television does not want that. What’s odd about that?

**John:** They are the same company.

**Craig:** They are the same company. Now, can someone explain this to me after all — I mean, look, it used to be easy. Studios couldn’t own networks and vice versa. There was Fin-Syn and all that and that then went away.

But now that they are all owned by the same parent company, I just don’t understand, I mean, why can’t they just figure this out internally. Why can’t ABC and Disney figure this out? Why can’t CBS and Paramount figure this out? I don’t get it.

**John:** Well, this article we’ll link to is by Marcus Wohlsen in Wired, and what it’s arguing, I think, ultimately is that even within a company, you have to recognize that the studio side has some different goals than the network does. And the studio is looking at this property for how do we get to — it doesn’t necessarily have to be a hundred of episodes anymore, but how do we make this show make us a lot of money both in broadcast right now but also at all the other markets after it’s been off the network TV. So they’re looking at this property in a very long-term space. The network is looking at this, you know, what do we do on a Monday night, what do we do on Tuesday night.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They kind of don’t care about the long-term value of something.

**Craig:** Well, I get that the individual fiefdoms have their priorities. At some point, some one ring to rule them all must be looking in a big picture way say, “Well, this is going to make us the most money in totality in the end, so this is what we’ll all do, so the other parts of you just shut up because this is what I’ve decided.” What was interesting to me was that, Netflix pays a ton, a ton for the right to do this in-stacking, in-season stacking and they basically said, “Look, if the networks start doing this, we’ll pay you much less.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And to that I could easily see the networks saying, “Yeah, we don’t care, because, you know, then theoretically, we’ll be getting more business and your eyeballs and make you less relevant.”

**John:** It’s the ongoing evolution of what is a network. Is a network a place that distributes tonight’s television or is a network a brand like HBO and these are all the shows within that brand? And as networks try to maintain their brand, that may be sort of where they’re going to. It’s like they want you to come to NBC to watch the NBC shows.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, I would have to say currently that there is no network that is a brand. No broadcast network is a brand. I don’t know what NBC stands for.

**John:** No, nor do I.

**John:** And they don’t stand anything. I mean, that’s the whole point of —

**John:** Yeah, Fox is probably the closest I can think of to a brand and they started kind of as a brand. But —

**Craig:** Are they? I mean, they’re —

**John:** Yeah, different nights are very different. It’s true.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think the whole point of broadcasting is we’ll give you everything. We’ll give you late night. We’ll give you a comedy. We’ll give you drama. We’ll give you 8 o’clock family stuff. We’ll give you 10 o’clock not family stuff. They do everything. And there’s so much content. Oh, and we’ll do reality and we’ll do news and we’ll do this and we’ll do that. They’re everything.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so, yeah, a supermarket can’t be a mom-and-pop store or a boutique. It’s just never going to work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, listen man, TV is just cuckoo nuts.

**John:** Cuckoo.

**Craig:** I can’t keep up.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to some questions.

First question comes from James and it’s actually a question about Courier Prime so I put it in here because I’m curious what your opinion is on this as well.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** James says, “I switched to Courier Prime several months ago and found it preferable to all the other versions. However, I’ve come across one aspect that has bugged me. This sounds awfully pedantic but I imagine in font design there is no such thing. I recently started working on an old script and the first thing I did was change the font from Courier Final Draft to Courier Prime. I always underline my scene headers and notice that the Prime underline is so close to the bottom of the text that they touch. In Courier Final Draft there’s a separation which I find to be much cleaner. I hope this is not perceived to be a criticism especially when it’s a free gift to writers.” So the question really is underlining. Do you underline in scripts, Craig?

**Craig:** Very rarely.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Very rarely.

**John:** So what situations do you underline?

**Craig:** If I really feel that there is a word that needs to be stressed but a reasonable reader would not know that it needs to be stressed, and I feel like an italic isn’t quite right, I will very occasionally throw an underline in there. And by the way, I use Courier Prime and I’ve never noticed an issue with where the underline is.

**John:** Yeah, I’ve never seen the touching either. So I’m sort of surprised that this is happening, but we’ll investigate and I’ll follow up with him about what his deal is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it could be that it’s a PC thing or there’s some other reason why that’s happening. I don’t underline very much at all but I do underline maybe once in a script if there is some line of scene description of action —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That if you missed it, like you’re going to miss a hugely important moment or thing. So it’s a way to stop skimming. It’s to give you that one underline.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But you do it too much, people are just going to stop paying attention.

**Craig:** Yeah, I guess, that’s exactly right. I will occasionally underline a line of action if it’s the big reveal or the Holy Crap moment. But I tend to use bold. I bold my slug lines. I would find that underlining to be really jarring to the eye. It would just become mush, page after page to see an underline slug line. I’m not a big fan of that. I will use italic more for emphasis then if I need to.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I try to avoid all that stuff anyway.

**John:** Courier Prime gives you a nice italic so you can use it when you need it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A question from Tony in Long Beach. “If you write a script using the existing property, not with the intention of selling it but as a fun exercise to show off skills, will anyone read it? Can you post it online or will you be sued for stealing other people’s ideas?”

**Craig:** So, getting back to our copyright discussion, you have without permission created a derivative work of somebody else’s work and now you’re putting it online and you’re putting it online with your name on it. Another copyright holder would absolutely have the right to call you and say, “Take that down.”

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You’re not allowed to do that without my permission. I did not put my work out there publicly for you. You’re not referencing it. You’ve made a derivative work. You have altered it and republished it publicly.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, yeah, no, I think that that’s a no, no.

**John:** Oh, I’m going to disagree with you. So I would say weirdly there’s a long tradition of people doing this. There was a Wonder Woman script that a guy just like wrote on spec and that Warner Bros ended up buying. There is classically Aliens vs. Predator, one of the first incarnations of that was just a spec script a guy wrote that sort of combined Aliens and Predators. So that does happen.

In a very general sense, people all the time will sort of do a spec adaption of a book. It’s not usually generally a well-known book but if it’s something they really like they’ll do it. But the standard caveats apply. You’ve written something that you cannot possibly sell and you’re going to have to publicly acknowledge at all points, like, I don’t actually own or control this.

And so, there’s a downside to it but all at the same time, I don’t want you to sort of not write the thing you want to write just because of those — I don’t — better to ask forgiveness than ask permission in some cases.

**Craig:** Well, I actually don’t think we disagree. I’m totally fine with the idea of doing a fan fiction script and handing it to a studio and saying, “Look, you might not want this, but if you like the writing, hire me to do something else.” You’re right. That happens all the time. It is high risk, high reward.

I mean, we talked to Kelly Marcel about when she was writing Saving Mr. Banks. They didn’t have Disney’s permission. They’re putting all this stuff in with not only Walt Disney as a character but it’s including songs from Mary Poppins. It’s about the writing of the songs and all the rest. They’re like, “We just don’t have permission. We’re going to write it and then we’ll give it to Disney and see what they say.”

The difference here is that this guy is saying, “I want to put it online.” That I don’t think you can do. I don’t think you can distribute your work publicly if it’s derivative of somebody else.

**John:** Craig, would you consider putting it up on Blcklst.com, just putting it online?

**Craig:** No, I think that you can make the argument that that’s essentially not public. In other words, that is a curated site that is subscribed to by individuals. It’s not like just literally putting it on the web for everyone to see with your name on. That’s where I think it might get a little dicey.

**John:** Yeah, I think you’re less likely to run into issues there. So I would separate this down to what is legally the correct, what is morally correct and what is practically correct. And so, legally, you are violating copyright doing that. They may not care about it, but you’re not in the clear.

**Craig:** That’s why I’m talking about this public stuff, because when you talk about this you have to ask, well, who has been damaged and how? If you publicly distribute this script across the entire Internet for anyone to read, you can make an argument that you’ve damaged my ability to — you’ve damaged my reputation because somebody thinks I’ve licensed this or you’ve damaged my trademark or my interest in this material because you’ve disseminated it widely, as opposed to putting it on the Black List where it’s quietly looked at and understood by professionals to be an example.

**John:** One example that comes to mind is it’s incredibly common in television to write spec episodes of shows. And so, that’s a classic way people get hired on things is to write an episode of CSI or to write an episode of Sleepy Hollow as a writing sample.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s done all the time.

**Craig:** Constantly.

**John:** So, in television you should never feel weird about doing that because that’s business as usual.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Our next question comes from Manchester, and so I’m not sure if that’s a person who lives in Manchester or a man named Chester. It could be any of these things.

But he or she writes, “Are there good, professionally-written scripts that you’ve read that might not do so well in a Three Page Challenge because, well, those first three pages just don’t work until you get to page four or five or six?

“As an example, pages one or two set up some sort of world, then page three changes that to a seemingly different world which is often inauspicious from your good writing perspective and it make good complete sense if you were to read page. I’m not suggesting that it’s okay to be unclear on pages one through three, and if you have some amazing reveal on page five and the rest is the best written script ever. Are there some good scripts that are simply not candidates for The Challenge? And if so, how would John and Craig describe this to people thinking about submitting?”

**Craig:** It’s a very good question. My instinct is to say no, that we are not looking at these three pages as needing to give us more plot or needing to give us any plot or any story. I have no problem if the world shifts suddenly and dramatically. I just want it to be good writing and I want it to be interesting. And I would think that any good script does have two interesting pages. For instance, we talked about The Social Network the other time, the other podcast.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it opens with dialogue. Just two people sitting at a table, in a bar, and a stream of dialogue, just ribbons of dialogue. But it’s so good. It’s just specific really good dialogue. I don’t think there’s any — I can’t imagine that we would ever look at the first three pages of a good screenplay and go, “What?”

**John:** Maybe not. So, people who are new to the show, there was actually an episode, we’ll figure it out and put in the show notes, where Craig and I did our first scripts and we did our first scripts as a Three Page Challenge. And that was revealing because they weren’t awesome and there was potential but there was also really a lot of problems in those first three pages.

And I guess, it might be interesting to take a look at the first three pages of some really good scripts and see what they’re doing and maybe make a special bonus episode where we just talk about some really good first three pages.

I can imagine there might be some scripts of movies that I ended up loving that I don’t know that I would have recognized that I would love them based on its first three pages. I think about the kinds of criticisms we often make in a Three Page Challenge, like, I don’t know what this movie is, I don’t know the world of this movie is, I don’t feel comfortable or grounded and that’s entirely possible. Like, I haven’t read the script for The Matrix, but there’s a lot going on in The Matrix and I wonder if after the three pages I might be like, “I don’t know what this is.”

**Craig:** It’s possible.

**John:** The world is big and crazy.

**Craig:** It’s possible, but I have to say that sometimes when we say, “I don’t know what the world is,” we’re not saying and we must always know what the world is.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think sometimes we’re just saying that the writer doesn’t know what the world is. What we’re picking up on is a lack of control over your own screenplay.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t mind not knowing stuff as long as I know you don’t want me to know it yet and that you want me to know what you’re showing me and what you’re showing me has purpose and is interesting in and of itself.

**John:** More than anything I would say, after reading a bunch of screenplays and a bunch of Three Page Challenges, you really quickly recognize good writing or you recognize a good writer. And that’s going to, no matter what is actually the content with those pages in some ways, you recognize like this person has a skill for slinging the words on the page and making me want to keep reading to the next page. I don’t think it’s innate. I think it’s a learned thing, but I think it’s a thing that some people are going to be great at and other people are not going to be great at and you can tell after three pages.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I have an actual One Cool Thing this week. Do you have an actual One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** Oh, god. No.

**John:** It’s all right. My One Cool Thing this week is a thing we started using here in the office. It’s called Slack and it’s kind of great. So it’s team management software but it’s really like chat software.

**Craig:** Just like the standing bed.

**John:** It’s just like the standing bed.

**Craig:** I really want credit. I nailed it.

**John:** You nailed it. It was great.

**Craig:** Nailed it!

**John:** So what Slack is for is basically any small group or any small project and especially software, you end up like emailing stuff back and forth a lot and you probably found this like in production, too, where like you’re constantly sending these little emails back and forth and you sort of lose track of emails and you sort of wish they could sort of all be grouped together.

This is sort of like chat software but for the small teams. And so, basically, everyone signs into this thing and it’s an app window that stays open in the corner. It’s also on your phone and you can just type in to these channels and like discuss things or drag in screenshots. You can talk through stuff. You can drag in links and it’s incredibly smart. And so now even like when on Twitter if someone tweets Quote-Unquote Apps that tweet shows up in there and we can respond to it immediately right there. It’s just genius. So it’s a subscription service. It’s all web-based and I thought it was just fantastic.

**Craig:** Well, that actually does sound pretty cool. I must admit. Although, I don’t have people that I have to do that with generally speaking.

**John:** And that’s where I would sort of stress is that it’s good if you are the right kind of small team. And so, like a small production would be fantastic for it. So, like where you have, you know, the AD needs to be able to talk to, you know, the production designer needs to be able to talk to the costume designer. Like that kind of stuff that needs to go back and forth really quickly would be fantastic for this kind of thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But for software, it’s just awesome.

**Craig:** For software, I can see it’s huge, yeah. Well, I guess, it’s funny, I realize now that I do have a One Cool Thing and it’s something that I forgot to turn on which caused me trouble in this podcast. When we’re doing the podcast and we’re recording, I don’t know about you but I’m not really — maybe you are because you’re looking at questions and stuff but I’m not touching my computer.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m not moving my mouse around. And like everybody, I’ve got my computer set to go to sleep or not go to sleep but if it’s not doing anything, the monitor will go off.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And like most people, I have a password on my computer, so now I got to put the password in or do the knock thing on the phone. It’s annoying.

And there is this tiny little app called Caffeine and it sits up in your menu bar. It’s for Mac OS. It’s just an empty coffee cup and then you click it and it’s a full coffee cup. When it’s a full coffee cup, it’s not going to go to sleep.

**John:** That’s brilliant.

**Craig:** Your computer won’t go to sleep. The display won’t go to sleep. It doesn’t matter. You can walk away for a year, it’ll still be on. And then when you’re done, you click it, coffee empty, it will go to sleep.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I forgot to fill my coffee cup, then I did and it works so elegant.

**John:** Yes. That is our show for this week. So you can find the links to the things we talked about in our show notes at johnaugust .com/scriptnotes. It’s also there you can find transcripts to all of our previous episodes.

You can listen to all the back episodes both there on the site but also through the Scriptnotes app for the iPhone and for Android, so check your app store. And weirdly, like a bunch of people have suddenly started using the app, so we get statistics and like it just went crazy hockey stick big, so whoever is using that and enjoying that, that’s great.

**Craig:** Perfect.

**John:** So the app is actually the best way if you want to listen to like really early episodes, you can do that. And Rawson Thurber actually emailed me saying like, “But I’d like the app but I want to be able to like download an episode for it so I can listen to it like while I’m on a plane or something.” You just tap the star. You tap the star and it downloads the episode.

**Craig:** Yeah, Rawson, tap the star.

**John:** Just tap the star. It’s actually completely unintuitive. We didn’t design the app but it’s out there.

**Craig:** God, Rawson, tap the star.

**John:** Tap the star.

**Craig:** Tap it.

**John:** But if you want to listen to some of the first hundred episodes or actually all of the first 100 episodes, we still have a few of those USB drives that have all 100 episodes so you can find those at the store.johnaugust.com.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel and edited by Mathew Chilelli who also wrote the outro for the show this week. So listen to that. If you have a question for me, you can write me at johnaugust or @johnaugust on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin.

If you have a longer question like the ones we answered today, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com and we occasionally open the mail bag and answer those questions.

**Craig:** [creepy Craig] Hey, John, that was a pretty good episode.

**John:** Thank you. I was going to try to do sexy Craig and I just couldn’t do it.

**Craig:** You don’t try to do sexy Craig, you just be sexy Craig.

**John:** And have a good week.

**Craig:** No, it’s terrible. You’re not doing it.

**John:** I’m not doing it. I’m not going to try to do it.

**Craig:** I know you shouldn’t try. You can’t try. Bye.

**John:** [attempts creepy voice] Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, no, that starts to sound like Beavis. That’s the least sexy thing I’ve ever heard. Shame on you John August.

**John:** Yeah. See you.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Tesla Model S](http://www.teslamotors.com/models)
* [Monkeys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey) on Wikipedia
* Standing beds by [Ernesto Neto](http://vectroave.com/2010/07/ernesto-neto-art-installations/ernesto-neto-art-installations-4/) and [Jamie O’Shea](http://www.gizmag.com/vertical-bed/20209/)
* The [Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/davidstripinis/status/448920986050899968) on linking to media
* [Fair use](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use) on Wikipedia
* [Is House of Cards Really a Hit?](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/is-i-house-of-cards-i-really-a-hit/284035/)
* [Netflix and In-Season Stacking](http://www.wired.com/business/2014/03/netflix-wants-keep-binge-watching/)
* Scriptnotes, Episode 58: [Writing your very first screenplay](http://johnaugust.com/2012/writing-your-very-first-screenplay)
* [Slack](https://slack.com/)
* [Caffeine](http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/) for OSX
* The Scriptnotes App for [iPhone](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scriptnotes/id739117984?mt=8) and [Android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.johnaugust.android.scriptnotes)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/world-building).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hey, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 135 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, how are you?

**Craig:** I’m all sexy, John.

**John:** Oh, no, you cannot keep doing that voice. That voice has to stop right now.

**Craig:** Because it’s making you uncomfortable?

**John:** Yes. Even through Skype it’s just making me really uncomfortable. Can you imagine if people did that to you in like real life?

**Craig:** I think it would be spectacular. And I’m kind of puzzled why people don’t do it more often to me.

**John:** There’s a lot of things that puzzle me. But we won’t solve all those questions today, but we will talk about some things that are good for us to talk about. Craig, we’re going to finally talk about True Detective.

**Craig:** Yes. Finally we can because the finale aired and we can’t get yelled out.

**John:** Exactly. So, we’re going to do that at the end of the show, so it’ll be the last topic so you can — if you’ve not seen True Detective and you don’t want to listen to us talk about True Detective we will get to that point and we will say, “Now we will start talking about True Detective,” and you can just stop listening. And then you won’t be spoiled for anything we’re going to say, because we’re going to spoil everything.

**Craig:** Everything.

**John:** But also today we’re going to talk about the situation where you have written something and then you see it in a movie and it’s like, wow, that is so much like the movie I just wrote. We’re going to talk about that and specifically how it’s often not related at all. Sometimes just ideas are out there and there’s a good example that just came across our desk.

And you also wanted to talk about world-building, didn’t you?

**Craig:** Yeah. That was something that someone brought up on Twitter and I thought, wow, that’s a really good topic and one that I think I can kind of quiz you about because I think just based on the movies you’ve done you’ve had more experience with that than I have.

**John:** Cool. So, we’ll talk about all those things.

First off, though, we have a bit of news. I will be hosting a panel on Saturday July 12 at the Writers Guild Foundation — for the Writers Guild Foundation and the Austin Film Festival. Our own Kelly Marcel will be with me and Linda Woolverton and we’re going to be talking about moving from the first draft to the final feature film, that whole how do you get from inception to a completed thing. This is part of one of those whole day WGF things they do. I think when you and I did that Three Page Challenge thing.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It’s that same kind of event. So, it’s a whole day where you’re buying a ticket for the whole big thing, so you can’t just buy one little section. You have to buy the whole thing. But if you would like to come see me, and Kelly, and Linda Woolverton on July 12 you can do that. There will be a link to that in the show notes.

My second bit of news is that Weekend Read just came out as we’re recording this, so it’s out in the App Store right now, and among the other things it includes is all the scripts to Rian Johnson’s films. So, he was nice enough to give us all his scripts.

We have the entire first season of Hannibal. Plus, we have the transcripts to every episode of Scriptnotes is now inside Weekend Read.

**Craig:** Whoa!

**John:** So, if you have not gotten Weekend Read, if you have not upgraded to Weekend Read do so now because it’s free and it’s in the App Store.

**Craig:** Great deal.

**John:** Great deal.

**Craig:** Great deal.

**John:** You had some follow up I saw in the notes.

**Craig:** I did. Yeah. We had a discussion I think in our last podcast when we were answering lots of questions. And we had a question from one listener about — well, actually, I don’t even recall what the question was that led me to the answer I gave. But we got a follow up question or response actually from one of our listeners named David Maguire.

And we will get these very nice letters every now and again, but this one I thought actually was worth sharing with everybody because one of the things that I’m always trying to put out there in the world is that your individual problems as a screenwriter are not in fact uncommon. Most of us share them, if not all of us. And I like this letter so much I thought I would read it. And so David gave us permission to go ahead and read it.

And he wrote, “Hey John and Craig, I’m an avid listener of your podcast and love that content you provide. Being an aspiring screenwriter your words are weighted for me and provide guidance for how I should move forward. Gushing aside,” and, now this is me — feel free to gush as long as you want. You know, when you guys write in, do it. Just gush.

**John:** Just paragraphs. Just gush.

**Craig:** “Hey, how you doing, I’m Craig Mazin.”

**John:** Craig’s a gusher.

**Craig:** Oh, so gross.

“Gushing aside, I wanted to comment on what Craig said during your last episode, Lots of Questions. He was answering a letter from a screenwriter who had just had surgery,” oh that’s right, now I remember. This was the very tragic question that we got.

“The screenwriter just had surgery, lost a relationship, and was deciding to focus on his screenplay and have that be his golden ticket. Craig said that you shouldn’t put all of your hopes in one script as it creates — and I am paraphrasing — an unrealistic expectation and stress. I found this bit of advice to be really what I need.

“Recently I found myself going to a pitch slam down in LA.” John, you’re familiar with these pitch slams?

**John:** Yes. I love a pitch slam, don’t you?

**Craig:** I mean, I super love it. [laughs]

**John:** I don’t love it at all.

**Craig:** No, me neither.

**John:** My sarcasm might not be coming through. I find them incredibly frustrating. But, maybe they’re helpful for some people, so keep reading.

**Craig:** For those of you out there, you show up at these things and you pitch stuff really fast, just lines of people, and it’s kind of like speed dating for screenwriting, and frankly I find the whole thing very disturbing.

“So, having no real idea of what that experience would be like, I went down there with an idea, no complete script, and a hope that my charm would wow them. Sadly, that did not work. The first session I watched said unless you have a near finalized script you shouldn’t be here. At that point I felt about two feet tall and foolish, but wanting to have the full experience I sucked it up and went to the pitch slam only to be rejected at every table except for one.

“A small production company told me that they didn’t want my half-realized drama and that they did action movies or horror movies, or even family-friendly action movies as they were more profitable. He gave me a card and said call him. I get home and I start trying to pull a story together under the idea that they are interested and want to work with me. So, I need to make this script a reality.

“After quickly outlining I got to start writing and I can’t — I just can’t seem to be happy with the script. That discourages me. And then that discourages me even further that I can’t get something out and I feel like this opportunity is slipping away. But Craig’s advice helps alleviate that stress and worry. And I suddenly realized that I like to write not so that I can make buckets of money, but because I like to tell stories. So, while it may be awhile before I get the action story figured out to a point where I feel comfortable with it, at least I’ll know I’m writing it for me and not for money.

“I’m sorry to drone on,” well, that’s never stopped me or John. “I’m sorry to drone on but I just wanted to say how appreciative I am for you guys and your show. Thanks, David Maguire from San Jose, California.”

And thank you, David, for writing. What a brave thing for you to write. And, also, pinpoint something that never goes away. It doesn’t matter where you are at any stage of the game. And that is this feeling like you have to write something to make somebody else happy so that you’ll be a writer, so that you’ll feel better about yourself. And unfortunately down that pathway is much danger and trouble. Trouble, I think. What do you think, John?

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s also a classic example of putting your self-esteem in the hands of somebody else. In this case the “somebody else” being that person you’re pitching to, or this person who expressed some interest in your idea and said like we’ll do it this other kind of way and then we might like it.

The minute you sort of hand off how you feel about yourself to somebody else, you’ve really weakened your position. You’re unlikely to have good outcome if you are putting how you feel about yourself in somebody else’s hands. And that’s a good lesson for work, but it’s also a good lesson for life. I think a lot of times in our personal relationships we tend to put way too much pressure ourselves and other people for how we’re going to perceive ourselves. And that’s not helpful and it’s not good.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well put. You really don’t want to give anybody that gun. And they will play the game where obviously it’s to their advantage in some ways to have some sort of power over you. I think what a lot of buyers don’t realize is that by doing that they have probably made the person they want work from that much worse of a writer.

It’s very hard to write for somebody else. We have to find a way to find common ground and an agreement with somebody else and then we write for ourselves. There’s no way around it.

**John:** And what I would stress is that you never really outgrow this. You may become more aware of when you’re doing it, but you won’t stop doing it. And that’s both as being the person who is putting yourself in these positions where you are fixated on what someone else is going to think. That still happens to me. It happens to me every — not every day, but every week. And especially the stuff I’m working on because I really want people to love it. And there are certain people who I want to love it.

Sometimes I’m just more aware now of not trying to please the people who kind of don’t matter in a strange way. So, to me that’s like I’m not going to knock myself out to please this junior executive on something because while she may be lovely she’s not the real opinion leader in this situation.

But I also find it, and tell me if you find this also, Craig, is that now more people are sort of working with you and for you, sometimes you recognize they’re trying to please you. And I don’t ever want to make someone feel like pleasing me should be their end all goal in life.

And so as we work on stuff there may be times where people are bringing us things and I try to always stress to them that like this isn’t working for me here right now, or this isn’t quite what I’m looking for. That doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. That doesn’t mean you did bad work. It’s just not what I need right now.

And that’s a useful thing I’ve tried to do more of as I’ve been working with other folks is to make sure that they understand that in no way should this reflect how I think of them as a person. It’s just like this is not what I need right here at this moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m the same way. I have no problem saying, listen, I don’t want to spend the time writing that because I don’t know how to write it or my heart is not in it. Somebody else’s heart will be in it and they’ll do something great.

You know, every time I pass on something I say, “I’ll see you at the Oscars with this,” [laughs] because I always feel that I passed on it, someone else is going to do it. They’re going to do it brilliantly and I’ll watch them at the Oscars. And I’ll be happy with it because it wasn’t for me. We can’t be everything to all people, nor should people feel the same towards us.

I will say that when it comes to listening to people, I don’t really — I never really concern myself with who matters. I only concern myself with who is right. If somebody — I don’t care who it is. If the lunch lady gives me an insight that I think is going to help me make my script better, I’m going to take it.

So, what I’ve done is I’ve tried to just tune out the fact that these are all people that I should somehow be pleasing and tune in just the content of what they’re saying. And then making decisions on the content, as if I were receiving these things over the wire as anonymous messages — what about this? What about this? What about this? And I go, well, no to that, no to that, yes to this, no to that, no to that.

**John:** Absolutely a great point. And you have to consider — when I’m saying like which notes I’m sort of I feel fine ignoring form sometimes a junior executive at this point in my career, it’s that there are sometimes you get feedback that you’re going to have to do something with even if it’s just to reject it. For certain other stuff I just let it sort of roll past and I don’t even sort of pay attention to it as much anymore. Because I’m always aware of the end of this is to get to something — to get to a great movie. And so if that note is helping me get to a great movie, I’m delighted to hear it.

If it’s going to be a note that’s going to get in my way of making a great movie, unless it’s from somebody who I really need to worry about, I don’t worry about it so much. And in people’s normal life, before they’re dealing with that, it may just be your friend who read the script who just didn’t get this one thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it’s good to listen to it, but that doesn’t mean you have to address everything that everybody says.

**Craig:** That’s right. In the end you have to be the one doing it and this is — I’m sure you’ve had the experience of writing something where you realized at some point I am not writing this for me anymore. I’m writing this either to make somebody stop yelling at me or to make somebody else happy, but not me. And it’s gross.

**John:** It’s gross and yet sometimes it’s necessary, because sometimes you recognize that you are link in the chain and you are not the final arbiter of what’s going to happen. And you have to make those decisions about whether to keep working on this in that capacity.

**Craig:** Right. Great.

**John:** Well, one thing we’re going to work on in a small capacity, in a five-minute capacity, we talked on the last show about this idea of what would a screenwriting format look like if we were to start from scratch, if we weren’t beholden to everything that had come before and wanted to do something from the ground zero. What would it be like?

And so you and I emailed back and forth this week, but you proposed like let’s just talk about it on the air. And I think it’s a great thing to talk about on the air, yet I don’t want it to take over the entire show. So, my proposal is that we will talk about it for exactly five minutes and then we will stop.

**Craig:** What if we don’t take up the whole five minutes? [laughs]

**John:** If we don’t take up the whole five minutes then everybody wins.

**Craig:** Then we vamp.

**John:** All right, so tell me when to start.

**Craig:** Start.

**John:** Go.

**Craig:** Okay. So, one thing that we’ve been talking about is getting away from the idea of pagination entirely. Thank you Final Draft. You inspired us. The idea being that until you are actually on set and handing out sides, which is something that happens at the tail end of a minority of development projects, everybody is reading the screenplay on some sort of device: a laptop, or a tablet, or a phone in this case.

So, one thing we wanted to do was get away from pagination because it’s irrelevant to that. We wanted to get away from pagination because it sort of is an old school physical object thing that no longer has meaning on a computer. We wanted to get away from pagination because the rule of one-page per one-minute is nonsense. And everybody knows it’s nonsense. Even if you think it’s real, you’re still stuck between screenplays that run roughly between 90 to 130 pages, which means that the page length is pointless anyway.

And we wanted to find something that is more useful in terms of how to actually break a screenplay up into pieces that matter, not 8.5 x 11 pieces, but purposeful pieces. John?

**John:** So, when we’re talking about breaking into purposeful pieces, the natural breaks would seem to be sequences and scenes. So, a sequence is a collection of scenes that tell a certain portion of a story. And a lot of times when we’re talking about a sequence sometimes they’re comprised of very short little scenes. So, if it’s just a few lines — a scene header and a few lines — it’s not really a scene in and of itself. And so sequences may be a good logical way of thinking about the breaking down of stuff.

The goal would be that even if you’re writing the document all as one flowing thing it can easily be broken apart into these pieces. And so as stuff gets moved around it can be recompiled into a full document again if someone wants to look at it as a full, more like a conventional script.

**Craig:** Right. So, the idea of the sequence is that we get away from orienting the screenplay around scenes based on locations. The reason that that happens is because in production people need to know is this inside or outside. Am I building something? Am I waiting for the sun to go up or down? And all the rest of it.

But in development that’s not quite as important. What is important is sequences. That’s actually the building block of storytelling, not whether I’m in a house and then I walk outside. If it’s all one motion and it’s all one sequence, narrative sequence, then that really is the building block. So, we want to get away from scenes in a weird way. We don’t have a problem with the idea of locations, but the word scene isn’t serving us as well as we think sequence would.

We also want to be able to deliver a format that is modern. So, music cues are clickable and playable while you’re reading. Sound effects are clickable and playable. Locations are clickable and visible. We want to be able to give people who are reading the context that they need.

If you describe something and there’s a great YouTube video that explains it perfectly, click it. And show it and watch it.

**John:** Yeah. So, what we’re ultimately describing here I think is a database that consists of the text elements of what the written screenplay is like, but also keyed up to each of these scenes or sequences can be additional information. And that already kind of exists.

As a film goes into production it is broken down. It is literally broken down into little strips, little bits of scenes that you would shoot. And that kind of information is stored along with that. So, it’s a different person that comes in and does all that work, usually the first AD and the line producer do all that work of breaking it down into these are the key components of what happens in this sequence and then storyboards are generated off of that based on those scene numbers.

That kind of stuff is there. It would be a way of here’s the text part of it and you can also flow through and see everything else that goes with it. And there should be a smart way to do that. If you are not bound by paper, that’s a thing you could very easily do.

**Craig:** How much time do we have left?

**John:** We have one minute.

**Craig:** Okay, great. One last thing. People are going to get freaked out by this get rid of pages thing. And I understand why.

First of all, we’ll have a solution for production. We understand how to do that because we work in production. But putting that aside for now, what people get scared about is how long is the script — what does that even mean? It doesn’t matter how long the script is. All that matters is how long the movie is.

Let’s first accept that, A, we don’t know how long the movie is going to be based on the script. We see that all the time when we turn in 100-page scripts and we hear that it’s actually a two-hour movie. Or when you turn 130-page scripts and we hear that it’s actually an hour and a half.

So, don’t worry about that. And also, I have to say, I think that we now have an inherent understanding of how long a movie is going to be based on just reading it. We get it. We have an internal clock running of our own. What matters is not some arbitrary number length, but how our interest is held. As such, by getting rid of pages we can also start doing things like using better fonts instead of stupid Courier.

**John:** Yeah. Which gets into the actual formatting on the page, which can be part of our next conversation because we’re down to 10, 9, 8…oh, we also have a way to do logical pages so we can still calculate page length if we have to. And 2…and…

**Craig:** And better revision marks. Excellent.

**John:** And we’re done.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** That was five minutes.

**Craig:** Terrific.

**John:** So, Craig, let’s get onto our new topics for this week.

Now, I had a blog post that was up about two weeks ago where it was actually a first person post. And a guy wrote in saying about his experience where he lives in China someplace and he had watched a trailer for a movie and went, “Oh my god, that’s the premise of this movie I wrote.” A script he’d written that had never gotten any traction. He sent it around by never got any traction.

So, he watched this trailer and is like, “Oh my god, what am I going to do?” And he was writing to me really with the question of should I watch this movie? What do I do? I’m freaked out. And so in the time between when he saw the trailer and I answered his letter he watched the movie and said, “It was bizarre watching it because it was the same premise but like kind of every choice they made along the way was vastly different.”

And so this thing where he originally thought like, I’m going to sue, he realized like, well, that’s crazy town. So, a thing came up this week that I thought was really fascinating so I wanted to read some things aloud. So, I’m going to read you the premise of two TV shows.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And I want you to try to keep them straight. So, TV show number one: “This series follows the residents of a small town whose lives are upended when their loved ones return from the dead, un-aged since their deaths. Among the returned is Jacob Langston, an 8-year-old boy who drowned 32 years earlier. Having somehow been found alive in China, he is brought back to America by an immigration agent. His surprise return inspires the local sheriff, whose wife presumably drowned trying to rescue Jacob to learn more about this mystery.”

That is the first TV show.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So, having heard that —

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** A second TV show: “In a small mountain town many dead people reappear, apparently alive and normal. Teenage road accident victim Camille, suicidal bridegroom Simon, a small boy named Victor who was murdered by burglars, and Serge, a serial killer. They try to resume their lives as strange phenomena occur. Amongst recurring power outages, the water level of the reservoir mysteriously lowers revealing the presence of dead animals and a church steeple. And strange marks appear on the bodies of the living and the dead.”

Two separate TV shows. Do you recognize either of these premises?

**Craig:** Well, to me, I immediately think of Pet Sematary.

**John:** Yes, oh yeah, Pet Sematary, the great Stephen King.

So, these are two TV shows that are currently on the air, which is what’s crazy.

**Craig:** Oh, I don’t watch TV, so —

**John:** One of them is called Resurrection and it’s on ABC. The other one is called Les Revenants, it was a French show that is now being aired on Sundance as The Returned. I dare anybody from a distance to tell those two shows apart. They sound really similar, don’t they?

**Craig:** With the exception of the occult baked into the second one? Yeah, I mean, basically it’s a small town where dead people are returning.

**John:** Yes. There’s water imagery in both. There’s a returned kid in both.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, here’s what’s crazy — the French show, Les Revenants, is based on a 2004 French film, so that’s back from 2004. They made a TV series that was based on this old French film. Resurrection, the show on ABC, is based on a book called, confusingly enough, The Returned, which is by Jason Mott, which is what the Sundance show version of the French show is called.

**Craig:** Okay. That is confusing. They’re sharing titles now.

**John:** So not only are they similar premises, but the title of one book is actually the title of the other series in English.

I bring this up because if you were to look at these from a distance you would say like, “Well, clearly one is based on the other.” They’re largely the same idea, and yet they’re not at all the same idea. Like there’s no lawsuit happening between these two because they’re actually separate ideas, and yet they’re so incredibly similar.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. Well, as always, the idea itself you can’t sue over anyway, so the question is what is unique about how they spool out. And this doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. In the slightest.

**John:** And yet every time I see one of these things about somebody is suing Tom Cruise for Mission Impossible 3, that’s exactly my idea. Well, like, was your idea as specific as the dead returning to life in a small town and everyone is freaked out by their loved ones coming back? That’s a pretty specific idea. And then you add in like, oh, these people drowned, there’s water imagery, and the same kind of sheriff. And that seems incredibly specific and it seems like, well, no two people in a vacuum could have come up with the same idea, but they did.

And you even said it. The first thing you thought of was Pet Sematary.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course. If you want to go back further, let’s go back to the bible when Jesus comes back from the dead. Coming back from the dead is not special. Coming back from the dead is a deep-seeded old, old animal-brain desire of humans.

Death is confusing to us. It is a repudiation of the logical sense of the world. It is absurd. Naturally people have sought to cheat death forever, and so the theme of the dead walk again has been done billions of times in so many different ways. And you just start looking down a list of things and you realize not only is it common, it’s like you can’t get rid of it. Frankenstein. And every ghost story. People are constantly coming back from the dead. Reincarnated, and da-da-da-da.

It’s natural. You write something. Writing something is an act of — an extraordinary act of ego. I dare to create something and put it in the world, create something unique. It is my expression. And it is therefore somewhat expected that the person would allow that ego to slop over to, “And nobody else could have possibly done it.”

**John:** Well, here’s the thing, it was an original idea to you.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It was the first time you’d ever had that idea.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so in our solipsism it always seems like, well, it’s the first time I ever thought of that idea, so it must be the first time anyone ever thought of that idea. And even if we kind of know that’s logically unlikely, it still feels kind of right because we can only have our own experience.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** There’s a Slate article that I’ll also link to in the show notes that they talk though the other shows that is surprisingly very much like.

There’s a 2002 Japanese film called Yomigaeri where the dead are mysteriously resurrected in the city of Aso and then investigated by a representative from the Japanese Ministry of Welfare as they attempt to reintegrate into society.

There’s also In The Flesh, a BBC 3 series in the fictional village of Roarton, Lancashire.

And there’s Babylon Fields, which is a CBS pilot a few years ago that now NBC is doing a pilot that is a similar kind of idea.

So, that’s just an idea that’s out there. It’s like an asteroid hitting the planet idea. It’s going to keep recurring.

My frustration over New Girl and that whole crazy lawsuit, like, “Oh my god, it’s a girl and there’s three guy roommates.”

**Craig:** That was the worst.

**John:** It just drives me crazy. And I just thought this was a great demonstration of sort of how the same idea can occur multiple times.

**Craig:** Not only in what we do, but in science. I’m trying to think, it was Newton and I think it was, was it Leibniz? Two people separately at the same time came up with calculus.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Which is insane.

**John:** Which is crazy.

**Craig:** It’s crazy.

**John:** It happens.

**Craig:** It happens. Look at what happened at the beginning of the AIDS crisis. The French team and the American team both working on trying to isolate the cause of AIDS and both sort of oddly simultaneously in a weird way coming up with HIV. Granted, that’s a complicated story, but these things happen. There’s a time for ideas to come forth. They are affected by all sorts of things. We don’t walk around in isolation. We pick up cues from the world.

But more importantly I want to single in on something that you said which is you having an original idea doesn’t make it the only possibility that someone else can have that idea. If two people think of something apart from each other, in isolation from each other, it is original to them. And that can happen. And we shouldn’t think that our idea is so — do you know how hard it is to come up with an idea that not one of the other, I don’t know how many humans have lived, 80 billion humans. I mean, really?

**John:** Well, it’s misleading because while it’s entirely possibly to come up with an original sentence, the pure number of possible sentences in the world is essentially infinite. Like you could come up with an original sentence, but an idea is both so amorphous and so specific.

The elements of this thing, like I’m going to combine these elements in a way that no one else will ever think of — well, no you’re not. I mean, it may be that no one else has published that idea yet, but someone else has sort of come up with those building blocks.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** A good example is let’s take baby names. Because what’s always so surprising to people is like how did that name become so popular, like where did that come from? And if you ask any individual parent they’re like, oh, it just suddenly came to me. Like I have no idea why that name came to me, but like why is it now in the top ten of all names?

Well, it’s because it was out there in the universe. It was going to happen. That’s why suddenly there are Madisons. There weren’t Madisons before. Why did it show up? Because it showed up. It’s the thing that it snowballed and it happened.

**Craig:** Splash.

**John:** Well, Splash, that’s actually a bad example because Madison is probably coming from Splash.

**Craig:** Yeah, but then again, it’s like, okay, so they named her Madison because he looked at the sign for Madison Avenue and then people pick up on that. But a lot of people who name their kid Madison, they’re just naming their kid Madison because they might have heard somebody named Madison somewhere who then is derived from Splash and so on and so forth.

And it’s okay. I mean —

**John:** It’s fine.

**Craig:** Honestly, if you’re going to come up with an idea that is interesting to millions of humans, it needs to be universal. It needs to have some piece of borrowed tradition. I mean, look, this particular example, you’re talking about dead people coming back to life. Perverting and overcoming death, right off the bat — you just start with death. Okay, well, there’s 14 million ideas. All right, well what about people that used to be dead but now they’re back. Now you’re down to like four million ideas. It’s just so — it’s such a typical area for drama because it’s dramatic.

Death is dramatic. Sex is dramatic. Violence is dramatic. Love is dramatic. Children are dramatic. Parents are dramatic. How could we possibly ever come up with one of these things and think to ourselves and no one has ever thought of this before? The idea isn’t what matters anyway. It’s what you do with it.

**John:** I agree. And really what this comes down to is your premise is based on the world is normal except for one thing, which is really what this premise is. You’re going to find a lot of overlap.

And I think that’s a great segue to our second topic which is world-building, which is how do you build the universe in which your story takes place, whether there is one thing that’s different or everything is different like some of these shows have happened.

Some of these shows create these universes that are so amazing and different and detailed and complex. And yet they have to have some grounding in our understandable emotional reality or they don’t make any sense at all. You can’t make heads or tails of them.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, let’s talk about some world-building.

**Craig:** Well, what interests me about the phrase — I think first of all let’s define our term if we can. Every time you sit down and you write a screenplay you’re world-building. You are — even if you’re telling the most mundane mumblecore story of two people in Brooklyn having a series of discussions over coffee, you’re building a world. You’re populating it with people. And you’re picking where you want to go.

But, where I think the term is typically used and where it’s valuable is in a story where you are creating a world that is not like ours. You are — it is a fantasy world or it is a science fiction world, a vision of the future, or a vision of long, long ago. So, part of the value for the person watching the movie is that they are entering a world that is not like ours. That even the mundane things in this world like buildings and language and weaponry and religion have changed dramatically, or are dramatically different from ours, and that’s part of the fun of it.

So, for instance, if you were to write Lord of the Rings, or if you were to write Star Wars, or if you were to write Her, you’re world-building. And that’s something that you’ve done because I know you did Titan A.E., which was science fiction and world-building, right?

**John:** Yeah. Absolutely. And pretty much all the Tim Burton movies have a huge world-building component.

**Craig:** Exactly. Right. All the Tim Burton. Because Tim Burton likes to basically say come into the world of Tim Burton.

**John:** Exactly. And even to some degree I would say the Charlie’s Angels movies, they take place in this heightened sort of it’s always sunny, shiny California universe that is very specific. And there are things that can fit into a Charlie’s Angels universe and things that can’t fit into a Charlie’s Angels universe, the same way certain things can fit into a Lego universe or Muppet universe and couldn’t in other universes.

So, yes, anything that doesn’t take place in a really readily identifiable place, there’s going to be some component of world-building.

**Craig:** And so when you sit down, John, and you know that you’re telling a story in a world that you have to build, my guess is you have at least some basic understanding of what the dramatics of the story are. They will involve human beings who have problems — problems are really built. Problems are problems we’re all familiar with. But when you think about designing this and building this world, how do you go about doing it?

**John:** I think it starts with a visual ideal of what it would look like to be inside that world. And what it would look like both with your eyes, but what it would feel like to be inside that world. And with the changes from a normal world to this world, how would everything else flow out of that? And so if you are in a universe where Corpse Bride, where you’re in the land of the dead, and everything is incredibly colorful, everything is sort of the opposite of sort of what you think death is supposed to be like. What is a restaurant like there and what would they serve.

You’re having to figure out all these details. And you start — that’s actually the most fun part of any screenwriting for me is all that figuring out what the world is like. The challenge is that you figure out these details and most of them you’re never going to use. Most of them are things that are just over on the edges and you will never actually see any of those things, because really the experience can only be what could our hero encounter or interact with.

If you’re in WALL-E you’re going to see everything from WALL-E’s point of view. So, WALL-E is interacting with trash. And, well what is the trash? Where does trash come from? What is the world like? What does WALL-E do when he’s not working? Answering all of those questions is letting you build your character’s story, but also define the limits of what we’re going to see about the world and the universe.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that when I watch a movie that has built a world sometimes it’s the small unremarked upon details that bring me the most joy. I remember when I saw Star Wars as a kid, when they go to the Cantina in Mos Eisley, just the way the drinks looked and everything, the glassware, you know. That there were these little things and world-building really is a — when they talk about film being a collaborative medium, it’s not as collaborative as people think. I always think that really it’s a directed medium. That people — the writer and the director — create a set of marching orders. And then it is an executed medium where people serve that.

But when you talk about world-building, everybody gets to kind of pitch in and design things from costumes, to hairstyles, to — I mean, everybody noticed the pants in Her. That is a nice built detail that nobody ever says, “Boy, I really like the way these pants turned out in the year 2040.”

**John:** To me an even more specific detail in her that was just so spot-on terrific is that Joaquin Phoenix is walking around with Scarlett Johansson’s character in his pocket, the little camera in his pocket. And so that she can see he has a little safety pin in his pocket, in his shirt pocket so that the camera is up high enough so that she can actually look and see what he’s seeing. It’s such a small little detail, but it’s so terrific and important. It’s not remarked upon in any way by the movie, but you say like, “Well why does he have a safety pin there?” It’s like, oh, so that the phone is high enough that she can see. It’s such a smart little detail.

**Craig:** Yeah, which also goes to the notion that you don’t want to overkill it. That when you build a world you are asking people to enjoy the things that are different, but not to the extent where nothing is the same. You can start to fall into a silly place where forks don’t look like forks anymore. And doors don’t work like doors. And you realize that the movie has just become obsessed with the notion that everything will be changed in the future.

Her went the other direction and said actually, no, you’re still going to open your mailbox with a key. And if you want to do something in your pocket, you’re not going to put a magneto Levitron phone lifter. You’re just going to use a safety pin. That didn’t change, you know?

**John:** I remember there was an episode of Buck Rogers and the 25th Century with Gil Gerard and they were eating food. And they have like little magnetic forks to eat their food.

**Craig:** Ugh, bingo.

**John:** It’s like that’s not an improvement. It’s clear like that didn’t make anything better the way you’re doing that right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. That would be the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” syndrome. It’s a good way to approach the future. And you see it sometimes where people just go nuts, you know. I mean, the fact that, look, in the future doors can go whoosh — or they can just open. And if you think about it, opened doors just swinging unhinged, it’s really useful.

Or, if you needed to save space and you were on a spaceship, just sliding the door like a pocket door would also be very useful.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But why would you have this incredibly complicated system where doors go whoosh, whoosh.

**John:** Yeah. Unfortunately on radio I don’t think people are seeing probably how you’re moving your hands for that.

**Craig:** You know I’m going whoosh, whoosh. [laughs] Yeah, you know what I’m doing. Everybody knows what I’m doing.

**John:** I know what you’re doing. The way that it’s not like a pocket door but it’s actually moving past each other in a really complicated —

**Craig:** And on its own and it’s electronic and you know that it’s a guy like, “Oh my god, the door on deck seven, the whoosh door, it’s not swishing.” “Oh, okay, well we got to get the guy to come and he’s got a backlog, so it’s going to be a few days, so you’re going to just stay in there.”

**John:** Obviously when we talk about big fantasy or sci-fi films, there’s an aspect of world-building which is going to be a conversation between the director and all the different designers, from costume, production designer. All those things are going to be influenced by it.

But since we’re mostly a podcast about screenwriting, let’s talk about what it’s like to be building a world on a page, because where you see this going wrong sometimes is where those first five pages are incredibly dense with like all these details crammed at you about sort of what this world is like.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the ones that have done it well, to my reading, have introduced you slowly to what this world feels like. So that the world starts in a way that lets you know the general sense of where this movie is going, what kind of universe we’re in, but it’s not hammering you with details. And so lots of readily identifiable behaviors, readily identifiable characters from the start. And then if they need to show you a big thing about how the world is different, they might not do that on page one. They might give that to you a little bit along the way.

Even The Matrix, which is about as complicated and confusing of a world that you could find, it starts in a more grounded way as you’re first meeting Neo, so you understand that there’s some basis of reality underneath all of this.

**Craig:** That’s right. And similarly when you have movies that take place entirely in a built world, like say Star Wars, there are points of reference, because you’re shooting here on this planet. Okay, Tatooine is a desert. It’s a small oasis town in a desert. Very good.

What’s happened now is we can make anything because of computers. So, there is a tendency I think sometimes for people to just go nuts and describe everything because their minds are blowing up with all of these interesting ideas.

I agree with you. You have to parcel it out carefully and meaningfully so that people don’t think they’re just reading a brochure for some house you’re trying to sell them, or a city you’re trying to get them to move to.

I have to say this is also frankly where a change in format would be enormously helpful. Text is a very clumsy way to describe a picture, which I believe has been calculated to be worth 1,000 words. It would be nice to just be able to click something and go, okay, I understand what they’re going for here. That would be useful.

**John:** I feel Frank Herbert’s Dune, I mean, Dune is a dense book and there’s a lot in Dune that is sort of world-building. It’s establishing this complicated world, the complicated rules, and the environments and all this stuff. A challenging thing to do as a screenplay because you’re going to have to be efficient about how you’re getting through this.

And so you want the audience to be able to make some leaps with you about sort of what world this is. Tatooine is a great example from Star Wars, because it’s mostly kind of like a little small tiny desert town. You can use a lot of your expectations about what a little desert town would be like, or a little desert dwelling would be like. And you don’t have to be introduced to every single new little thing.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And they’re not choking you with all the details.

The other thing I think writers are especially responsible for is figuring out what the character’s voice in your created world is going to be. And you may not specify that people are speaking with some sort of Irish brogue, but you’re making word choices about the ways people speak within your world. And that can be a crucial thing, too.

If you’re making a Lord of the Rings-y kind of movie, there’s an expectation that characters are going to speak in that sort of kind of English way. That sort of almost like received pronunciation Shakespeare kind of way. You kind of get that for free if you want that. If you don’t want that you’re going to have to make a deliberate choice that it’s not that and deal with the sort of reader pushback that you’re going to find from that decision.

**Craig:** Yeah. The other thing I’ll mention is for those of us who write comedies, there are times when you need to world-build in a comedy. And in comedies you tend to not get quite as much credit for building some elaborate “original world,” in part because we like funny things to be in contrast to ordinary things. It’s harder to laugh when the world around you is so outlandish and creative.

I’ve never seen Pluto Nash, but just from the trailer I thought I’m not sure how any of this is going to be funny in this elaborate space station. It’s just too fancy and frankly kind of ambitious of a setting, no matter how well or not well it was executed for me to be laughing at the mundane things that happen inside of it.

With that in mind, one great example of comedy world-building is Defending Your Life by Albert Brooks. And he was building heaven, which is something that other movies have done. And his choice was to build that world against the expectation and just set it basically as kind of a lovely hotel resort for middle aged to senior citizen type people, you know, with buffets and lounge acts. It was kind of like a mid-level Vegas hotel, which was brilliant.

**John:** Yeah. You’re bringing up Pluto Nash. The funny sci-fi film I can point to is Galaxy Quest. And what Galaxy Quest so smartly did is it didn’t rely on sort of what real science fiction would be like. It relied on what we already knew about what a science fiction TV show should be like. And so therefore it could work with all this stuff that we already had in our database for like this is what a TV show version of what a starship show should be like. And it could push back off of that.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. In fact, Galaxy Quest, among its many brilliant choices, Bob Gordon wrote a fantastic screenplay there, among the many brilliant choices was that when the aliens come to abduct or choose the heroes of the movie who played these characters on a Star Trek like show, the spaceship, their actual spaceship, they built it to the specifications of the show.

So, it wasn’t a built world. In fact, it was a very familiar world to us that was designed to look exactly like something that was fake. So, they could react to that and we didn’t feel like they were in a fancy ship, because they weren’t. They were actually in a very silly looking ship that was essentially created by tropes with which we’re all familiar.

**John:** Comedy is essentially expectation and then surprise. So, in comedy you have to have expectation about what’s going to happen next, and then a surprise that either something was said that wasn’t what you expected, or an event happens that isn’t what you expected.

If everything is brand new you kind of can’t have expectation. And therefore you kind of can’t be surprised in a way that’s funny. And that’s usually a huge problem with science fiction comedies.

**Craig:** Yeah. The word grounded comes up constantly when you’re making comedies. And even when we did spoof movies, when I did spoof movies with David Zucker one of the things that he was very adamant about and properly so is that if you’re going to spoof a scene from a movie the set needs to look just like that movie. It doesn’t need to be some funny version of that set. It needs to be just that set. And then funny things happen in it. You need to be grounded.

**John:** So, as you talk about sets, as we sort of wrap up this world-building thing: in general if I’m doing something that is a complicated production that is existing in a very different world than what I’m normally in, I will spend some time, you know, a couple days, although you can fall down deep k-holes and just go far too far with it. And just look up the imagery of the kind of thing I want these worlds to be like. And so you get to have a sense of style. Like this is the kind of universe this takes place in.

So, for Big Fish I did have some of that visual imagery of this is what this kind of fantasy nostalgic south of the past would be like. For other projects I’ve put together kind of a look book of this is the universe of what this world is like. And that’s incredibly helpful for you as the writer to be able to remember like, okay, that’s what I was going for there.

And even if you see that imagery, you can then start to think like what words would I use to describe what I’m seeing, because those are going to be the same kinds of words you’re going to use on the page to evoke this feeling for the person reading the script ultimately.

**Craig:** No question. Until you and I revolutionize screenplay format.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Which we’re going to do, by the way. We’re doing it.

**John:** We are. But first we should talk about a show that has done a great job of world-building this last season on HBO. And this is the time in the podcast where we’re going to talk about True Detective. So, fair warning, we’re going to spoil everything if you’ve not seen the show.

So, True Detective, Craig, I thought it was just a terrific show. How about you?

**Craig:** Yeah, it was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. The execution of it was not quite like anything I had seen before. And going back to our discussion of originality of ideas, two odd couple — odd couple detectives on the trail of a serial killer. Oh, you know, I don’t know —

**John:** Yeah, that’s tropey, tropey, tropey.

**Craig:** I mean, good lord. And they’re in the south. And I think I’ve seen that a bunch of times. And then there’s infidelity and, yup, yup, seen it, seen it, seen it, seen it. Even the notion that what’s behind it is a large conspiracy of powerful people and satanic rituals — done, done, done, done, done.

But what this show did better than any other, I thought, was create these two characters and let you — give you license to care more about those characters and where they were in their lives and the choices they were making than you did about the mystery itself.

Granted, I think some people didn’t. I think some people were just obsessed over the mystery to the point where the show could have not possibly satisfied them.

I thought that Nic Pizzolatto — Pizzolatto? Am I saying it right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Pizzolatto. And Cary Fukunaga made an amazing team. Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, brilliant performances. Best I’ve ever seen from them. Just a beautiful, beautiful show to watch. And as a student of Nietzsche, which I know you hate, I saw Nietzsche throughout the whole thing. I mean, this Nic Pizzolatto clearly a student of Nietzsche. No question. No question. And a smart student.

**John:** So, I was late to the show and sort of caught up. And so by the time we got to episode five or six I was watching it in real time. And I found it just fascinating. And fascinating in the sense of like when I first saw the promos for it I’m like I don’t know why I would watch this show, because I don’t watch procedurals, and it’s basically it felt like — from a distance it felt like a cop procedural staring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, both of whom I like but I’m not going to go racing to go see, set in Louisiana which I’m just so sick of Louisiana. I have no desire to see Louisiana again. And it felt tropey, tropey, tropey, trope.

And so it wasn’t until everyone told me like, “No, no, it’s brilliant. It’s brilliant. It’s brilliant. It’s brilliant.” And it’s really when people talked about the — when I decided I had to watch it was when people talked about the big shootout sequence, the sort of incredibly long tracking cam shot — the tracking shot that does all that that I know I had to catch up. Because I refuse to let this be another Breaking Bad where I’m behind everybody else on it.

So, what’s fascinating though is let’s go back to the reason I didn’t want to watch it is because on an idea level I’m like that doesn’t sound interesting to me at all. And where True Detective succeeds is in execution. Execution in acting. Execution in directing. But especially execution in storytelling, so I really want to focus on the decision to have the start of the show, at least the best parts of the show, the first six episodes, with the framing device of the interview.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** As we come into the show we’re seeing this murder investigation happen where there’s a dead woman, and there’s a tree, and there’s a crown and all that stuff. We’re seeing the same detectives interviewed and we’re not quite sure if it’s even about the same case. We literally see the video camera footage. Like what is happening here? And we start to piece together that these two detectives are being interviewed years later about these events and that they are going to be essentially narrating the story of their own solving of this case, or their own investigation to this case, which was just genius. And it was just so incredibly well done.

Every time we cut from the present day storyline — which was the interviews — to the past and back, the show gained narrative speed. And we did the show where we talked about long takes, I remember there was a blog post I did about long takes. There’s an amazing amount of scene-setting and world-building you can do when you have these very long takes, but there’s also a tremendous amount of power in cutting. And this show knew exactly when to cut and when to pass the baton between the past and the future. That tension between the past and the future was as much a narrative theme as anything else in the show.

**Craig:** I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone do it quite the way they did it on True Detective, so maybe exclusively until now movies would start with people and they’re remembering something and you flash back and you see it all happen and then you come back again to present day and they finish up and it’s a nice conclusion to the whole thing. And that’s fine. And that can work really well.

What was so terrific about the way they did it here where they kept it going through six episodes is that they were short-circuiting something that we’re all accustomed to watching and pulling out of narrative which is character development. They were showing you the end. They were saying this is how it ends. This guy is a drunk and a mess. And this guy is without a wife and a bit of a stopped up unfulfilled man. And that allowed them to play around with things in the past in a way that made it a little more meaningful. If I know that Matthew McConaughey ends up as a mess, watching him walk around perfectly shaven and coiffed and in complete control of his environment is far more interesting now. And I also don’t have to watch the breakdown. I just understand that I’m watching it now.

I’m seeing it and he doesn’t, which is great. Love that.

**John:** So, one of the key things to understand about True Detective is, again, at its best it maintained very vigilant POV, so every scene is not only involved but is driven either by Matthew McConaughey or Woody Harrelson’s character. You don’t get any scenes that don’t have them in it with very, very rare exception.

But by having the past and the future there’s really essentially four characters. There is the characters in the past and the characters in the present day, or the near present day, who are being interviewed. And it is the tension between the older and the younger versions of themselves is often as fascinating as anything else. The things that you see them promising in the past and how those promises are unfulfilled in the present are so rewarding, because your brain kicks into gear and tries to fill in all the missing pieces about how these things could possibly relate. And you see in the present day storyline during the interviews there is narrative tension within those scenes, too.

It’s not just that they’re narrating story. They’re trying to figure out information from the people who are asking them questions about what’s really going on.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You start to realize like these interviews aren’t happening simultaneously. They’re trying to find out information about each other in the present day storyline as they’re talking to these interviewers.

**Craig:** Yeah. And where it got, I think, where the series hit its dramatic climax and the climax I guess of its efficacy was in the episode where they finally got to the shootout in the woods. This was something that they had been talking about for some time, even early in the episodes both detective that are being interviewed keep asking the ones interviewing them — I assume you just want to ask us about the shootout in the woods. It’s the biggest thing that ever happened to them in their lives. And they’re not asking about it. “Not just yet. We’ll get to that.”

So, we know there is some crazy shootout in the woods. Where they finally got to juice all of the power out of their two-timeline structure is when we finally see the shootout in the woods and we hear present day McConaughey and Harrelson narrating past-day McConaughey and Harrelson and we realize that the story that they’re telling these guys is not at all what we’re watching. In fact, we’re watching something completely different.

**John:** It’s a complete fabrication. And it’s a fabrication they agreed to tell the same way so that they could keep their story straight.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And it was an ingenious way of sort of getting us through that moment because it was a moment that had enough narrative tension stakes anyway. It’s the first time people are actually shooting at them, and yet you’re also fascinated by the present day storyline where they’re telling these conflicting versions and you want to see if they can actually keep their stories straight.

**Craig:** Exactly. Because we’re learning, even as we’re watching this incredibly entertaining thing and this incredibly dramatic thing that also includes plot points, we are learning that these two men — separated by time and some enmity we don’t yet understand because of the incident in 2002 — they have each other’s backs still to this day, separate and apart from each other. That’s fascinating information that we’ll finally understand.

In that sequence, every now and then you watch something and it makes you feel something beyond just an emotion but rather you feel an intense narrative satisfaction. And for me it was when I was watching that and they’re describing it and I certainly had no idea what was coming. And I had no idea that they were going to be lying. And they start describing it and what I’m watching isn’t what’s happening, but in a very subtle way. Just like, “Well he went this way and I went that way,” but they’re not quite going that way.

And I, for a second I think did they make a mistake? And then four seconds later it locks in and I go, “Oh, oh, this is going to be good.”

**John:** Yeah. And it was good! It was great.

**Craig:** And I knew it was going to be good because as soon as I realized what was happening I thought, A, it’s great that they’re lying and not narrating what actually happened. But also it’s going to be good because whatever does happen is something they have to lie about.

**John:** Well, I also remember once I realized that the lie was happening you start watching that sequence again thinking like, but wait, they’re going to say there was a shootout but like no one actually fired a shot. How are they going to deal with that? And then you see in real time like McConaughey has the idea of basically staging the whole crime scene so that it looks like there was a shootout even though there wasn’t a shootout. It was all terrific.

Now, let’s talk about satisfaction because I think I was one of those people who wasn’t entirely satisfied by how the show ended. And I think it raises a whole question of like in some ways it didn’t used to matter how shows ended. We didn’t even used to have a sense that a series was supposed to end. But this is a rare case where everyone knew that this was going to be just a one-off thing, at least with these two characters. This was going to end.

And I think our degree of satisfaction was weirdly influenced by the way that this was released. So, this was released in a more conventional sense here in the US that it’s once per week. And so the expectation or build up from the Sunday to the next Sunday about like, oh, what did this episode mean, what is going to happen in this next thing, who is the Yellow King, which is never really resolved, is Rust really behind these murders. All these theories could percolate which sort of revved up the excitement and probably certainly revved up the ratings.

And you like in some ways I think lessened the likelihood that most people would be happy with it. If this were a Netflix show where they put all eight episodes in one block that wouldn’t have happened.

**Craig:** You might be right. The show became a victim of its own success, to some extent, because people began to obsess in between episodes about what everything went. And it reminded me of Lost mania where the numbers showed up and people were finding references and going crazy. It was a very similar thing when people quickly seized on references to the book, The Yellow King, or The King in Yellow, I should say. And everybody just wanted to hyper drive about this, as if this show would somehow give us an insight into the cosmology of our universe that we weren’t capable of understanding ourselves, which is insane.

I actually think that the show did show us the Yellow King. Maybe I’m the only one, but in the end when our detectives are going up against the ultimate bad guy, Lawnmower Man, in that room — or near that room — there was this kind of a statue or diorama made of skeletons and wings and it looked like he had built himself a god. And it was yellow. The skulls were yellow. And I just thought the Yellow King is this creation of a mad man. And my guess is that he wasn’t the one that created. It was created a long time ago. That they had built an idol to worship.

**John:** Yeah. And that’s a totally reasonable expectation and I think it would have been easier for most people to come to that if they’d seen the whole thing without that build up from week, to week, to week. That build up from week to week to week is what made it a phenomenon. I think if it had come as a chunk like Netflix would have people would have still loved it and it would still be absolutely as good of a show, but I don’t think it would have become the phenomenon it became with that week, after week, after week.

**Craig:** You might be right. I mean, some of the conjecture out there was mind-boggling to me. Obviously simple, sort of Shyamalan twist style guesses that Rust Cohle is the killer. Or one writer I know kept insisting to me that they were the same person and that we would find out they’re the same person. Like that’s simple not possible.

**John:** The Fight Club? Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not a Fight Club. They didn’t do it. And then there were deeper ones. People who — and I love the internet because people are like, “You’re all stupid. You don’t understand this, and this, and this, and see the stars on the beer cans and…and the girl with the dolls.” And, you know, again, anybody that was hoping for this show — and it’s funny, the show even comments on it that we have this need to find stories to give us meaning to the secrets and mysteries of the world. And the show kept telling us, don’t — you’re not going to find that in the bible. You’re not going to find it in books, you’re not going to find it in culture. We try and impose the order of narrative on the world and the world continues to defy it.

Now, was the ending brilliant? No, but I only think it wasn’t brilliant because it didn’t have enough episodes to be brilliant. You know, the ending of Breaking Bad is brilliant because no matter what anyone’s quibbles are about it, and few people had some, in the end it connected us to an emotion. And the emotion was earned between Walter White and the only thing he ever created that made him feel like he had been alive. This was his work of genius. This was his masterpiece, his imprint on the world, blue crystal meth. And he did it.

And that relationship was something that we needed to have five years invested in for us to give a damn about it. This show, eight hours of TV. And I thought very smartly they ended the show with these two men and finally showing the strongest of them, the one who never cried, the one who seemed to understand everything not understanding anything. I thought it did a fine job. It simply could not deliver what I think people suddenly wanted. I loved it.

**John:** I think that’s a fair perspective on it. It’s so hard not to play the “I wish they would have” with it where you sort of play the game like if they’d known what they actually had before they started shooting the whole thing, I think there’s a way they could have reminded us about the relationship between those two characters and their young versions. Basically I really missed the young versions in those last two episodes.

And that the tension between the past and the present was essentially all kind of forgotten. Or the times we tried to reference it, it was just two characters talking and not talking about especially interesting things. Whereas we used to be able to see it. And so I would have loved to have had some more moments — a reason to have some more moments with the younger versions of those characters to remind us of the journey that we went on with them. That we saw them from these younger selves to where they are now.

I feel like the realization that McConaughey’s character comes to at the end, which is basically like he thought he had the answers in the sense of there not being any answers and now he’s not even sure of that could have come home even more if I’d seen the younger version of him.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The confident younger version of himself.

**Craig:** I agree. Once the show lost the past and situated itself entirely in the present it gained an immediacy that demanded, you know, it demanded more than those guys just talking. We didn’t mind watching them talk and drive around in the past because we understood that it was in the past and things were going to happen and the past doesn’t recall itself on our time schedule.

But once they were in the future I got very antsy with them in the car. Like shut up. Go. Do something. [laughs] You know?

**John:** Also it was the only time in the series where for an extended period of time we broke POV and stayed with the killer’s perspective. And while it was terrific, it wasn’t the best thing we’ve ever seen. And it wasn’t our two guys. And so I honestly felt like we did a better job — the show did a better job of that arriving at the farm with him in episode four or five, or whatever it was, that shootout worked better because we didn’t know what we were getting into. Versus just breaking all the POV and just going in there and seeing what Lawnmower Man’s life was like.

**Craig:** That said, it did give us I believe the greatest euphemism for weird, creepy incest ever. “I’m going to make flowers on you.”

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Wow. “Don’t you want to make flowers on me?” Oh, that’s just great. Yes I do. Yes I do.

**John:** They’re making flowers. So, anyway, that ends our talk about True Detective. It really was an amazing accomplishment and congratulations to everybody involved in making True Detective.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so my criticisms are only because it was just remarkably good and I feel so lucky to be able to have television like that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I have no criticisms. I take it as it is. I thank you for it as it was. And can’t wait for season two.

**John:** Cool.

Craig, it’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So, my One Cool Thing is actually something a listener sent in and we had been talking about, you and I were playing Dungeon World, which was a great sort of non-traditional role-playing game, or a stripped down role-playing game. Someone wrote in — I forgot who wrote in — but someone wrote in to suggest this thing called Fiasco by Jason Morningstar.

And Fiasco is like a role-playing game but without a DM or GM. There’s no one leading it. It’s just the rules are all in the book about how you do it. But it’s a narrative storytelling game where three or four people get together and rolling dice and following these sort of rules and orders you create a story that’s kind of like a Coen Brothers movie, it’s all about like sort of small time capers gone bad. And so it can be in a small southern town or at a station in the Antarctic or in the Old West. But it’s all about sort of like things going wrong. And it looks like an incredibly fun game.

So, I’ve not actually played the game through with other people, but I’ve read through the book and sort of seen what I can do. And it’s a very ingenious idea and it makes really smart choices about how you set up a world — very applicable to our discussion today — and how you create complications for your characters. And so I really recommend it to anybody who is telling stories to sort of see how this is doing it. I mean, this is being done with dice and yet it creates some really interesting situations and conflicts.

It’s called Fiasco.

**Craig:** Maybe we should do it. Should we do it?

**John:** We should absolutely play it. So, my fantasy would be to get Kelly Marcel over here and play it some afternoon.

**Craig:** Kelly Marcel is the spirit of Fiasco.

**John:** Yes. She’d be fantastic.

**Craig:** “This is a total fiasco.”

**John:** “It’s a fiasco.”

**Craig:** “It’s a fiasco.”

**John:** Yeah, we could do something in London. It could involve — it could just be like a Guy Ritchie movie.

**Craig:** Ooh, I like Guy Ritchie movies. Hmm, all right.

Well, mine is far more mundane. I am in love with this new Mac OS email client called Airmail. Did you use Sparrow like I did?

**John:** So, I use Sparrow for all the questions that come in. I use it for certain accounts. So like all the ask@johnaugust accounts, I look at those in Sparrow. The rest of the stuff I use normal Mac Mail for.

**Craig:** Yeah. Mac Mail is fine. Mail.App is fine, except that lately it’s been annoying. It has certain behaviors I don’t like, one of which is occasionally it’s just glitch. I mean, there’s an acknowledged issue with receiving mail sometimes and sending mail. Sometimes you have to quit and restart to get it to do what you want. Also, I really don’t like that the delete key defaults to trashing emails as opposed to archiving it, which I think for IMAP it’s better to archive.

And so I used Sparrow for awhile, but then Sparrow got bought by Gmail or Google I guess technically, because I guess Google just wants to eat its guts and put it into its own system. But as such it just stopped getting developed and it’s never a good thing to use deprecated software. And then along comes this app called Airmail which is essentially they’ve taken Sparrow and just spiffed it up and started redeveloping it. And it looks great, it works great. Delete does in fact send mail to archive.

Setting up accounts was really easy and it’s gorgeous. It’s just well-designed. And lo and behold it’s available in the App Store for $2. What?!

**John:** That’s nuts.

**Craig:** $2. So, it’s kind of a no-brainer. They have a Twitter account at @airmailer, because I assume Airmail was taken, so they’re @airmailer. But the app is called Airmail. I love it.

**John:** Cool. Great. Well, that’s our show for this week. So, you can find the links to the things we talked about in our show notes which are at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. It’s also where you can find transcripts for all of our back episodes.

You can listen to all of the back episodes there or through our apps. So, we have a Scriptnotes app for iOS and for Android, so just check your applicable app store and find us there.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel. Yay Stuart. And edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Blake Kuehn. And if you’d like to write us an outro we’re actually kind of running low on outros, so send it to us. So, you send it to ask@johnaugust.com. And we love links from SoundCloud which is great for us. Just make sure it’s publicly available and that we can download it and tag it as Scriptnotes.

But we’ve gotten some great ones even when I put up the call yesterday for it we’ve gotten some great new outros. So, thank you for that.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** If you have a question for Craig, he is @clmazin on Twitter. I am @johnaugust on Twitter. Longer questions or things like what we read from the guy at the start of the show you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. And that is it.

Craig, thank you so much for a good show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. [creepy voice] Hey, John, hey, thanks man.

**John:** You’re making me very uncomfortable.

**Craig:** Yeah, hey. How you doing? [laughs]

**John:** All right. Cut.

LINKS:

* Get tickets now for John’s [WGF panel](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/first-draft-feature/), From First Draft to Feature
* [Weekend Read](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/weekend-read/id502725173?mt=8) 1.0.2 is in the App Store now
* Slate on [Resurrection vs. The Returned](http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/03/07/resurrection_the_returned_and_they_came_back_what_s_the_difference_video.html)
* [True Detective](http://www.hbo.com/true-detective) on HBO
* [Fiasco](http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/games/fiasco/) by Jason Morningstar
* [Airmail](http://airmailapp.com/) for OSX
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Blake Kuehn ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/procrastination-and-pageorexia).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 131 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, how are ya?

**Craig:** You know, I’m — do you ever get this thing, John, I’ll bet you you don’t. I bet you you don’t. But every now and again, and sometimes for stretches of days at a time, I’ll get that butterflies in the stomach anxiety thing.

**John:** For no good reason?

**Craig:** For no good reason. And I just sit and I wake up in the morning and there it is. And it kind of lingers all day. It’s really uncomfortable and I feel anxious and I don’t know why. I believe this is called Generalized Anxiety Disorder.

**John:** Yeah. Sorry to hear it.

**Craig:** Do you ever get that?

**John:** I do get that sometimes.

**Craig:** Oh, you do?

**John:** And, in fact, I will talk about a little section of my life. These last two weeks have been really busy with the contract negotiations. And then we were supposed to take a trip this weekend. And then the next week was going to be chaotic for different reasons. And I finally just had to say I cannot possibly take a trip this weekend. It just was going to be impossible.

So, we ended up staying home and it’s a lovely weekend in Los Angeles and it’s so much better and more fun.

But, yes, I sympathize with your Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I don’t know, is it technically some sort of like fight or flight instinct that has no basis? Do you know what it is?

**Craig:** It seems like it. I mean, every now and then I get that. It’s the feeling that you get when, I don’t know, you’re nervous or scared, except that there’s nothing to be nervous or scared about. So, you just get that fluttery — and I guess physiologically what’s going on is that adrenaline tends to divert blood flow and oxygen from your gut to your muscles and that what you’re feeling is the result of that. But it’s unpleasant and I’m not really sure what’s going on. And I just want it to stop.

And the problem with anxiety is that you — then what happens is you feel okay but then you get a little twinge of it again and then you suddenly worry, oh god, it’s happening, and then that’s why it’s happening. You know, it perpetuates itself.

**John:** Yeah. With me it’s usually I have convinced myself that I’m having a heart attack.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a panic attack. That’s a whole other…

**John:** Well, that’s true. That’s a whole extra discussion.

**Craig:** Yeah. I never had that. But people who get checked into emergency rooms all the time, with every symptom of a heart attack except cardiac damage.

**John:** Yeah. Well that’s me twice. I’ve twice had to go to the emergency room with all those symptoms.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And they said like, “Yeah, it was good that you came in. But, no, you’re not having a heart attack.”

**Craig:** Right. You’re just panicking.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh my god. The two of us are so panicky!

**John:** We’re so panicky.

Well, this week let’s talk about some psychological issues. Specifically I want to talk about procrastination and pageorexia based on partly a great article you sent through that we’ll talk about.

But we have a lot of other sort of follow up and bits and news and things. I want to talk about sort of all the changes in the industry with the Aereo lawsuit and the Comcast merger. So, let’s just get to it, okay?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, as long as I don’t freak out.

**John:** All right. Don’t freak out. I’m here to keep you company.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

First off, we can freak out just a little bit because we have a live show coming up. We have a live crossover episode with the Nerdist Writers Podcast. And I’m so excited because we’ve talked about doing this for a long time. The Nerdist Writers Podcast is potentially the other great screenwriting podcast or writing podcast you should be listening to and we’re going to have a joint show. We’re going to have a joint live show — they do all their shows live — April [13th] at 5pm. It’s at Meltdown Comics. And tickets are available right now. So, you can go get them.

We have a link in our show notes, but if you’re listening to this on Tuesday I would really recommend you get tickets now because they’re $15. They will sell out. And then you’ll be sad that you weren’t there in the audience for us.

**Craig:** Once again you and are the Jon Bon Jovi of live screenwriting podcasting events. So, yeah, you got to get these tickets.

**John:** I guess we are the Jon Bon Jovi. I don’t even know what the Jon Bon Jovi means though.

**Craig:** Well, Jon Bon Jovi keeps selling out — he sells out everything. You, Jon Bon Jovi is a huge — people love Jon Bon Jovi.

**John:** See, I’m learning things on this podcast even right now.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I should say that this podcast, like all the stuff we do, we’re not making any money off of this. The proceeds from this benefit 826LA, the non-profit organization that sponsors writing programs in Los Angeles. So, it’s another good cause to support.

**Craig:** I mean, you’re familiar with Jon Bon Jovi in general?

**John:** Oh, in general I am. But I’m familiar with him as being a thing from the past.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, for us to be like the current things, that makes me feel really weird like, oh my god, we’re like some ’80s relic. And I don’t feel like a relic whatsoever. I feel vital and young.

**Craig:** So does Jon Bon Jovi.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** [sings] Shot through the heart, and you’re to blame.

**John:** We also have some follow up. Last week on the podcast we talked about —

**Craig:** Just the best.

**John:** [laughs] I said, “Oh, there used to be this place called The Office where people would go and write.” And I spoke of it in the past tense and that was completely incorrect because it still exists. And so they sent a nice tweet, which I retweeted, saying like, “We still exist, we’re out there.” And I recommend people check it out.

There’s another place called Writer’s Junction which does the same function. So, I did mean for those to rhyme. But, if you are looking for a place to go that is not actually a coffee shop but is more like an office that you can go to and write, those are two options for you there.

Also, last week, Craig said The New Girl instead of New Girl for the TV show on Fox.

**Craig:** Sorry!

**John:** And I get it. I mean, it’s so easy to say The New Girl. But, it’s actually called New Girl.

**Craig:** And, by the way, my current television obsession — I shared this with millions of people — is True Detective. And about, I don’t know, 80% of the time I’ll say True Detectives with an S at the end.

**John:** Yeah, because there’s two of them.

**Craig:** There’s two of them and I’m basically a yokel.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. I can’t get this stuff right.

**John:** You’re the Cletus of the show. You’re the Cletus and Jon Bon Jovi of the show.

**Craig:** Cletus. Cletus is the greatest character.

**John:** He’s so good. Because clearly he was meant to be just a one-time throwaway and they just loved him so much that they brought him back.

**Craig:** Did you ever see the one where Marge is trying to find a designer dress at a discount price because she has to go to this fancy party?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they offer her, [laughs], they tell her that they don’t have anything right now, but in her price range there is a shipment expected of partially burnt Sears sportswear coming in. And she’s not interested. And Cletus walks up and he goes, “What time and how burnt?” [laughs]

Perfect line. Ah! He’s slightly discriminating.

**John:** [laughs] He is. Yeah, so it’s a character that you couldn’t get away with — if he had like a race associated with him you couldn’t possibly do it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But because he’s just white trash it’s still safe.

**Craig:** Oh, 100 percent. I talk about this with Malcolm Spellman all the time. We try and track what races are now safe to do. Like what racism is okay. I mean, poor white trash racism, thumbs up. Huge thumbs up. Irish people. Yeah. Green light. Green light.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Asians, I think, are successful now enough where it’s starting to get to be a green light. Bad news for Asians.

**John:** Yeah. But then you’re generalizing a whole giant category of people rather than being specific.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I mean, but that’s the point of racism. [laughs]

**John:** That’s the point of racism. It should not be precise enough in your description.

**Craig:** That’s it. The whole point is it’s a very clumsy, ham-fisted way of getting a laugh, a cheap laugh out of an entire billions of people. But, yeah. I think that they are successful enough, powerful enough that it’s happening. It’s happening.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I feel it.

**John:** Craig, so we recorded — the last show came out on Tuesday and Tuesday afternoon we put out this new app and I sort of didn’t want to talk about it ahead of time, I just wanted it to be a surprise upon the world, but it wasn’t actually a surprise to you because you’d seen the build of this app quite early on. This is called Weekend Read.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s an app for reading screenplays on your iPhone. And can you summarize what your reaction to the app was when you saw it?

**Craig:** [laughs] Look, you don’t have to set a trap for me. I’m perfectly happy to just jump into your spikes and poison. I have no idea.

**John:** And told-you-sos?

**Craig:** And, by the way still — and told-you-sos. I still have no idea why anyone would want to read a screenplay on their phone. On their iPad, sure, I get it. On their phone, it’s just tiny, and I frankly don’t want anyone reading my screenplays on their phone.

So, you sent it and I’m like, “Why would anybody?” It’s perfectly — you did exactly what you set out to do and you did it well, but why would anybody want this. Well, apparently, I’m just, once again, totally marginalized by existence. Everybody wants it. I think it’s your biggest seller, right?

**John:** Which has really been remarkable. So, Weekend Read is a reader for your iPhone. It basically takes a screenplay and melts it down so you can make it look good on an iPhone, so basically you can take a PDF of a screenplay, sort of like what Highland does, it melts it down and just gives you the text so you can change the size and make it actually readable on your iPhone.

You and I both — well, you said you’ve never ever had to read a script on your iPhone, but I’ve had to. And you basically end up squinting and pinching and it’s terrible. That’s why you would never want to read a script on your iPhone.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And now you suddenly can. So, we launched the app on Tuesday and within like four hours we’d sold — we’d shipped more copies of Weekend Read than we did of FDX Reader, our first app, which has been out for two years. So, that was remarkable.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** It seems to be quite popular among people. I just feel like many listeners of the show probably do read screenplays and many of them probably do have iPhones, so if you would like to try it out it’s free in the App Store right now. So, you just download it.

**Craig:** Look, congratulations. That’s spectacular. One thing that occurred to me when you were talking about how successful the launch had been is that you had — the app is a great name.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** It’s a really good name, you know. And it’s one of those names that manages to both say what the thing is but also sound interesting. It sounds like an actual name and not just a description.

**John:** Yes. So Weekend Reading in Hollywood lingo is classically the scripts that a development executive would read over the weekend. And so essentially a bunch of stuff will come in over the week and then they will sort of assign out the weekend read which is basically everyone on the team is supposed to read these scripts over the weekend. And so it felt like a very natural thing to call a script reader Weekend Read.

**Craig:** And now they’re going to read them on their phones. “Oh, good for you!” That’s my Christian Bale yelling at Shane Hurlbut. “Good for you!”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Have you ever heard that?

**John:** It’ll be nice.

**Craig:** Have you ever heard that?

**John:** Oh, yeah, that great audio of Christian Bale ranting at people?

**Craig:** That’s my favorite part. “Good for you!” [laughs]

**John:** Good for all of us. What Kelly Marcel pointed out, which I think will be interesting to see if it actually kicks in, is that a lot of times actors going out for auditions get sides. And those sides are just a PDF. And so it’s fantastic for them just like, well, it’s now on their phone and that’s kind of all they need. So, we’ll see if that works as well.

**Craig:** Oh, good, now the actors will just be reading their parts. “Good for you! Oh, good for you!” We got to throw a little clip of that in at the end of this.

**John:** It’s going to become a meme.

**Craig:** Did we ever talk about which side of that you come down on?

**John:** Both of them came out horribly in it I would say.

**Craig:** Interesting. I disagree.

**John:** You think Christian Bale came out — ?

**Craig:** I back Bale 100 percent on that one.

**John:** Okay. Here is my perception of what actually happened, being the person who was in Shane Hurlbut, the DP’s perspective. For people who don’t know what the hell we’re talking about, this was on the set of Terminator Salvation which was — Christian Bale played John Connor in a Terminator version. And he had a complete flip out on the set against the DP who was Shane Hurlbut I think is his name.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it was recorded because people were already wearing mics. So, Christian Bale initially came off really badly in this and sort of had to do some penance to dig himself out of this hole.

My gut feeling is that Christian Bale was incredibly frustrated by the situation and he couldn’t flip out on the director, McG, and so he flipped out on the nearest person who he actually could kind of flip out on, which was probably Shane Hurlbut. That’s my perception.

**Craig:** My perception is that Shane Hurlbut was doing something that I’ve never seen any DP do which is go and tweak lights in the middle of a take. And I guess the deal was it’s coverage, so the camera is aiming at Christian Bale over someone else’s shoulders. Which means all the lights are behind the camera pointing out at Christian Bale.

And you try and clear the eye line for actors so they’re not being distracted. They can perform in the moment. And then while he’s talking here comes this guy that just starts wandering in behind the person he’s talking to and starts moving stuff around.

And I guess he had asked him a bunch of times, “Please don’t do that,” and then the guy just kept doing it and he flipped out. “Good for you!” I’m sorry. This is the weirdest tangent. Like a weird old tangent.

**John:** It’s a fine tangent.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But let’s get to the meat of today’s podcast.

So, you had sent this great article by Megan McArdle which is from The Atlantic on procrastination. And I loved a little piece of it, but it’s worth reading the whole thing because I thought it was a really smart piece and it’s actually part of I guess a bigger book about sort of the importance of failure.

But, tell me why you sent it and sort of what you got out of it.

**Craig:** Well, first I got excited because I thought that the child star of Annie had written this, but that’s Andrea McArdle. Megan McArdle — boy, I’m in the craziest mood today.

**John:** That’s all right.

**Craig:** I promise you I’m totally sober.

Megan McArdle wrote about procrastination which in and of itself is nearly impossible to do, because it’s been written about 1,000 times, but what I liked about this was that she zeroed in on why writers — I mean, this is the title — Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators. And she has a theory.

Look, I’m not sure if her theory is correct. But at least it’s a theory of why it seems to be so much harder for writers than for other people. And essentially her theory is that writers were likely the kids who found writing easy. That is to say writing relative to their peers. So, you’re in English class, you’re doing creative writing, you’re discussing a book, you’re doing a book report — you have to write anything. And everybody pats you on the back because being able to write instinctively and write cohesively and interestingly turns out to be fairly rare. I mean, just walk around. Go into any business and read what people are writing. It’s just hard for most people.

It’s a little bit like singing. Most people can’t sing, but a lot of people can. And people who can sing it comes easily to them, that’s great.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And her point is that this unfortunately starts to — this creates a bad lesson for this kid, because they associate writing with something that is innate and fixed. That is to say this isn’t something I’m going to develop, it’s something that I was given. You have a gift as they say.

It turns out, of course, in the real world, no. You do have to develop your skills. Just because you have natural ability or a “gift” doesn’t mean that you are now ready for primetime or that there are other people that aren’t doing a lot better than you are. You have much to learn, much to learn. And you always will. You always will.

So, what happens for a lot of writers is that procrastination becomes the psychological extension of the fear that they don’t have anything more than what they have.

**John:** Yeah. I described it on the blog as the best scene is the scene you haven’t written yet. Or like you can’t fail at a scene you haven’t written yet.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There’s every chance — every time you sit down at the typewriter it’s a chance that you’re going to write something terrible. And so therefore maybe I just won’t sit down at the keyboard and I will do something else instead.

What I think is interesting about writing is you compare this to really kind of anything, like athletics, and so let’s say you’re a kid who is like really naturally athletic and great. And so you are very good at basketball or whatever. At a certain point it’s going to become objectively clear whether you are great at basketball or you were just good compared to your peers. Because you can actually see how good somebody is at basketball.

Writing is actually so much more amorphous. It’s really hard to say who’s a good writer, who’s not a good writer, who is a fantastic writer, who’s an okay writer. But weirdly the writer, him or herself, at a certain point develops a sense of like what is good and what’s bad. And they can recognize sometimes when they’re not writing their best. And there’s always that fear like, well, I might write something just awful. And everyone may — this is, again, the imposter syndrome — everyone may realize that I’m actually not that good of a writer at all.

And so by procrastinating, by putting off that writing you are delaying, you’re protecting yourself. It’s really self-preservation through procrastination.

**Craig:** That’s right. Because if you’re one of these people that falls into this category that there’s — Ms. McArdle sites Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck who is doing some research on this, and so professor Dweck has this idea that there are people who have the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. The fixed mindset people, basically when they do something they look at it as an indication of essentially what my ability is. Period. The end. That’s it. if you have a fixed mindset and you sit down, and you start writing, and either you don’t like what you wrote, or other people don’t like what you wrote, this is going to shatter some fixed part of your identity. People might as well be looking at you and saying you have an ugly face, you know, you’re far too tall, and I don’t like your eyes. You can’t change it.

Whereas the other kinds of writers, the growth mindset writers, don’t look at their writing ability as some sort of fixed capacity tank. Do you feel like you have both of these or just one, or — ?

**John:** I think I do have both of them. But I think I definitely am guilty of sometimes picking the easier — that sounds wrong — but in her article she talks about self-sabotage. I’ve definitely witnessed myself self-sabotaging by creating a situation where it was impossible for me to sort of succeed. And so therefore I have an excuse for why that thing wasn’t the best thing I could possibly do.

So it’s like, well, it’s the best I could do in that circumstance. Well, I put myself in that circumstance so therefore is it really my best work?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or, not doing that thing that is so incredibly risky because I wasn’t sure if I could write it.

I would say over the last ten years though I’ve been much more aggressive about picking the thing that I’m both sure I can write and also not sure I can write. The thing that’s sort of outside of my comfort zone.

And even I guess sometimes at the start of my career, definitely going from Go to Big Fish, which are not sort of natural progressions, I really tried to push myself to do both of those things.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s very —

**John:** Are you a growth or a fixed? I perceive you — I’ll diagnose you first, but I think I’ll be wrong. I perceive you as a person who is fixed in the sense that you perceive yourself as a comedy writer and yet you very much also want to stretch beyond those boundaries of just a pure comedy writer.

**Craig:** I, yeah, well the thing is the genre that you pick is probably — it’s probably a symptom of your desire to stay safe and to succeed.

I don’t feel that I’m a fixed person. I do feel like I am always trying to get better and challenge myself, which indicates that I don’t have a philosophical belief that I’m just capped at a certain level. But certainly like you, I’ve made choices to protect myself and like you, lately and particularly lately, I’ve been making choices that do the opposite, that essentially put me out there in an area — I think you said it perfectly. I can do this and I can’t do this. That’s a good place to be. That means you’re not trying to fly, but you’re definitely taking careful steps somewhere. And that’s a good thing.

**John:** Yeah. And I would say beyond just my pure writing stuff, I think in public speaking and sort of my moderating of panels and my doing stuff at the Academy has been also an expansion beyond what I’m comfortable and safe doing, because it’s just so much easier for me to stay at home and just write on blog. And to go out and have to be in front of a big crowd of people was not natural for me. And yet I’ve gotten much more comfortable about doing it.

I think I’ve told this story on the podcast before, but I’ll summarize it here because it actually fits really well with this sort of fixed versus growth mindset. I was on set and I was watching Spielberg direct this scene. And I was looking at sort of how he was doing stuff and how stuff was going. And I had this momentary flash where I realized like, oh, he’s just working really hard.

You associate these great directors as being these visionary talents who are born with these gifts. And while clearly he has gifts, he’s also just worked really hard. And I could see him — he’s Steven Spielberg, but he’s figuring out all these shots and he’s telling all these people what to do. And he’s really good at doing that, but he’s also just really focusing on it and he’s really working.

And it was one of those moments that was both sort of sobering in the sense that, oh, it’s not magic. But it was also like, oh, it’s not magic. Like I can work really hard, too. And that was actually greatly encouraging for me to see like, you know, it’s really, really hard work but I know I can work really, really hard.

And I think it gets back to Megan McArdle’s point is that oftentimes the people who succeed are the ones who just kind of aren’t afraid of failing. The ones who sort of can benefit from failure or benefit from struggles and learn how to sort of struggle.

**Craig:** That’s right. It puts you in a tough spot because most people on the planet don’t do jobs where failure is likely. They don’t. I’m not sure — most jobs are fairly safe things. This one isn’t one.

**John:** You can’t fail at a spreadsheet.

**Craig:** No, you can’t. I mean, you can, but it’s a different kind of failure. It’s not a failure of you. You can make mistakes but it’s not a failure of the expression of your point of view, your taste. Our brothers and sisters in the film review community, how do you fail? How do you fail?

If you can give Her a terrible review and still be at work the next week, how do you — there’s not failing there. But what we do, there’s failure every day. In fact, it’s built in. When we are hired, the contract is built around the notion that we’re going to keep failing. That’s why there is more than one draft even if it’s just optional. The entire editorial process is built around that. The reason you shoot more than you’re going to keep in the movies, because directors make mistakes all the time.

Why do actors get more than one take? Failure. Failure. Failure. The whole thing is a parade of it. And you have to make your peace with it, or it will absolutely destroy you.

**John:** It occurs to me that this kind of procrastination that a writer faces sitting down at the keyboard is really just a form of stage fright. It’s that fear that I’m going to get there at the keyboard and I’m not going to be good. And everyone is going to see that I’m not good and it’s going to be awful.

And so therefore I just won’t sit down at the keyboard.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the difference with stage fright is that eventually you have to get on. They’re going to call your name and you’re going to have to get up on stage and you’re going to have to start singing. And that’s, I think, ultimately what you have to face is a writer is that I have to sit there and I have to type this thing. And even if it’s terrible, I have to get through it because that’s my job. That’s what I’m here to do.

So, let’s just talk a little bit about sort of how you get past those humps and sort of what you find.

**Craig:** Well, I try and remember, and this is something that McArdle points out. I try and remember that there is no percentage for me to compare what I’m about to do or what I’m doing with finished products, which I think is the demon that plagues us constantly. I’m going to sit down. What should I write? Well, if I write this, that’s been done before. If I write this, somebody else already did that better. If I write this is it too much like that?

Constantly comparing the process, the messy process of cooking, to already completed perfect meals. You have to get ultimately to the place where it’s done. And, of course, we’re all trained to watch and appreciate the best of all those completions. So, I try and remind myself that there is nothing permanent about what I’m about to write. I can always hit delete.

It’s not like I’m expending resources, you know, rare resources to generate three or four pages, only to throw them out. I’m not building a wall, you know, where it’s going to cost me money to build it again. So, I give myself a break in that regard.

**John:** I think what you’re saying is exactly right in terms of recognizing that the finished product is not what you’re working on right now. You’re working on the process and in McArdle’s piece she points out that we always read, when we read like the great authors, we’re reading their final drafts.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We’re not reading everything they did along the way. We’re not seeing all their mistakes. We’re not seeing everything they threw out. We’re seeing the finished product. And it would actually be very helpful, I think, sometimes if we saw all the drafts that led up to it so we could see this.

Shakespeare actually weirdly, we do get to see all the different versions of things, and that’s kind of useful. You can sort of see how things grew and how things changed.

When I find myself procrastinating I, you know, the classic rule is you sort of set a timer. And it’s like for the next 20 minutes I’m going to write and I’m not going to do anything else. I’m just going to write. Jane Espenson calls this a Writing Sprint, which is basically no matter what, the next 20 minutes, the next 40 minutes, I’m going to write and I’m not going to stop writing until the timer goes off. That’s a great trick.

Freedom for Mac, the utility that we’ve talked about before on the show, which basically turns off your internet connection for a period of time, also really helpful. So, if you’re sitting there and you can’t get on the internet you’re more likely to be able to focus on the work you’re doing.

Anything else for you?

**Craig:** Yeah. The other little trick I do is to think about the scene that I’m supposed to be writing and then say, okay, maybe I’m scared to start writing this because I just don’t love it yet. There’s nothing in it that’s getting me super excited. And so I just try and think about it in different ways. Or just let myself think.

If it takes all day I’ll just think all day. If I have to take a walk, or you know me, a long shower is always great. But, when you find that thing that suddenly gets you excited then it’s a lot easier to sit down because it doesn’t feel quite so grindy.

And, by the way, interestingly enough, a lot of the times those things that got us motivated, they come out. It was something that we just needed to do it to not feel bad about moving our fingers over the keys. And there are days when you can take a walk and you feel like you can walk from one end of the earth to the other. And there are days when taking five steps just feels tough.

You have to actually honor that and not punish yourself for having one of those days. It’s totally normal.

**John:** Yeah. Agreed.

I want to sidestep to another sort of psychological thing which I actually witnessed this week in the negotiating room.

So, basically during the negotiations there is a lot of time where we as the screenwriters are just sitting there waiting for the next thing to happen. And so people are writing, which is great. So, you’re shoulder to shoulder with all these writers writing, which is fantastic.

But one writer who was sitting close to me was struggling to — his script was 116 pages and he really wanted to get down to 114, or 112. And he called it Pageorexia, which I thought was just the best term. And this wasn’t like a newbie writer. This was like a guy with multiple awards and nominated this year for awards. And I just thought it was hilarious that this is this guy who is getting paid a tremendous amount of money to do whatever he wants to do. And he still sweats all of these little details to try to get it down one more page.

He described it as, “Well, if they love it at 116 they’ll love it even more at 114,” which is such a classic anorexia kind of comment. It’s like he’s looking in the mirror and he’s not seeing what the script truly is.

**Craig:** Right. He’s got script dysmorphia.

**John:** Yes. But I would argue that in some ways that’s related to the procrastination thing that we’re talking about. It’s a perfectionism as a way of fearing failure. Rather than fear stopping him from writing, fear was getting him gripped into this sort of OCD must make everything perfect.

**Craig:** Yeah. We are constantly deluding ourselves that we have control over the response to our screenplay when we don’t. We write what we write. And we then give it to entirely different sentient organisms with completely different tastes, experiences, moods. And either they like it or they don’t. But that stuff is about trying to control that which we cannot control.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It does not — they will not like a 114 page script more than that script at 116, ever. [laughs] It’s never going to happen.

**John:** Yeah. What it’s doing is it’s crossing the line between like sort of professionalism, which is basically like making that look as good as it can. And perfectionism, or sort of needless perfectionism where you’re just moving commas around so that it breaks a little bit differently.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** This is a very smart man. So, I can tell him, and he knows that the 114 page script and the 116 page script will shoot exactly the same. You’re not changing the movie whatsoever. You’re just changing the words around on the page.

And yet sometimes we get obsessed about the words on 8.5 x 11 paper, not remembering like, oh that’s right, it’s actually just a plan for making a movie.

I heard a story, which may be apocryphal but it sounds absolutely true, because I feel I like I may have seen this in one of his scripts, that James Cameron when he got to — this is back in the time where you actually would type scripts or they were sort of printed out of things, so they weren’t PDFs. So, he would number it from 70 to 79 and when he got to 80 he would start it again at 70 to 79 again, so he could squeeze an extra 10 pages in. And no one would sort of notice that like it was doubled up there. Isn’t that a great idea?

**Craig:** [laughs] I totally believe it. I mean, the “it’s too long” is the traditional problem of the screenwriter. I’ve really never had a problem of a script that was much too long. The current script that I am doing is more of an action movie, and so I’ve given myself more length than a typical comedy. And it’s in at 119. And that’s 119 with proper margins and double spaces before the slug lines. And I feel good about that.

I called up Scott Frank in a little bit of a panic —

**John:** Scott Frank will tell you to turn in a 180 page script. Scott Frank writes long…

**Craig:** Scott laughed at me and then slapped me around and said, “No one gives a damn. I’ve never turned in a first draft that was shorter than…” Yeah. Exactly. “If it’s under 150 it’s a hallelujah for me.”

The one thing that I do spend time on, and I know Scott does — a lot of writers do — is page breaks at important moments.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I do look and see, okay, look, if there’s a big reveal or a moment, I don’t want that to be split up by a page break. If there’s an interesting speech. In fact, I don’t want any dialogue split over page breaks. I hate it. So, I try and — I mess around with stuff like that. But, you know, that’s when the script is done. And that’s just a fun hour or two.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s segue to our next topic which is a bunch of stuff happened this last week and it’s going to be happening in the next few months which could make everything quite a bit different in the next couple of years. So, I just want to give a little sense of what’s gone on and forecast — a very murky forecast — of what could happen in the weeks ahead.

So, this last week it was announced that Comcast is buying Time Warner Cable, which will create the largest cable company in the universe, I guess.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, it was the number one cable company, Comcast, buying the number two cable company, Time Warner. It raises just a lot of questions about sort of how powerful can one company be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Also, happening soon we have Aereo, the company that’s being sued by the broadcast networks. Aereo essentially retransmits over the air broadcast via the internet. And it’s a whole question about sort of what is possible there. What’s going to be legal there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then we also have, you know, this is the new season of House of Cards starting. A real question about Netflix and Amazon and now companies are making things that are like television but are not classically television. And how are we going to write for those and how are we going to get paid for those? And that’s a big thing.

**Craig:** It’s a mess out there. It’s a mess.

**John:** It’s a mess out there. And they’re actually all kind of related because — so, let’s go back to the Aereo lawsuit.

So, essentially Aereo’s lawsuit is — the broadcast networks are suing this company, Aereo, which provides television, a local channel television, but what they do which is very clever, they have these tiny little antennas and essentially as a subscriber you are renting this tiny little antenna which is often hooked to a tiny little hard drive which allows you to record the over-the-air broadcast in your market and so that you can look at it on your iPhone, your iPad, your computer.

It’s a way of getting your broadcast television to your computer or your other device. And it has this sort of geofencing on it and stuff so you’re not supposed to be able to get it outside of your region. Classically that would be called retransmission.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so when cable companies come into a market, or cable companies are in a market, they have to pay the broadcast channels for the right to retransmit their shows.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, they have to pay, the classically New York, CBS, and I guess it was Comcast had the fight over basically how much Comcast would have to pay CBS in order to rebroadcast.

**Craig:** It happens all the time. Yeah.

**John:** And so if you lose a channel, like basically for awhile CBS wasn’t on Comcast, and that was because they were fighting over the price. And the broadcasters make about $4 billion a year in those retransmission fees. So, if Aereo were to succeed the broadcasters would feel like, well, we’re going to lose all that money.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I don’t understand how this is legal at all. Anyone that watches a baseball game has heard, or any sports event, “This telecast cannot be rebroadcast or retransmitted without the expressed given permission, blah, blah, blah.”

Yeah, how do they do this? It doesn’t seem…

**John:** I’ll tell you exactly how they get away with it. It’s because of Comcast itself. So, Comcast won an earlier Supreme Court decision with their basically personal DVRs. So, what Comcast was letting it do, and I remember blogging about this a zillion years ago and actually coming down on kind of maybe the wrong side of it. But, so Comcast, the DVR decision, was essentially Comcast wanted to say like, “Okay, so we have this cable subscriber. And rather than having a DVR in their house, they can have their DVR at the cable company.”

**Craig:** Right. A cloud-based DVR. Right.

**John:** Exactly the same thing. But it’s one DVR per household, so it really is an individual’s DVR. And so the retransmission is public retransmission, not private retransmission. So, that is the very fine line that Aereo is trying to go for. And apparently the reason why they introduced service in New York City is because it was already in the second court, the second district court when it had that ruling for Comcast that was beneficial. So, it’s going to be fascinating to see what happens.

This case, and now I think it’s supposed to be heard by the Supreme Court in April, so we’ll have a ruling there.

The question is, from a writer’s perspective, and an industry’s perspective, what happens if the Supreme Court says you can do this sort of private rebroadcasting? Well, I think if you’re a cable provider you’re going to say like, well, I’m not going to pay this local channel all this money for this. I’m going to do this thing with the antennas and it will be cheaper for me just to do this thing with the antennas.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m always fascinated by these businesses that operate like fatal viruses. There’s the classic question in epidemiology. Why didn’t say small pox just kill everyone? What stopped it? And the answer what stops it is it’s too good at killing people. And it just kills at its hosts in an area too quickly and can’t transmit itself.

I’m fascinated by these companies that their business model is to feast on the corpse of the thing that’s giving them life until there’s nothing left.

**John:** Well, here’s the thing though. I think from what Aereo would argue back, and I’ll just play devil’s advocate for Aereo here, is that it’s essentially the same thing as what the Cablevision decision was. The subscriber is still getting exactly the broadcast that they would have gotten with their own rabbit ears.

And so they’re still getting all of the commercials. They’re still getting — Nielsen still measures those people. So, technically it’s not that they’re stripping out commercials. It’s not that they’re taking the content away. They’re just giving it to them in the way that they want. And so Les Moonves of CBS said, “Well, if this lawsuit happens maybe we’ll just become a cable channel.”

Well, maybe they’ll just become a cable channel. Or maybe they’ll just start offering on CBS.com all of your shows for a subscription.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which then raised the question of like, well, does that mean that five years from now, CBS, NBC, everything we associate as being broadcast television could ultimately become a subscription service?

**Craig:** Well, yeah, it could. I mean, the fact that anything is broadcast over the air anymore is, obviously, it’s archaic. But it is so much part and parcel with the way that networks work. And there are still a bunch of places in the country where people use antennas and pick signals out off the air.

**John:** Yeah. And complicating these things even more, when we switched over to the digital channels — there’s piggyback digital channels. There are basically secondary channels that can go along with this. And so you’ve seen like My Network TV in certain markets or there’s another thing with like Axion or something, that’s considered a piggyback. It’s a secondary digital channel. And the rules for how we treat those are still kind of amorphous. Are they broadcast? Are they not broadcast? Do they fall under those rules? Do they fall under some sort of digital distribution rules?

That’s all strange and complicated.

**Craig:** Mess. It’s a mess.

**John:** It’s a mess.

So, but let’s talk about Comcast because what’s so weird about Comcast is if the merger happens, it’s already the nation’s largest internet service provider. It’s the nation’s largest video provider. It’s one of the biggest home phone providers. It controls a movie studio, because Comcast owns NBC Universal, so it controls a movie studio, a broadcast network, and a whole bunch of cable channels. That’s a big company.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, where do you stand on big companies?

**Craig:** Well, my feeling is that as a professional writer who makes a living from these big companies, that I want them to survive but only to a point. I want them to survive with robust competition.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** So, I have no problem. I know the Writers Guild immediately freaks out every time this happens. They absolutely lose their minds over vertical integration and multi-national corporations consolidating the business. My feeling is, good, I’m okay with that. As long as there’s not one or two of them, you know.

We currently have Sony and we have Comcast Universal. And we have Warner Bros. which will exist with its networks and its movie studios and its television production regardless of the cable situation. We have Disney and we have Fox and we have Viacom. There’s big companies out there all fighting with each other. Those companies have the resources to not only make large scale entertainment but they also have the resources to pay us and to negotiate pretty good — pretty good deals with our union, as you’re in the middle of right now.

I think the Writers Guild, this is an area where I’ve never understood the Writers Guild’s full blown paranoia. Paranoia, yes. Hysteria, no. They’re constantly looking at Amazon and Google as some sort of rescuers. I keep screaming to everybody they’re the opposite. They’re the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Non-union shops that are used to bullying everybody out of everything.

I mean, we have five major movie studios, right? Five?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How many major search engines are there on the planet? One. That’s the way Google works.

How many major e-tailers compete with Amazon? I’m going to go with none.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I have no problem with these companies doing what they need to do to survive as long as I have options. Frankly, in my house I don’t get my internet from Time Warner or Comcast. I don’t get my phones from Time Warner or Comcast. I don’t get my television from Time Warner or Comcast. You know what I get from Comcast?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** I get paid because I’m working for Universal. [laughs] That’s what I get. I get paid.

**John:** Ha-ha! You get checks.

**Craig:** I feel like I’m still living — I get checks. So, I’m still living in a world where these companies have vital, large scale competition and I support their — I back their survival as long as there’s enough of them to keep each other honest. How about you?

**John:** All right. I’m concerned about this merger because it’s literally like, it’s just like number one and two, it’s like 75% of cable in the country would be controlled by this one giant company which doesn’t feel like a lot. And cable is also one of those weird things.

So, broadcasters are subject to these regulations because the broadcast spectrum is there are limited resources, therefore we have a lot of controls over sort of what you can do there and how many players you can have because it’s a limited resource.

But cable is actually a limited resource in the sense that every community had to make deals with the companies who are bringing in this wire. And basically because, so you’re not ripping up the streets a thousand times, they’re sort of near-monopolies in a lot of these markets.

And I do worry that because they are the fastest pipe into the house and it’s essentially only end up having one or now maybe two choices, a duopoly situation where AT&T is the other way you can get the stuff. It could just become really problematic.

And I’ve sympathized on both sides of the net neutrality debate, but I think it becomes a little bit more pressing when you have this giant company that controls the access to households, to so many households, and is making its own content and can therefore in the world of no net neutrality prioritize its content over anyone else’s content. And that is challenging to me.

**Craig:** In my mind, I don’t see that the company would do that. I don’t think that Comcast/Time Warner would — their merged cable system — if they were to tier stuff would say, hey, it’s going to cost you more to watch these other channels. It’s going to cost you less to watch the ones that we control.

**John:** But that’s exactly what they’ve done in cable. Cable is tiered. I mean, it already is tiered right now. You can get these channels with this. You can get this, a higher tier, you get these channels.

**Craig:** But in the way its tiered, they don’t — in other words, Time Warner never gave you a break on HBO. They charge you more for HBO because it’s worth more. My point being that they never — they know the consumers — the demand from consumers is what drives the market price. And if they try and use monopoly pressure. Well, first of all, they’re going to run into anti-trust problems if they start bundling, because that’s basically bundling. You’re not allowed to do it.

But also they’re just going to run into marketplace problems because people are not going to want that. Where I kind of see benefit for professional writers on these non-net neutrality side is if these companies said things like, “Well, we’re going to start charging a premium for super fast delivery of movies. All movies. Not Universal movies. All movies.” And then we would get better residuals. So, that — I could see that as a benefit for writers. But, I don’t, I mean, look, I personally suspect that cable has got another 10 or 15 years left. Physical cable. Because I think ultimately —

**John:** Before there is some sort of pervasive Wi-Fi?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s inevitable. It’s inevitable. So, I mean, this merger I don’t think is a cause for us to twist our underwear up.

**John:** All right. We’ll see.

We have some questions. Let’s go to some questions. So, Mark in Portland asks, “If pagination isn’t that important,” I think he’s talking about last week’s episode where I ranted on pagination. “If pagination isn’t that important, why use Courier or Courier Prime font?”

I would say that use Courier because Courier is what is expected in screenplays. It’s not that it’s better, or that it’s perfect, or that will exactly match the one page per minute guideline. It’s just what we’re expecting in a screenplay. And anything that’s not that will be met with an “Uh-huh? That’s not what a screenplay should look like.”

**Craig:** Yup. It’s basically tradition. Simple as that. It’s the tradition that comes from an old school way of thinking about stuff as being a page a minute and all that. And really it was way to try and — all of these things were really ways to foil writers who were trying to cheat either by not writing enough, or by jamming too much into a space. The studios got wise to all of our tricks.

It’s an easy way for them to go, “Oh, okay, well at least we’ve eliminated one variable. They can’t use the super tiny font. They can’t write everything in Times 12, you know.” But, yeah, it’s tradition.

**John:** I think we use Courier and Courier Prime, even though we have better fonts now, or different fonts that you could use, simply for the same reason why when you’re turning in those papers in college or in high school they wanted you to use a certain font so you wouldn’t cheat.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And it’s style sheets. I mean, Warner Bros. I think still includes all that stuff in the contracts. Margins and all that.

**John:** Scotty Shumaker writes, “I’m a 22 year old recent college graduate working as a night shift janitor at McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica.”

**Craig:** Awesome!

**John:** “I came here to find some adventure and pay off student loans. Because I work alone in a deserted science lab for 60 hours a week I’m able to pass the tedious hours mopping and scrubbing urinals by listening to you guys. I have probably listened to over 100 hours of Scriptnotes in the past few months as well as all seven Harry Potter books, all three Lord of the Rings, and about 100 episodes of a podcast called Inside Acting. I just wanted to say thank you and let you know that your wisdom and umbrage has made its way down to the seventh continent.”

**Craig:** That is amazing. I mean, first of all, there’s something — doesn’t that sound like the first five pages of a movie? You’re the guy —

**John:** Oh, come on, it’s a great setup.

**Craig:** You’re there at the science base on the south pole, but you’re not a scientist. You’re a janitor. You’re just the janitor.

**John:** You’re the janitor.

**Craig:** And you’re just scrubbing stuff. And then one day you come out of the bathrooms and everyone is dead.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And there’s something — yeah, I mean, it’s great. Anyway, my former college roommate, Eric Leech, I believe worked down at that very station. He’s an astrophysicist. And I think he was there for a year. It’s dangerous down there. When they have their winter, and our summer, you get like 15 seconds or 30 seconds to walk around before they make you come back in. It’s brutal.

**John:** It’s bad.

So, Craig, I’m hoping that over our many, many episodes of the podcast I’ll get to know all of your college roommates who have all gone on to become famous people.

**Craig:** Well, Eric and I share a common opinion of the junior senator from Texas.

**John:** A third roommate.

**Craig:** Ted Cruz. Yeah.

**John:** A question from Khrob in San Francisco.

**Craig:** Khrob?

**John:** Khrob. K-H-R-O-B .

**Craig:** Oh, Khrob.

**John:** Khrob. “Where’s the line for things in your script that are very clearly referencing the specifics of another project? If the Tae Bo movie had a shot — ” So, last week we talked about the Tae Bo movie, or the theoretical Tae Bo movie. I guess it was a real Tae Bo movie.

**Craig:** It was an actual Tae Bo movie.

**John:** “If the Tae Bo movie had a shot of the protagonist clearly doing Daniel-san’s Crane Kick practice, but was otherwise its own film, at what point would that cross from reference to homage to plagiarism? If a show like Futurama or The Simpsons builds a whole episode around a known property, the Futurama episode of Titanic, for example, do they pay for that or are they allowed to use specifics given their status as satirical shows?”

**Craig:** Well, I mean, you can reference any movie you want.

**John:** Yeah. That’s fine. It’s fine to reference the movie. And I would say like that whole thing about doing the shot, the Crane Kick position, that’s obviously a reference, we get the reference, you’re not stealing anything.

But I will tell you in a very real sense it does happen sometimes where people get uncomfortable, even not a legal standpoint, but sort of like, “I’m not sure we’re in a parody spot here. I just feels like too much the same movie.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It does happen. That’s a conversation that happens all the time.

**Craig:** Yeah, look, if you’re trying to parody something, parody is generally protected under the copyright law and fair use. But, let’s say you’re just making a reference so that the reader understands the kind of thing you’re going for, you know, you say something like, “The two of them begin fighting in the elevator. It’s like From Russia with Love,” but you know, something, something.

**John:** Over peanut butter.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, just so that people understand what you’re going for. That’s okay. I mean, don’t do it lot. You know, it starts to get a little weird. But it’s fine if you feel like it’s going to help convey your intention. You’re not copying something, but you’re saying it’s a little bit like this, but imagine that in this new circumstance. Just, you know, underline the film title and keep going.

**John:** Keep going.

Hope writes, “I’ve heard you and Craig mention several times on the podcast that now more than ever people should try to shoot their own small projects, like a short film. This helps them learn about filmmaking, see their words on a screen, and has a slim but real possibility of getting them attention either online or at festivals.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Would this advice still apply if you have no intention of becoming a writer-director? Is an award-winning short that you wrote a useful calling card as an aspiring screenwriter? Have there been any screenwriters, not counting writer-directors, who have gotten their first success in the industry through a short?”

**Craig:** Oh, I’m sure.

**John:** I’m sure there are. But I would say my general advice about like shooting your own stuff is not just as the calling card for yourself, while it can be really great as the calling card, it’s just so you actually understand what it is like to make something as a finished product rather than just a screenplay. And so that’s why — I think that’s why we talk about the importance of going out and actually shooting some stuff, just so you have a sense of what that is, because that is incredibly useful.

But if you wrote a really great short film, and even if you didn’t direct it, I think that is good for you. I think it is great exposure.

**Craig:** No question. Yeah, the whole point of making your own thing is to be a better writer. And if you say, “Well, I actually don’t want to direct, I just want to write,” which is completely noble and that’s pretty much what I do, then just do it anyway because it will make you a better writer for the person that is going to be directing it.

**John:** Yeah. A question from Oscar. “A script of mine was optioned by a producer over a year ago. It was a one-year free option. Nothing came of it, even though the producer pushed it and still wants to try to get it made. I don’t want to pull the rug out from under him, but several other producers have asked me to send them the script if nothing was done with it at the end of the option period. How do I handle this? What are my ethical options?

“I realize that legally I can do with my script whatever I wish because the option has expired, and wasn’t formally renewed. But I’d like to do what is right by the initial producer.”

So, what’s your advice for Oscar in this situation?

**Craig:** In this situation I don’t think the ethics are — there’s no shadowy ethics here. the ethics are that you made a business arrangement and the term of the business arrangement is up and it is now your choice. And you are able to ethically, guilt-free, do whatever you want with it.

The only question I think you need to ask is do you want to give this producer more time? Do you think that this producer actually can get it done, that their passion sets them apart from these other people? And that if they have another three or four months something terrific is going to happen and that’s the person you want producing the movie.

**John:** I agree with you. I would say — it’s not clear entirely whether this producer has had the option and no one else has been reading your script, because you need other people to read your script. I mean, you want people to read your script. And so no matter what, make sure it gets out in the world so people can see it.

If these other producers are asking about it because they have some plan for how they’re going to do it, I think honestly at this point you listen to their plans and if they sound like interesting plans you let them pursue it.

Now, it could come to a situation where they start to get some stuff moving and this initial producer gets upset and just the whole awkward terrible conversations, but those are awkward, terrible conversations that are happening because there’s movement and because there’s things that are going on with your script. So, that’s only a good thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s an interesting — I was talking about this the other day with a fellow writer. There is an interesting psychological phenomenon in our business as it relates to the relationship between writers and executives or producers. We writers are expected to be rejected constantly. And either rejected off the bat or hired and then replaced and fired.

We are meant to expect this and to absorb it politely and without fuss. They are not at all expected to handle rejection politely or without fuss. And very often are nasty about it. And I think you just have to remind yourself they — while the day that they’re complaining to you that you somehow have rejected them, they rejected five people before they got on the phone with you.

**John:** Yup. It’s absolutely true.

**Craig:** Part of life. Circle of life. Lions and gazelles.

**John:** And as a circle of the podcast, because it’s now time for One Cool Things.

Craig, do you want to start, or should I?

**Craig:** Oh, you should totally start.

**John:** Okay. I actually have two Cool Things, so I’m going to give both of them here.

First one is The Fog Horn, which I thought we had talked about on the podcast, but maybe we haven’t. Many episodes ago, god, 90 episodes ago we probably talked about Popcorn Fiction which is Derek Haas’s short fiction website.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The Fog Horn is an app. It’s a thing that you can find in the iPhone App Store, the iOS App Store, which is sort of like Popcorn Fiction, but it’s just short stories that every month they put out a new batch of short stories. It’s one of those sort of online magazines. And some of the short stories are terrific, so I would recommend you check out The Fog Horn online. It is a very good experience both as an app and some really good writing in there.

My second Cool Thing was something that, we’re recording this on Saturday, so this happened Friday, was Ellen Page’s coming out speech. So, Ellen Page, star of Juno, came out this week. And if you just saw the headline, like Ellen Page comes out. It’s like, oh, fine, good for her. But I actually — I really strongly recommend you watch the video. We’ll include a link to it if you haven’t watched it yet. Because it’s really just terrifically well written and terrifically well presented in terms of why she feels — why she hasn’t come out publicly before now, why she thinks it’s important to come out.

And last week we talked about sort of a hero sort of needs to be in charge of his or her own story.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s really very much about that. It’s basically until you can claim your own sort of self-identity you can’t actually control anything else in your life. And so it’s a really smartly done thing and I just sort of — I want to vote for her for something, because it was just an incredibly well presented, incredibly articulate and heartfelt description of both what was keeping her from being public. It was basically the lie of omission. And why she was excited to not be lying anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, I strongly recommend you check that out.

**Craig:** It’s great. Chris Nee, the creator of Doc McStuffins —

**John:** We love Chris Nee so much.

**Craig:** We love Chris Nee. And Chris made a really good point that one of the great things about the way that she came out in this video was that it was about a minute of “I’m gay” and really seven minutes of her acknowledging that all the people in the room didn’t need her to come out. They were already doing great work. They were already doing great stuff.

She said at some point, “So you guys are doing this, you’re doing this, you’re doing this, you’re doing this, and the truth is you didn’t need me to tell you any of it. That’s the weird part of this.”

And I love that she didn’t — it’s so easy for celebrities to turn everything into me, me, me, and frankly coming out of the closet is a me, me, me, and somehow she made it into a you, you, you, which was awesome.

**John:** It was really smart. So, the context of this was HRC’s Time to Thrive conference which is this sort of youth and teachers conference they were doing. And it was exactly what you described. It was five minutes of you, you, you, this is the nature of the struggle, and it’s because of what you’re doing that I’m able to come out. And so it was just a thank you.

And it was just perfectly done. Perfectly delivered.

**Craig:** It was. Well, you know, my One Cool Thing is also a person and it’s, I’m sad, I’m sad John because we found out this week that this coming baseball season will be Derek Jeter’s final season.

**John:** I can’t tell you how incredibly heartbroken I am to hear this.

**Craig:** Well, you should be, and I’ll tell you why.

**John:** I did know that Derek Jeter was a baseball player, so I get some points for that. [laughs]

**Craig:** Allow me to extend what his value is. Are you a Simon & Garfunkel fan?

**John:** I’m aware of who they are. That’s the best…

**Craig:** They are not baseball players. The famous folk singing songwriting duo of Simon & Garfunkel.

So, in their song Mrs. Robinson there is a lyric that says, “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you. What’s that you say Mrs. Robinson? Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away.”

And apparently this drove Joe DiMaggio nuts because he was a notorious grump. But Joe DiMaggio is in that song because he exemplified a kind of purity of a time. He was a class act playing America’s game. He was remarkably talented. And he just managed to do it all right. And we love that in our heroes. I mean, he had his stumbles and his falls, and he had his injuries and his mishaps, but he was classy. He was the Yankee Clipper.

And baseball has had lots of heroes and lots of great guys and lots of goats. God knows, so many goats. And in a time when America’s pastime has just been about the most tarnished it has been since the Black Sox scandal of the early part of the century, Derek Jeter has exemplified what it means to just be a classy, great baseball player. He’s done it right the whole time. He’s enormously respected.

And more importantly, now I feel old because Derek Jeter isn’t going to be out there anymore manning shortstop for the New York Yankees. This is going to be a tough season. He’s a shoe-in first ballot Hall of Famer. Never one iota of concern that he was on steroids. He wasn’t that kind of player. But, he has hit some magic benchmarks, well over 3,000 hits and a career average of slightly over 300 which I know is something that you always look for.

**John:** It’s really my first criteria, career average.

**Craig:** It’s sad because one of the greats is riding off into the sunset. One of the truly great, great players of a great, great game celebrated by a great, great country. So, Derek Jeter, today and for many months to come you will be my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Now. Craig, is it possible we’ve pinpointed the source of your anxiety. Was it his retirement that is causing your anxiety?

**Craig:** No. No. I’m not quite that, [laughs], I don’t like Derek Jeter at all, actually.

**John:** Not that much. You appreciate it more from a distance. And that’s our show. So, if you would like to know more about the things we talked about today, the show notes are always at johnaugust.com/podcast. You can see the things we’ve talked about. You can see some sort of article that Stuart will find about Derek Jeter. You will also find Ellen Page’s coming out stuff. Many of the articles we talked about today on the show.

If you are on iTunes looking through the App Store you can find the Scriptnotes app which lets you listen to our most recent episodes, but actually our entire back catalog as well. You’ll also find Weekend Read there while you’re there.

If you have iTunes open and you want to leave us a comment or a rating, that’s awesome as well. You can subscribe to us there in iTunes.

And so, Nerdmelt, so we should say the live show at Nerdmelt, the crossover episode with the Nerdist Writers Podcast. Tickets are available now, so don’t wait too long for that because that will sell out. There will also be other live shows coming later on in the spring, but we’ll have those details when they come.

**Craig:** “Good for you! Good for you!”

**John:** Craig, have a wonderful week.

**Craig:** You too, man.

Links:

* [Generalized anxiety disorder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_anxiety_disorder) on Wikipedia
* Get your tickets now for the [Nerdist/Scriptnotes Live Crossover episode](https://www.nerdmeltla.com/tickets2/index.php?event_id=791/) on April 13th at Nerdmelt, with proceeds benefiting [826LA](https://826la.org/)
* [The Office](http://www.theofficeonline.com/intro.htm) and [the writers junction](http://www.writersjunction.com/) are both open
* Weekend Read in the [App Store](http://highland.quoteunquoteapps.com/wr-podcast)
* Christian Bale [gets upset on set](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0auwpvAU2YA) (very NSFW language)
* Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators by Megan McArdle in [The Atlantic](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/why-writers-are-the-worst-procrastinators/283773/)
* [Freedom for Mac](http://macfreedom.com)
* Comcast/Time Warner deal will [face antitrust hurdles](http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/13/technology/comcast-time-warner-antitrust/)
* The [Aereo lawsuit](http://upstart.bizjournals.com/companies/media/2014/02/14/aereo-vs-the-broadcasters-six.html?page=all) on Upstart
* [McMurdo Research Station](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station) in Antarctica
* [The Fog Horn](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-fog-horn/id778971478?mt=8)
* Ellen Page’s [coming out speech](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hlCEIUATzg) at HRC’s Time to Thrive conference
* Wallace Matthews on [Derek Jeter announcing 2014 will be his final season](http://espn.go.com/blog/new-york/yankees/post/_/id/68961/for-once-jeter-can-savor-the-moment), and Jeter’s career on [Baseball-Reference.com](http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/j/jeterde01.shtml)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Kim Atle

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/period-space).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Argh! Ah! My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, Episode 130, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, last week there was some controversy and both you and I got sucked into it. So, I feel like maybe we should just start off with this and just get a clean slate here. Okay?

**Craig:** Fine.

**John:** So, this happened on February 3. Justin Marks, who is a screenwriter and colleague of both of ours — a friend actually — he tweeted something. He tweeted this: Screenwriters, use two spaces after a period, unless you’re writing scripts in Times New Roman which means you’re not a screenwriter.

So, Craig, I ask you, do you use one space or two spaces after a period?

**Craig:** One space.

**John:** Yeah. And so I feel like I am complicit in this controversy that has happened because Justin actually cited that I had said two spaces after a period, which is in fact true.

**Craig:** But what year was that? [laughs]

**John:** That was in 2005.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, in 2005 I made a blog post about how to change, basically saying that mono space fonts like Courier traditionally use two spaces after a period. Everything else — everything else — should be one space after the period.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But mono space faces use two spaces after the period. Even back in 2005 I said it’s not a must, I’m just saying it’s a thing that you can do.

Now, if a person were really carefully observing of my behavior they would notice that if you look through the script library at johnaugust.com at a certain point I actually switched to a single space after the period. And even you and I on the podcast have discussed it. I looked it up and in 2012 on episode 65 we actually talked about the fact that I was sort of leaning more towards using a single space.

But the truth is I have to sort of come out and say this: like most American screenwriters my feelings have evolved and I have become a single-spacer.

**Craig:** Mine too. I learned how to type in high school on a Brother electric typewriter. It wasn’t even the kind of electric typewriter that stored any of the words. It was just more of a clack-clack electric typewriter.

**John:** Did it have a little tiny display before you hit the thing, or just straight to paper?

**Craig:** No, nothing. Straight to paper. It was a disaster and also, therefore, a great way to learn how to type because it really forced you to learn properly.

And in 1985 I was taught two spaces. It took me awhile to get out of the two space habit because I am a touch typer, but I did. And there is absolutely no call for it. Most screenplays I read are one space. It seems very weird now to see something with two spaces. It’s old school. It’s unnecessary. I think it look worse. And Justin Marks is just wrong. He’s wrong!

**John:** [laughs] I won’t go so far as to say that Justin Marks is wrong. Or, actually, no, I’ll say he’s wrong in the sense that to be declaratory that it should be a certain way is wrong.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If he chooses to still use the two spaces, the world is not going to come crashing to an end. But, I would encourage you if you are not set one way or the other way to just use the single space, because for everything you’re doing in your life a single space will go great. It will look fine in Courier.

And here’s what actually pushed me over the edge is when we were working on Courier Prime, the type face of Courier that looks better than sort of normal Courier, we sort of put the punctuation in a place that looked really good with a single space after it.

**Craig:** Good. Good.

**John:** So, I would just encourage you to try single space and you probably won’t ever go back. And it’s sort of like when you stop smoking, I suspect, that you’ll suddenly notice other people smoking a lot. You will start to notice double spaces that annoy you to some degree.

**Craig:** You never smoked.

**John:** I never smoked. But you did.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t know what you’re talking about. [laughs]

**John:** If people go back to the early episodes of Scriptnotes you can hear Craig smoking while we are recording the show.

**Craig:** Well, I never smoked cigarettes while we were —

**John:** Oh, you did your little e-cigarettes.

**Craig:** My e-cigarettes. Yes. But that’s not smoking either.

**John:** So, one last tip, if you make your change midway through a script or if you’re going back to an old script that you’ve double spaced, the simple solution, of course, is to do a find/replace. Just do Find “period-space-space” and just swap it out for “period-space.” Run that through a couple times. You’ll get rid of all the double spacing and you’ll be happy.

**Craig:** You will, in fact, be happy.

I think it’s better looking, and you’re right, two spaces isn’t going to end the world, but certainly you can’t go on record with something as outrageous as the suggestion that two spaces is preferable and one space is verboten. Not true.

**John:** Not true. It reminds me of Animal Farm. If you remember that the animals, when they took over, they said like two legs bad, four legs good. And then, of course, they end up manipulate itself so that two legs were better because the pigs started walking on their back feet.

So, I’m just basically saying, “Justin Marks don’t be a pig.” Or, maybe I’m the pig in the example. It really wasn’t a well thought out example.

**Craig:** No. This was McKenna-like in its clumsy analogy with nature.

**John:** [laughs] I’m a squirrel in a rocket ship headed towards thieves.

Today on the show we obviously have to talk some Final Draft follow up.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because that was just a thing that happened.

**Craig:** That’s what everybody thought you were talking about when you said we got sucked into a controversy.

**John:** So, we want to talk about that. I want to talk about writing in public spaces, because it’s something I’ve had to do a lot this week. I want to talk about keeping your hero in the driver seat of your story. I had sent you this link to this blog post, this sort of regular column by Heather Havrilesky which I thought was just great because it was really talking about being in the driver’s seat but in real life.

We have a question that I haven’t even sent you yet but I’ll just read it and you’ll have a great answer for it.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We have people suing Tom Cruise for a billion dollars.

**Craig:** This is a big show.

**John:** It’s a big show. I want to talk about this thing called Time Tailor which I didn’t even tell you about but you will be annoyed when I tell you what it is.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** And so it’s a big show. We’ve got a lot to do here.

**Craig:** Big show.

Well, I guess we should start with Final Draft. We had an interview last week, or we welcomed as our guests on the show two gentlemen from Final Draft, one of whom was and is in fact the CEO of Final Draft.

**John:** That was Marc Madnick.

**Craig:** Marc Madnick.

**John:** And then Joe Jarvis who’s the Final Draft Chief, sort of, he’s the person who is the product manager of Final Draft and I think does more of the technical stuff.

**Craig:** How would you say — I’ve been looking around at Reddit and Twitter.

**John:** I haven’t actually seen you on Reddit but I heard through Stuart that you have actually been engaging with people on Reddit which is really dangerous, Craig.

**Craig:** It is? I mean, it’s in Reddit Screenwriting, not in Reddit, I don’t know, [laughs], whatever else Reddit.

**John:** Well, Reddit is nothing but timely threads. No, maybe it’s good. Maybe it’s good you’re engaging.

**Craig:** I mean, I’ve only posted a few things. Everyone has been very polite. What’s the feedback that you’ve sensed from the interview that we did?

**John:** People have written to say that it was incredibly uncomfortable to listen to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which it was uncomfortable to be in that room. So, I’d like to sort of paint the scene and sort of what happened when we did that. We were sitting around a folding table in our little office set with like two towels on the table to sort of muffle some sound. And I was manning the board, poorly, for the four microphones, which we’d just gotten the four microphones up and working.

As it turned out me and Joe Jarvis, we didn’t really need microphones because we weren’t going to be doing very much talking.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** It was mostly going to be Marc and Craig and I knew that it was mostly going to be mostly Marc and Craig which is why I sort of sensed that my role would be the let’s make sure no one flips the table over. That was my function to sort of calm things down.

And I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to challenge him on certain things that I thought were not entirely accurate because things were actually already pretty tense in that room.

**Craig:** They were a bit tense. But they were…I guess I would say they were civil-tense. In other words, everything was about Final Draft and about the product and how they conduct their business. I don’t think that Mr. Madnick did himself many favors, frankly.

You know, anyone can do what they want when they come on a show like our show and talk about what they have to talk about. I was really surprised, honestly surprised. I expected that he… — If it were me I would have come on the show and say, “Look, let me just be humble about this. Let me listen to your complaints and let me address them in that spirit,” because no company does everything right and certainly Final Draft hasn’t done everything right, and then kind of work back to a place of, “But here’s how we’re trying to get better.”

Not really the case. He was pretty defensive, I thought.

**John:** He was sort of more the Ballmer mode, the Microsoft Ballmer Chief, the “I know this is the right thing” kind of mode, versus the responsive way. Evernote, which is a product I use, the CEO or the president or whatever it was sort of very recently said like, “Listen, we know that our syncing and a lot of our services have slowed down a lot. We’re not satisfied and this is what we’re doing to fix it.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That wasn’t what I heard from him. I didn’t hear that he was responding to things. He was more sort of just defending what had happened.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you know a lot of the feedback that I saw on the interwebs following the posting of our show commented on his reliance on a couple of talking points, one of which was they had 40 employees, which I’m not sure is particularly relevant.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** One of which was —

**John:** Well, I would like to parse one second for 40 employees, because does 40 employees mean that you’re a giant or you’re small? Because I think to almost everybody listening were like, “Wow, you have 40 employees?” That felt so much bigger. And to him it’s like, “We’re a small company. We’ve got 40 employees.” And so it was a weird disconnect in terms of what I think — he didn’t seem to have a very good sense of who the listenership of the show was.

**Craig:** I agree, particularly when one co-host of the show has his own software company that puts out very good apps and I believe you have three employees.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** The proprietor of Final Draft I believe has one employee, himself. I think WriterDuet is two guys. This is sort of the way things are going. So, I think you’re right. There was a disconnect there. And there’s a question of how many of those 40… — Well, part of the problem is then you start saying, “Well what are those 40 people doing?” And I think it’s probably true that the minority of them are actually coding software. And then, of course, what that means is many of them are doing other things like promotion, and marketing, and other stuff.

So, that talking point was repeated a lot. I’m not sure if it helped him, or his case. The other thing that people picked up on was that both gentlemen were essentially saying we’re old software and we’ve been out of date for a really long time, so you just have to — that’s why it took us a really long time to issue this fairly expensive upgrade that accomplished things that should have been accomplished awhile ago.

I’m not sure that’s a great defense either.

**John:** I would agree. And so Kent Tessman recently wrote a blog post talking about sort of his experience as a software developer listening to this episode and sort of working through sort of point by point. And so do you want to walk through what Kent wrote about it, because I think that might be a useful start.

**Craig:** Yeah, so he makes some really good points here. And in the moment it was kind of hard, you know, I had to sort of battle to get in there. Marc is certainly an impressive talker, you know. I mean, I think I’m an — impressive meaning volume. So, you know, we couldn’t get into anything, nor could we rebut point by point. But, also, I’m not a software developer and Kent is, and so he had some interesting comments to make about the things that the Final Draft folks were saying.

First, Retina. So, we brought up the point that Final Draft 8 was not Retina-compatible, nor did they release a Retina-compatible patch. You had to wait I think it was the four years. Was it four years?

**John:** It wasn’t four years. It was essentially 14 or 18 months after the Retina —

**Craig:** Between 8 and 9?

**John:** Yeah, but no, essentially Retina became available and it was 18 months later that they actually supported it.

**Craig:** So a year and a half.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it was considered a feature of their $100 upgrade. And his point was, hey, you can’t say that Apple somehow shocked you in a way that nobody else was shocked. Every software developer is in the same boat, particularly guys that are smaller than the 40 employee shop. And what he did was he said all he did was just go into a thing called Quartz Debug and there’s a Graphics Tools folder and he turned on the “Simulate high DPI text demagnification” and, voila, he was able to… — He said he went over to Best Buy, downloaded the Fade In demo on a Retina MacBook that was there on display and it looked great.

So, why couldn’t they have done that? Well, the problem he says is not that they were somehow surprised by Retina. The problem is that they’re using not just old code but nearly ancient code.

**John:** Yes. He’s saying they’re specifically using QuickDraw techniques which were really from ancient Macintoshes to sort of do all the screen rendering. And specifically Kent is saying that likely in order to — every build they were doing, every time they opened up X code to actually build Final Draft they were getting these warnings saying, like, “You’re using things we don’t let you use anymore, you should switch to newer libraries.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And they didn’t and they couldn’t because everything else was dependent upon it.

**Craig:** Yes. So, QuickDraw goes back to the ’80s. And I’m a Mac-head, so I remember QuickDraw being a thing that they were promoting in the ’80s. But I also remember that when Mac OS X rolled out around 2000, 2001, that one of the things that they were really proud of was this Quartz technology and how — it’s the thing that allows print to look better, everything, the graphics/guts of the system software had been upgraded. And this is really — this has been around for a long time.

And one thing that’s puzzling, but more frustrating than puzzling is that Final Draft sat there knowing full well for decades that they were using deprecated software and they didn’t do anything about it. And they didn’t do anything about it because they didn’t have to. And that’s just poor planning. I’m sorry, it’s poor planning.

So, then for them to say, “Oh my god, we suddenly had to rewrite everything.” Well, you didn’t suddenly have to rewrite everything. You only suddenly had to do it when finally it seemed clear that you could no longer drive your Edsel down the freeway.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, that was an interesting point. He also makes the point that for Windows users this upgrade is even less valuable than the upgrade for the Mac people because they don’t even get the Retina stuff, or the full screen. He also points out that Unicode, which is something that they’re talking about jumping on the bandwagon with, this newfangled Unicode is something that has been available for 25 plus years.

**John:** Yes. So, let’s talk about what Unicode is. So, Unicode is a way of representing character sets, so languages, the glyphs of languages, letters that go beyond sort of a standard small roman subset of characters. And it becomes incredibly important for international support. So, if you’re going to be writing scripts in other languages, Unicode is what you need to be able to use in order to render those letters or characters in some cases on the screen. And they still don’t have it.

And it’s one of those things that essentially you get free in Macintosh right now. Like if you write any sort of text editing program that’s not a thing that you have to sort of carefully wrestle with and bake in. It comes free. The challenge is that everything you’ve done up until this point hasn’t used it. And so for Final Draft they have to sort of just do everything differently because it’s not the way they’ve been doing it. And yet it’s not that hard. And it was frustrating for me to hear Marc Madnick to hear sort of how their international users and all this stuff and how they’re doing all this stuff around the world.

And it’s like, well, how are people using your app? Are they only writing scripts in English? Because with Unicode support it’s going to be much more challenging for a writer in Greek to be using your app.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s really no excuse. The only excuse is, well, it’s not our focus. Our focus is to market our software, to market our competitions, and to make our deal with Writers Guild, and advertise. But to not feature something that’s over a quarter century old, which in computer terms means is 14 million years old is mind-boggling.

**John:** And to be fair, Unicode could be 25 years old. It doesn’t mean that everything was Unicode 25 years ago. But like the standard has been out there and now it’s standard. It’s actually genuinely standard.

**Craig:** It is genuinely standard and it has been standard for awhile. Kent makes the point that Carbon and Cocoa were meant to sort of work simultaneously but that moving to Cocoa isn’t something that people just recently decided is something they ought to do. It’s something that basically they’ve been aware they had to do, they should do, for what, ten years? I mean, that sounds —

**John:** That sounds about right. It’s essentially like the doctor says at some point you’re going to need to have this surgery. And, yeah, yeah, but I’m not going to do it this year. I’m going to wait another year. And so like you’re wearing down your joints and suddenly, “Doctor, I can’t move.” Well, yeah, you needed to have this surgery ten years ago. You needed to go and do this and now this is the repercussions of this.

**Craig:** Right. So, suddenly you can’t make the easy fix to have Retina. I don’t know if this is what impacted their application of Unicode, although I doubt it since Unicode pre-dates Cocoa. I doubt it.

And lastly, I’ll just pull up this point. You should read his — he has a very thoughtful piece here — but the last thing he mentions is Fountain. And there’s an exchange that occurs where Joe says, you know, “Fountain is not something that we support but it’s something that we could easily do.” And I said, “So then do it.” [laughs]

You know? And this is something where Kent says, “Fountain is something that they could implement in an afternoon.”

**John:** Easily.

**Craig:** And why aren’t they? And answer certainly can’t be lack of manpower. And I doubt it’s lack of interest. I think they’re not doing it because they are internally, I believe, it’s my opinion, see a defensive position in the proprietary nature of their code, or their format rather, their file format. They don’t want it to be easily translatable between other software programs. But, too bad, it is. And “we have a proprietary format” — that’s a mountain that so many companies have died on. Why would you want to be another one?

**John:** Yeah. I think that really comes down to my central frustration of their defense of sort of what they do. And it comes down to early on in the exchange Marc Madnick says, “We’re the only company that does pagination right.” And that statement really reveals sort of how he perceives his company. Because he built Final Draft because he got frustrated with sort of how hard it was to do his screenwriting, but he had this vision that a page is a page is a page, and it’s a minute per page, and I think he genuinely believes — and I think the company genuinely believes — that one page of screenplay is one minute of screen time. Not just a rule of thumb. I think it’s like a fundamentalism.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think they genuinely deeply in their bones believe that that’s how it is and that therefore maintaining that one page — maintaining that page on the Mac being a page on the iPad being a page on the PC, you know, no matter which platform you’re opening on that file will still open exactly the same way — is the fundamental thing that they think they do right and do better than anyone else can. And they believe that their one way of doing it is the precise right way.

Now, like any sort of fundamentalism there are really easy ways you can sort of poke that belief which is, well, if that’s true then why are you letting people set like tight or loose spacing?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Why are you letting people touch the margins at all? So, it gives lie to the idea that this rule of thumb is anything more than just the Crassus rule of thumb. And, of course, we are writers. We recognize that if I write “Atlanta burns” that’s not —

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s not a minute.

**John:** That’s four minutes of screen time in one sentence. So, but I genuinely think he believes that. And so I can understand from his perspective that pagination is the most important thing. And understanding that he believes that pagination is the most important thing, Fountain is an incredibly frustrating thing for them to deal with because pagination is fixed. Pagination is sort of how things are going to be when they’re printed on paper. And I think Final Draft is still fundamentally concerned about getting stuff onto paper.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so while they’ve been able to generate PDFs, they really still think about printing stuff out and they want stuff to print in the exact same page breaks and everything like that to be the same.

But, file formats and sort of the editable file formats are not fundamentally fixed that way. They’re fluid. And so FDX, which is the format that they use, is an XML format and doesn’t have any sense inherently of where the page breaks are. I know this for a fact because we deal with FDX all the time. And the only way that Final Draft is getting their page breaks to be the same way every time is by some really kludgy methods.

And so they sort of brute force it to fit onto a certain page and then if they have to do it on a PC that’s why they have Courier Final Draft which is a sort of made up font they have that is different on the PC, works differently on the PC than it does on the Mac so that all the words will end in the same place basically.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So it’s this really kludgy way of doing it. So, both Fountain and Courier Prime are big annoyances to them because it means the one thing they think they’re really good at isn’t important anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah, it struck me — it’s so funny when he said that this was their thing, that this was what set them apart and this was their obsession as a company. I was shocked because it’s not mine.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And I’m a screenwriter. This is supposed to be for me. Yeah, sure, I want a document that I’m writing on my Mac to have the same page breaks if somebody else opens that same document with the same software on their PC. Absolutely. And in that case Final Draft accomplishes that and so does Fade In.

They’ve extended that fetish to their app for iOS. Now, interestingly their app for iOS, another thing Kent points out is that they initially released it as Final Draft Reader. It was read-only, not write, and cost $20. And it was buggy. And then later they dropped the price from $19.99 to zero for Reader and then created the Read-Write app which I guess has a fee connected to it. Which isn’t great business practice to basically charge $20 to your early adopters and then go, “Eh, now it’s free.”

But either way I certainly don’t need my iPad to have precise pagination like that. And I was wrong. In the thing I said, oh, the iPad app for Fade In does that. It doesn’t have any pagination. You just read it. Because, as Kent said, you can tell who’s not a screenwriter on set? It’s the guy with the iPad. Either way, for me pagination is not this holy grail of things. That’s so ’90s to me.

**John:** It is. And I think it reinforces that obsession that you see in sort of beginning screenwriting books, too, which is that like this thing needs to happen by this page.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that obsession about that kind of thing — that’s not actually writing. And that’s the thing that I think I felt more than anything else is that they fundamentally believe this as a way to write a script. They believe this as a way to paginate a script. And I think they’ve sort of forgotten about the actual writing process. So, I did a video awhile back about why I like writing in Fountain. And one of the things I really stressed is that because you’re not thinking about like where the margins are you can actually just sort of focus on what the words are.

And I don’t think Final Draft has focused on the words for really quite a long time.

**Craig:** I agree. And this, I guess, I know they’re listening. This is my big advice.

**John:** I’m not sure they’re listening, but I think they’re going to read the transcript after it’s transcribed.

**Craig:** Fair enough. My big advice is to not — whatever resources you’re expending on developing your software, first of all I would increase them and maybe decrease some of the other stuff, Yeah, I guess I’m saying spend a little more on R&D. Sorry. I understand you’re not in business to go out of business — we heard that a lot. I don’t think spending more on R&D will push you out of business. I’m guessing you guys are in a low margin business, particularly because you’ve been charging premium prices for legacy software for well over a decade, nearly two decades now.

But I would say design. Concentrate on design and features and have less of an obsession over pagination. Pagination doesn’t matter. When you go into production the first AD and the line producer sit down with the screenplay and they start to break it down. And they break it down by content. They don’t care.

That’s why — they always catch you anyway, first of all. If you ever try and fiddle with kerning, or line spacing, or margins. They’re going to catch you anyway. And they read it and they’re experienced. They know how the words will translate into days and they start carving things up by day. And that is entirely about content. It is not about pagination.

That is a weird, weird hill to die on.

**John:** I agree. The last thing, you mentioned it briefly while they were there, but I think it’s worth everyone sort of taking a look at and I’ll put a link up to it, too. You mentioned QuarkXPress, which I thought was such a great example of a software that was completely disrupted by a newcomer. And I think they could be QuarkXPress. And they could essentially become marginalized by someone else just doing their thing better. And so in the case of QuarkXPress it was Adobe who came in with InDesign. It’s like, oh wow, it does all the stuff we need to do and it was just better.

And it wasn’t better at the start, but ultimately it was better and it got disrupted. And I just feel like it was fascinating to be conducting a roundtable interview thing with a company that I don’t think really understood that their whole world was being disrupted.

**Craig:** I agree. I don’t think they get it. I think part of the problem frankly is, and I’m happy to say this to Marc, and he’s invited us to go visit them. I think he’s the wrong CEO for this company.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** He’s not the guy that wrote the software. That’s Ben Cahan. So, he’s not the technical guy. And he’s not a screenwriter. And I wouldn’t expect him to be. So, then what is he? I think what he is is a very, very good promoter. A very good marketer. But that’s not enough anymore. And particularly because the CEO isn’t connected to the technological underpinnings of the product he’s selling, when he’s talking about it you can tell — first of all, how does he even keep his own guys accountable?

**John:** I don’t know. I mean, there’s a thing in software developing called “Dog Fooding” which is basically you have to eat your own dog food. And because I sense that most of them were not screenwriters, I don’t think they were using Final Draft to write screenplays and therefore had no sense of what that was. But refresh my memory. I don’t think they were actively involved in the screenwriting, sorry, in the software development world either because they’re just not making choices everyone else would have made five years ago.

**Craig:** Right. I think that’s right. And I think if what he has been promoting from the top down is pagination, pagination, pagination above all, well no wonder things like, I don’t know, like the fact that their dual dialogue system is ridiculous and clumsy, or the general design of the program looks ugly, or the amount of time it takes in between updates. All that stuff falls away.

The fact that they don’t have a proper way for two people in two separate places to collaborate at the same time on a shared document, that should be — that’s what they should obsess over, to the exclusion of everything else. That’s all —

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** That would — if they solved that, and legitimately solved it, I would think that they could survive.

**John:** Yeah, I agree.

**Craig:** But, you know, hey, look, he thinks that we’re nuts. Look, right now they’re like, “Eh, we own 95% of the market. Bring it on.” I remember that —

**John:** We’ll see if in two years, in five years, if they’re 95% of the market. We’ll see.

**Craig:** Well, I remember when the iPhone came out Ballmer said, “Right now Windows supports 60% of the phones that are being sold,” or something, and “Apple sold nothing.” Well, let’s see where they are in 18 months. Well, there they are.

**John:** There they are.

**Craig:** There they are.

**John:** Moving on.

**Craig:** Moving on!

**John:** Next thing. I want to talk about writing in public spaces. So, this last week we’ve had WGA contract negotiation, and while I can’t talk about the substance of what’s happened in the rooms there I can say that like you described it is sort of like jury duty in that there’s a lot of downtime. And so there’s a lot of time where I’m just sitting in rooms with a bunch of other writers. And it’s very tempting to just like trade war stories. Like Carl Gottlieb is right across the table from me.

But I’ve been actually just working. I’ve actually put in my headphones and started working. So, I want to talk a little bit about writing in public spaces because I didn’t grow up writing in coffee shops. Did you? Did you write in public spaces or did you always go someplace quiet?

**Craig:** No. No. I always just found a little, even when I had — I was sharing a tiny apartment with my then girlfriend now wife. I would just find a little corner.

**John:** So, I think we are sort of the exceptions to the rule. Most — my belief is that many aspiring screenwriters have found themselves out in public spaces and that’s where they feel naturally sort of drawn towards writing.

So, I’ve been one of those people increasingly I would say over the time, partly because of Big Fish. I’ve just been in New York so much. And that process of sticking in your headphones, staring at your screen, and just being someplace else.

What I’ve found — I mostly like it. And what’s so interesting about the process is that whether you’re alone in your office or you are in a public space, ultimately you put yourself wherever those characters are. And so you put yourself in the scene of where those people are.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that can be a really great thing. The challenge for me I find is I have to find exactly the right music or other sort of noise to drown out everyone else around me talking. I have to remind myself not to try to jump right into writing the scene but to sort of give myself some notes about what it is.

So, I find myself writing fragments of things. Like not even really an outline of a scene, but these are things that happen. This is ways to start. And just really sort of visualizing the different ways the scene can sort of get started and get going.

It’s really been kind of a great week. I’ve gotten much more down this week than I would have predicted because I’ve just sort of been forced to be outside of my normal environment where I have all of the distractions of my big computer. I’m just at this one table surrounded by other people. And Susannah Grant is right behind me and she’s just pounding away. So, it’s been a great week for me.

**Craig:** I think that’s the part, occasionally if I feel jammed up not creatively but jammed up motivationally I will occasionally take a road trip down the street. And I’ll sit outside the cigar shop and work or I’ll go over to the Coffee Bean. For that reason. You are now accountable to everybody that’s around you.

First of all, I love that everybody thinks I’m just some guy, [laughs], that’s wasting his whatever meager money he has chasing a stupid dream of being a screenwriter. I actually like that. It reminds me of what it was like when I was 21 and starting out. And I like the fact that I have to write. I can’t just sit there and stare at the screen. I’ll look like an idiot.

And porn is totally out of the question.

**John:** Absolutely. Public space. You can’t get away with any of that stuff.

**Craig:** Can’t get away with porn at the Coffee Been. Well, some people might be able to.

**John:** But you can’t get away with a game either. If you’re just sitting at the coffee shop and you’re playing a stupid game then you’re clearly not doing work.

**Craig:** By being in a public space you put yourself — you begin to play the role of professional screenwriter or screenwriter.

**John:** I think that that’s a crucial thing. There used to be a place and I think it’s closed now but it was called The Office.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And it was just a place that basically rented workstations and you’d just go like you were going to the office. And literally it was a place for screenwriters or other writers could go and work and be in a public work environment. It just changes your perspective in terms of, like, I am in work mode. I’m not in home mode. And that can be an incredibly useful thing.

So, I was already sort of in work mode because I couldn’t wear jeans and a hoodie to the negotiations, so it was forcing me more into that zone.

**Craig:** Yeah. Any tactic that gets you to write more and write better is a worthy tactic short of hurting yourself or others.

**John:** Or addiction.

**Craig:** I include addiction as hurting yourself.

**John:** That’s true. That’s a fair thing.

So, one of the things I was working on this week, I had the revelation — which I’ve had the same revelation 15 times, but every time I have it it’s like, oh, that’s right, I forgot this thing that I remembered from before. I was really having a hard time getting the scene short enough. And I recognized that I had a minor character who was doing a lot of talking and sort of setting up the story and I remembered like, oh that’s right, you’re a minor character I don’t care about at all. You should not be driving this scene at all.

And once I sort of demoted him and said like, no, you’re not allowed to say many things because you’re not the hero of the story, the whole scene changed. So, in general I just want to — it was reminded to me and I’m reminded that we had talked about on the podcast is to keep your hero in the driver seat of the scene. And occasionally you will encounter scenes where like the hero is not in charge of the scene. But almost always the hero needs to be taking the focus of what’s happening on screen at a given moment.

**Craig:** No question. Obviously we’ve come to this story because we’re interested in how the hero is going to develop, and change, and deal with his enemies, deal with the world around her, whatever it is. But let’s also point out most of the time your hero, if your movie gets made, is your movie star. And don’t you want to see the movie… — The word we would always use, I remember when I started working on movies with David Zucker. He would always caution against giving good jokes to day players.

Day players are actors that are there for a day. So, you have a scene where somebody walks into, Harrison Ford walks into a Starbucks and asks for coffee and the woman behind the counter has a couple of lines with him. That’s a day player. Well, don’t give the good stuff to the day players. Generally speaking your movie star will be better and even if they’re not people want to watch the movie star anyway.

**John:** It reminds me a little bit of — so, this last weekend we had a second session of this D&D game that we’re playing, Dungeon World, and one of the rules of Dungeon World, one of the reminders of Dungeon World is make characters take the action. The Game Master doesn’t take the action, the characters take the action. And sometimes that’s really challenging when you’re facing like a monster or something. It’s like I feel like I want to roll an attack role for the monster, but I’m not supposed to.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I’m supposed to let you guys as the players, the heroes, do the work and if your attack fails then I hit you. But if your attack succeeds then you’re the winner. And it’s a very good reminder that the heroes, you guys, are supposed to be the ones who are in charge of the narrative and in charge of the story.

That doesn’t mean that everything should go your hero’s way. Not at all. It just means that they should be the ones who you are following. What they’re trying to do should be the focus of the scene, not them being rebuffed or what the other character is trying to do.

**Craig:** And here’s an example that comes to mind of how you can do this — sorry, I’m fighting a little cold over here.

**John:** Both of us.

**Craig:** How you can do this even when you’re in a scene where your character, your hero, isn’t saying anything. Two other people are having a conversation or one other person is imparting information, opining, philosophizing, but you want your hero to drive it.

Scene that comes to mind: in The Godfather Michael decides he’s going to go and kill Sollozzo in the Italian restaurant. And he goes into the bathroom, finds the gun that’s been stashed for him. Comes back. Sits down.

For the next probably 40 seconds or so Sollozzo rambles, rambles on in Italian about why Michael should make a deal, why this, why that, and the entire time he’s talking we’re on Michael’s face and he’s thinking to himself. Do I do this? Should I do this? Am I capable of doing this? I’m going to do this. And then he does it.

**John:** If he didn’t have the gun that scene would be a completely different scene. It wouldn’t be his scene.

**Craig:** Correct. And I like that there are always ways to contextualize stuff through your hero. There are a lot of scenes where your hero is wandering into a room and they know less than everybody around them. Great. Don’t just shower the guy with information because then the information givers are the ones driving the scene. Let him piece it together. Let him uncover it. Let him be distracted by something that’s important to him.

We’ll still get the information filtered through. But very good reminder from you, John August, to all of our listeners, to keep your hero in the driver’s seat.

**John:** This is a good segue to a piece of advice that I read on The Awl this last week which I thought was actually terrific.

So, a woman named Heather Havrilesky writes a column called Ask Polly. And it seems like very standard sort of like relationship advice questions except they’re really long questions. Because usually when you think about relationship advice questions it’s the Dear Abby length where it’s two paragraphs, it’s really brief, and then the person responds. It’s very common sense. It’s all very boilerplate.

What I love about the internet is that there’s no reason why the question has to be short. And so this woman writes in with a question that’s just endless, or a situation that’s endless. It’s not even really a question. It’s just like this is the situation I’ve gotten myself into. Please help.

And this one was particularly great. So, the one I’m going to link to in the show notes is called “I Moved To A New City To Be With An Emotional Vampire.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which is a good headline. But essentially this young woman describes the situation where she got into this long distance relationship with a guy who is fantastic. He was going to move to her. She ended up moving to his city. He still hadn’t broken up with his current girlfriend but eventually did, but then there was this other girl who was always still around. And it was sort of strange.

Every time she tried to confront him then it made her feel bad about things. And so she details it. And as you’re going through you’re like, “Oh my god, how can you not see what you’ve done? How can you not see what has happened to you?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And why I bring this up is she is no longer in charge of her own narrative. She has taken herself out of the story of her life. She’s given this other guy — he has the important story and she’s like a bit player in his life rather than being the hero of her own life.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** And so I thought Heather’s advice was fantastic essentially about, first of all, you’ve got to get away and you’ve got to fix yourself, but it’s useful I think to screenwriters for two reasons. First off to recognize that there’s real life people who make just terrible choices like this. And so she as a character is kind of fascinating — maddening but fascinating. But also if you were to write from one of your character’s perspective, if they were to write into an advice columnist what would they write? And what would the advice be given to them?

I thought it was just a great example of sort of how people and characters can lose control of their story.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this particular story was rough to read. The woman who answered said, “Go back and read what you just wrote.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “And then you tell me how crazy does that sound.” Delusion is — I mean, now we’re just sadly exploiting this woman’s pain for fodder, but delusion and delusional behavior is a fascinating character trait and it is one of those things that does add very realistic texture to characters.

The trick is to make the delusion connected to something that we understand. And that usually is an emotion. True delusion, like schizophrenic delusion is boring, but delusional behavior and thinking that comes about as a result of fear, self-loathing, these things — we understand fear. We understand self-loathing. So, we can start to understand the delusion.

There is a way to understand how this woman got herself into that mess. That’s the fun of the screenwriter is putting your character in a mess that’s fascinating, and relatable and believable and then watching them wriggle out of it.

**John:** Yeah. I feel like the woman in this article who wrote in this letter, she would be a challenging character to have at the center of a feature, but she’d actually be a great character to be in like a one-hour drama.

If this character was going through this situation in a one-hour drama and like it wasn’t just her story but it was sort of her and the people around her, it would be fascinating because you can see why she made each of the individual choices, and yet having made that choice she is deeper and deeper and deeper to the point where she’s essentially like an addict who keeps going back for another hit of this thing.

And everyone around her must see what she’s done and she’s driven away everyone else who was a friend or could sort of help her out of this situation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I would say, again, because she’s lost control of her narrative she’s not really the hero of a movie, but I thought she’s a great character within a bigger context.

**Craig:** I think you’re totally right about that. One of the things about delusional behavior like this is when you do read it as one long story from beginning to end the weight of the insanity and the bad choices overwhelm your connection with the person who made them. But if you watch them happen one by one then you’re with somebody as they just slowly sink into quicksand.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And that’s understandable.

**John:** It is very much understandable. On the topic of delusional behavior, let’s talk about the $1 billion lawsuit that was recently filed against Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible 3.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And so these happen all the time. And so whenever one of these things happen you and I both get tweets saying like somebody is suing about this and they stole his idea. It’s like, well first off, that’s just crazy town. No one stole his idea. And then when you actually read — we’ll put a link in the show notes, too.

**Craig:** It’s a good one. It’s a good one.

**John:** This complaint. Like he’s clearly representing himself and basically he saw the movie and he’s like, “Well that’s just like this script that I sent to William Morris eight years ago and therefore it was lifted from me.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, it’s delusional behavior. And so when you actually read through his, the plaintiff’s — what he’s arguing — it’s like, well, you have no understanding of sort of what copyright law. And I don’t want to slam on him, because I think he’s probably not entirely there.

**Craig:** All there.

**John:** The fact that no one is willing to even represent him or take his case means that there’s not a there there.

**Craig:** Generally speaking that, yeah, pro se litigants aren’t your strongest litigants. [laughs] Yeah.

**John:** But the delusional behavior, it’s real to him. And that’s, I think, one of the interesting things about him as a character is to him this really is a real thing that was stolen him. And he, at the center of his whole inner narrative, this is a wrong that was done to him. This movie that had come out that he finally watched on video it’s like, “Well, wait, that’s my movie.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Someone stole my idea for my movie even though it’s called Mission Impossible 3 and it’s basically the third element of a franchise.

**Craig:** The thing that jumped out for me from his complaint was that he seemed to feel that producing proof that he had written what he wrote was enough. Generally speaking in a complaint you need to actually show how the defendant has infringed on your unique expression and fixed form. He doesn’t even bother with that. He just shows that he envelopes and things.

By the way, I’ve read other complaints that did list alleged examples of infraction and I wasn’t really swayed by those either, or infringement I should say.

But, you know, here’s what goes on. I talk about this a lot of times when I’m talking to writers about the credit process. Sometimes the arbitration system, the Writers Guild credit arbitration system, just blows it. Sometimes they get it wrong.

I would say a good chunk of the time when writers are infuriated by the result the arbiters have gotten it right and that what’s going on this: I write a screenplay, I live it. I see it in my head. It is not only connected to the effort that I put in, but it is vivid to me. I have felt it.

So, that’s my entry into this. And so then somebody hands me another thing and I read it and I go, “Eh, this is just words. I’m just reading this.” There’s nothing else behind it but the reading. And so, yeah, I see all of these things that are connected to my incredibly vivid thing. But they’re not. They just seem that way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We are tricked by the complete asynchronous nature of our experience of what we’ve written and what we read or watch. I can come up with 20 movies that have scenes that are very similar to the scenes that you’ve seen in Mission Impossible, whichever the one he’s complaining about, because it’s an action movie with a secret agent in it.

**John:** Yeah. I often call it silent evidence. The sense that you’re seeing these two things and you see them like, well these two things are similar so therefore they must be related. One is the cause of the other.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But you’re disregarding all of the other things that are similar to those two things which would indicate like, oh, it’s actually just a very common idea.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so let’s take Pitch Perfect. Let’s take a movie where it’s about a singing competition or a girl joins a singing competition in college. And so let’s say I wrote a script about a girl who joins a singing competition in college and then I see Pitch Perfect. I’m like, “They stole my idea.” Well, if I’m only looking at those two examples I would say like, well, that feels kind of true. The best defense against that to me would be if someone presented 12 other scripts that were written at the same time that were about singing competitions at college.

And if were shown those other 12 scripts I would say like, “Oh, well, I guess other people had kind of similar ideas. It wasn’t stolen from all of these things. It was idea that was out there.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then I would stop and think like, “Oh, you know what? I guess I did read that article in someplace about singing competitions. Or I guess I was in college and I did go in competitions. I guess there were other people who were in choirs, too.”

And you start to realize, “Oh, you know what? The whole universe does not revolve around me and my ideas.”

**Craig:** Ah-ha. Your ideas are not as unique as you thought. And, frankly, a lot of this stuff that these people are complaining about being stolen isn’t property that can be stolen anyway. For instance, there is — I can’t remember the name — but there was a movie that came out in the wake of the Karate Kid’s success. And it featured the guy who did Tae Bo. Remember Tae Bo?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** So, he’s a fitness trainer and he kind of invested this fusion exercise martial arts thing called Tae Bo.

**John:** I have a hunch that Stuart Friedel, our illustrious editor of the podcast, probably has a whole bunch of like Tae Bo stuff, because that feels like the kind of thing that he’d focus on.

**Craig:** Billy Blanks I think was his name.

**John:** I think you’re right.

**Craig:** And so after the Karate Kid’s success somebody went and made a movie where Billy Blanks played a janitor at a high school, just a humble janitor, and there’s this kid who’s just been — he’s a new arrival to the school and he’s getting beaten up by the bullies in the school.

**John:** Well that’s just terrible.

**Craig:** Yeah. And he’s really into this girl but she’s dating one of the bullies and what is he going to do. And one day when he’s getting beaten up the janitor pops out of the janitor closet, whoops everyone’s ass with Tae Bo, and then says I’ll teach you Tae Bo.

Well, you know, [laughs], you could say, “Well, oh my god, they’ve stolen Karate Kid.” No. They haven’t. And people don’t understand what is protectable and what isn’t. Ideas aren’t protectable. Tropes, character archetypes, these things are not protectable. And Karate Kid didn’t invent that stuff either anyway. It’s the specifics that are protectable. And, frankly, it’s the specifics that are the value. There’s a reason that the Billy Blanks Tae Bo movie wasn’t a big hit.

And there’s a reason that Karate Kid was, because Karate Kid is a better movie. It’s way better, you know.

**John:** Craig, that’s the most controversial stand you’ve taken today.

**Craig:** Thank you. [laughs] So, I just feel like people don’t even understand how this stuff works. Anyway, here’s an example. A couple of women are suing the folks who created New Girl, The New Girl, the sitcom.

**John:** Oh yeah. I remember seeing that lawsuit, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I read the complaint.

**John:** A girl moves in with three guys? That’s a revolutionary idea.

**Craig:** As if that’s something you can even own. But regardless of that, one of the examples that they cite of infringement is they have a character named Cece and in The New Girl there is a character whose initials are C.C. but doesn’t go by C.C. So, it’s like Catherine Cummings. And then they’re like, “Get? C.C. Get it?”

Well, that’s just delusional. Why would somebody who — think about it. The whole premise of a lawsuit is you intentionally stole my stuff. If I’m intentionally stealing your stuff why would I be encoding references to your stuff that are unnecessary to put in, to leave a breadcrumb trail back to my crime? It’s just bizarre.

**John:** So, what caused me anger about this and why I sort of want to address it with the Tom Cruise, but especially now with The New Girl, is that it creates this pall, this shadow over an original expression. So, Mission Impossible 3, fine, it’s a sequel that made a billion dollars. But the idea that Liz Meriwether copied somebody else’s script to create The New Girl is just absurd and I don’t want to say it’s like libelous, but it’s kind of libelous, honestly. Because I know Liz, I know what she did. That was incredibly difficult. She’s an established playwright. She did this thing that was great.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And for someone to say like, “Well, she clearly stole it from me,” it’s like, no. And I feel like the good sound evidence thing could come into pass which basically like let’s pull up all the pilots from the three years surrounding The New Girl that have guys and girls as roommates. And you’re going to see so many similarities in general because it’s guys and girls living in a house together.

**Craig:** How many metric tons of pilot scripts exist prior to whatever those women wrote and whatever Liz wrote where a woman was living with three guys, or a guy was living with three women?

It’s a sitcom. For the love of god, I mean, it’s like —

**John:** It’s Three’s Company.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s Three’s Company! [laughs] You know, it’s like come on! That’s not why people watch that show. People don’t watch that show because —

**John:** It’s execution.

**Craig:** Yes! Thank you. Nobody tunes in because, oh my god, they’re doing it again this week! She’s still living with three guys! Oh my god!

That has nothing to do with the value of the show. It’s so weird to me. That the initials are the same? Just none of that makes any sense to me at all. And, you’re right, it does cast a pall. And frankly it puts studios in this awful position of constantly, constantly having to waste attorney hours knocking away these Looney Tunes lawsuits. Even in The New Girl lawsuit they cite the fact that the studio offered them ten grand to go away.

**John:** Yeah. Because ultimately and frustratingly that’s what they do because I’ve been… — It would cost them more to try to fight it.

**Craig:** It would cost them so much more to try and fight it. When they offer you $10,000 what they’re saying is, “Oh my god, you will never win, because if you turn down our $10,000 we’re willing to spend $5 million because you’re that wrong.”

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Ugh, so annoying.

**John:** The other annoying thing I want to point out this week which I didn’t even spring on you because I didn’t know this even existed until a friend pointed this out and said that this is something that she was facing on a show that she was working on.

So, it’s a thing called Time Tailor. Have ever heard of Time Tailor?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So, it’s a TV thing that will horrify you. So, essentially what it is, it’s a service. And so if you are doing a one-hour drama or a half-hour show, after you’re done, you’re locked, color timed, everything is perfect, you think you’re ready to go to broadcast, the network takes that episode and they give it to this service called Time Tailor.

What Time Tailor does — I’m looking at their website which I’ll put a link to the show notes — “It reduces run times up to 10%, all without deleting scenes or alternating original content virtually undetectable to the viewer. Single pass repurposing makes a clean copy of your program with sophisticated digitizing to scan every single frame, then redundant fields are removed and adjacent fields are blended.”

So, essentially they’re snipping out scenes, or not scenes, they’re snipping out frames and blending frames to make everything tighter, basically to shrink it down so they can fit one extra 30 second spot into a show.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** Sometimes more than that.

**Craig:** Oh, you dicks. You know, I mean —

**John:** And the thing is, you don’t know this, but all the broadcast TV you’ve seen has had that for awhile. And a way that you could test for it is generally the iTunes version of it, if you downloaded that, it’s going to have a different runtime than what was actually broadcast on the air.

**Craig:** Time Tailor. So, in the old days when people would cut film on Moviolas, maybe I’d get this. You know, obviously the two technologies would not exist simultaneously. But now we have non-linear digital editing. We’re all capable of making the edits precisely to the frame we wish. And then you Time Tailor dicks come along.

Listen, man, what can I do? It’s like, this is the part of TV that I know everyone keeps telling me, “Oh, TV, TV…” And I’m like, yeah, yeah, but I have to say there’s some things in movies that I’m still happy I’m in movies.

**John:** So, my friend, I’m not saying, this isn’t like a basic cable kind of thing. She’s writing on a giant top-rated one-hour drama. So, she finished her cut with her director, editor, and then they’re like this going to happen. It’s going to go through this process and it’s going to be not what you turned in.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And that just would drive me crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. Umbrage.

**John:** Umbrage.

**Craig:** Umbrage.

**John:** Time for One Cool Things. Do you have one?

**Craig:** I do!

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** This one came from I think someone on Twitter and I love this. Do you like to cook, John?

**John:** I love to cook.

**Craig:** Okay. Then you’re going to enjoy this.

**John:** Is it an expensive gadget that I will only use once?

**Craig:** It is not, although I have those, like a nice French lemon zester. No. It’s called SuperCook.com.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** SuperCook.com. And what it is is a database site with lots of recipes, which there are many of, however this one is fun because what they offer you is the ability to just type in the ingredients you have. You type in everything you’ve got near you and they spit back a bunch of recipes that use nothing but those ingredients. Very clever.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s very clever. And their database is very extensive, so you can really get specific about what you’ve got.

**John:** Cool. That sounds fun.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is B.J. Novak’s book, brand new book, called One More Thing: Stories and Other Stores. So, B.J. Novak is a writer and performer from The Office. You also see him on The Mindy Project. He’s great and really, really funny.

**Craig:** Saving Mr. Banks.

**John:** Saving Mr. Banks.

**Craig:** Excellent in Saving Mr. Banks.

**John:** He is great in Saving Mr. Banks. Unlike most of these books where it’s essentially like an autobiography with some like lists thrown in and other stuff, it’s just short stories he wrote and they’re really good and really funny. And he’s a terrific writer, so I would highly recommend that.

**Craig:** I met him, I met B.J., at a Saving Mr. Banks event.

**John:** You went to the sing-along that I didn’t get invited to.

**Craig:** To the sing-along. Oh, you weren’t invited to it?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Well, you’ll be invited next time.

**John:** [laughs] For Saving Mr. Banks 2?

**Craig:** Uh-huh. Yeah. For Saving Mrs. Banks.

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** And he was a delight to talk to. And it’s funny, sometimes you meet writer-actors and you walk away and you think, “You’re an actor who does some writing.” Sometimes you meet them and you’re like, “No, no, no, you’re a writer who does some acting.” He’s a writer that does some acting. He’s a good actor, a very good actor, but he’s a writer. He’s got a writer’s soul.

It was very nice talking with him. He’s a very cool guy.

**John:** I’ll do one extra One Cool Thing. I tweeted about this. But he actually was on the Nerdist Podcast this last week, talking about him, about the writer, and actor/performer. They talk a lot about sort of the process of writing jokes versus writing comedy, writing characters. And it’s a great lesson in sort of how that all works. So, we’ll put that up as a little bonus One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** So, a few last bits of news. The Big Fish cast album is out. So, you can download the songs. It’s on iTunes right now. I think by the time this podcast is up the physical CDs will be shipping.

**Craig:** [sings] “Time stops, suddenly I’m….” Am I going to have to pay for this? [hums]

**John:** Yes. Andrew Lippa will get some royalties on that and that will be good.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just from that little snippet.

**John:** That’s good. I think both the CD and the iTunes are excellent. So, the CD gives you a really good booklet, which I had to sort of copy edit a lot, but it’s nice and has pictures and lyrics and all that lovely stuff. So the physical copy is good.

The iTunes version, you get some bonus tracks. You get an extra bonus track of Magic and the Man, This River Between Us, so it’s hard to say. I would really recommend you buy both.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** But anyway that’s out there so we’ll have links to both of those two things in the show notes.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** We also have a few last t-shirts. We don’t have all sizes — for Scriptnotes t-shirts I should say. But if you go to store.johnaugust.com we have a few last Scriptnotes t-shirts, the black ones, in various sizes. So, if you are still waiting on a Scriptnotes t-shirt you are maybe in luck if you’re just the right size.

**Craig:** And what size is that?

**John:** I don’t know. But if you go there it’ll show you what sizes are left.

**Craig:** You just have XXS and XXXL.

**John:** Yeah, we have the extra-large small shirts is really all we have left.

**Craig:** Extra-large small shirts. [laughs] I love that. Are you extra-large small?

**John:** Indeed.

Standard boilerplate stuff here. If you would like to write to me or Craig something short, Twitter is your friend. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. There is a question that somebody wrote in that we didn’t even get to this week, but we’ll get to it next week. So, that’s the place to send those longer questions.

If you are on iTunes buying the Big Fish cast album you could also go over to the Scriptnotes podcast page there and leave us a note because that’s lovely. You can subscribe to our show as well if you’re not subscribed to us right now.

In iTunes you can also find the iOS app that we have for Scriptnotes which lets you download all the back catalog. We have now 129 previous episodes. You can download those old ones and get all the show notes and stuff for them there.

Show notes for this episode and most episodes are at johnaugust.com/podcast. [motorcycle in background]

**Craig:** Motorcycle show up at the very end there.

**John:** That was very good, that motorcycle. Keeping it real.

**Craig:** Keeping it real, yo.

**John:** Craig, thank you again for a nice podcast. It was nice to be back in a normal situation.

**Craig:** Whoa. I want to know what happened in that gap. There was like a really cool gap where I feel like you just went away.

**John:** Did I disappear?

**Craig:** Yeah, you went into a fugue state and then you came back. I love it when you do stuff like that.

**John:** [pause] Like that?

**Craig:** Yeah. That was it. Oh my god. That was great.

**John:** I do it. I have these little silences. I think it might be a small stroke, but it’s all okay.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s an extra-large small stroke.

**John:** Craig, if I see you next week then I see you next week. If not, it’s been a pleasure.

**Craig:** [laughs] I can’t wait to do this alone.

**John:** [laughs] What if it’s always been alone. The whole time through it’s all been a monologue?

**Craig:** Yeah. I believe it.

**John:** All right. Thanks Craig. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Slate](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html) on why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period
* John’s [2005 blog post](http://johnaugust.com/2005/fixing-double-spaces-after-periods) on fixing double-spaces after periods
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 65](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-next-117-pages), in which John and Craig discuss their period-space preferences
* [Courier Prime](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 129: The One with the Guys from Final Draft](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-one-with-the-guys-from-final-draft)
* Kent Tessman’s [Notes on Scriptnotes](http://www.kenttessman.com/2014/02/notes-on-scriptnotes/) blog post
* [How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/quarkxpress-the-demise-of-a-design-desk-darling/)
* Heather Havrilesky’s [Ask Polly: I Moved To A New City To Be With An Emotional Vampire](http://www.theawl.com/2014/01/ask-polly-i-moved-to-a-new-city-to-be-with-an-emotional-vampire) on The Awl
* The AV Club on [Tom Cruise being sued for one billion dollars](http://www.avclub.com/article/tom-cruise-is-being-sued-for-allegedly-stealing-th-107570)
* THR on [The New Girl lawsuit](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/fox-wme-peter-chernin-sued-671788)
* [Time Tailor](http://www.visualdatainc.com/time_tailor.htm)
* [SuperCook.com](http://supercook.com/) tells you recipes to cook with what you have on hand
* [One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0385351836/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by B. J. Novak
* B.J. on the [Nerdist Podcast](https://www.nerdist.com/2014/02/nerdist-podcast-b-j-novak/)
* The Big Fish cast album on [iTunes](https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/big-fish-original-broadway/id816289324?ign-mpt=uo%3D2) and [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H3UKZ6E/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* We have a few shirts left in [The John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Matthew Chilelli